“I will,” I said.
In fact, I’d already mapped out the route to Brick Township, New Jersey, on my laptop while he was talking. If this turned out to be what it seemed, I’d be meeting Detective Cowen face-to-face before the day was out, and he and I would be taking a look around — or whatever.
Chapter 77
THE LIMITATION ON THESE new prints from New Jersey was that I had nothing to compare them to. No criminal records anyway. Accordingly, there was no way to know whether they’d all come off the same person or not.
I thought about Max Siegel’s offer of help the other day. With the Bureau’s resources, he probably could have gotten further with these than Detective Scott Cowen had. But I just wasn’t ready to jump in there.
Instead, I put in another request with my Army CID contact in Lagos, Carl Freelander. Better to go with a known quantity, I figured, even if he was halfway around the world and maybe getting sick of my calls.
“Twice in one month, Alex? We’re going to have to get you one of those punch cards,” he said. “Tell me what I can do for you people.”
“Meantime, I owe you another drink,” I told him. “And, for what it’s worth, I may just be chasing the same ghost as the last time, but I need to be sure. I’ve got six more prints I want to run through the civil database. Maybe all from the same person, and maybe not.”
Cowen had been right about the quality of the prints. MPD’s standard is thirteen points, meaning anywhere a ridge or line ends, or intersects with another ridge or line. If two prints line up in thirteen or more of those places, it’s a statistical match, and I had half a dozen viable scans to work with.
Carl told me to send them along and leave my line open for an hour or so.
True to his word, he called me back fifty minutes later.
“Well, it’s a good news / bad news kind of thing,” he said. “Two of the six prints you sent me came up military. You got the left index and middle fingers on a guy named Steven Hennessey. U.S. Army Special Forces, Operational Detachment–Delta, from nineteen eighty-nine to two thousand two.”
“Delta Force? There’s a red flag,” I said.
“Yeah, the guy saw action in Panama, Desert Storm, Somalia — and get this: he ran long-gun training for ground forces in Kunduz. Sounds a hell of a lot like a sniper to me.”
I felt as if my slot machine had just come up bar-bar-bar. We’d almost certainly just found our second gunman, and this one had a name.
“What about a last known address?” I said. “Do we know where Hennessey is now?”
“Yeah, that’s the bad news,” Carl said. “Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky. Hennessey’s been dead for years, Alex.”
Chapter 78
THE THREE-AND-A-HALF-HOUR DRIVE to New Jersey flew by. Probably because my mind was running the whole time. It was too bad I was so pressed, because I would have liked to have visited my cousin Jimmy Parker at his Red Hat restaurant along the Hudson in Irvington. God, I needed a break, and a good meal.
Maybe someone was buried down there in Louisville, but I was willing to bet that it wasn’t the real Steven Hennessey. Not with his prints on that Suburban.
The question was, who had Hennessey become in the last several years? Also, where was he now? And what were he and this phantom partner of his doing in New Jersey?
My plan was to meet Detective Cowen at Turn Mill Pond, where the car had been pulled out of the water. I wanted to catch that scene while there was still daylight, then follow him back to the impoundment lot to see the vehicle itself.
But when I called Cowen to tell him I was almost there, he didn’t pick up.
The same thing happened when I got to the meeting point at the south end of the pond. I was pissed, but there was nothing to do now except get out and take a look around.
Turn Mill was one of several bodies of water in the Colliers Mills Wildlife Management Area, which encompassed thousands of acres. From this spot, all I could see were trees, water, and the dirt road I’d just driven in on.
Plenty of privacy for dumping a car anyway.
The ground at the edge of the waterfront was heavily rutted and tamped down, presumably where the police had pulled the Suburban out. It looked to me as though the vehicle had been pushed into the water from the edge of a wooden bridge where the pond narrowed into a channel.
Looking down from above, one would assume the water was plenty deep enough, but it obviously wasn’t. In any case, it wasn’t the kind of thing you could undo.
Once I’d taken all of that in, I headed back to my car. I figured it couldn’t be too hard to the find the police station in town, but that’s when I saw a cruiser coming up the road, fast.
It sped along the pond a ways, curved into the woods, and then came back out again. It stopped right behind where I’d parked.