“We’ve got a serial killer. A hunter on a motorcycle. Draw a ninety-minute circle around us. That’s his hunting ground.”
“What’s he hunting?”
“Maseratis. Corvettes. Mustangs.”
“High-performance cars,” Sampson said.
“Well, the people who drive high-performance cars.”
“And drive them very fast.”
Tapping my lip with one finger, I thought about that.
“What’s the point?” Sampson asked. “Is it a game?”
“Could be,” I said. “That video from Peters’s car shows they were playing cat and mouse, and the motorcyclist was better at being the cat.”
Sampson shook his head. “The media’s going to have a field day with this one too. Remember the Beltway Sniper attacks?”
“How could I forget?”
I was still with the FBI on the morning of October 3, 2002, when four people were randomly shot to death in suburban Maryland. That night, inside the District, a seventy-two-year-old carpenter was shot and killed while taking a walk on Georgia Avenue.
The press called them the Beltway Sniper attacks. But it soon became clear to the FBI that the shooting spree had started eight months before in Tacoma, Washington. In all, we found twelve people who’d been wounded or killed by the snipers prior to October 3, from Arizona to Texas to Atlanta to Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
We eventually caught the two troubled men with a Bushmaster AR-15 rifle, but before it was over, seventeen people died. Another ten were wounded but survived.
“Malvo and Muhammad did it for sport,” Sampson said. “It could be what we’re looking at here.”
“Possibly,” I said. “A challenge to the motorcyclist, chasing the fast car down and getting off a lethal shot at the driver.”
“And escaping unharmed?”
I nodded, thinking how bad this could get. The country had been caught up in twenty-three days of fear when the Beltway Snipers were shooting and killing. Those twenty-three days had been some of the most stressful of my life.
“You going to tell Bree? She’s got a lot on her shoulders already.”
Before I could answer, my wife appeared at the door to my office, breathless.
“O’Donnell, Lincoln, and two patrolmen came under automatic-weapon fire in Northeast five minutes ago,” she said. “Lincoln was hit. So was a patrolman. O’Donnell says Thao Le was one of the shooters.”
Chapter
39
We raced through the city, blues flashing and sirens wailing. I drove. Sampson struggled into body armor in the seat beside me. Bree was in the back, fielding calls, fighting to get a full understanding of the situation, and coordinating with the other chiefs to send the right personnel to the scene.
Evidently, Detectives Lincoln and O’Donnell had been tracking Thao Le through his girlfriend Michele Bui. She had texted O’Donnell that Le was moving a load of drugs through a row house in Northeast that afternoon.
The detectives had gone to check it out and called for backup. One patrol car drove into the alley behind the house. Another patrol car came onto the block at one end, and Lincoln and O’Donnell came from the other. They saw Le and three of his men chilling on the front porch.
O’Donnell had stopped his vehicle just shy of the house. The other patrol car did the same. All four officers jumped out, guns drawn, and ordered the men on the porch to lie down. Le came up with an AK-47 and opened fire.
Lincoln and a patrolman were hit; Lincoln took a bullet through his thigh and another through his hand. O’Donnell had been able to pull him behind a car across the street. The injured patrolman, Josh Parks, had been shot through the pelvis, but he’d dragged himself up against the base of the porch, where he could not be seen or shot at from inside.
“How are you, Parks?” Bree asked over the radio.
“Feel like I got a drill bit through my groin to my spine, but otherwise peachy,” the officer said.