Chief Michaels gave Bree a withering glare as he worried a pen in his hand.
“You told me we had him!” Michaels said. “Self-confessed, you said! I told the mayor. I told the congressmen. I…shit.”
He plopped in his chair and tossed the pen on the desk in disgust.
Bree took a deep breath before saying as calmly as she could: “Chief, at the time, I believed I had Senator Walker’s killer. Romero had threatened the senator recently. He referenced Senator Walker’s murder as evidence he would not hesitate to kill Mrs. Sheridan or her daughters. His accomplice says he came three thousand miles to, quote, ‘set some things straight and make a pile of Benjamins.’ He was a prime suspect even before he started shooting.”
“But Romero’s on this motel security tape in Roanoke?”
“I haven’t seen it,” she said, deflated. “But evidently Romero, Lupe Morales, and this Chewy character are all on motel video checking in and out. With the snowstorm, there definitely was not enough time for them to get from Roanoke and back.”
“So the senator’s killer remains at large,” Michaels said. “There’s still an asshole out there we don’t know about.”
“Or a dead one we do know about.”
Michaels cocked his head. “I’m not following.”
Bree opened the manila file in her lap. She handed over photographs taken at the strangulation scene in Georgetown.
“This man, carrying the ID of one Carl Thomas of Pittsburgh, was throttled five blocks from the senator’s crime scene about seventeen hours after Walker was shot.”
“Loose proximity,” the chief said dismissively. “Where’s the hard connection?”
“The victim was able to get two shots off at his killer with a gun recovered at the scene,” she said, and then she pushed a paper across the desk. “The rush report says there’s gunpowder residue on the victim’s right hand and wrist that matches the pistol.”
“Okay?”
Bree handed him a second document. “Results for gunpowder on his clothes.”
Michaels studied the lab results, which had come in moments before Bree was set to speak with the chief.
He glanced at the first report. “Different gunpowders?”
Bree nodded. “It’s all being sent to Quantico for confirmation, but it will be interesting to see if the blast powder on his clothes matches the residues found in that apartment Senator Walker’s assassin used.”
“That’s a pretty big leap, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think so, Chief, even without the lab results,” she said. “I had Thomas’s prints run. We got no hits in the FBI databases, but we did in Scotland Yard’s files.”
Michaels sat forward. “Scotland Yard? I thought the victim was from Pittsburgh.”
“I said his driver’s license said he was from Pittsburgh.”
“And Scotland Yard says different?”
“Not in so many words.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means that when we ran the prints, we definitely got a hit in Scotland Yard,” she said. “There’s a file there somewhere, but we were denied access to it.”
Michaels shook his head. “So let me get this straight. A man with a Pittsburgh ID dies violently five blocks from Senator Walker’s murder scene, and Scotland Yard won’t tell us who he really is?”
“That’s correct.”
The chief thought about that. “So he’s a spook or something? Someone protected, anyway. Or someone Scotland Yard doesn’t want us to know about?”
“Any or all three, sir,” Bree said.
“What if he was working with the Brits? What if he shot Betsy Walker on orders from the Brits?”
Bree had not considered that last idea, and the implications shocked her.
“It would be a political assassination ordered by a foreign power,” she said. “An act of war. By an ally.”