were those hard, flat eyes. Ten years old. Dead. Two seconds’ hesitation. That’s all it took. A deuce of seconds. A pair of eye blinks. That was apparently the difference between going home and playing hoops in your new shoes or heading to the morgue to get your chest cavity emptied.
One more crime stat for the books. And yet it wasn’t just a stat. His name was Rodney Hawks. Beth had a photo of him from his fourth-grade class in her office on her shelf. She looked at it every day. It pushed her to work harder, try harder, to never leave anything to chance. To never again hesitate when her gun was cocked and locked on a target that required killing.
The shoe shop was no longer there. It was now a liquor store. But for her it would always be the place where she’d allowed Rodney Hawks to die. Where Beth Perry, who had never failed at anything, had failed. And a little boy had lost his life because of it.
Beth took a deep breath and pushed these images from her mind. She looked down at her notes and focused on the present situation. Had the homeless vet raped the power lawyer and then stomped on her neck hard enough to crack her brain stem? And then stuffed her in the fridge and gone about his business? The soiling on her clothes and the bits of fabric found at the crime scene also matched what was found on Dockery’s clothing. But that didn’t really matter. DNA was better than a print. And DNA from sperm was the gold card, particularly when it was found inside the woman. Taken together with the bruising in her genitals, there was no defense lawyer on earth who could spin that one into a positive.
She put the file down and picked up the phone and called her sister. There was no answer so she left a message letting Mace know that they would have the DNA results back soon. If it matched, Lou Dockery would spend the rest of his life in prison. Beth’s mind turned to how Dockery’s conviction might get Mace her old job back. Despite Mona putting obstacles in their way, if they could convince… Beth suddenly dropped this train of thought.
There was one loose end.
She flipped open the Tolliver file once more and looked at two evidentiary items.
A key. And an e-mail.
We need to focus in on A-
There was more here obviously than a homeless vet on a rampage. Yet the real question was, were they connected?
And then there was a shooter in a Town Car with tinted windows, no plates, and a can on the rifle muzzle aiming right at Mace. Was that from Mace’s past or tied to this case?
A deuce of seconds. That’s all it took.
She was not going to lose her sister again.
CHAPTER 50
THERE WAS NOTHING in the mailbox. Nothing, that is, until Mace felt around the top of the inside of the box and her gloved hand closed around a piece of paper taped there. She unfolded it and read the brief contents.
“A name, Andre Watkins. And there’s an address in Rosslyn. I guess for him.” She looked up at Roy. “Ever heard of this guy?”
“No, and Diane never mentioned him.”
“Did she go out a lot?”
“She liked to go to the Kennedy Center; she liked to eat out.”
“Well, she probably didn’t go alone.”
Mace put the paper back inside the box and closed the door.
“Leaving it here?”
“So the police can follow it up if they figure it out.”
“Or we could go and tell them about the letter right now.”
“We could,” Mace said slowly.
“But you want to solve this yourself?”
“It’s a long story, Roy. Don’t rag me about it. I’m not sure my answers will make any sense anyway.”
Twenty minutes later, Mace had parked her bike in an underground garage and she and Roy were zipping to the tenth floor of the apartment building. A man answered the door on the second knock after looking at them through the peephole. This wasn’t a guess, because Mace knew that he had. He was as tall as Roy, though about thirty years older, with a trim white beard to match his thinning hair. He was handsome and his skin was tanned a deep brown. He wore jeans that looked like they’d been ironed and a tuxedo shirt with the tail out. His bare feet were in a pair of black leather Bruno Magli shoes. He looked to Mace like