The Inside Ring Read online

  “Courtesy, my eye,” Banks said. “I run Homeland Security. I have a need to know.”

  “You do, sir, but does this gentleman?”

  “Yeah. He’s one of my assistants.”

  Turning to DeMarco, Prudom said, “May I see some identification, sir?” DeMarco smiled at Prudom but didn’t reach for his wallet. This son of a bitch didn’t look like anybody’s assistant, Prudom was thinking; he looked like guys he’d brought up on racketeering charges.

  “You don’t need to see his ID, Mr. Prudom,” Banks said. “You’ll take my word that he’s properly cleared and with a need to know. Now get on with it.”

  Prudom sat a second pondering his options, looking Banks directly in the eye. He wasn’t intimidated; he was just trying to figure out if bucking Banks was in the Bureau’s best interest.

  “Yes, sir,” he said at last, and opened his notebook. He flipped to a page with a few notes scribbled on it and said, “We finally figured out how Edwards pulled it off.”

  “That’s great,” Banks said, but DeMarco thought he looked nervous.

  “The day the President was shot,” Prudom said, “the agents never saw the shooter; they weren’t even sure where he fired from.”

  “Then what the hell were they shooting at?” Banks asked.

  “The bluff above the river,” Prudom said. “It was the only place that provided any cover so they saturated it with bullets in an attempt to keep the shooter from firing again. They were unsuccessful, as you know, because the shooter fired a third shot after the agents opened fire, killing Agent James, the agent who was lying on top of the President.

  “After the third shot, the shooting stopped but no one could get up to the bluff right away to go after the assassin. The remaining Secret Service agents had to get the President into the helicopter so he could be evacuated to the nearest hospital, and two of the three agents accompanied the President in the helicopter. The third agent stayed at the site and—”

  “Who was the agent that stayed?” Banks asked.

  Prudom consulted his notes again. “Agent Preston. Anyway, as soon as the helicopter lifted off, the agent, Preston, called the agents guarding the five-mile perimeter around the cabin and told them to start moving in toward the shooting site. After that Preston went up the bluff by himself to go after the shooter. It took him half an hour to climb to the top and by the time he got there the shooter was gone. Or so he thought.”

  “What’s that m—” Banks started to say but Prudom raised a finger silencing him.

  “Our forensic people arrived on scene four hours after the shooting but they couldn’t find a thing: no brass, no footprints, no areas where the grass had been trampled down. Everyone figured Edwards had to have fired from the bluff, it was the only thing that made sense, but the Secret Service was adamant they would have spotted the guy. They said they’d patrolled the bluff right up until it was time for the President to leave, and the helicopter that was taking the President back to Washington had been hovering above the bluff until just prior to the President’s departure. Everybody figured Edwards must have done one helluva camouflage job not to be seen on top of that bluff before the shooting, either that or he was the fuckin’ Invisible Man. Excuse me, sir,” Prudom added for his blue language.

  “Go on,” Banks said.

  “From the beginning,” Prudom said, “one of the guys in our lab said the shooting angles didn’t make sense. He did a bunch of computer simulations, and kept saying that in order for the angles to make sense, the shooter would have to have been about three feet below the top of the bluff. Everybody blew the tech off, figuring his calculations were screwed up. Yesterday this tech got permission to fly down to Georgia, and he finds a hole in the side of the bluff, three feet below the top.

  “You see,” Prudom said, excited now, “Edwards had burrowed this hole—it was about six feet long and three feet in diameter—into the side of the bluff sometime before the President arrived at Chattooga River. He camouflaged the opening so you couldn’t see it unless you were about two inches away, looking straight at it.”

  “Jesus,” Banks said.

  “Yeah,” Prudom said, abandoning any attempt at formality, “this bastard lowered himself over the side of the bluff, probably suspended from a rope, and dug a damn shooting blind into the side of a hill. Based on the timing of the President’s trip, the arrival of the Secret Service’s advance team at Chattooga River to secure the area, and patrols performed while the President was there, we think he dug the blind at least a week before the President arrived. Then, just before the President arrived, the son of a bitch snuck in at night, right past the guys guarding the perimeter, and entered the blind. He hid in the blind the two days the President was fishing on the river with Montgomery and then—and this is the really amazing part—he stayed in that damn hole for at least a day after the shooting. He got away the second night when all the evidence techs had knocked off for the day, and he went right by the FBI’s perimeter guards. It’s the only way he could have gotten off that bluff.”

  “I saw pictures of this guy Edwards in the Post,” DeMarco said. “He didn’t look all that athletic. You know, kinda hefty.”

  It was the first time DeMarco had spoken, and Banks gave him a look that said assistants should be seen and not heard. DeMarco pretended not to notice.

  Prudom shrugged. “He was small enough to fit in the blind. We measured. And every chubby guy you see isn’t out of shape either. Plus this guy was a hunter and he was in the reserve, which brings me to the next thing,” Prudom said. “The rifle he used was a Remington 700 with a Leupold Mark 4 tactical scope. We traced the serial numbers and found out it was stolen a month ago from an Army Reserve armory.”

  Banks looked over at DeMarco. Billy Ray Mattis was a member of the Army Reserve.

  “Which reserve unit was it stolen from?” DeMarco asked.

  “Edwards’s old unit. The one over at Fort Meade in Maryland,” Prudom said.

  DeMarco remembered from Billy’s file that his Army Reserve unit was based in Richmond, Virginia.

  “I thought Edwards was a hunter,” DeMarco said. “Why didn’t he use one of his own guns?”

  “He hocked ’em,” Prudom said, “because he’d been off work so long. All he had in his house were a couple of shotguns.”

  “And I suppose the Bureau is investigating the armory theft?” DeMarco said.

  Prudom nodded impatiently. “Of course, along with army CID, but we haven’t come up with anything that ties it directly to Edwards—other than the fact that all the weapons that were stolen were in his damn house. The .45 he killed himself with? It came from the armory.”

  “Is the rifle the only physical evidence you have?” Banks asked.

  “You mean besides the rifle and the suicide note?” Prudom said.

  “Yeah,” Banks said.

  “Well, we found a receipt in his car from a gas station about thirty miles from Chattooga River. But the guy left nothing in the shooting blind, and when you think about it, that’s also amazing. He was in that hole digging, eating, shitting, pissing, and shooting—and he managed not to leave any trace. He took all his garbage with him when he left and while he was in there he must have been covered head to foot in some kinda suit because he didn’t leave any hair or skin or anything else we could get DNA from. We didn’t find the suit in his house, by the way.”

  Prudom closed his notebook. “The good news, General, is that this helps the Secret Service. I mean it’s not like their procedures were sloppy or they were goofin’ off on the job. This guy Edwards may have been a whack job—but he was good. Really good.”

  “But how did he plan this thing?” DeMarco asked. Banks almost gave himself whiplash as his head spun toward DeMarco.

  “What do you mean?” Prudom said.

  “You said Edwards went down to Georgia the week before the Secret Service’s advance team arrived at Chattooga River, and that’s when he dug the shooting blind. How’d he know when
to go?”

  “We’re not sure, but this thing the President did every year with Montgomery always got plenty of ink. And obviously lots of people here in D.C. knew when the President was leaving and where he was going. The other thing is, we found out the other day that when Montgomery was at some book signing he talked about going down to Georgia to do some fishing with the President. We got that from his publicist. So to answer your question, we don’t know exactly how Edwards figured out the President’s schedule but we do know that planning for the trip wasn’t controlled like the Manhattan Project.”

  After Prudom left, Banks and DeMarco sat together in silence a moment thinking about what Prudom had told them.

  “You know,” Banks said, “Mattis being in the reserve, same as Edwards, you need to follow up on that armory break in.”

  “If the FBI can’t find anything, I doubt I’ll be able to.”

  “Yeah, but you gotta check it out.”

  “Sure,” DeMarco said.

  He had no intention of checking it out.

  11

  The man sitting at the bus stop across from Secret Service headquarters wore a blue polo shirt, chinos, and sandals with white socks. He was in his sixties, had iron-gray hair, and a face that DeMarco could envision, for some reason, behind the plastic face shield of a riot helmet. This was Emma’s man Mike, last name unknown.

  “Hi,” DeMarco said as he sat down next to Mike on the bench.

  “Hey, Joe,” Mike responded, but he didn’t look at DeMarco. His eyes continued to scan the building across the street, moving from exit to exit, and occasionally over to a nearby parking lot. When you got a guy from Emma, you got a pro.

  “How’s it going?” DeMarco asked.

  “Like watchin’ paint dry,” Mike replied. “He leaves his house at six thirty and gets here at eight—395 was a fuckin’ parking lot this morning. He goes directly to this building where he stays all morning. What he’s doin’ in there, I don’t know. At twelve he comes outside, grabs a burrito from a street vendor, takes a walk around the Mall, then goes back inside the building.”

  “Did Mattis see you tailing him?”

  Now Mike looked at DeMarco; his stare answered DeMarco’s question.

  “And I take it no one approached him while he was taking his lunchtime walk.”

  “You take it right,” Mike said.

  They sat in silence for a while, Mike watching the building, DeMarco watching the women walk by. As he sat there, DeMarco thought back to the FBI briefing. What Edwards had done fascinated him. He couldn’t imagine a man lying in a dark, claustrophobic space for two days waiting for the opportunity to take a shot and then having the balls to stay in the shooting blind while the FBI scoured the bluff above him for evidence.

  Which made DeMarco think of something else: Why did he take the shot he took? There must have been an easier shot Edwards could have taken while the President was fishing. Instead he waited until the day the President was departing, surrounded by his bodyguards. Then he remembered that Prudom had said that while the President was on the river the Secret Service had patrolled the bluff, so maybe that’s what had prevented Edwards from shooting earlier.

  The skill it had taken to sneak into and out of the area was also remarkable. Prior to the shooting Edwards had to get past a Secret Service cordon to get to the shooting blind he had previously dug. After the FBI’s forensic people arrived on-site, Prudom said they worked sixteen hours a day, and when they weren’t there, the area had been patrolled to keep out sightseers and protect the crime scene. Yet the assassin had left the shooting blind, probably the day after the shooting, reconcealed the blind, and either climbed back up to the top of the bluff or down the bluff to the river, carrying his waste and all his gear with him. Then he waltzed past all the people guarding the site.

  The rifle also intrigued DeMarco. Why would Edwards have taken the assassination weapon back to his house? Why didn’t he just dump it the first chance he got? It was almost as if . . .

  “You ever seen pictures of Mickey Mantle, Joe?” Mike said. “I don’t mean right before he died of cancer, but when he was playing.”

  “Sure,” DeMarco said.

  “Well that’s who this kid looks like. He looks like the Mick, ol’ number seven. Why am I tailing a guy who works for the Secret Service and looks like Mickey Mantle, Joe?”

  DeMarco rose from the bench. “I’ll check in with you again tomorrow, Mike. Thanks for helping out on this.”

  “Sure, Joe,” Mike said, “but if I gotta spend another day sittin’ in the sun on a concrete bench, I’m gonna go crazy. And when I do, you’re gonna be the first person I kill.”

  DEMARCO LIVED IN a small town house in Georgetown, on P Street. The town house, a carbon copy of several others on the block, was a narrow two-story affair made of white-painted brick. Wrought-iron grillwork covered the windows; ivy clung to the walls; azaleas bloomed in the flowerbeds in the spring. It was a cozy place, and he and his neighbors pretended the artfully twisted black bars barricading their lower-floor windows were installed for aesthetic reasons. He had purchased the house the year he married.

  The interior of DeMarco’s home looked as if thieves had backed a moving van up to the front door and removed everything of value—which, in a way, is exactly what had happened. A house once filled with fine furniture, Oriental rugs, and pricey artwork now contained only a few haphazardly selected pieces that DeMarco had bought at two yard sales one Saturday morning. The entertainment center in his living room had been replaced with a twenty-four-inch television on a cheap metal stand. A lumpy recliner sat a few feet from the television and on the floor near the recliner was a boom box that served dual purpose as a radio and a place to set his drink when he read or watched TV.

  DeMarco tossed his suit coat on the recliner—the antique oak coat stand that had been by the door was gone—and walked toward his kitchen. Each step he took on the bare hardwood floors echoed throughout the house like punctuation marks in a sonnet to loneliness.

  When DeMarco’s wife left him she decided not to take the house. Her lover had a house. She didn’t, however, like her lover’s furniture so her lawyer made DeMarco a deal: if he didn’t contest the divorce he would pay no alimony and get to keep his pension and a heavily mortgaged house. In return, his wife would get all the furniture and furnishings—and all the money in their joint savings account, the cash value of his insurance policies, and DeMarco’s best car.

  DeMarco’s dinner was two slices of cold pizza eaten while standing in front of the refrigerator. Dinner the night before had been the same pizza, except hot from the box. DeMarco was a good cook and he enjoyed cooking, but he didn’t enjoy cooking for one.

  He felt restless after his supper and the pizza sat like a cheese boulder in his gut. He changed into a pair of shorts, a sleeveless Redskins T-shirt, and a pair of scuffed tennis shoes and trudged slowly up the stairs to the second floor of his home. For a brief period, DeMarco’s ex had used one of the two upstairs bedrooms as a studio, ruining yards of perfectly good canvas while whining that the windows didn’t let in the northern light. This hobby, like others that followed, lasted only a short time before she returned to those activities at which she excelled: shopping and adultery.

  Now the bedrooms were empty and the only thing in the upper story of DeMarco’s home was a punching bag, a fifty pounder that swung black and lumpy from a ceiling rafter like a short, fat man who had hung himself. When asked why he had installed the heavy bag he would shrug and say it was for aerobic exercise, but the truth was that he loved to beat the shit out of an inanimate object when the mood struck him.

  He put on his gloves, warmed up with a little shadowboxing, and attacked the bag. The bag took the first round but by the second he was drenched with sweat, pounding leather with a vengeance, imagining his wife’s lover’s ribs cracking like kindling with each blow. His wife’s lover had been his cousin. He was so into violent fantasy that he almost didn’t hear the doorbell rin
g.

  Standing on his porch was a compact man in his thirties wearing a gray suit. When DeMarco noticed the pistol in the shoulder holster beneath the man’s suit jacket, he gave the stranger his full attention. Behind the man was a black limousine with government plates parked at the curb.

  “Are you Joseph DeMarco?” the man asked.

  “Yeah,” DeMarco said, still trying to catch his breath. “How can I help you?” DeMarco thought it prudent to be polite to armed men.

  “Patrick Donnelly, director of the Secret Service, would like a word with you, sir. Would you mind joining the director in his car?”

  Ah, shit, DeMarco thought. Shit, shit, shit. On the case less than two days and the Secret Service already knew he was involved. He thought of slamming the door in the agent’s face and running to hide under his bed.

  “Please, sir, would you mind coming with me,” the man prodded.

  Dignity prevailed over the ostrich defense. “You bet,” DeMarco said, his voice sounding more confident than he felt.

  Donnelly’s driver opened the rear door of the limo for him. Feeling foolish in his shorts and Redskins T-shirt, DeMarco stepped into the car and took his place on the jump seat so he could face Patrick Donnelly. The armed driver closed the door behind DeMarco then remained standing outside the limo, several feet away; apparently Mr. Donnelly didn’t want his man to hear their conversation.

  Lil’ Pat Donnelly stared at DeMarco, his eyes projecting his hostility. He was a slender man in his late sixties, no more than five feet six inches tall. His hair was dyed glossy black and parted so precisely on the left side that DeMarco could imagine him using a straightedge to guide his comb. He had small features, close-set ears, and narrow black eyes with drooping lids. His mouth was a cruel slash and his face was covered with a smear of five o’clock shadow. DeMarco thought he looked like a fencer, slim and wiry and nasty—the type who would use real swords if allowed the opportunity.