Triple Cross

ALTHOUGH SAMPSON AND I had been impressed by Thomas Tull’s calm, collected answers to our tougher questions, we’d given him a hard no on being a fly on the wall.

He’d wanted to know if we’d mind him asking the DC police chief, and we’d told him to go right ahead. Afterward, we spoke with Chief Michaels, who said he thought the exposure might be good for the department, especially if we caught the Family Man killer. But when we explained why Tull was a suspect, he agreed that until we cleared the writer, he would get no access whatsoever.

Which was why that Thursday evening we were hunkered down in an unmarked squad car up the street from the town house in Georgetown that Tull had leased.

A late-model midnight-blue Audi RS 7 was parked in front of the town house’s green door. The building was dark but for a single light shining in a second-floor window.

“How long are we going to give it?” Sampson asked.

It was a pleasant spring night. We had the windows open. I said, “Ordinarily, I’d be down for midnight at least, but Bree texted that she’s on her way back from New York. I’d like to see her before she goes to sleep.”

“And Willow’s babysitter can only stay till ten thirty,” Sampson said. “So, ten?”

“Ten it is,” I said.

Fifteen minutes later, a fit woman in her forties with short dark hair walked up to Tull’s place; she was wearing a worn leather jacket, jeans, and cowboy boots, and she carried a heavy messenger bag over one shoulder.

She dug in the bag, retrieved a large manila envelope, put it in Tull’s mail slot, and continued on. She passed us without looking our way and disappeared around the corner.

“Who’s she?” Sampson asked.

“No clue.”

A few moments later, the light in Tull’s second-story window went out.

The writer left the town house soon after; he climbed into his stylish four-door coupe and pulled out, heading north. Sampson put the squad car in gear and followed Tull at a comfortable distance.

“We have a license plate number?” I asked.

“New York plate S-C-R-B-L-R,” Sampson said. “Like scribbler?”

“Got it,” I said. He took a left and then another, heading south.

Tull was soon on local-access K Street heading east. It was a moonless night, which somehow made the headlight glare worse as we approached Twenty-Seventh.

The writer put on his left blinker, indicating he was going to take the Rock Creek Parkway heading north. We were six cars back when the light changed.

Driving down the on-ramp at thirty miles an hour, Tull merged into light traffic on the parkway, a four-lane thoroughfare surrounded by woods and divided by a strip of trees and azalea bushes. Tull accelerated to fifty.

Sampson followed suit, passing two cars. Approaching the M Street exit, we were three cars behind him in the right lane.

Then the writer pulled over into the left lane and got up alongside a black Porsche 911 Turbo Carrera. I still had my window down, so I heard the roar of huge high-horsepower engines before both vehicles went screaming up the parkway.

“Stay with him!” I shouted, and Sampson stomped on the gas.

CHAPTER 57

TULL’S STYLISH LITTLE GERMAN coupe turned out to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a sleek but conservative-looking car with a raging monster of an engine.

The Porsche 911 tried to accelerate with the RS 7, but within the first three seconds, Tull opened a gap of twenty yards, then thirty. We were much farther behind when both high-performance vehicles hit the brakes and downshifted before the tight right and a sweeping left curve below Dupont Circle.

They vanished from sight.

“He had to have hit a hundred there,” Sampson said. “I should put the bubble up and pull him over.”

“Just keep him somewhere in range,” I said, gritting my teeth as John hit the brakes and we went through the curves.

After we came out of the second one, the parkway straightened for more than a mile. We could see the rear lights of the Audi and the Porsche a good four hundred yards ahead, weaving in and out of traffic.

“He’s nuts,” Sampson said, pounding the gas pedal. “He’s going to hit someone.”

“Or they’re going to hit him,” I said as we sped forward, gaining some ground when both vehicles hit the brakes before a big right turn north of Montrose Park.

I caught only glimpses of what happened next.

The parkway ahead of the sports cars was near empty. Both drivers took advantage of that, the 911 in the right lane and the RS 7 in the left, burying their accelerators. The cars became a blur.

“That’s it—they are going to kill people,” I said. “Put the bubble up.”

Sampson did as we entered the turn north of Montrose Park. He flipped on the siren and accelerated again.

“I don’t know if I can catch up,” Sampson said as I peered ahead, trying to pick out the rear lights of the Porsche and the Audi as we raced through the densest woods along the parkway.

We were going eighty when I caught sight of the split at the end of the road where Shoreham angles northwest and Beach Drive goes northeast. “That’s the Porsche going up Beach,” I said.