“I’m there,” Mitch said. He was eyeing over his own scope and flipped off the safety as he watched. “Nice-looking piece of ass, Denny. Shame to mess her up, you know?”

“That’s why you’re just going for the shoulder, Mitchie. Just enough to put her down on the ground. Mr. D. first, and then the girl.”

“Mr. D. first, and then the girl,” he repeated, and settled into his final stance.

Downey poured a couple of scotches on rocks. He drained his own and then walked straight over to the suite’s living room window.

“Shooter ready?” Denny asked.

“Ready,” Mitch said.

The man of the moment reached up to close the heavy coffee-colored drapes, his arms spread in a wide V.

“Send it!”

Chapter 34

AT TEN THIRTY that night, I was standing on the roof of the Moore Building, looking across to the hotel suite where Skip Downey had just joined a small but growing fraternity of those recently deceased by sniper fire.

This latest made three incidents — the magic number. Our guys were now serial killers in the public eye.

Connecticut Avenue down below was a forest of mobile broadcast towers, and I knew from experience that the blogosphere was about to officially catch on fire with this thing.

“Can you see me?” I said into my radio.

I had Sampson on the wireless, from inside the hotel room. He was standing right where Skip Downey had gone down.

“Wave your arm or something,” he said. “There you are. But, yeah — that’s pretty good cover.”

Someone behind me cleared his throat.

I wheeled around and saw Max Siegel standing there. Great. Just who I didn’t want to see.

“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“No problem,” I said. Unless you counted the fact that he was up here at all.

“What have we got?” He came over to get the same view I had, and looked out across Connecticut. “How far a shot is that? Fifty yards?”

“Less,” I said.

“So they’re obviously not trying to top themselves. At least, not in terms of distance.”

I noticed he said “they” and wondered if he’d been on that FIG conference call — or if he’d come up with it on his own.

“The MO’s the same otherwise,” I said. “The shots came from a standing position. Caliber seems like a match. And then there’s the target profile, of course.”

“Bad guy out of the headlines,” he said.

“That’s it,” I said. “Plenty of people got screwed over by this Downey guy. The whole thing has vigilante justice written all over it.”

“You want to know what I think?” Siegel asked — of course, it wasn’t really a question. “I think you’re oversimplifying. These guys aren’t hunting, not in the traditional sense. And there’s nothing personal in the work at all. It’s completely detached.”