“Meantime, I owe you another drink,” I told him. “And, for what it’s worth, I may just be chasing the same ghost as the last time, but I need to be sure. I’ve got six more prints I want to run through the civil database. Maybe all from the same person, and maybe not.”

Cowen had been right about the quality of the prints. MPD’s standard is thirteen points, meaning anywhere a ridge or line ends, or intersects with another ridge or line. If two prints line up in thirteen or more of those places, it’s a statistical match, and I had half a dozen viable scans to work with.

Carl told me to send them along and leave my line open for an hour or so.

True to his word, he called me back fifty minutes later.

“Well, it’s a good news / bad news kind of thing,” he said. “Two of the six prints you sent me came up military. You got the left index and middle fingers on a guy named Steven Hennessey. U.S. Army Special Forces, Operational Detachment–Delta, from nineteen eighty-nine to two thousand two.”

“Delta Force? There’s a red flag,” I said.

“Yeah, the guy saw action in Panama, Desert Storm, Somalia — and get this: he ran long-gun training for ground forces in Kunduz. Sounds a hell of a lot like a sniper to me.”

I felt as if my slot machine had just come up bar-bar-bar. We’d almost certainly just found our second gunman, and this one had a name.

“What about a last known address?” I said. “Do we know where Hennessey is now?”

“Yeah, that’s the bad news,” Carl said. “Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky. Hennessey’s been dead for years, Alex.”

Chapter 78

THE THREE-AND-A-HALF-HOUR DRIVE to New Jersey flew by. Probably because my mind was running the whole time. It was too bad I was so pressed, because I would have liked to have visited my cousin Jimmy Parker at his Red Hat restaurant along the Hudson in Irvington. God, I needed a break, and a good meal.

Maybe someone was buried down there in Louisville, but I was willing to bet that it wasn’t the real Steven Hennessey. Not with his prints on that Suburban.

The question was, who had Hennessey become in the last several years? Also, where was he now? And what were he and this phantom partner of his doing in New Jersey?

My plan was to meet Detective Cowen at Turn Mill Pond, where the car had been pulled out of the water. I wanted to catch that scene while there was still daylight, then follow him back to the impoundment lot to see the vehicle itself.

But when I called Cowen to tell him I was almost there, he didn’t pick up.