I looked back over at all the trophies and awards. Maybe this was the one thing Mitchell Talley had ever been good at. The one thing in his life he’d ever known how to control. On the face of things, it seemed to make sense.

“When was he last seen around here?” I asked. “Did he ever come to visit?”

Cowen shrugged apologetically. “We’re still not sure. You’re catching us right at the beginning of this thing,” he said. “We don’t even have prints on the house yet. We just found the mother. You’re lucky that you’re here.”

“Yeah, lucky me.”

I had the impression that the high profile on this sniper case was making people nervous around here, too. Everyone seemed to know who I was, and they were all giving me a wide berth.

“Don’t worry about it. You aren’t any further along than I would have expected,” I told Cowen. “But I do have some ideas about how we might handle things from here.”

Chapter 80

SEVERAL THINGS HAPPENED really fast in Brick Township, mostly because I needed them to.

I worked my contacts with the Field Intelligence Group in Washington to get hold of the FIG coordinator up in the Newark field office. Because it was a Sunday night, and because we had sufficient reason to believe Mitchell Talley had crossed, or would cross, jurisdictional lines, we were able to get an immediate Temporary Felony Want. Cowen would have forty-eight hours from there to secure an actual warrant, signed and issued. In the meantime, Newark could get word out to law enforcement up and down the eastern seaboard right away.

The idea for now was to leave off any mention of Steven Hennessey, or any accomplice at all. The Want specified only that Mitchell Talley was being sought for questioning in the deaths of Bernice and Robert Talley. Wherever our presumed snipers were, I didn’t want them knowing we’d connected any of this to DC until I had more information.

Cowen agreed to give me some cover on that front. In the meantime, I got his people hooked up with Newark in the search for their suspect. Someone found a more recent snapshot in one of his mother’s photo albums, and they used a scan of it for the local and regional BOLO — Be On The Lookout.

Realistically speaking, no one expected Talley to be in the area. The larger effort was focused on looking at stolen-car reports, monitoring transportation hubs, and tracking down surveillance tapes at area airports and bus and train stations. With luck, someone would be able to turn up an eyewitness or maybe even a relevant piece of video somewhere.