I turned down Howie’s offer to send someone with me. We agreed if this was legit, I would bring him back with me and we would try to talk him into surrendering to law enforcement. Howie said he would speak to Lindsey the lawyer to protect the Pro from any potential claims of harboring or cooperating with a fugitive—although we couldn’t figure out how a supposedly dead man who had not been indicted could be considered a fugitive.

The promised snow was just beginning to fall as I walked over to the garage. I pulled up the collar of my trench coat; not as homage, I was just cold! The vibrancy that once activated Washington’s afternoon streets was gone. Instead it felt like the whole country had been lulled into the same kind of complaisant stupor as a hive of yellow jackets in the hard days of winter.

The garage had the architectural elegance of every municipal parking garage in every city in every state. Its cement ramp spiraled up six stories. The outer walls on each level were slightly more than four feet high. There was a roadway about two cars in width between parked cars. A folding billboard out front advertised the early bird special: $25 for all day if entering before six A.M. I usually got there about an hour early on my way to the gym. Van was parked where I’d left it, in a handicapped spot on the first level. I took the elevator to the fourth floor, then rolled slowly and carefully down the wide ramp, braking often until I reached the third floor. The light mist snaking in over the half walls made the visibility uneven. Certain areas were illuminated by caged industrial lighting, while others lay in deep shadows. I found a spot in the shadow of a inside retaining wall and waited there. I was out of the flow of traffic but still able to look over the wall to spot anyone driving up the ramp.

The garage was quiet. It was used mostly by people who worked in the area, people like me who parked there in the morning and departed at the end of the day. The shops in the area served mostly the locals—office workers; employees of a coffee shop, a florist, a CVS—so there was limited in-and-out activity. A couple of cars wound up the ramp to the upper floors and drifted slowly past me. Occasionally I heard the mechanical banging of the elevator rising or descending. An intermittent gust tickled me with a touch of wetness.

I waited, my emotions coiled, ready to spring. Okay, that is so completely not true. What I actually did was sit there trying to deal with my boredom. You rarely see that part of police work or investigative journalism in movies or on TV. That’s because boredom is, well, boring. I’d learned different tricks to keep my mind occupied while waiting. At times the toughest challenge is staying awake. I read an old James Lee Burke book I had on my phone; I responded to emails, checked the news, and sent a funny meme to Jenny.