Page 43 of Return of the Spider

He put on reading glasses to make sure he was seeing everything clearly and in the minutest detail. Kneeling, he studied the bumper and saw a little blood spattered there; a ragged strip of stretchy black fabric was stuck in the cavity of the broken headlight.

Soneji removed the fabric, set it aside, and installed the new bulbs. Before he put the replacement covers on, he worked the fabric into a gap in the upper right corner of the grille.

Satisfied, he went to the rear of the van and looked at the smears in the dirt where the bicyclist’s message had been written across the double doors. Then he reached up to a shelf behind the vehicle, moved a coffee can filled with wood screws, and found the key.

The rear of the van’s interior was a mess, just as he’d found it the first time, strewn with empty beer cans, old nudie magazines, newspapers, trash, papers, leaves, and everything else that belonged in a dump.

From his pack, Soneji fished out a baggie holding the piece of hair and scalp he’d torn off the dead woman after the second shooting. Another baggie held the Bulldog pistol. A third held the latex gloves he’d worn last night, fingertips covered in dried blood.

He opened the driver’s-side door, got out the pistol, set it aside, and turned the plastic bag upside down. He shook it out over the console between the two bucket seats and on the dash.

Then he opened the cylinder and extracted two of the four spent rounds. Soneji crouched down and carefully pushed the bullet casings into a frayed and separated seam in what was left of the van’s floor fabric.

Soneji closed the driver’s door and locked it, then returned to the rear of the van and opened the baggie containing the latex gloves. He’d worn two layers of gloves on his gun hand that night, and now he carefully separated the inner glove from the one with gunshot residue and blood from the dead passenger. He lobbed the contaminated glove into the mess, then opened the baggie with the bloody hair, scalp, and flesh in it. He flicked the treasure into the trash heap in the van’s rear, closed the van’s door, and locked it.

He returned the key to the shelf and set the coffee can on topof the key, put the pieces of the headlight and turn signal into his pack, then shut the door. He picked up the rake and gently stirred the dirt behind him as he backed out.

He threw the tarp over the front end and raked everywhere he’d been on the shed floor. When his boots reached weeds, where he would no longer leave tracks, he leaned over and placed the rake against the wall.

The air still stank of woodsmoke. It made Soneji’s eyes sting as he set off on the path through the bramble, toward the Saab and a dreaded, dutiful long weekend with Missy and Roni.

PART THREE

A More Intimate Way to Kill

CHAPTER

32

The thursday after theBeltsville shooting, Sampson and I went to the rehab facility in Bowie, Maryland, where Senate aide Carl Dennis was being treated for his many injuries. Before we went to his room, his wife, Kathleen, warned us that he was heavily medicated and remembered very little of the night he was run over.

But we had to try. It was hard to look at all the casts, traction cables, tubes, and IV lines that held Dennis together. His head was heavily bandaged. His face was swollen and bruised.

“Carl, hon,” his wife said. “These police detectives want to talk to you about the night you were hit.”

He said, his words sounding slurred, “Don’t ’member.”

“Nothing?” Sampson said.

He thought several beats before he said, “A shot?”

“You heard a shot?”

“Think.”

“What else?”

He closed his eyes a few moments, then opened them. “Lights. Fast. Low lights.”

I thought about what we knew. “Fast, low headlights?”

“Guess.” He shrugged.

I said, “Could it have been vehicle headlights coming at you?”

The Senate aide nodded.

John opened a folder and retrieved a still shot of the white Ford Econoline van. He showed it to Dennis. “Is this the van that ran you over?”