Murder at Union Station - Margaret Truman [44]
“…MPD has verified the victim’s identity as Leon LeClaire, Haitian-born and carrying a French passport. His last known residence was New York City. Fox News has also learned that LeClaire matches the description of the man accused of being the shooter in the recent Union Station murder. And exclusive sources tell me that MPD interest in the so-called mystery man—who told this reporter at the scene of the Union Station murder the name of the victim before anyone else knew it—has intensified.”
The camera pulled back to a wider shot; Mullin and Accurso could be seen in the background.
“I’m Joyce Rosenberg reporting.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Had Mullin decided to stop in at the Market Inn that evening, he would have crossed paths with a detective colleague, Fred Peck, who sat with Timothy Stripling in one of the bar area’s secluded booths.
The restaurant, beneath the freeway at 2nd and E Street, not far from the National Air and Space Museum, had been a fixture there for forty-five years, attracting a wide variety of Washingtonians—seafood lovers, jazz lovers, Supreme Court justices, and other law lovers at lunch, and those looking to extend the evening beyond the city’s early-to-bed reputation or their own. The sounds of jazz-tinged show tunes, smoothly played by Mullin’s piano-playing friend, accompanied by a bassist, wafted through the smoky bar. The anti-smoking police hadn’t invaded Washington yet, but no one doubted it wasn’t long before they did.
Peck, a gaunt man with a prominent hooked nose and sizable bags beneath large brown eyes, and whose slightly curved spine caused him to appear to be always going forward, belonged to a small faction of the Washington MPD known as deep throats. Prior to the success of Woodward and Bernstein’s account of the Watergate affair, the group had been known as the canaries. No matter what they were called, the view of them by others on the force wasn’t benign.
Peck had been a cop for twenty-four years. In the beginning, he’d been a respected and effective officer, with a bright future—in fact a little too bright, according to colleagues who watched him advance through the ranks faster than normal. That’s when speculation began to surface about why Fred Peck seemed to be favored over others when it came to promotions.
No one ever developed hard evidence that Peck had become a throat, a conduit of information to MPD hierarchy and Internal Affairs about the activities of colleagues. But suspicion had always been evidence enough in the gossip-driven Washington MPD. Shoulders turned cold, comments were made, and eventually veiled threats began to surface, nothing overt, but pointed enough to send Peck scurrying to handlers up the line in search of cover. He was taken off the street and assigned desk duty in the Missing Persons Unit, his current assignment.
While this took him out of the loop on the street, it didn’t interfere with his penchant for ingratiating himself with authorities—and profiting from it—inside the MPD and outside as well. That’s how and why Tim Stripling entered the detective’s life.
Stripling’s primary duty while a full-time employee of the Central Intelligence Agency was to develop relationships with individuals in a wide variety of government agencies and departments, much like his overseas colleagues worked to nurture moles inside foreign governments. His budget to accomplish this was off the books; Congress would not have been happy knowing it was supporting an inherently illegal activity.
The guidelines Stripling used to target potential candidates were the same as those