Murder Inside the Beltway - Margaret Truman [91]
“Why what?”
“You’re annoying me, pal. Why somebody wanted him dead.”
“I don’t know. He was in pretty heavy to some sharks and—”
“Loan sharks?”
“Yeah. He tried to hit me up for some money, but like I told him, business is slow, you know, people getting their stuff off the computers, the Internet, downloading stuff for free. So I told him I couldn’t help him, so he gets a little nasty, you know, and starts telling me he knows who his real friends are and—”
“And he walks out, and pop, he’s gone.”
“Yeah. Scared the hell out of me. This neighborhood’s bad, man. Time I got out’a here.”
Hatcher grinned and looked around the dingy shop. “Shame. Nice place you’ve got here.”
“You want something, take it.”
“I don’t watch this garbage. Give one of the officers outside your name, address, phone.”
Hatch and Wally spent a few minutes asking onlookers whether anyone could identify the car or the gunmen. There were no takers, nor were any expected. They waited until an ME van pulled up before heading back to Metro.
“You knew the guy?” Wally said.
“Knew of him. Suspect in that hooker murder in Adams Morgan. Ran an escort service she used to work for.”
“Anything happening with that, Hatch?”
“No, and nobody cares. Just as well. I’m packing it in, Wally.”
“Yeah? You’ve had enough?”
“More than enough. The minute we get back I’m filing the papers. Already have them filled out. I’ll put the house on the market and head south.”
“You got a place in Florida, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Tough to sell your place with the way the economy’s going. Could be on the market, say, months, huh?”
“I don’t care. We’ll get out of town the minute the pension clears and let some real estate cutie handle things up here. This city’s a jungle, Wally. Nothing makes sense anymore.”
“I know.”
“How much time you got left?”
“A couple’a years. Can’t wait. We’ll miss you, Hatch.”
Hatcher rubbed his eyes and looked out the window at the passing corner of the D.C. scene. “Yeah,” he said, “but I won’t miss this place. Not for a minute.”
• • •
Jackson and the second detective assigned to follow Rollins to his Maryland rendezvous with Kevin Ziegler fell into an easy pace as they trailed Ziegler’s Town Car back into the District. Jackson called Kloss at the house, saying that there was nothing to report. He gave the address in Maryland where the two men had met, and said that there hadn’t been a sign of them from the minute they entered the house until leaving.
They stopped a few car lengths away from the entrance to Rollins’s office building and watched as he got out of the car, lingered for a few moments to exchange parting words with his host, closed the door, and looked back at them before going through the glass revolving doors.
“What’s this all about?” Jackson’s colleague asked.
“I don’t know,” Jackson said. “Politics I guess. Ziegler’s a big wheel in Pyle’s reelection campaign, and Rollins advises Governor Colgate.”
“Cutting a deal, huh? Always a deal, even when a kid is missing. Politicians!”
Jackson laughed. “That’s a safe assumption.”
“They haven’t heard again from the kidnappers, Matt?”
“As far as I know.”
“What a hell of a thing for the parents to go through.”
“Can’t imagine anything worse,” Jackson responded, “unless…”
“Yeah, unless the kid is found dead. I suppose there’s always hope.”
“Nothing but hope.”
Jackson’s cell sounded.
“Matt, it’s Bob Kloss. Come on back to the house.”
When Jackson arrived at the Rollins’s Foggy Bottom home, there was heightened tension. The lead FBI special agent looked glumly through a small opening he’d created in a drapery. Sue Rollins sat in a recliner in the living room, feet up, eyes closed. Kloss conferred with a new face from Metro, who’d been sent to spell one of the detectives charged with monitoring the telephone recording devices. Kloss waved Jackson into the dining room, where the equipment was set up, and shut the double doors. “I want you to listen to something,” he said. “When Mr. Rollins got the call