“I noticed him,” a shopkeeper in the travel accessory store near gate A-8 told him. She was in her deep thirties. “He was standing near the gate reading a newspaper.”

“How come you noticed him?” Mullin asked. “Was he doing something that caught your eye?”

“He was-” She smiled sheepishly. “I thought he was really good-looking,” she said.

“Anything else?” Mullin asked.

There wasn’t. But the details checked.

Mullin concluded his walk-through by entering the East Hall, where the rolling kiosks were located. Two detectives were already there asking questions of the kiosk owners.

“This lady says she saw the guy we’re looking for,” Mullin was told by one of the cops. A conversation with her revealed that the tall, thin man had passed her kiosk and gone into the bar behind B. Smith’s restaurant. Mullin and one of the detectives went in and talked to the maître d’ at the front door of the restaurant. It featured southern cooking, which attracted a sizable African-American clientele.

“Yeah, I remember him,” the maître d’ said in response to Mullin’s question. “You say he shot somebody inside the station? Boy, he sure didn’t look like someone who just shot somebody.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was-well, he was very casual, didn’t seem in any rush. I asked if he wanted a table and he said he didn’t, but he wasn’t out of breath or anything. I mean, he didn’t run out of here. He just told me he didn’t want a table-I think he said ‘not today’-and left through those doors.” He indicated the restaurant’s main entrance leading to Massachusetts Avenue at the front of the station.

After noting what the maître d’ said and informing him he’d be asked later for a formal statement, Mullin told the two detectives to work the outside to see if anyone remembered seeing the alleged killer, and returned to the crime scene. The medical examiner was finishing up his preliminary examination.

“We ID him?” Mullin asked.

He was handed Russo’s wallet, as well as an Israeli passport. The wallet contained an Israeli driver’s license, a single Visa card, a photo of a woman posing on what appeared to be a beach, and slightly more than a hundred U.S. dollars in cash. Other travel documents included a round-trip airline ticket between Tel Aviv and Newark, with a plane change in Barcelona, Spain, and a one-way Amtrak ticket between New York ’s Penn Station and Washington ’s Union Station.

“Louis Russo?” Mullin said aloud. “That’s Italian. What’s he doing with an Israeli passport?”

Those around him didn’t have an answer.

Mullin handed the wallet and travel documents to an evidence technician and left the station, climbed in his car, and drove to First District headquarters on North Capitol Street N.W., where he sat with fellow detectives who’d been at the murder scene. They began to compare notes, speculate, joke, and put together a preliminary report.

“What do you figure the old guy was doing in D.C.?” someone asked. “Or going to do?”

“Visit family maybe,” someone else answered.

“Next of kin?”

“Back in Israel maybe,” Accurso said.

“You checked Russos in the D.C. directory?” Mullin said.

Accurso nodded. “You figure the shooter knew Russo?” he asked. “It comes off like a mob hit.”

Mullin laughed as he said, “Russo. Italiano. Maybe he’s some geriatric godfather nobody ever heard of. Or from some family the New York cops know well. Get New York on the phone.”

“Or the computer. It doesn’t make sense. Doesn’t make sense,” the youngest of the detectives said.

“What doesn’t?”

“Why some black guy would come up behind an old Italian guy named Russo, who’s here from Israel, and do him in public. The witnesses say the shooter was cool, unflustered, in no rush. A pro. So why pick Union Station? Who is Louis Russo, and why would a certified hit man want to whack him? For what? It doesn’t make sense.”

“You ever see a murder that made sense?” Mullin offered.

“Yeah, sometimes. You know, some people, well, deserve to get killed,” the young detective said. “Sometimes it’s justifiable. Justifiable homicide. That’s how they get off. Like a guy whose wife is screwing around and gets caught, and he pops her or the boyfriend. In Texas, that’s justifiable murder.”

“In Texas, that’s routine.”

Mullin glanced at Accurso, who was putting the finishing touches on their initial report. “See what you can learn by hanging around here, Vinnie?” he said, his voice mirroring his amusement. “Your wife plays around, it’s okay to pop her.”

“I didn’t necessarily mean that,” the young detective said defensively.

“You up for a drink?” Mullin asked Accurso.

“Thanks, no, Bret. Got to get home.”

“Anybody?” Mullin asked others in the room.

Heads were shaken, excuses made.

“Well, I’m packing it in. After a pop or two. See you tomorrow.”

Mullin’s apartment was in a four-story town house on California Street, between Dupont Circle and Adams-Morgan. It was too early to suffer the loneliness of the one-bedroom, perpetually untidy place he’d called home for the six years since Rosie, his wife of nineteen years, and he had called it quits, sold the house in Silver Spring, and gone their separate ways. She’d settled in a high-rise up near the National Cathedral and continued to work as a receptionist for a K Street law firm. They seldom talked unless something troublesome arose about their two kids, a son and daughter, who’d flown the coop and were doing pretty well, the girl in Denver where she worked as a personal trainer, the son a cop in a small West Virginia town. He hadn’t heard from his daughter in over a year; she blamed his drinking for the breakup of the marriage and had viciously condemned him the last time they spoke. His son kept in touch with an occasional phone call and Christmas and birthday card, but Mullin didn’t have any illusions about the depth of that relationship, either.

He was thinking of his dismal family situation when he entered the private entrance to the Jockey Club, in the Westin Fairfax hotel on Massachusetts Avenue. When it came to choosing bars, Mullin was an equal opportunity drinker. He’d been to most of them in D.C. over the years, although he had his favorites, depending upon his mood at the moment. Most nights, he opted for inexpensive neighborhood places near his apartment. But there were times when he felt expansive-or the reverse, particularly depressed, which triggered expansiveness-times when he preferred settings more genteel than the run-of-the-mill. This was one of those nights.

He was treated nicely at this bastion of Washington society-Jackie Kennedy and Nancy Reagan had been regulars; Mrs. Reagan’s chicken salad was still on the menu-although he sensed that his arrival wasn’t always as welcome as the serving staff made it seem. The arrival of a cop at a fancy spot like the Jockey Club caused a certain unease to set in, even though he wasn’t there to hassle or arrest anyone. There were establishments that liked having cops around. They provided color with their stories of life on the streets, and if a customer threatened to act up, there was muscle to handle the situation.

But in posh places, particularly where political movers and shakers tended to gather, sanctity was threatened, especially for those whose reasons for being there weren’t exactly aboveboard. Like the old silver-haired guy in a corner booth with his arm around a thirty-odd blonde who laughed too loud and long at anything he said. Or the two men in another booth who spoke in whispers. Mullin chalked them up as a lobbyist and pol cutting a deal that would probably cost the average citizen above-average money, hopefully not worse.

He ordered a bourbon on the rocks on his way to a wine-red leather chair in the bar area, where the AC countered the fireplace glowing on this hot summer evening-form over function. When he drank during the day, it was vodka, always vodka, its relatively odorless quality a necessity. But at night, with no one to smell his breath except his cat, Magnum, it was bourbon, Wild Turkey or single barrel.