“Go ahead,” said Strange.
“Mario’s younger brother is a guy named Dewayne Durham. Leads a gang called the Six Hundred Crew. Marijuana sales, primarily, with cocaine in the mix. Dewayne’s got priors, was a suspect in several murders in his younger days, the typical profile. He’s the big Magilla in his corner of the world.”
“So nobody’s gonna flip on his brother,” said Quinn.
“Exactly,” said Grady.
“You bring Dewayne in?” said Strange.
“Yeah,” said Grady. “He gave us jack shit.”
A brief silence fell.
“The gun he used is in the river right now, I expect,” said Strange.
“No,” said Grady. “Here’s where it gets interesting. You guys hear about that quadruple homicide in Southeast last night?”
“I read about it in the Metro section this morning,” said Strange. “They withheld the names of the victims.”
Grady leaned forward and issued a joyless show of yellowed teeth, meant to be a smile. “One of the guns used in the shooting was the same gun Mario used to shoot Olivia Elliot.”
“What the fuck?” said Quinn.
“How’d you get that so quick?” said Strange.
“There was an alert officer on the crime scene, remembered the caliber of the murder gun in the Elliot case. They sent one of the slugs and a casing out and ran them through the IBIS program, you know, with the ATF?”
“IBIS?” said Quinn.
“Inter Ballistics ID System,” said Grady. “You been away.”
“Not too long.”
“The slug from the shooting matched the slugs taken out of Olivia Elliot. A Taurus thirty-eight. It wasn’t just the same model of gun. The markings made it as the same exact piece.”
“Keep talking,” said Strange.
“Two of the victims of the shooting were known employees of Dewayne Durham. Jerome Long and Allante Jones. Allante. Christ, someone named their kid after a Cadillac, you believe it? And not even one of the good Caddies.”
“And?”
“One of them used the Taurus before he died.”
“Who’d he use it on?” said Quinn.
“Jeremy Coates. He and his cousin James worked for a rival dealer, this fat cat named Horace McKinley.”
McKinley. Strange’s blood ticked through his veins. James and Jeremy Coates owned the beige Nissan that had been tailing him the past two days; Janine had gotten him the information from her MVA contact after Quinn had taken their plate numbers off the 240.
“Funny,” said Grady. “Right?”
“If all else fails,” said Strange, “I guess you can follow the gun.”
“Oh, we’re already on that. We did a trace, the ATF again, God love ’em. The serial number was still on there, which tells us the gun came from a pro middleman. It was purchased in a gun store down in Virginia, way down off Route 1, called Commonwealth Guns. It’ll be a straw buy, we’re pretty sure. Probably went to an intermediary dealer who works the District. Anyway, we’re looking into it.”
“So the gun sale was legit,” said Quinn.
“Most likely. Purchased at an FFL—that’s federal firearms licensee to you, Quinn. Since you been away so long.”
“And that makes it legal?”
“Legal, not moral. But so what? Legal’s enough. Hard to stop straw buys, anyway, even if you wanted to. Sixty percent of the crime guns recovered in D.C. come from legitimate stores in Maryland and Virginia. In Virginia you can buy a gun, do an instant background check, and walk out of the store, that day, with the gun in your hand. Nice, huh?”
“If you’re buying a gun for protection or sport, then it makes sense,” said Quinn. “So I guess it depends on how you look at it.”
“Maybe you ought to ask Olivia Elliot’s son,” said Grady. “How he looks at it, I mean.”
“Anything else?” said Lydell Blue, cutting the tension that had come to the room.
“Yeah,” said Grady. “Anything else you two can tell me?”
“I’ve given you everything, I think,” said Strange.
But he hadn’t mentioned Donut, Mario’s friend. He and Quinn had agreed: They were saving that bit of information for themselves.
“You think of anything else, let me know,” said Grady, pushing two business cards across the table. “I’ve got to get down to the substation in Six D. They just brought Dewayne in for another go-round. I wanna see his face when we tell him about the gun.”
“If I run into Mario,” said Strange, sliding his own card in front of Grady, “I’ll mention you’re looking for him.”