Free The Yoga Store Murder by Dan Morse Page B

and a short man, walking together.
    For years, Bethesda Row had been safe, comfortable, and cozy. All of a sudden it wasn’t, and wouldn’t be again until the men were caught. “Is Bethesda going to get hit again?” people wondered.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Storming the Walls
    All weekend, reporters barraged the phones of officials with questions about the case, and the wave was still cresting Monday morning. Leads? Suspects? Bethesda still safe? Responsibility for the answers, or deflections, fell to Captain Paul Starks, the police department spokesman. He asked Captain David Gillespie, the major crimes commander, who had a simple message for his longtime friend: I’ve got nothing for you Paul, and tell the press to quit calling down here. Starks went to see his boss, Montgomery Police Chief Tom Manger.
    A onetime journalism major before switching to criminal justice, Manger was well seasoned in media. Between his six years as police chief of Fairfax County, in northern Virginia (another large, prosperous area outside D.C.), and his seven years at the Montgomery post, it amounted to thirteen years of navigating the kinds of public and political fallout that came from someone getting killed in a wealthy enclave where such things weren’t supposed to happen. Manger knew he had to stand in front of news cameras, flanked by his commanders, with a clear, two-part message: that he understood how scared people felt and that his detectives were working tirelessly. Absent such declarations, residents would start calling their elected officials, who’d start calling him. Or they’d light up their neighborhood e-mail discussion lists and write letters to the editor, raising a stink.
    Until then, Gillespie had kept his updates to Manger and Starks limited—the parking-lot video of the two men, the homeless suspect. But he had not mentioned Sergeant Craig Wittenberger’s early suspicions of Brittany, for instance. “We haven’t yet been able to get a full story from the rape victim,” Gillespie told the chief. Now the idea of having a press conference made him nervous, but he liked the idea of drawing more attention to the case, if that was possible, to scare up possible witnesses—and he figured that playing up a mounting reward fund couldn’t hurt.
    In addition to his media background, Manger was also a polished public speaker who’d performed in community theater and musicals. The three decided he would do the talking. And they thought it would be good to hold the press conference outside the store. That’s where all the reporters were camped out anyway.
    Down in their squad room, the detectives didn’t have to be in the meeting to know what a high-octane story this had become. To work murders in a large county like Montgomery—which was generally affluent but had sections of middle-and lower-class areas as well—was to inherently understand a weakness in American society. Statistics bore out what they knew: in the United States, nearly 5 of every 100,000 residents are killed every year, a markedly higher rate than most all of the developed world, and yet many pockets of America go along just fine. Residents rarely dwell on the possibility of murder—until a killer strikes, and there’s the sudden sense that danger is storming the walls. It was a phenomenon that Detective Jim Drewry, Sergeant Craig Wittenberger, and other longtime Montgomery detectives always groused about as a simple matter of class and race: how people viewed victims from places like Bethesda as innocents, while those murdered in Montgomery’s less ritzy areas—the Wheatons, the White Oaks, the Germantowns—they, well, somehow, someway, must’ve been doing something they weren’t supposed to.
    At the moment, it was background noise the detectives tried to ignore. They had to figure out what to do about suspect Keith Lockett, who’d been booked in the jail just six hours earlier. Detective Dimitry Ruvin was still hopeful, citing the comments Keith