“It’s like Davis never really moved in,” I said.

  “Like a visitor,” Sampson agreed.

  “Computer’s password-protected,” Mahoney said. “So’s the laptop.”

  One of the upstairs bedrooms was empty. The second held flattened moving boxes. The primary bedroom suite featured a big stall shower and a bed facing a balcony overlooking woods. We did find a row of Baltimore Ravens jackets and hoodies in the closet but not the one the deputy had seen the van driver wearing in Gravelly Point Park.

  Overall, the upstairs was as cold and impersonal as the ground floor and the basement, which had been transformed into a sprawling man cave with a large television, movie-theater chairs, and nothing on the wall or floors.

  “Like he ran out of ideas on how to spend his money,” Sampson said.

  “No pictures of the little girl anywhere,” Mahoney said.

  “There are a couple of empty picture frames on the wall in the kitchen,” I said.

  “Maybe he can’t bear the sight of them,” Sampson said.

  “Too painful.”

  “Or too rage-provoking,” Mahoney said.

  But we found nothing to say that Davis was the man behind the remote-controlled machine gun anywhere in the house or basement, which left the four-bay garage.

  We didn’t expect to find what we found: five expensive cars with a complicated hydraulic rack system that kept four of the vehicles stored in stacks of two and a 1963 split-window Corvette up on a lift in the third bay. The fourth bay was empty and spotless.

  “This guy doesn’t fool around, does he?” Sampson said. “He’s got a gizmo and a gadget for everything and his own machine tool shop. That sounds like someone who could build a remote-controlled machine gun.”

  “Or at least get the hardware to build it,” Ned said. “That curved track it was on.”

  “Maybe,” I said, wandering over to the old Corvette, which was in immaculate condition. In front of the car, against the wall, was a steel locker flanked by two obsessively organized workbenches.

  I opened the locker and found five mechanic’s jumpsuits hanging there, three blue and two tan. One tan suit had grease and oil on it. Another tan suit bore grass and mud stains at the knees. One of the blue jumpsuits had a big stain on the front that smelled like chemicals.

  Then I noticed the shoulders and neck of that same blue coverall were bunched up. I reached up with gloved hands and unzipped it, and what we saw pretty much ended our suspicions about Captain Davis.

  And confirmed them.

  Chapter

  38

  Bree sat in silence after Jannie related what her friend Iliana Meadows had told her in strictest confidence.

  “And she doesn’t know who’s behind it?”

  “Just that they have the video. She figures it’s someone from Paxson State,” Jannie said, referring to the college in rural Maryland.

  “And the video?”

  “She didn’t even know the coach had made it.”

  “But it was in high school?”

  Jannie nodded. “When she was seventeen.”

  “A high-school coach.”

  “She said that part was consensual, but the video definitely was not.”

  “And it’s not the coach blackmailing her?”

  “Not unless he’s blackmailing himself.”

  Bree checked her watch. “And she has that kind of money?”

  “Her father was killed in an industrial accident when she was twelve. A jury awarded her and her mother millions.”

  “Is that common knowledge?”

  “No. I knew Iliana for a long time before she told me.”

  “You said she was down here for a meet?”

  “She came down early to familiarize herself with the course. It’s at George Mason tomorrow.”

  “Where’s she from?”

  “Outside Philly,” Jannie said. “Newtown or something. It’s close to the city.”

  “On the Main Line, then,” Bree said, shaking her head.

  They were quiet for several moments, both scanning the sidewalks on both sides of the street for a girl Jannie said was built like a greyhound and wore her light brown hair pulled back in a long braid. But there was no one like that.

  Iliana Meadows was more than an hour and a half late.

  “Shouldn’t we report her missing?” Jannie said.

  “They won’t take a report until she’s been gone twenty-four hours,” Bree said.

  “Twenty-four hours?”

  “Do you have any idea where she was staying?”

  “All I know is it’s an Airbnb near George Mason. I think her friend Tina has the address.”

  “Have you called her mother?”

  “Nancy? Iliana says she’s not around a lot. She travels and has boyfriends.”

  Bree thought about everything Jannie had told her. She was getting Iliana’s story secondhand, so she knew there had to be flaws in the account. Still, there was no doubt that if even half of Iliana Meadows’s story was true, it was a potentially explosive situation.

  “Let’s try the mom and then the friend who knows where Iliana has been staying,” Bree said as her phone began to buzz and chime. She looked at the screen and saw a text from an unfamiliar number that read In situ. AA 839. Interior front near cockpit.

  Chapter

  39

  We caught up with Captain Davis as he was leaving the field house with some other coaches. Fiona Plum walked out of the school building and headed toward him, but we got to him first.

  “Find a machine gun in my basement?” he said jokingly. “Here to arrest me?”

  “As a matter of fact,” Mahoney said, “I hope you’re not going to resist and make this all uglier than it has to be, Captain.”

  “Ugly?” he said. “Resist? You’ve got to be shitting me. Other than in my F-14, I’ve never been near a machine gun in my life.”

  “But you use jumpsuits when you’re working on your cars and building your bombs,” Sampson said, spinning him around.

  “What?” he said. “No, this is not right. You have no evidence that—”

  Mahoney said sharply, “We do have evidence, Mr. Davis. One of your jumpsuits and one of your Ravens’ sweatshirts matches the description of the clothing worn by the man who machine-gunned the American Airlines jet. We swabbed both articles of clothing and ran the swabs through a portable analyzer.”

  I said, “Positive for explosives residue on both the hoodie and the jumpsuit, consistent with the fertilizer bomb that destroyed the van you rented.”

  “Captain?” Fiona Plum said. She was ten feet away.

  Davis’s head swiveled to her and he looked pained, chagrined. “It’s not true what they’re saying, Fiona. I don’t know what is happening here or why, but I’m telling you, what they’re saying is not true.”

  The English teacher looked at Davis as if her hero had been vanquished by some dark knight. Mahoney read the high-school football coach his Miranda rights and began to lead him away.

  “Hey! What’s happening?” several male voices cried.

  We looked back and saw coaches running our way. Scurrying toward us from another direction was a pale fellow wearing a bow tie.

  “I’m the headmaster here,” he declared. “What is this? I want an explanation!”

  “Coach Davis is being taken into custody pending a further search of his home,” Mahoney said. “No one touch his office. An FBI forensics team will be here in an hour.”

  “What’s he done?” one of the coaches yelled.

  “Hates American Airlines,” Sampson said, opening the squad car’s rear door.

  Davis, who was clearly shaken, said, “I don’t hate American Airlines.” Then he called out to the small crowd as he got in the car, “I haven’t done anything but have a little too much to drink. I promise you all that. I had nothing to do with that airplane coming down. Nothing.”

  No one said anything for a long moment. Sampson started to shut the door.

  “I believe you, Captain!” Fiona Plum called out. “Don’t say another thing! I’m calling you a lawyer!”

  Chapter

  40

  Bree and Jannie went across the street to the coffee shop and took seats where they could see the corner of Fourteenth and I in case Iliana Meadows miraculously showed.

  Jannie texted the friend who knew where Iliana was staying. Bree tracked down an address and phone for Nancy Meadows in suburban Philadelphia. Jannie called the friend, got voice mail, and left a message. Bree did the same with Iliana’s mother’s voice mail.

  Jannie put her phone down, frustrated. “I feel like we should be doing more.”

  “Sometimes the best thing you can do is wait and get answers,” Bree said, finally forcing herself to open the first of three shots an FBI agent named Amelia Franks had sent her of the interior of the forward fuselage of AA 839 before anyone entered to begin retrieving bodies.

  The picture had been shot with a powerful flash that threw the macabre scene into a garish light. The hull of the forward fuselage had broken apart in multiple places and had come to rest almost upside down. Most of the seats had been ripped from the floor in the crash and hurled about the interior as it rolled over and over. Some of the victims were still held to their seats by their safety belts. Others had been torn from their belts and tumbled freely along with carry-on bags from the overhead compartments.

  All Bree could make out from the picture was a grotesque jumbled knot of bloody torsos, arms, legs, heads, and luggage. There was no one recognizable, and she could not get a good look at the passengers still in their seats and dangling upside down, their backs to the camera.

  She opened the second picture, which was not much better. The third, however, was taken by an agent who’d climbed through the blown-out window of the cockpit and gotten the hatch door open.

  Five bodies hung upside down from their seats in the first four rows, their arms, hands, and fingers dangling, their faces and upper bodies beaten, gashed, and so swollen Bree doubted their own families would recognize them.

  She used her fingers to enlarge the picture and saw past an overweight male in the first-row right window seat to the second-row window. The plane had come apart next to the woman who hung there in a bloody white shirt and jeans, the gashes that had taken large parts of her facial skin and scalp clearly visible.

  And there was the big diamond on her left ring finger. A male in a gray business suit hung beside her. He’d been less maimed in the crash. Only the left side of his head had been destroyed.

  “Bree?” Jannie said. “I’ve got the address where Iliana’s staying. Tina’s going to meet us there. She’s driving in from Paxson.”

  “Let’s go,” Bree said as her phone buzzed with an incoming text. She got up and saw it was from FBI Agent Franks. She opened it: Still processing luggage, trying to match to Maggie Fontaine in seat 2A.

  Thanks, Bree replied as they went out the door. TSA?

  When she did not get an immediate reply, she shifted her attention to Jannie and her missing friend, wondering how she’d gotten herself into two missing-person cases in two days. “Address?” Bree asked.

  “On Fairfax Boulevard in Fairfax, unit twenty-one B,” Jannie said. “I’ll pull it up on Waze.”

  They got in Bree’s vehicle, picked up I-66 across the Roosevelt Bridge, drove south past Falls Church to Fairfax, Virginia, and were soon rolling slowly through a condo complex looking for unit 21B.

  “Got to be that building up ahead,” Bree said.

  “Hey, that’s Iliana’s car,” Jannie said. “Right there! The green BMW.”

  Bree pulled in and parked near the little sedan. It was even chillier here than it was in Washington and the leaves were falling. There were wet leaves on the BMW’s windshield.

  “She hasn’t been out since last night,” Bree said. “That was the last rain.”

  They went to the door of unit 21B and knocked. There was no answer.

  “We’ll have to search for a manager,” Bree said.

  “Wait, wait, this is an Airbnb,” Jannie said. “Do you have the app?”

  She did have the app and signed into it. Jannie had her search the address in Fairfax and quickly came up with the listing.

  “Two hundred and ninety a night?” Bree said.

  “Look at the contact—there’s definitely a messaging thing to the owner and maybe also a phone number or something.”

  Bree found both and phoned the owner in Reston, Virginia. Margaret Holmes didn’t seem interested until Bree explained that she used to be Metro PD’s chief of detectives and the young woman who’d rented the condo had gone missing.

  “Missing?” she said. “For how long?”

  Bree said, “About three hours.”

  “Three hours? Isn’t that jumping the gun a little?”

  “I can’t get into it, but she was being threatened, blackmailed. That’s why she rented the place from you, to get away from that threat. All we want to do is enter and see if she’s there.”

  Chapter

  41

  After a long pause, Holmes asked Bree to send a picture of herself and her private investigator’s and driver’s licenses. Bree did. The owner directed her to a lockbox in a utility closet beneath the staircase and gave her a digital code.

  Bree punched the number in, got the key, thanked the woman, and climbed back up to unit 21B, where Jannie was waiting nervously.

  Bree said, “I told the owner I would be the only one going in, and I have to video the place as I find it.”

  “That’s okay,” Jannie said. “I don’t know if I want to go in there.”

  Bree got out a tissue from her purse and held the door handle with it as she inserted the key in a dead-bolt lock. She turned it, heard it slide, and pushed the door open.

  Her phone buzzed with a text. Ignoring it, she turned on her phone camera and started videoing the short-term rental. Nice main room with new furniture and television. Everything neat and tidy. Several textbooks piled neatly on a glass table.

  “Jannie?” a female voice called. Bree looked over her shoulder.

  “Tina’s here,” Jannie said. “Iliana’s teammate.”

  “Both of you stay out while I clear it, please,” Bree said and she quickly did just that.

  No one in the kitchen. Only one of the two bedrooms had been used. The bed had been made. Iliana’s clothes hung neatly from hangers. There was a phone charger but no phone. And no sign of a computer anywhere.

  Bree called out to Jannie as she returned, “Empty.”

  Jannie said, “Tina wants to know if Iliana’s running shoes are there—Asics. And a blue and gold Paxson State running jacket? She’d wear it in this wind.”

  Bree pivoted, returned to the bedroom, looked, and called over her shoulder. “No Asics. No running jacket. Ask Tina if she had a laptop.”

  A moment later, Jannie called back, “Yes, a MacBook with a Paxson Cross-Country sticker on the lid.”

  “It’s not here.”

  Then she put her phone to her lips. “We are leaving now, Ms. Holmes.” She shut the camera app off. Before exiting and shutting the door of the condo, she glanced at her text messages and saw one from Amelia Franks that began Finally.

  Jannie was on the landing standing next to Tina Dawson, a tall, fit blonde wearing a Paxson State Track hoodie, shorts, and running shoes. Both girls looked at Bree anxiously.

  “If none of her running stuff is in there, she went out for a run,” Tina said.

  “Hold that thought. I’m trying to do two things at once here.”

  She stepped aside, opened the FBI agent’s text, and saw the image of the Irish passport of Maggie Fontaine used to board AA 839. The photograph was clear.

  The woman in seat 2A was unmistakably Leigh Anne Asher.

  Her heart sank. Even though she had thought it likely, the evidence was now incontrovertible. Elena Martin’s old friend was dead. And she had been engaged. But how could she have two passports under two different names?

  She called up one of the earlier pictures Agent Franks had sent. This time she blew up the picture to look at the man with the bashed head hanging beside Asher.

  Who are you? she wondered. Are you just some random guy? Or are you her fiancé?

  “Bree!” Jannie said, snapping her out of her thoughts. “What are we going to do?”

  “You said she was going to take a run in a nearby park, right?”

  Jannie nodded. “I guess it’s part of the race course.”

  Tina said, “That’s what she told me too. Mantua Park. Gerry Connolly Cross County Trail. She said it would be a good place for me to loosen up after the drive down. And I think the trail is part of the course at George Mason. She gave me directions, what trail to take and all.”

  “You were going to stay here with her?”

  “She invited me. Said it was better than the dump Paxson was putting us up in.”

  Bree said, “Were you two close? Did she confide in you?”

  Tina frowned. “We just met like six weeks ago. Confide in me about what?”

  “Nothing,” Bree said, heading for the stairs. “Let’s go look around that park.”

  “What if she’s not there?” Jannie asked.

  “We start calling hospitals. And then we call the police.”

  Chapter

  42

  In a modest apartment building in suburban Maryland, Padraig Filson checked to see if the VPN software he was running fully masked the IP address of his laptop. Assured that it did, he typed in commands that bounced his request through six different internet servers around the world before sending it into a virtual universe most people had heard of but never seen.

  Filson smiled. Can you imagine what we could have done with this back in the day? Everything would have gone down so much faster. Easier.

  He looked at the wall where he had thumbtacked a snapshot of a towheaded, freckle-faced young boy grinning through two missing front teeth. Filson sighed, knowing that rewriting the past behind that snapshot was just a pipe dream.