There were boxes of handload bullets of several calibers in the cabinets above the fridge. Wrapped in a white pillowcase under some blankets in the storage space beneath the master bed, there was a handcrafted weapon that looked like a miniature double-barreled side-by-side shotgun, except with a custom pistol grip.

  I cracked the breech and found two .25-caliber bullets in the chambers. When I lifted the gun and aimed at my reflection in a mirror, there was no question that at short range, Filson’s double gun would blow out both my eyes.

  “We got him,” Sampson said. “It’s over.”

  “Fat lady’s singing,” I said. “But I still want some answers.”

  “If he’ll talk.”

  “He’ll talk. I can see it. He wants to tell us all about it.”

  Because the murders occurred across multiple state and district lines, we decided to take the confessed Dead Hours killer to the federal detention facility in Alexandria until a judge could determine which jurisdiction to try him in. Filson said little during the drive, even when we passed groups of television reporters outside the campground and near the detention facility. We used the underground entrance and had Filson booked and then taken to an interrogation room, where we let him stew until two in the afternoon.

  When Sampson, Detective Marilyn Hanson, and I entered, Filson had changed into an orange jumpsuit and was shackled to his chair by his ankles. His wrists were in handcuffs, and he was forced-smiling, as if he were trying to enjoy himself or cover some pain.

  “Padraig Filson,” I said.

  “Call me Paddy,” he said in a brogue, sitting back in his chair with a grim expression on his face. “Everyone does.”

  Sampson said, “You turned down legal representation?”

  “Public,” he said. “I’ll go private if need be. How did you get me?”

  “Your earlobe,” I said.

  “Damn thing,” he said, wincing. “Al-Qaeda sniper shot it half off in Afghanistan twenty years ago.”

  Detective Hanson said, “Are you in pain, Paddy?”

  He forced the smile again. “Twenty-four/seven from various causes.”

  Sampson said, “You’re sick.”

  “Terminal,” he said. “Matter of months now, and there’ll be a big slide before a crash, and then I’ll be free again, beyond your reach.”

  I said, “You believe in life after death?”

  “I do. We are spirits having a physical experience.”

  Sampson said, “Do you expect to be judged for what you’ve done?”

  Filson shrugged. “Don’t know. But if I am, I believe I’ll be found justified.”

  Hanson sat back in her chair with an angry look on her face. “Justified? You feel you were justified in killing seven men in cold blood?”

  Filson nodded, smiled at her. “One hundred percent. And beyond that, I’m not saying another word without a glass of Jameson in front of me.”

  I said, “Booze? We can’t do that.”

  “Look, Cross, I am dying. Oxy doesn’t do a damn thing for the agony I get in. The only thing that kills the pain is Jameson. The good stuff. Bring me a bottle of that, and I’ll talk all day and into the night.”

  Chapter

  90

  It took a little while, but soon enough we had a bottle of the “good stuff,” Jameson Black Barrel Irish whiskey, and set it on the table in front of Filson.

  He looked at us snobbishly. “Well, it’s not Rare Midleton, is it?”

  Detective Hanson looked disgusted. “You think we’re going to spring for a three-hundred-dollar bottle for a confessed assassin?”

  “Aye, once you’ve heard the evidence against him,” he said. “But Black Barrel will do in the meantime. Can you pour me more than a wee bit, Dr. Cross?”

  I opened the bottle, poured two fingers into a paper cup. Filson picked it up with his handcuffed hands and poured it slowly into his mouth. As he did, his shoulders dropped and his core relaxed in a way that made me realize how tight he’d been holding himself. There was no doubt the man was suffering.

  When the whiskey was gone, he put the cup back on the table and nodded. I poured him a second round and he left it there.

  “Look,” Filson said. “I have seen the hard evidence against the men I killed. Each and every one of them needed to be eliminated before they scarred someone else for life and many lives beyond them. Trauma gets passed along, you know, generation to generation. Like a virus.”

  Over the next hour, which we recorded with multiple cameras, Paddy Filson sipped Irish whiskey and told us he’d seen juvenile records that were supposed to have been expunged and linked to every one of the Dead Hours victims.

  When Daniel Kling, the first to die, was sixteen, Filson said, he raped an eight-year-old boy after he himself was earlier abused by a family friend. Victim number two, Theo Leaver, had been high on meth when he attacked and raped an elderly woman. Another victim, Lavon Kyle, molested two six-year-olds when he was twelve.

  It went on. Trey O’Dell, the newlywed who’d told his wife he’d stolen a pair of cleats from a sporting goods store when he was fourteen, had actually sodomized a ten-year-old girl. Bart Masters, found off the lacrosse field, had been abused repeatedly as a child by an aunt’s boyfriend, and he in turn had started abusing a neighbor’s children when he was ten.

  “When Henry Pelham was fifteen, he got drunk and assaulted a ten-year-old neighbor girl,” Filson said. “And Dalton McCoy? When he was fifteen, he forced a twelve-year-old boy to rape his twelve-year-old girlfriend at gunpoint. And yet, even his records were sealed and supposedly expunged so he could start his life over at eighteen. Clean slate. No record. Free to destroy people’s lives again.”

  I said, “We’ve seen no record of anything as adults. They were never charged again. They never made the sex-offender registries.”

  “Because they were smart. They kept their lusts hidden on the dark web. The virtual world was where they connected.”

  Sampson said, “And where they bought?”

  “Correct. All the men I shot led secret lives where they paid to act out their twisted fantasies, most of the time on children being held as sex slaves.”

  “And you know this how?” Detective Hanson asked skeptically.

  He cleared his throat, looked nauseated. “There are videos.”

  “For all of them?” I said.

  “Some multiple. Seems it’s not enough for them to act out their perversions. They want the memory of it on video to be enjoyed over and over again. Or at least until they’ve raised the money to act out some new dark fantasy.”

  “Jesus,” Hanson said, trying to come to grips with what Filson was describing. “And how did you get hold of these videos and tie them directly to your victims?”

  “They were sent to me over Tor,” Filson said. “They also had to be watched within an hour of reception or they got nuked. No trace after sixty minutes. It’s how we communicate, how we’ve communicated almost since the beginning.”

  I said, “Who is we? You and who else?”

  The dying assassin laughed and sipped his whiskey. “You know what, Dr. Cross? I’ve tried to figure that out. I really have. But I honestly don’t know who calls the shots and pays the bills in this particular business.”

  Sampson said, “So you were paid.”

  “Aye. Paid well.”

  Hanson said, “Where’s the money? How much?”

  Filson laughed again and drained the whiskey. “Can’t tell you that. Otherwise what’s the point of it beyond a little cleanup of the nastiness under the rug?”

  I held up both hands. “We’re going in circles, Paddy. Why don’t you start at the beginning and tell us how it all started.”

  Chapter

  91

  Paddy Filson told us he started feeling sick early in the second year of his incarceration at the Rifle Correctional Center outside Glenwood Springs, Colorado. His visits to the prison infirmary had proved useless until a bone in his arm snapped for no good reason and he complained loud enough to get his blood tested.

  “Turns out, I was already a dead man walking,” Filson said. “Rare form of blood cancer. Slow creeper. Incurable. Makes my bones brittle. They told me I had a year, fifteen months, max.”

  Filson said he posted the news on prison social media and set about preparing himself to die in captivity. Shortly afterward, he was contacted by a legal group called the Exoneration Project that offered to take up his cause.

  He messaged back and forth with a woman named Elizabeth Brenner who said she would be the lead lawyer for his case.

  “I told her they had me cold on the weapons charges,” Filson said. “I was building ghost machine guns. But in my defense, it was only to see if I could do it. I had no interest in selling those kinds of weapons to people who had no clue how to use them.”

  “And?” Sampson asked.

  “She said that it didn’t matter. They would ask for my release based on the terminal diagnosis. A mercy thing. And it would save the corrections department a lot of money. An economic thing. I didn’t think she had a chance, but two days later, there I am, walking out the front door of the Rifle, a free man.”

  Filson claimed he was picked up by a young woman named Phoebe who said she worked for an affiliate of the Exoneration Project and that Elizabeth Brenner was sad not to be there herself. Phoebe drove him to the outskirts of Denver and stopped beside a steel building in an industrial area. Phoebe told him to go in a certain door, where someone associated with the Exoneration Project was waiting to discuss his health care and a possible well-paying job. Essentially broke coming out of prison, he got out of the car and went through the door.

  Filson entered an empty, cavernous space, dead center of which there was an overstuffed chair and a table with a glass and a bottle of Jameson whiskey on it.

  “I wasn’t going to turn that down after years in the hole,” Filson said. “So I sit there and pour myself one, drink it, and then the lights go off. I’m sitting there in the dark and there’s this guy talking through some kind of distortion machine to mask his voice.”

  “C’mon,” Hanson said.

  “On my mother’s grave,” Filson shot back. “Anyway, he tells me he represents people trying to clean up society, trying to take out the rapists and molesters before they can scar another generation. Then he tells me he’ll pay me fifty K for each lifelong sexual predator I take out. He’ll show me the evidence and let me make up my own mind.

  “He also said I’d be doing the world a favor in my final months, using my skills for a greater good. I thought about it for two seconds and took the contract.”

  Filson said he was given enough cash to buy the truck and the trailer and was told to go to Washington, DC, and wait. He saw the evidence against Kling a week later and shot the man four days after that.

  I said, “You look proud of it.”

  “Aye. He deserved it. I made the world a better place.”

  “And got paid for it,” Hanson said.

  “Aye. But don’t worry. The money will do some good for a little boy I met once, a good little boy who deserves a better life. I’ve made sure of that. And don’t bother with the Exoneration Project. It was a fake project with a website. It was taken down not long after I took the job.”

  I rubbed my temple. “You have no idea where the money came from?”

  “Payment was in crypto, so I don’t think I could figure out the source if I tried a decade, and I don’t have a decade,” Filson said.

  Sampson said, “Give us access to your crypto accounts.”

  “No.”

  I said, “I know cyber experts at the FBI lab at Quantico who will be able to trace these people.”

  “Highly doubt it. He seemed mighty sure he couldn’t be touched.”

  Hanson said, “The guy speaking through the distortion box?”

  “That’s right,” Filson said and drained another double shot of whiskey. “The Maestro himself.”

  Hanson did not react, but Sampson and I both sat forward fast.

  “What did you just call him?” I said.

  “The Maestro,” he said, his head retreating. “It’s what Phoebe called him afterward, when she drove me to a hotel.”

  Chapter

  92

  Cold rain fell on Captain Davis when he walked out of George Washington University Medical Center around three in the afternoon, feeling raw inside, scrubbed clean, a new man, clear-eyed and ready to face the music.

  He pulled the hood of his jacket up over his head and began to walk toward Foggy Bottom and the river. Rain or no rain, he needed time to think and prioritize, and he’d always done that best while walking.

  I’m not listing these in any order, he thought. That comes later.

  Rehab is definitely a priority.

  Davis knew he had a ways to go, knew he needed a good dose of long-term rehab before he could say he’d kicked his drinking habit. And he would go to rehab. He would.

  It was a priority, he decided, but not number one. Not yet.

  Fiona Plum.

  In his gut, he could feel that was the number one priority—to go see Fiona. Make amends. Apologize and seek her forgiveness. Once he had that, Fiona’s forgiveness, Davis would do whatever it took to resolve his issues with alcohol for good. At that point, his sobriety would become the priority for the rest of his life.

  But right now, it’s Fiona and how much I let her down.

  Captain pulled out his phone, and for the first time in four days, he turned it on.

  Almost immediately, it started dinging with text messages and e-mails marked urgent. Davis ignored them, feeling shivery as he called up the Uber app.

  He typed in Fiona Plum’s address in Alexandria and hit Enter. Two minutes later, a black Nissan Sentra pulled up.

  “You Marion Davis?” the young man driving said.

  “That’s me,” Davis said and he climbed in the back.

  “Traffic’s going to be bad with the rain. And they’re saying maybe snow tonight.”

  “I believe it. Hey, can you turn up the heat? I’ve got a little chill.”

  “You got it.”

  By the time they reached the Fourteenth Street Bridge, Captain felt like he was drying out in more ways than one. He started going through his messages and frowned. There were at least ten from Fiona. The first ones were asking where he was and saying she was worried about him. But the last three or four were begging him to surrender to the FBI.

  What the hell was going on? He’d been released from federal custody the day before he checked himself anonymously into the detox unit at GW Medical Center.

  Several texts were from his attorney, also advising him to turn himself in.

  Davis now felt as upside down as when he’d been entering detox.

  Someone’s framing me. I’m positive. Or is it just paranoia? Yeah, well, it’s not paranoia if someone’s really out to get you, is it?

  Soon after passing Reagan National Airport and exiting the GW Parkway, the Uber driver went by a liquor store. Davis suddenly wanted a drink. No, he desperately needed one.

  Within seconds, the need became an obsession. He could almost taste the beer and chaser sliding down his throat, giving him relief, fortifying him, giving him the courage to face every one of his shortcomings and drown them in alcohol.

  He almost told the driver to go back to that liquor store, but a voice inside him said that would be the end of whatever future there might be with Fiona Plum. He simply could not face her with booze on his breath.

  Not a chance. She would smell it. No doubt.

  Davis felt his heart race and noticed his hands were trembling. Not as much as they had been when he was going through full-blown withdrawal but bad enough to make him wonder if he had the emotional and physical strength to face Fiona in person.

  And then it was simply too late. The driver turned onto her road. A moment later, her little Craftsman bungalow with the attached garage came into view.

  A dark gray Sprinter van with the signage for a painting service was backed up to the mouth of the garage, which was lit up inside. Davis thanked the driver, got out, and noticed the WET PAINT sign on Fiona’s front door.

  Steeling himself, he walked toward the house, listening to the drumming of the rain on the roof and the van as he walked up the side of it. The rear double doors were open, almost flush to the frame of the garage door.

  He had to turn himself sideways to get past the frame and the van door. As he did, he saw a big, swarthy guy, shaved head, come out the door to the house. He was dressed in a paint-spattered coverall and carrying a paint can and a crescent wrench in hands covered in blue disposable gloves.

  The painter smiled when he saw Davis as if he were half expecting him, or expecting someone, anyway. There was something oddly familiar about the guy, but Captain couldn’t place him. “Hey there,” Davis said.

  “Hey there yourself,” the painter said in a Middle Eastern accent. He put down the paint can and came toward Davis, whose back was to the open van. “You’re Marion Davis, aren’t you?”

  “I am.”

  “It’s funny. That’s my name too.”

  “Really?”

  “True,” he said, smiling. “Coincidence, huh? Miss Plum could not believe it.”

  “I bet not. Where is she? Fiona?”

  The other Marion Davis grinned again. “She’s right behind you, Captain.”

  The football coach turned, peered inside the rear of the van, and saw Fiona Plum blindfolded, gagged, and bound with duct tape. A split second later, the crescent wrench smashed into the back of his head, knocking him out cold.

  Chapter

  93

  John Sampson and I jumped out of his Jeep Grand Cherokee down the street from a split-level ranch house in suburban Rose Hill, Virginia, a ten-minute drive from the federal holding facility in Alexandria.

  We’d left Paddy Filson in a hurry despite the fact that he’d just implicated the vigilante group Maestro and, by extension, our archnemesis M in the Dead Hours killings. They’d orchestrated them, in fact, if the assassin was to be believed.