Page 112 of Holmes, Margaret and Poe

“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 Ijumped 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.

But Ned Mahoney had called us in a panic. A nearly naked woman had collapsed and gone into cardiac arrest in her garage in Rose Hill after telling her neighbor she’d been drugged by the terrorist who’d shot down AA 839 with a machine gun.

“I’m on my way, but you can get there faster than I can,” Mahoney said, and we’d bolted, leaving Detective Hanson to continue the interrogation of the Dead Hours killer.

The rain had turned less torrential by the time we reached the yellow tape a sheriff’s deputy had put across the driveway. After showing him our identification, we walked up to the garage, where we saw a buxom woman in lavender lingerie sprawled on the concrete floor, brunette hair covering her face.

“Who found her?” Sampson asked.

“Lady across the street, there on her porch,” the deputy said. “She said the deceased is Rosella Santiago, who inherited this place from her uncle two years ago.”

I squatted down and used a pen to push back her hair.

Sampson whistled. “I know her.”

“I do too,” I said. “Our friend from the sports bar. The siren who was with Captain Davis when he disappeared before the shootdown.”

We both hustled across the street to talk with fifty-two-year-old Agnes Mellon, who’d been out walking her miniature poodle, Muffin, in the rain when Rosella Santiago staggered into her open garage and called weakly for help.

“She looked bombed, out of it on something,” Mrs. Mellon said. “And then she fell, and I ran up there with Muffin. She looked at me dazed and said in this slurred voice, ‘He did this to me. Machine-gun guy. Shot down the plane.’ That is what she said. Exactly.”

“Thank you for calling it in,” I said. “Have you seen him? This machine-gun guy?”

She shook her head. “I’m not the nosy neighborhood-gossip type. I have a busy enough life of my own. I just happened to see her go down in the garage.”

“What about the other neighbors?”

“You can try.”

Ned Mahoney came running toward us through the rain. Sampson’s phone buzzed with an alert.

He looked at it and said, “Marion Davis! He’s surfaced. I’ve got him using an Uber half an hour ago. He went to Fiona Plum’s. He’s got to be there right now!”

“I’m on my way there,” Mahoney cried; he spun around and ran back to his car. “Search that house! Talk to the other neighbors!”

CHAPTER 94

IN FIONA PLUM’S GARAGE,the man who’d renamed himself Marion Davis stared at the inert form of his namesake lying in the back of the van with the English teacher. He hyperventilated at his good fortune. He’d believed that sooner or later, Captain Davis would return to Plum’s house, that it was just a matter of time.

He had been waiting for barely two hours, and here was the former football star already! Marion Davis looked at his watch and saw it was a little before five p.m.

He’d figured the next strike for the following night at the earliest. But he could change the schedule. He could go tonight, couldn’t he?

Marion Davis felt his heart racing. He could go tonight. He could go now.

He pushed Captain Davis deeper inside the van, bound his wrists and ankles with duct tape, and put tape across his mouth.Satisfied, he got out, shut the rear doors to the vehicle, and removed the painter’s coverall.

Marion Davis went back into the house and turned off the lights. The garage light went off last. Five minutes later, he was driving away from Plum’s neighborhood.

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