Page 30 of Holmes, Margaret and Poe

“You think I should call now?”

“I think so.”

Bree got out her phone and punched in her boss’s number, then put the call on speaker. I held her around the waist as she said, “Elena, is there a chance Leigh Anne kept her Irish passport under her old name? Under Maggie Fontaine?”

“I don’t think that’s legally possible.”

“Forged passport?”

“What? No, I … I don’t know. Why would she do that?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

“Why? What’s happened?”

“There’s a Maggie Fontaine on the flight manifest of the plane that went down. One of the first-class passengers.”

For several seconds, Elena did not reply. Eventually she said, “What seat?”

“Two A. Window.”

There was a choking sound, and then Elena said, sobbing, “It’s her. That’s where she always sits if she can. Always, and … oh my God, I’m sorry, Bree, but I’m going to be sick.”

The call ended and Bree sagged against me. “My day sucked start to finish.”

“I hear you, baby. Mine wasn’t much better.”

CHAPTER 29

AROUND TEN THIRTY THEnext morning, Sampson and I drove to a meeting with Maryland State Police detectives about the latest Dead Hours victim, who had been identified overnight.

On the way there, my phone rang. It was Mahoney.

“Ned,” I said. I put him on speaker so Sampson, who was driving, could hear the conversation. “Find anything at Blades’s place?”

“Browning fifty-caliber machine-gun barrel in his shop. Enough to hold him on while we tear the rest of his place apart.”

“You think it’s him?”

“I don’t know what to think at this point, Alex. I was just notified by the lab at Quantico that they were able to bring back some of the writing on the scorched Avis rental contract that Kershaw’s people found in that metal estimator’s box.”

I said, “We have a name?”

“And an address,” he said. “Listen, I’m not getting back up there until late afternoon, and that’s if I’m lucky. Can you and John go talk to this guy? Get a read on him? I’ll send you his info and a picture of the agreement with the signature they lifted.”

“We’ve got a meet on the Dead Hours case in twenty minutes, but we’ll check him out right after.”

“Let me know.”

Sampson was quiet on our drive out to Laurel, Maryland. I asked him how his evening with Willow had gone.

“Great!” he said, but his smile waned almost as soon as it bloomed. “We watched a documentary about this guy in South Africa who snorkels and filmed this octopus every day for a year. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

I laughed. “Bree watched it last night and said the same thing.”

He shook his head. “I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever eat octopus again.”

“You love octopus.”

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