Page 31 of Holmes, Margaret and Poe

“Right? But I feel bad now. They’re different. They have serious brains. The damn octopus knew the guy swimming around and befriended him.”

“C’mon.”

“Watch it.”

I promised I would.

Not long after that, we were sitting in a briefing room with Detective Marilyn Hanson and two other officers working the case. They had identified the latest victim as Bart Masters, a twenty-nine-year-old computer engineer and Nevada transplant. Masters lived alone in Marlow Heights about a mile from where his body was found. He’d worked for NASA. Neighbors said they rarely saw the engineer. Masters kept odd hours, oftengoing out to run in the middle of the night, even in the dead of winter.

“You see overlap here, Dr. Cross?” Hanson said. “Among the victims, I mean.”

“They were early-morning runners or worked in jobs that had them up and out before three a.m.”

“Why does he shoot out both eyes?”

Sampson said, “It has a meaning, no doubt. But what that is and why the sheet with the bloody eyes, we still don’t know.”

Twenty minutes later, we left the meeting with promises to stay in close touch as our parallel investigations progressed.

I checked my texts when we reached Sampson’s car. Mahoney had sent me a JPEG of the writing the FBI lab techs had raised on the scorched car-rental slip. “Marion Davis,” I said. “Address in Falls Church.” I thumbed the info into the navigator. It came backNo such address.

Sampson snorted. “Surprise.”

“Hold on,” I said. I called up Google on my phone, thumbed inMarion Davis Falls Church,and hit Return. I stared at the results. “Huh?”

“What?”

“There’s a Marion Davis, address in Falls Church and … really? He’s the head football coach at the Charles School.”

Sampson whistled. “That’s Captain Davis, then. He went to the Charles School and the Air Force Academy. Fulfilled his commitment to the military, then played in the NFL. Long snapper for the Ravens. Quit football to go back and fly combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“Says here the Charles School football team is the best in the metro area,” I said.

“The best in a good chunk of the mid-Atlantic,” Sampson said.“Captain Davis is a heck of a coach. And a fairly high-profile guy. I can’t see him involved in shooting down a jet.”

“Still, wouldn’t a combat pilot know how to bring a jet down?”

He looked at me. “House or school?”

“House.”

CHAPTER 30

MARION “CAPTAIN” DAVIS OWNEDan impressive home, a sprawling French Colonial on several landscaped acres.

“If he can afford a place like this on a coach’s salary, he sure didn’t piss his pro football money away,” I said as we drove up around two that afternoon.

We went to the front door and rang the bell. No answer. We buzzed the intercom and got the same result.

It didn’t take us long to drive to the Charles School, which had a beautiful campus and an impressive athletic field house.

“Home of the Badgers,” I said, getting out.

“The Fighting Badgers,” Sampson said.

We heard the whistle, the claps, and the shouting of many voices coming from behind the field house. We walked over there and saw an impressive sports stadium with a scoreboard and a replay screen and seats for five hundred, easy. There wereat least fifty players on the field doing ballistic stretches in white practice uniforms.

“Tighten those hip flexors and imagine that you are driving the head of your femur into the turf, gentlemen,” a voice growled over the stadium’s public address system.

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