Page 42 of Holmes, Margaret and Poe

“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. Oneof 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 WENTacross 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.”

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