Page 47 of Holmes, Margaret and Poe

“Call me on my cell if you find anything on the way back,” Bree said, then hustled across Barkley Drive.

The light was more slanted in these woods, the trail more heavily used. Bree saw five times as many people using this section, and she decided that if something had happened to Iliana, it had to have been back there, across Barkley, on the trail north and west to Pickett Road.

She jogged back, crossed Barkley, and was puffing when her cell phone rang. “Jannie?”

Her stepdaughter was on the verge of crying. “We found her jacket, Bree.”

“Don’t touch it,” Bree said, quickening her pace. “I’m on my way.”

“Why would it be here like this?” Jannie said. “Down in the creek?”

“Get back on the trail and wait for me!”

She caught up to Jannie near the spur trail that ran north to Arlington Boulevard. Her stepdaughter was crying hard.

Somewhere, that dog was still yapping.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Jannie said, gesturing down into the creek bottom where a blue and gold Paxson State jacket was caught on an exposed tree root next to a culvert that ran under the spur trail. “I don’t know how we missed it the first time, but Tina saw it when we were coming back.”

“Where is Tina?” Bree asked, getting out her phone to photograph the jacket.

Jannie gestured toward the spur trail. “She said she wanted to know what that dog was barking at, and —”

Over the yapping and from the woods west of the spur trail came a cutting scream of horror and loss.

CHAPTER 45

CAPTAIN DAVIS INVOKED HISMiranda rights and refused to answer any more of our questions until he’d spoken with an attorney. We had forty-eight hours to hold him without charges while FBI criminologists pored over everything in his residence, looking for additional evidence.

The U.S. attorney who had jurisdiction over the case was getting bombarded with calls from people complaining about Davis being taken into custody and the subsequent search of his house. Rebecca Cantrell called Ned Mahoney, John Sampson, and me to her office in Arlington after we’d left Davis at the federal holding facility in Alexandria.

A short, pretty brunette in her late forties, Cantrell had worked multiple terrorism cases while an assistant U.S. attorney in New York. She had a reputation for being extremely thorough.

“You’re sure you’ve got Davis cold?” Cantrell asked after she’d waved us into chairs in front of her desk.

“Residue of explosive components on the coverall and hoodie,” I said.

“From a nitrate bomb,” Sampson added.

“He’s a high-profile suspect. We’re accusing a former NFL player and war hero of killing a hundred people. What’s the motive?”

“We don’t —”

“Rage,” Mahoney said. “His ex-girlfriend killed her daughter and herself after Davis flunked out of an American Airlines pilot program.”

“What?”

“True,” I said. “Davis was very close to the daughter. Treated her like his own.”

“Right to the end,” Sampson added. “And he claims he had enough money from football he didn’t need the job.”

“So the motive is shaky,” Cantrell said.

“With all due respect, I don’t think a grand jury will see it that way.”

“With all due and deep respect, Agent Mahoney, I’m the grand-jury expert here and if we’re going to destroy a man’s reputation in public, I’d like to do it with utter confidence in his eventual conviction on all charges.”

“That could take time. Longer than forty-eight hours.”

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