Page 57 of Holmes, Margaret and Poe

Penny looked chagrined. “Sorry, Detective, I wasn’t asked, and, well, I didn’t come forward with it because I didn’t want itto get around to this teacher friend of mine who has a mega-crush on the coach.”

“Fiona Plum?”

“That’s the one.” Penny sighed. “Sweet woman. Fiona would lie down and die for Captain and I don’t know if he even sees her half the time.”

“Describe the woman who was with Davis at the bar.”

“Late thirties, super-attractive, brunette, built like Captain likes them. And big brown eyes like Antonia. In fact, she could have been Antonia’s sister.”

“Antonia Mays? The ex-girlfriend who killed herself and her daughter?”

“Yeah, Jenna Mays,” Penny said, shaking his head. “Captain loved that little girl. And you know what? No matter what he says, he still loved Antonia. He just couldn’t live with her, you know? It’s a sad, sad thing.”

CHAPTER 52

Albemarle, North Carolina

MAHONEY, AGENT BEAUFORT, ANDI followed Detective Melanie Toof back down the ridge as she told us what she knew about the late Leslie Parks.

“There’s more rumor than fact,” she said. “I’ll give you the facts first and then the gossip, if that works.”

“It does,” Ned said.

Detective Toof said Parks was born in Little Rock. He was an only child. His father was a well-to-do dentist. His mother died when he was eight. His father died in a car accident when Parks was nineteen, and he inherited a large gun collection and a sizable amount of money.

“Enough to make him shiftless,” Toof said. “He quit school, partied. A lot. And here’s the thing I don’t understand. At some point in the next three years, he comes in contact witha couple of ex–Special Forces guys, and suddenly he’s in the Middle East.”

That caught our attention. “Doing what?” I asked.

“Gunrunning. All legit at first. He and the two Special Forces guys formed a company the U.S. DOD contracted with to get weapons to the Kurds and other rebel groups in Syria.”

Agent Beaufort said, “So Parks would have had access to heavy machine guns?”

“I assume so,” Toof said.

We had reached the bottom of the ridge and were walking through a pine forest back to Parks’s fortress when Mahoney said, “You said he was legitat first.”

“Correct, and this is where it gets a little hazy,” she said. “One of Parks’s private convoys was attacked in an ambush on a remote route in northern Syria shortly after they crossed in from Iraq. His partners were killed in the firefight.” Parks was shot twice, Toof said. One bullet hit him in his right arm and shattered his elbow. The other laid a quarter-inch crease down the left side of his head. “CIA Ground Branch guys found him and got him out,” Toof said. “They patched him up in a military hospital and then deported him because the entire shipment had been lost to some Iranian-backed militia group. Not only that, the DOD sued him for his profits on the missing weapons. A couple of million, I think.”

Agent Beaufort said, “That’s kind of harsh. I thought he was working for us.”

“For us and for himself,” Toof said. “But again, your instincts are excellent. Parks thought what they did to him was more than harsh, especially on top of wounds that left him with chronic arm pain, migraines, and a tendency toward rage, paranoia, and the occasional end-of-the-world diatribe.”

We emerged into the clearing where Parks had built his steel house.

“Which brings us to the fortress of solitude,” Mahoney said.

“Why the police tape if it’s been ruled a suicide?” I asked.

“That’s my doing,” she admitted. “The estate’s tied up in probate with distant cousins fighting over twenty million, so no one can touch it until that’s resolved. And I still think his death was a murder.”

She led us to the front door and used two keys to open the locks, explaining that Parks had taken a lot of money left over from his inheritance and the early success of his gunrunning company and bought the twelve acres and the shipping containers about a year after he left the Middle East. “He had crews in here for almost three years, excavating, making it just the way he wanted,” she said and pushed the door open.

I’d expected to find Parks’s fortress a dim warren of small musty rooms stuffed like a pack rat’s nest with supplies. Instead, he had cut out the floors and some of the walls of the containers to create a large living space with vaulted ceilings and skylights that were made of bulletproof glass.

The place was decorated spartanly with steel furniture and fixtures. One of the chairs at the table was turned over on its back. There were bloodstains on the floor and on the wall beyond the chair.

“He died right there?” Mahoney asked.

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