Page 81 of Holmes, Margaret and Poe

But the door never opened, and I saw no one. I arrived at the poor woman’s side and saw that both little girls were unconscious. One had been hit in the chest and was laboring to breathe. The other had been shot through the right thigh. Bone stuck out. Blood spurted.

“Help,” their mother whimpered. “Help them. I don’t know what to do.”

I tore off my jacket and pressed it against the girl’s leg wound as shouts went up. I looked over my shoulder to see Sampson sprinting after Sami Abdallah. He tackled the man and drove him facedown into the dirt.

Mahoney ran to me as I moved to the second girl. “Both roommates dead,” he said.

“We need multiple ambulances,” I said, then realized I could hear sirens in the distance. I squatted by the second girl, pulled her jacket and her shirt open.

I recognized what was going on when I saw the wound in her chest and heard the sucking sound it made whenever she breathed. “Mahoney, give me your windbreaker.”

Mahoney looked at me quizzically but took off the FBI wind-breaker and handed it to me. “Good. Now I need a knife.”

Ned handed me a pocketknife.

“Wait, what are you doing?” her mother cried.

“Saving her life,” I said. I took the blade and used it to slice the jacket in two. I pressed one half of it against the wound and wrapped the other half around the girl’s slim torso to keep the makeshift chest seal in place.

By the time the ambulances came, the girl’s breathing was less labored. The front door opened. Mr. Shariff stood there holding his third daughter, who was unhurt but crying. He was wailing in anguish. “We are not like them! We are not part of this!”I looked over and saw three of the other FBI agents coming toward us with two cuffed men in body armor.

Mahoney shook his head, said, “I’m sorry, sir, but everyone in this compound is under arrest until we can search it and figure out exactly what has been going on here.”

CHAPTER 72

IT WAS WELL AFTERmidnight before we reached DC. John Sampson went straight to my house to pick up Willow.

Mahoney and I went to FBI headquarters. We wanted to interrogate Sami Abdallah, the two men in body armor who’d given up rather than fight, and Aden Shariff, the father of the wounded girls. However, Abdallah and the other two men, Kourie Mustapha and Umar Hassan, immediately invoked their right to remain silent and asked for lawyers. Mahoney threw them in separate cells to let them stew before fulfilling their demands, and we turned to Mr. Shariff.

He was sleeping, head down on the table, when we entered the interrogation room around two a.m. Shariff came groggily alert. “My daughters?” he asked, searching our faces. “Maya? Aleah?”

“They’re both going to make it, Mr. Shariff,” I said, sittingdown opposite him and pushing a cup of coffee across the table. We’d decided I would play good cop during the talk and leave the heavy lifting to Ned.

Shariff’s tears came again along with a wide smile. “This is true?”

“As far as we know, sir, yes,” I said.

He shut his eyes blissfully. “Then all is good.”

Mahoney said, “We read you your rights, Mr. Shariff. Do you wish to talk to us?”

Shariff’s bloodshot eyes opened again. “Or what? You torture me?”

“We don’t do that kind of thing here,” I said.

“Americans did in Iraq.”

“Not us,” I said. “In this room, you have rights. We want to talk to you, but we cannot force you to help us understand why your girls were shot this evening.”

He said nothing for several moments, just stared at the table.

I said, “I sense you want to help us.”

Mahoney said, “And remaining silent does not help us see you as a good man caught in a bad situation.”

At last, Shariff nodded. “I am good man. We are good family. What do you want to know?”

Mahoney said, “Tell us about Sami Abdallah and his friends.”

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