Page 90 of Holmes, Margaret and Poe

Then Bree realized that, with everything that had happened in the past few days, she’d forgotten the questions she’d asked herself:Who was the guy hanging beside Leigh Anne Asher? Was he a stranger or her fiancé?

To those questions she added another:Or was the ring a fake, a way to ward off unwanted advances by strange men?

Even though she did not want to, she called Ned Mahoney again.

“Bree,” he said. “Was Thomas any help?”

“As helpful as she could be,” Bree said. “I hate to ask, but one more favor?”

“If I can.”

“Do we know who sat in seat two B on the American Airlines jet?”

“Everyone’s been identified. We matched the manifests with the TSA records three days ago. Hold on a second.”

Bree tapped a pen.

He came back. “All right, in that seat was Carson Daniels of Ada, Oklahoma.”

“Ada, Oklahoma?” Bree said, wondering how Carson Daniels of Ada could have been engaged to Leigh Anne Asher. “Huh?”

“Want a look at his driver’s license? I can send it.”

“Sure,” Bree said. “Why not? Do we know anything else about him?”

“Nope,” he said. “We’ve been focused on catching who did it.”

“Of course you are, and rightly so. I promise not to bug you anymore.”

“You’re family, so you’re not bugging me,” Mahoney said, and they said goodbye.

Ada, Oklahoma?Bree thought again. She turned to her computer and typed inCarson Danielsand the town. Up popped an address on Oklahoma State Route 3. Daniels appeared to have been thirty-five and unmarried.Okay, but what does he do that gets him in first class on a flight from Florida?

She dug deeper. Daniels was an independent crop-insurance agent. Was that enough? She supposed if he had lots of clients, it was. And Ada was certainly big-time farm and ranch country.

Her phone buzzed and her computer dinged, alerting her to e-mail from Mahoney. She called it up on her big screen and clicked on the image of Carson Daniels’s driver’s license.

Bree didn’t get it at first. The glasses and the goatee threw her.

But then she saw the resemblance. She whistled in disbelief.

And then she was so certain, she didn’t even have to check the driver’s license on her other browser to know that Carson Daniels of Ada, Oklahoma, and FBI special agent Charles Stimson of Groveton, Virginia, were one and the same.

CHAPTER 78

AFTER WE’D GIVEN MRS. MCCOYand her sister our cards and explained what was likely to happen next in the investigation, we headed back to Washington. Sampson drove. I sat there feeling exhausted and gloomy.

“Get some shut-eye,” Sampson said. “I got more sleep than you did last night.”

“Agreed, but I have to do a couple of things first,” I said, yawning as I pulled out my phone.

I called Keith Karl Rawlins, a private consultant to the cyber-crimes unit at the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia. Rawlins had dual PhDs from Stanford in physics and electrical engineering and a third doctorate from MIT in computer science. He was the smartest hacker I’d ever known.

“Alex Cross, as I live and breathe,” Rawlins said.

“How are you, KK?”

“Not bad. Not bad at all.”

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