Page 110 of Holmes, Margaret and Poe

Filson claimed he was picked up by a young woman named Phoebe who said she worked for an affiliate of the Exoneration Project and that Elizabeth Brenner was sad not to be there herself. Phoebe drove him to the outskirts of Denver and stopped beside a steel building in an industrial area. Phoebe told him to go in a certain door, where someone associated with the Exoneration Project was waiting to discuss his health care and a possible well-paying job. Essentially broke coming out of prison, he got out of the car and went through the door.

Filson entered an empty, cavernous space, dead center of which there was an overstuffed chair and a table with a glass and a bottle of Jameson whiskey on it.

“I wasn’t going to turn that down after years in the hole,” Filson said. “So I sit there and pour myself one, drink it, and then the lights go off. I’m sitting there in the dark and there’s this guy talking through some kind of distortion machine to mask his voice.”

“C’mon,” Hanson said.

“On my mother’s grave,” Filson shot back. “Anyway, he tells me he represents people trying to clean up society, trying totake out the rapists and molesters before they can scar another generation. Then he tells me he’ll pay me fifty K for each lifelong sexual predator I take out. He’ll show me the evidence and let me make up my own mind.

“He also said I’d be doing the world a favor in my final months, using my skills for a greater good. I thought about it for two seconds and took the contract.”

Filson said he was given enough cash to buy the truck and the trailer and was told to go to Washington, DC, and wait. He saw the evidence against Kling a week later and shot the man four days after that.

I said, “You look proud of it.”

“Aye. He deserved it. I made the world a better place.”

“And got paid for it,” Hanson said.

“Aye. But don’t worry. The money will do some good for a little boy I met once, a good little boy who deserves a better life. I’ve made sure of that. And don’t bother with the Exoneration Project. It was a fake project with a website. It was taken down not long after I took the job.”

I rubbed my temple. “You have no idea where the money came from?”

“Payment was in crypto, so I don’t think I could figure out the source if I tried a decade, and I don’t have a decade,” Filson said.

Sampson said, “Give us access to your crypto accounts.”

“No.”

I said, “I know cyber experts at the FBI lab at Quantico who will be able to trace these people.”

“Highly doubt it. He seemed mighty sure he couldn’t be touched.”

Hanson said, “The guy speaking through the distortion box?”

“That’s right,” Filson said and drained another double shot of whiskey. “The Maestro himself.”

Hanson did not react, but Sampson and I both sat forward fast.

“What did you just call him?” I said.

“The Maestro,” he said, his head retreating. “It’s what Phoebe called him afterward, when she drove me to a hotel.”

CHAPTER 92

COLD RAIN FELL ONCaptain Davis when he walked out of George Washington University Medical Center around three in the afternoon, feeling raw inside, scrubbed clean, a new man, clear-eyed and ready to face the music.

He pulled the hood of his jacket up over his head and began to walk toward Foggy Bottom and the river. Rain or no rain, he needed time to think and prioritize, and he’d always done that best while walking.

I’m not listing these in any order,he thought.That comes later.

Rehab is definitely a priority.

Davis knew he had a ways to go, knew he needed a good dose of long-term rehab before he could say he’d kicked his drinking habit. And he would go to rehab. He would.

It was a priority, he decided, but not number one. Not yet.

Fiona Plum.

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