Page 113 of Holmes, Margaret and Poe

He pulled into a strip-mall parking lot, drove around the back of the stores into an alley with dumpsters, stripped the magnetic painting company signs off the side of the van, and put them in an empty dumpster. Then he drove west at a sedate pace due to the relentless rain. Another good omen, as far as he was concerned.

The storm and the coming night would shield him from prying eyes as he moved into position for the shot. All he needed now was continued low cloud cover and a little ground fog to make the hunting conditions absolutely ideal.

CHAPTER 95

SAMPSON AND I LEFTAgnes Mellon, returned to Rosella Santiago’s house, and started going through it while a Fairfax County medical examiner and two criminalists photographed and documented the scene in the garage.

John went upstairs; I moved through the kitchen and living area, which were immaculate and smelled slightly of bleach. Sampson returned and said the upstairs was the same. He’d found a vacuum cleaner in the master bedroom closet. Its bag was gone.

We looked in the trash cans in the garage, but they were empty as well. Around the back of the house, I spotted a bulkhead, which meant there was a basement. We found the door to it off the laundry room and walked down a flight of stairs into a well-equipped woodworking shop: A bandsaw. A table saw. Two lathes. A drill press and multiple hand tools above a long bench.

Sampson opened a door and found another workroom, this one for metals and electronics.

“It’s him, Alex,” he called out a few moments later. “It’s definitely him.”

I followed John inside and saw him photographing two diagrams he’d found pinned to the wall. At the top of each it said raytheon corp., fim-92 stinger. The diagram on the left showed the inner workings of the surface-to-air missile. The right detailed the Stinger’s infrared homing system.

“He’s been working on the missiles,” Sampson said. “Right here.”

“And he’s got them with him,” I said. “Keep looking. I’m talking to the neighbors.”

I knocked on the doors of several houses to either side of Santiago’s but found no one home. I was crossing the street to try Agnes Mellon’s neighbors when Ned Mahoney called.

“No Fiona Plum. No Captain Davis. But there was a brutal letter to him from her. Said she never wanted to see him again if he didn’t get help.”

“Her car there?”

“Yes.”

“Is the place spotless?”

“You could eat off the floor. Some tarps in a hall and unused paint cans in the garage.”

“He was here. We found diagrams for the Stinger missiles.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Put out a heightened alert on Davis.”

“On it,” he said and hung up.

I knocked on the front door of Mellon’s neighbor to her left and got no answer. But the door of the house to the right of hers opened before I could knock.

A male in his late teens who told us his name was Rex said, “What’s going on? Is Rosella dead?”

I nodded.

“Wow, that’s sad. What happened?”

“Someone drugged her, and she told your neighbor before she died that it was the guy who shot down the American Airlines plane.”

“No shit,” Rex said. “Damn it, I knew that dude was wrong.”

“What dude?”

“Davis. Marion Davis. The dude she lived with.”

I swallowed hard. “As in Marion Davis, the NFL player?”

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