Page 16 of Holmes, Margaret and Poe

The screen shifted to an image of a tropical scene.

“That’s Fiji,” Elena said, distraught. “That’s where we were supposed to go!”

“You may get there yet,” Bree said. “Pull up the Find My iPhone app.”

“Oh, that’s a good idea,” Jill said. “I should have thought of that.”

She called up the app and found that Asher had indeed linked her phone to it. But when Jackson tried to track it, it blinked for almost a minute before saying,Leigh Anne’s iPhone is inactive.

Elena said, “Can it tell us when and where it was last active?”

Bree said, “I don’t think so. We’ll have to contact the wireless carrier to do that. We’ll also need her credit card accounts to check on their most recent uses.”

Asher’s assistant said, “I can help with that.”

“Can you get me into her e-mail?” Bree asked. “Messaging system?”

Again, Jackson and Elena Martin exchanged glances. Elena said, “Bree, we are working for Leigh Anne. She is our client. Are we clear?”

It was clear as day to Bree: Elena was telling her she might see information in the e-mails and texts that was potentially damaging.

They accessed her most recent messages and saw that Leigh Anne Asher had gotten many but hadn’t responded to any ofthem since noon on Friday. The texts from Friday morning, before the silence, seemed routine: reminders and questions going back and forth between the entrepreneur and the various people involved in the upcoming IPO of her company.

“The e-mails?” Bree said.

Jackson called up Asher’s Gmail account, which had nearly two hundred unread e-mails. Bree’s attention was caught by the subject line of several of them.

She looked at her boss and then at the entrepreneur’s assistant, but they both avoided eye contact.

“Leigh Anne Asher’s married?” Bree said. “Why didn’t either of you mention that?”

Elena said, “I can explain.”

CHAPTER 16

OLSON STREET BENDS NORTHEASTpast the campus of Stoddert Middle School, which sits a little more than a mile as the crow flies from the southeast boundary of Southeast Washington, DC, where the previous Dead Hours murders had taken place.

A crowd of people had gathered across the street from the chain-link fence at the south end of the middle-school campus, where the grounds narrowed considerably. Lacrosse and soccer goal cages were stored there.

The field’s grass had been allowed to grow, making it almost impossible for anyone to see the corpse from the road. But as Sampson and I walked through the wet grass toward the yellow tape around the scene, we saw the body. It was covered in a white sheet and propped up in a sitting position against the school fence.

At the head, two bright blossoms of blood had seeped throughthe sheet and dripped down the front; it looked like some macabre horror-film costume.

“Same as the others,” Sampson said.

I went to one of the Maryland troopers standing outside the tape and showed him my credentials. “We have an ID yet?”

“None on him, Dr. Cross,” the trooper said. “Looks like he’d been out for a run. We’ve got officers canvassing the locals.”

“How far do the woods go?” Sampson asked, looking over the school fence.

“Couple hundred yards? There’s an apartment complex on the other side.”

Two criminalists were documenting the scene with still shots and video. We waited until they gave us the okay to go inside the tape with the Maryland homicide detectives.

One of them, Detective Marilyn Hanson with the Maryland State Police, had the grisly job of lifting the sheet, revealing a chubby, pale man in his mid-twenties wearing a dark blue wind-breaker, a bright green reflector vest, leggings, a red skullcap, and Nikes. A Petzl headlamp hung askew from his head.

The killer had shot out the victim’s eyes, leaving empty sockets that seemed to gaze at us mockingly.

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