Page 53 of Holmes, Margaret and Poe

“Then we have a deal. Gimme the Venmo.”

Filson gave him the account name and watched the fish thumb it into his phone. Then he reached inside the duster and drew out the double-barreled pistol.

“You perverted piece of dung,” Filson said, aiming the glowing tritium pin at the bridge of the fish’s snout at point-blank range.

“No! Plea —”

Filson didn’t give him a chance. He pulled the single trigger and blew out both goggling eyes.

The fish flopped, dropped his phone. Filson turned off the tablet’s camera. He hung the double-barreled gun back on its hook, then went over and picked up the phone.

The crypto app was still up. He typed in $10,000 in Bitcoin and sent it to one of his anonymous accounts.

Then he wiped the phone clean with a camera cloth, put large disposable gloves over his leather gloves, and tore off the ski mask. Next, he pulled out the sheet, removed the wrapper, and draped it over the dead man’s head. Filson pressed the fabric into the eye sockets until the blood came through, then sat the fish upright, his back to the boundary fence.

He retreated a few steps, picked up the tablet, and took several photographs of the scene. Satisfied, he turned and left,not giving the fish a second thought.Got what he deserved, the creepy bastard,Filson thought. He felt a rumble in his stomach.

Ah, Jesus,he thought.Not now.

Filson tried to swallow against it, but there was no controlling his body these days. He broke out in a cold sweat and then projectile-vomited up his dinner, lunch, and whatever was left of breakfast.

Racked by dry heaves so powerful he thought he’d fall over, Filson knew he’d just made a huge mistake, the kind that a careful, disciplined man always feared. He’d left a trace of himself behind. A big one.

And there was nothing he could do about it now.

CHAPTER 49

Fort Bragg, North Carolina

SHORTLY AFTER EIGHT THEnext morning, a young FBI agent named Sherry Beaufort from the Bureau’s Raleigh office picked me and Mahoney up at Fort Bragg. We’d caught a late military flight out of Joint Base Andrews and spent the night in guest quarters on base.

Agent Beaufort drove us thirty miles northwest to the small town of Albemarle, where we were met by Detective Melanie Toof of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department. Detective Toof was one of the more physically formidable women I’d ever seen: at least six feet tall, broad-shouldered, and muscular, with short sandy-blond hair.

“I thought someone might finally show up from DC,” Toof said after we’d introduced ourselves. “Told my husband the same thing when that plane got shot down.”

“We didn’t have this incident in our files,” Mahoney said.

“Don’t doubt it,” Toof said. “Doug Ferris? The guy they sent out from the NTSB? He was a dipshit if ever there was one. Pardon my French.”

“French pardoned,” I said. “You’re saying there’s more to the investigation?”

Mahoney said, “First tell us what Ferris did find.”

The detective said the federal aviation investigator looked at the fuselage of the Cessna 130, noted three holes consistent with .50-caliber rounds, and spent the rest of his time grilling the pilot about where he’d really been when the plane came under fire.

“The low-altitude radar at Charlotte was acting up that day, which meant they weren’t picking Lunt up on most of his flight path,” she said. “Ferris got it in his head that Lunt hadn’t known where he was going, went by Fort Bragg, and got shot at. His superiors saw that and talked to folks at Bragg, who denied it up, down, and inside out. Lunt denied it as well. Then Ferris got popped for an opioid addiction. NTSB buried the report, fired the junkie, and never got around to putting anyone else on the case.”

She was smiling.

I said, “But you kept looking into the case, didn’t you, Detective Toof?”

“Yeah, I kept looking,” she said, and she gestured for us to get in her Jeep Cherokee. Mahoney told Agent Beaufort to follow, which she wasn’t happy about.

Toof drove us east out of Albemarle on Highway 27, explaining that Chris Lunt, a part-time resident of Charlotte, North Carolina, kept his private plane at a strip north of the city. Lunt spent his summers flying tourists around Denali National Park and his winters doing the same in the Florida Keys.

“Spring and fall, he’s here flying the Cessna,” Toof said. “I guess what I’m saying is he’s a pilot’s pilot, so he knows where he is in the air, you know?”

“I get it,” Mahoney said. “Is he here? Lunt?”

---