Page 58 of Holmes, Margaret and Poe

She nodded. “Twelve-gauge buckshot to the throat. Almost decapitated him.”

I said, “The throat’s not usually the target in a male gun suicide.”

“Exactly,” Toof said. “They usually put it to the mouth or the side of the head.”

“And every once in a while, under the jaw,” Agent Beaufort said.

Mahoney said, “That can’t be the only reason you think he was murdered.”

“It’s not,” the detective said. “We’ll come back after you see the armory and the practice range. They matter.”

CHAPTER 53

DETECTIVE TOOF LED USpast pantries with floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with canned and dry goods into the three-story west wing of the fortress.

Having seen the shooting slits in the walls, I figured we were climbing up the spiral staircase rising from the floor. But Toof went to the far corner and waved her hand across a motion sensor.

A large plate in the floor slid back, revealing a shiny metal chute.

“It’s a spiral slide to the lower level,” she said. “Don’t worry, there’s a way out.” With that, Toof got into the slide and pushed off. She disappeared around the bend.

“I’d rather go down another way,” Mahoney said, but he got in and slid out of sight.

Agent Beaufort went next, and I followed, going down a full corkscrew that spit me out into a foam pit.

“It’s the only thing I like about this place,” Toof said, then she took us through a door and turned on a light revealing a space about half the size of the living area upstairs.

Mahoney and I both gasped. The walls on three sides featured floor-to-ceiling lockable rack systems bulging with guns, sporting and military.

“His father started the collection with the rare hunting rifles and shotguns,” Toof said. “The rest belonged to Leslie, and he had federal firearms licenses for all of them.”

She walked us over to the fourth wall, which was mostly covered in sports paraphernalia, collectibles, and photographs of Leslie Parks with various athletes. An elaborate shooting bench faced the only blank space on the wall.

Toof flipped a switch, illuminating a hundred-yard tunnel with a bullet backstop at the end.

“He used to shoot in here all the time, and no one knew that was possible,” she said. “Well, the contractors knew because they built it.”

I left the shooting range and walked around the room, looking at what had to be hundreds if not thousands of weapons, wondering what possessed someone to buy this many guns. Then I realized the collection was probably all he’d had left of his father and kind of understood the compulsion.

I returned to the sports wall and was looking at the various signed and framed hockey, baseball, and football jerseys when Mahoney said, “Why isn’t Parks’s death a suicide? No note?”

“No, there was a note,” Detective Toof said. “It said, ‘I hate who I have become.’”

“And?”

“I talked to his PTSD counselor, who described Parks as suffering a mild case compared to a lot of his clients.”

“Lot of people with mild symptoms kill themselves,” I said, still looking at the photographs, many of them taken at major sporting events, the World Series, the Super Bowl, and so forth.

“One hundred percent,” Toof replied. “But those people didn’t have an Iraqi refugee living with them around the time of their deaths, a refugee who has not been seen or heard from since someone with a machine gun on the ridge above us tried to shoot Chris Lunt down.”

“Name?”

“Ibrahim. No surname. Multiple people saw Parks driving around with the guy in the month before his death. Two older women down the road who share mailbox space with Parks said he stopped there to get his mail and introduced the man as Ibrahim, an old friend from his time working in the Middle East.

“And the only neighbor who ever socialized with Parks said the man was introduced to him as Ibrahim, an old friend from Parks’s days in Iraq and Syria, a refugee who was looking for work as an engineer in the Raleigh area.”

Mahoney and I exchanged glances at the Iraqi’s profession. Ibrahim was an engineer. Someone who could design and build a remote-controlled machine gun.

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