CHAPTER 9

THREE HOURS LATER, I was in suburban Bowie, Maryland, riffling through the mailbox in front of a slate-blue, split-level ranch. Mahoney was trying to see into the attached garage, looking for a gray Dodge Durango.

“Not here,” Mahoney said, walking back to me.

I shut the box. “Everything here is addressed to Agnes Pearson or AP Limo. Nothing for Aldo in the last two days.”

After leaving Professor Whelan, we’d filed for warrants to search her home and office. While waiting for the warrants to be signed by a federal judge, I called an old friend in the Maryland state police and asked her to run a search in their DMV files for a gray Dodge Durango with 9-UU in the plate number.

She eventually got a hit: a 2015 silver Dodge Durango with Maryland license plate 309-UU. The registered owner was Aldo Pearson, husband of the deceased driver of the late Judge Emma Franklin.

The registration of the Dodge SUV and the address on Pearson’s driver’s license was this house. We found out he had a rap sheet—several arrests for dealing small amounts of illegal steroids. His license photo showed a man with a shaved head, a neck like a tree trunk, and bad skin.

This was why we’d been going through his mailbox and looking in his garage. Maybe we didn’t understand the dynamics of the murder. Maybe Judge Franklin was not the primary target and her driver, Agnes Pearson, was.

Since we were dealing with a murder victim’s house, we felt we had ample cause to enter, so we did, using a crowbar to jimmy open the rear door. We put on protective gloves and boots and went inside. The place was spotless but badly in need of updating. The counters and appliances looked fifty years old.

We walked through a living area with a huge TV screen, a couch, and a couple of chairs; there were a few pictures on the walls, mostly of Agnes Pearson with a Belgian Malinois in various settings.

“Let’s try the bedrooms first,” I said, glancing down the stairs to the front door and the lower floor.

We went through a guest room, a sewing room, and a master bedroom, all of them revealing very little about the owners’ personalities. Then we noticed that one side of the closet in the master was empty.

“I think they split up,” I said. “Aldo moved out.”

“Which makes it more disturbing that he was trailing her until moments before she died,” Mahoney said, and gestured to a home office off the master. “I’ll look here.”

“I’ll start with the lower floor,” I said. I went back to the stairs, which descended to a landing at the front door and then dropped again into a furnished basement with another bedroom on the left and a second living area on the right.

There was a closed door ahead where the hall doglegged left. As I stepped into that dogleg, I picked up motion to my left.

Twisting, I saw a very big guy—like, pro-football-big—charging at me. He growled some guttural curse I did not understand and threw a haymaker that caught me on the right cheek.

I was slammed back against the wall and fell to the floor, dazed, seeing things in wavy triplicate.

He stepped over me, his ham-like fist cocked back, and said, “That will teach you not to go messing with what’s Aldo P.’s. You got me, mo-fo?”