CHAPTER 11

WE PRESSED PEARSON ON his alibi. He insisted he’d been in his room studying. He remembered he’d been online with his laptop several times, submitting assignments for various courses.

“There will be records of that, right?” Pearson said. “I mean, the IP address of my computer and the school’s computer and the time and all that.”

“There should be,” Mahoney agreed. “And your Wi-Fi router history.”

“Okay,” he said. “My laptop’s in my rig.”

“The Durango?”

He nodded. We went outside with him and saw what looked to be the same silver-gray Dodge Durango that had followed Agnes Pearson and Judge Franklin.

Pearson’s laptop was in the front seat. Mahoney took it and bagged it. “We’re going to need this for a day or two,” he said.

Pearson squinted. “I guess I can borrow one from school.”

“And your cell phone.”

“C’mon, man.” He groaned. “I’ve got my life on that thing.”

Mahoney said, “And the keys to the Durango.”

“What the—” Pearson said. “What am I going to do, walk to school? I swear to you, I had nothing to do with Agnes’s death.”

I’d been circling the Durango during the conversation and I noticed something odd at the front end my second time around.

“Mr. Mahoney,” I said, stepping away. “Can I have a word?”

“Don’t touch the vehicle in any way,” Mahoney told Pearson.

Pearson held up his hands and moved back.

“What’s up?” Ned said when we’d walked a good ten yards away.

“Show me the still of the partial plate.” Mahoney called it up. I looked at it. “No registration sticker.”

“Because they put them on the rear plate in Maryland.”

I gestured over at the Durango and the front plate with the registration sticker.

Mahoney walked back to Pearson. “Maryland law says your registration sticker goes on the rear plate.”

“I always put it there,” Pearson said, frowning as he came around the front of the SUV. “That’s not right. That has never been that way.”

We looked at the screws that held the plates on the bracket but could not tell if they’d been tampered with recently.

“Crime lab will tell us,” Mahoney said. “So what’s your relationship with Willa Whelan?”

His left eye crinkled. “Who?”

“She’s a law professor at GW,” I said.

“Never heard of her.”

“We won’t find her on any of your devices?”

“To my knowledge, that’s correct,” he said evenly. “Now, can I at least use my phone to call an Uber home? I mean, I’m cooperating. I’m not under arrest, am I?”

“Not today,” I said. “But don’t go leaving town on us.”

“I told you, I’m in school,” Pearson said, and got a sad look on his face. “And now I guess I’ve got to start planning Agnes’s funeral.”

After allowing him to hail an Uber, we bagged his phone and called for FBI criminalists to come take possession of it, the laptop, and the Durango. In our minds, we still had not cleared Pearson when his ride came and picked him up.

Nor had we excluded Professor Willa Whelan.

Mahoney dropped me off shortly after dark in front of my home on Fifth Street in Southeast DC. The cold wind blew leaves off the front lawn as I hurried up the stairs and into the house, which smelled incredible.

“What are you cooking?” I called into the front room where Nana was watching the evening news.

“Short ribs,” Nana Mama called back. “Been braising them for hours.”

I hung up my coat, put my weapon in the lockbox, and peeked around the corner into the front room. My grandmother was alone. “Where is everyone?”

“Jannie’s at a friend’s house, Ali’s in the kitchen working on a science project, and Bree is upstairs getting showered and changed.”

“I’ll do that too. When’s dinner?”

“Forty minutes.”

“Perfect,” I said, and went and kissed her on the cheek.

“What’s that for?”

“You just being you,” I said. I winked at her, winced.

She adjusted her glasses. “What happened to your face?”

“A very big guy hit me,” I said. “But I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine.”

“Thanks,” I said, and climbed upstairs.

I found Bree dressing in her walk-in closet.

“Oooh,” she said when she saw me. “Who hit you?”

“A suspect who may or may not be a suspect,” I said, and gave her a short rundown of my day before getting into the shower. “And you?”

She described her calls to the real estate agent and the sheriff’s deputy in Elko, Nevada.

“Sounds open-and-shut from what the deputy told you,” I said.

“As far as she’s concerned, it’s a closed case,” Bree said, frowning. “But why would he go back up that mountain alone? In a handicap van without snow tires?”

Standing under the hot water, I said, “How much were they selling the ranch for?”

“Sixty-three million for twenty-seven thousand acres.”

“Well, that kind of money would warrant a second visit in my book.”

“But why alone? I mean, he couldn’t get around very far, I’d imagine.”

“Maybe that was the point,” I said. “He got up there, it started to snow, and he realized that he wasn’t going to get far in his wheelchair.”

Bree remained skeptical. “I still don’t get why he wouldn’t just use the helicopter to go back up in there again. He was a pilot. Oh, it snowed in the mountains—maybe the poor visibility made him take the van?”

“Makes sense. Was there anyone up there at the time he died?”

She shook her head. “There’s a winter caretaker, but he was in Denver with a sick mother.”

“Absentee owners?”

“A Brazilian cattle company, O Casado.” She perked up. “Which is familiar, isn’t it?”

“How’s that?”

“Remember that ranch in Colorado where the Alejandro cartel slaughtered all those Maestro operators?”

In the shower, I cocked my head. “That’s right. It was owned by some Brazilian cattle company, but it wasn’t O Casado.”

“Still, we’ve got two different ranches owned by Brazilians coming up in the same web of evidence that surrounds M.”

“That’s a pretty broad web, but it does seem an odd coincidence.”

A knock came at the door, and Ali called from the other side, “Nana Mama says dinner’s almost ready, and John and Willow just got here. Wait until you see all the loot she scored in Disney World!”