CHAPTER 17

MAHONEY PICKED ME UP the following morning, and I told him what Bree and Sampson had discovered about the Brazilian cattle companies. He thought the link to Ryan Malcomb was more than a little tenuous, but in the end, he agreed to contact the Brazilian national police.

“After we execute a warrant on Professor Whelan’s home in Bethesda,” he said.

“What took so long?”

“We lost one judge to recusal because she knows Whelan personally. The second judge sat on it but ultimately found the testimony of the old lady across from Judge Franklin’s house compelling enough to give us a look around the place.”

“I get the feeling the professor is not going to be happy to see us.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and she’ll be in her office or teaching.”

We weren’t lucky. Willa Whelan was at home, and when she answered the door to her modest house at the edge of a creek, she took one look at the booties on our shoes and the warrant and let loose with a barrage of insults and curses. Mahoney had to threaten her with obstruction if she did not let us in.

The law professor’s lips curled bitterly, but at last she stepped aside, and we entered. As I passed her, I could not help thinking that in my experience, most people who unleash a tirade like that are doing so out of fear.

As we began the search, I believed Willa Whelan had something to hide.

At first, my suspicions ran to undeclared income. For a law professor who had been an assistant U.S. attorney in Arkansas, she had a home that was borderline lavish. It was relatively small and the outside was plain, but the interior held Persian rugs, limited-edition sculptures, original oil paintings by well-known artists, and a state-of-the-art entertainment center. The kitchen appliances were all from Scandinavia; the counters were beautiful green granite; the fixtures were copper, unique, and gleaming.

By the time we turned toward the bedrooms, I believed that the professor had either inherited a pile of cash or was a tax cheat. The sudden appearance of all the finer things in life, the things you can buy when you have a lot of cash lying around, is often an indication that someone is trying to avoid the IRS.

Whelan’s spare bedroom was set up for guests and decorated out of Laura Ashley and Pottery Barn. The primary suite was huge, its hardwood floors covered with more Persian rugs.

Then we found embarrassing intimate tools and lubricants in a drawer in the bathroom. For the next half an hour or so, I figured that must have been the source of her fear and I was glad she hadn’t been in the room when we made that discovery.

We looked in every cranny upstairs and found nothing to link Whelan to Emma Franklin’s death. We did, however, find a gun safe in her basement.

The professor opened it unhappily. It held three different nine-millimeter match-style shooting pistols with brightly colored handles, one green, one blue, and one red.

None of them looked remotely like the suppressed pistol carried by the judge’s assassin.

“Are we going to find more weapons in the house, Professor?” Mahoney said.

“No,” she said. “I sold all my late husband’s. They were too big for my hands.”

I said, “If you don’t mind me asking, how did he die?”

She gazed at me. “An industrial accident. Tim was a drilling engineer.”

“Big insurance payout?”

Whelan appeared insulted. “I sued his company for gross negligence and won.”

That explained the house, the lifestyle. I shut the safe.

As Mahoney was leaving the basement, I realized I had not seen any kind of office space in the house. “You don’t work at home?” I asked her.

“Rarely,” she said immediately, as if she’d been waiting for the question. “And if I do, it’s usually upstairs at the kitchen table with my laptop.”

I smiled. But then the law professor’s eyes flickered toward the far wall of the basement, which was covered in barnboard and adorned with sporting items hanging on hooks: tennis rackets, bike helmets, and the like.

I acted as if I hadn’t seen the tell and followed Mahoney back upstairs.

“I suppose you’ll want to see the garage and the shed out back,” she said, sounding relieved.

“I’ll take the garage,” Ned said.

“The shed’s mine,” I said, and left the house by the kitchen door.

There was a small garden shed in one corner of the backyard, but instead of going to it, I walked around the house, looking at the foundation and the well windows. I was able to see into the basement on the back and both sides, but at the base of the front of the house, toward where I believed the barnboard was positioned, two well windows were covered with blackout curtains.

I found Mahoney in the garage. “Nothing,” he said.

“Let’s take another look below,” I said, and we went inside.

When I opened the basement door, Whelan came over. “There’s nothing down there. You’ve seen it. I told you.”

“You did, and you’re lying,” I said, going down the stairs.

She and Mahoney followed me as I went to that wall covered in barnboard. I scanned it, searching for a seam. I looked back at the professor. “You going to show me how it opens, or do I call in an FBI team with chain saws?”

Whelan glared at me for a long moment, then walked to the left side of the barnboard and pressed a hidden button. A door-size piece of the wall clicked and sagged open.

I went in and found a narrow office with a desk and computer at one end and pegboards on the walls. The two pegboards closest to the desk on both sides were covered in clippings about Judge Emma Franklin, both before and after her death.

Mahoney looked back at Whelan, who was standing there with crossed arms, slinging hatred at us with her eyes and posture.

“Uh-oh,” Ned said.