Bree straightened her shoulders, glanced at me with mock pity, then followed Mahoney inside. John and I went into the observation booth with Special Agent Kim Tillis, who had just arrived.
On the other side of the one-way mirror, William Nolan had his left wrist cuffed to his chair and his right arm in a sling. He was hunched over and looked miserable. I was surprised to see Sandra Wendover, the same federal public defender who’d worked on Martin Forbes’s case, sitting beside him.
“Hey, c’mon,” Nolan said as Bree and Ned took chairs. “I’m dying here.”
“You’re not dying, Mr. Nolan,” Mahoney said.
“I’m in serious pain,” he insisted in a hoarse whine.
Wendover said, “My client has three broken ribs, a blown ACL in his right knee, and a separated shoulder. That could be construed as brutality.”
Mahoney snorted. “Except your client jumped off a roof into a tree and then took off trying to elude federal officers who were forced to subdue him.”
“Who cares?” Nolan said, irritated. “Because I know for a fact I’ve done nothing wrong. A misdemeanor, maybe. But not something you go away for.” Mahoney said, “Well, Mr. Jailhouse Lawyer, here’s a news flash for you: We are holding you as the prime suspect in a federal kidnapping-and-mass-murder investigation.”
That got Nolan’s attention in a big way. He rocked back in his chair, eyes big as sand dollars, then he winced and said, “Whoa! Whoa! What are you talking about?”
Wendover said, “Wait — he’s involved in Martin Forbes’s case?”
“He is.”
“Then I must recuse, and I advise my client to stay silent until federal defenders can send over another lawyer to represent him.”
“What? No,” Nolan said. “No, just sit here, I’m not admitting to nothing because I didn’t do anything.”
Bree said, “How about cutting off people’s heads? You did that, didn’t you, M?”
Wendover said, “Mr. Nolan, I advise you not to answer.”
Nolan shook his head violently. “I do not know what they’re talking about.”
“Are you M?” Mahoney asked. “Simple question.”
Nolan’s brow knitted. “That a name or something?”
“You know it is.”
“What, like some rapper?”
“You’re saying you are not M?” Bree said.
“I can say without a doubt that I am not Em or Eminem or whoever this dude is, and I have never, ever killed anyone, much less chopped off a bunch of people’s heads.”
On the other side of the mirror, behind Mahoney and Bree, I keyed my mike, said, “The blood he splattered on my windshield.”
Bree nodded, said, “You’re sure, William? Because Dr. Cross says you threw a blood balloon at his windshield out on the Beltway.”
“Blood balloon?” Wendover said. “Do not answer that question, Mr. Nolan.”
He ignored her. “That was fake blood, and so what? It’s like a kid’s prank.”
“Except that wasn’t fake blood,” Mahoney said. “That was a blood cocktail taken from several different human beings. We haven’t done the entire DNA workup yet, Mr. Nolan, but the smart money is on the blood matching the heads and, therefore, you.”
Nolan lost all color and looked dazed by what he’d just been told.
“Okay,” Wendover said, gathering her things and standing. “I am out of here.”
“Stop!” Nolan said. “Why?”
She glared at him. “Because, Mr. Nolan, I represent an innocent man who’s in jail, accused of the heinous crimes you’ve been involved in.”
“Heinous?” he said, looking after her as she left the room. “I’ve never done anything heinous in my entire life!”
Wendover shut the door behind her. I was about to go out into the hallway to talk to her when Nolan said, “I admit I’ve done things I’m not proud of, and I did time for them, but nothing heinous. Nothing remotely heinous.”
“But you can see where this is going, William,” Bree said. “Your blood balloon. The heads. The bodies. You must already be fearing the day they execute you.”
“Wait, now. I...” He struggled and then apparently came to a decision. “I was given the balloon. I was told the blood was fake, you know, movie-prop stuff.” In the observation booth, we all leaned forward as one.
“Who told you that, Mr. Nolan?” Bree asked. “Who gave you the balloon? And who told you to visit Marty Forbes in jail and act like Kyle Craig?”
Nolan closed his eyes, said, “He calls himself M.”
Chapter 88
Shortly after seven that evening, in the Homeland Security offices at Union Station, Mahoney, Sampson, Bree, and I crowded around Lieutenant Edith Prince, a TSA officer with access to the archival feeds from cameras mounted in and around the transportation hub.
We asked her to bring up the footage from several days before, when Nolan had been caught on-camera. The time stamp said 4:01 p.m. when the Kyle Craig lookalike appeared in the feed, walked through the main hall of the rail station, and disappeared into the Metro.
“He told us he went to a locker before going to the Metro,” Bree said.
It took a few tries before Prince picked him up on another camera feed, this one overlooking a bank of lockers open for use between six a.m. and midnight.
On the TSA lieutenant’s screen, Nolan appeared at 3:54 p.m. He went to locker C-2, one of the larger storage bins. It was open.
Nolan reached inside and up. He groped around, then pulled his hand out in a loose fist and put it in the pocket of his jacket. The door swung shut. Nolan left.
Exactly the way he had described his actions to Bree in the interrogation room.
“What happened just there?” Prince asked.
“Nolan says he retrieved a claim check for a piece of carry-on luggage in storage at the Willard Hotel,” Bree said.
“Now we just need to figure out who put the claim check in the locker, and the luggage at the hotel,” Mahoney said.
“Can’t help you with the hotel,” Prince said, and she gave her computer an order. “But just maybe...”
The viewer played backward at six times normal speed. I had trouble keeping my eyes on the screen. My mind kept leaping back to the Kyle Craig lookalike’s claim that he was contacted two years before through an anonymous Panamanian server and an e-mail account belonging to someone named M.
The sender was aware of Nolan’s circumstances, that he was an ex-con trying to stay clean years after his release from prison, that he was working too many hours for too little pay.
M also knew Nolan had been an actor and a stuntman and thought he’d be perfect for several roles he had coming up. The first role would involve five days of work, and the pay was one hundred thousand dollars, twenty-five up front, seventy-five on completion.
“For doing what?” Bree had asked.
Nolan had shifted and winced. “I don’t think I should answer that, actually.”
Mahoney leaned across the table. “Headless bodies, William. Blood from those bodies in your possession. Start talking or start thinking about what you want for your last meal.”
The stuntman wasn’t happy, but he spilled everything. He’d been the one who chloroformed Marty Forbes in that Fort Lauderdale motel room. He’d been the one who’d put an IV in Forbes’s arm and run drugs into him. He’d been the one who’d kept the maids away the entire four days Marty had lain in a chemical haze.
“I waited until Forbes was starting to come around, and then I left,” Nolan said. “Five days later, I get a UPS box filled with seventy-five grand in cash. I’m still not sure what I did to earn it.”