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Sean was grateful Lucy wasn’t here. To Lucy, it was always the victims who mattered, not the trappings, and she would take issue with the sister’s description.

Suzanne said, “When we were going over her calendar and notes, we noticed she had scheduled a meeting with a reporter, Rob Banker. Do you know him?”

“Yes, he was one of Rosie’s closest friends.”

“She canceled the meeting because she had a lead to follow. Did she tell you anything about it?”

Bridget shook her head. “I didn’t see her before she left. I was out at dinner. I invited her to join me, but she thinks my friends are boring.” She smiled sadly. “She did mention she had a meeting, but I didn’t ask any details.”

Sean said, “She dedicated her first book to a Newark police officer, Bob Stokes. Do you know him?”

Bridget straightened in surprise. “Actually, I do. He was one of the officers she’d known when she was a reporter in Jersey. They were friendly. But she hadn’t talked to him in years until he came up here for the funeral of Dom Theissen. Dom was a friend of Rosie’s. They talked a lot. I thought there might be something romantic between them, but she never said anything. I know his accident hit her really hard.” Bridget began to look irritated. “I told all of this to the other FBI agent who came by.”

“Who did you speak with?” Suzanne asked.

“Agent Presidio. You brought him with you earlier. Don’t you remember?”

“Yes, I just didn’t know he returned. What time did Agent Presidio visit you?”

“Thursday, late afternoon. Nearly five. He was on his way to the airport, he said. Is something wrong?”

“He died of a heart attack Thursday night,” Suzanne said. “We never got his report.”

Bridget put her hand to her mouth. “Dear Lord. I’m sorry. He just had a couple questions, then asked to see the files in the attic again.”

“Did he take anything with him?”

“I don’t think so. If he did, he didn’t ask me.”

“May we?” Suzanne gestured toward the stairs.

Sean followed Suzanne up. “What time were you and Tony here?”

“We left around three in the afternoon, went back to headquarters with Weber’s notes from the original McMahon investigation. They were in shorthand.”

“What time did he leave?”

“I don’t know. I left him with the analyst and worked on reports. I didn’t see him again.” Suzanne pulled out her phone. “I’ll find out.”

Sean looked around the attic. Everything was well labeled. Suzanne walked over to a stack. “We only took the notepads that pertained to the missing files on the McMahon book. Tony had hoped an analyst could decipher Weber’s shorthand and it would give us an idea of what was in the stolen files.”

“Why did he come back?” Sean walked slowly around. One of the boxes had a lid that was skewed. He looked at the label. It was from the year following the McMahon homicide, while Weber was still a reporter in Newark. “One of the notepads is missing,” he said. He opened the box and noticed that Weber had meticulous labels. The front of every pad was dated. She went through at least one notepad a week.

“It’s the anniversary of Rachel McMahon’s murder that’s gone,” Sean said. “That’s three months after Kreig’s trial.”

“Why didn’t he tell me?”

“Maybe he planned to. We need to find out if he called anyone after he left here. And I’ll call Noah and find out if he had the missing notepad on him.”

They went back downstairs and Sean remembered that Tony had asked Bridget Weber more questions.

“Ms. Weber, when Agent Presidio returned, what did he ask you?”

“He wanted to know if she thought someone was following her. Specifically, he asked me if she was being stalked. And one more thing-how far back she kept her fan mail.”

“We took all her mail,” Suzanne said.

“Yes, and I told him that. He wanted to know about when she was a reporter, before she wrote the McMahon book. I didn’t know, but I can’t imagine that she’d keep anything that long.”

Suzanne and Sean thanked the sister for her time and walked out.

Sean said, “Did you have any indication that Weber was being stalked?”

Suzanne shook her head. “No police reports, no restraining orders, nothing in her e-mails or notes, but I have an analyst going through them in greater detail. But Tony said something earlier about her killer knowing everything about her. Her schedule, what she would do. He felt that her killer was confident she’d expose herself to him and not be scared.”

“Did he say anything else to you when he left?”

“Nothing. I left him with an analyst to go over the notes we found here. She just sent me a message that he left headquarters at four thirty, plenty of time to get back here by five.”

“I’m going to pull the newspaper archives from that missing week and see what Weber wrote. Tony thought it was important enough to take her steno pad.”

“He should have called me.” Suzanne was justifiably upset.

“He didn’t know what he knew,” Sean mumbled. “It was a hunch. Suzanne, I need a favor.”

She rubbed her temples. “I’m not going to like this, am I?”

He grinned. “It’ll be easy. Really. I need the accident report and autopsy for Dominic Theissen.”

“You think it wasn’t an accident.”

“What I think and what I can prove are completely different, but yeah, I think it’s highly suspicious.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Washington, D.C.

Lucy was surprised to find Noah waiting for her when she exited the gate at Reagan National. “I was going to take a taxi,” she said.

“I want to fill you in, and the best place is on the road.”

Lucy had first met Special Agent Noah Armstrong eight months ago during one of his investigations. Though she’d disliked him at the beginning-considering he had questioned her as a suspect in a murder investigation-they’d ended up becoming friends and he’d taken her under his wing during her ten weeks as an analyst in the D.C. regional office. Surviving a plane crash in May had solidified their friendship.

“How’s Hans? He’s going to be okay, right?”

Noah put his hand on her shoulder. “Lucy, it’s serious. He’s been unconscious since Security found him early this morning.”

Lucy nodded, but her chin trembled. She swallowed and asked, “What happened?”

“We don’t know exactly. Can we walk and talk?”

She nodded.

He squeezed her arm and then walked briskly toward short-term parking.

“Hans was working in Tony’s office late last night. He made arrangements to stay in one of the bungalows Quantico has for VIPs and temporary instructors. He signed out of the building just after midnight and crossed a construction area on his way to the house. A scaffold fell on him.”

“It really was an accident?”

“We’re supposed to believe it was an accident, and that’s what everyone will be told today. A scaffolding did collapse, but two things point to attempted murder. First, the structure of the scaffolding had been compromised. The lab is testing the metal, but it appears that an acid ate away at the base and all it would have taken was a light push to make the whole thing come down.”

“And that’s not a construction mistake?”

“It could have been, but the project manager has been working with Forensics all morning to account for the weakness, and he swears it wasn’t his team. We don’t know what the chemical is yet, but there are a lot of common products that could be mixed to eat through the metal. The second piece of evidence is that the security camera outside of the armory caught a shadow. No face, but there was definitely a person moving away from where Hans was attacked at approximately the same time. Where he was attacked is outside the camera’s range.”

They arrived at Noah’s sedan and he opened the passenger door for Lucy, then closed it and walked around to the driver’s side and started the car. Lucy blinked back tears and looked out the window as Noah drove out of airport parking.