Philip Margolin - Capitol murder

“You’re right,” Ginny said. “He’d have all that sexual energy pent up inside him. He’d want to enjoy himself. So why the quick kill?”

“The only thing I can think of is that he was sending a message to me, telling me that he’s here,” Brad answered. “I just don’t get why. I know he’s not normal, but I helped him out. And he’s escaped from death row. You’d think he’d want to go underground. Why risk everything to threaten me?”

“Is it possible that Koshani was his target all along and the murder had nothing to do with you?” Ginny asked.

“She does live in Oregon,” Brad said. “Clarence could have met her there.”

“There’s another possible explanation for the quick kill,” Dana said. “The MO is almost identical to the MO in the Little cases, but unlike the Oregon cases, many of the torture wounds were postmortem.”

“They were made after she died?” Ginny asked.

Dana nodded. “The medical examiner is guessing that she died unexpectedly while she was being beaten.”

“That would explain why she wasn’t abducted and why the torture wasn’t drawn out,” Brad said.

“Exactly,” Dana said.

“Ginny told me that you met Koshani at the airport and were picking her up on Senator Carson’s orders this morning.”

Brad nodded.

“What was Koshani’s connection to the senator?”

“She was going to testify before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.”

“About what?”

“I don’t think I can tell you that without the senator’s permission. Everything that goes on in their sessions is secret.”

“This could have a bearing on why she was killed and whether you’re involved or just a bystander.”

“I know, but I can’t discuss what I heard in the committee session.”

Dana looked frustrated, but she knew better than to press Brad.

“I guess we’ll just have to proceed on the theory that Little might be a threat to you and Ginny until we know otherwise.”

Ali met the three other members of his cell for the first time a few days before they were smuggled out of Pakistan. It soon became apparent that they were slow-witted. Nothing he had learned about them in the intervening months had changed his opinion. As soon as Steve Reynolds showed them how to work the cable television in the safe house, his companions had no trouble passing the time. Porn occupied a good part of each day, but action movies with a lot of explosions and car chases were a close second.

Ali found pornography offensive and the action movies mindless. He got out of the house on Sundays when the Redskins had a home game. If he went outside, he couldn’t go far for fear of being seen. Ali prayed and read the Koran, but he was going stir crazy. So it was a great relief when Steve Reynolds phoned one Thursday morning and told him they were going for a ride.

Ali heard the horn and was out of the house before it honked a second time. Reynolds was driving a white van decorated with a plumbing company logo. The American said very little during the ride, and Ali knew better than to start a conversation.

At the camp in Somalia, Ali’s intelligence had been recognized and appreciated, and he had been trained to construct bombs. None of the material he needed to build a bomb was in the house. He hoped that this trip was connected to the final phase of his mission.

As they drove, Ali had an unsettling thought. By killing unbelievers, he was serving the one true religion and guaranteeing an eternity in paradise. But carrying out his mission would mean that Ann O’Hearn would die. This was troubling, but it could not be helped. Maybe Ann would be spared. Allah was merciful. Then again, Ann was a heretic. Ali forced himself to stop thinking about Ann because it confused him.

An hour and a half after leaving the house, they were driving through farmland in western Maryland when Reynolds turned off a two-lane rural highway onto a narrow dirt road. Two miles farther on, he drove through a gap in a weathered slat fence and onto a gravel drive that led to a farmhouse. Next to the house was a barn covered in peeling red paint. Two horses and some sheep were grazing in a pasture behind the barn.

“We’re going to meet some people,” Reynolds said when he stopped the van. “They have the detonators and our explosives. I’m going to tell them that you don’t speak English. I’ll do all of the talking.”

Three men walked out of the house as soon as Reynolds parked in the yard. The man in the lead was shorter than the other two, clean shaven and slender with wheat-colored hair and narrow blue eyes that lasered in on the van as he walked toward it. He was wearing jeans and a faded Baltimore Ravens T-shirt.

The other two men resembled Baltimore Ravens. They were huge and bearded and looked like men who enjoyed violence. They made Ali very nervous.

Reynolds hopped down from the van and nodded at the slender man. “Hey, Bob, it was good to hear from you. I was starting to worry.”

“I said I’d get the stuff.”

“Yes, you did. So where is it?”

“First things first,” Bob said. He motioned toward Reynolds and Ali, and one of the behemoths walked toward them. Before he’d gotten halfway across the yard, Reynolds reached behind his back and pulled out a matte black Glock.

“Let’s do this the way we did it the first time we met. You show me yours, then I’ll show you mine.”

Bob’s features darkened, and the two giants tensed.

“You think we’re cops?” Bob asked.

“Except for what I’ve been told by some criminals, I don’t know shit about you, and criminals are notoriously untrustworthy.”

Bob turned to his bodyguards. “Business is business,” he said. “Let them frisk you.”

Reynolds turned to Ali. “Pat them down to make sure they’re not wired,” he said in Urdu.

“Speak fucking English,” Bob barked.

“He doesn’t speak English. I just told him to pat you down.”

Bob looked at Ali with distaste and spat in the dirt. Then he raised his hands. Ali went over the men very professionally, the way he’d been trained to do it in the camp.

“Satisfied?” Bob asked.

Reynolds nodded. He put away his gun and raised his hands. One of the giants patted them down. Ali thought he was excessively rough.

“Now that that’s out of the way,” Reynolds said, “show us what you got.”

Bob nodded, and one of his bodyguards went into the barn.

“You have the money?” Bob asked while they waited.

“Every penny. Where did you get the stuff?”

“A coal mine in West Virginia.”

The bodyguard came out of the barn carrying a cardboard box. His eyes were glued to it, and he walked slowly. Warnings on the sides of the box identified the contents as dynamite. The man set the box down in the dirt and returned to the barn.

Reynolds knelt down beside the box and opened it. Ali looked over his shoulder. Inside were stacks of yellow tubes made out of heavy paper and surrounded by clear plastic to prevent leakage.

The man who had returned to the barn came out carrying a cardboard carton. He set it down next to the dynamite. Reynolds opened that box. Inside were several two-inch-long aluminum tubes with the diameter of a pencil. Reynolds looked up at Bob.

“I want to test one of the blasting caps and one of the dynamite sticks,” he said.

“Be my guest.”

Reynolds’s hand hovered over the detonators. Then it dipped down and plucked out one of the tubes. After examining it, he selected a stick of dynamite. Then he turned to Ali.

“Let’s see what you’ve learned,” he said in Urdu as he handed over the blasting cap and the stick of dynamite.

Ali’s chest puffed with pride. As he went to the van, he vowed to show Steve how much he appreciated the American’s trust.