Philip Margolin - Capitol murder

“Is she waiting in the hall?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. You’ve been very helpful. Can you get us that address and phone number for Mr. Cooper before we go?”

“Sure thing.”

Keith gave Gutierrez his card. “Give me a call if you think of anything else.”

Maggie escorted Gutierrez into the hall and asked him to point out Ann O’Hearn.

“Ann, they want to talk to you,” Gutierrez said.

Maggie walked up to the girl and smiled to allay her fears. “Hi, Miss O’Hearn. I’m Maggie Sparks,” the agent said as she led the nervous girl into the skybox.

“The first thing you need to know,” Maggie said when they were seated, “is that you aren’t suspected of any criminal activity. We want to talk to you to get more information about a man who worked with you in the concession stand, Ali Bashar.”

“Why do you want to know about Ali? What did he do?”

“We’ll talk about that in a minute. Mr. Gutierrez told us that you were friendly with Mr. Bashar.”

“Yeah. I mean I only saw him at work, and we’ve only had a few games, but he was always nice.”

“What did you two talk about?” Maggie asked.

Ann took a moment to think. “He told me he played soccer. I’m on my college team. Once, after a game, we talked about soccer.”

Maggie nodded to encourage her to continue.

“He said he was going to school too, that he was a student.”

“Did he say where he went to school?”

“No, I got the impression he wasn’t going yet, that he planned to go, but I’m not completely sure about that.”

Ann looked troubled. “Can you tell me why you’re asking about Ali?”

“I can see that you liked Mr. Bashar, so this may upset you. Ali Bashar was part of a cell of Islamic radicals who tried to blow up FedEx Field today.”

Ann lost color and looked as though she might faint. Maggie laid a hand on her shoulder.

“Are you okay? Do you want some water?”

Ann shook her head. She seemed dazed. “He tried to warn me,” she managed, her voice barely above a whisper.

“Warn you how?” Maggie pressed.

“Just before he took his tray into the stands, he told me he had to talk to me, that it was important. Then he told me to say I was sick and to go home.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him I wasn’t sick and we were very busy. If I left, Jose would have been shorthanded. I asked him why I should go home.”

“What did he say to that?”

“He looked like he wanted to tell me something. Instead he said he was being foolish and that it was nothing. Then he left, and I was too busy to think about what he’d said anymore.”

“It sounds like Mr. Bashar likes you. Did he ever ask you out or say anything inappropriate?”

“No. I told you, we barely talked because he hawked in the stands. I’d only see him before the stand opened or when we were cleaning up. He seemed shy. The day we talked about soccer, I got the impression that talking to me took a big effort.”

“Can you think of anything else that might help us understand Mr. Bashar?” Maggie asked.

“Not really.” Ann shook her head. “This is a lot to take in. You’re saying he was going to kill everyone?”

Maggie nodded.

“My God. He was so nice. I can’t believe it.”

“He just appeared to be nice, Miss O’Hearn.”

“No, he was nice to me. He… he tried to save me. God, I feel sick.”

Maggie questioned Ann O’Hearn for a few more minutes before getting her address, e-mail, and phone number. Then she told Ann she could go home. Mr. Gutierrez was waiting outside the door with Lawrence Cooper’s phone number and business address. Maggie thanked him and called the next witness into the skybox.

An hour later, Keith ushered the last witness into the hall. No one knew much about Ali Bashar. He was quiet, worked hard, and didn’t cause any trouble. No one except Ann had talked with him about anything except work.

Keith closed the door and settled into a seat beside Maggie. “What do you think?” he asked.

“We have to talk to Cooper to find out how Bashar got his job.”

“I’m betting Cooper placed all four of the bombers, which is interesting.”

Maggie nodded. “Do you think Bashar liked Ann O’Hearn?”

“He must have if he tried to get her to go home.”

“Let’s tell Harold. Maybe he can use it when they interrogate Bashar.”

All of the concessions where the suicide bombers worked were owned by Lawrence Cooper, and the managers had been told by him to let the suicide bombers work at each one. Harold Johnson told Keith and Maggie to pick up Cooper and bring him in for questioning.

Cooper lived in a ranch-style house at the end of a cul-de-sac in a development in Rockville, Maryland, that had been built in the late fifties. It was dark when Keith parked in the driveway. He noticed that the lawn was mowed and the house looked as though it had been given a fresh coat of paint in the not too distant past. The agents walked up a narrow slate path to the front door and rang the bell. There was no answer. Keith rang again, then knocked and called Cooper’s name. When there was still no answer, Maggie walked around back while Keith tried to see around the curtains that had been lowered to cover the picture window that looked out on the lawn. The living room was dark, but Keith made out a pale glow that he took for lights that were on in some other part of the house.

Maggie returned to the front yard. “The side door opens into the kitchen. It isn’t locked. What do you think?”

“I don’t like this.”

“Let’s have a look.”

Keith followed Maggie around the side of the house. They drew their guns, and Maggie eased the door open. They were immediately hit by the nauseating smell that hung over every scene of violent death they had ever entered.

“Mr. Cooper,” Maggie called, not expecting an answer.

Keith nodded and the agents crept into the kitchen. The lights were on, and there were pots soaking in the sink and half a loaf of bread and a knife with a serrated blade on a cutting board.

Keith and Maggie entered the dining room cautiously. They saw half-finished meals at place settings where two chairs had toppled over when their occupants leaped up from them. Neither the man nor the woman had made it very far. Mr. Cooper had been shot in the head and had toppled to the floor. A woman who Keith assumed was Mrs. Cooper had made it halfway to the living room when a shot to the back had brought her down and a second shot to the back of the head had finished her off.

Maggie knelt beside Mr. Cooper and studied the entry hole in the center of his forehead.

“One shot, dead center. That’s not easy,” she said.

“Tying up loose ends,” Keith said wearily as he took out his cell phone and dialed Harold Johnson’s number.

“The bombers didn’t do this,” Maggie said as soon as Keith finished the call.

“Their handler, the guy who told Cooper to place Bashar and the others?”

“That’s a good guess.”

“Let’s check Cooper’s bank records to see if he deposited a large sum of money recently.”

“He could have been a dupe. I mean, Bashar and the others were probably smuggled in, so they couldn’t have gotten jobs legally. Cooper might have thought he was getting a group of illegals jobs without knowing what they were planning to do.”

Keith looked at Cooper’s corpse. “We may never know the answer to that one.”

One of Imran Afridi’s companies owned a home on the beach in Southern California. Another owned a palazzo near Lake Como in Italy and an apartment in Tokyo. But Afridi had watched the Redskins play the Giants on a big-screen television in the den of his mansion in northern Virginia because he wanted to be close to the terror and chaos that would follow the demolition of FedEx Field.