Rizzo shakes her head. “I’m shooting this picture over to Dennis Chan. See if he can match it.” She attaches the image to a text and clicks Send.
About thirty seconds later, Rizzo’s phone rings. She answers. “Well?”
She slams her hand down on her desk. “Thank you!” She hangs up and turns to me. “He says it’s a match. That’s our guy.”
“Great! Now we need to find out—”
Before I can finish my sentence, Rizzo starts receiving file after file.
“Damn,” Rizzo says. “Dennis is fast!” I lean in over her shoulder as she starts reading off details from her screen. Everything you’d ever want to know about one Aiden Evan Phillips.
“Thirty-four years old. Separated, two kids. Ex-military, spent nine years with Third Special Forces Group Airborne at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.” Rizzo scrolls down. “Overseas deployments … one tour in Iraq, three in Afghanistan. Other military records redacted.”
“Black ops?”
“Who knows?” says Rizzo. “Maybe something sensitive with the State Department.” She looks up from the screen and turns to me. “Get this—spent six months as an instructor at the army EOD school at Fort Gregg-Adams in Virginia.”
I know that school. Their mission is to train explosives technicians. “He’s a bomb expert!” My heart is pounding. I can feel my palms starting to sweat.
“What about other criminal activity post-army?”
Rizzo scrolls again. “Aiden is a naughty boy. Assault, assault with a deadly weapon, and … holy shit!”
I pull a chair over and plop down next to her. “What?”
“Look! He was arrested for criminal trespass at the U.S. Capitol Building but later released for lack of evidence.”
“What else?”
“He was a patient at a VA hospital in Richmond.”
“Combat injury?”
Rizzo clicks through the records. “Nope. Mental-health issues.”
“Not a surprise. Him and a few million other vets.” I scroll down the contacts on my phone and tap.
“Who are you calling?” asks Rizzo.
I put the phone on speaker and lay it on Rizzo’s desk. On the second ring, the line connects. “Chief Grace, Palmer Police.”
“Wilma! It’s John Sampson and Anna Rizzo in DC. We got your files.”
“Good. Hope to hell you can do something with ’em.”
“We already did,” says Rizzo.
I lean toward the phone. “We’re looking at the guy named Aiden Phillips. Do you remember anything about him?”
“Phillips? Let’s see … well, I remember that he was a real anti-government type. Told people he served in Afghanistan and was pissed off when the Taliban took over.”
“What about the bomb in the sandpit?”
“We picked him up the day after based on his record. He had an alibi and we couldn’t place him at the scene. Had to let him go. Never saw him again.”
Rizzo chimes in. “Did you test his hands and clothes for explosive residue?”
“Guys, this is Palmer, Georgia, not DC. Like I said, we sent all our evidence and suspect files to GBI.” She pauses for a second. “Hang on! You guys like Phillips for the bombings up there?”
