“The government? And how long will that take? A year? Ten years? Forever?” Margie Coffey waves her hand in disgust and turns to leave.
I step in front of her. “How did he sleep?” I ask.
Coffey stops. Takes off her glasses. “To tell you the truth, terrible. I live right above the office, and some nights I could hear him yelling from his room—awful screams. A couple of times, he woke up the guests in the next room. When I knocked on his door, he came out wrapped in a sheet, so apologetic. Told me he had nightmares. Other nights, I’d come home late and see him sitting in a lawn chair outside his room, covered in a blanket, smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer, looking out into the distance but like he wasn’t really seeing anything.”
“You mean like a thousand-yard stare?” I ask.
“That’s exactly right,” says Coffey. “A thousand-yard stare. How did you know?”
“Because I’ve seen it a thousand times.”
CHAPTER 51
I SLIP MARGIE COFFEY my business card. “Please call me if you remember anything else about Aiden Phillips.”
She looks around. “Only if you promise to pay for the room damage.”
“You file the forms, and I’ll make it happen. I promise.”
From her expression, I don’t think she believes me.
On her way out, Coffey steps around Rizzo, who’s on her hands and knees on the worn orange carpet, staring at the bottom of the door.
“Interesting,” Rizzo says. She dangles the trip wire with the eye hook at the end. “The knot was secure. The line was intact. But the bottom of the door has dry rot. Looks like when the entry team hit the trip wire, the eye hook popped out of the wood.”
I reach down to pick up the tiny piece of hardware. “I guess we should thank Margie for letting the place go to hell.”
“Detective Sampson!” one of the techs calls from the bathroom.
Rizzo gets to her feet and we walk over together. Mahoney is already in there.
Inside the tiny room, a forensics tech is dusting a broken mirror over a cracked porcelain sink.
The center of the mirror is smashed. When I lean in, I can see dried brownish bloodstains in the cracks. “Looks like a fist punched into it. Guess something set him off. But what?”
“Who knows?” says Mahoney with a surly attitude. “Maybe the death count for the bombings wasn’t high enough for him. Maybe he was having a flashback to Kandahar. Maybe his internet got glitchy. I think we’ve established that the guy is a head case.”
Rizzo, Mahoney, and I leave the bathroom, and I hear a tech on a stepladder next to the sheet on the wall say, “All clear. No wires. No timers. No fuses. We’re good to take this down.”
He gets off the ladder as we all move closer.
“Can I do it?” asks Rizzo.
“Be my guest,” says Mahoney.
Rizzo steps onto the ladder and yanks out the pushpin that’s holding up the top left corner of the sheet. The sheet falls away, exposing the wall behind it.
Everybody in the room looks up and stops working. The place goes quiet.
One of the techs is the first to speak. “Holy shit” is all she says.
A guy on the forensics team picks up his camera and starts snapping pictures.
“Nobody touch anything,” cautions Mahoney. “Just document it.”
I step forward until I’m only a few feet away.Jesus!
The wall is filled with taped-up clippings fromUSA Today,theWashington Post,theNew York Times,and theRichmond Times-Dispatch,all fitted together like a madman’s mosaic.
