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“One of the things we do at work, our bread and butter, really, is vet companies and people for other companies and people.”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“Anyway, one of our clients, who shall remain anonymous, has been looking to invest in several real estate projects with a company based in Bethesda called Frost and Lear Development. They’re private. Not much about them online.”

Sampson looked at his watch. “How’s this going to help us?”

“I know it’s past your bedtime, but give a lady a chance,” Bree said.

He smiled and held up his hands in surrender. “Keep going.”

“I’ll cut right to the chase. When I looked into the land beneath the Bridge to Nowhere, I kept coming up with part ownership belonging to the District and the rest to the feds.”

I nodded. “You’d said that.”

“I did,” Bree said. “But just now I thought about looking into the land ownership adjacent to the ramp and that homeless camp.”

“Frost and Lear?” Sampson said.

Bree bobbed her head. “For the past year they’ve been quietly buying up all kinds of properties from the lumberyard to the ramp and from the ramp to the river. A month ago, they closed on more condemned properties to the left and right of the camp.” She turned her laptop and showed us a map. “Frost and Lear has the place surrounded.”

Studying the map, I said, “Which means they probably intend to get control of the ramp next.”

“Exactly,” Bree said. “Why buy up condemned properties with a doughnut hole in the middle you can’t develop?”

“Frost and Lear has to want that camp gone,” Sampson said.

“But why murder people and desecrate bodies to do it?” I said.

Bree shrugged. “Timetables? Deadlines? Financial considerations? Plus, it has to give the people living there the heebie-jeebies, knowing someone is targeting them. Maybe the intent is to scare the community enough that they leave on their own.”

“Certainly gives them an incentive to get out of Dodge.”

“And there’s more,” Bree said, pecking at the keyboard. “You know that building where the first homeless victim was shot and burned?”

“Frost and Lear owns that too?” Sampson said.

She nodded. “They bought it through a shell company three months ago.”

46

BEFORE JOHN SAMPSON LEFT, he and I made a plan to pay a visit to Frost and Lear Development’s offices in Bethesda first thing on Monday morning.

But our phones lit up at four a.m.

A fire had been spotted burning in the woods below the Broadmoor, a housing co-op in the southwestern part of Rock Creek Park. Firefighters and police officers called to the scene discovered a body in the flames on the uphill side of the Reservation 630 trail.

Sampson and I arrived in the rear parking lot of the Broadmoor as the sky pinkened with dawn. Fire captain Sheila Wilson told us they’d managed to smother the flames before the body was completely consumed.

“But it took a lot of effort and dirt,” Captain Wilson said. “That wasn’t regular gas used as the accelerant.”

“Avgas?” Sampson asked.

“Maybe. But if so, only as the base. Looks like there was a jelly of some sort added to it, which made it almost like napalm, tough to knock down.”

“Napalm?” I said, shocked by the idea.

“I said like napalm,” Captain Wilson said. “We’re lucky there was no wind and that the area around the body was rocky. If there’d been a breeze or if he’d been set on fire in the leaves, this whole side of the park could have gone up.”