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 from USA Today, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch, all fitted together like a madman’s mosaic.
The stories and pictures are on a single topic: the DC bombings. In some spots, there are circles in red marker. A circle around the word dead in a headline. Another around a picture of a blackened baby stroller. Another around a close-up of a bloody shoe.
Rizzo steps back from the ladder and looks at me. “John, what the hell is this? Some kind of sick scrapbook?”
“Not quite. I’ve seen displays like this before. It’s his trophy wall.”