Jannie was so good at the event, she’d attracted the attention of coaches at Division 1 schools as well as private coaches. She had already been offered scholarships to several colleges, including the University of Oregon and the University of Texas. But the coaches who’d talked to her and us had been split on whether she should focus solely on the four-hundred-meter or broaden her horizons to the multi-event heptathlon, where her natural overall athleticism shined.
“Are you training for any of the field events these days?” Bree asked.
“Not this week,” Jannie said, taking another salmon cake. “I’m running in that regional invitational Saturday at Howard University, and Coach wants me to focus on the four-hundred. He said a lot of college coaches will be there.”
“There’s always some college coach at your meets,” Ali said. “When are you going to make up your mind and choose?”
“I was kind of wondering the same thing,” I said.
“Take the best track program,” Bree said. “The one that will take you the farthest toward your Olympic dream.”
“The best academics,” Nana Mama said, shaking her fork. “Sports are fleeting.”
For a few moments, Jannie didn’t say anything, just gave us all a cryptic smile. Then she said, “After this race, if it goes the way Coach says it could go, I think I’ll know exactly where I’m supposed to be.”
CHAPTER 7
BREE LEFT THE HOUSE first the following morning, heading off to her meeting at the Bluestone Group’s headquarters across the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia.
Sampson and I were not far behind her.
We drove back to Chevy Chase and the Carpenters’ neighborhood and knocked on the door of many a small mansion. We got very little. Either the residents had not known the Carpenters or they had known them so well that they were too devastated to talk.
Again and again, we were told how wonderful Sue and Roger Carpenter had been as neighbors, friends, and fellow worshippers at the nearby Episcopal church. And again and again, we saw the evidence of the strange, terrible fascination and fear that the Family Man killings had ingrained in the public mind.
“I haven’t seen it like this since the Beltway sniper attacks when I was a kid,” said one neighbor, a man named Chuck Reed. He lived around the corner from the Carpenters. “Everyone’s scared to go out or is talking about putting in better alarm systems. But it doesn’t matter, does it? The killer has to be an expert on those systems because Roger Carpenter had one. Am I right? He disables them and goes right on in, doesn’t he?”
“We think so, Mr. Reed,” I said, giving him my card.
Elaine Parsons lived up the street from Reed in a large Tudor-style home with a For Sale sign out front. She opened her door on a chain and peered out at us with bloodshot eyes.
We held up our identification. “We’re with Metro Police,” I began.
“I figured,” Parsons said. “I don’t know anything. If I did, I’d tell you.”
“Can we talk anyway, ma’am?” Sampson said.
She hesitated, then drew back the chain and stepped out onto the porch. “Place is a mess inside. I’ve been … packing.”
She was in her late thirties, I guessed, and quite pretty, with long, wavy auburn hair. She wore yoga gear and her body looked fit, but her face was a different story. Her skin was sallow. She had bags under her eyes. Her breath and the coffee she carried smelled of vodka.
“Did you know the Carpenters?” I asked.
“Sue was the salt of the earth,” Parsons said. “And Roger was the best divorce attorney in the business. Got me this house and half of everything Hank had.”
“Hank’s your ex-husband?”
“As of last month, you betcha,” she said and sipped on the coffee and vodka.
“Did Hank know the Carpenters?”
She snorted. “He and Roger were big golfing buddies until Roger told him I’d given him a five-dollar retainer fee years ago in case Hank and I ever got on the outs.”
Sampson asked, “When did Hank learn this?”
“When he tried to hire Roger to divorce me so he could marry Sally the Ice Queen,” she said, smiling and enjoying the memory. “Hank flipped and broke a nine iron because he knew what Roger could do to him. He called Roger a traitor even though I retained Roger the very first time I met him. I’d heard what a tiger he was and just handed him the five bucks. Turns out he was a tiger, a kind—”
Parsons stopped talking, her jaw quivering. Tears began to roll down her cheeks. She looked up at us. “Roger was one of the good guys. Even though Hank hated him after that, he did right by me. I … I can’t believe he’s gone.”
Sampson said, “When did you last see Roger or Sue?”
She thought for a moment. “I saw Sue jog by last week. Roger I saw maybe two days ago?”
“Where was that?”
She appeared confused. She squinted and said, “At his mailbox.”
“At the bottom of the driveway?” I asked.
Parsons looked down and nodded. “I was late for a spa appointment. I didn’t stop. We just waved at each other. I … I didn’t know I would never see him again.”
She put her face in her hands and broke down sobbing. “So many things are ending on me, I can’t stand it half the time.”
CHAPTER 8
THAT MORNING, BREE WALKED into the corporate offices of the Bluestone Group in Arlington, Virginia, greeted the receptionist, and was told that Elena Martin was awaiting her in the conference room.
Bree had been in law enforcement for nearly twenty years and had worked every kind of case people could imagine and a few no one could. But she still felt the familiar thrill of anticipation as she headed to the conference room.
The last time she’d come in for a secret assignment like this, she’d ended up in Paris in a firefight with modern vigilantes associated with a mysterious organization known as Maestro and its even more mysterious leader, a man who called himself M.
Maestro and M had come into Bree’s life through Alex. One day about five years ago, out of the blue, Alex and John Sampson began getting texts from M. At times, M’s texts were taunting, criticizing her husband and his partner. But occasionally, M gave Alex information that resulted in big arrests.
But that all changed when M sent ex–Special Forces commandos to ferret out and kill U.S. federal law enforcement officers and agents corrupted by the Mexico-based Alejandro drug cartel. After Bree survived the firefight in Paris, Alex and Sampson got in the middle of the Maestro investigation and were caught in the Montana wilderness in open combat between M’s forces and the Alejandro cartel’s soldiers.
The experience had almost cost them their lives.
But now, the Alejandro cartel was no more. And M had been silent ever since the cartel’s leader had been killed when her private jet was blown up as it was taxiing down the runway.
Elena Martin waved at Bree from the other side of a glass wall. The founder and CEO of the Bluestone Group was talking on her phone and nodding. Two large cardboard boxes rested on the table in front of her.
Martin, wearing a sharply cut gray pantsuit, had shoulder-length light brown hair and a no-nonsense style that Bree loved. A former investigator with the Defense Intelligence Agency, Martin was also an entrepreneurial visionary who, after leaving the military and her marriage, had built Bluestone into one of the top private security firms in the country by aggressively recruiting top law enforcement professionals like Bree.