Criss Cross

Chapter 88

Shortly after seven that evening, in the Homeland Security offices at Union Station, Mahoney, Sampson, Bree, and I crowded around Lieutenant Edith Prince, a TSA officer with access to the archival feeds from cameras mounted in and around the transportation hub.

We asked her to bring up the footage from several days before, when Nolan had been caught on-camera. The time stamp said 4:01 p.m. when the Kyle Craig lookalike appeared in the feed, walked through the main hall of the rail station, and disappeared into the Metro.

“He told us he went to a locker before going to the Metro,” Bree said.

It took a few tries before Prince picked him up on another camera feed, this one overlooking a bank of lockers open for use between six a.m. and midnight.

On the TSA lieutenant’s screen, Nolan appeared at 3:54 p.m. He went to locker C-2, one of the larger storage bins. It was open.

Nolan reached inside and up. He groped around, then pulled his hand out in a loose fist and put it in the pocket of his jacket. The door swung shut. Nolan left.

Exactly the way he had described his actions to Bree in the interrogation room.

“What happened just there?” Prince asked.

“Nolan says he retrieved a claim check for a piece of carry-on luggage in storage at the Willard Hotel,” Bree said.

“Now we just need to figure out who put the claim check in the locker, and the luggage at the hotel,” Mahoney said.

“Can’t help you with the hotel,” Prince said, and she gave her computer an order. “But just maybe...”

The viewer played backward at six times normal speed. I had trouble keeping my eyes on the screen. My mind kept leaping back to the Kyle Craig lookalike’s claim that he was contacted two years before through an anonymous Panamanian server and an e-mail account belonging to someone named M.

The sender was aware of Nolan’s circumstances, that he was an ex-con trying to stay clean years after his release from prison, that he was working too many hours for too little pay.

M also knew Nolan had been an actor and a stuntman and thought he’d be perfect for several roles he had coming up. The first role would involve five days of work, and the pay was one hundred thousand dollars, twenty-five up front, seventy-five on completion.

“For doing what?” Bree had asked.

Nolan had shifted and winced. “I don’t think I should answer that, actually.”

Mahoney leaned across the table. “Headless bodies, William. Blood from those bodies in your possession. Start talking or start thinking about what you want for your last meal.”

The stuntman wasn’t happy, but he spilled everything. He’d been the one who chloroformed Marty Forbes in that Fort Lauderdale motel room. He’d been the one who’d put an IV in Forbes’s arm and run drugs into him. He’d been the one who’d kept the maids away the entire four days Marty had lain in a chemical haze.

“I waited until Forbes was starting to come around, and then I left,” Nolan said. “Five days later, I get a UPS box filled with seventy-five grand in cash. I’m still not sure what I did to earn it.”

“You were part of a frame job that put Forbes behind bars for murders he did not commit,” Bree said.

“I didn’t commit them either!” Nolan said. “And I didn’t know about Forbes being in jail until ten days ago, when I was told to go see him but say nothing.”

Nolan claimed M had contacted him again back in February and offered him a month of work that would pay two hundred grand. For that he was supposed to stay at the Regal Motel and wait until he was told what to do.

“Still via this Panamanian e-mail account?”

“No,” Nolan said. “He made me switch to this phone application called Wickr.”

That’s when I believed everything Nolan said. I’d already been inclined to believe him when he said M had made contact with him through a Panamanian e-mail account, just like he had with Marty Forbes. But Wickr, the anonymous, disappearing digital-telegram system, was how M had contacted me, goaded me to—

“Stop!” Bree said, startling me from my thoughts.

The feed froze on the screen inside the Homeland Security offices. It showed a young Caucasian woman wearing a peasant dress and a woolen cap over blond dreadlocks. She was standing in front of locker C-2.