Iron Orchid

THIRTY-THREE

LANCE CABOT AND KERRY SMITH were in a meeting in the twelfth-floor conference room when a call came in. Lance picked up the phone. “Yes?”

“Director Robert Kinney for you or Agent Smith,” the operator said.

Lance pressed the speaker button. “Director, this is Lance Cabot; I’m here with Agent Smith.”

“Afternoon,” Kerry said. “Something has come up. Kerry, you remember the hangar at Manassas Airport where Teddy Fay had his workshop.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes, sir,” Kerry replied.

“This morning we had a call from the airport manager down there. Apparently, Fay had a second hangar, where he kept the Cessna he blew up, and the manager found it on a routine check this morning. There’s a lot of stuff in the hangar, but the man says he didn’t touch anything. I’d like you-and Lance, if he likes-to take a couple of people, fly down there and process the scene, see what you can come up with.”

“All right,” Kerry said. “I’m on my way. Will you send a tech team from there to meet us? I suppose it will be about… three hours, before I can get there.”

“Director,” Lance said, “if it’s all right, I’m going to let Kerry handle this; I have a lot on my plate here.”

“Yeah, I heard about the Said thing,” Kinney said. “Send whomever you like.”

“Thank you, sir.” Lance punched off the call. “Kerry, why don’t you take Holly and Ty with you?”

“Okay. Do we have a chopper yet?”

“Not our own; we have a service that operates out of the East Side Heliport. I’ll have someone call and book one.”

HOLLY LOOKED OUT the window of the helicopter and saw Manassas Airport as they approached. It was a quiet little field nestled in the Virginia countryside. “Teddy had a workshop here?” she asked Kerry.

“Yeah. He also kept an RV and a souped-up Mercedes sedan there, too. He crashed the Mercedes, running from the scene after he killed the speaker of the house and abandoned the car in a parking lot nearby. We don’t know what happened to the RV, and we didn’t know he had a second hangar. Apparently, he kept his airplane there. I should have ordered a search of all the hangars on the field.”

The chopper settled onto a taxiway on the side of the field opposite Dulles Aviation, the FBO that serviced local and visiting aircraft. Two rows of hangars took up most of the space there. A man in a warm coat met them and introduced himself as the airport manager.

“Your other people are waiting in a big van over by the hangar,” he said. “Come on, I’ll walk you over there.”

At the hangar, Kerry met the head of the tech team. “Are we worried about booby traps?” the man asked.

“I don’t think so,” Kerry said. “The manager has already been in there today, and he’s still with us. You take your people in first and establish a perimeter around whatever evidence is there, so we can get out of this cold.”

The man nodded and signaled for his three assistants to follow him. He opened the door of the hangar and looked around, then turned back to Kerry. “You can come in,” he said; “everything is down at the other end.”

Holly followed Kerry into the hangar, which was brightly lit. She stood just inside the door and waited for the head of the tech team to do a quick survey of the items in the hangar. He came back after a few minutes.

“Okay, we’ve got tire tracks of an airplane, Michelin tires, tricycle gear. That’s consistent with the Cessna 182 RG Fay was flying, until he blew it up. We’ve also got a set of Goodyear Wrangler tracks. That’s a truck tire often used on SUVs and RVs, and the width of the vehicle is consistent with an RV or a rental truck. When we have precise measurements, we should know which. There are also a lot of miscellaneous tools and scraps of materials.”

“Check everything for prints,” Kerry said. “To this day, we don’t have Fay’s prints, not even from his house in Maine.”

“How does somebody not leave prints in his own house?” Holly asked.

“We think he cleaned up the place before he left the last time. He had only been back for a few minutes when we went in. His house in the Virginia suburbs was also clean of prints, the first time I’d ever seen a house with no prints at all.”

“Yeah, I was the tech team leader on that one,” the tech guy said, “and I’d never seen that either. This guy is really something. By the way, I won’t put this in writing, but it’s my guess that the truck or RV was driven out of here some time after the airplane left.”

“Any idea how recently?”

“Days, is my guess. Why don’t you folks get a cup of coffee or something and come back in, say, two hours?”

Kerry nodded and led them out of the building. The airport manager drove them to the terminal, and they got sandwiches from the machines in the pilots’ lounge.

TWO HOURS LATER, they were back in the hangar. “Tell me about it,” Kerry said.

The tech team leader laughed. “Teddy’s done it again: not a print anywhere, and believe me, we’ve looked everywhere. The guy is a neat freak, paranoid to a turn.”

“Is there anything at all interesting here?” Kerry asked.

“We’ve determined that the vehicle was an RV, consistent in size with one manufactured by Winnebago. If you find it, we can match it to the tracks in here. One other thing, we found this.” He held up a small plastic bag with an object inside.

“Looks like a computer chip,” Kerry said.

“It is; automotive. It’s from the central computer of an SUV, a stock-standard chip, no alterations. Can you associate that with anything?”

Kerry thought for a minute. “Yes,” he said. “The Supreme Court justice killed in the automobile accident.”

“Right. The chip we recovered from that vehicle had been altered to reverse the commands sent from the onboard computer to operate the automatic stability control. If the car went into a skid, for instance, the ASC would cause one or more wheels to brake in order to correct the skid. The replacement chip did the opposite, causing it to skid even more. Fucking ingenious.”

“Well, anyway,” Kerry said, “it lets us tie Teddy to the death of Mr. Justice What’s-his-name.”

“It would, if we had found any material evidence that Teddy had ever been in this hangar,” the tech guy said. “Without prints or other evidence, we can’t prove he was here.”

“Better circumstantial evidence than no evidence at all,” Kerry said.

“if you say so,” the tech guy replied. “But this Teddy is really something, you know?”

“I know,” Kerry replied.

Holly knew, too.