Page 103 of Return of the Spider

Soneji paused at the rear of the minivan for a long moment, studying the house and the mother-in-law’s cottage, then lay down on his back in the snow building on the drive.

He wriggled beneath the vehicle, dragging his tool kit, ignoring the icy slurry that found its way under his collar. When he turned on his headlamp’s red bulb, he could see the underbelly of the minivan well enough to identify the brake linkages.

Soneji opened his tool kit, found the correct sprocket wrench, and set about loosening the linkages until they would dance on a razor’s edge before shearing.

CHAPTER

85

The morning of decemberfifteenth, the nation’s capital was a quintessential mess. Four inches of snow, sleet, and freezing rain had fallen and temperatures had plunged into the twenties with a howling wind behind them.

I almost hit the ground three times on the slick sidewalks between the Metro stop and work; and I called Maria when I got to the office to tell her not to go out at all and to reschedule her appointment with her obstetrician. Sampson did not make it to the office until after nine.

Diehl and Kurtz came in together at a quarter to ten.

“Nice brunch?” I asked.

“Yeah, I wish,” Kurtz said. “Effing Beltway was a hockey rink.”

“DC don’t do ice,” Diehl said, plopping down at her desk. “I don’t do ice.”

Kurtz said, “We made it in slowly, but we heard there were fifteen accidents this morning, including a bad one westbound on the Beltway. Chain-reaction pileup.”

Diehl nodded grimly. “Ten cars. They’re taking out survivors by chopper.”

“Survivors?” Sampson said.

“I was told two dead in the first vehicle to crash. They expect the toll to rise.”

Before we could comment on that sad state of affairs, Helen Mathers, with the Pennsylvania crime lab, called.

“Tommy French wanted me to say happy holidays to you and Detective Sampson and give you both an early gift,” she said. “It wasn’t easy because there was deer blood on the rope, but we got a match to Brenda Miles’s blood type. Diggs’s and Beech’s blood are on the rope too.”

Sampson grinned, sat back with his fingers laced behind his head. “We got them. No matter what, we’ve got those bastards.”

“That’s amazing, Helen,” I said. “Really seals the deal.”

“Oh, there’s more.”

Mathers said that her team had identified human hair in the debris removed from the back of the van. Auburn, probably female.

“Could belong to Bunny Maddox,” I said. “We know she was in the back of that van.”

“Bunny could be buried somewhere on Diggs’s farm,” Sampson said.

“Tommy French is going back with cadaver dogs once the weather clears,” Mathers said. “Oh, and we have a blood type match from the scalp to Alice Ways as well.”

We hung up, and suddenly it did feel a lot like Christmas. Whatever misgivings I might have had about Diggs and Beech’sinvolvement in the Bulldog shootings and the strangling of Brenda Miles were a thing of the past.

For the next hour, we contacted the various detectives who’d helped us on the case, including Deb Angelis in Fairfax County and Kelsey Girard in Goochland County, and told them about the evidence linking both men to the strangling of Brenda Miles, the murder of Alice Ways, and the kidnapping and possible murder of Bunny Maddox.

“You want me to call Calvin, Bunny’s brother?” I asked Detective Girard.

“No, thanks. That’s on me.”

Both detectives told us they were going to recommend that Diggs and Beech be charged and tried for capital murder in Virginia for Brenda Miles’s death before Maryland and the District of Columbia had their chance, which worked for us because we had the pair sitting in the federal detention center in Alexandria awaiting disposition of trial venue.

The temperatures had risen throughout the morning, and the wind calmed. That afternoon, we drove over to the detention center and arranged to meet with Diggs and his new defender, a sharp-faced guy in his forties named Richard Conlon.