Page 11

STILL DAZED, I SAW Mahoney step into the hall, gun drawn.

“FBI, Pearson!” he shouted. “Hands in the air!”

For a moment, the big man looked like he was about to hit me again anyway, but then he raised his hands. “FBI? What’s this all about? Where the hell’s your warrant?”

“We don’t need one,” Mahoney said.

“The hell you don’t. I know my rights.”

My head was clearing. “This is a double-homicide investigation, Mr. Pearson.”

“What?” he said, a little less sure of himself. “Who got killed?”

“You haven’t been watching the news?” Mahoney said.

“Never. Screws up your mind.”

I said, “I’m sorry to say that your wife and her client, Judge Franklin, were murdered last night. Shot down in the judge’s driveway.”

Pearson stood there, blinking, his face twitching. He whispered hoarsely, “Aggie? Dead?”

Mahoney said, “I’m afraid so, sir.”

The man’s bear-paw-like hands began to tremble. The shaking traveled to his shoulders and stomach; his knees buckled and he sank down against the wall and started sobbing.

After a while, in my line of work, you learn to recognize manufactured displays of grief, but if this was an act, it was world-class. The cries came from deep in the big man’s chest, the unmistakable sound of a heart shattering.

“Noooo, Aggie,” he moaned. “Not after everything. Not now.”

I stood up slowly, feeling my cheek already swelling from the punch. I went and got ice from the freezer and put it on my face while Pearson’s crying slowed. He wiped at his nose and face with the sleeve of his shirt.

“Why? Why would anyone want to shoot Agnes?”

“We were hoping you could tell us,” Mahoney said. He took out his cell phone and showed Pearson the video of the gray Dodge Durango following his wife’s Cadillac town car.

Pearson stared at the video. “That’s not me.”

“It’s your SUV,” I said. “We got a partial plate, and this is the only silver or gray Dodge Durango in the state of Maryland that matches it.”

“I don’t care,” he said. “That’s not me. When was this?”

“Last night, as your wife drove Judge Franklin home.”

“What time?”

“There’s a running stamp on the video,” Ned said. “As you drove onto the Fourteenth Street Bridge, it was six thirteen p.m. We lost you at six twenty-two, near the exit to Judge Franklin’s home.”

Pearson’s lower lip trembled as he shook his head. “Honest to God, I was nowhere near Alexandria. I live about six miles from here in a place I rent above my friend’s garage. I was there studying. I’m an EMT and I’m trying to get my nursing degree.”

“Can anyone put you there?”

He shook his head. “My friend’s on vacation.”

“And your Dodge Durango?”

“It was parked in my driveway all night. Look, I didn’t kill my wife. We had an agreement. No killing each other.”

I said, “Run that by me again.”

“Back when we got married, like fourteen years ago, the two of us, we watched a lot of those true-crime shows,” Pearson said, wiping at a tear. “You know, they’re always about husbands and wives killing each other. We’d always say, ‘Why didn’t they just get divorced if they didn’t love each other anymore?’ So we promised that if one of us wanted out, no killing, just ask for a divorce, which is what I did.”

Ned said, “You were getting divorced?”

“Amicably,” he said firmly. “We’d just outgrown each other is all.”

I said, “We’re not going to find records of domestic violence between you two?”

His expression hardened. “Once. Three years ago. I was drunk and on the juice. The incident was enough to get me off steroids and into AA, and I still go. I’ve been sober in every way ever since.”

“If you were separated, why did you come in here?” Mahoney asked.

“We co-own the house,” he said. “I come over when I’m off duty and not in class to work on some upgrades. We were getting ready to sell it, use the money to start new lives for ourselves.”