Page 5

THE ALARM ON MY phone went off at eight thirty the next morning. I’d gotten home around two. I forced myself out of bed and into the shower.

I was in the bathroom shaving when Bree came in, carrying coffee and the Washington Post and looking as frustrated as I’d ever seen her.

“I can’t believe it,” she said. “I knew we should have gone to Boston two weeks ago when we had momentum.”

“What’s going on?”

“He’s dead.”

“Who’s dead?”

“Malcomb.”

“C’mon!”

She showed me the headline on the front page of the paper’s business section:

Reclusive Billionaire Dies in Nevada Accident

Beneath it was a picture of Ryan Malcomb, dead at the age of forty-eight. He’d founded Paladin, a data-mining company based in suburban Boston that did contract work for federal security and law enforcement agencies, including the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI.

I flashed on Malcomb, whom I’d met on several occasions, seeing him in his wheelchair explaining how his remarkable proprietary algorithms were able to sort through stupefyingly large amounts of raw data and home in on specific subjects.

“Read it to me,” I said, rinsing my face.

Malcomb, the story said, had been on a sabbatical of sorts for the prior two months and had crashed his van on a remote mountain road during a snowstorm.

A graduate of MIT, Malcomb had been stricken with muscular dystrophy as a teenager, which put him in a wheelchair much of the time. He had been traveling alone around the West in a van adapted for his use, looking for ranch land to buy, and had apparently lost control of the vehicle in the remote Independence Mountains, northwest of Elko, Nevada.

Elko County sheriff’s investigators said Malcomb had skidded on a notoriously bad turn and hit the guardrail; the vehicle flipped into a canyon and caught fire.

“‘The van’s VIN and the handicap plates identified the vehicle as Malcomb’s, and the billionaire’s Massachusetts driver’s license survived the fire in a metal wallet,’” Bree read. “‘The Elko medical examiner will take DNA samples of the remains found and seek dental records to confirm the identity of the billionaire, as the crash victim’s body was burned beyond recognition.’

“‘According to an Elko real estate agent, who asked not to be named because of a nondisclosure agreement with Malcomb, the day before, the entrepreneur had visited a ranch at the top of the same canyon he died in.’”

I shut off the water. “What’s the company saying?”

Bree read, “‘Steven Vance, the CEO of Paladin, said he and the rest of the company’s four hundred employees were in shock. He added that Ryan was their visionary and that without him, there would’ve been no Paladin.’” Bree stopped, turned the page. “Vance also said, ‘This loss is enormous. He is irreplaceable.’”

She tossed the paper onto the counter. “So that’s the end of the story. M is dead. He got away with all of it.”

“We still can’t say Malcomb was M,” I said.

“Of course he was. Who else could have run something like Maestro? Like Sampson always said, it had to be someone who had access to all sorts of law enforcement and national security files. No one had more access than Malcomb.”

John Sampson, my best friend and former partner when I worked full-time at DC Metro, had taken his young daughter, Willow, to Disney World for the week. And it was true that John had been the first to suggest that Maestro must have access to top secret files. That had led to our early suspicions about the vigilante group, which was headed by a mysterious character who called himself M.

At times, M had helped us, sending us leads on various investigations. At other times, he had hindered and taunted us. And he had tried to have me and Sampson killed when we were on a wilderness rafting trip in Montana.

In the wake of that trip, Bree, who used to be DC Metro’s chief of detectives, had become obsessed with finding M and taking down Maestro.

“There’s more evidence right in that article that Malcomb was M,” she said. “He started his sabbatical two months ago, which was about the time I began suspecting him.”

That was also true. Prior to that rafting trip, M and Maestro had been involved in the killing of U.S. drug agents and the leaders of a Mexican drug cartel that had corrupted them. More recently Maestro had been behind the murders of several pedophiles and a famous fashion designer who had been involved in human trafficking. Evidence we’d gathered during those investigations had led Bree to the conclusion that M was Ryan Malcomb.

“The FBI still has to look into him,” Bree said. “We need to know for certain that he was M. Or I do, anyway.”

“Good luck,” I said, heading to the closet. “I don’t think Ned’s going to get a whole lot of traction with that idea now that Malcomb is dead and a federal judge has been murdered in a professional hit. I mean, with the inauguration coming up, this murder puts us all in the hot seat.”