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Now her closest friend, her mentor, confidante, and one-time lover—was dead.
What did you find, Tommy?
She’d been thinking about their last conversation almost nonstop since she heard his message on her voicemail. He’d told her he was meeting with Peter Grey, the man who killed Adam Hannigan. The man who stole justice from Regan when he shivved Chase’s killer in prison.
Adam Hannigan was the only person who had the answer to her question:Why.
Tommy’s house was on a quiet tree-lined street of older homes on the outskirts of Reston, thirty minutes from where they had worked together at the federal courthouse in Alexandria. He’d bought the house years ago when the market was in the tank and over time had painstakingly renovated it. The sanding and painting and extensive maintenance had been his release from the pressures of their job. A few times over the years Regan had worked for the US Marshals—the first eight as Tommy’s colleague, the last five as his subordinate after his promotion to assistant chief deputy—she’d joined other members of her team to help out when Tommy needed extra hands for a specific improvement, but he’d truly enjoyed the work himself.
A towering oak tree stood in the center of the circular drive. It was in that tree, shielded by thick foliage, that Tommy’s killer had waited for him to leave his house yesterday morning. Seventy feet away, thirty feet high, hiding in a tree, waiting for his target. As soon as Tommy closed the front door and started down the steps, the sniper fired a bullet.
Charlie had told her before she left Arizona that an analysis of the crime scene showed that Tommy had evaded his attacker after being shot in the thigh, that based on the angle of the blood spatter he’d been moving into the bushes when he was first shot.
But the shooter shot him three times more, including once through the head. Took his phone—Tommy had called 911, but at 6:09 a.m. the call had disconnected and GPS could not be traced. Because Tommy was flagged as law enforcement and dispatch couldn’t reach him, they sent out a patrol and found his body ten minutes after the call disconnected.
Why did the killer take his phone?
Regan’s chest hitched. Tommy was a former Marine and a trained marshal. He’d fought back, did everything he could under the circumstances, but the shooter had defeated him. Had Tommy suspected a threat? Was he on alert? Or did he leave the house expecting nothing, until a sliver of an instinct had him diving into the bushes?
The shooter was a trained sniper. Former military? Cop? The FBI—who would most likely be investigating Tommy’s murder—would be asking the same questions.
Regan pulled her rental car behind Tommy’s truck, which was parked in front of the stairs leading to the small porch fronting the brick house. She stared at the oak tree for a long minute before getting out of the car. Charlie had sent her crime scene photos. She knew where the killer had staked out his spot.
She breathed in the spring air. Mild humidity hit her first—maybe because she’d come from the dry, crisp, fresh mountains of northern Arizona she noticed it more. Then came the scents of honeysuckle and pine and fresh-cut grass.
The house was grand—far too big for one person, but for Tommy it had been a therapeutic project as well as his home. She walked up the five steps and stopped at the door. The smell of bleach hit her. Someone had recently, perhaps even this morning, cleaned the remnants of biological matter off the porch and the door.
She looked down. Blood had soaked into the brick. That would be next to impossible to remove. If someone didn’t know what it was, they’d think it was just spilled paint.
But Regan knew. It was Tommy’s blood.
The bushes that Tommy had dived into were cut away so first responders could retrieve his body and collect evidence. She couldn’t see the blood that had soaked into the earth, but some of the leaves were stained dark, and she knew that, too, was Tommy’s blood.
“Tommy,” she murmured, “what got you killed? What did you find out? Who...” The million dollar question.Who did it?
She turned, her back to the door, and stared again at the oak tree. The leaves easily hid the shooter. It had been dawn, so visibility would have been poor. One shot could have killed him; but Tommy had sensed or heard or seen something and tried to escape.
No tire tracks had been found, but faint shoe prints—an average size eleven—led to the street, a point between Tommy and his neighbor to the west. Not clearly visible from Tommy’s house because of the neighbors’ hedges on both sides.
The killer could have parked there; he could have been picked up. Whatever he’d done, he was gone before the first sheriff’s unit rolled up less than ten minutes after the 911 call went through.
Kill a man and disappear in minutes.
The killer retrieved his phone. The killer saw his handiwork, walked right up to Tommy, and stared at his dead body.
Tommy didn’t deserve to die like that, killed in cold blood.
Regan watched as a white Volvo pulled into the circular drive behind her rental. It was Terri Granger, Tommy’s sister, right on time—nine sharp.
She stepped out and approached Regan. She wore slacks, a blouse, little makeup. She was five years older than her brother, which made her more than a decade older than Regan. She didn’t dye her light brown hair, which was now liberally streaked with gray. Her pale blue-gray eyes matched Tommy’s.
Regan walked down the steps to greet her. She didn’t want Terri to see the bloodstains.
“I would have met you at your place,” Regan said after pulling Terri in for a close hug. The two women exchanged half smiles.
“Grace and I were talking to our pastor about Tommy’s memorial service,” said Terri. “She stayed to work through some of the details, I needed to leave. It’s been—well, Tommy has always had a dangerous career. We knew this could happen, but—I wasn’t expecting it.”
“No one ever expects it. Even when you think you do.”
