CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO

McLean, Virginia
Detective Darren Fletcher

Fletcher and Hart watched the crime scene techs print the doorknobs of the Donovan home.

“You think she’s just losing it?” Hart asked. “It’s not that hard to misplace a hat.”

“It’s possible,” Fletcher replied. “Then again, any-thing’s possible. She seemed pretty adamant that she threw the hat out. Trash comes on Tuesday in this neighborhood. According to her statement, she put the trash out Monday night, with the hat in it, so that leaves a good ten hours for someone to go sneaking around.”

Hart hid a yawn behind his palm. Fletcher pretended not to notice, but had to admit he shared the sentiment.

“Eh, there’s nothing we can do here. Let’s go talk to the neighbors, see if any of them saw something.”

Hart’s face lit up. The man was a ball of energy. Sitting and thinking wasn’t his style.

They split the street, Fletcher taking the north side, Hart taking the south. The Donovans’ house was the end house of a cul-de-sac, with eight houses on either side leading up to it. It was a pretty neighborhood. Safe. Sturdy. The houses were two-story, brick on four sides, fenced yards, with gaily-painted shutters and matching front doors.

Suburbia. The perfect place to raise a family, and feel safe doing so.

No wonder Donovan lived here. From what everyone talked about, the man was overly concerned with safety, and this was as safe as he could get without putting bars on the windows or digging a bunker.

Even though Fletcher recognized that Susan Donovan’s intruder story could easily be that of a grieving widow hoping for attention, something felt off about this whole case. He had put a uniform on the Croswell house, just in case, and was waiting for the Army to give him the list of everyone who’d served in Donovan and Croswell’s unit. The wives could only give them so much information—the Ranger battalion had nearly six hundred soldiers in it. It was probably a long shot at best, but Fletcher wasn’t about to take any chances. Two good men were dead already. He didn’t want to have a third killed on his watch.

He had a short list of men who were in the immediate group that Donovan and Croswell hung out with. There were two names both Betty Croswell and Susan Donovan had mentioned—Billy Shakes and Xander Whit-field. But he hadn’t been able to find addresses on either man yet.

Betty Croswell had given him the names of the men her husband was supposed to meet in Denver. Fletcher had talked to them all—and hit another dead end. Croswell had stood them up, and while they were his friends, they’d been furious about it. Fletcher got the sense that most everyone was exasperated with Hal Croswell. Of course, once they found out why he hadn’t shown, they’d grown quiet, teary and apologetic. Death was a pretty good excuse for missing a job interview.

Fletcher felt like he was overlooking something. As he made his way down the tree-lined street, knocking on doors and striking out, that lack of knowledge nagged at him.

It took an hour for him to meet back up with Hart, who’d managed to get a rock in his shoe, and was looking rather pained over it. He leaned against the car and started to unlace.

“Did you have any luck?” Fletcher asked.

“I don’t know if you want to call it luck. Chick in the gray brick house remembers seeing a truck she didn’t recognize over the weekend. But all she could say was that the truck was blue. There’re teenagers on this street, it could be a friend of any of them. A bunch of people aren’t home from work yet. We’ll have to come back and recanvass later tonight.”

“Did you ask if the truck had four wheels?”

“And a bed in the back, too, dickwad.”

Fletcher grinned. “Fuck you. A blue truck. That’s all we got. Let’s go see what the print guys found.”

The crime scene techs were also miffed—they’d finished half an hour before and were champing at the bit to get to their next case. The lead tech—Fletcher couldn’t remember his name—shook his head.

“We scanned what we could, but don’t be expecting much, if anything. The maid came Monday. Wiped everything down. She’s thorough, I’ll give her that. All we got was a couple of partials upstairs in the bathrooms.”

“Great. Anything else?”

“You said the maid told you she didn’t see anything, or anyone, unusual, and that jibes with what we’re seeing here. No alarm bells from us.”

Great. A clean house and a mysterious blue truck. Exactly squat.

“Thanks, guys.”

The team trudged down the driveway and loaded themselves in their van, then drove off.

The neighborhood’s natural noises surrounded Fletcher. Crickets, a child shouting in the distance, birds twittering. He gave the place a last glance, then shrugged.

“Might as well go on back to the Croswell site, recanvass there, see if anyone remembers a blue truck. Maybe stop by and talk to Mrs. Lyons again.”

Hart groaned.

“If you have a better suggestion?”

“No. Who knows, we might actually catch some of the folks who’d gone off to work right about now. Let’s stop at the 7-Eleven. I need a Slurpee.”

“A Slurpee?”

“Pure energy, my friend. I think you need one, too. Cheers what ails ya.”