Page 7 of The House of Cross

AS I’D PREDICTED, ASsoon as Mahoney learned that Ryan Malcomb was dead, he decided to hold off on a deep dive into the late billionaire and his company.

“I spoke with Director Hamilton earlier,” Ned told me in the car after he picked me up at home. “Franklin’s case is our top priority.”

“Agreed,” I said. “Hard to believe Malcomb’s dead, though.”

“Yeah. What’s a guy in a wheelchair doing up on a mountain road alone in a snowstorm, even if he’s driving a handicap van?”

“ThePostarticle said he was interested in buying property up there,” I said. “The Independence Mountain range is mostly U.S. Forest Service land, but evidently there’s a big landlocked place up there he wanted.”

“All the billionaires are buying up big ranches out west. I read a piece about it in theWall Street Journal. They’re all looking for hard assets.”

“Good to know for when I make a billion. Where are we going, by the way?”

“DC Metro headquarters. I contacted them first thing. They’re pulling together footage of Franklin’s car between the courthouse and her home.”

“How do they know the route?”

“Pearson, the driver, was running Waze on her phone, which was still active and linked by a USB cable to the car’s onboard computer when we arrived on the scene. We know exactly how they went to Alexandria.”

Quinn Davis, a Metro PD sergeant who specialized in video surveillance, met us in the lobby, and took us to a control room where a team of eight people were monitoring cameras all over the nation’s capital.

“We’ve got your car all the way into Alexandria,” Davis said. “No CCTV cameras in the judge’s neighborhood, though.”

“We’ll take what we can get,” Mahoney said.

Davis called up the footage. We watched the Cadillac sedan leave the courthouse parking annex, take a right on C Street, then another right onto Third. South of Pennsylvania Avenue, Third was blocked off for construction, and Pearson started driving side roads, angling west toward Fourteenth Street and the bridge to Northern Virginia.

When the town car was crossing Seventh on Madison Drive, Mahoney said, “Stop. Back it up. There.”

Davis froze the footage on the town car as it sat at the traffic light. You could see Agnes Pearson clearly in the streetlamp glow.

“See the gray Dodge Durango, three cars back?” Mahoneysaid. “It’s been following her three cars back and turn for turn the entire time.”

“Good catch,” Davis said, typing. “Let’s slightly expand the time frame to include our Dodge Durango.”

A few minutes later, she stopped typing, and the footage of the Cadillac town car continued along with the Durango, which stayed three or four cars back on Fourteenth Street, across the bridge, and down the George Washington Memorial Parkway to Alexandria. But when Pearson left the parkway at West Abingdon Drive, the gray Dodge SUV drove on.

“We lose the town car just ahead here,” Davis said, and froze the picture.

I looked at the time stamp on the video and did the math in my head.

“We lost them at six twenty-two p.m.,” I said. “It could not have taken more than three minutes for them to reach Franklin’s house. Can we get cell transmissions around this time? See if there was a call from that Dodge to the killer?”

“Maybe,” Mahoney said. “I’ll try.” His cell phone buzzed with a text. He looked at it, said, “Well, this is good.”

“What’s that?”

“Alexandria police canvassed the neighborhood first thing this morning. They got footage from several doorbell cameras. They’ve got the shooter.”

“That definitely helps,” I said.

“Have them send it here,” Davis said, and gave him her secure email address.

“Meanwhile, can you reverse the footage?” I asked. “See if we can get a good look at the Durango’s license plate?”

While Mahoney contacted the Alexandria police, Davis rolled the footage we had backward. We quickly determined by theblack lettering on a reflective white background that the plate was from Maryland. But the plate lights were dim at best. All we could make out was9-UU.

Before Davis could check the Maryland DMV, the video from the Alexandria police came in. She loaded it and hit Play, and we were suddenly looking out at Judge Franklin’s street from a house on the corner.

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