Page 113 of Dead Fall

“Where are you?”

“At my desk.”

“Don’t move,” ordered Carolan. “I’ll be right there.”

Exiting his office, the FBI man walked down the hall to Fields’s. When he got there, she already had a coffee waiting for him.

“Thank you,” he said, removing the lid and taking a sip as he sat down. “Walk me through it. All of it.”

“Okay, well, we know that Greg Wilson hadn’t intended to go to Boston. He had purchased a round-trip ticket to Maine, which he then changed at the last minute. Based on when he arrived in Boston and when he departed for the final leg of his journey back to D.C., he had only gone to Boston for one reason.”

“The lunch.”

“Exactly,” answered Fields. “It got me wondering if his lunch buddy maybe flew in as well. I passed the photos we received to a friend of mine in the National Joint Terrorism Task Force, and he asked his contact at TSA to run it through their facial recognition system. They got a hit. After wrapping lunch, he also hopped a flight.”

“To D.C.?”

“No, but close. He flew to Baltimore.”

“How long had he been in Boston?” asked Carolan.

“Only a few hours. He’d flown out that morning.”

“These guys could have just met in D.C. or Maryland.”

Fields nodded. “Seems odd, right? He didn’t change his plans until we reached out to his office and requested an interview. I couldn’t help but wonder if the lunch might have had something to do with Burman’s death. Maybe he was worried we’d be waiting for him at the airport when he got back.”

“Possible. How’d you get the name?”

“The TSA guy gave my guy the manifests for the Baltimore-to-Boston and Boston-to-Baltimore flights. Only one passenger appears on both flights—Joseph Nistal. Out of an abundance of caution, I asked a contact at the Maryland State Police to run Nistal and see if they had a file on him.”

“Did they?”

“Nope. The guy is clean. I did, however, get a copy of his driver’s license,” she stated, pulling it up on her monitor and showing it to him.

“What else do we know about him? Any social media presence, dating apps?”

“Zero. The guy is nowhere to be found on the open internet.”

“How about on the not-so-open internet?”

Fields smiled. “When I visited some of the data broker sites we subscribe to, a bigger picture started to emerge. Mr. Nistal does own a house in Frederick, Maryland, which matches the address on his driver’s license, but several months ago he used the address of a Frederick self-storage unit on a rental application.”

“And the rental was for a unit in Burman’s swanky building?”

“Correct. Which got me to thinking. What if the reason we couldn’t capture our killer on video was because he’d never left the building? What if he’d been in there the whole time?”

“Jesus,” Carolan exclaimed.

“And taking out the backdoor camera? How smart would that have been? It’s the ultimate red herring. Precisely what a hit man or a wet-work team would do, right?”

“This is excellent work, but we’re going to need more than just a rental application to nail this guy.”

“I’m not done yet,” said Fields.

Carolan took another sip of coffee and let her continue.

“In addition to confirming Nistal’s house in Maryland, I was also able to pull information about his car—a late-model, white Nissan Sentra. The color made me think about Burman’s sneakers and how you pointed out how the toes were scuffed. If he was dragged across the terrace and tossed over the side, the marks suggested a two-person job. So I went back to the CCTV footage from the building looking for Nistal and anyone I might be able to connect him to.”

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