It was becoming clear that the secondary casualty of the investigation was sleep.
After leaving Chris and Denise, Mars slept for less than four hours when, once again, he’d awakened with a start. And with the certainty that falling back to sleep wasn’t going to happen.
There was just too much going on and too much that needed to be thought through. He wanted to confirm their progress on the target victim identification, look at the plans for the task force meeting that Nettie had worked out with the chief’s office. And he wanted to make another pass over files for anything he might have missed.
The dark quiet of the squad room had served him well the previous night. He headed back downtown.
Mars was almost relieved to find no one in the squad room other than researchers. And they were zombies, hypnotized by the screens they’d been staring at for hours. He talked briefly to the lead researcher who confirmed they were closing in on the last five target descendents. Then Mars scooped up files and headed back to the lounge.
He went first to Hec Macintosh’s file. His gut was telling him there had to be some connection there that would lead them to Hec’s silent partner. But there was nothing that fit. No one who had been involved who fit the profile. Especially no one who had been involved and then dropped out in
advance of the hangings. He went to Nettie’s file on the nineteen Virginians who’d died at Gettysburg. She’d found cause of death for all but two—and none of the seventeen she had identified involved hangings. That fact hit him hard. It was their best chance for figuring out a connection to a suspect, and it wasn’t looking good.
He went back over news clippings on the flag controversy, hoping for a name that had been missed. Marshall Sherman, General Pickett, Phil Stern, John Lee …
Mars stopped at Lee’s name. What? He looked at Phil Stern’s name. Then he heard Phil Stern’s voice saying, ‘Hector Lee Macintosh.’
What? John Lee had been the last member of the Twenty-eighth Virginia to carry the flag before it was captured at Gettysburg—but he’d survived. And the South was full of Lees. The possibility that John Lee of Gettysburg was related to Hector Lee Macintosh was probably less than the possibility that the names were a coincidence.
There was a way of checking. Mars went back to his computer, back to the Virginia Historical Society’s Web site. He worked through the screens he’d used to identify the birthdates of the nineteen Virginians who’d died at Gettysburg. He entered “John Lee” and selected death record. Fulfilling his expectations, endless screens of names scrolled before him.
He stared, then went back and filled in a date field for one year after Gettysburg. What if John Lee had died of wounds following Gettysburg? The screen reported the deaths of eleven John Lees in the year after Gettysburg. There were no Macintosh names associated with any of the eleven.
Mars exhaled deeply. He needed to rethink his approach. There had to be a simpler way of zeroing in on John Lee of Pickett’s Charge. Which gave him an idea. He went to newspaper records and entered five search words: “John,” “Lee,” “Gettysburg,” “Pickett,” and “death.”
A newspaper obituary flashed on the screen. The article included the bearded face of a man identified as John Lee.
The obituary noted that Mr. Lee had fought in the Twenty-eighth Virginia, the Army of Northern Virginia and had survived Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. John Lee had died two years after Gettysburg, but no cause of death had been listed. The only thing the article told Mars that he didn’t know was the name of Lee’s only child. A daughter, named Thalia Marie.
At this point he had two choices. He could go back and search for more information on John Lee’s death or he could track the daughter’s line to see if he could find a Macintosh connection. He went for Thalia Marie.
In moments a list of newspaper headlines appeared. An engagement announcement was the first to catch Mars’s eye. On July 14, 1879, Thalia Marie Lee, daughter of John Lee, deceased, and Marie Lee Harris, was betrothed to George M. Macintosh of Richmond, Virginia.
It was only half a neural synapse from Thalia Marie’s engagement announcement to Mars’s next question.
And minutes later to an answer that rang bells and sent chills up and down Mars’s spine.
The newspaper account of Hec Macintosh’s death told Mars everything he needed to know. Hec had gone up to his cabin west of Green Springs to hunt wild turkeys. He’d gone alone, the article noted, which probably cost him his life. When he didn’t return to Richmond as expected, Ruth Palmer Macintosh called the sheriff’s office near Green Springs. The sheriff and his deputy found the cabin door open, a trail of blood from the door into the woods. Inside the cabin was a blood-covered chair and a table on which gun-cleaning equipment and materials were spread out. And an almost empty bottle of bourbon. On the floor was a rifle, its trigger, trigger grip, and butt covered in blood. Lab testing confirmed the blood was Hec Macintosh’s.
No one thought Hec Macintosh killed himself. He was a man who enjoyed life and believed himself to be superior to any challenge. The scenario everyone accepted was that Hec
had cleaned his rifle while he was drunk and shot himself in the process. Probably shot himself in the face, looking down the barrel. Then had staggered out, screaming, into the woods. Where he’d been picked apart by critters.
The part that interested Mars was that Hector Lee Macintosh’s body had never been recovered. Mars pushed back from the computer with a deep sense of accomplishment. He was remembering Ruth Palmer Macintosh’s face when he’d asked her if Hec had been buried at Hollywood. He was remembering Phil Stern describing Junior at Hec’s funeral. How Junior hadn’t been upset.
For the first time in this investigation, Mars knew who he was looking for.
A half hour after she came in, Nettie found Confederate army pension records that indicated John Lee had hanged himself two years after Gettysburg. Not that Mars needed anything else to convince himself that Hector Lee Macintosh was their phantom suspect. But it was nice and neat, which they hadn’t had a lot of.
He’d half expected the chief and Keegan would view it more as a hallucination than a revelation, but that hadn’t happened. Both of them—maybe especially Keegan—listened quietly to Mars’s reasoning. They had a few questions, but they were prepared to accept that it was probable that Macintosh’s death had been staged and that Macintosh was their suspect. Keegan immediately began contacts with the Bureau to set the Bureau’s fugitive search team in motion. He planned on going back himself immediately after the task force meeting.
Keegan had said, “Macintosh could hole up for a while with a stash of cash and get by, but to conduct an operation like this, he has to have access to funding. I just can’t believe he’s accessing assets in any direct way, or that his widow—if you’ll pardon the expression—is giving him money directly. Ruth Palmer Macintosh driving up to some West Virginia backwater to hand Hec a bag of cash? I don’t think so.”
Nettie said, “That’s where you think he’d be? West Virginia?”
“No place better for him to hide,” Keegan said. “He knows the Appalachians. He was a good woodsman, a good hunter, a world-class fly fisherman by all accounts. He probably set up some kind of base before he staged his death. And I can’t see Hec driving down to Richmond to get money. He was a well-known man about town. Somebody’s helping him. I’d put money on Junior Boosey, but Junior doesn’t explain the money connection—so there’s still somebody else out there who’s working with Hec.”
Looking at the chief, Mars said, “I agree with what Keegan says about Hec staying clear of his wife’s house in Richmond. All the same, I think we need to ask the Richmond police to set up a stakeout around Hec’s wife’s house.”