“Sorry,” I said. “And sorry I’m so late. I don’t suppose Agent Siegel’s still around?” I wasn’t keen to end my day with him, but in the name of collaboration, here I was.

“He got tired of waiting,” she said. “We’re supposed to meet him in the SIOC conference room.”

She called his extension and left a message that we were on our way, but when we got there — surprise, surprise — no Siegel. We waited a few more minutes and then started our meeting without him. Fine with me.

Chapter 51

PATEL QUICKLY BROUGHT me up to speed on the True Press e-mails. Actually, there wasn’t that much to tell, at least not at this point in her investigation.

“Based on the header, the IP address, and what I got from the registry over at Georgetown, Jayson Wexler’s account was open and active at the time both messages were sent,” she told me.

“Which is not to say that Wexler sent them himself,” I said.

“Not at all. Just that they either originated from or somehow passed through his account.”

“Passed through?”

“It’s possible someone used an anonymous remailer from a remote location, but really they’d have no reason to. A stolen laptop that never turns up is a perfect dead end, forensically speaking. You’re better off looking for any witnesses to the theft itself.”

“We canvassed up, down, and sideways where Wexler claims the computer was taken,” I told her. “Didn’t get anywhere. And the closest surveillance cameras are DDOT’s, over on K Street. There’s nothing from the park at all. No one saw a thing — which is a little odd.”

Patel sat back, twiddling a pen between her fingers. “So should I keep going? Because there’s more bad news.”

I ran my hand over my mouth and jaw, an old tic of mine. “You’re just full of sunshine today, aren’t you?”

“Technically, this is Siegel’s piece, so you can’t hold it against me,” she said. I liked working with Patel. She seemed to keep her sense of humor no matter what, and the humor was dark and deep.

“Go ahead,” I said. “I can take whatever you’re dishing out here.”

“It’s about this ‘Patriot’ moniker they used in one of the e-mails. Ever since True Press ran the story, the name seems to have stuck, in a really scary way. We’ve got people at both ends of the spectrum foaming at the mouth, from the radical antiglobalization types all the way over to the hard-right survivalists. The Bureau’s already working up contingencies around the possibility of tribute killings.”

She ran a simple open-source search on her laptop. Less than a minute later, I was looking through pages of results — websites, blogs, vlogs, chat rooms, mainstream commentary, fringe press — all of it giving credence to the supposed “patriotism” behind these sniper murders.