“He put me in touch with the other two men,” Grace said, “and I had the binder in my hands thirty minutes later. It names both of you right away, and the term Rigel shows up soon enough, but there’s no description of what the hell it is. Anyway, I was only a few pages in when I called the guys in D.C. who’d sent that memo around. I told them this was the lead, for sure, and that we needed to find the two of you right away. But we’d barely gotten started on that search when the word came in from Thousand Oaks: the murder scene with your car out front, Danica. That’s when we were sure beyond a doubt—we were on the right track.”

“These people,” Dryden said, “Whiskey’s people … they came after the two of us because the crowdsourcing tipped them off. Right? When the FBI put the word out to other agencies and the military, asking about Rigel, Whiskey got wind of it.”

Grace nodded. “He has deep connections inside the military. It’s how he does business in the first place. So yes, he would have found out we were getting closer. If he was afraid we might eventually find out about you two, it would make sense to grab you first. Like I said before, the fact that he’s worried about you gives me hope—the only hope I have right now.”

“That binder,” Danica said, “wasn’t there anything else in it that could help? Beyond the name Rigel?”

Grace shook his head. “The book is mostly scattered notes your father took down from people he met with, in the years after the accident in 1989. Friends he’d served with at Ashland, who he trusted. He cobbled together what they knew, and somewhere in there he got the name of that weapon system, but whoever he got it from didn’t know anything else about it. In any case, your father seemed to be … obsessed with learning what happened that night, and he seemed to have a real fixation on the military’s own investigation of it.”

“Moss mentioned that,” Dryden said.

“It’s not unheard of,” Grace said. “That sort of victim mind-set. The man almost lost his daughter, and here was the military pretending it never happened, keeping all the answers for themselves. I think it may have been that simple. It just pissed him off, and he couldn’t let it go. He wanted to find out what the hell they knew.”

A long silence played out. Dryden listened to the deep drone of the engines, and the whisper of thin air over the jet’s skin.

Then he looked up at Grace. “Why can’t you guys find out what the military knew? You’re the FBI, and you’ve got the whole government backing you on this thing. You’ve probably got the president weighing in.”