When the agents were in position outside her car, Sam opened the door to a barrage of questions that were every bit as brutal as she’d expected.

“What took so long to find Carisma?”

“Were you called back from vacation at Camp David?”

“Did your father know that no one bothered to look for Carisma?”

“What else has the MPD ignored?”

“Does the MPD have a racism problem?”

That, right there, was why the chief had ordered them to stop investigating Stahl’s cold cases. Motherfucker.

“Did the president give you a ride back to DC on his helicopter?”

Sam ignored the questions and let Vernon and Jimmy move her through the throng into the morgue door, where Lindsey waited to greet her.

“I knew from the roar coming from outside that it had to be you.”

“You must’ve gotten up early.”

“Four a.m.,” Lindsey said with a yawn and sleepy grin. “I heard you were coming in, and I’m very sorry to see you here when you’re supposed to be on vacation.”

“I’m sorry to be here,” Sam said. “I meant to ask you at the camp why you were coming in on a Sunday?”

“With Byron away for his brother’s wedding, I needed to be back in town, so I came in to do some paperwork that I can’t ever seem to get ahead of. And P.S. the Brown bust is amazing.”

“Even if it’s eleven years too late.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s being said online?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“And the word on the street here?”

“Also not great.”

“Fucking hell.” Sam used her chin to gesture to the morgue. “You got a minute, Doc?”

“For you? Always.”

They went through the sliding glass doors into the antiseptic-smelling morgue, Sam’s least favorite room in the building. “There’s a very good chance I could get fired for this.”

“No way. For one thing, the chief would never fire you, because he loves you. For another, having the first lady working for us is the best PR we’ll ever get. And third, you guys did the right thing pursuing those leads. No one knew it would blow up into something like this.”

“The chief was afraid of this very thing.”

“You know what? Who cares if it’s a media shit storm? Jeannie saved the lives of ten people, nine of them little kids and babies. That’s what matters here. That’s the only thing that matters, and if you say that, over and over, eventually people will hear you.”

“Yes, I suppose you’re right. I’m worried about this blowing back on my dad and his legacy.”

“I know,” Lindsey said with a sigh. “I thought of that, too. Where was the brass when Stahl was ignoring these cases?”