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We made a short stop at the Bridge to Nowhere. Nelly, Boog’s mother, was now worried sick about her son and Anna’s kids—and she was also anxious because she needed to return to Chicago to start her new job. We talked to Sean Brundage, who said he had not seen any of them but was looking for Colin O’Hare himself.
“You find him, you call us,” Sampson said. “We would much appreciate it.”
“By the way, you look good, Sean,” I said as we prepared to leave the high troll.
“Miracle what cutting your booze intake in half will do,” the former police detective said.
After visiting two other encampments, we headed to the ravine behind the Avid Eyeball strip club. We showed the people there O’Hare’s military ID photo, which we’d gotten from the FBI, and pictures of Boog, Emma, and Luke from their school IDs.
No one in the ravine recognized any of them. Or at least admitted to recognizing them.
It was almost four when we climbed out and went over to the Avid Eyeball. Sampson noticed that a few of the sad guys who’d been in the parking lot waiting when he’d come by the first time were there again.
A woman—Sampson told me her name was Milly White—came to the door of the Avid Eyeball the second she saw us approach.
“Hi, Detective,” she said to Sampson, then leaned around him and yelled at the guys getting out of their cars, “Not yet, you horndogs!”
We went into the air-conditioned lobby. Sampson showed her O’Hare’s photo. “You know him?”
She studied it. “Yeah. Scruffier now. He’s a big guy and can get belligerent. We have to limit his booze intake.”
It was a momentarily exciting lead. But when we checked out the interior and exterior camera feeds from the night Corey McGovern was murdered, there was no sign of the former Special Forces operator. We thanked White and crossed the parking lot to the tool-rental place.
Mimi Wallace said she didn’t recognize O’Hare, but she did allow us to watch more footage from around the time of McGovern’s death. Once again, we saw the girl exit the Uber, cross the expanse of the Avid Eyeball’s parking lot, and head for the front door. We watched the comings and goings of men from the strip club for the next hour, all of whom we’d already seen coming and going in the Avid Eyeball’s own footage.
The last two guys, both wearing football jerseys, came out around two a.m. They climbed into a Prius and drove away, leaving the lot empty.
“Rewind, Mimi,” Sampson said. “I didn’t catch this before. But as the good ol’ boys climb in the Prius, I think someone’s moving back along the edge of the ravine.”
Wallace reversed the footage, and the Prius moved backward until John said, “Stop.”
She froze the image and the three of us squinted at the screen. Sampson was right—there was indeed a blurry outline of someone very large in the shadows above the ravine.
“Can you reverse it in slow motion?” Sampson asked. Wallace did, and we watched until the figure stepped into an area illuminated by the rental shop’s security lights. “There! Freeze!” He looked at Wallace’s keyboard. “May I?”
She nodded. Sampson reached over and typed a command to magnify the image.
“That’s O’Hare,” we both said.
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WE PUT OUT AN APB on Colin O’Hare, then went to the federal detention center in Alexandria, Virginia, to talk to Alejandro Rodriguez.
At first the former Special Forces operator refused to see us, but when we let him know that we wanted to talk about Bing Bang, Hawk reluctantly came out.
He gazed at us evenly through the bulletproof glass. “What’s Colin done now?” he asked, phone to his ear. “And what’s in it for me if I talk to you?”
“What’s in it for you depends on what you tell us,” I said. “But honestly, I don’t know how much we can do for you, given that you blew up a plane. Even if you were high on mushrooms at the time.”
He pondered that, then said, “You still haven’t said anything about Colin.”
“We think he’s the Firebug, Hawk. We think he, not you, killed Corey McGovern. As well as the guy in the Audi and others.”
Hawk raised an eyebrow. “Well, there you go. Bing Bang was known for pushing the envelope in Afghanistan. Sadistic asshole at times, I heard. Liked his knife. And, come to think of it, O’Hare was always negative about Corey’s… you know, extracurricular activities.”
“Why didn’t you tell us any of this before?” Sampson demanded. “Like when she showed up dead.”
“I had no idea O’Hare was still around, man,” Rodriguez said. “Hadn’t seen him in a while. Some people were saying that he was the guy who got shot and burned near that abandoned building in Northeast.”
