Private Delhi (Private 13)

The ME, a plump, brassy, extremely competent redhead named Nancy Ann Barton, knelt by the driver’s side of the Maserati and peered in with a Maglite.

“What do you think, Nancy?” I asked.

Barton looked up and saw me, then stood and said, “Hi to you too, Alex.”

“Hi, Nancy,” I said. “Anything?”

“No ‘Good morning’? No ‘Top of the day to you’?”

I cracked a smile, said, “Top of the morning, Doc.”

“That’s better,” Barton said and laughed. “Sorry, Alex, I’m on an old-school kick. Trying to bring congeniality back to humankind, or at least the humankind around me.”

“How’s that working for you, Nancy?” Sampson asked.

“Pretty well, actually,” she said.

“This an accident?” I asked.

“Maybe,” she said, and she squatted down again.

I knelt next to Barton, and she shone the light into the Maserati, showing me the driver. He was upside down, hanging from a harness, wearing a charred Bell helmet with a partially melted visor, a neck brace, and a Nomex fire suit, the kind Grand Prix drivers used, right down to the gloves and booties.

“The suit worked,” Barton said. “No burn-through that I can see. And the air bag gave him a lot of protection. So did the internal roll bar.”

“Aaron Peters,” Sampson said, looking at his smartphone. “Former Senate staffer, big-time oil lobbyist. No wonder he could afford a Maserati.”

Standing up to dig out my own flashlight, I said, “Enemies?”

“I would think by definition a big-time oil lobby

ist would have enemies.”

“Probably so,” I said, squatting back down. I flipped my light on and probed around the interior. My beam came to rest on a black metal box mounted on the dashboard.

“What is it?” the ME asked.

“If I’m right, that’s a camera inside that box, probably a GoPro. I think he may have been filming his run.”

“Would something like that survive a fire?” Sampson asked.

“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” I said, then I trained the beam on the driver’s blackened helmet. I noticed depressions in the upper part of it that didn’t look right.

“You’ve photographed it?” I asked.

Barton nodded. I reached up and released the buckle of the chinstrap. Gently but firmly, I tugged on the helmet, revealing Aaron Peters. His Nomex balaclava looked untouched by the fire, but it was blood-soaked from two through-and-through bullet wounds to Peters’s head.

“Not an accident,” I said.

“Impossible,” Barton agreed.

My phone rang. I was going to ignore it but then saw it was chief of police Bryan Michaels.

“Chief,” I said.

“Where are you?”

“Rock Creek,” I said. “Murder of an oil lobbyist in his car.”