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sitting there letting these new concerns sink in when my desk phone rang with a muffled chirp.
    “Mike, I don’t know how you jumped the line,” Medical Examiner Dr. Linder said in my ear. “But in my hand, I hold the hot-off-the-press report from our latent lab. Today’s your lucky day, Mike. You have a hit on your mystery man jumper.”
    “Tell me this isn’t a practical joke. What’s his name?”
    “One Stephen Eardley,” she said. “It says here, he’s in the Air Force. His prints actually came from the FBI database off his 2001 Armed Forces application. I’ll email the whole report to you just as soon as I’m done scanning it.”
    “You’re the best. I owe you, Clarissa. Talk to you later,” I said, already bringing up a search engine to find Stephen Eardley.
    As soon as I hit Enter, my jaw fell open. I collapsed back into my office chair in wide-eyed wonder as the search results continued.
    I didn’t think this case could get any stranger, but it had.
    I clicked the first link and read a news article from the Ogden, Utah, Standard-Examiner dated May 20, 2007.
    LOCAL HERO DIES IN IRAQ
    The small town of Liberty in northwestern Ogden Valley is in mourning today as a native son, Air Force pilot Stephen Eardley, was put to rest at the Liberty Cemetery. Eardley, who played football and baseball at Weber High in Pleasant View, was killed in action on Friday, May 3, 2007, when his C-130 aircraft crashed thirty-six minutes after takeoff from Balad Air Base in northern Iraq.
    An on-board flight fire that was speculated to have been caused by an electrical short circuit forced Eardley to attempt a crash landing. The pilot was trying to lose altitude quickly in a maneuver known as a side slip when the plane went out of control, inverted, and crashed in the desert. Eardley, a five-year veteran pilot attached to the elite Air Force Special Operations Command, was thirty-two years old.
    Killed in action! I thought, as I sat there grabbing the sides of my head. How? How the heck could that be?
    How could Eardley be killed in action in a plane crash in the Iraq desert in 2007, and then end up dead again in Midtown Manhattan?

Chapter 12
    Early the next morning, I was sitting in the crowded business section of a southbound Acela Amtrak train, checking my email between sips of an iced Americano as southern New Jersey streaked past the window beside me.
    The high-test coffee was entirely necessary. I’d been up half the night fielding calls as the lid officially blew sheer off the top of my case.
    After several phone calls to three different FBI officials of increasing rank, I’d learned that the newspaper article on Eardley was correct. According to Air Force records, Stephen Eardley was KIA in a military plane crash in Iraq in 2007.
    Which one would think was nuts enough. But it got more complicated.
    Because Eardley had been supposedly killed in a military plane crash in Iraq in ’07 during a classified mission.
    That was why I was heading down to Washington, DC, this rainy gray morning. Since I didn’t have intelligence clearance, I was told the best way to make headway into Eardley’s death was to contact military intelligence personnel in DC—off the record.
    Though a so-called legal Chinese wall separates the intel community from domestic law enforcement, I’d learned that unofficial exceptions are sometimes made for compelling reasons. Especially if there is anonymity and all parties are sufficiently discreet.
    Classified intel and Chinese walls, I thought, putting away my phone to look out the train window at the wet trees and old brick factories blurring past. Deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole, I go .
    Just after ten thirty I got off the train. I found myself smiling despite the rain when I saw the liaison the Bureau had sent to guide me around the Beltway. Waiting in a blue fed car for me, outside the magnificent dripping arches of Union Station, was none other than my good buddy FBI Special Agent