2. If you were attempting to engineer a death by making a car burst into flames, you would probably not know a heck of a lot about how hard it is to rig a car to explode like this, absent propellants and ordnance. (There were none detected at the scene.) If you wanted to make a homicide look like a suicide, you wouldn’t rig a car to explode on impact precisely because it is out of the norm and doesn’t often happen. It draws attention. To put it simply, it is not how anyone with the capability to kill someone would go about doing it. It happens in Murder She Wrote, it happens in the movies — but not in real life. There are, sadly, many easy ways to kill someone and make it look like a suicide. A car crash would be the MOST suspicious.

3. Explosives: Are there explosives that are hard to detect after an explosion? Yes. Can a bomb-maker be sure that explosives won’t be detected? Absolutely not. And there would be many other signs of an explosion unless somehow a car was rigged to explode but then not look like it was rigged to explode.

4. It is of course relevant to note Hastings’ fears about the FBI before his death. Maybe the FBI was investigating leaks based on a story he had written. Maybe it was investigating him for something else. We will surely know soon; there are a lot of reporters on the case. In any event, the FBI does not chase after cars driven by people whose identity and eventual destination is known. The bureau uses cell phone geolocation data to track people.