by Steven James
“Who made the ID?”
Ralph indicated toward Mollie’s purse. “The keeper found her driver’s license, called it in. They got the congressman over here right away. He IDed her. Yeah, I know it’s unusual to do it on-site,” he went on, “but there was concern this might be a politically motivated crime, that his life might be in danger, so the Capitol police brought him in. Took him to a secure location when he was done.”
With the extent of her disfiguring injuries, I wondered how he’d identified her. A birthmark maybe. A tattoo.
He’s her father, Pat. A dad knows his daughter. Even in death.
I scrutinized the blood-spattered straw surrounding Mollie’s body. A frenzy of violence. “Other family members?”
“She’s an only child. Her mom is in Australia for a relative’s wedding.” The CSIU officers eyed me quietly. I had the sense they were not happy I was on their turf.
I stood up, appraised the area, taking it in. “Anything else like this? Any similar crimes that we know of? Links to other homicides?”
“We checked ViCAP,” Ralph said. “People have been fed to Dobermans, pigs, gators—but never primates. At least not that we know of.”
I could look into that more in-depth later.
The crime scene technicians would be scouring the room for physical evidence. I wasn’t here for that. My job was to notice the pieces of the puzzle other people miss.
I mentally ran down what I knew.
The Metro stop.
The rain.
The congressman’s high profile position as house minority leader.
Timing. Location. Patterns. Routes.
Lien-hua was studying the position of the chimps’ bodies. Ralph knelt beside Mollie, inspecting her injuries. The three CSIU officers were still watching me.
“Time of death?” I asked them.
“Not long ago,” one of them replied. He was slim with blue eyes, blond hair, and had a nervous habit of rubbing his left thumb and forefinger together. The cloth name tag sewn onto his uniform read Officer Roger Tielman. “Body temp and lividity suggest one to three hours ago. Probably sometime around 6:00. Maybe closer to 7:00.”
Not specific enough to help me narrow things down.
“Last call on her cell phone?” I asked. “Any texts?”
“We already followed up on the last ten calls—all from preprogrammed numbers. Eight female, two male.”
“Any from an R.M.?”
A quizzical look.
“Were any of the calls from someone with the initials R.M.?”
He sent one of the officers beside him to find out.
“She’s got hundreds of text messages from the last month,” Ralph added. “The ERT guys are tackling that.” The Evidence Response Team, or ERT, is the FBI’s forensics unit.
I pulled out my cell. Tapped in a few numbers on the flat screen’s touchpad.
“What about the facility’s security cameras?” I asked Tielman. “Anything?”
“Yeah. We checked.” He sounded almost insulted by the question. “The footage from 5:00 to 7:00 was deleted.”
On my phone I surfed to the Federal Digital Database and logged into the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s site. They might not record detailed data from every city in the US, but I was counting on the fact that they would track meteorological changes here in our country’s capital. I punched in my federal ID number then looked through the glass to one of the cameras above the central walkway. “Were the cameras on when you arrived?”
“Yeah.”
“And are they directed in the same position now as they were before the footage was lost?”
He looked a little confused. “The same position?”
I was getting frustrated by Tielman’s repeated need for clarification. “The cameras are all stationary; non-panning. I want to know if someone has reviewed the footage prior to 5:00 and confirmed that the angles at which the cameras are currently positioned are the same as they were before the footage was deleted.”
He let his eyes wander from me to his partner, a slim Hispanic woman, then back to me. “I would imagine they are.”
“Don’t imagine,” I said. “Find out.”
“Why would that matter?”
“Everything matters.”
“Go,” Ralph said, ending the discussion.
Tielman spoke to his partner, sent her to find out about the camera angles. He stayed behind as she passed out the door.
The NOAA precipitation data appeared on my screen in a series of condensed scrolling columns of numbers, organized by longitude and latitude coordinates.
A few more taps at my screen and I’d pulled up the defense satellite’s imagery of the city.
I went to a corner of the habitat, pushed a little straw aside to make room for my phone, laid it on the concrete, and opened the hologram program.
A moment later, the phone was projecting a 3-D hologram of downtown DC. It hovered a meter off the ground, half a meter in width and length.
Glimmering buildings, shimmering roads.
With this phone I had the capability to rotate the hologram, zoom in and out, and overlay data to highlight specific locations and travel routes. Although I wasn’t sure my idea would work, I transferred the precipitation stats and coordinates onto the city, overlaying them against the hologram’s 3-D imagery, just as I do with the travel routes of victims when I’m doing a geoprofile.
The precip levels were marked in layered, darkening shades of blue corresponding to the precipitation level recorded by NOAA’s satellites. Although it was difficult to discern the subtle changes in color, when I studied it closely I could just barely make out the differences. I began reviewing the levels at fifteen minute intervals starting at 4:00, when Mollie was last seen.
“It’s not a spectator sport,” Ralph growled. His words caught my attention, and when I glanced up, I saw that everyone in the habitat, except for Ralph and Lien-hua, was staring at the hologram.
“Get back to work.” When Ralph speaks, people obey. Within moments they’d all turned away from me.
Lien-hua leaned down, brushed at a small pile of blood-spattered straw.
I continued to scroll through the time markers until I came to 7:00 and saw what I was looking for.
“I need to see the parking garage,” I said.
“What is it?” Ralph asked.
I closed the program, the hologram disappeared. I pocketed the phone. “Shift change and the Metro station. It fits.” I started for the exit, but before I could leave, I met two members of the Bureau’s ERT crawling through the door.
First, Agent Tanner Cassidy, an old friend of mine, emerged. Medium build, brown hair. Soft spoken, meticulous, and dedicated. He introduced me to the attractive agent who, only a moment later, stood beside him. “This is Natasha Farraday. Transferred in from St. Louis.”
I introduced myself. “Pat Bowers.”
She shook my hand by squeezing my fingers lightly rather than by gripping my palm. “Good to meet you.” With a disarming smile and wide, shy eyes, she made me think of a twenty-five-year-old Christina Ricci.
“You too.”
“Agent Cassidy,” Lien-hua called, her voice grim. “Over here.”
“I’ve read your books, Dr. Bowers,” Natasha said to me.
I was studying the deep concern on Lien-hua’s face. “Okay.”
Cassidy and Tielman joined her. Knelt beside her. Cassidy called for a photographer and an evidence bag. “We’ve got Mollie’s eye here.”
A sweep of nausea.
“Excuse me,” I said to Natasha, indicating toward the door, but then realized I could probably use her help. “Wait. Can you join me in the parking garage?”
“Of course.”
I asked Ralph if he could come along, and he followed me, barely squeezing his massive shoulders through the doorway.
“Good thing it’s built for gorillas,” I said.
“Watch it.”
W
e took the stairs to the garage. If I was right, the killer’s car would still be here.
11
I was scanning the vehicles.
“Mollie’s car isn’t here,” Ralph said, somewhat impatiently. “We already checked.”
“I’m not looking for her car.” I’d expected only a handful of cars, but there were more than thirty here. “There was just a skeleton crew on hand here tonight; why all the vehicles?”
“I already went through this with the security guard.” He sounded annoyed; maybe at me, maybe at the conversation he’d had with the guard. “Since the facility provides free parking for its employees, lots of the staff leave their cars here and take the Metro around the city. Beats having to pay for a spot near their apartments.”
City life. Perks.
So these are only cars from employees . . . Good. That narrows it down.
Natasha stood beside me, waiting for instructions.
Ralph said, “Whose vehicle are you looking for?”
“The video would have caught the car leaving the parking garage. I was assuming that the killer was aware of that.”
“I thought you didn’t assume?”
A van would have been ideal for transporting an abducted woman. And, while I didn’t see any vans, I did see six minivans, but right away I could tell they hadn’t been used to transport Mollie. “Let’s call it an initial hypothesis.”
I let my eyes pass through the garage . . . eliminating possibilities . . . eliminating . . . “Look for cars that have trunks that are—”
Then I saw it.
“There.” I started jogging toward it, a sky blue ’09 Volvo sedan.
“How do you know?” Natasha called. I heard her and Ralph hurrying after me.
“Water.” I pointed. “Under the wheel wells.”
I arrived, used my MagLite to scan the wet concrete beneath the car, continued my explanation, “It started raining in DC at 5:06 p.m. and hasn’t stopped. Mollie is wearing cotton clothes that would absorb water, but they’re dry, so the killer had to have unloaded her inside here. Only three cars out of the thirty-two have water beneath them—two have monthly access stickers on them—one would be the security guard’s, the other the keeper’s. This one doesn’t have a sticker. It doesn’t belong.”
I still had on the latex gloves. I tried the doors. Locked.
Then the trunk.
Locked.
“Couldn’t it be someone else’s car?” Natasha asked.
Maybe . . .
I pointed at the car’s blue carpeting. “She had blue fibers caught on a broken fingernail.”
I pulled out my lock-pick set and peered into the car windows but couldn’t see anything unusual.
Beside me, Ralph had his phone out, already running the Virginia plates: 134-UU7.
“Why would the killer leave the vehicle here?” Natasha asked.
It was a good question, the obvious question.
Maybe to avoid being caught on camera . . . ?
But even if he didn’t drive out, the cameras would have caught him walking out. Besides, the footage was deleted . . .
“I have no idea.” I started working on the lock to the trunk, then I caught sight of movement and saw Lieutenant Doehring approaching with a stocky, mustached officer I didn’t know swaggering beside him.
Ralph slipped his phone into the case on his belt. “Car’s registered to Rusty Mahan.”
“R.M.,” I said.
“Mahan?” It was Doehring. “I just got off the horn with Congressman Fischer. A guy named Rusty Mahan is Mollie’s boyfriend. Twenty years old. Lives on campus at Georgetown.”
“Was her boyfriend,” the other officer responded. “Until yesterday. Big fight at her daddy’s mansion. Fischer said the Mahan kid took it hard.”
I was working on the trunk’s lock. “We need to find him.”
“Campus security’s already on it,” Doehring replied. “But you’ll love this: he’s a grad student in evolutionary biology. Worked here as an intern last semester.”
“So he could have gotten access to the building,” the burly officer said. I glanced at his badge: Lee Anderson. He continued, “The car places him at the scene, and if he just broke up with the vic, we’ve got motive.” He sounded like he’d just solved the case.
“Well, then.” I was still working on the lock. “As long as we’ve got that settled.”
“Don’t get him started,” Doehring said to Anderson.
“On what?”
“Motive,” he answered. “And don’t say vics, doers, perps. You’ll regret it.”
Definitely not the time to have this conversation.
“We’re looking for clues,” I said. “Motive isn’t a clue. At best it’s circumstantial evidence, and even that’s debatable.”
“What do you mean, motive isn’t a clue?” Anderson asked skeptically.
“Here we go,” Ralph grumbled.
The lock was giving me trouble, and that annoyed me.
I was not in the mood for this. “There’s no way to prove a person had any specific motive at any specific time, and there’s no reason to even try—our justice system doesn’t require showing motive to get a conviction for any crime on the books. Jurors like it, but it’s misleading because trying to figure out motive is a guessing game you can never be sure you’ve won. Investigators should deal with facts, not conjecture.”
There.
The lock clicked.
I popped open the trunk.
All three men and Natasha leaned close to peer inside.
Blue carpeting.
And a series of black smeared dints on the metal body on the passenger side. “She was conscious when they transported her.” I didn’t realize I’d said the words aloud until I saw Natasha looking at me curiously. I pointed to the marks. “Same color as the soles of her shoes. She kicked. Hard.”
“She was in here awhile.” Doehring was staring at them. “Struggled a lot.”
Timing, location.
Timing.
I pulled out my cell and speed-dialed Lien-hua. “Any word on the security cameras?”
“Same angles, Pat,” she said. “Whoever deleted the footage didn’t redirect them. Why did you want that checked anyway?”
“The killer deleted footage—so he obviously knew the system—but then he would have had to leave the building after doing so, and the cameras would have been on when he left. I wanted to see if he redirected the angle of one of them so he could exit undetected. If he had, it would have told us which door he used to leave the scene, or if he used the parking garage.”
A moment of reflection passed as she processed what I’d said. “Good call. Another thing: someone using a cell phone captured footage of an electronics store that’s been airing a live feed from the security cameras here inside the research facility. They sent the clip to CNS News. We’re all over the airwaves.”
Oh, bad.
She told me the name and location of the store.
“We need to cross-reference a list of store employees with people who might work at the research facility. Also check credit card receipts, find the most recent, most frequent customers.”
These weren’t Lien-hua’s duties, she knew that, I knew that, but she understood the way I work and she would make sure they got done. There’d never been any professional jealousy between us. No rivalry. We complemented each other.
Or at least we used to.
I leaned away from the phone. “Doehring, see if Mahan had any connections with Williamson’s Electronics Store over on Connecticut.”
Doehring nodded, went for his walkie-talkie.
I returned to my phone conversation with Lien-hua. “Come down here as soon as you can. We need to talk.”
After hanging up I noticed that Natasha had called for two additional ERT agents and the three of them had started processing the car. When Doehring ended his transmission, Ralph began to bring him up to speed on what we knew so far, and I stepped to the entra
nce of the parking garage and stared into the night to sort through my thoughts and wait for Lien-hua.
If Mahan was the killer, why go to all the trouble of bringing her in here? Why leave your car at the scene? Why leave her purse and its contents in the habitat . . .
Rain spattered on the roof. A thin, constant drumbeat of water.
The nearby Nationals Park rose like a great black beast blotting out the skyline.
At the end of the block, traffic lights moved through their slow, methodical three-step dance from green to yellow to red.
Slashing rain. Curling lights from emergency vehicles. Dark DC streets.
Time of death—between 6:00 and 7:00.
Green.
She was last seen at the Clarendon Metro stop . . .
At least it gave us a location to work with. To try and follow her movement patterns.
Yellow.
Lien-hua arrived, and I caught the gentle scent of her presence. So familiar to me, but also, now, so much more distant than it had been a month ago.
Red.
“Pat. I’m here.”
I took a moment to tell her about the car and Rusty Mahan, then said, “I know you don’t like doing this on the spot. But can you give me the preliminary profile? Just whatever your first impressions are.”
“I don’t trust first impressions, you know that. I trust critical assessment.”
“Yes, I know,” I said. “So do I.”
“The way you feel about profiling, Pat. I’m surprised you’d ask me to—”
“Please.” It wasn’t just the gruesome nature of this crime; I couldn’t seem to wrap my mind around the context of what we had here. “What are you thinking?”
At last Lien-hua closed her eyes. Entered the profiler’s world of empathy and understanding, the world I’ve never really understood, never stepped into. Using one careful finger, she traced her thoughts through the air as she spoke.
“The abduction, the sophistication of rerouting the video feed, drugging the guard, using the chimps, along with the ability to get in here, tells me he’s experienced, highly educated, organized. Early to mid-thirties. Computer programming background. Hacker maybe. Demographics and Mollie’s race suggest a Caucasian offender.”