by Steven James
So far I agreed with her.
“However, it would have been difficult for someone working alone to abduct a woman undetected, subdue her, access the building, drug the chimps and the guard, transport her into the chimps’ cage—”
“He had help.”
A nod. “Considering Congressman Fischer’s position, it might have been an attempt to hurt him, some kind of political statement.”
I disagreed. “The political angle seems weak to me. There’s no note, no threat, no demands. And a team of killers who could pull off a crime this elaborate could certainly go after the congressman if they wanted to. Why not just kill him?”
She opened her eyes. “This sends a stronger message.”
When I thought about it I had to agree, although I had no idea what that message might be. “But,” she added, “you’re right; we need more information.”
A moment later Doehring joined us.
“It’s not the boyfriend,” Lien-hua went on. “His age doesn’t work for this, and the crime is too involved to put together in twenty-four hours. Besides, Mollie didn’t break up with him. They might have argued, but that’s all.”
“How do you know that?” he asked her.
“Mollie was still wearing the locket with Rusty’s initials on it. If she broke things off, she wouldn’t be wearing it.” Lien-hua averted her eyes from me, looked toward Doehring. “I’m a girl. Believe me. She would have taken it off.”
Her words made sense, but I caught myself wondering if she still had any of the gifts I’d given her. It was painful to picture her throwing or giving them all away.
I buried the thought.
“Also, the sadistic nature of the crime points to a different—and I don’t care if you don’t like the term, Pat—but a motive other than jealousy or anger over a breakup.”
She might have been right about that too, probably was—but that’s the problem with psychoanalyzing someone: you can never be sure.
She finished, “We need to find Mahan and talk with him not as a possible suspect but for information about who else might have wanted to harm Mollie or her family.”
“Why would someone send a video feed to a television store?” Doehring asked.
“Just like the killers who return to a scene to watch,” she replied, “it was his, or their, way of being present, but also of being safe.”
“They knew procedure—that we photograph those who gather at the scene.”
Or the killers could have learned that by watching just about any episode of CSI or Law and Order.
I noticed that the rain was finally letting up. A small tilt in the weather.
“Do we know if there are any security cameras at the store?” I asked Doehring. “Focused on the street? The crowd outside?”
“They’re checking.”
Traffic lights.
Red.
Green.
I let the facts flip though my mind. Tried to lock them in place, but I found myself threading things together with unsupported assumptions rather than evidence.
Yellow.
I slid my speculation aside and went back upstairs to have another look at Mollie Fischer’s body.
12
I spent two more hours at the scene, and by the time I was ready to leave, neither Georgetown’s campus security nor the Metro PD had been able to locate Rusty Mahan.
We discovered that the security cameras at the electronics store had been disabled, making the job of tracking down whoever might have been present all the more difficult: all we had to work from was the brief CNS News video from the cell phone—which showed no faces—and the earliest the FBI Lab would be able to analyze the video was tomorrow morning.
The Evidence Response Team at the primate center had identified dozens of prints on the facility’s doors and Mahan’s car, but none of them matched anyone in AFIS.
A series of dead-ends.
All the circumstantial evidence pointed to Mahan, but when all the evidence points one way, it’s usually a good idea to start looking in another; otherwise you all too often end up inadvertently confirming your assumptions rather than vigorously trying to refute them.
Margaret had arrived ten minutes ago, much later than I would have expected, especially considering what she’d told me at the Academy about having to make two quick phone calls before coming. I listened in as Ralph and Lien-hua briefed her on what we knew.
Margaret directed them to have reports on her desk by 9:00 sharp, then she turned to me. “Go home, Agent Bowers. I do not want the quality of our class offerings to be negatively affected because you didn’t get enough sleep. We’ll work things from this end and fill you in tomorrow on what we find.”
It wasn’t concern for the students that I heard in her voice but rather a subtle dismissal, as if she felt I’d fulfilled my role and she was now excusing me.
“Come here for a second.” I motioned toward a corner of the parking garage behind a nearby SUV. “I need to ask you a couple questions.”
When we were alone, her hands went to her hips. “Yes?”
“First, why am I on this case? From all indications, this is an isolated homicide. My specialty is analyzing linked serial offenses not—”
“Director Rodale made the assignment, not me. And I’m only guessing here, but I would imagine it’s because of your field experience working cases with high media exposure rather than your area of expertise.” Then, “Next?”
“All right. Detective Warren from Denver. There’s a six-month application process to get into the National Academy. How did she get accepted if she just applied?”
“She is well qualified.” I caught something in her tone. Slyness. “You should know that from working with her.”
“Of course I know that, but you can’t just discover you have vacation time coming and sign up for an NA class. Someone had to pull strings to get her in, and that someone would be—”
“Me.”
“Yes.”
“The chief in Denver was concerned about the emotional toll of the Giovanni case. He wanted to give her some distance from the city.” A smirk. “I would have thought you’d be glad to see her. From what I understand, you two have a close working relationship.”
I eyed her.
“Don’t keep secrets from me, Margaret.”
“And don’t question my decisions, Patrick. I’ll have Agent Hawkins brief you at 11:30 a.m. tomorrow. That should give you enough time to get to NCAVC after your class is done.” The National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime is a section of the FBI that Ralph, Lien-hua, and I work for. The building is a twelve-minute drive from the Academy at Quantico. “Good night.”
She took a step.
“Wait,” I said.
She stopped. Glared at me.
“If Rodale wants me in on this, then I’m all in. Don’t micromanage. Let me do my job.”
“That’s precisely what I’m here to do: to make sure everyone does his job.”
She left.
I thought about the case and about Cheyenne.
Call it a quirk, but I don’t like unanswered questions, so even though it felt like a vague disloyalty toward Cheyenne, I decided to check on any prior ties she might have with Executive Assistant Director Margaret Wellington.
As I headed for my car, I made a wide berth of the cable news feeding frenzy outside the building.
Ever since arriving at the house nearly three hours ago, Tessa had been trying to make her way through Boulders Dancing on the Tip of My Tongue, a collection of poems by Alexi Marnchivek, a Russian poet mostly unknown in America but someone who understood the paradoxes of life—both its tragedy and its glory.
Tessa didn’t know Russian, only Latin and French, so she was stuck reading an English translation, which was sort of annoying.
Finally she put it aside. Her friend Pandora had been bugging her to read some Sherlock Holmes, which she was totally not into, but Tessa had been hoping to check out some Robert Louis Steven
son, who, unlike so many of the writers of “the classics,” actually could write.
She opted for Stevenson instead of Doyle and pulled out The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Every five minutes she’d been checking to see if there was an email from Paul. He always sent his emails by 9:00, but for some reason tonight he was late, and that sort of worried her. She’d emailed him over an hour ago, but he still hadn’t replied.
She found her bookmarked page and read Stevenson’s description of a foggy night in London.
The fog still slept on the wing above the drowned city, where the lamps glimmered like carbuncles; and through the muffle and smother of these fallen clouds, the procession of the town’s life was still rolling in through the great arteries with a sound as of a mighty wind.
Nice.
Very nice.
Tessa checked the email again.
Nothing.
She read on, but ten minutes later, distracted by her thoughts, she laid the book on the couch and tried the TV. American Idol reruns.
Karaoke on steroids . . .
That would be a no.
Click.
Some kind of Western. Click.
A Seinfeld rerun, commercials, commercials, one of the Star Wars movies. More commercials. She was about to turn off the stupid thing when she came to a cable news story with footage of a zoo or something in DC where a congressman’s daughter had apparently been attacked.
She paused.
The reporter, a perfectly sculpted woman with perfectly styled hair speaking in a perfectly cultivated voice, was explaining that the congressman couldn’t be reached for comment. “But we have confirmed that this is a joint investigation and that the FBI is already working closely with local law enforcement. Bob—”
The FBI, huh?
“Thank you, Chelsea.” The camera cut back to the news anchor. Then he started interviewing the network’s “expert crime analyst” who apparently didn’t have any additional information but wasn’t about to let that stop him from giving detailed interpretation of the unconfirmed facts concerning the case.
Guesswork about conjecture based on hearsay.
Cable news today.
On the news loop captured “only moments ago” running behind Anchorman Bob’s left shoulder, Tessa noticed a man in the background walking toward a car. He was wearing an FBI jacket and might have been just another anonymous agent, but she recognized the way he carried himself. And she knew the car.
Patrick.
Okay.
That’s informative.
She waited for more details from the anchorman, but the same footage kept replaying, and Bob kept restating the same information with slightly different wording each time, including a teaser before each commercial break to make it seem like there was breaking news about the case.
Finally, when he invited people to email him their opinions about whether or not this was an act of domestic terrorism, promising to read the messages on the air as they came in, she couldn’t deal with it anymore. Actual news reporting had died a swift and certain death in the age of instant messaging and 140-character attention spans.
She clicked off the TV.
Checked her email.
Nothing.
After grabbing a bag of tortilla chips from the kitchen, she flopped onto the couch again and thought back through the night.
Detective Warren had dropped her off at the house just a few minutes after 8:00, the storm churning around them.
They’d talked about surface stuff on the way: what Tessa was hoping to do during the summer (check out the Smithsonian, Library of Congress, maybe the NSA museum, the Spy Museum, things like that), and if she had a boyfriend (nada), and if she was thinking about college yet (yeah, maybe Brown or USC; maybe Duke), what she wanted to study (that’s easy—double major in English and Deep Ecology).
When they arrived at the house, Detective Warren had offered to stay with her, but Tessa told her not to worry about it. “I’ll be fine. Seriously. But thanks for the ride.”
“All right. Lock the doors.” And even though she was nowhere near old enough to be Tessa’s mother, she sounded parental.
“I will.”
“Good night.”
Tessa hesitated before climbing out of the car. “You’re not just here to take a bunch of classes, are you?” She didn’t wait for a reply. “I know how you feel about Patrick. I could tell. In Denver.”
A long pause. “Good men are hard to find.” At this point, the detective sounded more like a sister than a parent. Guy talk between two girls.
“So you came here to win him back?”
“I never had him, Tessa.”
“What about your ex-husband? Aren’t you two—”
“Tessa.”
She waited, expecting to hear that it wasn’t any of her business, but Detective Warren went a different direction. “We’re getting along again—and that’s a good thing. But we’ll never be close like we were. That’s over.”
It was hard to know how to respond.
Actually, Tessa respected her for her frankness and for pursuing what really mattered to her, and from everything she’d seen, Cheyenne and Patrick really would make a good couple. “He likes you too,” she said at last, though she wasn’t sure she should have. “Patrick does.”
Detective Warren was quiet. “I should probably go. Good night, Tessa.”
“G’night.”
“And lock those doors, okay?”
“Right.”
Then Tessa hurried through the rain, using her body to protect the mail she’d grabbed at the end of the driveway on the way to the house.
Then inside.
Door closed.
Locked.
Ever since being attacked and nearly killed by a serial killer whom Patrick had been tracking last October, she’d learned to be extra cautious. She checked the back door, confirmed that it was locked.
Okay.
Good to go.
But now, three hours later, Patrick still wasn’t home.
She knew that he hadn’t gotten over Lien-hua yet, but if things weren’t going to work out there, she felt like he should totally hook up with Detective Warren.
However, it was obvious he liked them both, and honestly, so did she. It would have been a lot simpler if one of the women had been a real loser, but Detective Warren, the forthright cowgirl, and Agent Jiang, the introspective beauty, were both pretty amazing women.
Tessa checked her laptop once more, and this time she saw the email icon flashing.
With a small shiver of the guilt that comes from going behind someone’s back, she tapped the space bar.
Tessa,
Hey! You’re not going to believe this. I’m in DC! Only for the next couple days—a friend of mine has a few sculptures that are showing at the Hirshhorn Museum. I have the middle of the day tomorrow free and I’d love to see you. I could meet at 10:30 or so. I’m thinking by the Capitol, maybe? I know a few people and I think I can get you a tour of the House gallery.
Let me know.
Love,
Paul
Oh.
Unbelievable.
Not good.
Not good at all.
She reread the letter.
Tomorrow!
Why didn’t he tell you about this sooner? Why would he—
A pair of headlights turned from the road and began meandering down the long, winding driveway to the house.
Oh, man.
Patrick.
Tessa couldn’t think of any way of telling him what was going on—no, no, no, not right now. He’d been suspicious of Paul from the start, and if he found out she’d been emailing Paul like this behind his back, he’d be furious.
Besides, even if he would give her permission to meet with Paul, there was no way he’d be happy about it.
No way in the world.
Enough with the emails. There’s stuff you need to talk to Paul about. Go see him, get your answ
ers, then sort everything out with Patrick tomorrow night.
She typed in her reply to Paul.
The garage door opened.
Patrick was home.
13
I heard Tessa rummaging through the cupboards in the kitchen. “That you?” I called.
“How could the answer to that question possibly be no?”
I paused.
Good point.
She appeared, crossed the room, and plopped onto the couch.
“Did you have a good night?” I asked.
She shrugged. “You? Was it bad? At the primate place?”
I let my eyes ask her how she knew where I’d been, and she flipped her thumb toward the television. “I saw you on TV.”
“Perfect.”
“It’s all over the news.”
I sighed. “Yeah, well, the media is going to have a field day with this one.”
She’d piled the mail on the coffee table beside her laptop, and I picked up the stack and started shuffling through it as we spoke: the latest issues of Sports Illustrated and Soldier of Fortune, both addressed to Freeman Runnels, the man who was letting us stay in his home for the summer . . . “Did you thank Detective Warren for the ride?”
“Patrick, I’m not five.”
“I know that.” A handful of sales flyers, a few credit card offers—all for Runnels.
“So, don’t treat me like it. I know when to say please and thank you.”
I looked up and saw that she was giving me an irritated stare.
“I’m just making sure you were polite,” I said.
“I’m the queen of polite.”
I blinked. “You’re the queen of polite?”
A raised eyebrow. “Careful.”
“I’m just saying.”
She laid her book on the couch and stood. “I gotta get to bed.”
“Hey, are you feeling all right?”
“Sure, yeah.” Her tone softened. “I’m just, you know. Worn out, I guess. I have a big day tomorrow.”
Back to the mail again. “I thought you were gonna hang out around here. Read?” Hardly anyone knew we were staying here, so I was surprised to see an official-looking letter addressed to me from a law firm in DC.