by Steven James
“I’ll be back.”
Then he left her again, lying there alone in the dark. He went to check the wiring and timer on the explosive device that he had created. A one of a kind. A work of art.
An elegant surprise for Special Agent Patrick Bowers.
20
Ralph spent five minutes filling us in, mostly reviewing information I’d already read in the online case files.
I was anxious to find out what else we’d learned since I left the scene last night but tried not to appear as impatient as I felt.
“By the way,” he said. “There’s no sign of Mollie Fischer’s laptop—we were hoping that might get us somewhere.”
When he mentioned Mollie’s laptop, I realized Cheyenne would need more than Ralph’s cursory summary, so I flipped open my computer, clicked to the online case files, and turned the screen so that it faced her. “So you can catch up as we talk.”
“Thanks.” She tapped the mouse pad, began to scroll through the files.
“Where’s Doehring?” Lien-hua asked.
“Command post. His team is back at the primate center interviewing the staff.” Ralph pulled out a notepad. “All right, let’s run down the timeline. What do we know?”
“Perhaps,” Lien-hua said, “the key right now isn’t focusing on what we do know but on what we don’t.” She ticked off her points one at a time on her fingers as she listed them: “We don’t know if Rusty drove his car to the scene, accessed the facility, was present at the storefront, wrote the suicide note, or killed himself—or even for sure that he and Mollie broke up.”
“So basically, nothing,” Cheyenne observed, her eyes still glued to the laptop screen. “Square one.”
“Okay, let’s think about this.” I stood. Began to pace. “Let’s say someone is trying to set up Rusty. Considering the technical and tactical aspects of this crime, doesn’t leaving his car at the scene seem like an odd way to frame him? Taking into account the typed confession, the ideally timed phone call just as a jogger is going past Mahan’s body—”
“Too obvious,” Ralph said. “Amateurish.”
“Yes. And why leave Mollie’s purse with her in the chimp’s habitat?”
“But if someone wasn’t trying to set Mahan up,” Cheyenne said, “then it might have been him—all the circumstantial evidence points to him as the killer.”
“That’s true.” Lien-hua nodded. “But Rusty is almost certainly not the killer, so . . .”
“Square one,” Ralph said.
Even though my specialty is working serial crimes in which there are half a dozen or more primary or secondary crime scenes, the key to all investigations is zeroing in on timing and location, and that’s where we needed to look more carefully right now. “The research center’s video surveillance footage was deleted from 5:00 to 7:00, right?”
Nods.
“And Mollie’s death appears to have been between 6:00 and 7:00 . . .” I was thinking aloud now, reevaluating an idea I’d toyed with but never really pursued. “And yet, the killers—let’s say it’s plural for now—exited the scene at some point—most likely after her death, but possibly before. In either case, they weren’t caught on tape leaving the building . . . so unless there was some way to circumnavigate the cameras or preprogram the security system to start videotaping again after they left—”
“They stayed inside.” Lien-hua leaned forward. “Then left after they’d turned on the cameras again.”
A spark.
A possibility.
“And they would be caught on tape leaving sometime after 7:00.” Ralph said.
“Let’s try this,” I said. “If we review the videotapes starting at 7:00, we should be able to identify everyone who entered or left the building after the keeper’s 911 call—all the law enforcement personnel, EMTs, everybody.”
“Yes,” Lien-hua said. “So if we find footage of someone who left the building—”
“But no footage of ’em entering it,” Ralph interrupted, “we have our inside man.”
“Or woman,” Cheyenne said.
I nodded. “That’s right.”
The logic of it was simple, but admittedly, there were holes. There might have been a way we didn’t know about to avoid the cameras, but it was an avenue to pursue. A place to start.
Ralph scribbled on his pad. “I’ll get some agents on this ASAP.”
“Do we know any more about Sandra Reynolds, the keeper?” Cheyenne was studying the computer screen. “The woman who shot the chimps? She was present when the officers arrived.”
“She looks clean,” Ralph said. “Doehring and his guys interviewed her pretty extensively. We’ll see if they get anything else from her this morning.”
“And the security guard?”
“We had a tox screen done to see if he might have been lying about being knocked out, but he still had tranqs in his system. I’d say he’s clear too. Neither of them saw anyone else there.”
Ralph sounded convinced. I decided to move on. “And Mollie was deceased when the responding officers arrived? They confirmed it?”
“Oh yeah,” he said, his voice somber. “There was no question about that.”
A moment of uncomfortable stillness crawled through the room.
The pieces just weren’t coming together.
Cheyenne tipped her gaze away from the laptop and toward me. “I’m wondering, what if the chimps didn’t kill her?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, is it possible she might have been dead before the chimpanzees maimed her?” She pointed to a crime scene photo of the straw-covered floor of the habitat she’d pulled up on the screen. “There’s blood on the straw, but it’s not as pervasive as you might expect, considering the wounds on the jugular vein in her neck, and once her heart stopped beating, she would have stopped bleeding.”
“Gravity.” Ralph nodded. “Blood pools to the lowest part of the body.”
“Yes,” she said.
I glanced at Ralph. “Is the autopsy finished yet?”
A look at the clock. “In progress.”
“Let’s see if the ME can establish for certain the mechanism of death.”
More notes.
Lots to do.
He rose. “Actually, let me put this stuff into play. I think there’re enough questions to hold off Doehring’s announcement. I’ll be right back.”
As he left, Cheyenne discreetly asked Lien-hua where the ladies room was. “I’ll show you,” she replied, and they stepped into the hall.
I took the opportunity to connect my laptop to the USB hub for the flat screen wall monitor so we’d all be able to view the images when the three of them returned.
Then I began scrolling through the crime scene photos, focusing on the contents of Mollie’s purse, trying to find anything that didn’t mesh with the theory that Mahan was innocent.
“It’s remarkable,” Tessa whispered as she and Paul approached the sculpture.
Nearby, a mother was corralling two young boys toward the stairs, but even with that annoying little drama going on, the sculpture still held Tessa’s attention.
It was a three-foot-tall mixed media sculpture of a girl with her hands wrapped around a boy’s waist. Somehow the sculptor had captured the moment in such a way that it made it appear as if the girl was both clinging to the boy and pushing him away at the same time.
Even though Tessa had been hesitant about the whole idea of the art museum, after seeing this sculpture she was hopeful that it might not be a complete waste of time. Without glass enclosures around the sculptures, you could get really close, and she stepped forward and inspected it admiringly.
Here you had the tension of a life captured in wire and plastic resin: holding on and pushing away; we want to be close but separate, independent but needed, free but constrained by love. Human nature in a nutshell.
“I’m glad you like it.” Paul seemed pleased, almost proud.
“Yeah. It’s really nice.”
<
br /> Out of the corner of her eye, Tessa noticed the woman turn her back on one of the boys. Without her supervision, the boy apparently felt free to approach a ceramic sculpture on a short wooden stand.
“Is it one of the pieces your friend made?” Tessa said, but her eyes were on the small boy who was reaching for the sculpture.
“Julia? No. Hers are—”
She could see disaster written all over this and called out to the woman to warn her, “Hey, your son!”
But the woman turned toward Tessa instead of looking at the boy. Tessa pointed at him as his hand found the sculpture—
The ceramic piece smacked to the floor.
And in that instant, Paul whipped around, his back to Tessa, shielding her from the direction of the sound—but of course there was nothing to protect her from.
Then an alarm was ringing and two staff members were rushing to the family. The mother was already scolding her son, and now Paul was herding Tessa to the other end of the exhibit hall.
“What was that all about?” she asked him. “You were like crazy fast. Were you ever a cop or something?”
“No,” he said simply. “Come on, we’ll work our way up to the fourth floor.”
It would make sense if he was. Mom always was into the law-enforcement type.
“Seriously, you—”
“No.” And he guided her onto the escalator in front of him.
21
11:58 a.m.
I didn’t find anything significant while they were gone, and when the four of us reconvened, Ralph announced, “All right, Doehring said he’ll hold off on releasing any info to the press for now, but the congressman isn’t going to. He scheduled a press conference for 1:00. And that’s in stone. So unless we have something more by then, he’s going to tell the press that his daughter’s killer was Rusty Mahan.”
“We need to rein him in,” I said. “That could seriously hamper the investigation.”
“I called Margaret to ask about this, but Rodale seems to be behind the congressman.”
“That’s unbelievable,” Lien-hua said. “What’s going on here?”
Politics as usual.
He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said gruffly. “But it doesn’t smell right to me either.”
Forget the press, focus on the evidence.
I closed my eyes and reviewed the street layout surrounding the research facility, mentally following the route I’d taken to get there, forming a three-dimensional map in my head. But my memory wasn’t nearly as accurate as a satellite image would be, so I opened my eyes, pulled out my phone, and projected the 3-D hologram of DC above the table.
All four of us gathered around it. Studied it.
I drew my finger across the phone’s screen to zoom in on South Capitol Street where the research center lay, then rotated the image, studying the sight-lines from the parking garage’s exit, the building’s other exits in relationship to the streets, the parking lot . . . the traffic lights . . . the looming stadium.
Wait.
A thought.
On the laptop, I clicked to the DC Metro police site. Typed in my federal ID number.
Oh yes.
A small thrill. The moment opening up.
“What is it?” Ralph asked.
“Cameras,” I mumbled.
“The footage was deleted.” I could hear his growing impatience in his voice. “We just went through all that. We need to—”
“No. Traffic cams.” I felt the juices flowing. The case beginning to enter my system in the way it’s supposed to; the way I like. “We might not have footage of the killer arriving at the research center, but we might have video of him approaching it. If we caught Mahan’s car on the way to the facility, we should be able to get a look at the driver.”
“Confirm for sure whether or not it was Mahan.” He was tracking with me now, step by step.
“Exactly.”
It took me less than a minute to log in, pull up DC’s traffic camera database, and find the video archives.
Mollie was last seen leaving the Clarendon Metro station.
I chose the traffic lights two blocks north of the facility, since it would be in a more direct route from the area of the city where she was last seen.
And, starting at 4:00, the time Mollie was last seen alive, we began to study the footage at 8x speed, looking for Rusty Mahan’s ’09 Volvo.
Brad carried the duffel bag containing everything he and Astrid would need to the van. Set it inside.
According to the plan, Astrid would meet him at the hotel at 2:00, but he liked the idea of having the woman alone with him in the room for a little while before Astrid arrived.
Leaving now would give him plenty of time.
He chambered a round in his gun, a Walther P99, holstered it, then went back downstairs, grabbed the woman by the hair, and, as she squirmed desperately to get away, dragged her toward the stairs.
It didn’t take Tessa long to realize that the sculpture of the boy and the girl was the exception, not the rule.
Most of the sculptures were completely lame—trying too hard to say too much, or so esoteric that they failed to say anything at all. In the latter case, the museum staff had placed little plaques next to the sculptures describing why the artist made them, what was going on in his or her life, and what the sculpture was supposed to mean.
How helpful was that.
But the thing is, true art, real art, needs no explanation. There’s no epilogue at the end of a novel telling you what the story was supposed to mean. No commentary at the end of a symphony explaining what the composer was trying to communicate with those specific notes. No footnotes clarifying the meaning of poems—at least not any that are worth reading. Art either stands on its own or it does not. As soon as it needs to be explained, it ceases to be art.
She didn’t say any of this to Paul, though. Probably not the ideal dad/daughter conversation, since she would undoubtedly end up dissing this whole reclusive-sculpture-guy-thing he had going on, and she didn’t want to do that.
They were still on the second floor, and the journey upstairs to Julia’s exhibit was going excruciatingly slowly since Paul was studying each sculpture for way too long.
Finally, when he paused to read the plaque beside a bronze sculpture of two gray apples with red wigs kissing each other, Tessa said, “So you never got married?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I guess I never met the right woman at the right time.”
“So for Mom, was it the wrong time or the wrong woman?”
He looked at her. “I was the wrong man. I guess.”
Not the answer she’d expected. She let his words sink in.
He led her to a large UPS box encased in glass. A sword had been driven through it, as if it were Excalibur piercing a stone.
Another explanatory plaque.
Oh, joy.
“So, no other kids?”
“No.”
“That you know about.”
The smile he’d been wearing when they first met on the steps of the Library of Congress had slowly been fading throughout the morning, and now he gazed at her curiously. Perhaps with a hint of hostility.
“I mean, you’ve made it clear that you didn’t know about me,” she explained. “But here I am. So, what I’m saying is: you mean there are no other kids that you know about.”
“There aren’t any others.”
He sounded certain, but she couldn’t believe that over the last seventeen years he’d never slept with any other women.
“How do you know?”
“I don’t have any other children, Tessa.” Something cold and uncertain had wormed its way into the space between them.
She repeated herself, speaking more slowly this time. “How do you know?”
“I had a vasectomy, Tessa.”
It was too blunt, not the kind of thing a father tells his teenage daughter. Sure, she’d pressed him, but still—
“Come on.” He pointed to the elevator. “I’ll show you Julia’s sculptures.”
“Okay,” she said. “And you can tell me a little more about her on the way.”
22
Nothing.
No Volvo.
But we did have footage of the guard’s car moving through the intersection at 5:53 p.m., and the GM Volt of the keeper, Sandra Reynolds, at 7:02.
I made a mental note of the times. However, the storm, traffic, any number of factors could have affected their arrival times.
Try the traffic lights south of the facility.
It would be a more circuitous route from the Metro station where Mollie had been seen last, perhaps indicating that her abductors left the city and then returned with her. And if that was the case, when I drew up the geoprofile, depending on the hot zone’s location, it might prove significant.
Home? Did they take her to their place of residence?
Questions, questions.
I needed facts.
Only seconds after I’d started the second video, Ralph nailed his finger to the screen. “Gotcha.”
At 5:32 p.m. Rusty Mahan’s ’09 Volvo passed through the intersection.
They arrived and then waited for the shift change?
Maybe.
I paused the image, backed it up to the moment the car first appeared onscreen.
Pressed play.
“That’s it,” Lien-hua said, but there was a note of disappointment in her voice. “But you can’t see the driver, too much glare from the rain.”
“Play it again,” Cheyenne said.
I did, twice, and at different speeds. But the glare obscured the driver’s face.
Ralph pulled out his cell. “The lab guys can pull some of that off—”
“No,” I mumbled. I was staring at the image. “That’s not right.”
“What?”
“Look.” I zoomed in on the license plate. “It’s a different plate. The Volvo in the parking garage had 134-UU7 for its tags; this one has IPR-OMI.”
Ralph lowered his phone. “But that is the same car.”
“Let’s make sure.” I tapped the play button again.