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The Death Row Complex (The Katrina Stone Novels Book 2)

Page 10

by Kristen Elise Ph. D.


  “I could dust the card for prints with fluorescent powder and look using the gooseneck—that would be the most sensitive way to examine it for fingerprints. But that would contaminate the card, and if we did pick up a print, I bet it would match the hair sample so it would not give us any new information.

  “So I have decided go a different route instead. I’m going to proceed with the ESDA. This will also damage the document, but it might pick up a trace of another writing or other indentation. So it could give us a unique piece of information. If your perp is a scientist or a doctor, as the lab coat fiber suggests, then he or she probably writes on a million things a day. We might get something from this.”

  “Sounds good,” Bob Wachsman said. “Make it happen. What about the tracing of the postage? Linguistics? Handwriting?”

  “Useless. The language is a mixture, the handwriting is a mystery, and Mason tracked the IBI of the postage stamp as far as he could, which wasn’t very far. It was mailed in Phoenix. That’s all we know.”

  “Great,” said Wachsman. “So basically, our perp is anyone in Arizona.”

  “Or anyone in San Diego with a car,” Gilman added.

  “Or anyone in the world who’s not afraid to fly,” Teresa corrected.

  DECEMBER 4, 2015

  9:04 A.M. EST

  In the main forensics laboratory at the USPIS, Teresa reached into a plastic bag with a gloved hand. She gently pulled out the White House greeting card and then took a deep breath. After a moment to ensure the entire experiment was ready to go, she laid the card, opened, onto a flat surface in front of her. Instantly, the force of a vacuum sucked the card to the surface where it formed a seal.

  Teresa worked expertly and quickly. The ESDA—electrostatic detection apparatus—would pick up invisible impressions in the paper. But the longer the card sat over the vacuum, the less sensitive the assay would become as the force of the vacuum increasingly flattened the impressions in the document. Teresa laid a thin layer of plastic film over the card and the vacuum immediately pulled the film taught. With a hand-held corona wire, she began to deposit a negative electrical charge to the entire surface of the plastic.

  Then she waited. The time frame for the experiment was absolutely critical to maximize the negative charge while minimizing the damage done to the document by the force of the vacuum.

  Teresa took pride in her skill with the ESDA. When intuition told her she was at the critical moment, she retrieved a vial of what appeared to be colored powder. In fact, the vial was filled with tiny, positively charged glass beads, coated with liquid toner. Quickly, she poured the beads over the plastic, where they automatically distributed to neutralize the charge applied to the document.

  Gradually, a series of impressions developed as the beads were sucked into the lowest points on the document. The first indentations shown were those produced by the Arabic text, which became crisper before Teresa’s eyes as if an invisible hand had come in with a second pen and precisely traced the writing.

  A moment later, a second set of impressions began to emerge.

  Teresa began to grin, and then chuckle. “Damn, I’m good,” she said aloud. She reached into a drawer and grabbed a sheet of sticky, transparent film, from which she then removed the plastic backing to expose the tacky surface. Carefully, to avoid introducing air bubbles between layers, she laid the film over the newly created trace to preserve it.

  DECEMBER 7, 2015

  7:45 A.M. PST

  In a San Diego hotel room, Roger Gilman sat on the bed cross-legged, surrounded by pages and pages of documentation. On the notepad in his lap was a sketched Venn diagram. In one circle, the agent had written the names of suspects who were female and Caucasian—women whose DNA could match the hair sample Teresa had found in the greeting card. At the top of the list was Katrina Stone. Several other names were scrawled beneath that of Stone in the circle: Stone’s Russian graduate student, Oxana Kosova, the heavy metal postdoc’s soon-to-be ex-wife, Angela Fischer, and his crazy stripper groupie, Lisa Goldstein.

  Family. Stone had both a daughter and a sister. Her mother was in the beginning of stages of Alzheimer’s disease—not a likely suspect, but still ambulatory. Stone’s ex-husband had remarried. Kimberly Stone. Another Caucasian female.

  In a second circle of the Venn diagram, Gilman had written the names of suspects who would wear a lab coat or other white standard-issue uniform. Katrina’s ex-husband, Tom Stone, had been included. He was a medic. Stone’s other female student, Li Fung, was not Caucasian but she did fit into the second circle. So did the rest of Stone’s staff.

  Asked to provide DNA, Li had willingly submitted as had Joshua Attle. Jason Fischer had said, “Fuck you—come back with a court order,” without looking up from his experiment. Todd Ruddock had provided the sample along with a middle finger, and then cheerfully requested with his charming British accent, “Now bugger off, will ya?” Angela Fischer had agreed to provide a sample and then slapped Gilman across the face when he plucked the hair from her head.

  Gilman had not managed to locate Lisa Goldstein. According to another stripper at the club where she worked, Lisa had a tendency to go on “vacation” with some of her “clients” and would probably be back at some point.

  The area of overlap between the two circles contained only two names—only two Caucasian females who would wear lab coats. Oxana Kosova and Katrina Stone.

  A third, non-overlapping circle was reserved for suspects who had no obvious ties to either the hair sample or the fiber. The ISIL network, which had been silent on the matter since day one of the investigation. Other international terrorist organizations. Domestic terrorists. Also in the third circle was the phrase “2000 Hispanic Prisoners,” and beneath that, “Prisoners’ Victims.”

  Lawrence Naden was, indeed, sitting in a prison cell in Texas. Not a suspect. Gilman had written his name outside of all circles and then drawn a direct line to the name of Katrina Stone. One woman in the center of the diagram. One woman at the center of it all.

  Gilman reflected back on his short, wonderful visit to Washington, D.C. and sighed.

  His cell phone began to ring. Gilman crawled over the paperwork on his hotel room bed and began rifling through clothing on the floor. Finally finding his phone in the pocket of a pair of slacks, he clicked into the call. “Hello, this is Roger Gilman.”

  “Hi Roger, Teresa Wood calling from Dulles. I’ve got good news and bad news. Do you have a few minutes?”

  Gilman scrambled to find a notepad and pen. “Uh, sure. Hang on a minute.”

  The hotel staff had been given strict instructions to leave the room alone and had evidently been complying. Gilman found what he was looking for and shoved a few papers on the bed aside before sitting down. He uncapped his pen. “What did you find with the DNA?”

  “In short, nothing,” Teresa said. “I ran the sample against all of the suspects you gave me. There was no familial similarity with any of them, let alone exact matches. You mentioned that two of your potential suspects had not given up their DNA at the time you sent the samples, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “And have they now?”

  “The court order came through and we’ve gotten DNA from one of them—Jason Fischer. But he’s a man, obviously, and he has no family near San Diego. He doesn’t seem too close to any of his family at all, so I doubt we’ll get anything from his DNA. Even though he’s a punk.”

  “Send me the sample anyway,” Teresa said.

  “Of course.”

  “What about the other suspect?”

  “We still haven’t located her. But I doubt she’s our perp anyway.”

  “She? What color is her hair?”

  “Brownish. And point taken. I’ll find her.” Gilman paused and then added, “I was really hoping for a hit on the lead suspects so I could wrap this up and go home.”

  “Sorry,” Teresa said. “I guess it’s not that easy this time.” A moment later, she cleared her throat. “
Uh, Roger, I have another question for you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I hate to insult your intelligence here, but did you include a DNA sample from the intern that opened the card at the White House?”

  Gilman paused. “You’re kidding, right?”

  Another pause. “Um, no. Are you?”

  “You mean you haven’t collected that sample?”

  Teresa groaned. “Oh, God Roger! Why would I have collected that sample! You were supposed to be providing me with DNA. I was never under the impression that I was to collect any of it myself. Nor do I have time to!”

  “Teresa, do you realize I’m in San Diego? Because I do realize that you are in D.C. I have collected the evidence here, you collect it in D.C. Make time!”

  “No, I’m not in D.C. I’m outside of D.C. I don’t just pop into the city on a daily basis. And I do not have time to be collecting evidence! Gilman, let me tell you something you don’t seem to know. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service has had more than twenty thousand incidents to respond to since the anthrax mailings of 2001. FBI and CIA applicants have increased more than tenfold since then. But applicants to be federal postal inspectors—not so much. They don’t call us the ‘silent service’ for no reason. So to put it mildly, we’re grossly understaffed.

  “I’ll get the intern’s hair. But you could have let me know! Shit!”

  “You can say that again!” Gilman said.

  “All right,” Teresa said, a bit more calmly. “I’ll take care of this. I’ll let you know when or if it tells me anything.”

  Gilman heard the click of Teresa hanging up, and then a dial tone. He sat on the bed a moment longer. The mistake had been both of theirs. Gilman desperately hoped that the intern’s DNA would not match the strand of hair on the card. If it did, his efforts to collect samples from every suspect had been nothing but wasted time.

  A moment later, Gilman realized that Teresa had never given him the good news.

  It took Teresa less than forty minutes to obtain a hair sample from intern Amanda Dougherty. When she called Jack Callahan at the White House, Dougherty was working in the next room.

  Amanda was both stunned and thrilled that her own genetic material was actually being examined in a real FBI case. She could not wait.

  Jack advised Teresa that because she did not usually conduct business within the White House, it would be easier to bring Amanda to Teresa than to bring Teresa through White House security. Teresa informed Jack that there was no way he was bringing a complete stranger into the National Forensics Laboratory, not even a kid. They decided to meet halfway.

  In the time it took Jack and Amanda to get out of the White House, through central Washington, D.C., and across the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Bridge, Teresa was already waiting at the Iwo Jima monument when they arrived. When she saw Jack, she waved him over. “Thanks for meeting me,” she said and turned to the girl. “I assume you are Amanda?”

  “Yes, I’m Amanda,” the girl said. She was grinning. “So what do you do, just pluck out one of my hairs?”

  “Yep, that’s it,” Teresa said. “Easy, huh? But I need to pull it, not cut it. I need the root.”

  “I thought so,” Amanda said, looking proud.

  Teresa pulled a plastic bag out of her pocket and then reached toward Amanda to extract the hair sample.

  “Ouch,” Amanda said quietly when the hair was yanked out. “So, are you an FBI agent?”

  Teresa smiled. “No, I’m a postal inspector.”

  “Oh,” Amanda said with obvious disappointment.

  “But I work with the FBI,” Teresa said. Amanda looked unimpressed.

  Teresa tried again. “We were the first federal law enforcement to use the Tommy Gun, ya know.”

  Blank stare.

  Teresa turned instead to Jack. “This is why I’m understaffed.”

  DECEMBER 8, 2015

  12:35 P.M. EST

  The next day, Teresa Wood held a phone to her ear while typing furiously. When the call she had placed was answered, she ceased her data entry and gripped the phone with one hand while leaning backward in her chair.

  “Hello, this is Roger Gilman.” As Gilman spoke the words in San Diego, Teresa simultaneously mouthed them in Dulles. His greeting never varied.

  “Roger, Teresa Wood here,” she said. “I have good news and bad news.”

  Gilman groaned. “Oh no, not again.”

  “Yeah, no kidding. The bad news is that it was the intern’s hair on the greeting card. So we’ve wasted time that we could not afford to waste. There is no other possibility for DNA. We’ve come to a dead end on that front.”

  “That was our best chance at finding the perp!”

  “Don’t you think I know that?”

  “What else?” Gilman demanded.

  “Well, I forgot to mention this in the confusion over the intern’s hair—but the ESDA picked up a trace of another writing. It’s a good trace. But… I don’t know what it means. I don’t know if it will tell us anything.”

  Gilman sighed. “It better tell us something. Christmas is in seventeen days.”

  DECEMBER 14, 2015

  7:35 A.M. PST

  The ESDA trace told nothing. Eleven days before Christmas, Roger Gilman sat staring at the text in the office he now occupied adjacent to Katrina Stone’s new laboratory. Three lines. That was all. And it was gibberish.

  WHO1315

  DR1630

  AL1800

  Who? Dr? Dr. Who? What? And who is Al?

  Gilman had been staring at the text for the better part of five days. He had read up on Dr. Who and decided that if the popular time-travel science fiction series had any connection at all to Operation Death Row, the nation was sunk. He had given the three numbers from the ESDA trace to top FBI code-breakers who had come back with nothing.

  It was over.

  Reluctantly, Gilman picked up the receiver of his office phone to call Bob Wachsman and recommend that the government prepare for the worst.

  The prisoner was already waiting at the small table when his visitor sat down across from him. Her black headscarf and Muslim robe had been gone for more than a month, along with the Arab alias and bogus accent. Instead, the visitor’s dark face was now obscured by long thick waves of black hair. A chunky sweater draped over a skirt that flowed almost to the floor. She’s still ugly as fuck, the prisoner thought offhand.

  The visitor scanned the room for watching guards and then reached into a fold of the skirt. “I can’t keep this up,” she whispered as she leaned in to hand the money to the prisoner. “I’m going broke.”

  “I don’t really give a shit,” the prisoner said. “You’ll keep paying for as long as I say. But just to make you feel a little better”—he cocked his head and a grin spread across his face—“I’m almost done with you.”

  DECEMBER 19, 2015

  9:00 A.M. PST

  Following a phone call from Roger Gilman to Bob Wachsman, the terror threat level was increased to red—the highest of the Homeland Security Advisory System. Official government briefings warned the public to remain hyper vigilant and to report any suspicious activity immediately. No specifics were provided.

  But then, the classified report detailing the anthrax outbreak at the prison was leaked to the press. Word of the genetically activated strain spread through the nation like wildfire, and the media developed a feverish interest in the sudden massive expansion of an unknown anthrax research laboratory in San Diego.

  Katrina Stone and her staff had been amply forewarned that there would be a federal presence in their laboratories for the duration of the project. What they were not prepared for was a full military invasion. Every entrance to the original building and the new facility across the street was now guarded by at least two armed soldiers. Only essential personnel were permitted access to the buildings. Construction workers, scientists, and professors were issued ID access badges and required to wear them visibly at all times. Random searches became t
he norm.

  The building housing Katrina’s lab at San Diego State University was still a construction site. Now, it was also a police state.

  It was six days before Christmas when Katrina and Jason Fischer stood over the bodies of three dead monkeys. “Why, Jason?!” Katrina was practically crying. “Your compound was completely effective in mice! Why isn’t it working in monkeys? What’s the difference in the primates?”

  Jason shook his head. “I’m not sure,” he said. “It could be one of any number of things. Primates aren’t mice—we’ve rediscovered this inconvenient fact a million times. But if the drug doesn’t work in monkeys, I bet my life it’s not going to work in humans.”

  “I know that, Jason!”

  Jason raised a palm toward Katrina in a gesture for her to calm down. “I have an idea about what might be causing the discrepancy,” he said. “But I need another few days to confirm or disprove it.”

  “Another few days is literally all you have,” Katrina said.

  DECEMBER 23, 2015

  8:23 A.M. PST

  Four days later, Jason had the answer.

  It was the day before Christmas Eve, and Katrina was standing with Gilman and McMullan in the break room outside of her laboratory. Although they stood close together, nobody spoke. All three were gulping large cups of coffee and staring absently at the floor, all three absorbed in their own concerns, all three ultimately consumed with the same thought. The day after tomorrow.

  Jason burst into the room. “There you are!” he said as he rushed toward Katrina. “I’ve got it.”

  Katrina sank into a chair at the break room table. Her hand was shaking as she set the coffee cup loudly onto the table. “What is it then?”

 

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