by Steven James
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.”
We 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 a
s 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 entrance 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.”
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.
&nb
sp; 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.”