The Bishop pbf-4

by Steven James

  “Patrick.”

  “Sorry?”

  “His name is Patrick.”

  But even as she said the words, it occurred to her that her comment probably sounded rude. “I mean, maybe if you could call him Patrick instead of ‘your stepfather,’ that’d be cool. I call him Patrick.”

  “Sure, right. I meant no disrespect.”

  “I know.”

  They crossed Independence Avenue.

  “Well, ever since you two showed up at my cabin, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

  “Yes.”

  Paul Lansing put a hand on her shoulder. A friendly gesture. That was all.

  Something a father would do.

  For his daughter.

  But when a clutch of businessmen approached them, she gently eased away from him so that the men could pass between them.

  “Cheyenne, hang on a sec.”

  Class had just finished, and she was on her way to the door with the rest of the students. When she heard me call her name she paused and glanced my way. She didn’t normally wear makeup, but I noticed that she’d put on lipstick today. “Yes?”

  “Thanks again for taking Tessa home last night.”

  “No problem.”

  My thoughts corkscrewed between her and Lien-hua, bothering me in a way that didn’t exactly bother me. “Listen, last night you asked me if there was anything you could do regarding this case. Were you serious?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, I think I can get you into the Joint Op program; it’s where NA students-”

  “Sure. Consult on cases in conjunction with NCAVC.”

  “You know about-”

  “It’s covered in the application process, Pat. It’s not a state secret.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “And, yes. I’d love to work with you.”

  I noted her choice of words: “with you” not “on the case.”

  To work with me.

  “But I’ll be in class most of the time this summer,” she said. “Almost every day.”

  “We’ll catch up in the evenings.”

  A slight pause, and with it, a smile. “That sounds doable.”

  “Great. So, actually I’m on my way to NCAVC right now for a briefing. If you’re not doing anything, why don’t you come along? We can put the paperwork through and I’ll show you around.”

  She hesitated. “That’d be nice, but the thing is…” She flicked her thumb toward the dining hall. “I missed breakfast. I need to grab a bite or I’ll never make it through the afternoon.”

  “We’ll pick up something on the way. My treat. For helping me out by taking Tessa home.”

  “Pat, you don’t owe me anything.” Her words had become taut. I might have offended her. “I told you before. I was only trying to help.”

  “Okay, then. You can treat me.”

  With my comment, the mood of the conversation softened, and she gave me a light, conspiratorial smile. “And why would I do that?”

  I thought for a moment, made a decision. “In exchange for me not prying into why you’re really here this summer.”

  “Well, then, your car or mine?”

  “Mine.”

  We started down the Gerbil Tube. “And where exactly did you have in mind?” she asked. “For lunch?”

  “Billy Bongo’s Burger Hut. It’s right on the way.”

  “Billy Bongo’s Burger Hut? You’re kidding me.”

  “Nope. Fastest fast food in town.”

  She shook her head. “You and your cheeseburgers.” That’s what she said, but underlying her words was a subtle message: I know you. What you like. We have a history together.

  “Well, I never get any burgers at home-one of the disadvantages of living with a teenage PETA member. I have to sneak out for one whenever I can.”

  “So now I know your dirty little secret.”

  “Everyone needs a couple of those.”

  And we stepped outside, into the day.

  Okay, so something wasn’t right.

  When the Library of Congress staff member asked to see the driver’s licenses of the couple in front of them in line, Paul whispered to Tessa that he needed to make a quick call and that he would be back in a minute, would meet up with her by the door. “You’re going to be all right?” he asked.

  “Sure, yeah.”

  “Good. Okay, I’ll be right back.”

  And as he walked away Tessa felt a quiet, tiny twitch inside of her, in the part of her where she needed most to feel safe. She didn’t know this man very well. Patrick was suspicious of him. She wasn’t supposed to be here, in the city, alone with him.

  Just chill.

  He’s your dad.

  She reminded herself that her mother had trusted him enough to sleep with him. And if her mom could trust him, she could too.

  Tessa moved forward in line, pulled out her wallet, and handed her license to the man.

  19

  The NCAVC building was actually an old warehouse that still had a sign out front for Tarry Lawnmower Supply. Posters of lawnmowers still filled the front lobby, the receptionist still answered the phone, “Tarry Lawnmower Supply, how can we meet your lawn service needs?”

  No sense advertising the headquarters for the FBI’s investigative group dedicated to studying and solving the nation’s most violent crimes, as well as the location of ViCAP, and the offices of the fifteen top behavioral profilers in the world.

  Cheyenne and I passed through security, I picked up the Joint Op paperwork at the front desk, signed the recommendation forms, and told her, “You’ll need to fill out the rest of these. Don’t worry, Ralph’ll send ’em through.” I handed her the pack of papers. “Try not to get writer’s cramp.”

  She weighed the stack in her hands. “I’ll try to not throw out my back first.”

  Ralph was on the phone when we entered his office. He gave Cheyenne a quick glance, and I realized that even though he’d visited me in Denver, the two of them had never met. I signaled to him that she was with me, then pointed to the Joint Op forms in her hand and he waved us through to the conference room.

  I led her inside.

  And found Lien-hua sitting at the table, paging through a file folder.

  Oh.

  She looked up as we entered. Her eyes flitted to Cheyenne.

  The phrase “unintended consequences” came to mind.

  “Lien-hua.” I said. “This is Detective Warren. From Denver.”

  “From Denver,” Lien-hua said.

  “We’ve worked together a few times.”

  “Seven,” Cheyenne said.

  “I see.” Lien-hua stood, extended her hand to Cheyenne. “Lien-hua Jiang.”

  Cheyenne shook her hand convivially. “Cheyenne Warren. So you must be the profiler Pat talks so much about.”

  “Really?”

  She gave Lien-hua a warm smile. “It’s all good, though, I assure you.”

  Lien-hua looked like she was about to respond, but before she could, Cheyenne added, “Pat and I just had lunch together, and he offered to show me around the center.” She held up the Joint Op papers. “And it looks like I’ll be helping with the case.”

  “Welcome to the team, then,” Lien-hua said in a tone that was impossible to read. “Detective.”

  “Thank you, I’m glad I’ll have the chance to work with you.” The two women had started talking around me, as if I weren’t even in the room.

  “And where did you go?” Lien-hua asked.

  “Oh, we just got here.”

  “No, for lunch.”

  “Billy Bongo’s Burger Hut.”

  For some reason I felt like I needed to defend myself. “It’s right on the way.”

  “Of course.” Lien-hua gave Cheyenne a wink. “Let me guess: he got the Ultimate Deluxe Classic Cheeseyburg Extreme, curly fries, and a medium Cherry Coke?”

  Cheyenne l
ooked at Lien-hua oddly. “Right on the very first try.”

  “Old habits die hard,” Lien-hua said.

  Okay. This was officially awkward.

  I heard heavy footsteps just outside the door, and I was relieved when Ralph flung it open and joined us. He tossed a stack of bulging manila folders onto the table and looked like he was about to launch right into the case, but took a moment first to introduce himself to Cheyenne, and based on my recommendation, he immediately signed her forms. “Finish it up, hand it in tomorrow,” he mumbled, but I could tell something was definitely weighing heavily on his mind.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “So here’s what’s up.” His tone was rough and hard. “That was Doehring on the phone. They just found Rusty Mahan. Dead. Hung himself sometime last night. Left a note confessing to Mollie’s murder.”

  A stretch of elegiac silence filled the room. Lien-hua slowly lowered herself into one of the chairs circling the conference room table. “Where was he found?”

  “Underneath the Connecticut Avenue bridge, near the riverbank. He was hidden in the trees. Never would have found him if the phone in his pocket hadn’t started ringing. A jogger heard it, saw the body.”

  “Was the note handwritten or typed?” I asked.

  “Typed. On his phone.”

  “Did we identify the caller?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I know, it’s all too convenient, but Doehring doesn’t think so. The kid had motive, means, and opportunity. You know Doehring. And here’s the clincher: he’s planning to go public with this at the top of the hour.”

  He glanced at the clock on the wall.

  11:35.

  “Just twenty-five minutes before this thing explodes,” Lien-hua said.

  Ralph motioned for us to take a seat. “That’s what we have to stop from happening.”

  Cheyenne chose the chair between me and Lien-hua.

  “Quick update,” Ralph said. “Margaret is in DC running point on the joint task force. We’ve set up the command post at Metro PD headquarters, third floor. So far we’ve got FBI, Metro PD, Capitol police, US Marshals on this.” He shook his head. “Probably call in the freakin’ Boy Scouts before this thing is over.”

  A deep breath, then he flipped open one of the folders. “All right. Here we go. Here’s what we know so far.”

  The woman wasn’t being cooperative.

  Okay. Enough with that.

  Brad forced a gag into her mouth.

  Tugged it tight.

  Looked at his watch.

  11:39.

  “You have until 3:00 this afternoon to live: three hours and twenty-one minutes left to reflect on eternity.” He took a breath. “I was hoping it wouldn’t have to go down this way. If you’d been more willing, things might have turned out differently.”

  She tried to cry out, but the gag swallowed the sounds.

  “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 so
mber. “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.