by Steven James
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.”
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.” Some
thing 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.
Lien-hua ran the second set of plates while Cheyenne, Ralph, and I reviewed the footage to the point at which the emergency vehicles passed through the intersection at 7:14 p.m. on their way to the scene. No other Volvo sedans.
“OK,” Lien-hua said. “Both sets of plates are registered to Rusty Mahan.”
“Two sets of plates for the same car?” Cheyenne turned the keyboard toward her so she could tap at the keys, bring up the case files. “You’d need someone on the inside at the Department of Motor Vehicles to pull that off.”
Ralph shook his head. “No. A driver’s license, address, and a few bucks’ll get you plates.”
“Fake ID?” Lien-hua asked.
“Sixty bucks on the street.”
I shook my head. “I could see switching plates to avoid apprehension, but why switch them if you’re just going to leave the vehicle at the scene? Especially if you use plates registered to the same owner?”
The case seemed to be skewing into a completely different direction.
“All right, let’s think about this,” Lien-hua said. “IPR-OMI. Does that mean anything to anyone?”
“IP is your Internet Protocol,” Cheyenne said. “Your computer’s address within a network. ROM has something to do with computer memory.”
“Read-only memory,” Lien-hua said.
Cheyenne tapped at the keyboard. “IPROM stands for University of Illinois Probability Modules. A software program students use in their probability courses.”
Ralph cut in, “Lien-hua, you said our guy might be a hacker?”
“Yes. But what about the I at the end?”
We were quickly sinking into the quagmire of conjecture.
He shook his head. “OMI could mean ‘oh, my.’”
“Hang on a minute,” I said. “Rather than worry about what kind of hidden message the plates might contain, let’s find the DMV clerk who filed the registration papers and see if we can get a description of the person who applied for them. See if it was Mahan or not. We can have Angela Knight or the NSA’s cryptographers work the plate angle for us.”
No arguments.
“All right, bring up the video again, Cheyenne.” Then I addressed all three of them. “Is there anything else here? Anything we’re missing?”
She played the footage again.
The traffic light.
Red. Yellow.
“The facility’s cameras…” I mumbled, “the electronics store. .. the killers know video…”
Green.
“Wait,” I said. “Replay it.”
And at last I saw it.
I couldn’t believe I’d missed it earlier.
“Here, here, here. Watch it again. The traffic lights.” I leaned close to Cheyenne. Hit play. I caught the light, sweet scent of her perfume, tried to ignore it.
As the video played, I could see from the looks on everyone’s face that none of my colleagues had any idea what I was talking about. I moved the cursor back and pressed play one last time. “The light. Notice when it changes.”
We all watched as the car approached, the light turned green, the vehicle slowed, passed through the intersection, accelerated.
“He slows down,” Lien-hua said, “as he approaches the light.”
“Yes, as he approaches,” I said. “But it turns green while he’s at least thirty meters away. So why would he slow down on an empty street as he approached a light that just turned green?”
“It could be almost anything.” Ralph put an edge to his words, and it was clear he didn’t think this was significant at all. “He could have been distracted, on the phone, fiddling with the radio…” A stretch of thoughtful silence, then he mumbled the same thing I’d been thinking, “Or he wanted to get caught on camera.”
“That’s what I’m wondering,” I said. “Everything else so far has been set up to make us look in one direction while missing the obvious facts in another. They switched the plates and it looks like they wanted us to notice-but not right away.”
“Who would even guess that we would check this?” Lien-hua asked. “The traffic cams?”
“Someone who thinks like Pat,” Cheyenne said.
“But why?” Ralph asked. “Why would-”
My phone rang and my caller ID told me it was Missy Schuel, the lawyer.
Her timing couldn’t have been worse. I hated to step away from this conversation, but this was one phone call I couldn’t afford to miss.
It rang again.
“Hold that thought,” I told my friends. “I’ll be right back.”
I slipped into the hallway and answered my cell.
23
“Pat Bowers here.”
“Dr. Bowers, Missy Schuel. I received your message. I’m sorry I didn’t get back to your sooner, but my daughter threw up this morning, and I had to take her out of daycare.”
Of all the excuses to not return a call, taking care of your sick child had to rank near the top of the list, but it seemed oddly forthcoming for a lawyer to share that with a potential client.
“Is she all right?”
“Yes. Thank you for asking. She’s with a friend.” A brief transitional pause, presumably meant to bridge the conversation from personal matters to business. “Normally I’m not able to see new clients on such short notice, but I had a cancellation at 12:50. I can meet with you then for perhaps fifty minutes. It’s my only opening until the seventeenth.”
I glanced at my watch.
12:20.
Not gonna happen.
&
nbsp; I knew that Missy Schuel’s office was in downtown DC, at least a thirty minute drive from NCAVC, so even if I left immediately and sped all the way there, I’d barely make it, and considering how much Missy and I needed to discuss, I couldn’t think of any way I’d make it back to Quantico in time for my 2:00 class. “There’s nothing else? You’re sure?”
“Dr. Bowers, I can meet with you at 12:50.” No irritation in her voice, just professional formality. “Otherwise, I’ll be glad to give you the names and numbers of other lawyers I would recommend. Which would you prefer?”
“Are they as good as you are?”
“No.” A simple, frank assessment that impressed me.
I thought of Ralph’s list of all the agencies involved in this investigation, all the people on the case. They can get by for a couple of hours without you, Pat. Don’t mess around here. Do what’s best for Tessa.
“I’ll be there at 12:50.”
“All right. My office is located at 1213 11th St. NW. Park at the liquor store across the street. They don’t mind.”
“The liquor store?”
“I don’t have any parking here at my office, so I tell my clients to use their lot. Just don’t linger or they’ll think you’re there for a drug deal.”
My confidence in Ms. Schuel was beginning to falter.
“Okay.”
“I’ll see you soon, Agent Bowers.”
“Hang on. I told you I was a doctor; I didn’t say anything about being an agent.”
“I looked you up. I don’t like surprises.” And that was all.
We ended the call, and I hurried back to the conference room and collected my things, leaving my laptop for the team to use. “I need to go.”
Lien-hua gave me a look of concern. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.” I gestured toward the hallway. “Can I talk to you a moment?” As we left I noticed Cheyenne watching us curiously, but when she saw me look her way she focused on the computer monitor again.