by Steven James
She pulled it out and left him a rather unambiguous message on the screen of what he could do with his little gift phone, then dropped it in the trash can beside the front door as she left the museum. Go ahead, let him track it, find it, read it.
Enjoy that, Dad.
She fished out her own phone. Speed-dialed Patrick.
No answer.
Come on, pick up, pick up.
Nothing.
Dang.
She left a message, trying to make it seem like she wasn’t totally about to lose it, but it wasn’t easy.
Get back home.
Back to the house. Just get out of here.
At the street corner, she found a placard showing the location of the city’s Metro stations, located the nearest one that could get her to the VRE back to Virginia, and headed toward it.
Missy Schuel’s reception area was a small, cluttered nook of a room containing a desk piled high with papers, invoices, and legal pads filled with illegibly scribbled notes. No receptionist. An old TV sat in the corner of the room, sound off, mutely showing an empty podium with a flag beside it. Text at the bottom of the screen told me that Congressman Fischer’s press conference would be starting momentarily.
I’d dealt with enough crimes in the DC area to recognize the press corps room just outside the house minority leader’s office.
The place Ralph had told me to go.
A door to my left had a sticky note on it: “I’m in here.”
A sticky note.
Wonderful.
Brineesha said she’s good. At least give her a chance.
I knocked.
“C’mon in, Dr. Bowers.”
I stepped inside.
27
12:48 p.m.
A simple office.
Law manuals packed the bookshelves, a small window on the east wall faced another building less than five meters away. A laptop computer sat centered on her desk flanked by a small digital clock and a picture of three smiling children-one boy and two girls, all of whom appeared to be ten years old or younger. A neat, nearly empty inbox.
Missy Schuel was neither hefty nor slim, neither beautiful nor unattractive. Early forties, black hair fringed with a touch of gray. She made me think of an elementary school principal rather than a hard-nosed divorce attorney.
She stood and took my hand. “Dr. Bowers, pleased to meet you.”
“Call me Pat.”
“Missy.”
Before asking me about my situation with Lansing, she dove into an explanation of her own story: she was a mother of three who’d recently gone back to work after her husband left her last summer, he was a good man, she said, and it hadn’t been for another woman and she didn’t hold it against him.
Once again, strangely forthcoming.
And although I found it hard to believe, she really didn’t seem bitter toward her ex-husband, just wounded by him. I got the feeling that she’d been shattered by the fact that the man she’d given her life to had decided he would rather be alone than with her-a blow that I could only imagine might take a person a lifetime to recover from.
Still, as sympathetic as I felt toward her situation, I just wanted to get started and I think she could tell. “I only share this with you,” she explained, “so that you know I’m a single parent myself and that I can understand the types of struggles and issues you deal with. Every case is personal to me.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
We promptly discussed her fees, and in contrast to her office surroundings, she wasn’t cheap, but I accepted her terms. Then she told me she would only be able to meet until 1:20, twenty minutes less than I had thought, and we both took a seat. She positioned a legal pad in front of her. “I won’t lie to you, Agent Bowers. These things, these custody cases-they can be…” She seemed to be searching for the right word.
“Tricky,” I said.
A nod. “Yes. And painful. And confusing. Especially for the children.”
I felt a twist of anxiety, maybe even guilt, although I couldn’t think of anything I’d done that I should feel guilty about. “I’m aware of that.”
She lifted an impossibly sharp pencil, held it in her hand just so, the tip against the top line of the legal pad. “All right. From the voicemail you left me this morning, I understand that your stepdaughter’s biological father is trying to get custody of her.”
“Yes.”
I handed her the letter from Paul Lansing’s lawyers.
She studied it. Set it aside.
“Talk me through this. You first met Tessa when?”
My cell phone vibrated in my pocket, and I ignored it.
“About three months before her mother and I got married.”
“Three months.”
“Yes. Christie and I were engaged for only a short time.” I gave her the dates.
She wrote.
The phone continued to vibrate and I continued to ignore it.
A new habit of mine.
I kind of liked it.
She glanced toward my pocket. She must have noticed the muted sound of my phone. “And your marriage lasted?”
“Christie died four months after we married.”
Missy paused. “I’m very sorry.” The sympathy in her voice seemed honest and heartfelt, and I began to trust Missy Schuel with my case.
“Thank you.”
My phone stopped.
“Go on,” I said.
“May I ask-if you only knew Tessa for such a short time when her mother passed away, why didn’t you contact another relative to have him or her raise Tessa after Christie’s death?”
“Both of Christie’s parents died when Tessa was young. Christie didn’t have any siblings. And I had no way of knowing who, or where, her biological father was.”
“So there were no close relatives.”
“Not that I was aware of, no. Before she died, Christie asked me to take care of Tessa.” Another call was coming in, but I didn’t want any distractions, so I took a moment to still the vibrate function on my phone.
“Then you do have custody? Legal custody?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
A ray of optimism. Things were going to be okay after all.
But that’s not what Missy’s face told me as she asked me for more background. I took her through the story of how, after Christie’s death, I’d moved with Tessa from New York City to Denver in the hopes of putting some distance between us and our grief. At first we’d struggled to get along, but since my work schedule required seven or eight days of travel each month, mostly weekends, we were both able to get enough space to stay sane.
“And where did she stay during those times? When you were gone?”
“With my parents.”
I mentioned Tessa’s difficult times with self-inflicting-or cutting, as kids today call it-and then concluded by telling Missy about the weekend last October when our relationship began to improve. Pain had brought us together.
“She was abducted by a serial killer. He cut her and left her to die.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Yes, but I got to her in time. After that, I don’t know… maybe we both realized how much we’d always loved each other, needed each other, but had never really understood how to show it.”
“Does she have scars?”
“Pardon me?”
“You said he cut her. Does she have scars?”
The question seemed a bit intrusive. “Yes. She has a scar on her left arm. There’s a tattoo covering it, but it’s still visible.”
Missy wrote a few notes on her pad. I didn’t like that she scribbled in a style of shorthand that was impossible for me to read upside down. “And Paul Lansing,” she said, “what do we know about his relationship with Christie?”
“The few times I asked her about who Tessa’s father was, she only told me that he was no longer a part of their lives.”
Missy had her head down, staring at the paper, but no
w raised her eyes, gave me a slow, measured look. I sensed that she did not believe me.
“I didn’t press the issue with her. We all have some things that are too painful or awkward to share. Things we need to put behind us.”
“All right.”
“Tessa only found the diary with Paul’s name in it recently, a few weeks ago.”
A head tilt. “Diary?”
“Yes, Christie’s. From when she was in college. According to what she wrote, she had a short-lived relationship with Paul and that was all.”
“And did he choose to assert his rights as Tessa’s father at that time?”
I hesitated.
Missy watched me. Reading my face, my silence.
“Tell me.”
“When Christie found out she was pregnant she decided to have an abortion. He wrote to her, Paul did, begging her not to. She kept his letter in her diary. After she chose to have Tessa, there’s no mention of him again in the diary entries. But it wasn’t the letter that persuaded her. It was-”
Missy set down her pencil.
“I’ll need to see that letter. The diary too.”
Even though I knew it was wishful thinking, I’d hoped to keep those two items out of this. There was no way either Paul’s letter or the diary was going to help our case. “All right.”
“And after Christie passed away, you didn’t put any paperwork through to legally adopt Tessa?”
“I had custody. It never occurred to me to adopt her.” The more we spoke, the more off balance I felt, as if everything I’d thought was solid in my life was sinking, shifting.
A slim breath. “Tell me a little more about your stepdaughter.”
Brad was parked in the handicapped parking spot beside the Lincoln Towers Hotel.
He crawled into the back of the van, held the woman’s arm still, and slid the needle into her vein. Depressed the plunger.
The drug he was using would work quickly. It wouldn’t take long until she would be unconscious.
He removed the needle, sat back, and watched as her breathing slowed.
As her eyelids drooped.
As her body went limp.
She lay helpless beside him.
He unpocketed his phone and took some video. It wasn’t officially part of the plan. This video was just for fun. For his own personal use.
Then he pulled out the woman’s computer to hack into the hotel’s security system and loop the video footage on the back alley’s surveillance camera.
28
1:15 p.m.
Missy Schuel tapped her pencil against her desk.
“You mentioned that in the first eight months following Christie’s death, that you two-you and Tessa-struggled relationally.”
“Yes. Things were a little rough between us at first, but like I said, we didn’t know each other well, we were both hurting.” Our time was almost up, and I didn’t feel like we’d made much progress. There was still a lot to cover.
“All right.” Missy let out a careful sigh. “Here’s what I would say if I were Paul Lansing’s lawyer: after her mother’s tragic death, you uprooted the girl, moved across the country, and there, in Denver, pursued a job that took you away most weekends, forcing her to stay with your parents, whom she barely knew. You endangered her by allowing her into a life that no grieving teenager should have to experience. In fact, as a direct result of one of your investigations, she was abducted, suffered unimaginable mental duress, and was nearly killed.”
When Missy put things like that, I couldn’t imagine any judge landing on my side. “She was at an FBI safe house when she was taken.” The words seemed weightless. Without merit. “I did all I could to make sure she was safe.”
“I’m afraid that might not matter. The fact that this killer managed to find her and attack her, that’s all the judge is going to hear-especially if he sees that scar, and you can be sure Lansing’s attorneys will make that happen.”
I repositioned myself in my seat. “So where do we go from here?”
Rather than answering my question, she asked one of her own: “Do we know for certain that Paul Lansing is Tessa’s biological father?”
“We did a DNA test. It’s confirmed. He’s her dad.”
She slid her notebook aside. “I’m going to be honest with you, this diary, this letter, they trouble me.”
“It wasn’t the letter that convinced Christie to keep her baby.”
“I understand that, but his lawyers will argue that it was, and we can’t prove that his words didn’t influence her, at least to some extent.” After a pause, “Can we?”
“No.” I hated to admit it. “We can’t.”
Over the years I’d worked enough with the judicial system to know where all of this was leading. “He’s got a good case.” I didn’t ask it as a question.
“A tenuous case,” she corrected, but then hesitated for a long time before going on, and I had the sense that she was trying to find a way to put a positive spin on things. “Tessa would prefer being with you, rather than Paul, correct?”
Her question felt acidic, not because of her tone, but because I wasn’t certain of the answer. “Does that matter?”
“When a girl’s her age, yes, it does.”
“I think so.”
A nod. “And you are her legal guardian. You’ve been her sole caregiver and provider for over a year. That counts for a lot. It really does.”
She paused.
There was more.
“But?”
“But, Lansing apparently desired to be involved in her upbringing, and her mother denied him that. If indeed he is her biological father and took legal steps during Christie’s pregnancy to establish his paternal rights, he might… well, he might gain some sympathy from the judge. But listen to me, I’m good at what I do, and I promise I will do my best to help you keep sole custody of your daughter.”
“Stepdaughter.”
“No, your daughter,” she said simply, leaving me to interpret that as I chose.
She glanced at the clock on her desk, and my eyes followed hers.
1:18 p.m.
“I need to go,” she said. “We’ll talk soon.”
We both stood. “Get me that diary and the letter. Today.” She jotted an address on the back of a business card. “If you can’t get it here before 6:00, drop it off at my house.” She handed me the card. “And I’ll contact Paul Lansing’s lawyers. I’ll want to meet with them as soon as possible.”
I hesitated. “Why as soon as possible?”
“People only cower when they’re afraid or have something to hide. We don’t want it to look like we’re stalling or dragging our feet. If we move forward quickly and confidently, it’ll show the judge the truth: that we have a solid case and nothing to fear.”
I liked the way she thought. “I’ll get them to you.”
“One last thing. Does Paul Lansing know that you have his letter and Christie’s diary?”
I let out a small breath. “We showed it to him when we met in Wyoming, when we first met him.”
She kept her face expressionless. Pointed to her card. “Call my cell if you think of anything else that might be helpful. Anything at all. No secrets. Remember-”
“You don’t like surprises.”
“See you soon.”
As I left her office, I glanced at the television screen in the corner of the receptionistless reception area. The congressman was stepping away from the podium. I punched up the volume just in time to hear a female correspondent say, “Bob, to reiterate, Congressman Fischer has just announced that Rusty Mahan, the primary suspect in the case, has been found dead in an apparent suicide. We don’t know the details yet, but we will be covering this breaking story closely as events unfold.”
Great.
While the reporter went on to summarize Fischer’s press conference, his daughter’s smiling photo floated in the upper left-hand corner of the screen and I realized that, apart from the brief glimpse at Cheyenne’s
cell before I left the Academy to go to the scene, I had yet to see Mollie’s face.
I observed her closely now. She had a thin jawline, jade eyes, an attractive dimple-I caught myself overlaying her features against the gruesome, chewed-off remains I’d seen the night before, and quickly I blinked the image away… light complexion, a pair of earrings in each ear, a small, delicate nose A shiver ran through me.
It can’t be!
I yanked out my phone, speed-dialed Ralph. He answered immediately, harshly: “Pat, you are in deep-”
“Listen to me,” I said. “Did Mollie Fischer wear contacts?”
“What?”
The picture disappeared from the television screen.
“Contacts. Did she wear contact lenses?”
“What are you-”
“Check it, Ralph. The case files!”
A long pause accompanied by the click of keystrokes.
“No,” he said. “No glasses either. What’s going on?” The hot anger I’d heard in his voice only a moment ago was gone. I felt like we were on the same page again.
“It’s not her.”
“What?”
“The woman we found at the primate facility, it’s not Mollie Fischer. The dead woman had only a single piercing in each ear, Mollie has two; and the iris found at the scene was blue. In her AP photo, Mollie’s eyes are green, and since she didn’t wear contacts-”
“But she was positively IDed by her own father,” he mumbled, and I couldn’t tell if he was disagreeing with me or simply thinking aloud.
“Her face was missing.” I was rushing out the door.
Of course she was positively IDed, everything else pointed to her. The killers had dressed her in Mollie’s clothes, left her with Mollie’s driver’s license, purse, ring, necklace, phone. The depth of the deception we’d fallen for was staggering.
Mollie Fischer might still be alive.
I hit the sidewalk running.
Mollie had been missing for nearly twenty-one hours, and with every minute our chances of finding her grew slimmer; Ralph knew all of this, I didn’t need to tell him. “Call the congressman,” I said. “Tell him to announce it now, at this press conference. If Mollie is alive-”
“Yeah, I know. The public can help. Get to the Capitol, Pat. If he doesn’t listen to me, you can talk to him in person.”