by Steven James
Brad said, “It doesn’t matter what.”
Predator. Prey.
Control over hope.
“Time’s up,” Astrid said.
“No, no, no,” Mollie cried. “Rusty. Okay, Rusty, please.”
And as the woman asked to see the face of the young man she had loved, the man who was already a corpse, Astrid felt sweet excitement, the same frisson of dark pleasure she’d felt last month when the EMS dispatcher kept asking the corpse of Jeanne Styles if it was okay.
“Are you hurt?”
No, hurt is a whole different thing.
Rusty had been in the van with her, tied, gagged, blindfolded, last night. But she hadn’t even known.
Prey.
“All right.” Astrid gestured toward the woman’s computer. “Do you have a picture of him?” The schedule was tight, but she wasn’t willing to give up this part of the game.
A nod.
“Where?”
“My photos.” Mollie sounded frightened, desperate as she nodded toward the computer. “In iPhoto.”
Astrid gestured to Brad, and he opened the computer’s directory to find the files.
Twana Summie.
She was a college student from northern Virginia who attended Gallaudet, hadn’t been seen since Tuesday morning, and her Visa card had been used to book two nights-last night and tonight-at the Lincoln Towers Hotel.
So: a college student booking two nights at a hotel that charges six hundred dollars per night for a room? At a hotel that close to her college?
“Turn around,” I told Doehring. “Get us to the Lincoln Towers Hotel.” It was downtown. Close.
“You have something?”
“I might.” As I told him what I’d found, he whipped the car around and I pulled up Twana’s DMV records to see if she shared enough physical characteristics with Mollie to have been the victim we found in the Gunderson Foundation Primate Research Center.
Astrid found the photos of Rusty and Mollie, and when she pulled up one of the young couple on the beach, Mollie nodded, closed her eyes, nodded again.
It was a quaint picture. A dock with a sailboat in the background. A lightly clouded horizon and blue ocean beyond them-sun and sea and scalloped sky. Rusty’s arm was draped around her shoulder, and she was leaning tenderly against his chest.
“It’s nice.”
“I’ll do anything. Please, just-”
“Shh.” Brad laid a hand on the woman’s shoulder. A nurturing gesture. “Calm down. All will be well.”
Astrid looked at him and loved him and desired him.
She let her finger graze across the picture of Rusty. “He’s very handsome. You made a good choice. To die looking at him.” Then to Brad: “Turn up the volume on the television.”
Yes.
Although Twana was slightly taller than Mollie, she had the same build and hair color.
“That’s it.”
I felt the net tightening.
Twana’s credit card had been used to book a room at the hotel tonight, her abductors might be there… if they brought Mollie.. .
Too many ifs.
The hotel was two blocks away.
I called their number to find out which room Twana Summie was staying in.
And they put me on hold.
Astrid used the cursor to highlight the picture of Mollie and Rusty at the seashore, hit delete, and then emptied the trash so that the picture was gone now and forever. “How did I do?”
Mollie’s fear subsided briefly, turned to confusion. “What?”
“Did I have you convinced?”
“You’re going to let me go?” A glimmer of hope in her voice. “You’re not gonna hurt me?”
“No. I mean did you think I was going to let you look at that picture while you died?”
Astrid noticed that Brad looked as surprised as the woman.
“What is this?” Brad asked.
“I had you too?” Astrid felt a tickle of satisfaction.
“Had me?”
“Believing that I would let her look at something pleasant while you killed her?” She spoke to him as if Mollie were not there. As if she were already dead.
Mollie begged, “No, no…” Terror rising in her eyes.
Brad looked slightly betrayed, and that bothered Astrid. What was his problem? It was all part of the game. “Don’t pout.”
“It wasn’t in the plan.”
“I thought it would be more fun this way. And it was, wasn’t it? It was more fun.” She kept her eyes locked on his until at last he looked away.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “It was more fun.”
“Why do you think I had you take the video of Rusty last night?”
Brad was quiet.
“Video of Rusty?” the woman said. “What did you do to him!”
Astrid had a feeling what would happen when she showed Mollie the footage of her boyfriend struggling for breath at the end of the rope.
She picked up the gag and turned to her.
“I’ll show you.”
Doehring and I rushed through the doors of the Lincoln Towers Hotel.
Adrian Lees, the manager, was waiting for us.
Mid-forties. Slim. Tailored suit. Small goatee, neatly trimmed. “I’m the CEO,” he said. “Here at the Lincoln Towers. We checked the system.” He paused at awkward intervals as he spoke, chopping his sentence into odd, bite-sized pieces. “No one by the name of Twana Summie has a room here.”
What?
“No credit card charges?”
He shook his head.
But that’s not possible…
“Take us to your control center,” I said.
His face was flushed. “Is everything all right?”
“No,” Doehring growled. “The control center! Now!”
Lees motioned toward the hallway behind the registration desk. “This way.”
After my initial surprise that there were no rooms reserved in Twana’s name, I realized that the glitch, the inconsistency, was a clue that we were on the right track-but we still had no way to know if our suspects were on-site. As soon as we could confirm My phone rang.
Ralph.
“Yes?” I answered. I was hurrying down the hallway, following Lees.
“The videos. I just got word.”
“Tell me.”
“A cleaning lady-name of Aria Petic. No video of her entering the building either before 5:00 or after 7:00, but she left immediately after the EMTs arrived. We’re looking for her.”
“Do we have her face on tape?”
“Mostly obscured. Only a partial.”
At least we could get her pace, stride, approximate height. “Send it.”
End call.
Game on.
30
Astrid played the two-minute-and-fifty-one-second video chronicling Rusty’s death, first the preparation, then footage of him dangling beneath the bridge, clawing uselessly at the rope cinched around his neck, and the voice of her father, her dead father, spoke to her, With each passing second, the young man became less and less animated. Less frantic. More submissive to the inevitable. The final denouement of his ever-shrinking world.
Mollie had stopped trying to scream now and was watching the video with large, terrified, broken eyes.
Predator.
Prey.
The game.
Astrid tapped the space bar to pause the video, then said to Brad, “All right. Let’s send that message to the FBI.”
He went to the duffel bag to pull out the items he would need.
On the way to the control center, I asked Doehring if he’d interviewed anyone named Aria Petic, and he mentally clicked through his list of names. “No, I don’t think so.”
We arrived, and I immediately noted that the hotel had a better security surveillance system than most FBI field offices. Six attendants monitored an array of video screens stretching across the wall, each person’s eyes flickering from one screen to the next as the images c
hanged to show different angles and hallways of the hotel.
Twenty-eight screens.
State of the art.
Adrian Lees introduced us to his head of security. “This is Marianne Keye-Wallace. Used to work for the NSA. She’ll help you. With anything you want.” Platinum blonde. Careful, steady eyes. She couldn’t have been more than thirty, but high-tech security positions rely more on brains and adaptability than either brawn or experience.
Without waiting for our names, she told Lees, “We’ll call you if we need you.” Then she promptly took a seat beside one of the computers turned to us. “Talk to me.”
“Are there any guests here by the name of Aria Petic, Twana Summie, or Mollie Fischer?” I said.
Marianne’s fingers were light and spidery on the keyboard. Lees hovered for a moment, then disappeared. “No,” she said. “What are we looking for here?”
It would take too long to explain. I pulled up the video of Aria Petic that Ralph had just sent me. “Do you have facial recognition on your video surveillance system?”
“Of course. Facial, audio, video.”
I handed her the phone. “Upload this picture. I need to know if this woman is in this hotel.”
The folded-up wheelchair leaned against the wall beside the room door, the duffel bag next to it. The suitcases that Astrid had brought into the hotel last night sat beside that.
Brad was busy with Mollie.
Astrid made the call to the front desk.
No footage of Aria Petic.
“You gotta be kidding me.” Doehring smacked the wall.
“What else?” Marianne asked, fingers poised at the keyboard.
Come on, come on, come on.
“We’re looking for…” I began, but my thoughts distracted me.
The key is Mollie. Everything revolves around her.
“Yes?” Marianne asked.
“Go online. Pull up the AP photo of Mollie Fischer.”
It took seconds.
“Do a search. If she’s here, I want to know what room she’s in. Pull up any video of her entering or leaving the hotel since 7:00 last night.” I figured we’d start there and work backward, if necessary to 4:00, when she was last seen.
A few minutes later Marianne found footage of Mollie in a wheelchair, being pushed into the hotel by an unidentified man wearing a baseball cap that completely hid his face from the camera, which told me he knew the camera’s angle and location before he even approached the building.
Follow up on that. If he knows where the cameras are, he’s likely to have been here before, scouting out the site.
Later, later, later.
Because, for now, we also had footage of them entering a service elevator inside the hotel. “Where do they exit the elevator?” I asked. “Which floor?”
“There’s no way to know. We only have surveillance cameras covering the guest elevators on each floor, not the service elevators.”
“Have they left the building?” Doehring said.
“Let me find out.” Marianne let her fingers loose on the keyboard.
She did another facial recognition search, then shook her head. “Unless they found a way to get past our cameras, they’re still inside.”
But that was enough for Doehring. He was on his radio calling for backup to set up a perimeter around the hotel; in less than five minutes, we would have the area secured.
“Have security seal off all the exit doors,” I said to her. “The suspect transported Mollie into the hotel in a wheelchair, so look for a handicapped-accessible vehicle outside. And go back to the footage of him entering the elevator. I’ve got an idea.”
31
The video revealed that after the man entered the elevator, he reached out to press one of the floor’s buttons before the doors closed and the two of them were gone.
“Back it up.”
She did.
“Pause it.”
The image froze.
I pointed. “There. Which button is he pressing? Which floor?”
“Hang on.” Marianne slid the cursor, zoomed in, then cursed. “I can’t tell. The angle is wrong.”
“Download that to my phone.”
She connected my cell to her system, tapped at her keyboard, then seconds later handed back the phone, the image frozen on the screen.
“He might have changed clothes, but circulate this image to security,” I said. “Let’s see if we can get an ID. And call every room, leave a recorded message that security’s looking for a missing wheelchair. Let’s see who tries to sneak away. And no one leaves this hotel.” I started for the door. “Where’s the service elevator he used?”
“Take a left out the door, at the end of the hall go through housekeeping. The elevator will be on your right.”
Doehring and I took off.
Everything had been arranged.
Mollie was not going to be a problem for them.
Astrid glanced at her watch.
“We need to move,” she said to Brad, who was taking care of the room.
“Almost done.”
We made it to the elevators.
I studied the video on my phone, the height of the man’s hand in relationship to the floor numbers… the angle of the camera in the hall… then I stood in the same place he had, raised my hand to the same level as his, and played the video again.
It was possible the suspect pressed a second button after the elevator doors closed, but we had to start somewhere.
Doehring and I scrutinized the video. “What do you think?” I said. “Floor eight or nine?”
He shook his head. “I can’t tell.”
“Send security to both floors, sweep the rooms. You take nine. I’ll get eight.” I sprinted for the stairwell at the end of the hall.
Astrid and Brad were just about to leave the room when the phone rang.
Both of them stared at it.
Another ring.
Then, ever so faintly, they heard simultaneously ringing phones in the adjoining rooms.
“They know,” Brad said. “Somehow they know.”
She shook her head. “That’s impossible. You took care of the cameras, right?”
“Yes.”
But as the phones continued to ring, Astrid felt, for the first time since they’d started their games, a small nervous twitch of anxiety. She hesitated for a moment, then, with a gloved hand, picked up the room phone, listened to the message. Hung it up. “We need to leave.”
Brad said nothing, went to the door, peered out the peephole, then eased the door open a crack. Checked the hallway. “It’s clear.”
She picked up the laptop.
“Careful,” he said. “You don’t want to-”
“Drop it. I know.” She nodded toward the door, where their things were sitting. “Get those.”
He did.
They slipped into the hall.
Eighth floor.
Legs screaming from the sprint up the stairs.
My. 357 SIG P229 in hand, I threw open the door to the hallway.
Two maids, a few kids in swimming suits running down the hall to their room, a bellhop pulling a luggage cart, two security personnel knocking on doors.
They’d gotten here fast. Good.
Good.
No sign of the suspect.
I flashed my creds. “Anything?” I called to the guards.
“No,” one of them replied.
“No one leaves this floor. Understand?”
“Got it.”
I bolted down the hallway, then to an adjacent hall to the east.
And as I flared around the corner, I saw a man pause at the door to the stairwell at the far end of the hallway about thirty-five meters from me. He wore the same clothes as the man who’d been caught on the security video pushing the wheelchair.
“Stop,” I shouted, “FBI!”
He glanced over his shoulder, his face shadowed by the cap. He reached toward his belt.
A gun.
; He’s going for a gun!
I leveled my SIG. “Hands to the side!”
He hesitated.
“Now!”
But a door opened between us, and an elderly couple left their room. “Get down!” I yelled.
They were terrified and hesitated. The man by the stairwell door ducked through and disappeared.
“Get back in your room!” I shouted to the couple, and I raced down the hallway even as I yanked out my cell, called Doehring. “Get someone to the southeast stairwell. First floor. Now!”
Past the terrified couple.
Seconds ticked.
Ticked.
To the stairwell door.
Readied myself.
Threw it open.
Footsteps below me.
Weapon ready, I swung around the corner, scanned the area, and saw someone rounding the stairwell far below me. “Stop!”
I tried to tell if there were two sets of footsteps or just one.
Two, I thought, but I couldn’t be sure.
One suspect or two?
Advice from my training: Always assume the greater threat.
Two.
Quickly I checked the landing above me for any accomplices.
No one.
Then I flew down the stairs, taking them three at a time.
Astrid and Brad had made it to the first floor.
Brad had his Walther P99 in one hand and cautiously pushed the door open with the other.
No cops.
Two doors before her. She pointed to the underground parking garage sign, just ahead on the left.
“Wait,” Brad said. His eyes were on the oversized freight elevator. “I have an idea.”
Ground level.
I burst through the door.
No one.
But the doors of a freight elevator at the end of the hall were closing. “Stop!”
I rushed forward, my heart hammering from my sprint up, then down eight flights of stairs.
And from adrenaline.
And from the hunt.
By the time I arrived, the doors had closed. I pressed the up button. Steadied myself. Leveled my gun.
They slid open.
Empty.
I raced to the parking garage.
Scanned the stretch of concrete and cars.
And saw a latex glove on the ground about five meters away, directly to my right.
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