by Steven James
“Her condition proved to be fatal.”
“We arrived too late to save her.”
Platitudes.
Undoubtedly, officers would be following up with the family and friends, asking the typical questions: Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to harm her in any way? Did she mention any people she was meeting on the day she disappeared? Was she acting unusual prior to her disappearance? Did she know Rusty Mahan or Mollie Fischer?
And of course, they would be checking her address book and calendar, looking into her recent phone calls, searching for and then interviewing the last people who had seen her alive.
During my six years as a homicide detective in Milwaukee, I’d done my share of asking those questions and pursuing those types of leads, and I remembered how discouraging it can be to run into dead-end after dead-end.
Yet now, given the inscrutable actions of this week’s killers-switching the license plates, staging the crime scenes, using elaborate misdirection techniques, daring us to decipher their clues and anticipate their next move-I had a feeling even more dead-ends than usual were on the horizon.
I read on.
The task force was compiling a list of other potential suspects. So far they’d collected hundreds of names from tips and the case histories of hundreds of known offenders who’d committed violent crimes in DC and its neighboring states. The suspect pool was growing larger, not smaller, by the hour. In fact, two more names appeared on the active screen even as I was reading the report.
The team was still looking for Aria Petic.
No DNA had been found on the latex glove left in the parking garage. Apparently, it had never been worn.
Amazingly, the ERT hadn’t pulled anything useful from the handicap accessible van, except for a gas station receipt from last week that had no prints on it and DNA evidence that Mollie, Twana, and Rusty had been in the back. They followed up, but the receipt didn’t lead anywhere. No usable prints on the elevator button that the suspect had pressed, so evidently, he’d avoided touching it with the pad of his finger or had wiped it clean.
Dead-end after dead-end.
Dr. Trower, the District of Columbia’s medical examiner, confirmed that Twana had died from the chimpanzees’ attack. The bites on her neck had caused her to die from exsanguination.
However, according to him, there were lacerations on her face that could not have been caused by the chimpanzees. He speculated that since chimpanzees consume blood, the killers had inflicted these wounds prior to her death to attract the chimps’ attention. Although his theory was still unconfirmed, it seemed like a plausible explanation to me.
As of yet, there were no clear ties between Twana Summie and Mollie Fischer, Rusty Mahan, Congressman Fischer, or the research center. And the only connection Twana seemed to have to the Lincoln Towers Hotel was the use of her credit card to pay for the room-the credit card number that somehow did not show up on the hotel’s records. Which served as further evidence that one of the killers was a skilled hacker.
I considered Twana for a moment. It was entirely possible that the killers had chosen her simply because of her physical similarities to Mollie Fischer, but if that were true, they still would have needed to find her and follow her before abducting her. And that was a clue as to where they’d been earlier this week.
And since awareness space correlates to movement patterns, it was also a clue as to where they might be right now.
I pulled out the notes I’d scribbled yesterday afternoon while waiting for the doctor to look at my arm, and paged through them until I came to the list of locations related to the crimes. • The Gunderson Foundation Primate Research Center-chimp habitat, parking garage, research room (for the drug), security control center, other?? • The Lincoln Towers Hotel-room 809, the parking garage, the service elevator, the lower level storage room, other?? • The van in the handicapped parking space. • The taxicab’s pickup and drop-off points, the taxi itself. • The Connecticut Street bridge where Rusty’s body had been found. • Williamson’s Electronics Store-possibly. • The residences, work addresses, and travel patterns of Rusty Mahan, Mollie Fischer, Twana Summie, and Aria Petic.
Just a cursory look at the list told me that I had enough information for an initial geoprofile to begin narrowing down the most likely location for the killer’s home base.
I jotted a few questions: 1. What significance do these crime scene locations hold for the killers? Why the primate center? The Lincoln Towers? What’s the connection between the two of them? 2. How might the killer’s life have intersected with Mollie Fischer’s? Rusty Mahan’s? Twana Summie’s? The congressman’s? 3. Who was the woman who fled the Lincoln Towers Hotel with the unidentified man? Aria Petic? 4. How could the killers have gotten Mollie Fischer out of the hotel?
5. Did they?
I gazed at those last two words, considered once again what I knew about the case, and then wrote down one final question, a troubling one, but something that needed to be considered: was Mollie Fischer really abducted after all?
47
I stared at the question, thought about what we knew so far: Mollie was missing, she was not the victim we’d found at the research center, she’d been wheeled, apparently unconscious, through the door by an unidentified man, but as of yet there was no evidence that he’d harmed her. As far as we could tell, only two people had snuck out of the hotel, and if the male suspect was one of those two people and Mollie Fischer rather than Aria Petic was the second, it would explain why her body hadn’t been found.
The scenario seemed unbelievable to me, but I’d worked cases before with so many twists and turns that I didn’t want to discount anything.
Ralph was in Michigan and Margaret had ordered me not to work today, so I emailed Doehring with my thoughts and asked him to have an officer follow up on everyone who actually was registered at the Lincoln Towers Hotel yesterday to see if we could connect the dots between one of the guests and either Mollie or Twana. I also asked him to look more closely at Mollie Fischer’s background for any possible connections to alleged or confirmed criminal activity.
Then I dove into the geoprofile.
Cognitive maps differ not only in respect to people’s relationship with their surroundings but also in regard to their relationships with each other-married, single, divorced, as well as their age, sex, race, socioeconomic status, and the actual layout of the city in which they live.
Every one of us is only intimately familiar with a small fraction of our city’s or rural region’s overall area. And here is the key: the awareness space of a victim almost always overlaps, at least to some extent, with the awareness space of the offender. Which makes sense, because their lives intersected at least at the moment of the crime.
So that’s where I would start-the known travel routes and awareness space of the victims. And I could determine those by the locations of their most frequent credit card purchases, their club memberships, GPS locations of their past phone calls, and so on.
I placed the phone with the hologram projector onto the table in front of me, used a fire wire to connect it to my laptop, positioned my coffee cup next to the computer, and went to work.
6:02 a.m.
FBI Executive Assistant Director Margaret Wellington did not feed canned dog food to her purebred golden retriever, Lewis.
Absolutely not.
Gourmet food only, and now as she ripped open the bag, he must have heard the sound because he came trotting into the kitchen. Wagged his tail cheerily.
“Good morning, Lewis.” She scratched his neck and filled his bowl. After Lewis had taken a moment to nuzzle her hand, he turned to the food.
She collected her things and headed for the door.
Margaret was in the habit of leaving for work by 5:30 a.m., primarily to avoid the DC traffic but also to get in as much work as possible before Rodale loaded her plate with even more.
Today, however, she was already more than thirty minutes behind. And that di
d not make her happy, especially in light of her packed schedule for the day.
In addition to the drive to the city, she had at least three hours of work to do before the press conference scheduled at 9:00 a.m.
Impossible, but still she would be expected to do it.
She didn’t mind speaking to the press, it suited her, but she did not like cleaning up other people’s messes. And so far, that’s what this case was turning into-a complete mess.
First, she had the public outcry from Fischer’s misidentification of the homicide victim on Tuesday night. The right-wing bloggers were having a field day with that: “If he doesn’t even know his own daughter, how can he know what’s best for the country?”
Idiocy.
As well as unconscionable-taking advantage of a family’s loss solely for political gain.
It made her furious.
Fischer’s mistake might result in a lawsuit against the Bureau-even though the ME who failed to verify the young woman’s identity worked for the city and not the FBI. That’s what comes from these joint investigations-incompetency and unclear lines of authority. And in this case, since Rodale had assigned her to head things up, the buck stopped at her.
Not only did she need to deal with the Bureau’s public-relations black eye but also the distraught Summie family, the self-possessed congressman and his cronies, and an ever-shrinking investigative team.
Agent Hawkins was in Michigan.
Agent Bowers was recuperating.
Yesterday evening, before she’d spoken with Bowers, she’d read over the hospital’s report concerning his GSW and knew that it was more serious than he was letting on.
His recovery was necessary for the good of the investigation as well as the National Academy classes beginning on Monday. Despite his impertinence, he was the Bureau’s most qualified instructor in crime mapping and site analysis, environmental criminology and geospatial investigation, and she couldn’t afford to have him out of action and chance diminishing the Academy’s reputation as the premier law enforcement training facility in the world.
So yes, he needed rest, but she knew him well enough to guess that he was not the kind of person to listen to a doctor’s advice. So, for his own good, she’d quoted a bogus Bureau policy about agents who are injured in action being on mandatory medical leave for forty-eight hours.
And he’d actually seemed to buy it.
As she thought about him, she noted that one of the few characteristics she shared with Patrick Bowers was this: neither of them believed in coincidences.
She’d served on a committee last winter for a Defense Department program that had been terminated in February, and because of the nature of the project that the committee had been overseeing, she was almost certain it was no coincidence that the killers had chosen the Gunderson facility-however, because of the social and political implications of Project Rukh, she needed to tread lightly and confirm her suspicions before bringing them up with the task force.
For the moment, it was her job to keep all of these plates spinning in the air, and despite her experience and administrative acumen, she wasn’t sure she could do it.
But as she merged onto the highway and drove to work, she told herself that she could.
48
It took more than two hours to narrow down a possible hot zone where the killer might live or work, and I ended up with a ten-block radius in the business district of the city-not as precise as I would have hoped for, but at least it was a starting place for us as we began evaluating the home and work addresses of the people on the burgeoning suspect list.
I was emailing the data to Doehring when I heard Tessa moving around in her bedroom.
She doesn’t usually crawl out of bed until at least 10:00, and it wasn’t even 8:30 yet. I supposed that the emotional impact of finding out about the custody suit had stolen some of her sleep.
Since I didn’t want her to get a glimpse of my work, I shut off the hologram, and a few minutes later she shuffled into the kitchen, still bleary-eyed and in her pajamas but at least remotely conscious.
“Morning, Raven,” I said.
“Morning,” she managed to say. She moved in slow motion. She might have been a zombie.
“Trouble sleeping?”
She poured herself a cup of coffee, took a long, slow drink. “Yeah.” Then she gestured toward my arm. “I was worried about you.”
“About me?”
“Your scratch.”
“Well, thank you. It’s doing better. So, there’s a tender side to you after all.”
“Yeah, right.” She glanced at my phone, laptop, handwritten notes. “I see you’re already hard at work disobeying your boss.”
“I thought I’d get an early start.”
“Let me guess…” A yawn. “Trying to brush off conjecture with the facts until only the truth remains? Something like that?”
I stared at her. “Did you just make that up?”
She shrugged, rubbed a tired hand through her hair. “Sounded like something you might say.”
“I might want to use that in my lectures.”
“You must be desperate for material.” She drained her cup and went for a refill.
I slid my computer to the side. “Really, Tessa. Are you doing all right?”
She shrugged again. “You know.” Another yawn. “I gotta get dressed.”
While she took a shower, I spent some time finishing the paperwork for Margaret and the forms for the hospital. Soon the water in the bathroom turned off, and I started paging through some of the primate research Tessa had printed out.
I’d gotten through two articles when my computer’s video chat program blinked on and told me that Lien-hua was online.
After a moment’s consideration, I typed in, “Good morning.”
Waited.
It wasn’t long.
“Turn on your camera,” she wrote. “So we can talk.”
I did.
Her face appeared, a vase of artfully arranged flowers beside her. So, she was in her kitchen. Her sable hair was still unkempt, but it didn’t quiet her beauty.
Lien-hua appraised me for a moment, then said, “I would ask about your arm, but you’re just going to tell me that it’s okay, so let’s just skip that part. How are you, Pat? Really?”
“It feels like a bullet went through my biceps and I only got a few hours of sleep.”
My comment brought a smile and a small nod. “Thank you. And they’re saying it’s going to be okay?”
“No rock climbing for a few days. Other than that, I should be fine.”
“Ooh… that’s going to be rough. Think you’ll make it?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll have to take up something less strenuous. Like kickboxing.”
“Whenever you want a lesson, just let me know.”
I felt the intimate attraction I’d had for her returning. Maybe it had never left. “Be careful, I might take you up on that.”
“I’ll hold you to it.”
It wasn’t easy stifling my curiosity about what she and Cheyenne might have talked about last night when they had dinner together, but it wasn’t really my business and I refrained from asking about it. “How was the body farm yesterday?”
“Disturbing. That’s not really my thing.”
“I hear you.”
A pause. “Pat, I heard through the grapevine that Margaret put you on bed rest for the next couple days.”
“Just a nasty rumor.”
She nodded softly.
Silence took over the conversation, and I could sense the mood shifting, deepening. At last she said, “I have to tell you something.”
I waited.
She was slow in responding. “When I heard you were shot, I… Pat, everything between us, whatever it was that went wrong, when I found out you’d been hurt like that, it all seemed so minor. So inconsequential.” She pushed a rogue strand of hair from her eye. “I was so worried about you.”
Despite myse
lf, I noticed thoughts of Cheyenne skirting around inside of me, vying for my attention. I pushed them aside. “I should have called you last night-”
Lien-hua swept her hand through the air, as if she were erasing any missteps from our past. “It’s all right. I ended up calling Ralph, he’d just arrived in Michigan. He told me you were going to survive, unless he kills you for whining.”
I wanted to tell her that he’d yanked an IV out of my arm and that hurts and there were a lot of needles and everything, but realized that didn’t sound very macho. “Well, that’s thoughtful of him.”
Another pause-and again it seemed to move the moment deeper, shrink the space between us. “I’d like to see you,” she said, “but I’ll be at the command post at police headquarters for most of the day. Will you be in the city at all?”
“Actually, Vanderveld’s covering my classes. I have a meeting with Rodale at noon. So, yeah. I’ll be in DC for that.”
“There’s a briefing scheduled for 2:00. If your meeting doesn’t go too long, would you like to grab lunch with me afterwards? I just need to be done by 1:30.”
“Lunch sounds good. I’ll give you a shout when I’m ready to leave HQ.”
“Okay.” She let her eyes smile at me and drew me inescapably into her world. “I’ll talk with you later.”
“Talk to you soon.”
As I tapped the keyboard to end the chat, I noticed Tessa with her eyebrow ring, fresh black fingernail polish, and wearing a neobeatnik skirt over black tights, watching me from the doorway.
Patrick was staring at her judgmentally.
“What?” she asked him.
“You’ve gotten into a bad habit of eavesdropping on my conversations.”
“Actually, I’ve always had it, you’re just now noticing.” She stepped into the room. “Girl problems, huh?”
“No.”
“Mmm-hmm.” She took a seat facing him. “So, you’re confused about the two of them? Which one to pursue?”