Close Your Eyes

by Iris Johansen

  Lynch examined the badge clip before putting it on. “You’re right. Sharp little teeth on this thing.”

  She turned toward Lynch. “I know there are some things you’re not telling me. I haven’t cared enough to press the point, but I will not even consider helping you until you tell me everything there is to know.”

  He nodded. “Would you believe me if I said I didn’t want to influence your perceptions just yet?”

  “There’s not much chance of that. I trust my own judgment far too much to be so easily swayed.”

  The corners of his lips indented in a half smile. “I’m starting to realize that.”

  She heard the elevator chime and a familiar set of footsteps approaching from the other side of the guard desk. “We’ll talk later … if I’m interested.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Agent Bill Santini appeared, a sandy-haired man of medium height. His middle-age paunch had grown since the last time she had seen him, Kendra noticed. “Kendra, Lynch … Good morning.” His monotone was meant to be without expression. It was not—he was definitely pissed off.

  “Good to see you, Bill,” Kendra said. “So you got picked to take us up. Does Griffin still put you in charge of the afternoon Starbucks run?”

  He scowled and turned around. “Follow me.”

  Kendra smiled. Santini might have been helpful when she’d pumped him for information about Lynch but the truce was clearly over. And Santini was so easily annoyed by her that she just couldn’t resist scoring off him.

  “Can you at least try not antagonizing them?” Lynch murmured.

  “Can’t help it. Just comes naturally.”

  Santini escorted them to the fifth floor, where Kendra noticed that she and Lynch were attracting a lot of attention—some of it hostile, some merely curious—as they walked past the offices and cubicles. He stopped at the small conference room and motioned for them to step inside. He followed and closed the door behind them.

  The head of the San Diego office, Special Agent in Charge Michael Griffin, stood and walked toward them. He was a fiftyish man with silver hair, and as far as Kendra had ever been able to tell, no sense of humor. “I was surprised when Lynch told me you would be joining him, Kendra. I’m not sure there’s much you can do for us here.”

  “I’m not sure either, Griffin. Let’s find out.”

  Griffin motioned toward the only other person in the room, a young blond woman with shoulder-length hair. “Kendra, this is Special Agent Sienna Deever. She’s been working this case with us for the past few weeks.”

  Sienna stepped forward and eagerly shook her hand. “A pleasure, Dr. Michaels. I’ve been reading up on the other investigations you helped along. I’m impressed.”

  Kendra smiled. Sienna possessed an enthusiasm that characterized many agents just out of the academy. She hadn’t been beaten down. Yet. “Don’t be too impressed with me, Sienna. It could make you very unpopular around here.”

  Sienna’s face froze as she decided how to react.

  Griffin brushed past her and motioned toward a series of whiteboards running down the length of the room. “Let’s get started. We have a case file, of course, but this is probably a better way to get a quick grasp of what we’re dealing with. These are our victims. Three women and two men. Age range from thirty-five to forty-seven.”

  Kendra looked at the whiteboards, which featured a driver’s license photo of each victim, crime-scene shots, and vital stats. She paid particular attention to the crime-scene photos. “Serial killers don’t usually mix genders like this. Were they each attacked in similar surroundings? At home?”

  “Three were, two weren’t.”

  Sienna pointed at the photographs. “Tricia Garza, Monica Sellers, and Nick Wagner were killed at home. Stephanie Marsh and Steve Conroy were killed in public places, a parking garage and a city park.”

  Kendra studied the crime-scene photographs. “It looks like Garza, Sellers, and Wagner lived in detached single-family homes. Correct?”

  Sienna nodded. “The other two lived in apartments.”

  “Less private, easier to be seen coming and going,” Kendra said. “Probably why these two were attacked elsewhere.”

  Griffin dropped down in one of the diamond-backed chairs. “That’s how we see it. These people were targeted.”

  Kendra tried to detach herself emotionally from the horrific images on the board, but she couldn’t. She never could. Others in the room could look at the splayed bodies and awful grimaces as mere puzzle pieces, but she would never have that facility.

  Thank goodness.

  But she was positive they would sleep better than she would that night.

  She turned from the photos. “Different murder venues. Again, not typical for a serial killer. So what’s the connection? There has to be one, or else you guys wouldn’t be involved.”

  Griffin looked at Lynch. “You haven’t told her?”

  “I’m letting you take it, in case she has follow-up questions.”

  Griffin exchanged quick glances with the other two agents. “We haven’t gone public with this yet. We’re actually not even sure what it means.”

  They were clearly uncomfortable discussing it with her, Kendra realized. “Why all this buildup, guys?”

  “What we’re about to tell you can’t leave this room.”

  She half smiled. “My, my, you sound like someone in a grade-B movie. It’s not as if I’m going to run out and sell the story to Rolling Stone. You seriously overestimate my interest in this case, Griffin.”

  She’d done it again. Kendra could see them stiffen and draw away from her.

  Sienna quickly stepped forward, as if to get between Kendra and her superiors. “Dr. Michaels, perhaps I should tell you that I was brought into this investigation because I’m a toxicology expert.”

  “Poisons?”

  “Yes. I’ve published quite a few papers on the subject. I was actually an Army physician before I joined the Bureau.”

  “Now it’s my turn to be impressed. But the bodies in these pictures don’t look as if they were poisoned.”

  “They were, believe it or not. Every one of them.”

  Kendra glanced back at the photos of corpses lying in pools of their own blood.

  “It obviously isn’t what killed them,” Sienna said. “But that’s our common thread. They each had the same contaminant in their systems. It was discovered almost by accident in the first victim’s autopsy.”

  “What contaminant?”

  Sienna shook her head. “We don’t know.”

  Kendra’s brows rose. “That’s your expert opinion?”

  “I’m afraid so. We have half a dozen labs working on it, but so far we can’t identify the substance.”

  “I’m not sure I understand. You say that this contaminant isn’t something that killed them…”

  “It might have, if they had lived longer. We do know that this contaminant, whatever it is, appears to be a base-altering mutagen. It invades the system and actually alters the DNA.”

  “That’s not so rare, is it? There are insecticides that do that.”

  “This is no insecticide.”

  “Just how does it alter the DNA?”

  “Hard to say without knowing exactly what we’re dealing with.” Sienna peeled back several pages of a flip chart on an easel until she came to a large molecular drawing. “Here’s what it looks like, at least on a molecular level. We just don’t know where it came from or what its purpose is.”

  Kendra stared at the drawing. “You’re telling me this contaminant is something no one has ever seen before, except in the bodies of these five murder victims?”

  “That’s the way it looks.”

  “Interesting.” Kendra scanned the vital stats written beneath the photos of each victim. “Did they ever cross paths with each other?”

  “Not as far as we can tell. They lived and worked in different parts of the city, and there’s no evidence of any kind of environmental ex
posure that could have affected just these people.”

  Kendra studied the victims’ photos a moment longer. “You’re doing a good job keeping this under wraps from the media,” she said slowly. “I’m finding that unusual. Why don’t you go public with this?”

  “The killer doesn’t know we know about this,” Griffin said. “It’s the one strategic advantage we have.”

  “‘Strategic advantage’? Shouldn’t people be warned that there’s a killer on the loose?”

  Santini broke in, “What possible purpose could that serve? If there were a geographic pattern to the killings, we could warn people. But the killer has struck at different times and in different places. Anybody’s at risk.”

  “Anybody, apparently, with this chemical in their systems,” Kendra said. “How did you first discover this? You said it was almost an accident. Was it the medical examiner’s autopsy?”

  “No,” Griffin said. “It’s clear the examiner was obviously a moron.”

  Sienna shook her head. “In all fairness, nobody performing a standard autopsy on a stabbing victim would have discovered this. It’s a miracle we latched on to it at all. The first victim had donated her body to UC San Diego Medical Center, where they happen to be in the midst of a major air-pollution study and the environment’s effect on people of various ages. They ran a battery of tests on her organs and body tissues. That’s how they discovered it, and it was unusual enough that they reported their findings back to the police department. The second body was still in the morgue, so we decided to check it out. The substance was identical, and so were the levels. The same has held true for the other victims.”

  Kendra nodded. “And you’re positive the substance wasn’t injected into the victims at the time of their murder?”

  “Positive,” Sienna said. “It had been in their systems for varying amounts of time but no less than a few weeks.”

  Kendra tried to absorb it all as she stared absently out the window. She wanted to bolt from the room, take the elevator down, and leave all this behind her.

  Dammit.

  “Kendra,” Lynch said.

  She turned around. “Let’s talk about Jeff.”

  “He’s the only reason you’re here, isn’t he?” Griffin’s lips twisted. “To hell with the case.”

  Calm down. Don’t let this asshole piss you off.

  It didn’t do any good. She was pissed and to hell with trying to hide it. “You bet it is. What do you expect? This is your case, not mine. I know you don’t want me on it. If I thought you could do a decent job of finding him, I wouldn’t have to be here.”

  “I can’t tell you how much we appreciate your barging in here to show us how much more brilliant you are than the rest of us,” Santini said sarcastically.

  Lynch held his hands up as if to block the imminent body blows between them. “Come on, I asked for her help. She knows Agent Stedler better than any of you do, and unless I’m mistaken, she’s been of considerable help to you in the past. I know that you’ve been told to extend every courtesy to me while I’m here, and that also goes for Dr. Michaels. Are we clear?”

  Sienna was the only one who nodded.

  “How far along was Jeff in his investigation? Was he getting close?” Kendra asked. “Has there been any indication that he or any of you might be in danger?”

  There was no answer, but Griffin finally broke the silence. “No,” he said. “Sienna here was working the medical aspect of the case, which frankly holds far more promise than anything he was doing. He was running the straight procedural angle, getting statements from family members, coworkers, the usual. He had come up with nothing.”

  “I want to see his desk.”

  “Sure, but there’s nothing to see.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure,” Lynch said. “Remember who’s doing the looking.” He gestured toward the door. “By all means, Kendra.”

  Griffin shrugged. “Whatever.”

  Griffin led the group out of the conference room and past the long row of cubicles they had passed on the way in. They rounded the corner, and Kendra found herself standing in front of Jeff’s desk, bordered on the front and right sides with the same green partitions that marked off all of the office’s cubicles.

  Although she had stood in his apartment less than twelve hours before, she found herself more saddened and unsettled by the sight of his desk. Somehow, this seemed more … him. In addition to the piles of paperwork, there was the photograph of his sister and late parents, and his autographed Sammy Sosa home-run ball, which he had once confided was merely a forged duplicate—the original was secured in his safety-deposit box, protected from any after-hours cleaning crews brazen enough to rip off an agent in the heart of an FBI field office. It was where he felt most at home, more than at his condo, more than with most of his friends and family, and certainly more than he had ever been with her.

  She studied the cluttered desktop as she spoke. “You have the voice memos from his pocket recorder, right?”

  Santini nodded. “Lynch called and told us that you wanted those. We transferred them all to a thumb drive. It’s about thirty hours. If you’d rather have a transcription…”

  “I’ll take both, thank you.” She pointed to the computer. “Have you searched his files in here?”

  “Of course. The only pertinent records were already in the case file.”

  “How about his Internet search history?”

  “We haven’t taken it that far yet.”

  “No time like the present.” She hit the space bar of his keyboard. An FBI splash screen came up with a password prompt. “What’s his password?”

  Griffin shook his head. “We don’t know. I can have an IT guy come and give us access, but I’ll have to review it before we can release that information to you. This wasn’t his only case.”

  Bureaucracy at work. As if she gave a damn. Kendra picked up the keyboard and angled it into the light and inspected it closely as she shook it for a long moment. She spent another few seconds lightly running her fingers over the rows of keys, pausing occasionally to retry a section. She then placed it back onto the desk, quickly punched a few keys, and watched as Jeff’s secure desktop appeared on the screen.

  “You knew his password?” Sienna said.

  “Not immediately. If you know Jeff, you know that his computer is always password-protected after five minutes of inactivity. He’s constantly coming back to check e-mail without sitting down, and when he does, he uses his right index finger to enter the password with a ridiculous amount of force. It’s as if he’s trying to drill through to the desk. I could see that some of the password keys are loose and the others I could feel. The springs are shot to hell. His laptops at home have always been the same way.”

  Sienna was staring at the keyboard. “How did you figure out the order?”

  “I guessed. The password is Seatbelt7. It could have been TabSteel7, BaleTest7, EastBelt7, or quite a few others, but Seatbelt7 seemed like a more obvious place to start.”

  “Apparently.”

  Kendra launched the browser and immediately drilled down to the user history.

  “Stop. I told you some of this may be classified,” Griffin said between clenched teeth. “Step away from that computer, Kendra. I’ll get you whatever you need, but I must insist that you—”

  Lynch quickly stepped protectively behind her and in front of the investigative team. “Come on, Griffin. May I suggest this isn’t the time to unload a mound of red tape over us? We’re trying to get your agent back.”

  “So are we all. But we deal with a lot of sensitive material here, and Stedler would have been the first to insist—”

  Kendra closed the browser. “It’s all yours. I got what I needed.”

  “Shit,” Griffin muttered. “Glad to be of service,” he said sarcastically. “Anything else?”

  “Yes. Who was the last person to see him?” She turned away from the monitor. “Was it one of you?”

  “No,” Santini sa
id. “As far as we can tell, it was the fiancée of Steve Conroy, victim number three. Jeff interviewed her at her workplace sometime after lunchtime last Thursday.”

  “I assume someone has followed up with her since.”

  “I did,” Santini said. “According to her, it was just a routine interview. She has no idea why her fiancé was killed, and that’s exactly what she told Stedler. He left her place, and no one has seen him since.”

  “I have her info,” Lynch said quietly.

  Griffin reached into his pocket and produced a small USB thumb drive. “And now you have it, too. The entire case file is here, along with those voice memos you wanted.”

  Lynch took the drive, examined it closely for a moment, then handed it back to Griffin. He produced his own smaller drive and held it up. “Please put that info on this one instead.”

  Griffin moistened his lips. “I don’t understand.”

  “Sure you do,” he said. “Your drive has a GPS chip inside it. As long as she’s carrying it, you can track her to the square yard.”

  Kendra raised an eyebrow. “They were trying to track me?”

  “Pretty good piece of gear,” Lynch said. “I used ones just like it before they came out with models with more durability and better range. The online retailers have been selling that one for a steep discount lately. I guess the budget cuts have hit the Bureau pretty hard, huh?”

  “We just want to keep track of our case files,” Griffin said. “It’s routine.”

  “That’s pretty weak.” Lynch pointed to the drive in his hand. “If you wouldn’t mind.”

  Griffin nodded to Santini, who in turn took the drive from Lynch’s hand and walked with Sienna toward another cubicle.

  Griffin stared at Kendra. “Well? Any thoughts?”

  “Other than on the invasion of my personal liberties?”

  “As I recall, you always seemed to have had some kind of observation. Don’t tell me that you’ve not been able to form an impression.”

  “It’s too early for impressions.”

  He stared at her suspiciously for another long moment. “Are you holding back on us?”

  She was suddenly angry with Griffin. She was tired of the thinly veiled antagonism and scorn she could sense behind every word. She didn’t expect respect, but she resented him trying to use her at the same time that his attitude breathed derision. She had actually been fairly patient … for her. Screw it. Screw him. “You’re the one holding back, Griffin.” She paused. “At least from your wife.”