by Fritz Galt
Flashing blue lights from a police cruiser and ambulance illuminated the structure where the murder took place.
It was a two-story, white frame house, the kind used by students sharing expenses. A pair of policemen relaxed against the hoods of their squad cars and watched him pull up. One car was marked as campus police and the other was a city patrol car.
Jake identified himself to the men and the city cop lifted the police tape for him to enter the crime scene.
“The sergeant is waiting for you upstairs. Watch out for the broken glass by the door.”
Jake saw where someone had poked something through a glass window beside the front door, presumably to reach inside and unlock the door.
He stepped carefully over the shards of glass and climbed the stairs. He could smell death halfway up to the second floor.
The last member of a forensics team was just leaving a bedroom. Jake found the detective, a large, grim-looking man, inside. He was accompanied by a female assistant who was still taking notes.
Jake shook hands with the two, then turned his attention to the victim.
The body was large and hairless and lay naked in the middle of a queen-sized bed. The monogrammed silver handle of a steak knife stuck straight out of the victim’s chest.
Jake didn’t study the corpse for long. He had seen death before. Above the stench of a body that had been lying there for over two hours, one could always smell in the room whether there was foul play.
The young student appeared to have been murdered in his sleep. There was no sign of a struggle. The only sign of a crime aside from the body was the broken glass by the front door.
It looked like a straightforward case of breaking and entering, climbing upstairs past the rooms of other tenants, finding the student asleep without clothes, perhaps because of the ninety-five degree, non-air-conditioned room, and killing him.
The only thing odd aside from the murder was the lack of a computer. Otherwise, the desk was orderly with a can of pens and a pad of scratch paper.
Jake turned to the detective. “You said he was a computer engineer?”
“Grad student,” the cop said with all the extra vowels associated with a southern Virginia accent.
“And where’s his computer?”
“Never found one.”
There was a power strip under the desk, indicating where electronics might normally be charged.
“Other tenants suspect it was stolen from the room.”
“About these other tenants,” Jake said. “Foreign exchange students?”
“A whole house of Chinese.”
Jake nodded. The similarities to the bike path murder in Arlington were inescapable. It involved a Chinese victim, computers and a stabbing to the center of the chest.
“Dust the murder weapon?” Jake asked.
“Got prints,” the detective said. “We’re running a check now.”
“Check the Department of Justice personnel files, too,” Jake said. “I’m afraid that’s where you’ll find a match.”
The detective frowned. “One of you?”
“I’m afraid so,” Jake said.
The detective nodded wordlessly at his assistant, who pounced on her handheld device to put the suggestion through to the lab.
“Can we remove the body now?” the detective asked without masking the hostile sarcasm in his voice.
After all, Jake considered, the guy had a right to be mad about federal agents killing people in his jurisdiction. And the smell was getting to everyone.
“Of course,” Jake said.
He couldn’t wait to leave the room, either.
Nor could he wait to get back to his boss.
Jake stepped outside into the dark yard. He placed a call to Bob Snow’s personal phone. “Just as we suspected,” Jake reported. “Another murder nearly identical to the bike path murder.”
“Prints?”
“Yes. The local police will check them against Justice Department personnel files. I’m convinced it’ll come up Simon Wu.”
“I’ll check into the fingerprint situation tomorrow,” Bob said. “If Wu is murdering all these people, why is he leaving fingerprints all over the place? It doesn’t make sense.”
Jake could see Bob’s point. If anything, a federal law enforcement officer would know not to leave prints at the scene of a crime. It almost looked like he was deliberately leaving signs that he was there. “Let me know what you find out.”
“Seen any trace of Stacy?” Bob asked.
“She wasn’t exactly waiting for me, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Jake said. “I didn’t tell her I was coming.”
“Well, don’t tell her you’re there,” Bob said. “Epstein will be there tomorrow and track her down.”
“I don’t even have her cell phone number,” Jake said.
“Don’t act so naïve. The FBI can track her down through her credit card or cell phone in minutes.”
“I’m not asking anyone to track her down,” Jake tried to assure him. “But I’ll bet she’s long gone.”
Jake had spent four great years of his life at the University of Virginia. He had even made it to living in the Ellipse his senior year. Freezing cold with no heat and having to use outdoor plumbing had been part of the experience of reliving life on the campus as Thomas Jefferson had designed it two hundred years before.
Tonight, he craved an air-conditioned restaurant and some time to think.
The waitress was a brunette college student, bright-eyed and talkative. Jake just wanted a beer.
He had checked into a locally owned hotel and dumped his hastily packed bag on the bed. Then he had slipped his passport and wallet into his coat pocket before heading off to the bar.
The waitress was from Northern Virginia, but had travelled a lot. And she wasn’t shy telling people so.
She had begun the conversation as she brought his beer and chicken wings with, “Itadakimasu.”
“What does that mean?”
“Oh,” she said, and giggled. “I didn’t even realize I was speaking Japanese. See, I’m taking a placement test tomorrow.”
“That makes sense. Well, good luck.”
“Gambatte,” she said. “That means ‘Good luck.’”
“I see. I guess you’re going to do pretty well on the test.”
“Why? Do you speak Japanese?”
Jake thought the question laughable, but reminded himself that he was back in an academic environment. “Don’t ask me about languages,” he said. “I barely passed my four years of French.”
“You go here?”
“Did. Twenty years ago.”
“That’s cool. What was your major?”
“Criminal law.”
That threw her for a moment. “You a cop?”
“Kind of.”
“Cool.” She gave him a wink and turned to head for the kitchen to get the rest of his order.
He lifted the beer mug to his lips and admired her form as she walked. She had a posterior that just wouldn’t quit.
When she brought out the burger, he was ready to subtly interrogate her. “Do you have a lot of Chinese students on campus nowadays?”
“Summer? Not really. They all go home for the break. But they’ll be back in droves starting next week.”
“Do you know any of them?”
“It’s a hard bunch to get to know. They stick together and don’t engage much. It’s changing, though. Every year, they seem a bit more sophisticated.”
Jake was thinking computer sophisticated. “What do you mean by that?”
“I’m talking about their attitudes. They’re more worldly. Trying to figure Americans out. Trying to fit in more.”
“Do you speak Chinese?”
“No. I missed that boat. That’s where all the jobs are these days.”
Jake understood that lots of jobs had been shipped to China.
“Silly me,” the waitress said, sitting down to share the bench with him. “Here I am learning Japanese. Su
ch a quaint language from the past.”
“Why the past?”
He felt her hips squirm, momentarily brushing against his.
“Japanese, Taiwanese, Koreans, Chinese. They come in waves. Every ten years there’s a new influx from Asia. Next it will be Vietnamese.”
She sounded pretty sure of herself. But her shorthand of recent history seemed to match his observations.
He was running out of things to say. He wanted to eat his burger, but he also didn’t mind her company.
“Maybe you should study Vietnamese,” he said.
She turned to look at him, mere inches from his face. She gave a sloppy, wry grin. “Yeah, maybe.”
She left the table to clean up after departing customers. Jake watched her work as if her mind wasn’t into it. She was already thinking about her future, perhaps switching majors on the spot.
Two decades out of college and he couldn’t flirt like he used to. Nor could he keep up mentally.
His beer foam swirled toward his lips as he lifted his mug again. He was past learning about the world, and had to operate in it on a day by day, crime by crime basis. He had to worry about what hackers were up to, and what government agencies handled cyber threats.
He no longer had the luxury to dream.
Chapter 22
The cell phone woke Jake up. There was only the faintest touch of light outside his hotel room and Thursday had already begun.
It was Bob Snow. “Just heard from the lab. They ran the prints from the steak knife in Charlottesville, and they match up with Simon Wu.”
That was two for two. Did they have a serial killer on their hands?
First Han Chu, head of a computer firm was stabbed cleanly to death. Yesterday it was Jason Yang, an engineering grad student. What was the connection between the two victims? It would be up to Michael Epstein to figure that out.
Once they established that, it would be clear what Wu was up to.
Jake’s first thought was that Wu was a patriot after all. He might be stemming the tide of hackers. But killing them one by one made no sense.
Jake was thinking clearly now. “I guess Epstein will be down here today to review the case. He’s sure to connect this up with Simon Wu.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if he has Wu behind bars by the end of the day,” Bob said.
“Why do you sound so disappointed?” Jake said.
“We had an eyewitness on the bike trail,” Bob reminded him. “She knows Simon Wu, and she said it definitely wasn’t him. It still doesn’t add up.”
“Are you saying…”
“She’s yours if you want her,” Bob said.
Bob was giving him permission to talk with Stacy in order to investigate Wu. Jake wouldn’t be just bending the rules. He would be breaking them. Number one, he was breaking Epstein’s orders by getting in touch with Stacy. Number two, he was about to investigate a fellow federal law enforcement officer without Inspector General approval. And number three, just like in the pre-9/11 days, he was compartmentalizing the investigation, not sharing information across department lines.
“I’ll have to find Stacy,” Jake reminded him. “I need to hear from her why she’s in Charlottesville and what Simon is up to.”
“You’ll find her at the DoubleTree off US 29. And I didn’t tell you that.”
“Thanks, boss.”
On Jake’s first drive by the DoubleTree Hilton, he saw Stacy’s Jeep parked two lots down from the hotel’s pillared front doors.
He had to establish that Wu was in Charlottesville that morning, and decided to get some concrete proof.
On a hunch, he parked nearby and whipped the fingerprint detection kit out of his glove compartment.
Nobody was walking through the light fog and the parking lot was still full.
He sprayed fine, black powder on the handles of both doors, brushed it off lightly and applied clear lifting tape to the surface. Then he peeled off the tape and affixed it to white backing cards. That displayed and preserved the latent fingerprints.
He packed the samples into an evidence bag and labeled it clearly: “Jeep Cherokee owned by Stacy Stefansson. Virginia license plate number YBZ 7786.” He noted the date, time and location as well.
When he got back to Arlington, he would drop them off for analysis and to add to the growing record against Simon Wu.
Mildly surprised that Stacy and Wu had remained in Charlottesville after the murder, he was even more astonished to see them seated prominently in front of the buffet table in the breakfast room.
Jake took a close look through a wooden lattice at Simon Wu. Short, dapper and moving like a cat from one food station to another, he was the same person Jake had seen at the funeral escorting Stacy away, and at her house carrying the groceries. And, finally, he matched the photo the Justice Department had in his personnel file. That was Simon Wu.
If Stacy had been a participant in or observer of the murder the previous afternoon, she certainly didn’t show it.
Her mood was light and her voice carried over the general clatter of dishes and conversations at other tables. She acted like someone with nothing to hide.
And she saw Jake standing there behind the wooden screen.
“Jake!” she called out, trying to get his attention.
He stepped out from behind his hiding place. He needed to work on his counter surveillance tradecraft.
Wu was just returning to Stacy’s elegantly set table when he saw Jake approaching. Wu’s spine stiffened, as did his general demeanor.
Like ants with highly sensitive antennae, two federal agents could easily pick each other out on visual clues alone. There was something about the clean-cut, by-the-book attitude that Jake saw in Wu, and, he was sure, Wu saw in him.
Jake watched Wu’s hands carefully to make sure they didn’t reach inside his jacket.
“Hi, Jake,” Stacy called out as Jake approached.
As if he weren’t obvious enough.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
Jake avoided the question. “Great to see you.”
She didn’t seem to buy the notion that it was a chance encounter. “How did you find me here?”
“I saw your Jeep outside.” It wasn’t a lie, and it was good enough for the moment.
She wiped her fingertips on her pink napkin and dropped it on the table.
Jake saw two room keys there, presumably to show the hostess and bill their meals to separate rooms.
“This is Simon Wu I was telling you about the other day.”
“Jake Maguire.” Jake was first to extend a hand.
Wu seemed wary and showed no sign of recognition, but took the handshake. Then he turned to Stacy. “Why were you talking about me?”
She was about to respond, but Jake cut her off. “Just chatting among friends.”
She appeared to go along with that vague explanation. “Join us,” she told Jake, an engaging look in her eyes. Her expression was less than imploring, but something more than simply being friendly.
He had hoped to snag a few minutes alone with her to question her about where she was at the time of the murder, but it was clear he wouldn’t get that opportunity that morning. He was left with having to explore her story in front of both of them.
“Listen,” he said. “I’ve already eaten, and I’m interrupting your breakfast.”
“Nonsense,” she said, and pulled out a chair for him.
Both men nudged their shoulder harnesses behind them as they took opposing seats.
Jake decided to plunge right in. “What are you two doing in Charlottesville?” he asked brightly.
If Wu felt uneasy with the question, he didn’t show it. “We’re heading south to see her folks.”
The simplicity of the answer might be cunning, but it was the implication that threw Jake off guard. The two were friendly enough to visit her parents.
Jake had to fight the feeling that he was intruding on their privacy. “That’s great,” he sa
id. “What did you guys do yesterday?”
Stacy and Wu exchanged glances to decide who got to answer the question.
“You go ahead,” Wu told her, and let her respond.
“We spent all day at the Downtown Mall,” she said. “Saw a movie. Shops were open late, buskers played into the night.”
“Sounds romantic,” Jake said. He had invited dates off campus to the old Main Street, where historical buildings were turned into a pedestrian shopping mall with eateries, yet retained their pre-Civil War charm.
He had a hard time processing all the information he was gathering so quickly. But the best approach was to learn their story now and verify it later.
He checked his mental calendar. It wasn’t a weekend, but there was a holiday coming up. “So you’re down for a long Labor Day weekend?” he asked.
“I haven’t seen my folks in months,” she said.
That was believable enough.
“And how about you?” she asked. “What brings you to Charlottesville?”
Jake didn’t even have a story. “Just visiting my alma mater.”
It sounded lame, and it was. But he was sticking to it.
Wu in particular wasn’t buying the story. But he wasn’t saying much either.
Jake watched Wu’s adept knife-work as he cut into his roll and lathered on butter. Only then did he realize that the butter knife had the same monogram that was on the steak knife at the murder scene the day before.
Wu seemed to use his full plate as an excuse for not talking. But he was also eating fast.
Suddenly, Wu’s cell phone rang. He excused himself and took the call out of earshot.
“Nice fella,” Jake lied.
Stacy looked at Jake reprovingly. She could see through him.
She was right. It wasn’t worth lying to her.
Wu came back to the table with a frown. “It was the office. They need me in Louisville.”
“Louisville?” Stacy said, confused and clearly disappointed. “As in Kentucky?”
Wu nodded and took a last, hurried swig of coffee.
“But how will you get there?” she asked. “We only have the Jeep.”
“I’ll rent a car,” Wu told her, and wiped his lips. “You can drive down to your folks alone.”