“Thank you, I’m glad I’ll have the chance to work with you.” The two women had started talking around me, as if I weren’t even in the room.
“And where did you go?” Lien-hua asked.
“Oh, we just got here.”
“No, for lunch.”
“Billy Bongo’s Burger Hut.”
For some reason I felt like I needed to defend myself. “It’s right on the way.”
“Of course.” Lien-hua gave Cheyenne a wink. “Let me guess: he got the Ultimate Deluxe Classic Cheeseyburg Extreme, curly fries, and a medium Cherry Coke?”
Cheyenne looked at Lien-hua oddly. “Right on the very first try.”
“Old habits die hard,” Lien-hua said.
Okay. This was officially awkward.
I heard heavy footsteps just outside the door, and I was relieved when Ralph flung it open and joined us. He tossed a stack of bulging manila folders onto the table and looked like he was about to launch right into the case, but took a moment first to introduce himself to Cheyenne, and based on my recommendation, he immediately signed her forms. “Finish it up, hand it in tomorrow,” he mumbled, but I could tell something was definitely weighing heavily on his mind.
“Thank you,” she said.
“So here’s what’s up.” His tone was rough and hard. “That was Doehring on the phone. They just found Rusty Mahan. Dead. Hung himself sometime last night. Left a note confessing to Mollie’s murder.”
A stretch of elegiac silence filled the room. Lien-hua slowly lowered herself into one of the chairs circling the conference room table. “Where was he found?”
“Underneath the Connecticut Avenue bridge, near the riverbank. He was hidden in the trees. Never would have found him if the phone in his pocket hadn’t started ringing. A jogger heard it, saw the body.”
“Was the note handwritten or typed?” I asked.
“Typed. On his phone.”
“Did we identify the caller?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I know, it’s all too convenient, but Doehring doesn’t think so. The kid had motive, means, and opportunity. You know Doehring. And here’s the clincher: he’s planning to go public with this at the top of the hour.”
He glanced at the clock on the wall.
11:35.
“Just twenty-five minutes before this thing explodes,” Lien-hua said.
Ralph motioned for us to take a seat. “That’s what we have to stop from happening.”
Cheyenne chose the chair between me and Lien-hua.
“Quick update,” Ralph said. “Margaret is in DC running point on the joint task force. We’ve set up the command post at Metro PD headquarters, third floor. So far we’ve got FBI, Metro PD, Capitol police, US Marshals on this.” He shook his head. “Probably call in the freakin’ Boy Scouts before this thing is over.”
A deep breath, then he flipped open one of the folders. “All right. Here we go. Here’s what we know so far.”
The woman wasn’t being cooperative.
Okay. Enough with that.
Brad forced a gag into her mouth.
Tugged it tight.
Looked at his watch.
11:39.
“You have until 3:00 this afternoon to live: three hours and twenty-one minutes left to reflect on eternity.” He took a breath. “I was hoping it wouldn’t have to go down this way. If you’d been more willing, things might have turned out differently.”
She tried to cry out, but the gag swallowed the sounds.
“I’ll be back.”
Then he left her again, lying there alone in the dark. He went to check the wiring and timer on the explosive device that he had created. A one of a kind. A work of art.
An elegant surprise for Special Agent Patrick Bowers.
20
Ralph spent five minutes filling us in, mostly reviewing information I’d already read in the online case files.
I was anxious to find out what else we’d learned since I left the scene last night but tried not to appear as impatient as I felt.
“By the way,” he said. “There’s no sign of Mollie Fischer’s laptop-we were hoping that might get us somewhere.”
When he mentioned Mollie’s laptop, I realized Cheyenne would need more than Ralph’s cursory summary, so I flipped open my computer, clicked to the online case files, and turned the screen so that it faced her. “So you can catch up as we talk.”
“Thanks.” She tapped the mouse pad, began to scroll through the files.
“Where’s Doehring?” Lien-hua asked.
“Command post. His team is back at the primate center interviewing the staff.” Ralph pulled out a notepad. “All right, let’s run down the timeline. What do we know?”
“Perhaps,” Lien-hua said, “the key right now isn’t focusing on what we do know but on what we don’t.” She ticked off her points one at a time on her fingers as she listed them: “We don’t know if Rusty drove his car to the scene, accessed the facility, was present at the storefront, wrote the suicide note, or killed himself-or even for sure that he and Mollie broke up.”
“So basically, nothing,” Cheyenne observed, her eyes still glued to the laptop screen. “Square one.”
“Okay, let’s think about this.” I stood. Began to pace. “Let’s say someone is trying to set up Rusty. Considering the technical and tactical aspects of this crime, doesn’t leaving his car at the scene seem like an odd way to frame him? Taking into account the typed confession, the ideally timed phone call just as a jogger is going past Mahan’s body-”
“Too obvious,” Ralph said. “Amateurish.”
“Yes. And why leave Mollie’s purse with her in the chimp’s habitat?”
“But if someone wasn’t trying to set Mahan up,” Cheyenne said, “then it might have been him-all the circumstantial evidence points to him as the killer.”
“That’s true.” Lien-hua nodded. “But Rusty is almost certainly not the killer, so…”
“Square one,” Ralph said.
Even though my specialty is working serial crimes in which there are half a dozen or more primary or secondary crime scenes, the key to all investigations is zeroing in on timing and location, and that’s where we needed to look more carefully right now. “The research center’s video surveillance footage was deleted from 5:00 to 7:00, right?”
Nods.
“And Mollie’s death appears to have been between 6:00 and 7:00.. .” I was thinking aloud now, reevaluating an idea I’d toyed with but never really pursued. “And yet, the killers-let’s say it’s plural for now-exited the scene at some point-most likely after her death, but possibly before. In either case, they weren’t caught on tape leaving the building… so unless there was some way to circumnavigate the cameras or preprogram the security system to start videotaping again after they left-”
“They stayed inside.” Lien-hua leaned forward. “Then left after they’d turned on the cameras again.”
A spark.
A possibility.
“And they would be caught on tape leaving sometime after 7:00.” Ralph said.
“Let’s try this,” I said. “If we review the videotapes starting at 7:00, we should be able to identify everyone who entered or left the building after the keeper’s 911 call-all the law enforcement personnel, EMTs, everybody.”
“Yes,” Lien-hua said. “So if we find footage of someone who left the building-”
“But no footage of ’em entering it,” Ralph interrupted, “we have our inside man.”
“Or woman,” Cheyenne said.
I nodded. “That’s right.”
The logic of it was simple, but admittedly, there were holes. There might have been a way we didn’t know about to avoid the cameras, but it was an avenue to pursue. A place to start.
Ralph scribbled on his pad. “I’ll get some agents on this ASAP.”
“Do we know any more about Sandra Reynolds, the keeper?” Cheyenne was studying the computer screen. “The woman who shot the chimps? She was present when the officers arrived.”
“She looks clean,” Ralph said. “Doehring and his guys interviewed her pretty extensively. We’ll see if they get anything else from her this morning.”
“And the security guard?”