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“We had a tox screen done to see if he might have been lying about being knocked out, but he still had tranqs in his system. I’d say he’s clear too. Neither of them saw anyone else there.”

Ralph sounded convinced. I decided to move on. “And Mollie was deceased when the responding officers arrived? They confirmed it?”

“Oh yeah,” he said, his voice somber. “There was no question about that.”

A moment of uncomfortable stillness crawled through the room.

The pieces just weren’t coming together.

Cheyenne tipped her gaze away from the laptop and toward me. “I’m wondering, what if the chimps didn’t kill her?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, is it possible she might have been dead before the chimpanzees maimed her?” She pointed to a crime scene photo of the straw-covered floor of the habitat she’d pulled up on the screen. “There’s blood on the straw, but it’s not as pervasive as you might expect, considering the wounds on the jugular vein in her neck, and once her heart stopped beating, she would have stopped bleeding.”

“Gravity.” Ralph nodded. “Blood pools to the lowest part of the body.”

“Yes,” she said.

I glanced at Ralph. “Is the autopsy finished yet?”

A look at the clock. “In progress.”

“Let’s see if the ME can establish for certain the mechanism of death.”

More notes.

Lots to do.

He rose. “Actually, let me put this stuff into play. I think there’re enough questions to hold off Doehring’s announcement. I’ll be right back.”

As he left, Cheyenne discreetly asked Lien-hua where the ladies room was. “I’ll show you,” she replied, and they stepped into the hall.

I took the opportunity to connect my laptop to the USB hub for the flat screen wall monitor so we’d all be able to view the images when the three of them returned.

Then I began scrolling through the crime scene photos, focusing on the contents of Mollie’s purse, trying to find anything that didn’t mesh with the theory that Mahan was innocent.

“It’s remarkable,” Tessa whispered as she and Paul approached the sculpture.

Nearby, a mother was corralling two young boys toward the stairs, but even with that annoying little drama going on, the sculpture still held Tessa’s attention.

It was a three-foot-tall mixed media sculpture of a girl with her hands wrapped around a boy’s waist. Somehow the sculptor had captured the moment in such a way that it made it appear as if the girl was both clinging to the boy and pushing him away at the same time.

Even though Tessa had been hesitant about the whole idea of the art museum, after seeing this sculpture she was hopeful that it might not be a complete waste of time. Without glass enclosures around the sculptures, you could get really close, and she stepped forward and inspected it admiringly.

Here you had the tension of a life captured in wire and plastic resin: holding on and pushing away; we want to be close but separate, independent but needed, free but constrained by love. Human nature in a nutshell.

“I’m glad you like it.” Paul seemed pleased, almost proud.

“Yeah. It’s really nice.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Tessa noticed the woman turn her back on one of the boys. Without her supervision, the boy apparently felt free to approach a ceramic sculpture on a short wooden stand.

“Is it one of the pieces your friend made?” Tessa said, but her eyes were on the small boy who was reaching for the sculpture.

“Julia? No. Hers are-”

She could see disaster written all over this and called out to the woman to warn her, “Hey, your son!”

But the woman turned toward Tessa instead of looking at the boy. Tessa pointed at him as his hand found the sculpture The ceramic piece smacked to the floor.

And in that instant, Paul whipped around, his back to Tessa, shielding her from the direction of the sound-but of course there was nothing to protect her from.

Then an alarm was ringing and two staff members were rushing to the family. The mother was already scolding her son, and now Paul was herding Tessa to the other end of the exhibit hall.

“What was that all about?” she asked him. “You were like crazy fast. Were you ever a cop or something?”

“No,” he said simply. “Come on, we’ll work our way up to the fourth floor.”

It would make sense if he was. Mom always was into the law-enforcement type.

“Seriously, you-”

“No.” And he guided her onto the escalator in front of him.

21

11:58 a.m.

I didn’t find anything significant while they were gone, and when the four of us reconvened, Ralph announced, “All right, Doehring said he’ll hold off on releasing any info to the press for now, but the congressman isn’t going to. He scheduled a press conference for 1:00. And that’s in stone. So unless we have something more by then, he’s going to tell the press that his daughter’s killer was Rusty Mahan.”

“We need to rein him in,” I said. “That could seriously hamper the investigation.”

“I called Margaret to ask about this, but Rodale seems to be behind the congressman.”

“That’s unbelievable,” Lien-hua said. “What’s going on here?”

Politics as usual.

He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said gruffly. “But it doesn’t smell right to me either.”

Forget the press, focus on the evidence.

I closed my eyes and reviewed the street layout surrounding the research facility, mentally following the route I’d taken to get there, forming a three-dimensional map in my head. But my memory wasn’t nearly as accurate as a satellite image would be, so I opened my eyes, pulled out my phone, and projected the 3-D hologram of DC above the table.

All four of us gathered around it. Studied it.

I drew my finger across the phone’s screen to zoom in on South Capitol Street where the research center lay, then rotated the image, studying the sight-lines from the parking garage’s exit, the building’s other exits in relationship to the streets, the parking lot

… the traffic lights… the looming stadium.

Wait.

A thought.

On the laptop, I clicked to the DC Metro police site. Typed in my federal ID number.

Oh yes.

A small thrill. The moment opening up.

“What is it?” Ralph asked.

“Cameras,” I mumbled.

“The footage was deleted.” I could hear his growing impatience in his voice. “We just went through all that. We need to-”

“No. Traffic cams.” I felt the juices flowing. The case beginning to enter my system in the way it’s supposed to; the way I like. “We might not have footage of the killer arriving at the research center, but we might have video of him approaching it. If we caught Mahan’s car on the way to the facility, we should be able to get a look at the driver.”

“Confirm for sure whether or not it was Mahan.” He was tracking with me now, step by step.

“Exactly.”

It took me less than a minute to log in, pull up DC’s traffic camera database, and find the video archives.

Mollie was last seen leaving the Clarendon Metro station.

I chose the traffic lights two blocks north of the facility, since it would be in a more direct route from the area of the city where she was last seen.

And, starting at 4:00, the time Mollie was last seen alive, we began to study the footage at 8x speed, looking for Rusty Mahan’s ’09 Volvo.

Brad carried the duffel bag containing everything he and Astrid would need to the van. Set it inside.

According to the plan, Astrid would meet him at the hotel at 2:00, but he liked the idea of having the woman alone with him in the room for a little while before Astrid arrived.

Leaving now would give him plenty of time.

He chambered a round in his gun, a Walther P99, holstered it, then went back downstairs, grabbed the woman by the hair, and, as she squirmed desperately to get away, dragged her toward the stairs.