Thursday, June 12
5:15 a.m.
My arm was killing me.
I’m not a big fan of drugs, so last night, even though I took the antibiotics, I’d passed on the second dose of meds the doctor had offered me, and as a result, the gunshot wound had ached and throbbed throughout the night, keeping my sleep light and fitful and sporadic.
At last, when daybreak cut through my window, I gave up fighting for sleep and climbed out of bed.
And took the stupid painkillers.
No workout today, but I washed up, and as I was getting dressed I noticed the St. Francis of Assisi pendant that Cheyenne had given me lying on my dresser where I’d left it when we moved into the house for the summer.
Last month when I was preparing to leave to testify at Richard Basque’s retrial, she’d offered the pendant to me, explaining that St. Francis is the patron saint against dying alone. “It helps remind me why I do what I do. It’ll be good for you to have at the trial. To remember the women he killed.” I knew she was Catholic, and her words had underscored to me how seriously she took her faith. “Don’t worry, I can get another one.”
I’m not very religious or superstitious, but the gesture meant a lot to me, and I’d accepted the pendant.
Now, as I picked it up, I couldn’t help but think of what Lien-hua had mentioned about how Mollie Fischer would’ve gotten rid of the locket that Rusty had given her if she’d really broken up with him.
So maybe you shouldn’t keep the pendant…?
But Cheyenne and I had never broken up, never been a couple-in fact, we’d only gone out once, and that was just a pseudo-date since Tessa had tagged along.
Pseudo-date or not, I slipped the pendant into my pocket, chose a shirt that was baggy enough to hide the bandages on my arm, bypassed the sling, and went to the kitchen for breakfast.
Margaret had made it clear that she didn’t want me working on the case today, but there was no way I could shut off that part of my brain for forty-eight hours.
Besides, we hadn’t found Mollie yet, and there was a remote chance that she was still alive. I figured job security wasn’t all that big of a deal when there were lives at stake, so after grabbing some breakfast and brewing a pot of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, I went online and logged onto the case files to see what had been added since last night.
The FBI Lab had established with certainty that the woman who’d been found in the primate research facility was indeed Twana Summie. Her family had been contacted, and as I read through the autopsy report, I thought of the words that had likely been said to them:
“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.