As far I knew, he had only one brother. “The former vice president told you?”
“Yes.”
“How does he know about a custody case involving my stepdaughter?”
“He’s acquainted with your stepdaughter’s biological father. That’s all he said.”
What?
“How?”
He shook his head. “Honestly, I don’t know. He didn’t say.”
The congressman seemed to be telling the truth, and if he was, it added a whole new layer of complexity to what was going on. It meant Lansing had friends in very high places-and that would not be to my advantage in keeping custody of Tessa.
“But why?” I said to him. “Why did he tell you this?”
“Since it involved an FBI agent”-he avoided looking at Rodale-“and I’ve proposed budget cuts to the Bureau, I suspect he was trying to get me to… well…”
“What? Threaten me?”
“Suggest cuts in strategic departments.”
He didn’t have to spell it out for me.
Get rid of the agent; help his buddy get custody of the child.. .
“When I found out you were on the case involving Mollie, I felt torn, and I knew we needed to talk. In the end, I said things to you I shouldn’t have.”
I didn’t find his explanation entirely satisfying, but it was a start. I needed to give all this some thought.
He offered us both a departure nod. “I do need to get back to the House floor.”
After he left, the mood of the room still felt full of static. There was too much being left unspoken here. “Director,” I said, “did you tell the congressman to refrain from announcing the news about the victim’s true identity yesterday?”
“An announcement like that should come from the public affairs office or one of the ADs, you know that, Pat. It doesn’t come from the father of a missing girl. Or from an NCAVC field agent. We have a system in place for the release of pertinent information, and that system serves the good of everyone.”
“Not Mollie,” I said. “Not yesterday.” He eyed me severely, but I didn’t care. I went on. “Why did you call me in on this case to begin with? You know my specialty is serial offenses, but when we started on this we knew of only one homicide.”
“We haven’t always agreed on everything over the years, but we’ve always respected each other.” He made it sound like an answer, but I couldn’t see how it was.
“Yes, I would say that’s true.”
“You’re not the kind of man who plays politics, who’s always looking for a way to get ahead.”
His comments were making me a little uncomfortable. “I’m an investigator not a bureaucrat, if that’s what you mean.”
“Yes. That’s what I mean. And that’s why I want you on this.”
But if he doesn’t want people working this case with an eye on a promotion, why did he assign Margaret to head it up?
“If I can be frank, sir, none of this makes any sense. It seems like politics and personal agendas are taking precedent over finding a missing person.”
Welcome to Washington, Pat.
“You know that’s not true.”
“I’m not sure that I do.”
A dark cloud was crossing his face And then it hit me.
“The budget cuts. Is that what this is about? Maybe, ‘Find my daughter, keep my involvement with this research place under wraps, and I won’t push through the legislation to cut Bureau funding.’ You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours?”
Rodale looked at me icily. “I will pretend that you did not just say that.”
“Don’t bother.” I headed for the door. “I’ll keep you informed,” I said. “Of our progress.”
Tessa could tell I was upset when I met her in the lobby. “You all right?” she asked.
“Oh yeah.”
Then I was on my way to the exit and she was hastily grabbing her things and catching up with me. “Agent Jiang called while you were in there. She told me she can meet us at Jacob’s Deli at about 12:30, if that works. She said you’d know where it is.”
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to cancel. There’s someplace else I need to go.”
“Where’s that?”
“The Gunderson Primate Research Center.”
51
The Lincoln Towers Hotel
Room 809
Nothing.
Margaret Wellington shook her head.
Mollie Fischer couldn’t have just disappeared. Where is she!
Lien-hua was standing beside the bed, carefully studying the room. “We found the wheelchair in here but no other physical evidence?”
“That’s right.”
“But how could that be? The video of the suspect wheeling Mollie into the hotel shows that they entered at 1:29 p.m. And Pat was shot just after 3:00.”
“That means at least one of them was in a room with an abducted woman for approximately an hour and a half,” Margaret said, following Lien-hua’s train of thought, “but yet managed to leave no forensic evidence behind.”
“That’s not likely.”
“No, it isn’t.”
Margaret thought, They faked Mollie’s death… left her purse in the habitat… left Mahan’s car at the scene… left the glove in the parking garage…
They used misdirection every step of the way…
Of course.
“They used another room,” she said. “Just left the wheelchair in here to mislead us.”
Lien-hua considered that for a moment. “According to Pat’s report, there were two maids in the hall when he was pursuing the subjects. I wonder-”
“Come on,” Margaret said, heading for the door. “We need to have a talk with those maids.”
Tessa and I grabbed drive-thru bean burritos for lunch and were on our way to the primate center.
I convinced her to listen to her iPod for a few minutes so I could make a call, then I speed-dialed Lien-hua’s number, and, speaking quietly so Tessa wouldn’t overhear me, I cancelled lunch, then summarized my meeting with Rodale and Fischer. Lien-hua listened attentively, and toward the end of my explanation, I heard Margaret speaking incredulously somewhere near her. “What’s going on?” I asked.
“We’re wondering if the killers kept Mollie in a room other than-”
I heard Margaret’s voice again, the words were indistinguishable, but she was obviously upset. “Just a sec,” Lien-hua said. She spoke off-phone for a few seconds, then said to me, “You’re not going to believe this: there is no Aria Petic.”
“What do you mean? We have footage of her leaving the facility.”
She took another break from talking with me to get an update from Margaret, then spoke into the phone again. “Margaret just got a call from Doehring. Apparently, the primate facility contracts out their janitorial services. Aria’s name appears on the computerized records, but that’s all. No one by that name has ever worked for them.”
“How come we’re just finding this out now?”
“Why do you think Margaret is so upset?”
Unbelievable.
“So,” I was thinking aloud, “the killers get into the research facility, they enter a fictional name onto the janitorial records so if the woman is seen leaving the building it won’t raise any immediate red flags.”
Plus, as a contract employee, the security guard and keeper wouldn’t be expected to recognize her if she were detained.
“But as it turned out, she wasn’t even questioned,” Lien-hua said. “In the confusion she just walked away. Slipped out one of the side doors after the EMTs arrived.”
Spaghetti.
I heard Margaret call for Lien-hua, who subsequently told me, “I have to go.”
“Listen.” I was thinking of Lien-hua’s drowning incident in San Diego during the Project Rukh case. “Remember how things went down in February? If these killers are involved in any way with the conspirators from San Diego-”
“I’ll be careful,” she said. “I promise.”
“Be extra careful.”
“I will.”
After we’d ended the call, I saw that Tessa was staring out the passenger-side window, still listening to her music. We were only a few minutes from the research center. “Look, college guys,” I said softly, quieter than I’d been speaking to Lien-hua, and Tessa’s head snapped in my direction.