Finally, before catching up with Tessa, I took a moment to check in with Ralph. He told me that Lebreau went through boyfriends “amazingly fast for a law professor,” so it wasn’t easy eliminating potential suspects. Also, there was still no sign of Lebreau or Basque, but he was following up on two possible eyewitnesses: one who claimed to have seen Basque’s car in the parking lot where Lebreau’s SUV was found, the other who said she saw a man fitting Basque’s description leave a gas station in Lansing, Michigan, an hour after Lebreau failed to show up for class. “Says there was a woman in the car with him. But you know how reliable eyewitnesses are.”
“Keep me posted.”
“I will.”
I debated whether or not to tell him that Angela Knight was working this from another angle; but for the time being, I decided not to mention it.
I ended the call, met Tessa at the car, and we drove to the Lincoln Towers Hotel.
Brad checked the girl’s email.
Last month when he’d contacted Dr. Calvin Werjonic, when he’d asked Astrid to research the federal agent’s presence at the assassination attempt, he hadn’t had any idea how neatly his plan would come together.
But fate seemed to be on his side. Everyone who mattered was in the Metro area now this week.
Just a little tweak in the agenda for today to make the climax as exciting as possible: the special gift for EAD Wellington would have to wait until tomorrow night. But the delay would only serve to make the game better, more complete.
No doubt the task force’s command level staff were busy trying to connect the Lincoln Towers Hotel with the primate center, diving into the possible implications, the importance each location might hold in the mind of the killers. But there were so many layers to Brad’s plan that the authorities would never unpeel them all in time.
Astrid had asked him to call and check in every hour, and this was not the time to displease her.
He punched in her number.
“Do you have the car?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“And the plates?”
“I’ll be leaving to get them in a few minutes.”
“Don’t wait too long.”
“All right.”
“We’ll talk soon.”
“Yes.”
The call ended, and he pulled up the video he’d taken of Mollie Fischer yesterday in the van and watched it in one corner of his screen while he scanned the email program in the other.
After reading the most recent emails, he googled the FBI Academy. It was amazing what you could find online, and last week he’d located a page on their official site that showed a map of the Academy grounds. Now, he confirmed that there were no changes, then printed the helpful little map that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had posted for all the world to see.
54
3:18 p.m.
After I’d grabbed a pair of latex gloves from the car, I led Tessa into the hotel.
She watched me slip the gloves into my pocket. “What are those for?”
“Examining stuff.”
“Wow. Never would have guessed.” Her sarcasm felt friendly and familiar, but under her words I could tell there was something deeply troubling her.
“Stick with me long enough and you’ll learn all kinds of cool things.”
She was quiet.
“You all right?” I said.
“Yeah.”
We stepped into the expansive atrium. “So you’ll be okay hanging out here for a few minutes?”
She nodded as she glanced at the hanging gardens, waterfall, and streams, and I realized I’d never brought her to this hotel before. She was obviously impressed.
“I just need to see if I can slide a few pieces of the puzzle together,” I said. “I won’t be long.”
She didn’t reply or complain, and I almost wished she would have argued with me; at least then I would have known she was feeling okay.
“So we’re cool? You’re sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah.”
As she took a seat, I suggested she might want to touch base with her friends in Denver, give Pandora or Jessie a call.
That seemed agreeable to her; she pulled out her computer and clicked to her video chat program.
I was turning toward the front desk when she said, “Do you think she’s dead?”
When I faced her again, I saw that her eyes were on a WXTN News cameraman filming a reporter who was interviewing Mr. Lees, the hotel manager. They stood at the other end of the atrium.
“Do you mean-”
“The congressman’s daughter.”
Careful, Pat.
“I don’t think we should jump to conclusions,” I said. “Stay here and wait for me, okay? Just give me maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. Then we’ll take off.” I thought for a second. “And I’ll get you home.”
She was repositioning herself so that her back was to the news crew. “Okay.”
I wanted to see if the former NSA analyst Marianne Keye-Wallace and her “facial, audio, video” recognition computer system would be able to help me find a connection between the would-be assassin at this hotel six years ago and the killers who brought Mollie Fischer here yesterday.
Leaving Tessa behind, I walked toward the hallway that led to the control center.
55
Ten minutes later
I was striking out.
Marianne had started out by telling me she didn’t have records from that far back. “When the hotel went through its renovations last year, we switched to a new computer system-by the way, are you okay? Weren’t you shot yesterday?”
I patted my left arm gently. “It’s just a scratch. So, you’re telling me the computer records didn’t transfer?”
“No, they transferred, it’s just that the management decided to only keep records for the last five years-and I’m not just talking about video footage. All the guest room records.” She shook her head. “I beat my head against the wall trying to convince them to archive everything, but they wouldn’t listen to me.”
Working with so many disparate agencies over the years, I knew all too well that arbitrary and ill-informed decisions happen all the time. Often we don’t even know why we ourselves do what we do, let alone understand the motivations of others-still another reason why probing for motives is so unreliable.
I explored a few other ideas with Marianne, seeing if either the congressman or former vice president had stayed at the hotel recently or if there’d been any other constitutional law conferences in the last few years related to the one that the vice president had been scheduled to speak at when Hadron Brady tried to kill him.
Nothing.
Okay, so where does that leave us?
“Lien-hua mentioned the maids,” I said. “Did she and Margaret talk to you about that?”
“Already looked into it. Housekeeping made up more than twenty rooms on the eighth floor between 2:00 and 4:00, not in any particular order, just as they received word from their superiors. As far as I know, EAD Wellington had agents look through all the rooms on the floor again-some were already occupied-nothing suspicious.”
“What about when the hotel was remodeled-could there be a dumb waiter? Some kind of panic room, something like that put in to room 809?”
“The renovations were mostly cosmetic.” She brought up a floor plan of the building prior to and after the renovations, overlaid them. Nothing of note.
I tried to think of what else I could do here and came up blank.
Maybe you should just get going, find out what’s bugging Tessa. See if Rodale and Fischer forwarded the files to you.
I flicked my eyes across the computer monitors one last time and saw that the cameraman and reporter had finished interviewing Mr. Lees and were packing up their things. He was standing just a few feet away from them. Watching them.