My fingers trembled slightly as I rolled the suitcase away from the others in the stack and tilted it toward the floor.
It was very heavy and settled onto its side with a disquieting, moist thump.
Heart hammering, I reached for the zipper.
A bellhop rolled these suitcases right past everyone…
Right past you.
Carefully, I guided the zipper along its track, making sure it didn’t catch on the fabric, didn’t snag on my glove. Or get caught on anything else.
Why those two rooms on the eighth floor?
What’s the connection between these killers and the assassination attempt six years ago?
The zipper reached the end of its track.
Heart beating.
Beating.
I took another picture with my phone.
Then I braced myself.
And lifted the unzipped flap of the suitcase.
Just as the door behind me swung open.
64
I quickly closed the suitcase.
I’d only needed a glimpse to confirm my worst fears-the killers hadn’t used just this one suitcase. Based on what I saw, I suspected they would have needed most of the ones in this stack.
Trying to hide the torrent of grief and anger I felt, I turned to see if it was Marianne at the door behind me.
And it was.
And Tessa was with her.
“What are you doing here?” I shouted.
She was quiet, staring past me at the luggage I was kneeling beside.
“Tessa, you need to leave this room. Now.” I didn’t intend for my tone to be so harsh, but I did not want her anywhere near this place.
Marianne put a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s go, sweetie.”
Tessa’s face was flushed. She was a smart girl, she could put two and two together. “Is that…?”
“Come on.” Marianne ushered her out of the room.
Before joining them, I quickly phoned Doehring and told him to send another forensics team. I felt sick having to say it: “I found Mollie Fischer’s remains.”
After making sure the bellhops knew not to enter the room, I hurried to the hall and caught up with Tessa and Marianne near the elevator at the south end of the basement. Marianne gave Tessa’s shoulder a soft squeeze, said a few words of assurance to her, then left us alone. We entered the elevator quietly, watched the doors close. Stood beside each other in a shroud of silence.
I didn’t want to ask Tessa the question, but I knew I had to, so just before we reached the ground floor, I said, “What did you see in there?”
“Just…” She hesitated. “A suitcase. A bunch of suitcases.”
The elevator dinged.
“That’s all?”
The doors slid open.
“And the look on your face.”
I felt a deepening sense of failure-first, for not finding Mollie alive, then for letting Tessa see the ragged anger in my eyes. “Come on,” I told her. “Let’s get you out of here.”
As we were leaving the hotel, the first wave of officers, including Officer Tielman, the CSIU member whom I’d met at the primate center on Tuesday, were already rushing through the front doors.
While she was sitting at her desk at the command post, Margaret Wellington got word that Patrick Bowers had found Mollie Fischer’s body at the hotel.
Slowly, she set down the phone.
Earlier in the day Rodale had notified her that Bowers was back on the case. She’d felt a wave of indignation toward both Bowers and Rodale, and it hadn’t gone away all afternoon.
But now that Bowers had found Mollie, something even she’d failed to do, she felt conflicted.
She’d never liked Bowers’s headstrong attitude or his unconventional approach to law enforcement, but she could hardly believe he was the kind of man to go behind her back to Rodale like that. Not only was it a direct challenge to her authority, but it showed contempt for the Bureau’s chain of command and its motto: Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.
She saw none of those three in his actions.
And none in Rodale’s decision to contravene her orders and reinstate him.
Just another example of Rodale’s inept leadership at the helm of the Bureau.
However, despite all of that, apparently, Bowers had done his job, done it well.
So it was up to her to make the call.
She picked up the phone again.
Congressman Fischer’s wife was still on her way back from Australia, so at least she wouldn’t have to traumatize her, but as the head of the task force, Margaret did need to call the congressman to ask him to identify his daughter’s remains-the second time he’d been asked to do so this week.
She took a deep breath, and then, with a stark mixture of sadness and frustration-both toward herself and at the Bureau for not saving Mollie Fischer-she dialed the number.
On the way home, I tried comforting Tessa, but she told me she didn’t want to talk and if I could just leave her alone that would be good.
Over the past year she’d explained to me more than once that usually the best way to help her get through stuff is to just let her be-advice that sounded counterintuitive to me but actually did seem to work.
So for the moment at least, I let things rest and allowed my thoughts to return to the case.
Right now the team would be interviewing the bellhops for a description of the people who’d had suitcases taken from their rooms. Officers would be checking the suitcase for prints, DNA, trace evidence; tracking the luggage claim tag to see if they could tie it to any of the guests who’d recently checked into or out of the hotel; processing the luggage storage room and the hotel room containing the spot of blood.
The nuts and bolts of police work.
But based on what I’d seen so far, the killers this week would have known all that, would have anticipated it.
I was reminded of Sevren Adkins, the killer in North Carolina who called himself the Illusionist and had attacked Tessa and then tried to kill us both. He’d taunted the authorities with clues from future crimes and always seemed to find a way to hide in plain sight, even managing to be at crime scenes without raising suspicion. Right before he died he’d challenged me to a rematch “I was looking for you.”
Tessa’s words jarred me out of my thoughts about Adkins, and it took me a moment to mentally shift gears. “In the luggage room?”
A nod. “I had a visitor.”
“A visitor?”
She didn’t answer right away. “Paul Lansing.”
“What!”
“Don’t worry.”
“Lansing was there? Did he do anything to-”
“It’s okay. I got some good footage.”
“Footage?”
I listened as she summarized her meeting with Lansing, but even as she spoke I realized I needed to see this footage for myself, so I exited the highway, parked at a gas station. Then she flipped open her laptop.
And pulled up the video.
65
I watched the digitally recorded conversation three times, shocked by what Lansing had told her, incredulous that he’d followed us, angry at myself for not noticing his car.
His claims seemed outrageous.
But also, though I hated to admit it, perhaps not so outrageous after all.
Actually, if what he was saying was true, it would explain a lot, including how Vice President Fischer knew him and had heard about the custody case, why Christie never told me the identity of Tessa’s father or informed him that he had a daughter-and also why I hadn’t been able to find out more about Paul Lansing’s past.
Of course, I would need to confirm everything, but the more I thought about it, the more I found myself anticipating that his story was going to check out.
Momentarily, I had a disturbing thought, and I was ashamed at myself for even thinking it, but as an investigator I couldn’t help it: Tessa’s father was in this hotel six years ago when the shooter tried to assassinate the vice president… Because of his involvement he would likely know about the two rooms on the eighth floor… He was here this week at the time of this crime spree.. . The use of the two rooms pointed to a connection between the crimes