“Changing views?”
“When does life begin? At birth? At conception? How do you define liberty?”
I was getting more and more lost here. “How is all of that connected to what’s going on here this week?”
She shook her head. And when she spoke, she didn’t answer my question. “There are some things I need to check into.” Before I could get a word in, she added sharply, “If you have a problem with me, you talk to me. Not Rodale.”
“If I have a problem with you, I’ll make a point to let you know. Now tell me what-”
But, abruptly and without any further explanation, she excused herself and walked away.
All right. That was odd.
And a little unsettling.
After she was gone, Lien-hua approached me. “What was that all about?”
“Good question.” I shook my head. “She started off by getting on my case, but when I mentioned Project Rukh, her whole attitude, her entire demeanor, changed.”
“In what way?”
“She seemed uneasy.”
No, she seemed scared.
Silence passed between us, then Lien-hua softly stated the obvious, but for some reason it felt reassuring to have it out in the open: “This case goes a lot deeper than just these four homicides.”
Twana Summie, the college student.
Mollie Fischer, the congressman’s daughter.
Rusty Mahan, the boyfriend.
Juarez Hernandez, the gas station attendant.
“Yes, it does,” I said. “And Margaret knows something she’s not sharing with the rest of the class.”
What is obvious is not always what is true.
I gazed around the room. “Lien-hua, what are you going to work on right now?”
“Clearly, the killers had some grounds for choosing to use the same two Lincoln Towers rooms used by Hadron Brady. I think the key to solving this case will be zeroing in on the killers’-you’re not going to like this-”
Motives, I thought.
“Reasons,” I said.
A half smile. “Close enough. I’m looking into that. And there’s one other thing: the lack of DNA and prints at each of the scenes, it really troubles me. All of these crimes? No physical evidence?”
“Hmm.” I considered that. “The dog didn’t bark.”
“What?”
“Sherlock Holmes. It’s… well, the idea is to avoid looking at what did happen and focus on what didn’t happen that should have-and they should have left DNA.”
“Yes.”
“So by not leaving any, the killers have revealed something significant about themselves: they know how to avoid leaving even the most minute physical evidence at a crime scene.”
“Someone in law enforcement?” she said softly, repeating her observation from the briefing.
“Or the military.” I showed her the six names I’d pulled up during the briefing.
“Great minds.” She jotted down the names. “What about you?”
“I’m going to review that video of Rusty Mahan’s death,” I said. “And then I think I’ll spend a little time watching the news.”
The baby kicked. For the first time ever, she felt the child inside of her kick. “I’m alive! Don’t forget about me! Let me live! Let me live!” The struggle to survive. Always. Always. To live. “Two for the price of one,” her ex-lover had said just before rolling her into a shallow grave on top of a rotting corpse. Her baby kicked again. “I’m sorry I wasn’t stronger,” her father had written the night he gave up on life. The night he let death win. She heard a voice, nearly audible, “Don’t let it win! Don’t let it win!” And as she felt the tiny life inside of her move again, despite her raw exhaustion, despite her broken hope, she promised her child that she would be stronger, that she would be strong enough to survive. And she began to rage against her bonds.
87
Twenty minutes later
I pressed play.
It was my fourth time through the footage of Rusty Mahan’s death. Each time I’d been trying to keep myself objective, focused not on his death itself but on what the video might tell us about his killers.
But I was finding that nearly impossible.
Watching him die was just too troubling.
This time, I did my best to keep my eye on the camera angles and the orientation in reference to the background images in the frame.
When I finished, I went to the WXTN website and reviewed the footage of the on-sites filed by Nick Trichek and Chelsea Traye, starting with the discovery of Mollie’s body yesterday at the Lincoln Towers Hotel, and moving backward through the homicides this week to those they covered over the last two months, comparing the camera work to the footage of Mahan’s death.
And came up empty.
Not surprisingly, almost all of the newsreels had been shot with stationary cameras rather than handheld ones, like Rusty’s death had been.
In my searches I found that Chelsea had done a special in April on the Gunderson facility’s primate research, but so had three other local stations over the last year. She covered most major crimes in the Metro area and had done a controversial piece recently on the movement to legalize prostitution in the District of Columbia. Other than that, nothing jumped out at me.
When I searched for any previous criminal offenses or mis-demeanors, I didn’t find anything for Chelsea and only a few speeding tickets and a marijuana possession charge against Nick from three years ago.
No red flags in the location of Nick and Chelsea’s work or home addresses, nothing suspicious about the arrival times at the scenes.
In frustration, I slid my laptop aside.
Tunnel vision.
Try to disprove your theories, don’t try to confirm them or you’ll be blinded by your desire to prove yourself right!
I needed to clear my head.
I made a trip to the snack machine at the end of the hall, grabbed a three-course mini meal of Snickers, Cheetos, and a hermetically sealed cinnamon roll that might have been left over from the days of the Cold War, and returned to my work station.
C’mon, Pat, think this through.
How are this week’s crimes connected to the assassination attempt on Vice President Fischer?
Why did the killers choose Mollie Fischer?
Brush off conjecture with the facts until only the truth remains.
Cheetos in hand, I pulled up the active screen for the case file updates and saw that Anderson, who’d been working the ViCAP linkage analysis, had posted a list of three homicides in the northeast that could potentially be linked to this week’s crimes.
(1) A dismembered body in New York City three months ago. The body hadn’t been found in suitcases but rather in three large boxes. Apparently, the killer had been planning to mail them to an ex-employer.
(2) In April a twenty-two-year-old male Baltimore native was found in his bathtub with his wrists slit, but there were lingering questions about whether or not it was homicide or suicide. His phone was beside the tub and had been used to record his death.
Hmm.
A possibility.
(3) A homicide in Vienna, Virginia, last month. The killers had left a text message on the female victim’s laptop, taunting the authorities.
Because of its proximity to DC, the Vienna crime had been covered by Chelsea Traye and the WXTN News team, and I’d seen the footage just a few minutes ago, but from what I could tell by glancing over the case files, there weren’t any obvious links to the crimes this week.
As far as being related cases, none of the three looked especially promising, and none of them had anything to do with license plates-which might have just been a red herring anyhow.
A quick check of the time: 1:22.
I rubbed my head. I had less than forty minutes before I needed to pick up Tessa.
With a growing sense of apprehension about the 3:30 custody meeting and a tightening sense of disappointment from my lack of progress on the case, I turned my attention to the active screen and saw one more crime appear.