“I can rephrase it if that would make it easier for you.”
“You’re more important to me than-”
“Don’t do that.”
My phone rang. Cheyenne’s ringtone.
Unbelievable.
“Do what?”
“Use me as an excuse.”
“I’m not using you as an excuse.”
It rang again.
“I get it that you love me,” she said. “But do they have a better chance of saving lives if you’re at home babysitting me?”
“Why are you asking me this?”
Ring.
“Just answer it.”
“I’ll get it in a minute.”
“No, I mean my question.”
“The answer is no-”
“Okay.” She sounded satisfied. “Now, get the phone.”
Another ring.
Annoyed, I picked up. “Cheyenne. Hey.”
“How are you doing? Just touching base. Seeing how the case was going. How your arm is.”
“Listen, can I call you back?”
“Sure.” But she sounded concerned. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah.”
Tessa said, “Ask her what she’s doing tonight.”
I shook my head at Tessa, spoke to Cheyenne, “Just give me a few minutes.”
“Ask her,” Tessa urged.
“Cheyenne, can you hang on a sec?” I held the phone against my chest. “What is it you want, Tessa?”
“It’d be stupid for her to drive into the city to help you out right now. With traffic on a Friday night? Give me a break. It’ll take me like an hour and a half to get home on the VRE, she can work till then, hang with me for supper, and whenever you get back you can fill her in on the case. It’ll give you a couple hours to work, I’ll be safe, problem solved. Everybody’s happy.”
I tried to find a glitch in her plan.
“No,” I said stubbornly.
“Can I see your phone for a sec?”
“Tessa-”
She held out her hand. “Here, just for a minute.”
“I’m-”
She cocked her head and raised her eyebrows. A reprimand from an adolescent girl.
I resisted, but in the end I found myself giving in.
Tessa took the phone. “Detective Warren, hey, it’s me. Um, listen, I’ll be home at like 6:45 or so. Can you stop by until Patrick gets back? Yeah, he’s getting all weird on me… I know. Yeah, no, we’re okay… Whatever, you will so not beat me this time… Yeah, right. So, okay, do you want to talk to him again…?”
She returned the phone to me. “She wants to say hey.”
I said to Cheyenne, “I’m sorry about that.”
“You don’t have to be sorry about anything.”
“Tessa’s trying to flex her wings, and it’s just not good timing.”
“It’s no big deal, really. I’ve been in class all day. I’ll hit the firing range, get my rounds in, then head to your house and see you when you get there. You can bring me up to speed. Besides, this’ll give me a chance to practice my new hobby.”
“Your new hobby?”
“Remember? Coming to your rescue?”
Oh boy.
“Yeah.”
Don’t be flirty.
Don’t be flirty.
Don’t be flirty.
“Well,” I said. “Thanks.” I gave her Tessa’s cell number so it’d be easier for them to connect, and we ended the call.
Tessa was finishing her latte. “So?”
“Are all teenagers like this?”
“It’s possible that I’m gifted.” She hitched her purse strap over her shoulder. “Don’t worry, everything’s cool. She doesn’t have to stop being your friend just because you kissed Agent Jiang. Just remember-”
“Yeah, I know. Don’t lead her on.”
“Exactly.”
I took a deep breath. “Here’s what I want you to do: text me every fifteen minutes until Detective Warren arrives. To let me know you’re all right.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
“I’m not kidding.” I held up a cautionary finger to stem a comeback. It didn’t work.
“You’re not supposed to use mobile devices on the Metro,” she countered.
“If you get arrested I’ll make sure you don’t serve hard time.”
She sighed with her eyeballs. “Whatever.”
“Call me if anything comes up, anything at all.”
“I will.”
I took her to the Metro stop, waited for her to board, then drove to police headquarters.
To map out this cave.
95
4 hours left…
5:29 p.m.
Margaret had stepped away, Doehring was at the reins, and it looked like the team had been making some progress.
He filled me in.
The big news: Agent Cassidy had found traces of military grade C-4 on some of the carpet fibers in the back of the van.
“I thought they cleared the van?” I said.
“After you linked last night’s gas station explosion to the crime spree, they started going back over everything, start to finish.”
The ATF has the best explosive and accelerant detection dogs in the business, so their teams had been sent to the Lincoln Towers Hotel as well as the congressman’s office and the Gunderson facility.
The ATF.
One more agency added to the plate.
“Let’s get them to the Capitol Police HQ as well.”
“Right.” He made a note of it. “Next: you know how Fischer has connections with the Gunderson Foundation? Well, a couple of my guys did a little looking into some of his biggest campaign supporters.”
“Let me guess: the Gunderson Foundation?”
He shook his head. “No, but we did find two other organizations in the same neuroscience business, both trying to identify the parts of the brain that lead to psychopathology. And both have pretty deep pockets.”
Hmm.
I recalled my trip to the primate center and Fischer’s concern that his relationship to the Gunderson Foundation not become public.
“Is the info on the electronic case files?”
He nodded.
“All right,” I said. “I’m following up on this. Stay on top of the bomb deal. Keep me informed.”
He nodded, then crossed the room to speak with Officer Tielman, who had just arrived.
I checked my texts: only one-Tessa telling me she was fine.
Good.
I positioned myself at a table near the wall, pulled out my laptop, and clicked to the online case files.
But after fifteen minutes of dead-ends I decided to try another angle and surfed to www.thomas.loc.gov to search through the list of pending legislation in the House of Representatives. It would take forever to read the bills, most of which were probably hundreds of pages long, but two topics could help narrow things down.
I had the first in mind already: justice reform.
And Margaret had given me the second.
Abortion.
She had drained his savings account and was in a hotel room cleaning up, thinking about the implications of her decision to disappear. Everything she needed to fake her death was in their basement, in the room that the man she’d trusted had so carefully remodeled. All the tools. All the chemicals. But of course, since he might show up at the house at any time, she would be taking a huge chance going back there. However, she needed to take care of this tonight, as soon as possible, and the basement was the most obvious place to do it. In fact, given the tight time frame, it might very well be the only place she could pull this off. If she were a suspect in this crime spree, the airports would likely flag her name, but being presumed dead she would be off the radar screen. She would be free. By leaving some of her own blood and tearing out some of her own hair she would make it appear as if she was the prey. But a little blood and hair wouldn’t be enough to convince the FBI. To make this work, she needed a body. One that she could dissolve beyond recognition-put the body in the tub, fill it with water, add a few gallons of drain cleaner, turn the victim into soap. Even recombinant DNA becomes almost impossible to identify when you use enough drain cleaner. If she could leave just enough evidence that a woman had been killed, and just enough evidence to make it appear that the woman had been her, she could at least buy enough time to get out of the country. To escape. Disappear. Start a new life and raise her baby. So in the end she realized that even though returning to the house might be risky, it was a chance she had to take. However, she’d never killed anybody in NowLife, just arranged things so that her lover could put her ideas into action, and now, to her surprise, the more she thought about taking another woman’s life, the more unsettling the idea became. But there was no other choice. For the sake of her own freedom, for the sake of her baby’s future, someone would need to die. One life for two. And because of the research she had done for work, she knew the perfect person to choose as her victim. She changed into a new set of clothes, grabbed the car keys, and left the hotel to go get her prey.