“No, it’s okay. We’ll-”
“Pat.” Cheyenne laid her hand on my forearm. “You read too much into things. I just want to help. Just as a friend. Honestly.”
She was right; I was seeing ulterior motives in her offer and it bugged me that she’d nailed it. I felt a little embarrassed and yet slightly flattered that she could read me so easily.
Cheyenne removed her hand, waited for my reply.
Just let her help.
“Honestly, if you could take her home, that would be great.”
“Great.”
We jogged toward the car, and I opened the passenger-side door. “Raven, Detective Warren is going to give you a ride back to the house.”
With Tessa’s insatiable curiosity I expected her to ask to come along to the crime scene, which she did. “You know I can’t do that,” I countered. “Besides, there’s a dead body there and you might see-”
She swung her legs out of the car. “Yeah, I get it.”
Cheyenne started toward the south end of the parking lot. “My car’s over here.”
“I’ll see you at the house, Tessa,” I said.
“Okay.”
The two of them were hurrying toward Cheyenne’s car. “Hey, thanks again,” I called to Cheyenne.
“No problem,” she hollered back with a wave of her hand.
I got into my car. Flipped on the radio to listen for any breaking news.
And headed to the scene of Mollie Fischer’s murder.
8
Brad stood anonymously in the crowd of people watching the television screens.
Despite the storm, fifteen people had gathered outside Williamson’s Electronics Store on Connecticut Avenue near Union Station in the heart of downtown DC.
The high-end television showroom featured Sony, LG, Samsung, and Bang amp; Olufsen’s next generation of organic light-emitting diode televisions. Razor-thin screens, sixty-five inch, seventy inch, and larger. The world’s most expensive home theater systems on display and facing the street.
From observing the store over the last few weeks, Brad knew it wasn’t unusual to find half a dozen people pausing by the window, coveting the TVs. In fact, the store’s popularity was one of the reasons he’d chosen it.
Now, the grainy images carried on each screen looked like a movie in the tradition of Blair Witch or Cloverfield, but each television contained six different camera angles, and the time marker at the bottom of each screen made it clear that the feed was live.
The videos showed the interior of an expansive building, a walkway between walled-in glass enclosures at least twenty feet tall. Speakers located beneath the storefront’s overhang projected the sound of the chattering monkeys, baboons, gorillas, and other primates as they swung from thick ropes and clambered over the stout limbs of artificial trees, obviously constructed to hold the apes’ immense weight.
A flurry of FBI agents and DC police, easily identifiable by the letters emblazoned on their jackets, moved into and out of the picture.
Because of the indistinct shadows and the glare off the glass, it was difficult to tell how many bodies lay inside the farthest primate cage on the left. At least one. Maybe as many as three.
No one else knew this, but the footage was only being transmitted to this one location.
Brad listened quietly as those around him tried to figure out what was going on: “It’s some kind of gorilla zoo or something,” somebody said.
“Is this live?” a man in a gray Valentino suit asked. “This is live, isn’t it?”
“They were talking about this on the news,” the woman beside him said. “I think it’s a senator’s kid who was killed.”
“Killed?”
“That’s the security cameras from inside the building.”
“No, it was a congressman,” someone said.
“Fischer’s daughter. That’s what I heard.”
Brad had snugged a Washington Nationals baseball cap over his head to shield his eyes from view and wore a fake, scraggly beard. Actually, disguises were one of his specialties.
He’d turned his collar up against the weather and was dressed in the reeking, tattered clothes he’d stolen from a homeless man he’d beaten senseless half an hour ago. Dressed as he was, Brad looked just like any other nameless, faceless vagrant.
Invisible.
In plain sight.
He wished he could stand here and watch for hours, but it was time to go.
He had a busy night-one more murder to commit, C-4 to pack into the metal tubes, a detonation sequence to set up.
And a few other chores.
He walked four blocks to the handicapped accessible van that he and Astrid were using; the van where he’d left the next two victims tied and gagged. Personally, he would have preferred leaving them unconscious, had planned to, but Astrid had told him it would be more fun if they were awake, anticipating what was to come.
Since they knew each other, if they hadn’t been blindfolded, they would have been comforted. As it was, in the end, the impact would be so much greater this way.
One would die tonight.
The other would spend the night with him and Astrid at the house.
9
The Gunderson Foundation Primate Research Center
1311 South Capital Street
Washington DC
8:26 p.m.
Raindrops slashed against the windshield. Tiny dark knives in the deepening twilight.
Yellow police tape surrounded the facility and twisted and snapped in the sharp wind. Fifteen patrol cars sat angled to the curb, lights still on. Colors lancing the rain.
The facility’s underground parking garage had been cordoned off, so I parked on the street behind one of the police cruisers. Already, half a dozen cable and network news crews were lining the neighboring streets.
Just what we needed.
Despite the media presence, the news coverage on the radio had been sketchy. The reporters couldn’t seem to agree on whether there was one body or two or maybe three, whether or not the police had a suspect in custody, and whether or not Congressman Fischer was actually in the city or overseas meeting with soldiers in Afghanistan.
Clusters of FBI agents, Metro Police officers (who have jurisdiction over the city), Capitol police officers (who protect Capitol Hill), and even US Marshals stood around the entrance to the building.
American law enforcement is set up like a plate of spaghetti, and the individual noodles overlap, wind together, and get entangled all the time. Depending on the type of crime and where it’s committed, you might have eight or nine state and federal law enforcement entities, intelligence agencies, military units, defense organizations, and justice department agencies all trying to investigate it.
And most likely not sharing information all that efficiently as they do.
Each of the armed forces has their own division of criminal forensic investigators; add in a helping of the ATF, DEA, CIA, FBI, NSA, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, the US Marshals Service and Federal Air Marshals, the Secret Service, US Customs and Border Protection, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, even the Office of Inspector General for the United States Postal Service-as well as regional and state law enforcement, sheriff’s departments, and the six classified investigative agencies that don’t appear on any government books It’s mind-boggling.
All too often, conducting an investigation is like sticking your fork into the mess and twirling. Sometimes I’m amazed any crime gets solved or any terrorist attack gets thwarted.
Now, as I looked around at the variety of agencies already onsite, I could feel it happening again: The spaghetti was beginning to spill off the plate.
It struck me that Congressman Fischer might be right about wanting to cut down on bureaucratic redundancy.
A Metro police officer was approaching my car.
I picked up a pair of latex gloves from the crime scene kit I keep in the glove compartment, made sure I had my lock-pick set, my Mini MagLite, my 3-D hologram projection phone, then grabbed my FBI windbreaker and stepped into the storm.