“Who’d he kill?”
“It’s not entirely clear that he killed anyone, although he was convicted of multiple homicides. There are no eyewitnesses, so the case was built on strong circumstantial evidence, and he offered no defense.”
In ’96, a mother and her teenage daughter were about to enter Gifts of the Magi, a store that sold items for the Catholic market. Nativity scenes, pictures of Jesus, stuffed lambs, icons, that sort of thing. As the mother began pushing the door open she looked through the glass and saw a man standing a few feet inside. He was covered with blood. The mother saw several other people lying on the floor or slumped over the counter.
She pulled her daughter away and called the police from the Barnes & Noble in the same strip mall. When the first responders arrived, the man was still standing there. He made no attempt to flee or resist arrest.
There were four victims. The woman who owned the store, her disabled vet of a husband, and two customers. All of them had been stabbed repeatedly.
“Here’s the challenging part,” said Church. “All four victims were stabbed with the same knife, and from the wound profiles it’s clear that it was a double-edged British commando dagger. However, no weapon was found at the scene. All of the area drains were checked, rooftops searched, trash picked through. There are no traces of blood outside the store, suggesting that the perpetrator never left the premises, and Nicodemus was drenched in blood. All of the experts agree that had he left the store he would have left a blood trail.”
“Weird.”
“Very.”
“He could have handed the knife off to an accomplice who was not bloodied.”
“Of course, but it was the first of a number of unusual elements associated with the case. You’ll enjoy this.”
“Okay … hit me.”
“During the booking phase three separate police cameras malfunctioned. The fingerprint ten-card went missing. When his clothes were collected, bagged, and sent to the lab in Philadelphia, the police courier had a fender bender and at some point while he was arguing with the other driver his car was robbed. The only thing taken was the evidence bag. When they ran him through the system, his fingerprints were not in AFIS, and today when we ran them through the military fingerprint banks we got nothing; however, he was wearing a Marine Corps Force Recon ring when he was arrested.”
“Did they do DNA on him?”
“Yes, but no one can put their hands on the results. I’ll get a court order to take a new cheek swab.”
“Have Jerry Spencer take the swab when he gets back from London. He doesn’t make procedural mistakes. He thinks the chain of evidence is holy writ.”
“As is appropriate. Spencer’s on the plane with me, by the way. He’s sleeping and said that if you called I was not to wake him. He said that he needed sleep more than he needed to talk to you.”
“What a guy.” Jerry still resented my bullying him into foregoing early retirement from Washington PD and signing on to the DMS. Even though it was a big pay bump and nobody shot at him anymore, he would rather be entertaining trout on a quiet lake somewhere. “Eventually I’d like Jerry to look over all of the original evidence collection procedures from Willow Grove, the State Police, the Sheriff ’s Office, and the DOC. I know a lot of guys from that area. They don’t make a lot of mistakes.”
“No,” Church agreed.
“Somebody should get eyes on this Nicodemus character. Can you reroute Rudy? Send him to Graterford?”
“He’s sitting next to me and our plane just touched down at Heathrow, however, I can get him on the next outbound flight to Philadelphia.”
I heard a brief muffled conversation as Church explained my suggestion to Rudy. Rudy’s voice went up several octaves and he said something about me in gutter Spanish involving fornication with livestock. He’s a mostly charming guy. Real class.
“He said he would be happy to,” said Church.
“So I heard.”
Ghost was looking at my phone with great interest and thumped his tail enthusiastically. He probably had heard Rudy’s voice.
“As for the stateside phase of this,” Church said, “I’m passing the ball to Aunt Sallie.” Aunt Sallie was Church’s second in command. I hadn’t yet met her, but she and Church had history going back to the Cold War days and she was supposed to be a wild woman. “She’ll coordinate with domestic agencies and keep a line open to our friends in NATO and INTERPOL.”
“Okay, I’m heading back to Whitechapel to join the door-to-door of the neighborhood. Somebody may have seen something like delivery vans. They had to have brought a whole lot of explosives in. And I’ll want to talk to staff members who weren’t working today. Somebody has to know something.”
“Good. I’ve also brought Hugo Vox in on this.”
“Vox the T-Town guy?”
“Yes. I’ve asked him to put together his groups of consultants. He’s built several think tanks of strategists, novelists, and screenwriters. Thriller novelists mostly. David Morrell, Gayle Lynds, Eric Van Lustbader, Martin Hanler—authors of that stripe. Their novels are built around extreme and devious plots and are usually so well thought out that some in our government have decried them as primers for terrorists.”
“Yeah, I heard a lot of that after the Towers. People were making comparisons to Black Sunday, that book by the Silence of the Lambs guy.”
“Thomas Harris. And, yes, there are striking similarities. The authors are vetted by Vox, of course. We’re hoping the authors will come up with scenarios that we can use for programming MindReader’s searches.”
“Worth a shot. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“One of these days you’ll have to tell me where you continue to find your optimism,” he said, and disconnected.
Interlude Six
T-Town, Mount Baker, Washington State
Four Months Before the London Event
Dr. Circe O’Tree lived in Terror Town.
Her office was tucked away in a corner of a sprawling jumble of blockhouses built as extensions to what had been a ski chalet prior to 9/11. The office was never warm and she could hear gunfire all day long.
Circe spent most of her day on the Internet, cruising Web sites and social networks, reading thousands of posts, making notes, updating lists, and fighting the onset of early cynicism. At twenty-eight she still believed it was possible to remain idealistic and optimistic about the better nature of the human species despite all of the evidence that filled her daily intake of information.
“Knock, knock,” said a voice, and she turned to see her boss, Hugo Vox, standing in the doorway. He held two chunky ceramic mugs of steaming coffee and had a box of doughnuts tucked under his elbow. “You ready for a break?”
She pushed her laptop aside. “Like an hour ago. My eyes are falling out.”
“You look as tired as I feel,” said Vox as he handed her a mug. “I’ve been doing Webinars all day with the DOJ and there’s only so much red tape I can eat before I want to shoot myself.”
He hooked a visitor chair with his foot and dragged it in front of her desk, then lowered his bulk into it.
Hugo Vox was a big man, son and grandson of Boston policemen, though he did not wear a badge himself. His father had been wounded on the job and retired early to write novels, and the second one had become an international bestseller, spawning a Robert De Niro movie and a TV series that ran for six years. His next eleven novels had made the family rich. On the day the elder Vox, who had single-parented Hugo, won an Emmy for his show, he drove out to the estate of the mother of his son and proposed. They had been lovers in college, but her wealthy and aggressively classist parents had forced her to give up their baby. Now, as young forty-somethings (she had inherited millions after her parents—the computer fortune Sandersons—died in a plane crash), they settled down to form the family that fate and the class system had once denied them. As a result, Hugo had been able to afford Yale, and while still an undergraduate he formed a staffing agency, specializing in security guards. He hired many of his father’s retiree cop friends. By the time Vox was out of grad school his company was providing security for the United Nations in New York and thirty other organizations with government ties.