We entered the maze of hallways that meandered behind the habitats and past a series of glass-walled research rooms equipped with wire mesh partitions to keep the researchers safely separated from the primates. The back door in each habitat opened to one of the rooms.
Lien-hua walked beside me. Graceful. A gazelle.
I could feel the weight of the unsaid stretching between us, and I tried to think of a way to clear the air, but before I could land on the right words, she broke the silence. “Pat, our past needs to stay in the past.” She spoke softly, her voice rich with her Asian heritage, and though she tried to sound objective and detached, I could tell the topic was difficult for her to bring up. “This case, this is where we are. This is where we need to be.”
She was right, of course, but that wasn’t going to make things any easier.
“We can’t pretend that nothing happened between us,” I said, more for my sake than for hers. “That we weren’t…”
In love, I thought.
“Close,” I said.
A small pause. “I’m not suggesting we pretend, just saying we need to move on.” A thin thread of pain ran through every word, but I couldn’t help recall that she was the one who’d ended things, not me. “People do that, you know,” she said. “People see each other, they break up, they find a way to work together again.”
Yes. You’re right. People do that.
She looked my way. “We need to do that too.”
“I know,” I replied.
“Okay.” She took a breath, then added, “I’m glad you’re back in town, though.”
“It’s good to see you too.”
Lien-hua.
Cheyenne.
This was going to be a hard summer.
As we passed through the hallway, I noticed computerized testing stations, fMRI and CAT scan machines in the adjoining rooms. From a case I’d worked in San Diego last winter, I even recognized two MEG, or magnetoencephalography, machines used to study the magnetic fields that are caused by neurological activity.
There was definitely some big money behind this facility.
Lien-hua noticed me surveying the rooms. “We had a briefing before you got here.” Her tone was professional, that of a co-worker, and it hurt to hear her use it on me. “Mostly the research here focuses on primate cognition, but in this wing, they’re also studying primate aggression. The keeper arrived at 7:00 to check on the animals, found the security guard drugged, Mollie dead, and the chimps mutilating her body. She called it in. That’s about all we know. Metro police are interviewing her now.”
“Any indication she might be involved?” I guessed that Lien-hua would want me to mirror her cool, detached tone, and I tried to but failed pitifully.
“Not so far.”
“How was the drug identified so quickly?”
“They use it in their research.”
After a few more steps she said, “A personal question. Is that all right?”
“Sure.”
“How are you and Tessa doing?”
Although I hadn’t told Lien-hua about Paul Lansing, she was aware of my struggles connecting with my stepdaughter. At the moment I avoided the whole topic of Tessa’s father. “She’s good. Thanks for asking. Actually, she mentioned she was looking forward to seeing you this summer. Wants to talk to you about something called .”
A small moment. “Yes. That would be nice.”
I kept my curiosity to myself.
We arrived at the doorway to the ape habitat where Mollie had been killed. The door was wide, but low, and at six-foot-three I had to crouch to get through.
As I entered, I was struck by the stark smell of straw and feces and the rusty scent of blood.
Death in the air.
To get to Mollie, I had to walk past the two dead chimpanzees.
Both had blood-stained teeth and streaks of blood smeared across their faces and hands. The larger of the two had a single gunshot wound to the chest. The other had been shot two or three times, it was hard to tell, and lay closer to the door. An officer was interviewing a distraught-looking female civilian, possibly the keeper, but I tried to avoid making assumptions.
Ralph was having a word with the three CSIU officers beside Mollie’s body. By the time Lien-hua and I arrived, they had stepped aside.
And so, Mollie.
Lying at my feet.
I knew that chimpanzees are many times stronger than humans and can turn violent, but I had no idea they could be this vicious. Most of Mollie’s face was missing, the deep, bloody bite marks trailing down what was left of her cheeks and gouging deeply into her neck.
With so much skin and meat missing from her face, her jaw jutted out grotesquely toward me. One of her eyes was pulverized, the other missing.
I felt myself grow both sickened and enraged.
She had a single piercing and earring in what was left of each ear and wore a silver chain necklace that was tucked beneath her Georgetown sweatshirt. Once light gray, the sweatshirt was now darkened with splattered blood. Using a gloved hand, I eased out the necklace and found a locket with two engraved initials: R.M.
Mollie had a small build, weighed perhaps 110 pounds, wore blue jeans and black pumps and had blonde hair, now matted with blood and several thin, grisly strips of flesh that had been torn from her face. Her right leg was obviously broken, the foot turned sideways, perpendicular to the rest of the leg.
A savage and brutal and terrible death.
The contents of her purse lay scattered around me in the straw.
Apart from the blood on her sweatshirt, her clothes were dry.
The leather straps the killer had used were still snugged tightly around each wrist, and the skin surrounding the straps was red and raw from what must have been her desperate attempts to get free. I noticed that two of her fingernails were chipped, and caught on the corner of one of them were several threads of blue cloth.
From the killer’s clothing?
Carpeting?
Bedsheets? A blanket?
The guys at the lab would find out.
I mentioned the fibers to the CSIU, and they told me they’d already taken note of them. I glanced up and saw two strips of leather hanging from the branch of the tree she’d been secured to. I assumed the responding officers had needed to slit the straps to lower her to the ground. “When was she last seen alive?”
“We’re not sure,” Ralph answered. “Someone saw her at the Clarendon Metro stop at about 4:00 this afternoon. That’s the last we know of.”
I considered that.
4:00 p.m.
It was now 8:31.
I looked at the black soles of her shoes. Scuffed.
Felt the cuff of her jeans.
Dry.
I ran through the seven steps law enforcement officers take: secure the scene, secure the subject, assist the injured, call for responders, detain witnesses, identify the body, pursue all leads.
“Who made the ID?”
Ralph indicated toward Mollie’s purse. “The keeper found her driver’s license, called it in. They got the congressman over here right away. He IDed her. Yeah, I know it’s unusual to do it on-site,” he went on, “but there was concern this might be a politically motivated crime, that his life might be in danger, so the Capitol police brought him in. Took him to a secure location when he was done.”
With the extent of her disfiguring injuries, I wondered how he’d identified her. A birthmark maybe. A tattoo.
He’s her father, Pat. A dad knows his daughter. Even in death.
I scrutinized the blood-spattered straw surrounding Mollie’s body. A frenzy of violence. “Other family members?”
“She’s an only child. Her mom is in Australia for a relative’s wedding.” The CSIU officers eyed me quietly. I had the sense they were not happy I was on their turf.
I stood up, appraised the area, taking it in. “Anything else like this? Any similar crimes that we know of? Links to other homicides?”
“We checked ViCAP,” Ralph said. “People have been fed to Dobermans, pigs, gators-but never primates. At least not that we know of.”
I could look into that more in-depth later.
The crime scene technicians would be scouring the room for physical evidence. I wasn’t here for that. My job was to notice the pieces of the puzzle other people miss.
I mentally ran down what I knew.
The Metro stop.
The rain.
The congressman’s high profile position as house minority leader.
Timing. Location. Patterns. Routes.
Lien-hua was studying the position of the chimps’ bodies. Ralph knelt beside Mollie, inspecting her injuries. The three CSIU officers were still watching me.
“Time of death?” I asked them.
“Not long ago,” one of them replied. He was slim with blue eyes, blond hair, and had a nervous habit of rubbing his left thumb and forefinger together. The cloth name tag sewn onto his uniform read Officer Roger Tielman. “Body temp and lividity suggest one to three hours ago. Probably sometime around 6:00. Maybe closer to 7:00.”
Not specific enough to help me narrow things down.
“Last call on her cell phone?” I asked. “Any texts?”
“We already followed up on the last ten calls-all from preprogrammed numbers. Eight female, two male.”
“Any from an R.M.?”
A quizzical look.
“Were any of the calls from someone with the initials R.M.?”
He sent one of the officers beside him to find out.
“She’s got hundreds of text messages from the last month,” Ralph added. “The ERT guys are tackling that.” The Evidence Response Team, or ERT, is the FBI’s forensics unit.
I pulled out my cell. Tapped in a few numbers on the flat screen’s touchpad.
“What about the facility’s security cameras?” I asked Tielman. “Anything?”
“Yeah. We checked.” He sounded almost insulted by the question. “The footage from 5:00 to 7:00 was deleted.”
On my phone I surfed to the Federal Digital Database and logged into the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s site. They might not record detailed data from every city in the US, but I was counting on the fact that they would track meteorological changes here in our country’s capital. I punched in my federal ID number then looked through the glass to one of the cameras above the central walkway. “Were the cameras on when you arrived?”
“Yeah.”
“And are they directed in the same position now as they were before the footage was lost?”
He looked a little confused. “The same position?”
I was getting frustrated by Tielman’s repeated need for clarification. “The cameras are all stationary; non-panning. I want to know if someone has reviewed the footage prior to 5:00 and confirmed that the angles at which the cameras are currently positioned are the same as they were before the footage was deleted.”
He let his eyes wander from me to his partner, a slim Hispanic woman, then back to me. “I would imagine they are.”
“Don’t imagine,” I said. “Find out.”
“Why would that matter?”
“Everything matters.”
“Go,” Ralph said, ending the discussion.
Tielman spoke to his partner, sent her to find out about the camera angles. He stayed behind as she passed out the door.
The NOAA precipitation data appeared on my screen in a series of condensed scrolling columns of numbers, organized by longitude and latitude coordinates.
A few more taps at my screen and I’d pulled up the defense satellite’s imagery of the city.
I went to a corner of the habitat, pushed a little straw aside to make room for my phone, laid it on the concrete, and opened the hologram program.
A moment later, the phone was projecting a 3-D hologram of downtown DC. It hovered a meter off the ground, half a meter in width and length.
Glimmering buildings, shimmering roads.
With this phone I had the capability to rotate the hologram, zoom in and out, and overlay data to highlight specific locations and travel routes. Although I wasn’t sure my idea would work, I transferred the precipitation stats and coordinates onto the city, overlaying them against the hologram’s 3-D imagery, just as I do with the travel routes of victims when I’m doing a geoprofile.
The precip levels were marked in layered, darkening shades of blue corresponding to the precipitation level recorded by NOAA’s satellites. Although it was difficult to discern the subtle changes in color, when I studied it closely I could just barely make out the differences. I began reviewing the levels at fifteen minute intervals starting at 4:00, when Mollie was last seen.
“It’s not a spectator sport,” Ralph growled. His words caught my attention, and when I glanced up, I saw that everyone in the habitat, except for Ralph and Lien-hua, was staring at the hologram.
“Get back to work.” When Ralph speaks, people obey. Within moments they’d all turned away from me.
Lien-hua leaned down, brushed at a small pile of blood-spattered straw.
I continued to scroll through the time markers until I came to 7:00 and saw what I was looking for.
“I need to see the parking garage,” I said.
“What is it?” Ralph asked.
I closed the program, the hologram disappeared. I pocketed the phone. “Shift change and the Metro station. It fits.” I started for the exit, but before I could leave, I met two members of the Bureau’s ERT crawling through the door.
First, Agent Tanner Cassidy, an old friend of mine, emerged. Medium build, brown hair. Soft spoken, meticulous, and dedicated. He introduced me to the attractive agent who, only a moment later, stood beside him. “This is Natasha Farraday. Transferred in from St. Louis.”
I introduced myself. “Pat Bowers.”
She shook my hand by squeezing my fingers lightly rather than by gripping my palm. “Good to meet you.” With a disarming smile and wide, shy eyes, she made me think of a twenty-five-year-old Christina Ricci.
“You too.”
“Agent Cassidy,” Lien-hua called, her voice grim. “Over here.”
“I’ve read your books, Dr. Bowers,” Natasha said to me.
I was studying the deep concern on Lien-hua’s face. “Okay.”
Cassidy and Tielman joined her. Knelt beside her. Cassidy called for a photographer and an evidence bag. “We’ve got Mollie’s eye here.”
A sweep of nausea.
“Excuse me,” I said to Natasha, indicating toward the door, but then realized I could probably use her help. “Wait. Can you join me in the parking garage?”
“Of course.”
I asked Ralph if he could come along, and he followed me, barely squeezing his massive shoulders through the doorway.
“Good thing it’s built for gorillas,” I said.
“Watch it.”
We took the stairs to the garage. If I was right, the killer’s car would still be here.