Tessa needed to get her mind off the whole deal with Paul Lansing, but it was still gonna be more than three hours before Patrick was supposed to show up.
Great.
Not exactly in the mood for crossword puzzles or poetry. Not today.
Maybe do something to make up for keeping the emails from him, for going behind his back, that would be a major plus.
So? Clean?
Um… not.
Supper?
Ouch-that was painful just to think about. She’d tried cooking a few times, and those had not exactly been her best hours.
Okay, so what does he care about-besides you-what matters to him?
Well, that was obvious.
His work.
And right now that meant finding whoever killed the congressman’s daughter in that whole weird, totally disturbing, chimpanzee attack.
She tried to think like Patrick would:
Location and timing.
Why then?
Why there?
What does the choice of this location tell us about the killer’s familiarity with the region, about his travel patterns? About his perception of the area and his relationship with the victims?
Timing: last night.
Location: the primate research place.
The cable news last night had said that the place was studying cognition in higher primates.
She knew a little about primate cognition, but maybe…
The Internet was a possibility, but she had a better idea.
She went online and, using her freshly acquired reader’s card verification number, logged onto the Library of Congress’s archives, the world’s largest collection of scientific journals, and then typed in “Gunderson Foundation Primate Research.”
A nurse checked my blood pressure and pulse and then put a bandage on my seeping IV needle mark, and after she left the exam room, I spent ten minutes filling in the hospital’s paperwork while I waited for the doctor to arrive.
But at last I set the forms aside, borrowed some paper from a receptionist, and began analyzing the details of the hotel chase, the shooting, the locations related to the crimes, jotting notes as I did.
After a while I realized that it’d been an hour since I’d spoken with Tessa or checked in on the case, and I still hadn’t gotten back with Director Rodale, who’d left me a message earlier for me to call him.
I phoned Tessa first, and she assured me she was fine. “Detective Warren is here.” She lowered her voice. “I didn’t need a babysitter.”
“That’s not why I asked her to stop by. You know that.”
A slight pause. “I guess so.”
“What are you two doing?”
“Talking about boys.”
“No, we’re not,” Cheyenne called from the background.
“Boys?”
“She thinks you should let me date older guys.”
“No, I don’t,” Cheyenne said.
“Whatever.”
Despite Tessa’s reluctance to have someone check in on her, she sounded much more relaxed than when we’d spoken earlier, and I was relieved. “Anyway,” she said, “we’re playing chess. She’s a lot better than you are.”
“Well, that’s not too hard.”
“True.”
I tapped a finger against the chair. Since I was still waiting for a doctor, my chances of getting home in time were growing slimmer, but I said, “I’m still hoping to make it by 7:00.”
I heard Cheyenne again: “Check.”
“All right, I’ll see you.” Tessa sounded distracted, and I pictured her studying the board.
She hung up, I called Doehring.
We talked for a few minutes about the case-still no sign of Mollie Fischer, but they were checking the hotel room by room. “Farraday found the wheelchair in room 809.”
“Whose name was the room reserved under?”
“The manager’s. It’s a comp room he keeps reserved for foreign dignitaries visiting Washington.”
Unbelievable.
“Fourteen sets of prints on the chair-so far mostly partials, DNA from Mollie, two maids, some still unidentified. No matches to anyone in the system, though. And the alley? Well, somehow these guys hacked in and looped the video feed. That’s why we didn’t see the woman enter. Marianne’s furious she didn’t catch it.”
So the question remained-where was Mollie?
I remembered reading about a case from the 1990s in which a Belgian couple abducted young children and kept them in a specially designed dungeon. The police searched the house twice and heard children crying each time, but assumed the sounds came from kids playing outside somewhere. Two girls starved to death while the husband was serving time and his wife, who was an elementary school teacher, stayed in the house and ignored the girls’ cries for weeks until the two children finally died.
“Take the room apart,” I said. “Check under the bed frame, move the furniture, assume nothing.”
“It’s done.”
“A maid’s cart? Could they have put her in a laundry cart?”
“We checked. Listen, how is your-”
“I’m fine. The freezers at the hotel? The roof? What about the elevators? Check on top of them-” And then, thinking of the hotel’s state-of-the-art security and ultramodern renovations, I had a grisly thought. “Any document shredding machines at the hotel? Large ones, I mean industrial-sized?”
“Don’t worry. My men are thorough.”
At last, as we were finishing the call, I asked him if he could send an officer to pick me up when I was finished here, take me back to my car.
“You were shot, Pat. I’ll have Anderson take you all the way home.”
“No, I just need to get to my car. I’ll call you when I’m ready to leave the hospital.”
We hung up.
Finally, under the pretext of returning the call he’d made to my cell earlier in the afternoon-but primarily hoping to find out if he was the one who’d told Fischer to keep the information about Mollie from the press-I punched in Director Rodale’s number.
His secretary told me he’d just gone home for the day. “He wants to speak to you too,” she said.
That was no surprise.
We set up a meeting at his office tomorrow at noon, between my classes.
Then I went back to my notes, and a few minutes later the doctor arrived.