I stared at the question, thought about what we knew so far: Mollie was missing, she was not the victim we’d found at the research center, she’d been wheeled, apparently unconscious, through the door by an unidentified man, but as of yet there was no evidence that he’d harmed her. As far as we could tell, only two people had snuck out of the hotel, and if the male suspect was one of those two people and Mollie Fischer rather than Aria Petic was the second, it would explain why her body hadn’t been found.
The scenario seemed unbelievable to me, but I’d worked cases before with so many twists and turns that I didn’t want to discount anything.
Ralph was in Michigan and Margaret had ordered me not to work today, so I emailed Doehring with my thoughts and asked him to have an officer follow up on everyone who actually was registered at the Lincoln Towers Hotel yesterday to see if we could connect the dots between one of the guests and either Mollie or Twana. I also asked him to look more closely at Mollie Fischer’s background for any possible connections to alleged or confirmed criminal activity.
Then I dove into the geoprofile.
Cognitive maps differ not only in respect to people’s relationship with their surroundings but also in regard to their relationships with each other-married, single, divorced, as well as their age, sex, race, socioeconomic status, and the actual layout of the city in which they live.
Every one of us is only intimately familiar with a small fraction of our city’s or rural region’s overall area. And here is the key: the awareness space of a victim almost always overlaps, at least to some extent, with the awareness space of the offender. Which makes sense, because their lives intersected at least at the moment of the crime.
So that’s where I would start-the known travel routes and awareness space of the victims. And I could determine those by the locations of their most frequent credit card purchases, their club memberships, GPS locations of their past phone calls, and so on.
I placed the phone with the hologram projector onto the table in front of me, used a fire wire to connect it to my laptop, positioned my coffee cup next to the computer, and went to work.
6:02 a.m.
FBI Executive Assistant Director Margaret Wellington did not feed canned dog food to her purebred golden retriever, Lewis.
Absolutely not.
Gourmet food only, and now as she ripped open the bag, he must have heard the sound because he came trotting into the kitchen. Wagged his tail cheerily.
“Good morning, Lewis.” She scratched his neck and filled his bowl. After Lewis had taken a moment to nuzzle her hand, he turned to the food.
She collected her things and headed for the door.
Margaret was in the habit of leaving for work by 5:30 a.m., primarily to avoid the DC traffic but also to get in as much work as possible before Rodale loaded her plate with even more.
Today, however, she was already more than thirty minutes behind. And that did not make her happy, especially in light of her packed schedule for the day.
In addition to the drive to the city, she had at least three hours of work to do before the press conference scheduled at 9:00 a.m.
Impossible, but still she would be expected to do it.
She didn’t mind speaking to the press, it suited her, but she did not like cleaning up other people’s messes. And so far, that’s what this case was turning into-a complete mess.
First, she had the public outcry from Fischer’s misidentification of the homicide victim on Tuesday night. The right-wing bloggers were having a field day with that: “If he doesn’t even know his own daughter, how can he know what’s best for the country?”
Idiocy.
As well as unconscionable-taking advantage of a family’s loss solely for political gain.
It made her furious.
Fischer’s mistake might result in a lawsuit against the Bureau-even though the ME who failed to verify the young woman’s identity worked for the city and not the FBI. That’s what comes from these joint investigations-incompetency and unclear lines of authority. And in this case, since Rodale had assigned her to head things up, the buck stopped at her.
Not only did she need to deal with the Bureau’s public-relations black eye but also the distraught Summie family, the self-possessed congressman and his cronies, and an ever-shrinking investigative team.
Agent Hawkins was in Michigan.
Agent Bowers was recuperating.
Yesterday evening, before she’d spoken with Bowers, she’d read over the hospital’s report concerning his GSW and knew that it was more serious than he was letting on.
His recovery was necessary for the good of the investigation as well as the National Academy classes beginning on Monday. Despite his impertinence, he was the Bureau’s most qualified instructor in crime mapping and site analysis, environmental criminology and geospatial investigation, and she couldn’t afford to have him out of action and chance diminishing the Academy’s reputation as the premier law enforcement training facility in the world.
So yes, he needed rest, but she knew him well enough to guess that he was not the kind of person to listen to a doctor’s advice. So, for his own good, she’d quoted a bogus Bureau policy about agents who are injured in action being on mandatory medical leave for forty-eight hours.
And he’d actually seemed to buy it.
As she thought about him, she noted that one of the few characteristics she shared with Patrick Bowers was this: neither of them believed in coincidences.
She’d served on a committee last winter for a Defense Department program that had been terminated in February, and because of the nature of the project that the committee had been overseeing, she was almost certain it was no coincidence that the killers had chosen the Gunderson facility-however, because of the social and political implications of Project Rukh, she needed to tread lightly and confirm her suspicions before bringing them up with the task force.
For the moment, it was her job to keep all of these plates spinning in the air, and despite her experience and administrative acumen, she wasn’t sure she could do it.
But as she merged onto the highway and drove to work, she told herself that she could.