Twenty minutes later
I pressed play.
It was my fourth time through the footage of Rusty Mahan’s death. Each time I’d been trying to keep myself objective, focused not on his death itself but on what the video might tell us about his killers.
But I was finding that nearly impossible.
Watching him die was just too troubling.
This time, I did my best to keep my eye on the camera angles and the orientation in reference to the background images in the frame.
When I finished, I went to the WXTN website and reviewed the footage of the on-sites filed by Nick Trichek and Chelsea Traye, starting with the discovery of Mollie’s body yesterday at the Lincoln Towers Hotel, and moving backward through the homicides this week to those they covered over the last two months, comparing the camera work to the footage of Mahan’s death.
And came up empty.
Not surprisingly, almost all of the newsreels had been shot with stationary cameras rather than handheld ones, like Rusty’s death had been.
In my searches I found that Chelsea had done a special in April on the Gunderson facility’s primate research, but so had three other local stations over the last year. She covered most major crimes in the Metro area and had done a controversial piece recently on the movement to legalize prostitution in the District of Columbia. Other than that, nothing jumped out at me.
When I searched for any previous criminal offenses or mis-demeanors, I didn’t find anything for Chelsea and only a few speeding tickets and a marijuana possession charge against Nick from three years ago.
No red flags in the location of Nick and Chelsea’s work or home addresses, nothing suspicious about the arrival times at the scenes.
In frustration, I slid my laptop aside.
Tunnel vision.
Try to disprove your theories, don’t try to confirm them or you’ll be blinded by your desire to prove yourself right!
I needed to clear my head.
I made a trip to the snack machine at the end of the hall, grabbed a three-course mini meal of Snickers, Cheetos, and a hermetically sealed cinnamon roll that might have been left over from the days of the Cold War, and returned to my work station.
C’mon, Pat, think this through.
How are this week’s crimes connected to the assassination attempt on Vice President Fischer?
Why did the killers choose Mollie Fischer?
Brush off conjecture with the facts until only the truth remains.
Cheetos in hand, I pulled up the active screen for the case file updates and saw that Anderson, who’d been working the ViCAP linkage analysis, had posted a list of three homicides in the northeast that could potentially be linked to this week’s crimes.
(1) A dismembered body in New York City three months ago. The body hadn’t been found in suitcases but rather in three large boxes. Apparently, the killer had been planning to mail them to an ex-employer.
(2) In April a twenty-two-year-old male Baltimore native was found in his bathtub with his wrists slit, but there were lingering questions about whether or not it was homicide or suicide. His phone was beside the tub and had been used to record his death.
Hmm.
A possibility.
(3) A homicide in Vienna, Virginia, last month. The killers had left a text message on the female victim’s laptop, taunting the authorities.
Because of its proximity to DC, the Vienna crime had been covered by Chelsea Traye and the WXTN News team, and I’d seen the footage just a few minutes ago, but from what I could tell by glancing over the case files, there weren’t any obvious links to the crimes this week.
As far as being related cases, none of the three looked especially promising, and none of them had anything to do with license plates-which might have just been a red herring anyhow.
A quick check of the time: 1:22.
I rubbed my head. I had less than forty minutes before I needed to pick up Tessa.
With a growing sense of apprehension about the 3:30 custody meeting and a tightening sense of disappointment from my lack of progress on the case, I turned my attention to the active screen and saw one more crime appear.
A triple homicide in Maryland last month. Two police officers had been killed as well as a female civilian, apparently as the result of a domestic dispute. Anderson seemed to think that the proximity to DC, a crime scene that appeared staged, and a possible discrepancy between the arrival time of the husband at the house and the time of death of the officers made it a crime to look into.
However, Philip Styles, the woman’s husband, had pled guilty, presumably to avoid the death penalty, and was now in jail awaiting his sentencing trial. A connection seemed unlikely to me.
Still, we had four separate crimes that might be linked to the killings this week. And despite my initial impressions, I needed to have a closer look at them.
Taking a bite of my Snickers, I clicked to the first crime listed to try to eliminate, rather than corroborate, its relationship to this week’s crime spree.