4 hours left…
5:29 p.m.
Margaret had stepped away, Doehring was at the reins, and it looked like the team had been making some progress.
He filled me in.
The big news: Agent Cassidy had found traces of military grade C-4 on some of the carpet fibers in the back of the van.
“I thought they cleared the van?” I said.
“After you linked last night’s gas station explosion to the crime spree, they started going back over everything, start to finish.”
The ATF has the best explosive and accelerant detection dogs in the business, so their teams had been sent to the Lincoln Towers Hotel as well as the congressman’s office and the Gunderson facility.
The ATF.
One more agency added to the plate.
“Let’s get them to the Capitol Police HQ as well.”
“Right.” He made a note of it. “Next: you know how Fischer has connections with the Gunderson Foundation? Well, a couple of my guys did a little looking into some of his biggest campaign supporters.”
“Let me guess: the Gunderson Foundation?”
He shook his head. “No, but we did find two other organizations in the same neuroscience business, both trying to identify the parts of the brain that lead to psychopathology. And both have pretty deep pockets.”
Hmm.
I recalled my trip to the primate center and Fischer’s concern that his relationship to the Gunderson Foundation not become public.
“Is the info on the electronic case files?”
He nodded.
“All right,” I said. “I’m following up on this. Stay on top of the bomb deal. Keep me informed.”
He nodded, then crossed the room to speak with Officer Tielman, who had just arrived.
I checked my texts: only one-Tessa telling me she was fine.
Good.
I positioned myself at a table near the wall, pulled out my laptop, and clicked to the online case files.
But after fifteen minutes of dead-ends I decided to try another angle and surfed to www.thomas.loc.gov to search through the list of pending legislation in the House of Representatives. It would take forever to read the bills, most of which were probably hundreds of pages long, but two topics could help narrow things down.
I had the first in mind already: justice reform.
And Margaret had given me the second.
Abortion.
She had drained his savings account and was in a hotel room cleaning up, thinking about the implications of her decision to disappear. Everything she needed to fake her death was in their basement, in the room that the man she’d trusted had so carefully remodeled. All the tools. All the chemicals. But of course, since he might show up at the house at any time, she would be taking a huge chance going back there. However, she needed to take care of this tonight, as soon as possible, and the basement was the most obvious place to do it. In fact, given the tight time frame, it might very well be the only place she could pull this off. If she were a suspect in this crime spree, the airports would likely flag her name, but being presumed dead she would be off the radar screen. She would be free. By leaving some of her own blood and tearing out some of her own hair she would make it appear as if she was the prey. But a little blood and hair wouldn’t be enough to convince the FBI. To make this work, she needed a body. One that she could dissolve beyond recognition-put the body in the tub, fill it with water, add a few gallons of drain cleaner, turn the victim into soap. Even recombinant DNA becomes almost impossible to identify when you use enough drain cleaner. If she could leave just enough evidence that a woman had been killed, and just enough evidence to make it appear that the woman had been her, she could at least buy enough time to get out of the country. To escape. Disappear. Start a new life and raise her baby. So in the end she realized that even though returning to the house might be risky, it was a chance she had to take. However, she’d never killed anybody in NowLife, just arranged things so that her lover could put her ideas into action, and now, to her surprise, the more she thought about taking another woman’s life, the more unsettling the idea became. But there was no other choice. For the sake of her own freedom, for the sake of her baby’s future, someone would need to die. One life for two. And because of the research she had done for work, she knew the perfect person to choose as her victim. She changed into a new set of clothes, grabbed the car keys, and left the hotel to go get her prey.
Margaret found what she was looking for.
She was in her office at FBI HQ and had just finished analyzing interoffice memos and electronic communication to track the release of the Project Rukh files. She discovered that indeed it was FBI Director Rodale who had approved the transfer of the Project Rukh research to the Gunderson Foundation-just days before Congressman Fischer’s contributions to the Foundation began.
Maybe the two men weren’t at odds at all, maybe they were partners.
But then why would Fischer propose budget cuts to the Bureau?
Whatever Rodale’s connection with Fischer, the next step seemed obvious to her.
Follow the money.
Margaret picked up the phone to make a few calls.