Lien-hua gave us a decisive nod. “So. The email was sent to Hunter. Someone is trying to control him. So what does Austin Hunter want?”
“Cassandra,” I said. Nods from the people in the room. We were on the same page. “But,” I added, “if Hunter is our arsonist, what did he want when he started the other fires?”
Lien-hua looked at me with a light grin. “It sounds like you’re trying to decipher motives, Dr. Bowers.”
“Just trying to be cooperative.”
Ralph was taking notes on a scrap of paper, figuring out all the threads of the investigation we needed to pursue. He nodded to one of the men in the room. “Peterson, check Hunter’s bank accounts, see if our guy made any sizable deposits around the time of the fires.
Graham, Castillo, have Lieutenant Mendez take you back through Hunter’s apartment, see if there’s anything there that might lead us to him. Solomon, you’re all over that dart. Find us a brand name, manufacturer, distributor. And Mueller, go through Hunter’s personnel records and start following up with the other guys on his SEAL team. Maybe there’s a connection we missed. I’ll work with Lieutenant Graysmith, have him send a team to Cassandra’s place.”
I could feel a growing urgency in every word he spoke.
“But,” Lien-hua said, “the big question we still need to answer is: if eight o’clock really is the deadline, what determines whether or not Cassandra gets set free? What does Hunter bring to the table?”
“He specializes in starting fires,” I said.
“What do you think?” Ralph was addressing the whole team.
“‘Burn down a building and you get Cassandra back.’ Sounds like ransom to me.”
“Yes,” said Lien-hua thoughtfully. “But if he started other fires before, why not just ask him to start this one…” Once again she was doing what she did best: diving into people’s motives, thinking like they think. Reasoning like they reason. “Wait. Maybe this is a building he wouldn’t normally agree to burn down. He’s always been careful to set the fires so that they burn out quickly. No fatalities. No injuries.”
Uh-oh.
“You think maybe a building filled with people?” asked one of the agents nervously, mirroring my thoughts.
“We can’t count it out,” Lien-hua said. “Like Ralph said before, if you threaten to take away the one thing that matters most, a person will abandon his values, everything he holds dear.”
In the icy silence that followed her statement, I decided what angle I had to pursue. I stood up. “I’ll follow up on the videos from the aquarium, see if we got any footage of the abductor. Also, Cassandra was working on some kind of grant from the government. I want to know exactly what it involved. I’ll fly through some of her files, see if I can figure out why she went to the aquarium this morning. Maybe that’ll tell us what the people who took her are after.”
“I’m going to watch the video of her again,” said Lien-hua. “Try to climb into our kidnapper’s head.”