by Steven James
Now we were at Doehring’s squad. Both of us climbed in.
“I’m not sure,” he said.
I didn’t need to tell him to make the call to find out. He had the radio in one hand and was cranking the ignition with the other.
I recalled my class discussion earlier in the day about planning the perfect murder. So far, these killers were right on target.
Except for one thing: if our hypothesis was correct that there were multiple offenders, that meant there was at least one accomplice. And that meant there was a loose end.
The DC streets were clogged, but we pulled into traffic and headed toward Metro police headquarters.
2:12 p.m.
Astrid finally arrived at the hotel, wearing a wig, sunglasses, a small disguise. She was somewhat rushed, somewhat frustrated: the task force had made the discovery much quicker than she’d expected.
But it wouldn’t change things. Everything else was still in play.
She peered into the van and saw that Brad had forgotten the duffel bag and the woman’s laptop computer. She sighed, retrieved them, then entered the hotel through the alley door where Brad had made sure the video footage was looping. At least he’d remembered to leave that propped open for her.
She went to the stairwell.
Because of the FBI’s progress, they would move up the schedule.
Mollie would die at 2:45 instead of 3:00. Just to make sure.
“Did the lab remove the glare from last night’s video?” I asked Doehring. “The footage of the Volvo?”
“Most of it, from what I heard, but not enough for us to ID the driver.”
Come on, Pat. What are you missing here? What are you missing?
The Volvo’s driver slowed down as he approached the light . . . He switched plates so that you’d notice . . . So that you’d notice . . .
I phoned Ralph. “Any ID on the woman yet?”
“No. We’ve got a list of possibles, Metro PD is going through them.”
“Did the agents find footage of any unidentified people leaving the facility last night?”
“They should finish in about ten minutes.”
“They should have finished an hour ago!” I snapped.
“They gave me some crap about a lot of people being there.” His tone was fiercer than mine had been. “A lot of partial faces, having to analyze stride length, posture, height, weight, whatever.”
“Just tell ’em to hurry.”
“Oh, believe me, they know.”
End call.
Doehring threw on his siren and overheads. Slowly, cars began to edge to the side as much as they could to let us through, but with the congestion in both lanes, it didn’t make that much of a difference.
I considered the locations we knew of so far . . . the electronics store . . . the primate research facility . . . the Metro stop where Mollie had been seen yesterday afternoon . . . the Connecticut Avenue bridge where Rusty had been found . . .
The killers approached the primate center from the south, less than ninety minutes after Mollie was last seen.
Oh.
Obvious!
I could hardly believe I’d missed it.
I tapped at my phone, pulled up the videos of Mahan’s car approaching the facility.
Doehring glanced at me. “What are you thinking?”
“The Volvo would have traveled through more than one light.”
Astrid opened the hotel room door and saw Mollie Fischer sitting on the bed, shivering with fear, her hands bound behind her, her legs tied together. Blood oozed down the left side of her forehead from something Brad must have done to her. Now he dabbed at the blood, even though in a few minutes none of that would matter.
Both of them looked her way. She entered the room, closed, then dead-bolted the door behind her.
And the voice inside of her, the one that Astrid realized was beginning to sound more and more like her father, narrated:
Most people do not scream as they die, they move through the doorway with a slight gasp or a soft breath, or a faint and final moan.
One would think that the culminating act of life would be more dramatic, more exciting, but that final moment is not nearly as fascinating as the movies make it seem. More often than not, it’s disappointingly anticlimactic. Passing away is actually a good phrase to describe it. We slip into the eternal sea, and the ripples of our lives quickly fade and settle and disappear.
And soon, so soon, we are forgotten.
Astrid looked at the woman and thought of death—the ones she’d witnessed, the ones she’d helped arrange—thought of the pain and meaninglessness of the life that precedes it. Sometimes the passing away starts years before passing through the doorway.
Just like Dad’s.
Brad finished wiping the woman’s forehead and turned on the television, clicked through the channels until he found a car chase that seemed loud enough to hide any sounds Mollie might make when they removed her gag.
Astrid didn’t like the idea of having Brad inflict undue physical harm, but Mollie’s compliance was important, so she told her, “In a moment we’re going to remove that gag. And if you make any sound, I’ll have my friend beat you until you’re unconscious, and then do things to you that I can guarantee you would not want done. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
A small and terrified nod.
Power.
Power over hope.
Astrid motioned for Brad to loosen the gag.
No!
I’d been hoping to track the Volvo’s path backward to its point of origin, but I came up empty. Admittedly, I was flying through the footage too quickly to be absolutely certain, but I wasn’t able to locate the Volvo at any other traffic lights, and there were plenty of routes he might have taken to evade the city’s traffic cameras if he knew their location.
If only we knew the identity of the Jane Doe at the research center . . .
Timing, timing, timing.
We were almost to HQ, but I didn’t want to wait. Using the radio in Doehring’s cruiser I called the command post, identified myself, spoke with one of the officers. “The missing persons you’ve been following up on. Have you checked their recent phone calls, credit card usage, emails?”
“Of course, sir.”
“Send them to me.”
Astrid had studied acting when she was an undergrad, and now she was enjoying her role.
She flipped open Mollie’s laptop, logged into the hotel’s wireless connection, and then positioned the screen so that Mollie could see it. “I am going to give you a gift that very few people have ever been offered.”
“You’re gonna let me go?” Mollie’s voice was shaking. She was a mouse staring into the eyes of a snake.
Predator.
Prey.
“The last thing you see.”
A question crossed Mollie’s face, and Astrid said to her, “What do you want it to be? I’ll pull up any image from the world, any picture you like.”
Yes.
Control.
“No.” Mollie’s voice was shaky. “Please.”
Prey.
Astrid stared at her for a moment, then let her gaze drift toward Brad.
He spoke softly, reassuringly. “Mollie, I need to tell you something.” He nodded toward Astrid. “My friend is a persistent woman. She’ll make you choose eventually, but it’ll be less trouble for everyone if you choose something now. Whatever you want. Any picture. Any video. Just say something.”
His acting was almost as good as hers.
Mollie gulped. “I don’t know.”
Brad took over the keyboard and clicked to an Internet search engine. “Think of something calming. It might help. A seashore, maybe? Or a mountain meadow or a sunset? Just tell her something.”
“Please.” She shook her head. “Stop.”
Brad said, “It doesn’t matter what.”
Predator. Prey.
Control over hope.
“Time’s up,”
Astrid said.
“No, no, no,” Mollie cried. “Rusty. Okay, Rusty, please.”
And as the woman asked to see the face of the young man she had loved, the man who was already a corpse, Astrid felt sweet excitement, the same frisson of dark pleasure she’d felt last month when the EMS dispatcher kept asking the corpse of Jeanne Styles if it was okay.
“Are you hurt?”
No, hurt is a whole different thing.
Rusty had been in the van with her, tied, gagged, blindfolded, last night. But she hadn’t even known.
Prey.
“All right.” Astrid gestured toward the woman’s computer. “Do you have a picture of him?” The schedule was tight, but she wasn’t willing to give up this part of the game.
A nod.
“Where?”
“My photos.” Mollie sounded frightened, desperate as she nodded toward the computer. “In iPhoto.”
Astrid gestured to Brad, and he opened the computer’s directory to find the files.
Twana Summie.
She was a college student from northern Virginia who attended Gallaudet, hadn’t been seen since Tuesday morning, and her Visa card had been used to book two nights—last night and tonight—at the Lincoln Towers Hotel.
So: a college student booking two nights at a hotel that charges six hundred dollars per night for a room? At a hotel that close to her college?
“Turn around,” I told Doehring. “Get us to the Lincoln Towers Hotel.” It was downtown. Close.
“You have something?”
“I might.” As I told him what I’d found, he whipped the car around and I pulled up Twana’s DMV records to see if she shared enough physical characteristics with Mollie to have been the victim we found in the Gunderson Foundation Primate Research Center.
Astrid found the photos of Rusty and Mollie, and when she pulled up one of the young couple on the beach, Mollie nodded, closed her eyes, nodded again.
It was a quaint picture. A dock with a sailboat in the background. A lightly clouded horizon and blue ocean beyond them—sun and sea and scalloped sky. Rusty’s arm was draped around her shoulder, and she was leaning tenderly against his chest.
“It’s nice.”
“I’ll do anything. Please, just—”
“Shh.” Brad laid a hand on the woman’s shoulder. A nurturing gesture. “Calm down. All will be well.”
Astrid looked at him and loved him and desired him.
She let her finger graze across the picture of Rusty. “He’s very handsome. You made a good choice. To die looking at him.” Then to Brad: “Turn up the volume on the television.”
Yes.
Although Twana was slightly taller than Mollie, she had the same build and hair color.
“That’s it.”
I felt the net tightening.
Twana’s credit card had been used to book a room at the hotel tonight, her abductors might be there . . . if they brought Mollie . . .
Too many ifs.
The hotel was two blocks away.
I called their number to find out which room Twana Summie was staying in.
And they put me on hold.
Astrid used the cursor to highlight the picture of Mollie and Rusty at the seashore, hit delete, and then emptied the trash so that the picture was gone now and forever. “How did I do?”
Mollie’s fear subsided briefly, turned to confusion. “What?”
“Did I have you convinced?”
“You’re going to let me go?” A glimmer of hope in her voice. “You’re not gonna hurt me?”
“No. I mean did you think I was going to let you look at that picture while you died?”
Astrid noticed that Brad looked as surprised as the woman.
“What is this?” Brad asked.
“I had you too?” Astrid felt a tickle of satisfaction.
“Had me?”
“Believing that I would let her look at something pleasant while you killed her?” She spoke to him as if Mollie were not there. As if she were already dead.
Mollie begged, “No, no . . .” Terror rising in her eyes.
Brad looked slightly betrayed, and that bothered Astrid. What was his problem? It was all part of the game. “Don’t pout.”
“It wasn’t in the plan.”
“I thought it would be more fun this way. And it was, wasn’t it? It was more fun.” She kept her eyes locked on his until at last he looked away.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “It was more fun.”
“Why do you think I had you take the video of Rusty last night?”
Brad was quiet.
“Video of Rusty?” the woman said. “What did you do to him!”
Astrid had a feeling what would happen when she showed Mollie the footage of her boyfriend struggling for breath at the end of the rope.
She picked up the gag and turned to her.
“I’ll show you.”
Doehring and I rushed through the doors of the Lincoln Towers Hotel.
Adrian Lees, the manager, was waiting for us.
Mid-forties. Slim. Tailored suit. Small goatee, neatly trimmed. “I’m the CEO,” he said. “Here at the Lincoln Towers. We checked the system.” He paused at awkward intervals as he spoke, chopping his sentence into odd, bite-sized pieces. “No one by the name of Twana Summie has a room here.”
What?
“No credit card charges?”
He shook his head.
But that’s not possible . . .
“Take us to your control center,” I said.
His face was flushed. “Is everything all right?”
“No,” Doehring growled. “The control center! Now!”
Lees motioned toward the hallway behind the registration desk. “This way.”
After my initial surprise that there were no rooms reserved in Twana’s name, I realized that the glitch, the inconsistency, was a clue that we were on the right track—but we still had no way to know if our suspects were on-site. As soon as we could confirm—
My phone rang.
Ralph.
“Yes?” I answered. I was hurrying down the hallway, following Lees.
“The videos. I just got word.”
“Tell me.”
“A cleaning lady—name of Aria Petic. No video of her entering the building either before 5:00 or after 7:00, but she left immediately after the EMTs arrived. We’re looking for her.”
“Do we have her face on tape?”
“Mostly obscured. Only a partial.”
At least we could get her pace, stride, approximate height. “Send it.”
End call.
Game on.
30
Astrid played the two-minute-and-fifty-one-second video chronicling Rusty’s death, first the preparation, then footage of him dangling beneath the bridge, clawing uselessly at the rope cinched around his neck, and the voice of her father, her dead father, spoke to her,
With each passing second, the young man became less and less animated. Less frantic. More submissive to the inevitable. The final denouement of his ever-shrinking world.
Mollie had stopped trying to scream now and was watching the video with large, terrified, broken eyes.
Predator.
Prey.
The game.
Astrid tapped the space bar to pause the video, then said to Brad, “All right. Let’s send that message to the FBI.”
He went to the duffel bag to pull out the items he would need.
On the way to the control center, I asked Doehring if he’d interviewed anyone named Aria Petic, and he mentally clicked through his list of names. “No, I don’t think so.”
We arrived, and I immediately noted that the hotel had a better security surveillance system than most FBI field offices. Six attendants monitored an array of video screens stretching across the wall, each person’s eyes flickering from one screen to the next as the images changed to show different angles and hallways of the hotel.
Twenty-eight screens.
/> State of the art.
Adrian Lees introduced us to his head of security. “This is Marianne Keye-Wallace. Used to work for the NSA. She’ll help you. With anything you want.” Platinum blonde. Careful, steady eyes. She couldn’t have been more than thirty, but high-tech security positions rely more on brains and adaptability than either brawn or experience.
Without waiting for our names, she told Lees, “We’ll call you if we need you.” Then she promptly took a seat beside one of the computers turned to us. “Talk to me.”
“Are there any guests here by the name of Aria Petic, Twana Summie, or Mollie Fischer?” I said.
Marianne’s fingers were light and spidery on the keyboard. Lees hovered for a moment, then disappeared. “No,” she said. “What are we looking for here?”
It would take too long to explain. I pulled up the video of Aria Petic that Ralph had just sent me. “Do you have facial recognition on your video surveillance system?”
“Of course. Facial, audio, video.”
I handed her the phone. “Upload this picture. I need to know if this woman is in this hotel.”
The folded-up wheelchair leaned against the wall beside the room door, the duffel bag next to it. The suitcases that Astrid had brought into the hotel last night sat beside that.
Brad was busy with Mollie.
Astrid made the call to the front desk.
No footage of Aria Petic.
“You gotta be kidding me.” Doehring smacked the wall.
“What else?” Marianne asked, fingers poised at the keyboard.
Come on, come on, come on.
“We’re looking for . . .” I began, but my thoughts distracted me.
The key is Mollie. Everything revolves around her.
“Yes?” Marianne asked.
“Go online. Pull up the AP photo of Mollie Fischer.”
It took seconds.
“Do a search. If she’s here, I want to know what room she’s in. Pull up any video of her entering or leaving the hotel since 7:00 last night.” I figured we’d start there and work backward, if necessary to 4:00, when she was last seen.
