The Bishop

by Steven James

Vienna, Virginia

  11:47 p.m.

  After the debacle at the Lincoln, Astrid had suggested that she and Brad stay at a hotel tonight rather than the house, just to play it safe.

  “At least it all worked out,” Brad had told her as he locked the door.

  “But shooting an FBI—it was rash. Careless.”

  “Okay.”

  “You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  So that was an hour ago.

  Now, she was slipping into something a little more comfortable for bed, and he was watching her.

  Over the last few minutes, for whatever reason, they’d gotten onto the topic of serial killers. “They take souvenirs,” Brad said. “The serial killers do. So that they can relive their crimes, so they can feel that sense of power and control again.”

  She already knew this of course, but decided to pretend that she didn’t. “What kind of souvenirs?”

  “Jewelry, underwear, body parts. In a surprisingly high number of cases, shoes.”

  Serial killers.

  Like Brad.

  But not like her. She’d never killed anyone, not in NowLife. It’d always been him.

  She’d planned it that way from the start.

  Just in case they ever got caught.

  No, she was not a murderer. Just a bystander. “We keep a different kind of souvenir,” she said, getting back to the conversation.

  He stared at her quizzically.

  “In the freezer,” she added.

  “The freezer?”

  “Prison, our little fishbowl.”

  A questioning look.

  “I never told you about that? About the fishbowl?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She stepped into the bathroom to freshen up. “You mentioned once that you had a dog, when you were a kid.”

  “Brandi, yes. She was a Sheltie.”

  “I never had a pet myself, but my sister did.” She’d told him stories about her sister Annie before. “A goldfish named Goldie.”

  “Annie had a goldfish named Goldie.”

  “What can I say, I was always the more inventive one in the family.” She washed her face. “Goldie lived in a fishbowl on the dresser in our bedroom; anyway, one night Annie and I got into a fight. I don’t remember what it was about—who was supposed to help Dad with the dishes, maybe. Something like that. But I ended up being the one who got into trouble, and Annie spent the rest of the night teasing me. Well, the next morning when she woke up, Goldie was gone.”

  “You flushed her goldfish?”

  “No.”

  Astrid finished in the bathroom. “Goldie’s bowl was gone, and Annie looked all over for it. It was Saturday but my father worked weekends, so we were home alone. Annie was bigger than I was, stronger, and she hit me. A lot. But I didn’t say a word. She emptied out the garbage, didn’t find any glass, looked everywhere outside. No sign of the fish or the bowl anywhere.”

  She glanced at him to see his reaction.

  He was listening intently. She had him, she could tell.

  “I guess Annie must have searched for three or four hours that morning. Finally, at lunch, I figured it’d been long enough. I told her to check—”

  “The freezer,” he said.

  She smiled. “Yes. Annie cried for three days. My dad beat me for doing it, but every time he hit me I hardly noticed, all I could think of was how it had felt when Annie was looking. The feeling was . . .” She searched for the right word, couldn’t find it. “It was like nothing I’d ever experienced before.”

  “Exquisite,” he said. “It was exquisite.”

  “Yes.” She joined him beside the bed. “All I’d done was set the bowl in the freezer and close the door. It was that simple. And then the water began to freeze and I knew that slowly, slowly, it would become a solid block of ice.”

  “It made you feel powerful.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that how you got started?”

  “It wasn’t the only thing.” She reflected for a moment. “You set things in motion and then life simply goes on, but you have a secret, and in a way you want someone to open the freezer to see what you did, to see your handiwork, but you don’t tell them because while they search, while they wonder, while they worry, you own a piece of them.”

  “Like the FBI, right now,” he said. “Searching for Mollie, for us. We control a part of them.”

  She thought of the current game, but also of the four men in prison because of her. The goldfish from the previous games. She could get them released at any time; all she needed to do was tell the authorities the truth. “Yes.”

  Then, after watching him for a moment, she stepped back and smiled. “So, how did I do?”

  “With what?”

  “The story. Did I have you?”

  A question mark on his face. Then dawning disappointment. “You made it up?”

  “It was good, wasn’t it?”

  “I didn’t know it was a story.”

  So, yes, he had believed her. He was staring at her with a wounded, confused look, the same look he’d had at the hotel when she deleted the picture of Rusty.

  “Don’t sulk.” She trailed a finger along his cheek. “It was a good story, wasn’t it?”

  After a moment: “Yes. It was a good story.”

  “Time for bed.”

  “Okay.”

  The novel that was her life played out in her head.

  He remained distant and distracted throughout the night and that bothered her, especially since he was the one who had failed her earlier in the day—being so impulsive, so remiss, shooting the FBI agent.

  Yes, it was true she’d deceived him, now, twice in one day, but it shouldn’t have been a shock to him. After all, so much of their relationship had been built on the sand of half truths and lies. Ever since the beginning. Ever since DuaLife.

  This moodiness, his carelessness, were not acceptable.

  In a quiet, slow U-turn of emotion, she found herself considering possibilities she had never fully explored before.

  She began to wonder if he might be turning into a liability.

  The idea made her uncomfortable. He was the father of her unborn child and she loved him, but now she realized that if things came down to it, she might need to be ready to swing the freezer door shut on this scarred little pet resting in her arms.

  And to her surprise, she found the idea enticing.

  Maybe even exquisite.

  46

  Thursday, June 12

  5:15 a.m.

  My arm was killing me.

  I’m not a big fan of drugs, so last night, even though I took the antibiotics, I’d passed on the second dose of meds the doctor had offered me, and as a result, the gunshot wound had ached and throbbed throughout the night, keeping my sleep light and fitful and sporadic.

  At last, when daybreak cut through my window, I gave up fighting for sleep and climbed out of bed.

  And took the stupid painkillers.

  No workout today, but I washed up, and as I was getting dressed I noticed the St. Francis of Assisi pendant that Cheyenne had given me lying on my dresser where I’d left it when we moved into the house for the summer.

  Last month when I was preparing to leave to testify at Richard Basque’s retrial, she’d offered the pendant to me, explaining that St. Francis is the patron saint against dying alone. “It helps remind me why I do what I do. It’ll be good for you to have at the trial. To remember the women he killed.” I knew she was Catholic, and her words had underscored to me how seriously she took her faith. “Don’t worry, I can get another one.”

  I’m not very religious or superstitious, but the gesture meant a lot to me, and I’d accepted the pendant.

  Now, as I picked it up, I couldn’t help but think of what Lien-hua had mentioned about how Mollie Fischer would’ve gotten rid of the locket that Rusty had given her if she’d really broken up with him.

  So maybe you shouldn’t keep the penda
nt . . . ?

  But Cheyenne and I had never broken up, never been a couple—in fact, we’d only gone out once, and that was just a pseudo-date since Tessa had tagged along.

  Pseudo-date or not, I slipped the pendant into my pocket, chose a shirt that was baggy enough to hide the bandages on my arm, bypassed the sling, and went to the kitchen for breakfast.

  Margaret had made it clear that she didn’t want me working on the case today, but there was no way I could shut off that part of my brain for forty-eight hours.

  Besides, we hadn’t found Mollie yet, and there was a remote chance that she was still alive. I figured job security wasn’t all that big of a deal when there were lives at stake, so after grabbing some breakfast and brewing a pot of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, I went online and logged onto the case files to see what had been added since last night.

  The FBI Lab had established with certainty that the woman who’d been found in the primate research facility was indeed Twana Summie. Her family had been contacted, and as I read through the autopsy report, I thought of the words that had likely been said to them:

  “Her condition proved to be fatal.”

  “We arrived too late to save her.”

  Platitudes.

  Undoubtedly, officers would be following up with the family and friends, asking the typical questions: Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to harm her in any way? Did she mention any people she was meeting on the day she disappeared? Was she acting unusual prior to her disappearance? Did she know Rusty Mahan or Mollie Fischer?

  And of course, they would be checking her address book and calendar, looking into her recent phone calls, searching for and then interviewing the last people who had seen her alive.

  During my six years as a homicide detective in Milwaukee, I’d done my share of asking those questions and pursuing those types of leads, and I remembered how discouraging it can be to run into dead-end after dead-end.

  Yet now, given the inscrutable actions of this week’s killers—switching the license plates, staging the crime scenes, using elaborate misdirection techniques, daring us to decipher their clues and anticipate their next move—I had a feeling even more dead-ends than usual were on the horizon.

  I read on.

  The task force was compiling a list of other potential suspects. So far they’d collected hundreds of names from tips and the case histories of hundreds of known offenders who’d committed violent crimes in DC and its neighboring states. The suspect pool was growing larger, not smaller, by the hour. In fact, two more names appeared on the active screen even as I was reading the report.

  The team was still looking for Aria Petic.

  No DNA had been found on the latex glove left in the parking garage. Apparently, it had never been worn.

  Amazingly, the ERT hadn’t pulled anything useful from the handicap accessible van, except for a gas station receipt from last week that had no prints on it and DNA evidence that Mollie, Twana, and Rusty had been in the back. They followed up, but the receipt didn’t lead anywhere. No usable prints on the elevator button that the suspect had pressed, so evidently, he’d avoided touching it with the pad of his finger or had wiped it clean.

  Dead-end after dead-end.

  Dr. Trower, the District of Columbia’s medical examiner, confirmed that Twana had died from the chimpanzees’ attack. The bites on her neck had caused her to die from exsanguination.

  However, according to him, there were lacerations on her face that could not have been caused by the chimpanzees. He speculated that since chimpanzees consume blood, the killers had inflicted these wounds prior to her death to attract the chimps’ attention. Although his theory was still unconfirmed, it seemed like a plausible explanation to me.

  As of yet, there were no clear ties between Twana Summie and Mollie Fischer, Rusty Mahan, Congressman Fischer, or the research center. And the only connection Twana seemed to have to the Lincoln Towers Hotel was the use of her credit card to pay for the room—the credit card number that somehow did not show up on the hotel’s records. Which served as further evidence that one of the killers was a skilled hacker.

  I considered Twana for a moment. It was entirely possible that the killers had chosen her simply because of her physical similarities to Mollie Fischer, but if that were true, they still would have needed to find her and follow her before abducting her. And that was a clue as to where they’d been earlier this week.

  And since awareness space correlates to movement patterns, it was also a clue as to where they might be right now.

  I pulled out the notes I’d scribbled yesterday afternoon while waiting for the doctor to look at my arm, and paged through them until I came to the list of locations related to the crimes.

  • The Gunderson Foundation Primate Research Center—chimp habitat, parking garage, research room (for the drug), security control center, other??

  • The Lincoln Towers Hotel—room 809, the parking garage, the service elevator, the lower level storage room, other??

  • The van in the handicapped parking space.

  • The taxicab’s pickup and drop-off points, the taxi itself.

  • The Connecticut Street bridge where Rusty’s body had been found.

  • Williamson’s Electronics Store—possibly.

  • The residences, work addresses, and travel patterns of Rusty Mahan, Mollie Fischer, Twana Summie, and Aria Petic.

  Just a cursory look at the list told me that I had enough information for an initial geoprofile to begin narrowing down the most likely location for the killer’s home base.

  I jotted a few questions:

  1. What significance do these crime scene locations hold for the killers? Why the primate center? The Lincoln Towers? What’s the connection between the two of them?

  2. How might the killer’s life have intersected with Mollie Fischer’s? Rusty Mahan’s? Twana Summie’s? The congressman’s?

  3. Who was the woman who fled the Lincoln Towers Hotel with the unidentified man? Aria Petic?

  4. How could the killers have gotten Mollie Fischer out of the hotel?

  5. Did they?

  I gazed at those last two words, considered once again what I knew about the case, and then wrote down one final question, a troubling one, but something that needed to be considered: was Mollie Fischer really abducted after all?

  47

  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?”