Unsolved

by James Patterson

  Officer Ciomek, the other female officer, says, “We’ll look at the surveillance-camera footage in the area. The car wash has cameras. The laundromat. The supermarket. The liquor store. I think the dollar store does too. It must. But there are limits to what the cameras capture.”

  “And who knows which day it would’ve been,” says McBride. “He could’ve cased the area a week earlier.”

  Officer Ciomek snaps her fingers. “You know who would notice? You know who’s out there all day, every day?”

  “Oh, right,” says Howse. “Our eyes and ears.”

  “Mayday,” say Officers Ciomek and McBride together.

  45

  ON A computer in the opposite corner of our temporary headquarters, a Skype conference is about to begin. Ashland and I go over there, and Rabbit’s worried face pops up on the screen.

  “Bonita Sexton,” I say, using Rabbit’s formal name, “this is Special Assistant Director Elizabeth Ashland.”

  After an exchange of pleasantries, Rabbit says, “CCTV coverage on the northwest side of Chicago is sporadic. They devote most of their resources, apparently, to the south and west sides.”

  Where all the shootings have been taking place. Makes sense.

  “But we have over a thousand hits on license plates. We’re already cross-referencing,” she tells us.

  I say, “We have reason to believe the bomb was planted between nine thirty on Saturday night and three in the morning Sunday, local time.”

  “Okay. So we’ll look at nine p.m. to four a.m., just to capture the whole window.”

  “What about people on the ground?” Ashland asks.

  “We’re using whatever we have, facial recognition where possible, but the quality of the images isn’t good.”

  Ashland nods. “He would’ve staked it out. Easier to do that on foot.”

  “But he’d have to deliver the bomb materials by vehicle,” I say. “TATP is far too volatile to carry around. Unless you’re a suicide bomber with a backpack.”

  “And David is definitely not that,” says Ashland.

  No, he’s not. The working theory is that Citizen David is a man of considerable means and intelligence. He has hacked with the best of them, from the Georgia prison to the Ivy League university to the pharmaceutical company’s e-mail system, all without a trace, meaning he’s as adept at cyberwarfare as—well, as adept as the best people the Bureau has to counter it. And he’s managed to move about the country in his bombing attacks without leaving a trace, which is nearly impossible to do with the CCTV cameras we have today and our ability to track people and discern patterns from any number of decisions a citizen of this country makes daily.

  “David? This wasn’t David,” says Rabbit.

  Ashland smirks and looks over at me. “You two seem to have a crush on the lad.”

  “We have a profile on him,” Rabbit says. “And this doesn’t fit.”

  Rabbit and I have been in touch repeatedly throughout the day. She knows that the bomber used the same Garfield the Cat watch that Citizen David used. She’s as baffled as I am. Everything about this says it’s not David—yet everything about it says it is.

  “But I agree that there would be foot surveillance,” I say. “Whoever it is, David or not, he would’ve had to spend some amount of time scoping out the place on the ground. That would be easier to do on foot.”

  On the somewhat fuzzy screen, Rabbit seems to recoil at my words, presumably the “David or not” part, as if I’ve committed an act of treason by allowing for the possibility that the bomber might, in fact, be David. I still believe in my heart that this couldn’t have been his work. But apparently I’m going to have to deal with Elizabeth Ashland from now on, and I’m going to need unfettered access to her, so there’s no point in going out of my way to alienate her.

  Ashland looks at her phone. “Assistant Director Ross is calling me. I have to take this.” She walks away, leaving me alone in front of the computer.

  “Confirmation bias, Rabbit,” I say to her. “A good reminder for me too.” It’s a problem in our line of work. When you have preconceived notions about an outcome, you fit the data in line with that outcome and ignore alternative possibilities. An open mind is critical in data analysis. Rabbit has been doing this a lot longer than I have, so she knows this. But it’s not always easy to remember.

  Rabbit rubs her face.

  “Hey, girl,” I say, “go home and get some rest. You’ve plugged in all the data to the algorithms. Let it work. You’ve been at this for sixteen hours. You and Pully need to rotate. Go get a few hours’ sleep. Then Pully can sleep.”

  “Pully’s been at this as long as I have,” she says.

  “Yeah, but Pully’s, like, fifteen years old.” I’m exaggerating by ten years, but Pully is thirty years younger than Rabbit. “And you look like you’re about to fall over, kiddo. So for the first time since we’ve known each other, I’m going to issue an order. Go home and sleep.”

  I sign off with Rabbit and find Ashland, who’s typing on her phone. The ASAC, Wilson, reaches her at the same time I do.

  “Apparently,” says Wilson, “they can’t find this guy Mayday.”

  46

  ELIZABETH ASHLAND and I, exhausted to the bone, trudge through the doors of a chain hotel a few blocks away. I don’t care how long you’re in the business or what you’ve witnessed, seeing what we saw today takes its toll.

  “Mayday could’ve been one of the homeless in the Horizon Hotel,” Ashland says as the clerk passes her a room key.

  “But the cops said he didn’t stay there. So we can hope.” I hand my information over to the hotel clerk. “I’m going to review the surveillance footage tonight.”

  “Make sure you sleep a little,” she says, waving her room key. “One thing I’ve learned, you can’t do the job without sleep.”

  Same thing I told Rabbit a few hours ago; I hope she took my advice.

  Ashland lingers for a moment, looking at me like she’s about to say something else. Our relationship has been going on all of one very long day thus far. It didn’t begin well, and it hasn’t improved much. But we’ve worked intensely alongside a mass grave. We’ve witnessed unspeakable horror. We’ve smelled death. We’ve breathed the oily fire’s remnants, tasted it in our mouths. We share something now.

  “Anyway,” she finally says, “see you in a few hours.”

  I go to my hotel room and drop my bag. I want to do nothing more than sleep, but I head to the bathroom. It’s the first time I’ve seen myself in a mirror all day, and I’m not a pretty sight; I’ve got soot and grime on my face and caked in my hair. I turn on the shower and scrub my face until it hurts. I shampoo my hair three times, my fingers digging into my scalp. I brush my teeth over and over again and scour my tongue to remove the taste of chemicals and smoke. It takes soap and a towel at the sink before I can finally rid my face of all traces of the oily grunge. At last, I’m back to myself—a road map of scars on my body, red streaks across my face, but myself.

  Then I sit down on the toilet and burst into tears, deep, heaving sobs, as if I’m suffering all of the tragedy and horror that those poor victims must have experienced. They were people who needed help, mentally ill or addicted to drugs, people who struggled for basic things that I take for granted. All they wanted was a place to sleep in peace. And for that, they were incinerated and crushed like human garbage.

  I wrap my arms around myself, shivering but not from the cold, realizing how desperately I want someone else’s arms around me. I ache, I yearn to hear his voice, to see his eyes squint when he smiles. I want to be there in his bed, tucked inside his arm, with the musky smell of his deodorant, the sound of his ragged breathing, beams from the rising sun striping through the blinds. I want that right now. I want that forever. I need to feel that way again. I need to be human again.

  I find my phone and start to dial, then scold myself for thinking of myself at a moment like this, when so many have suffered so cruel a fate. But ma
ybe that’s when the importance of these things is the clearest. Maybe it takes something like this for me to see it.

  But it wouldn’t be fair to him. I’ve pushed him away. He deserves to move on with his life; he doesn’t need to hear the cries and regrets of an ex. He deserves better. He always did.

  As I wage war with myself, phone in hand, that very phone buzzes, a text message. It’s from Pully.

  David finally posted.

  I snap back into focus, click on the link and read the Facebook post from Citizen David:

  Chicago was not me. I would never kill people. I condemn that bombing! #protestwithoutcasualties

  I forward the link to Elizabeth Ashland, then text Pully back and tell him to try to trace the source of the Facebook posting. He already knows to do that, of course, and we both already know that he will fail. We got a court order forcing Facebook to help us trace the source, but David was too adept. Tracing his IP address was like trying to grab hold of sunlight. He used remote servers and anonymous proxies that took us around the globe. He could be in the hotel room next door or in Antarctica.

  David has never denied anything he’s done. Just a scroll down his Facebook page shows he’s proud of the hacking and bombings he’s committed in the name of the little guy, the wrongly convicted, the cheated and downtrodden, all of it to rail against corporate fraud and abuse and an unfair criminal justice system.

  “You wouldn’t kill two hundred people,” I say to my phone. “It wasn’t you.”

  You two seem to have a crush on the lad, Ashland said to Rabbit and me. I can’t deny that Rabbit and I share the same concerns as David. Our justice system is unfair to minorities. Our lenders do take advantage of the poor. Most corporations will do whatever it takes to make a buck, and only protests or regulations can stop them.

  My phone rings in my hand. Rabbit.

  “Did you see the posting?” she asks.

  “You’re supposed to be sleeping,” I say.

  “I got some sleep. I’m fine. Really. Did you see it? He’s never denied his involvement in anything.”

  “But he never killed two hundred people, even if accidentally,” I say, playing devil’s advocate.

  A heavy sigh from her end. “I’m going in, gonna relieve Pully,” she says.

  I sign off with Rabbit and drop onto the bed, feeling my eyelids close as soon as I hit the mattress. When my phone rings in my hand, I don’t know if two minutes or five hours have passed.

  “They found Mayday,” says Elizabeth Ashland.

  47

  I SHAKE off the cobwebs and clear my throat. “They found Mayday?” I say. “Great. Should we meet somewhere?”

  “Not unless you want to visit the morgue,” Ashland says. “He’s dead.”

  I moan. The police officers made him sound like a plausible lead. “Shit. So he died in the hotel after all.”

  “Actually, no. They found him dead in an alley a mile away.”

  I sit up in bed. “Cause of death?”

  “They’re thinking heart attack. Looks like he’s been dead a day or two. But no foul play, they say. Natural causes.”

  My blood goes cold.

  A homeless man.

  Natural causes.

  Sure, it happens every day, but…

  “Where is he now?” I ask.

  “Still at the morgue. One of the cops, Ciomek, confirmed the identification.”

  “Is Ciomek still there?”

  “I—I suppose so. I don’t know. Why?”

  My heart’s pounding so hard, I can barely speak. “Never mind. I’ll see you in a few hours.”

  “At this point, just ninety minutes.”

  “Right.”

  I check my phone for Officer Ciomek’s number. We exchanged contact information with all the officers. She answers on the second ring.

  “Officer Ciomek, this is Emmy Dockery.”

  “Sure, Emmy. You heard about Mayday?”

  “I did.”

  “That’s a tough break. Mayday knew everything on that block. We even used him as a CI from time to time.”

  “Right, you mentioned. Listen, are you still at the morgue?”

  “Just leaving. Why?”

  “Could you do me a favor? Could you check something for me?”

  I explain it to her, and Officer Ciomek seems annoyed, probably because she’s as sleep-deprived as the rest of us, as weary and disheartened and drained as everyone else. She never actually says yes, but I can tell she’s walking and talking, calling out to people in the morgue, and then the voices are muffled as she presumably drops the phone to her side.

  I pace the carpet of this tiny hotel room, my hand shaking so hard I can hardly hold the phone. Then I hear her voice, not muffled at all but clear and loud.

  “How in God’s name,” she says, “did you know there would be tiny puncture wounds on his torso?”

  The phone falls from my hand. I grab the dresser to keep myself from falling too.

  How, I keep asking myself. How?

  How could it be the same person?

  Killing the homeless is his specialty. The puncture wounds, a death seemingly without foul play. And now he’s managed to kill a couple hundred of them, all at once.

  But how did he know to use David’s explosive, TATP? And the aluminum tray?

  And the Garfield the Cat watch?

  Nobody knew that stuff. It was never made public. Nobody knew but—

  I turn, rush to the bathroom, and make it just in time to vomit into the toilet, gagging on an empty stomach. I turn on the shower, let near-scalding water cascade over my body, and scrub myself with the soap until it’s reduced to a useless nub.

  So someone was in my apartment that day. It was him. He hacked into my computers. He knows everything I know about Citizen David.

  He knows everything I know about him. And he knows where I live.

  48

  I MEET Ashland ninety minutes later in the hotel lobby. She looks immaculate again, hair done just right, pressed suit, her only allowance for the fieldwork today being flats instead of heels. We walk to the bomb site and our makeshift headquarters. We talk about the Citizen David posting on Facebook and the bad luck with Mayday. I don’t take it any further. Something tells me that this might not be the perfect time to offer up my new theory.

  Officer Ciomek is there when I arrive. I’d been under the impression she was off duty today, but maybe this is a day where no Chicago cop is off duty.

  ASAC Wilson confers with Ashland as Ciomek pulls me aside. “Help me out here,” she says. “You’ve never met this guy in your life, but you know he has puncture wounds on his torso?”

  I glance over at Ashland to make sure we have some privacy. “Officer Ciomek, you ever run into operational resistance up the chain of command?” I ask.

  “I work for the Chicago Police Department, honey,” she says. “It’s a daily occurrence. And call me Natalie.”

  “Well, Natalie, I’m experiencing that now. The upper brass and I, we have a disagreement on who’s responsible for what happened here.”

  “Citizen David or not.”

  “Right. I’ve never really thought this was David. But now I think the bomber is someone I’ve been tracking for a long time. Someone who preys on the homeless, elderly, disabled, frail, but hides it by making the deaths look natural or accidental. Not like homicides.”

  She wrinkles her nose. “You think he was trying to make this bombing look like an accident? Because if so, he didn’t do a very good job.”

  “No, the bombing’s different, I realize that,” I say, and here I have a preview of how my superiors will react when I lay out my theory. “He must have switched tactics, probably because he knows we’re tracking him. This bombing—I think he was trying to hide under the umbrella of Citizen David. But his typical MO has been killing people the way he killed Mayday. The puncture wounds—he’s probably injecting something that incapacitates the victims. Then he kills them without a struggle.”

>   “These other victims in the past,” she says, “what do the tox screens from the autopsies show?”

  I give a grim smile. “I can’t get anyone to perform an autopsy.”

  “You? The girl who caught Graham? You should be running that place by now.”

  I continue to be surprised at how many strangers know who I am. I will probably never get used to it. “It’s a long, bureaucratic story,” I say.

  She smirks. “Let me guess. The big boys with badges don’t like the data girl showing them up.”

  I haven’t done much smiling in the past forty-eight hours—shit, in the past several months—so it feels good on my face. I shouldn’t be surprised that a woman cop would put her finger on it right away.

  “Well, listen,” she says, “I’ll get us an autopsy on Mayday. Would that work?”

  “That would be…so great.” I almost collapse with relief.

  “Hey,” Ciomek says, “can you break free?”

  I look back at Ashland, huddling with ASAC Wilson. “I think so. Why?”

  “Got some things you’ll want to see,” she says.

  49

  IT TURNS out that it isn’t hard to break free. I tell Ashland I’m running off with Officer Ciomek to interview homeless people who might have been in the neighborhood while the bomber was milling around, which is basically the truth. She’s deep in conversation with Wilson, so she waves me off absentmindedly.

  We get inside Ciomek’s squad car, and she hands me a laptop. “Pull up this surveillance footage,” she says, pushing a button. “It’s from the car wash a half a block north up the street.”

  Like a lot of surveillance cameras, this one has its limits. It was intended to cover the lobby of its store, but you can see through the glass walls onto the street a bit, looking south and east. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go far enough south to capture the bomb site—the payday-loan store and Horizon Hotel. But there’s a decent shot of the east side of Broadway from several days ago. It looks quite different from the Broadway Street I saw yesterday.