by Alex Kava
“I don’t like this,” Cunningham said.
They were curbside in a white panel van with an orange-and-blue plumbing logo that looked authentic, but inside, three FBI techs tapped at keyboards and watched wall monitors that showed four different angles of the house in question. The cameras relaying those angles were attached to the helmets of SWAT members getting into place. A duplicate van was parked behind them. A public-utility van was a block away, waiting with a bomb squad.
Maggie readjusted a purple-flowered jacket she’d never own, but that fit perfectly over the bulletproof vest. She had found it in one of BSU’s closets that housed an odd assortment of potential disguises. Unlike her copper-colored suit jacket that said, “Warning, FBI agent knocking at your door,” the purple flowers hopefully would get a “welcome” nod. That is, if no one noticed the bulge of her gun.
She readjusted her shoulder harness and the Smith & Wesson in its holster. Other agents had updated years ago to Glocks, but Maggie stayed with her original service revolver. Situations like this she couldn’t help thinking it didn’t matter what kind of gun she used. The bulletproof vest wouldn’t make much difference either, especially if they tripped an explosive device. Guys who sent invitations to law enforcement officers usually did so because they enjoyed blowing apart a few of them.
Cunningham had put in place as many precautions as he could. Unfortunately, a house-to-house evacuation was impossible. And they were running out of time.
Maggie glanced at her wristwatch: 9:46. Her eyes searched the neighborhood again—at least what she could see from the tinted back window.
He was probably here.
Watching. Waiting.
Maybe he had the detonator.
“What about the moving truck?” Maggie asked.
“Too obvious.” Cunningham dismissed, without looking away from the monitors.
“Sometimes the ordinary becomes the invisible.”
He glanced at her and for a second she thought it might be a mistake to quote his own words to him. His eyes darted back to the monitors but he fingered the miniature microphone clipped to his lapel and said into it, “Check the moving truck.”
In a matter of seconds they watched an agent dressed in a tan jumpsuit with the same plumbing-company logo slip out the back of the van behind them. He approached the truck, checking the addresses on each house against a clipboard in his left hand. He was still talking to the truck’s driver when Cunningham pointed to one of the other monitors, an impatient chess player anticipating the next move.
“Can we make out anything inside the house yet?” Cunningham asked the tech tapping the computer keys without a pause.
Maggie watched the moving truck, but glanced at the monitor that Cunningham was anxious to view. Somewhere behind the house in question, one of the SWAT-team members wore a helmet-mounted thermal imaging camera. The infrared-sensor technology could pick up body heat, distinguishing between a sofa and the person on the sofa. Hot objects appeared white, cool ones black. Anything above 392 degrees showed up in red. Firefighters used the cameras to find victims in smoked-filled buildings. Here they hoped to get a heads-up of how many people—whether victims, hostages or bombers—waited for them inside.
“Small heat source in the first room,” the tech said, pointing at the screen as the first white mass glowed bright white. A few seconds later he was tapping the coordinates of the second heat source. “Maybe a bedroom. The person’s lying down.”
They waited, Cunningham leaned over the tech’s shoulder, pushing up the bridge of his glasses. Maggie sat back where she could keep an eye on the other monitors and glance out at the moving truck. The agent waved a thank-you to the driver, but he walked around the open back of the truck, continuing his charade of checking addresses.
“Is that it?” Cunningham finally asked the tech. “Just two heat sources?”
“Looks that way.”
Cunningham glanced out the window then looked to Maggie as he buttoned his jacket, a worn tweed borrowed from the same closet where Maggie found the purple-flowered one.
“Ready?” he asked as he grabbed a handful of campaign flyers and adjusted the Glock in his shoulder harness.
She nodded and scanned the neighborhood one last time.
“Ready,” she said, then followed him out the back of the van.
CHAPTER
5
Washington, D.C.
Artie left the SUV in a public parking lot where the government-issued license plate would warrant little attention. He was a quick learner and he knew better than to get tripped up on a simple parking fine or traffic stop. Like Ted Bundy. The guy gets away with murder, escapes prison and then gets pulled over in a VW bug, driving after 1:00 a.m. on Davis Highway in Pensacola, Florida. An astute police officer thought the orange VW looked out of place and checked the license plate, discovering the car had been stolen in Tallahassee.
Artie knew stuff like that. Bits of trivia about killers. He also learned from it. He knew not to draw attention to himself. So he parked the SUV and walked. He didn’t mind walking. He was in good shape, though he didn’t work out. Practically lived on fast food, switching from one kind to another. The hotel was only a few blocks away. He arrived as the tour bus was boarding. Perfect timing.
He had taken this tour of the Washington monuments a couple of times before. It was a great way to add to his collection. He could get DNA samples from people all across the country just by riding the ten-mile tour. Last time he had been lucky enough to confiscate a long red hair from a woman wearing a Seattle Seahawks sweatshirt.
The driver collected Artie’s pass and he took an aisle seat across from a middle-aged couple. They said hello to him and immediately he pegged them from the Northeast, maybe New Hampshire. It was a game he played with himself, matching dialects to places.
“Where are you folks from?” he asked, friendly enough for a response.
“Hanover, New Hampshire,” both said in unison.
He smiled and nodded, satisfied.
“How about yourself?”
“Atlanta,” he chose this time, always using a city too big for anyone to expect him to know their aunt or cousin. Then he opened his tour brochure and closed the conversation. That was all he had really wanted, after all, was to prove himself right.
They took the hint but he could tell they would have liked to have asked more. He could morph himself into different characters. And he could be quite charming when he wanted to be. As a result, everyone seemed to enjoy talking to him. Sometimes he allowed it. It was good practice. Sometimes he could make up the lies faster than they could ask the questions. But he wasn’t in the mood today. He had other things that required his focus.
He glanced at his watch. In a few minutes the FBI would be storming suburbia, expecting a crash, and he would be miles away. Artie believed the plan ingenious even though he didn’t get to participate. He could imagine the routine. They would bring a SWAT team and a bomb squad, only they wouldn’t be anywhere near prepared for what they’d find. They were such linear thinkers. The fact that they couldn’t see that seemed just desserts for what was about to happen.
He slid his bulging backpack on the empty seat beside him. Usually it discouraged the stragglers, the tourists who thought they’d go on the tour alone and chat up other losers traveling by themselves. Speaking of losers, one was coming down the aisle now. He recognized the wandering eyes, looking, searching for one of its kind yet scurrying to find a seat. She wore a purple sweatshirt with embroidered butterflies and faded blue jeans and carried a huge, black purse, practically a saddlebag. Artie avoided eye contact when she looked his way, pulling open the brochure and pretending, once again, to be interested though he knew the route by heart.
She slid into the seat in front of him. In the reflection of the window he could see her pull the purse into her lap and start sifting through the contents. Soon he heard the click-click of nail clippers, and found himself thinking it was the nervous ener
gy of a straggler held in captivity.
How rude. Whatever happened to common manners? People brushed their hair in public, scratched their private areas, picked their noses and trimmed their fingernails. And of course, he actually loved it, because he had learned to use their bad habits to his advantage.
Artie grabbed a tissue from his backpack and accidentally dropped his brochure. As he picked it up with one hand, he took a swipe at the floor with the tissue cupped in his palm. He wadded it up and stuffed it in the book bag without anyone noticing the gestures or the fingernail clippings he had collected.
Then he sat back, pleased. The tour hadn’t even begun and it was already quite successful, providing resources for the future. He glanced at his watch again. Yes, it was turning out to be a good day, a very good day.
CHAPTER
6
Elk Grove, Virginia
Maggie’s hand stayed tucked inside her jacket, fingertips on the butt of her Smith & Wesson as the door opened. It had to be a mistake or a brilliant setup. The little girl who answered the door couldn’t be much older than four, maybe five years old.
“Is your mom here?” Cunningham asked and Maggie didn’t hear a trace of his surprise. Instead, his voice was gentle and soothing, like a man who had once been a father to a child this age.
Maggie’s eyes searched the room beyond the doorway. A noisy TV was the main attraction, with pillows, dirty plates and discarded toys surrounding it. The place was a mess, but from neglect, not a hostage takeover.
The little girl looked neglected, too. Peanut butter and jelly with crumbs stuck to the corners of her mouth. Her long hair was a tangle that she pushed out of her eyes to get a better look at them. She wore pink pajamas with stains where cartoon characters’ faces used to be.
“Are you sellin’ something?” Maggie could tell it was a question she was used to asking, well rehearsed and even with a dismissive frown.
“No, sweetie, we’re not selling anything,” Cunningham told her. “We just need to talk to your mom.”
The little girl took a glance over her shoulder, a telling sign that the mother was, indeed, here.
“What’s your name?” Cunningham asked while Maggie edged closer inside.
She could see two doors, one door was open, showing a bathroom. The door to the right was closed. From what she remembered on the computer monitor, the second heat source was on the other side.
“My name’s Mary Louise, but I don’t think I’m ’posed to talk to you.”
The little girl was distracted and watching Maggie. She wasn’t as smooth with children as Cunningham and somehow kids always sensed it. Just like dogs. Dogs always seemed to be able to pick out the one person who was uncomfortable being around them, then gravitated to that person as if trying to win her over. Dogs, Maggie could handle. Children, she didn’t have a clue about.
She heard the whisper of one of the FBI techs in the microphone bud in her right ear, “Nine minutes,” and she glanced back at Cunningham. He touched his ear to tell her he had heard, too. They were running out of time. Maggie’s gut instinct told her they should snatch up the little girl and just leave.
“Is your mom asleep, Mary Louise?” Cunningham pointed at the closed door.
Mary Louise’s eyes followed his hand as Maggie slipped behind her and into the room.
“She hasn’t been feeling good,” the little girl confessed. “And my tummy hurts.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Cunningham patted her on the head. The distraction worked. Now Mary Louise didn’t even glance back at Maggie, who tiptoed across the room, her eyes taking in everything from the People magazines scattered on the coffee table to the M&Ms spilled on the carpet to the plastic crucifix hanging on the wall. She looked for wires. She listened over the TV cartoons for any buzzing or clicking. She even sniffed the air for sulfur.
“Maybe I can help you and your mom,” Cunningham told the girl who stared up at him and nodded.
Maggie could see the girl was on the verge of tears, biting her lower lip to keep from crying. It was a gesture she recognized from her own childhood and she hated that adults were evidently still using that stupid ruse that “big girls don’t cry.”
But it was clear Cunningham had won the girl over. She reached up and took his hand. “I think she’s really sick,” Mary Louise said under a sniffle with a quick swipe at her nose. Then she started leading Cunningham to the closed door.
That’s when Maggie heard another whisper in her ear, “Four minutes left.”
CHAPTER
7
Quantico, Virginia
R. J. Tully couldn’t believe he was missing out and all because Emma didn’t have a ride to school. He didn’t want to think she might have orchestrated the entire event just to convince him she needed her own car. He wasn’t ready to believe his seventeen-year-old daughter could be that manipulative. And he certainly wasn’t ready to give in. He hated the idea of her having her own car. A car was a huge responsibility. He had a job for three years—starting at age fifteen—before he was allowed, or rather, could afford his own car. A car was a level of independence he wasn’t willing to grant Emma just yet. It should be something she earned. Although he wasn’t sure what she’d need to do to prove herself worthy.
“How many doughnuts?” Keith Ganza’s monotone brought Tully back to the FBI lab. Getting in late put him in charge of the evidence, so here he was in Ganza’s glass-enclosed work space.
“I don’t know,” Tully said. “Does it make a difference?”
“It does if they’ve been tampered with.” Ganza’s skeletal frame with sloped shoulders was bent over the center counter as he dissected a glazed cruller.
Maybe there was something wrong with Tully because, tampered with or not, the cruller still made his mouth water. He’d had only coffee for breakfast, most of it spilled over the interior of his car, and lunch was a couple hours away. He glanced instead at a couple of white-coated scientists in the glass-enclosed labs across the hallway. Tully disliked his claustrophobic office, four floors below the earth back at BSU, but he knew he’d never be able to work here in the labs where your every movement could be observed. Each lab—the techno-term was “biovestibule”—really amounted to a glass cubicle, a sterile workstation surrounded by metal contraptions, test tubes in trays and microscopes attached to computers. The glazed cruller on Ganza’s stainless-steel tray seemed out of place.
“Doughnut places don’t deliver, do they?” Tully asked, thinking out loud.
Ganza looked up at him, pale blue eyes over half glasses that had slid to the end of a hawkish nose. He reminded Tully of a friendly version of a mad scientist or of a tall scarecrow wearing a Boston Red Sox baseball cap. The cap forced Ganza’s thinning gray hair to stick straight out over wide-rim ears, adding to the overall picture. His lined and haggard face registered a perpetual frown, and now he shot Tully a look that said, “You’ve got to be kidding,” but Ganza would never say that. He knew that ridiculous questions sometimes ended up cracking a few cases.
“There might be a place in the District that’ll deliver, but out here to Quantico? I’d guess, no.”
“We’re going over everyone who came and went this morning. So far there’s been no unusual activity,” Tully said.
Tully noticed that the box was plain white cardboard with no logo imprinted anywhere outside or inside.
“From the note it sounds like the doughnuts were only a means to deliver the threat,” Tully said, “rather than the actual threat.”
“You never know.” Ganza slid crumbs from the cruller into a test tube.
Ganza was a process machine, a scientist before a law officer. He didn’t decide what needed to be done, he simply did it, discounting chance, luck or speculation. For Ganza, the evidence always told the story. It wasn’t just props for a story or theory already in progress.
He poured a clear liquid into the test tube, capped it with a rubber stopper and began to agitate it. Tully watched him rock back
and forth on the balls of his feet as he rocked the test tube, almost like someone would rock a baby to sleep. He tried not to think of Ichabod Crane doing the Robot or he might burst out laughing. That was the kind of morning he was having.
Tully’s stomach growled and Ganza raised an eyebrow at him. They caught each other glancing at the counter where the remaining doughnuts sat in their box.
“There’s a tuna sandwich in the fridge. You’re welcome to half,” Ganza offered, nodding toward the refrigerator in the corner where Tully knew there were also lab specimens. Possibly bits and pieces of tissue and blood. It would all be contained, bagged or capped, even on a separate shelf, but still too close for Tully.
“No, thanks,” he told the lab’s director, trying to sound grateful instead of disgusted.
Tully had watched Ganza eat between tests and he had seen his partner Maggie O’Dell eat a breakfast sausage biscuit once during an autopsy. But Tully viewed it as his last bastion of civility that he wouldn’t cross that line. There were so few in this business left to cross. At least, that’s what he told others. Fact was, it made his skin crawl just a little to combine the idea of eating a meal with the blood and guts of a murder.
Tully was still thinking about his stomach when he picked up the two plastic bags, one containing the note, the other the envelope. He had used plain white paper sold anywhere from office supplies stores to Wal-Mart. The ink he used would, no doubt, test to be the same ink used in just about every ink pen. And the guy didn’t seal the envelope, so no chance of saliva, no chance of DNA.
Tully had put in a call to George Sloane before joining Ganza. Sloane was Cunningham’s choice documents guy ever since the anthrax case in fall 2001. Tully thought forensic document sleuthing was more luck than anything, but he didn’t see any harm in letting Sloane play his magic. Of course, Tully realized that his thinking of Sloane’s contribution as little more than voodoo was no different than what some people thought of criminal profiling. Both depended on recognizing behaviors of the criminal mind, which was never as predictable as any of them hoped.
