Steven James - The Bishop

There was definitely some big money behind this facility.

Lien-hua noticed me surveying the rooms. “We had a briefing before you got here.” Her tone was professional, that of a co-worker, and it hurt to hear her use it on me. “Mostly the research here focuses on primate cognition, but in this wing, they’re also studying primate aggression. The keeper arrived at 7:00 to check on the animals, found the security guard drugged, Mollie dead, and the chimps mutilating her body. She called it in. That’s about all we know. Metro police are interviewing her now.”

“Any indication she might be involved?” I guessed that Lien-hua would want me to mirror her cool, detached tone, and I tried to but failed pitifully.

“Not so far.”

“How was the drug identified so quickly?”

“They use it in their research.”

After a few more steps she said, “A personal question. Is that all right?”

“Sure.”

“How are you and Tessa doing?”

Although I hadn’t told Lien-hua about Paul Lansing, she was aware of my struggles connecting with my stepdaughter. At the moment I avoided the whole topic of Tessa’s father. “She’s good. Thanks for asking. Actually, she mentioned she was looking forward to seeing you this summer. Wants to talk to you about something called .”

A small moment. “Yes. That would be nice.”

I kept my curiosity to myself.

We arrived at the doorway to the ape habitat where Mollie had been killed. The door was wide, but low, and at six-foot-three I had to crouch to get through.

As I entered, I was struck by the stark smell of straw and feces and the rusty scent of blood.

Death in the air.

To get to Mollie, I had to walk past the two dead chimpanzees.

Both had blood-stained teeth and streaks of blood smeared across their faces and hands. The larger of the two had a single gunshot wound to the chest. The other had been shot two or three times, it was hard to tell, and lay closer to the door. An officer was interviewing a distraught-looking female civilian, possibly the keeper, but I tried to avoid making assumptions.

Ralph was having a word with the three CSIU officers beside Mollie’s body. By the time Lien-hua and I arrived, they had stepped aside.

And so, Mollie.

Lying at my feet.

I knew that chimpanzees are many times stronger than humans and can turn violent, but I had no idea they could be this vicious. Most of Mollie’s face was missing, the deep, bloody bite marks trailing down what was left of her cheeks and gouging deeply into her neck.

With so much skin and meat missing from her face, her jaw jutted out grotesquely toward me. One of her eyes was pulverized, the other missing.

I felt myself grow both sickened and enraged.

She had a single piercing and earring in what was left of each ear and wore a silver chain necklace that was tucked beneath her Georgetown sweatshirt. Once light gray, the sweatshirt was now darkened with splattered blood. Using a gloved hand, I eased out the necklace and found a locket with two engraved initials: R.M.

Mollie had a small build, weighed perhaps 110 pounds, wore blue jeans and black pumps and had blonde hair, now matted with blood and several thin, grisly strips of flesh that had been torn from her face. Her right leg was obviously broken, the foot turned sideways, perpendicular to the rest of the leg.

A savage and brutal and terrible death.

The contents of her purse lay scattered around me in the straw.

Apart from the blood on her sweatshirt, her clothes were dry.

The leather straps the killer had used were still snugged tightly around each wrist, and the skin surrounding the straps was red and raw from what must have been her desperate attempts to get free. I noticed that two of her fingernails were chipped, and caught on the corner of one of them were several threads of blue cloth.

From the killer’s clothing?

Carpeting?

Bedsheets? A blanket?

The guys at the lab would find out.

I mentioned the fibers to the CSIU, and they told me they’d already taken note of them. I glanced up and saw two strips of leather hanging from the branch of the tree she’d been secured to. I assumed the responding officers had needed to slit the straps to lower her to the ground. “When was she last seen alive?”

“We’re not sure,” Ralph answered. “Someone saw her at the Clarendon Metro stop at about 4:00 this afternoon. That’s the last we know of.”

I considered that.

4:00 p.m.

It was now 8:31.

I looked at the black soles of her shoes. Scuffed.

Felt the cuff of her jeans.

Dry.

I ran through the seven steps law enforcement officers take: secure the scene, secure the subject, assist the injured, call for responders, detain witnesses, identify the body, pursue all leads.

“Who made the ID?”

Ralph indicated toward Mollie’s purse. “The keeper found her driver’s license, called it in. They got the congressman over here right away. He IDed her. Yeah, I know it’s unusual to do it on-site,” he went on, “but there was concern this might be a politically motivated crime, that his life might be in danger, so the Capitol police brought him in. Took him to a secure location when he was done.”

With the extent of her disfiguring injuries, I wondered how he’d identified her. A birthmark maybe. A tattoo.

He’s her father, Pat. A dad knows his daughter. Even in death.

I scrutinized the blood-spattered straw surrounding Mollie’s body. A frenzy of violence. “Other family members?”

“She’s an only child. Her mom is in Australia for a relative’s wedding.” The CSIU officers eyed me quietly. I had the sense they were not happy I was on their turf.

I stood up, appraised the area, taking it in. “Anything else like this? Any similar crimes that we know of? Links to other homicides?”

“We checked ViCAP,” Ralph said. “People have been fed to Dobermans, pigs, gators-but never primates. At least not that we know of.”

I could look into that more in-depth later.

The crime scene technicians would be scouring the room for physical evidence. I wasn’t here for that. My job was to notice the pieces of the puzzle other people miss.

I mentally ran down what I knew.

The Metro stop.

The rain.

The congressman’s high profile position as house minority leader.

Timing. Location. Patterns. Routes.

Lien-hua was studying the position of the chimps’ bodies. Ralph knelt beside Mollie, inspecting her injuries. The three CSIU officers were still watching me.

“Time of death?” I asked them.

“Not long ago,” one of them replied. He was slim with blue eyes, blond hair, and had a nervous habit of rubbing his left thumb and forefinger together. The cloth name tag sewn onto his uniform read Officer Roger Tielman. “Body temp and lividity suggest one to three hours ago. Probably sometime around 6:00. Maybe closer to 7:00.”

Not specific enough to help me narrow things down.

“Last call on her cell phone?” I asked. “Any texts?”

“We already followed up on the last ten calls-all from preprogrammed numbers. Eight female, two male.”

“Any from an R.M.?”

A quizzical look.

“Were any of the calls from someone with the initials R.M.?”

He sent one of the officers beside him to find out.

“She’s got hundreds of text messages from the last month,” Ralph added. “The ERT guys are tackling that.” The Evidence Response Team, or ERT, is the FBI’s forensics unit.

I pulled out my cell. Tapped in a few numbers on the flat screen’s touchpad.

“What about the facility’s security cameras?” I asked Tielman. “Anything?”

“Yeah. We checked.” He sounded almost insulted by the question. “The footage from 5:00 to 7:00 was deleted.”