Steven James - The Bishop

“I have no idea.” I started working on the lock to the trunk, then I caught sight of movement and saw Lieutenant Doehring approaching with a stocky, mustached officer I didn’t know swaggering beside him.

Ralph slipped his phone into the case on his belt. “Car’s registered to Rusty Mahan.”

“R.M.,” I said.

“Mahan?” It was Doehring. “I just got off the horn with Congressman Fischer. A guy named Rusty Mahan is Mollie’s boyfriend. Twenty years old. Lives on campus at Georgetown.”

“ Was her boyfriend,” the other officer responded. “Until yesterday. Big fight at her daddy’s mansion. Fischer said the Mahan kid took it hard.”

I was working on the trunk’s lock. “We need to find him.”

“Campus security’s already on it,” Doehring replied. “But you’ll love this: he’s a grad student in evolutionary biology. Worked here as an intern last semester.”

“So he could have gotten access to the building,” the burly officer said. I glanced at his badge: Lee Anderson. He continued, “The car places him at the scene, and if he just broke up with the vic, we’ve got motive.” He sounded like he’d just solved the case.

“Well, then.” I was still working on the lock. “As long as we’ve got that settled.”

“Don’t get him started,” Doehring said to Anderson.

“On what?”

“Motive,” he answered. “And don’t say vics, doers, perps. You’ll regret it.”

Definitely not the time to have this conversation.

“We’re looking for clues,” I said. “Motive isn’t a clue. At best it’s circumstantial evidence, and even that’s debatable.”

“What do you mean, motive isn’t a clue?” Anderson asked skeptically.

“Here we go,” Ralph grumbled.

The lock was giving me trouble, and that annoyed me.

I was not in the mood for this. “There’s no way to prove a person had any specific motive at any specific time, and there’s no reason to even try-our justice system doesn’t require showing motive to get a conviction for any crime on the books. Jurors like it, but it’s misleading because trying to figure out motive is a guessing game you can never be sure you’ve won. Investigators should deal with facts, not conjecture.”

There.

The lock clicked.

I popped open the trunk.

All three men and Natasha leaned close to peer inside.

Blue carpeting.

And a series of black smeared dints on the metal body on the passenger side. “She was conscious when they transported her.” I didn’t realize I’d said the words aloud until I saw Natasha looking at me curiously. I pointed to the marks. “Same color as the soles of her shoes. She kicked. Hard.”

“She was in here awhile.” Doehring was staring at them. “Struggled a lot.”

Timing, location.

Timing.

I pulled out my cell and speed-dialed Lien-hua. “Any word on the security cameras?”

“Same angles, Pat,” she said. “Whoever deleted the footage didn’t redirect them. Why did you want that checked anyway?”

“The killer deleted footage-so he obviously knew the system-but then he would have had to leave the building after doing so, and the cameras would have been on when he left. I wanted to see if he redirected the angle of one of them so he could exit undetected. If he had, it would have told us which door he used to leave the scene, or if he used the parking garage.”

A moment of reflection passed as she processed what I’d said. “Good call. Another thing: someone using a cell phone captured footage of an electronics store that’s been airing a live feed from the security cameras here inside the research facility. They sent the clip to CNS News. We’re all over the airwaves.”

Oh, bad.

She told me the name and location of the store.

“We need to cross-reference a list of store employees with people who might work at the research facility. Also check credit card receipts, find the most recent, most frequent customers.”

These weren’t Lien-hua’s duties, she knew that, I knew that, but she understood the way I work and she would make sure they got done. There’d never been any professional jealousy between us. No rivalry. We complemented each other.

Or at least we used to.

I leaned away from the phone. “Doehring, see if Mahan had any connections with Williamson’s Electronics Store over on Connecticut.”

Doehring nodded, went for his walkie-talkie.

I returned to my phone conversation with Lien-hua. “Come down here as soon as you can. We need to talk.”

After hanging up I noticed that Natasha had called for two additional ERT agents and the three of them had started processing the car. When Doehring ended his transmission, Ralph began to bring him up to speed on what we knew so far, and I stepped to the entrance of the parking garage and stared into the night to sort through my thoughts and wait for Lien-hua.

If Mahan was the killer, why go to all the trouble of bringing her in here? Why leave your car at the scene? Why leave her purse and its contents in the habitat…

Rain spattered on the roof. A thin, constant drumbeat of water.

The nearby Nationals Park rose like a great black beast blotting out the skyline.

At the end of the block, traffic lights moved through their slow, methodical three-step dance from green to yellow to red.

Slashing rain. Curling lights from emergency vehicles. Dark DC streets.

Time of death-between 6:00 and 7:00.

Green.

She was last seen at the Clarendon Metro stop…

At least it gave us a location to work with. To try and follow her movement patterns.

Yellow.

Lien-hua arrived, and I caught the gentle scent of her presence. So familiar to me, but also, now, so much more distant than it had been a month ago.

Red.

“Pat. I’m here.”

I took a moment to tell her about the car and Rusty Mahan, then said, “I know you don’t like doing this on the spot. But can you give me the preliminary profile? Just whatever your first impressions are.”

“I don’t trust first impressions, you know that. I trust critical assessment.”

“Yes, I know,” I said. “So do I.”

“The way you feel about profiling, Pat. I’m surprised you’d ask me to-”

“Please.” It wasn’t just the gruesome nature of this crime; I couldn’t seem to wrap my mind around the context of what we had here. “What are you thinking?”

At last Lien-hua closed her eyes. Entered the profiler’s world of empathy and understanding, the world I’ve never really understood, never stepped into. Using one careful finger, she traced her thoughts through the air as she spoke.

“The abduction, the sophistication of rerouting the video feed, drugging the guard, using the chimps, along with the ability to get in here, tells me he’s experienced, highly educated, organized. Early to mid-thirties. Computer programming background. Hacker maybe. Demographics and Mollie’s race suggest a Caucasian offender.”

So far I agreed with her.

“However, it would have been difficult for someone working alone to abduct a woman undetected, subdue her, access the building, drug the chimps and the guard, transport her into the chimps’ cage-”

“He had help.”

A nod. “Considering Congressman Fischer’s position, it might have been an attempt to hurt him, some kind of political statement.”

I disagreed. “The political angle seems weak to me. There’s no note, no threat, no demands. And a team of killers who could pull off a crime this elaborate could certainly go after the congressman if they wanted to. Why not just kill him?”

She opened her eyes. “This sends a stronger message.”

When I thought about it I had to agree, although I had no idea what that message might be. “But,” she added, “you’re right; we need more information.”