Steven James - The Bishop

“Yeah, I know. Don’t lead her on.”

“Exactly.”

I took a deep breath. “Here’s what I want you to do: text me every fifteen minutes until Detective Warren arrives. To let me know you’re all right.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

“I’m not kidding.” I held up a cautionary finger to stem a comeback. It didn’t work.

“You’re not supposed to use mobile devices on the Metro,” she countered.

“If you get arrested I’ll make sure you don’t serve hard time.”

She sighed with her eyeballs. “Whatever.”

“Call me if anything comes up, anything at all.”

“I will.”

I took her to the Metro stop, waited for her to board, then drove to police headquarters.

To map out this cave.

4 hours left…

5:29 p.m.

Margaret had stepped away, Doehring was at the reins, and it looked like the team had been making some progress.

He filled me in.

The big news: Agent Cassidy had found traces of military grade C-4 on some of the carpet fibers in the back of the van.

“I thought they cleared the van?” I said.

“After you linked last night’s gas station explosion to the crime spree, they started going back over everything, start to finish.”

The ATF has the best explosive and accelerant detection dogs in the business, so their teams had been sent to the Lincoln Towers Hotel as well as the congressman’s office and the Gunderson facility.

The ATF.

One more agency added to the plate.

“Let’s get them to the Capitol Police HQ as well.”

“Right.” He made a note of it. “Next: you know how Fischer has connections with the Gunderson Foundation? Well, a couple of my guys did a little looking into some of his biggest campaign supporters.”

“Let me guess: the Gunderson Foundation?”

He shook his head. “No, but we did find two other organizations in the same neuroscience business, both trying to identify the parts of the brain that lead to psychopathology. And both have pretty deep pockets.”

Hmm.

I recalled my trip to the primate center and Fischer’s concern that his relationship to the Gunderson Foundation not become public.

“Is the info on the electronic case files?”

He nodded.

“All right,” I said. “I’m following up on this. Stay on top of the bomb deal. Keep me informed.”

He nodded, then crossed the room to speak with Officer Tielman, who had just arrived.

I checked my texts: only one-Tessa telling me she was fine.

Good.

I positioned myself at a table near the wall, pulled out my laptop, and clicked to the online case files.

But after fifteen minutes of dead-ends I decided to try another angle and surfed to www.thomas.loc.gov to search through the list of pending legislation in the House of Representatives. It would take forever to read the bills, most of which were probably hundreds of pages long, but two topics could help narrow things down.

I had the first in mind already: justice reform.

And Margaret had given me the second.

Abortion.

She had drained his savings account and was in a hotel room cleaning up, thinking about the implications of her decision to disappear. Everything she needed to fake her death was in their basement, in the room that the man she’d trusted had so carefully remodeled. All the tools. All the chemicals. But of course, since he might show up at the house at any time, she would be taking a huge chance going back there. However, she needed to take care of this tonight, as soon as possible, and the basement was the most obvious place to do it. In fact, given the tight time frame, it might very well be the only place she could pull this off. If she were a suspect in this crime spree, the airports would likely flag her name, but being presumed dead she would be off the radar screen. She would be free. By leaving some of her own blood and tearing out some of her own hair she would make it appear as if she was the prey. But a little blood and hair wouldn’t be enough to convince the FBI. To make this work, she needed a body. One that she could dissolve beyond recognition-put the body in the tub, fill it with water, add a few gallons of drain cleaner, turn the victim into soap. Even recombinant DNA becomes almost impossible to identify when you use enough drain cleaner. If she could leave just enough evidence that a woman had been killed, and just enough evidence to make it appear that the woman had been her, she could at least buy enough time to get out of the country. To escape. Disappear. Start a new life and raise her baby. So in the end she realized that even though returning to the house might be risky, it was a chance she had to take. However, she’d never killed anybody in NowLife, just arranged things so that her lover could put her ideas into action, and now, to her surprise, the more she thought about taking another woman’s life, the more unsettling the idea became. But there was no other choice. For the sake of her own freedom, for the sake of her baby’s future, someone would need to die. One life for two. And because of the research she had done for work, she knew the perfect person to choose as her victim. She changed into a new set of clothes, grabbed the car keys, and left the hotel to go get her prey.

Margaret found what she was looking for.

She was in her office at FBI HQ and had just finished analyzing interoffice memos and electronic communication to track the release of the Project Rukh files. She discovered that indeed it was FBI Director Rodale who had approved the transfer of the Project Rukh research to the Gunderson Foundation-just days before Congressman Fischer’s contributions to the Foundation began.

Maybe the two men weren’t at odds at all, maybe they were partners.

But then why would Fischer propose budget cuts to the Bureau?

Whatever Rodale’s connection with Fischer, the next step seemed obvious to her.

Follow the money.

Margaret picked up the phone to make a few calls.

3 hours left…

6:29 p.m.

I didn’t find anything specific on justice reform, but I did uncover two House bills with Fischer’s name on them that were currently before Congress-either of which might relate to the case.

The first one, H.R. 597, would add restrictions to death penalty sentencing procedures. “In response to the burgeoning world sentiment on the human rights abuses often precipitated while carrying out lethal injections.”

Second, a bill he was cosponsoring that would increase federal funding for the in-vitro testing of babies to identify genetic or neurological disorders: H.R. 617. The bill didn’t appear to relate per se to abortion, as Margaret had intimated, but these types of in vitro tests were often used by parents who were considering abortion as a Tielman called my name and I looked up.

“We have another plate for you,” he announced.

It took me a moment to mentally shift gears. “A plate? A license plate?”

“Yup.” He crossed the room toward me. “A National Academy student going back to the dorm. Ends up, the plates on her car aren’t hers. A sergeant at the front gate, guy named Hastings, noticed it. Just ten, fifteen, minutes ago.”

“Which student?” I asked.

He glanced at the note he was carrying. “Detective Annette Larotte.” He handed me the paper. “They’re registered to her, but she says she never applied for them.”

Her plates: SED-UAR.

Hmm.

I jotted the plates from Mahan’s car beneath them:

SED-UAR

IPR-OMI

Or maybe,

IPR-OMI

SED-UAR

Ignoring the dashes and read together, the plates could be read “I promised you are-”

You are what? Who is it referring to?