Terrorists and toxic substances. A scary combination. But she couldn’t quite see where Mobius fit in. She The freight elevator hummed. It was coming.
She slipped into an unlocked janitorial supply closet, leaving the door an inch ajar.
The elevator doors slid open. Out came a group of men covered from neck to ankles in yellow Nomex jumpsuits. They wore heavy black gloves and boots, and carried helmets under their arms.
Hazmat suits. Tess had seen them before, at chemical spills and industrial fires.
Following them was another man, this one in a blue business suit incongruously overlaid with a SWAT flak jacket and an oxygen canister. He carried a ballistic helmet and a gas mask under one arm.
'You’re a hundred percent certain?' he was asking.
Tess studied him. Iron-haired, squat and muscular and thick-necked. She pegged him as Special Agent Tennant of DTS.
One of the hazmat guys tapped a piece of gear he was toting, which Tess recognized as a portable chemical detector, known to experts as a sniffer. 'The APD is sensitive to one part per million. If anything was there, we’d have picked it up.'
'Okay. You head over to City Hall East. I’ll meet you there. The briefing starts at eleven hundred, sharp.'
Tess wanted to hear more, but the men had already moved out of earshot. A moment later she heard an exit door clang shut. They were gone.
She left the closet and retraced her route to the lobby. Andrus was looking for her.
'There you are. You disappeared on us. I thought I might have to call out the bloodhounds.'
'You could have paged me.'
'True. I suppose I thought you might need some time alone before going upstairs.'
'I was using the rest room.'
'Well, you can go upstairs anytime you want.'
Do I need a hazmat suit? she almost asked. But she preferred not to let Andrus know what she had found out, at least not quite yet. Not that she didn’t trust him, but…well, actually she didn’t trust him. He had been withholding information from her, and she didn’t know why. Andrus was a good manager, and he kept the standard bureaucratic ass-covering office politics to a minimum, but he’d never been what might be called a stand-up guy.
'Who else is up there?' she asked.
'Michaelson. A couple of techs.'
'Gaines wasn’t invited? How about DiFranco, Collins, anybody else?'
'We don’t need a hundred people tramping through the room.'
'Maybe you just don’t want a hundred people to know what’s in the room.'
He winced. 'Tess, I would share everything with you if I could.'
She wasn’t sure she believed this. She didn’t know what to believe right now.
'I know, Gerry,' she said with her best fake smile. 'I understand.'
She didn’t understand, of course. Not yet.
But before long, she promised herself, she would.
21
Tess knew exactly what to expect even before she stepped into room 1625. The details of Mobius’s crime scenes never varied. Even the brand of duct tape was always the same.
What she couldn’t anticipate was her reaction. That was what scared her, what set her heart pumping hard as she left the elevator and walked down the hall.
She had not been to a room like this since the night of February 12. She wasn’t sure what it would do to her. Crazily she feared she would throw up or faint or run out screaming.
The door to the room was open. A Santa Monica patrol officer stood guard. Michaelson was inside, along with a crime-scene photographer and an evidence technician from the field division’s crime lab, unpacking his gear as he prepared to bag and tag, dust, and vacuum.
Tess showed the cop her creds, then crossed the threshold. During her bureau-mandated bereavement counseling, she had learned several techniques for managing stress. Among these was a breathing exercise-a slow intake of breath, a pause, and an even slower exhalation. The method helped her sometimes. She tried it now.
Breathe in…
The corpse on the bed, wrists taped to the headboard, head lolling, eyes wide, mouth hidden behind a strip of tape slapped over her lips, a semicircular wound across the throat, a spillway of dark brown blood descending like a bib.
Hold the breath…
The woman was naked, her legs twisted in a pose of writhing. Her complexion was smooth and pale. Even in death, her eyes were oddly bright. She looked determined, somehow. There was a silent, still intensity to her face that made Tess think of that term soldiers used-the thousand-yard stare.
Breathe out…
Patches of purple lividity mottled the exposed portions of her back, where the blood, no longer circulating, had settled heavily. She had lain there for perhaps seven hours, more or less; the medical examiner would give a more precise estimate. Most likely she had died around two o’clock, later than Mobius’s other kills. Tess thought of William Hayde, detained at the field office until after midnight. He might have had enough time to drive over here-it was only a ten-minute trip from Westwood-then slip on a disguise and pick up this woman.
It was unlikely, though. She was probably just getting desperate.
Breathe in…
The woman’s clothes were scattered on the bed in what appeared to be evidence of hectic lovemaking. Tess scanned the sheets for a semen stain but saw none. There would be no semen in the vaginal canal, either. Mobius practiced safe sex.
Hold the breath…
The sheet under the woman was dark with sweat-the residue of sex and, later, fear. Her sweat, not his. He would have been on top throughout the encounter. He needed to be dominant, needed to be in control.
A tremor worked its way through her. She fought it off. She would not yield to some idiot reaction of her body. She would be stronger than her emotions.
Breathe out…
She couldn’t look at the woman anymore. The corpse, the staring eyes, the bloody neck-it was too much like Paul. She turned away and focused her attention elsewhere.
A minibar. She took a quick inventory of its contents. Nothing appeared to be missing.
Notepad of hotel stationery on an occasional table. No writing on any of the pages.
What else? Drapes drawn shut over a balcony door. Armchair. Table strewn with magazines of local interest. Bureau and desk chair. Small suitcase, its contents scattered.
'Her bag, I assume,' she said to Michaelson.
The Nose sniffed at her as if deciding whether she was worthy of an answer. 'Yes,' he said finally, without looking at her.
'When did she check in?'
'Didn’t.'
'What?'
He expelled a loud sigh, an audible expression of his impatience with her stupidity. 'It’s not her room,' he said.
'So whose is it?'
'His. He checked in.'
'Mobius took this room?'
'That’s correct, Agent McCallum. He signed for it under the name Donald Stevenson, using a credit card he’d recently obtained for that identity. If you’d been in the lobby when the AD briefed me ten minutes ago, you’d know
