“I don’t know. I think I’ve told you everything I can remember.”
Bosch wasn’t convinced. He began to go through the story with her again, coming at the same information from new angles. It was a tried-and-true interview technique for eliciting new details and it did not fail him. The most interesting bit of new information to emerge in the second telling was that the man who spoke English also asked her what the password was to her e-mail account.
“Why would he want that?” Bosch asked.
“I don’t know,” Alicia Kent said. “I didn’t ask. I just gave them what they wanted.”
Near the end of the second telling of her ordeal the forensics team arrived and Bosch called for a break in the questioning. While Alicia Kent remained on the couch, he walked the tech team back to the master bedroom so they could start there. He then stepped into a corner of the room and called his partner. Ferras reported that he had found nobody so far who had seen or heard anything on the overlook. Bosch told him that when he wanted a break from knocking on doors he should check into Stanley Kent ’s ownership of a gun. They needed to find the make and model. It was looking like his own gun was probably the weapon he was killed with.
As Bosch closed the phone Walling called to him from the home office. Harry found her and Brenner standing behind the desk and looking at a computer screen.
“Look at this,” Walling said.
“I told you,” he said, “you shouldn’t be touching anything yet.”
“We don’t have the luxury of time anymore,” Brenner said. “Look at this.”
Bosch came around the desk to look at the computer.
“Her e-mail account was left open,” Walling said. “I went into the sent mail file. And this was sent to her husband’s e-mail at six-twenty-one p.m. last night.”
She clicked a button and opened up the e-mail that had been sent from Alicia Kent’s account to her husband’s. The subject line said
HOME EMERGENCY: READ IMMEDIATELY!
Embedded in the body of the e-mail was a photograph of Alicia Kent naked and hog-tied on the bed. The impact of the photo would be obvious to anyone, not just a husband.
Below the photograph was a message:
We have your wife. Retrieve for us all cesium sources available to you. Bring them in safe containment to the Mulholland overlook near your home by eight o'clock. We will be watching you. If you tell anyone or make a call we will know. The consequence will be your wife being raped, tortured and left in to many pieces to count. Use all precautions while handling sources. Do not be late or we will kill her.
Bosch read the message twice and believed he felt the same terror Stanley Kent must have felt.
“‘We will be watching… we will know… we will kill her,’” Walling said. “No contractions. The ‘too’ in ‘too many pieces’ is spelled wrong and then the odd construction of some of the sentences. I don’t think this was written by someone whose original language is English.”
As she said it Bosch saw it and knew that she was right.
“They send the message right from here,” Brenner said. “The husband gets it at the office or on his PDA-did he have a PDA?”
Bosch had no expertise in this area. He hesitated.
“A personal digital assistant,” Walling prompted. “You know, like a Palm Pilot or a phone with all the gadgets.”
Bosch nodded.
“I think so,” he said. “There was a BlackBerry cell phone recovered. It looks like it has a mini-keyboard.”
“That works,” Brenner said. “So no matter where he is, he gets this message and can probably view the photo, too.”
All three of them were quiet while the impact of the e-mail registered. Finally, Bosch spoke, feeling guilty now about holding back earlier.
“I just remembered something. There was an ID tag on the body. From Saint Aggy’s up in the Valley.”
Brenner’s eyes took on a sharpness.
“You just remembered a key piece of information like that?” he asked angrily.
“That’s right. I for-”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Walling interjected. “Saint Aggy’s is a women’s cancer clinic. Cesium is used almost exclusively for treating cervical and uterine cancer.”
Bosch nodded.
“Then we better get going,” he said.
FIVE
SAINT AGATHA’S CLINIC FOR WOMEN was in Sylmar at the north end of the San Fernando Valley. Because it was the dead of night they were making good time on the 170 Freeway up. Bosch was behind the wheel of his Mustang, one eye on the fuel needle. He knew he was going to need gas before coming back down into the city. It was he and Brenner in the car. It had been decided-by Brenner-that Walling should stay behind with Alicia Kent, to continue both questioning and calming her. Walling didn’t seem happy about the assignment but Brenner, asserting his seniority in the partnership, didn’t give her room to debate it.
Brenner spent most of the drive taking and making a series of cell calls to and from superiors and fellow agents. It was clear to Bosch from the side of things he was able to hear that the big federal machine was gearing up for battle. A greater alarm had now been sounded. The e-mail sent to Stanley Kent had brought things into better focus and what was once a federal curiosity had now gone completely off the scale.
When Brenner finally closed the phone and put it back in his jacket pocket he turned slightly in his seat and looked over at Bosch.
“I’ve got a RAT team heading to Saint Aggy’s,” he said. “They’ll go into the materials safe to check it out.”
“A rat team?”
“Radiological-attack team.”
“What’s their ETA?”
“Didn’t ask but they might beat us. They’ve got a chopper.”
Bosch was impressed. It meant that there had been a rapid-response team on duty somewhere in the middle of the night. He thought about how he had been awake and waiting for the call out that night. The members of the radiological-attack team must wait for the call they hope never comes. He remembered what he had heard about the LAPD’s own OHS unit taking training in urban assault tactics. He wondered if Captain Hadley had a RAT team, too.
“They’re going full field on this,” Brenner said. “The Department of Homeland Security is overseeing from DC. This morning at nine there will be meetings on both coasts to bring everybody together on it.”
“Who is everybody?”
“There’s a protocol. We’ll bring in Homeland, the JTTF, everybody. It’ll be alphabet soup. The NRC, the DOE, RAP… who knows, before we get this contained we might even have FEMA setting up a tent. It’s going to be federal pandemonium.”
Bosch didn’t know what all the acronyms stood for but didn’t need to. They all spelled out
“Who will be running the show?”
Brenner looked over at Bosch.
“Everybody and nobody. Like I said, pandemonium. If we open up that safe at Saint Aggy’s and the cesium is gone, then our best shot at tracking it and getting it back will be to do it before all hell breaks loose at nine and we
