she was stationed here in North Carolina. Slipped my mind entirely. Obviously it had, or I wouldn’t have accepted Ralph’s invitation to consult on the case. I retrieved my hand. She wasn’t going to shake it anyway.
Margaret Wellington had a habit of breathing in sharply through her nose, which made it seem like she was constantly disgusted with you. Which, maybe, she was. “It’s been, what, Dr. Bowers? Four years?”
“Has it been that long?” I said. “Hardly seems like it.”
She blinked. “Yes. Four years.” She cocked her head slightly. “So. How have you been?”
“Busy.” It was true enough.
“I heard your wife died,” she said. I could feel my anger rising. She continued, her voice even and emotionless. “Very tragic. And then they transferred you to Denver and stuck you behind a desk. Must have been hard.”
“I volunteered for the position in Colorado,” I said coolly. The National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center in Denver housed the most advanced crime-mapping program in the world. I’d been helping integrate the research from the National Institute for Justice with that of the FBI. “It’s important work and this way Tessa could be closer to my parents.”
“Yes of course.” Finally she backed up a little and even let the hint of a smile dance across her lips. “Well, it looks like I’ll be moving back to Quantico again as soon as this case is wrapped up. They’d like me to teach at the Academy again.”
“Congratulations. I know how important that is to you.”
“Yes.” Her voice had turned to chalk. “You do.”
I held my tongue. Better to let it be at that.
“See you in the briefing room,” she said at last and stalked off to her glass-enclosed office in the corner of the room.
The air around me seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. I saw Lien-hua glance up from her desk, a question mark on her face. “What was that all about?”
“It’s complicated,” I said. “Ralph, why didn’t you tell me she was here?”
He grinned. “Must have slipped my mind.”
“Yeah, well, you’re going to owe me big-time for this.”
“What do you mean complicated?” asked Lien-hua.
I sighed. “We were both working at the Bureau. I was teaching environmental criminology, and she was assigned to counterter-rorism-”
“Wait a minute,” Lien-hua said. “I thought that before you moved to Denver you lived in New York City?”
“I did. I’d fly in to teach a couple weeks every month. Anyway, she’d been eyeing the assistant director’s position for quite a while and was on the fast track toward getting it when-”
“Some evidence was lost,” Ralph said. “There were a lot of accusations, and Pat here noticed some things that internal affairs was very interested in.”
I sat down at the desk beside Lien-hua. “Like I said, it gets complicated. Anyway, there was a disciplinary hearing. I had to testify, and she ended up getting transferred here, to the satellite office, to push papers around.”
“She’s blamed Pat ever since,” Ralph added. “And brown-nosed everyone she can to get reinstated at Quantico. Needless to say, she wasn’t too happy to have any of us come in on this case, but on the other hand, she wants it all wrapped up as soon as possible because it doesn’t look good to have a serial killer running around loose in your neck of the woods when you’re trying to impress the director.”
I turned back to Ralph. “Wait a minute, what did she mean by that ‘see you in the briefing room’ comment?”
“Oh yeah. Margaret wants you to brief the team on your investigative techniques.”
“When?”
He looked at his watch. “Half an hour.”
“What? No way. I haven’t visited the crime scenes yet. She knows that. It’s too early for any kind of preliminary report-”
“Just walk us through the process, Pat. You know, all that geographical time and space mumbo jumbo.”
“I can’t, Ralph. I haven’t even-by the way, you make my work sound so intriguing and scientific-”
“Thank you.”
“I need two days at least.”
“We can give you till noon-”
“There’s no way I could be ready by-”
“Two o’clock, then?”
“Two o’clock!”
“Two o’clock it is,” said Ralph triumphantly. “Good man. I’ll go tell Margaret.”
“What? Wait a minute.” I turned to Lien-hua. “What just happened there?”
“I think you’re going to give a briefing at two.”
“I didn’t agree to that, did I?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “But I can already tell I’m going to enjoy watching you two work together.”
I grabbed a handful of files off the desk and stood up. I couldn’t believe it. I came in here today planning to visit the crime scenes, and now I was going to be stuck giving a briefing instead. I hate giving briefings almost as much as I hate bad coffee.
She motioned to the screen mounted on the wall. “Before you get started, c’mere for a second. There’s something I wanted to show you.”
“Listen, Lien-hua. I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
“Wait. This might be helpful.” She pulled up the crime-scene photos and started scrolling through them. “He abducts them, tortures them, then kills them and dumps their bodies where we can find them, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Where we can find them.”
“That’s right.”
“Most killers either leave a body indoors, at the primary crime scene, or if they move the body at all it’s to obstruct the investigation. To hide evidence.”
Hmm. And this from a profiler. “That’s right. Good point. So why does he want them found?”
“Right. That’s what I’m wondering. And one more thing I noticed. He started with blunt force to subdue Patty. Then he progressed to drugging his victims.”
“Not as messy,” I said, “and more reliable. Sometimes hitting someone on the head has the unfortunate result of killing them right away. Doesn’t give you the chance to torture them to death.”
“Well, there was some contamination in the original toxicology tests, so we didn’t get the correct results in until yesterday. This wasn’t in the information Ralph sent you. Look, the drugs used for Alexis and Bethanie are different from the ones used on Jamie and Reinita.”
She slid the toxicology reports my way, and I picked them up. “It is a little odd that he’d alternate like that,” I said. “Seems more likely he’d progress from one to the other, not switch back and forth.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“Let’s see what the autopsy brings back on Mindy. If she was drugged too…”
She scrolled to Mindy’s picture. I glanced back and forth from the bulletin board to the computer screen. In the one picture Mindy looked so alive, so timeless. So enduring. And in the other, so violated, so helpless, so dead; so utterly, unchangeably dead. Life is so terribly fragile. So fleeting. So brief. It’s a puzzle I can’t begin to understand even after all these years. One minute you’re dreaming of writing a novel, or retiring early, or vacationing in Bermuda, and the next you’re a slab of cooling meat with a blocked artery or a brain aneurysm. Or a chest full of cancer.
“You OK?” It was Agent Lien-hua’s voice. She was staring at me. I had no idea how long I’d been lost in thought.
“Huh?”
She pointed at my hands. I looked down. I’d curled my hands into fists and was squeezing so tightly my knuckles were turning white. I quickly relaxed my hands, flexed my fingers, shook them loose. “Yeah, yeah. Of course. I’m fine. Sorry. What were you saying?” My heart was hammering. Stay in control. Don’t get distracted here.
