“What about the drug?”
“Tox screening is backed up. It could take a couple days.”
“We need it now. Get on their backs, and if they won’t put a rush on it, sic Ralph on them.”
He nodded and was about to leave when he added, “Oh, and by the way. We still don’t have anything solid on Cassandra’s family.
We confirmed her mom’s death, found strangled in an alley, but can’t find any record of her dad. He might be dead too. No way to tell.”
That was par for the course. “Thanks.”
Solomon left and I returned to my research on Cassandra’s grant, but that didn’t seem to lead anywhere helpful either. All I found were a few references to something called Project Rukh and some PDF files with additional information about magnetoencephalography technology and mucopolysaccharides, the jellylike substance that acts as a semiconductor in the shark’s electrosensory organs.
But how was it related to the case? A way to improve an MEG’s efficiency for a new generation of machines? Maybe trying to figure out how sharks can sense and locate fish so you can find a way to do it synthetically?
Possibly. But how that might be connected to her abduction I couldn’t even begin to guess. To use Lien-hua’s analogy, I needed to step out of the car. Or maybe look out a different window.
Since the aquarium was owned by Drake Enterprises, I thought maybe I could find out more about the grant by following the money backward.
Their website featured a prominent picture of the CEO, Victor Drake, and I recognized him as the man who’d almost knocked me down when I was leaving the aquarium earlier in the day. Even though I hadn’t heard of his company before this week, he’d apparently managed to build one of the leading biotech firms in the country.
But how is that relevant? How is it connected?
Biotech?
Shark research?
Magnetoencephalography?
They all seemed to have something to do with the fires and with finding Cassandra, but what?
It seemed like every step I took toward gathering more clues led me farther away from the heart of the case. I looked at the clock: 5:34 P.M.
With each passing moment, the chances of finding Cassandra alive were shrinking and I was tense, so when the phone rang it jarred me. I grabbed it. “Pat here.”
“Dr. Bowers, it’s Aina Mendez. Agent Hawkins told us that Hunter might go after an inhabited building.”
“It’s possible.”
“Well, because of that, we brought the bomb squad to his apartment. They found traces of radioactive isotopes on Hunter’s clothing.”
“What?” I gasped.
“Cesium-137. It’s nasty stuff. Faint, but definitely present. It might have come from something as innocent as visiting a chemo lab at a hospital, or from someone working on a dirty bomb. The team is doing a more extensive sweep now, but I thought you should know.”
The case cycled through my head, facts tumbling over each other.
“Aina, have your team check the fire sites, see if they find any traces of the cesium there. Start with last night. I’m wondering if Hunter might have added something else that we didn’t think of to the paste he used as an accelerant. And hurry. We don’t have much time.”
“But we’ve already done that.”
“You have?”
“Si. San Diego is one of the world’s most important seaports and military hubs, so MAST regularly does sweeps through the city to look for radioactive isotopes, for any evidence of terrorist activity.
In the past we’ve identified traces of cesium-137, but mostly that’s from the medical research facilities here.”
“Cross-check the records.”
I knew I was getting tense, and I think she could hear it in my voice because it was a long moment before she said, “All right. I’ll let you know what we find.”
We ended the call. I looked at the clock.
5:37 p.m.
Lien-hua Jiang watched the video of Cassandra over and over again, each time pausing at different places. At last, she opened her notepad and wrote, “It isn’t the killing that excites him the most.
It’s the power, the high he gets from holding another person’s life in his hands. And he wants to make that feeling last as long as possible.”
She paused. Yes. Cassandra’s terror would go on for hours as she watched the water slowly rise around her-all the while knowing she couldn’t escape. And he would be enjoying every minute of her suffering. Lien-hua put her pen to paper again, “Once the victim is dead, the thrill is over, so killing once isn’t enough for him. He wants to experience it again and again. That’s why he’s taping her death.”
When Lien-hua closed her eyes, she saw the face of a woman staring lifelessly through the water. A face pale, and shaded with death. She’d seen a face like that floating in the water once.
A long time ago.
She opened her eyes, rewound the video to the beginning, and started watching it again.
I felt the familiar tug in my heart: dad vs. FBI agent.
I needed to pull away and be a dad for a couple minutes. I tried Tessa’s number. No answer.
Of course not.
I was a little worried about her, so I punched a few buttons on my cell phone to see if I could find her. Then I stood to stretch and clear my head, walked around the room twice.
When I took my seat and looked at my screen, my video chat icon was flashing. I clicked it and Terry’s face appeared. “There you are, Pat. Good news. The video of Cassandra isn’t on the Internet.”
“How can you be sure?” I asked.
“Angela’s team scanned the web with their latest image-based search engines. We don’t have to type in text anymore, just grab an image and go. It’s like worldwide facial recognition. Web looks clean.”
“Good. What else?”
“We deciphered the encrypted files. It’s mostly all shark research, something about the ampullae of-”
“Lorenzini.” I was getting antsy. “I got that too. Anything else?”
The clock on the wall.
5:49 p.m.
“Well, there’s a Project Rukh and some guy named Dr. Osbourne.
I looked him up. He works for Drake Enterprises. First thing we thought-maybe the kidnapper, right? We did some checking on him, though, he’s speaking at a convention in Boston. Been there for the last three days. Won’t be back in town till tomorrow.”
I thought through flight times and time zones and realized he couldn’t have flown to San Diego and then back to Boston during the night to be part of the abduction. But I wrote down his name.
I could follow up on him later. “What’s Project Rukh, Terry? Do we know?”
“Looks like a DARPA project, although the Pentagon is pretty guarded about its defense contracts, and my intel is patchy. All I could come up with is that Drake Enterprises landed the contract.”
Drake Enterprises again.
So, Cassandra did have a grant from the government after all.
In my mind I flew through a few of the things I knew about DARPA: theoretical weapons research-technology that’s still twenty to fifty years out, sometimes they subcontract weapons systems to civilian organizations. But why an aquarium? Why a biotech firm? “Terry,” I said, “DARPA. Talk to me. Quick summary.”
“They’re way out on the lip, Pat. If I wasn’t here I’d be there.
NASA grew out of DARPA, so did modern computer operating systems, artificial intelligence, voice recognition…” He must have been a bigger fan of DARPA than I thought. He continued to rifle through his list: “Hypertext, virtual reality, laser technology for space-based defense systems, submarine technology, and the Internet-all DARPA babies.”
