This was another agent — a peer — and an analyst she’d approved to work on the case. Not her boyfriend and some hooker from south of Broadway.
She turned and left them, her thoughts contradictory. It was probably the residue of her uneasy night, when she’d tossed and turned, worried over the Eric situation. There had been so many unpleasant confrontations with him leading up to the divorce. That had probably colored her attitude this morning, so when she met Stacy, who was without a doubt beautiful and available, with Richard, who she had to admit was very attractive…
Silver didn’t have the luxury of turning her team into a tawdry soap opera. She was the boss — she admonished herself that she’d better start thinking like one. Rounding the corner to her office, she made a mental effort to banish any further speculations about Richard and his…his analyst. Besides, it was probably just an innocent work relationship.
Where Stacy might have to burn the midnight oil with him, and perhaps soothe the kinks out of his strong back with her capable…
She reached her door and pushed it open with her toe, setting her briefcase down on the meeting table and switching on the lights. It was a little early for chocolate, especially the rich Belgian variety she had stashed — but was it ever really too early?
She rounded her desk, plopped down in the seat, and slid her drawer open.
Silver spent the morning updating the paperwork associated with operating the task force — not her favorite part of the job, but a necessary evil. Her computer pinged a warning at her, signaling that her meeting to go over the forensics report from the latest killing was in five minutes.
A soft knock at the door disrupted her. She put her pen down with an exasperated sigh.
“Yes.”
Seth poked his head in. “We still on at eleven?”
“Yes. My automated taskmaster just flagged me.” Silver gestured at her screen.
Seth stepped into the office. “I began the search for like incidences, but it will take a while. I had no idea there were so many house fires every year.”
“I’ve been thinking about that. Once you’re done, it would be interesting to focus on only those where two people were killed — remember that there were two victims in Connecticut.”
“One of which could have been an unintended collateral victim…”
“That’s always bothered me a little,” she reflected. “I’m not so sure it was accidental. Our killer is sophisticated, smart, and has so far made no mistakes. And yet he leaves the son where he won’t burn. That doesn’t make any sense. Why not just lock him in the basement where he would be guaranteed to be safe?”
“Maybe he was in a hurry?”
“Maybe. But he took the time to tie him up, drag a chair there… No, I’m beginning to believe he had a reason. When you sort the results, look for father/son deaths in fires. Or fires where only one of the people in the house died from the fire, and the other or others died from smoke inhalation or the structure collapsing. Call it intuition, but I don’t believe anything the killer is doing is unplanned. If that’s correct, then he wanted the son to die in precisely the way he did.”
“I’m all for intuition, Silver. I get where you’re going with this. It kind of makes sense, in a weird, twisted serial-killer-thinking kind of way. Remind me never to piss you off.” Seth checked the time. “Now, I think we’ve got a meeting to go to?”
“I know. I’ll be there in four or five minutes. I just have a few more things I have to sign.”
“All right. See you in the conference room in five.”
Silver organized her notes for the meeting and tried to clear her head. She was over the Stacy/Richard thing by now, but she was having a problem putting aside the other nagging matter that had been preoccupying her thoughts — how to fund her legal bills.
Two hours of filling out forms at the bank had resulted in promises of an answer on her loan application — a second mortgage for two hundred thousand dollars she could draw down as needed. That would more than fund an adequate war chest, although even as she had signed the application she had understood that her income wasn’t really strong enough to make the payments if she had to use more than about fifty grand of it, which she would burn through quickly based on what Ben had said.
She needed to hear something soon — the money issue was beginning to distract her, and she couldn’t afford to be anything but completely on. Which reminded her that she needed to get moving. She grabbed her computer and the case files and strode to the door. Time to go find out what forensics had come up with.
Chapter 8
The room was full, with Richard and Seth sitting on either side of Silver, and the rest of the agents, mostly male, gathered around the table. Sam stood and moved to a laptop that had been set up with an overhead projection system. Seth flipped off the lights, and Sam began the rundown.
“Cause of death was decapitation. Instrument appears to have been a sharp blade used in a chopping manner — looks like four blows. Probably a hatchet. Sharp one, that’s for sure. Time of death narrowed to around four a.m.. The bruising and lacerations were sustained prior to death, and the head had a nasty bump on the front that was caused by a blow, which likely rendered the victim unconscious for a while.” Sam stopped, looking around the room. “The condo locks had been picked, so best guess is that the killer broke in while the victim was asleep, hit him over the head to knock him out, tied him to the bed with the same electrical wire that he used in the house fire, then slapped him around before doing the chop job.”
Silver glanced at Sam, indicating that he should move it along.
“While processing the site, we recovered a number of fibers that don’t match anything in the room, and also may have gotten lucky. We have a single hair, which doesn’t belong to either the victim or the maid,” Sam revealed.
“Girlfriend? Boyfriend?”
“The report says it’s male, inch and a half long, and medium brown. We’re still checking, but neither the maid nor the doormen think the victim had a girlfriend. Or a boyfriend, for that matter. Whatever he was doing, he didn’t do it at home.”
“Superintendent? Maintenance guy?” Seth suggested.
“We’re working on those, but the building superintendent is Chinese and in his late thirties, which means it isn’t his. We’re looking over the log of all visitors for the last three months. The doorman records everyone, so at least there’s that.”
“What does forensics think about the fibers?” Silver asked.
“They aren’t definitive, but they believe they could have come from the perp’s clothing. Nothing in the condo resembles them. The report spends three paragraphs describing length, density and all, but in the end it concludes that they’re probably from an area rug — they’re synthetic fibers of the same sort used in cheap carpets and floor coverings.”
“Great. Doesn’t leave us with a lot,” Seth said.
“The contusions raise a question in my mind, though,” Sam continued. “If this isn’t a single perp, and these killings are being staged to look like the random acts of a serial, then perhaps the team carrying them out was extracting information from the victim. That would explain binding him to the bed and beating him.”
“As would a single perp who was mad as hell,” Silver observed. “So far, the theory that these are staged has exactly zero basis in any of the evidence. And nothing about this one is changing that.”
“True, but I’m just saying-”
“I think we’re all clear on where you’re going with this. You like the idea that the killings are somehow tied to terrorist funding. The problem is there’s nothing to support that idea.” Silver enjoyed stopping him in his tracks, but then changed the discussion. “What the profiling group has come up with to date is available for everyone to study, but it’s pretty generic. Many of the usual vague assertions are made — that he’s a loner, single or estranged from
