Next Victim (19 page)

"What elements?"

He shook his head and smiled. "Loose lips…You know how that goes."

"They sink ships. Old wartime slogan. But this is a crime scene, Gerry. Not a war zone."

When he looked at her, she saw something flicker in his ash-gray eyes. "You sure about that?" Andrus asked.

20

Tess wasted an hour in the lobby, stealing doughnuts from a spread laid out by the Santa Monica PD. Nobody would tell her anything, and after a while she eased up on her paranoia enough to decide that nobody knew anything worth telling. All she could learn was that the hotel room had been entered by the local SWAT team, who’d found a woman dead and no sign of her killer. How the room had been identified in the first place, why the police department’s SWAT guys had been brought in for what should have been a federal bust—these were questions without answers. The SWAT squad had been isolated for debriefing, the incident commander wasn’t around, and the street cops guarding the lobby had nothing to say.

She slipped into the rear office behind the registration desk and found clear indications that the office had been used as a temporary command post. Coffee mugs and chocolate bars were scattered around, extra phones had been jacked into the walls, folding tables and chairs were set up in available corners. The nature of the work done here was a mystery. All wastebaskets had been emptied. Any computer gear had been removed. But under a desk, she found a wadded scrap of paper that had been overlooked, covered with scribbled writing. Most of it was indecipherable, but one string of words, circled and recircled by an insistent hand, stood out from the rest.

tox (aer) ~.01 mg/kg

Tox
must mean toxic.
Aer
probably stood for aerial or—no, aerosol.

Aerosol toxicity? A gas?

Had to be. A gas with a toxicity of approximately point zero one milligrams per kilogram.

Lethal stuff. The tiniest droplet would be deadly.

Tess stared at the piece of paper for a long moment.

Another investigative team
, Andrus had said. A team dealing with hazardous substances?

If there was a hazmat squad upstairs, and if they were keeping their presence secret, then they wouldn’t use the main elevator when they left. They would take the freight elevator and exit through a rear door.

Tess left the office and headed to the back of the hotel, passing several ballrooms named after local flora—the Bird-of-Paradise, the Oleander, the Bougainvillea. She went through an unlocked door marked HOTEL STAFF ONLY, into a hallway decidedly shabbier than those intended for public use. Corrugated cartons were piled against cinder-block walls. Bare fluorescent tubes flickered overhead.

She found the freight elevator and waited to see if anybody came down.

Andrus had been secretive and uptight about whatever was going on. And last night, when she’d overheard him on the phone in his office, he’d sounded agitated, stressed.

Damn it, Tennant, you can’t afford to screw this up
.

Tennant.

She took out her cell phone and called the main switchboard at FBI headquarters in DC, asking to be connected with Special Agent Tennant. The call was transferred to Tennant’s office, but she got only his voice mail. She terminated the call without leaving a message and speed-dialed the Denver field office. With the one-hour time difference, it was 8:30 in Denver—early, but not too early for Lori to be in.

Lori Woods was her closest friend in the bureau. She was not an agent but one of the twenty thousand civilian employees who received no media attention or publicity, never had TV shows built around fictionalized versions of themselves, never received any special commendation or acknowledgment, yet kept the whole nationwide enterprise running.

"Tess," Lori said when she came on the line, "how are things going in LA?"

How are you handling it?
was what she meant. Tess wasn’t sure she knew the answer to that question. "Things are pretty crazy," she said. "There’s been another killing."

"Oh, damn."

"I’m about to enter the crime scene."

"That won’t be easy."

Tess wanted to say something glib like,
It’s what they pay me for
. But she couldn’t fool Lori, so all she said was, "I’m not looking forward to it. In the meantime, I have a favor to ask."

"Ask away."

"I’m away from the office now. Can you look through the personnel database and tell me about a special agent name of Tennant, who works out of Ninth Street? I have a feeling he’s somebody I should have heard of."

"He is. I mean, I’ve heard of him, and I’m only a lowly civilian."

"They also serve who only file and type. Who is he?"

"Grizzled veteran. Been here forever. Since the Hoover days. Must be pushing sixty by now."

"If he’s sixty, he’s past retirement age," Tess said.

"I heard they made a special exception for him. Postponed his mandatory retirement date."

"So he’s got pull?"

"He’s got balls," Lori said. "Some people say he’s got a little something extra, too."

"Such as?"

"Such as inside knowledge of the bureau’s various, um, indiscretions." Lori had lowered her voice.

"You’re saying he’s blackmailing the higher-ups?"

"No, nothing that crude. It’s not like he knows anything personal. What he knows is the agency dirt. You know, the botched operations, the money that went down various rat holes without appropriate congressional oversight. You hang around this place for thirty-plus years, you learn where the bodies are buried."

"And he’s holding that over their heads to extend his career?"

"It may not be so overt. I think they’re just worried that he’ll be harder to control if they cashier him. And of course he doesn’t want to turn in his badge. He’s one of those guys who eat, sleep, and breathe the bureau. No wife, no kids. He’s married to the FBI."

"Okay, I get the picture. Now who the heck is he?"

"Didn’t I tell you? He’s chief of DTS."

Tess let that sink in. "I see," she said finally.

"He’s been over there for a couple of years. Transferred out of Philly, where he was the SAC."

"A couple of years," Tess echoed. She knew why she hadn’t stayed abreast of Tennant’s assignment. In the past two years, since her return from bereavement leave, she had merely gone through the motions of her job. Anything outside her immediate purview had been ignored.

"Now you tell me something," Lori said. "Why do you want to know?"

"Because he’s here. He’s in LA."

"Well, I guess that’s not too surprising. DTS gets around. But he can’t have anything to do with your case."

"No," Tess said. "No, of course not. I was just curious, that’s all. I couldn’t place the name."

Lori sounded suspicious. "There something you’re not telling me, kiddo?"

Tess tried to laugh off the question. "I wouldn’t dare. Look, I’ve got to go. What’s the weather like, anyway?"

"Cool and rainy. Clearing tomorrow."

"Sunny here."

"Sure it is. It’s LA."

Tess promised to talk to her soon and ended the call.

DTS, she thought. Domestic Terrorism Section.

And a hazmat team. Man-lethal doses.

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.