The Death Row Complex (16 page)

“Well, I’m a stripper,” the woman said. “And spare me the moral judgment on that, because frankly, I’m not up for it right this minute.”

Gilman was uninterested in Lisa Goldstein’s choice of career. He was contemplating the notion of a Ph.D. biologist in a band who worked on anthrax and picked up strippers in his free time.

D
ECEMBER 2, 2015
3:15 P.M.
EST

Roger Gilman could not stop smiling as he and Dawn strolled slowly through Lafayette Square. Directly in front of them stood a large statue of Andrew Jackson waving his hat atop a rearing horse. Centered behind the statue was the White House; behind it, the Washington monument stretched toward the heavens.

It was an unusually cold fall in D.C. A light dusting of snow already covered the square, and both Gilman and his wife wore long coats, scarves, and hats. Each of them had removed one glove, and his large hand enveloped her small one. It was just perfect.

“Mary is doing so well,” Dawn was saying. “She’s reading almost all by herself. When you first left town, she was crying a lot. But then she got this new determination all of a sudden.” Dawn laughed at the memory. “She just comes to me and says, ‘Mommy, I’m not going to cry for Daddy anymore. I’m going to learn how to read really good and then when he gets home I’ll surprise him!’

“So James has been working on it with her. Every day, he comes home from kindergarten and she’s waiting for him to teach her what he learned that day. It’s so cute to see them camped out in their PJs, with her sounding out the words while he corrects her by sounding out the same words.”

Gilman’s eyes welled up. He was not ashamed. He wiped the tears softly with the gloved hand not holding Dawn’s, and then stopped walking and pulled his wife into his arms. For a moment he just stood with her, not wanting to miss a moment of this time. “What about the rest of them?” His voice was on the verge of breaking.

“Oh, they’re fine,” Dawn said. “The older kids are a lot more used to having you gone for a while. They know you’ll always be back. They’re just going to school, going to church, doing their homework… sports… business as usual… you know.”

Dawn fell silent as they began walking again. Wordlessly, they changed direction and began heading east, and then south along 15th street. It was as if Gilman was responding to an inexorable pull, a magnet drawing him toward FBI headquarters.

“What time is your flight in the morning?” Dawn asked.

“My driver is coming to get me at 4:50.”

“Ouch!” she laughed.

“I know, but I practically had to beg just to get an overnight stay at all. This meeting is only supposed to last about an hour. Bob was going to put me back on a plane to San Diego this afternoon.”

“Well I’m glad the begging worked. The kids are thrilled you’ll be there when they get home from school. Speaking of which, I do have to go. Mary and James will be out soon.”

For a moment, they stood at the northwest corner of Freedom Plaza, Dawn’s kind eyes shining up into his. He sighed. “I need to get to work. But I’ll be home as soon as I can.”

“Good,” she said with a hint of mischief in her voice. “I’m making pot roast.” Pot roast was Gilman’s favorite dinner in the winter. He smiled gratefully and hugged his wife for a long moment, his round belly pressing into her flat one.

Minutes later, Gilman was across a conference table from Teresa Wood and Director Bob Wachsman. Beside him was Sean McMullan. In front of each of them was a copy of the same status report. Bob appeared to be reading it when Gilman approached. Gilman had familiarized himself with the information on the airplane.

Teresa had written the report. “There are two primary pieces of evidence that have come to light on my end,” she said after Gilman sat down. “The first is a fiber from a piece of clothing. I’ve had this material analyzed and tracked, and it helps us—well, maybe a little. It is most likely a fiber from a white lab coat. There are many other standard-issue white uniforms, all of which are generated by the same clothing manufacturer. But given all of the other evidence in this case, Ockham’s razor tells me it’s probably a lab coat, probably from a researcher or a doctor.

“Second piece of evidence: there was also a microscopic hair in the envelope with the card. Medium brown and fine, although the fineness of this one tiny sample doesn’t necessarily mean your perp has fine hair overall. We’ve done a DNA analysis. It’s from a Caucasian female.”

Gilman and McMullan looked at each other. Neither spoke.

“Now, I understand we have some suspects that fit the description?” Teresa continued.

Gilman nodded grimly. “That and every other description on the planet. McMullan and I have been combing through the backgrounds of all of our San Diego-based suspects since October. Our counterparts in San Francisco are doing the same work at San Quentin. It’s taking a long time. The heavy metal guitarist alone has hundreds of friends and even more enemies.”

“Well,” Teresa said, “get me a DNA sample from your top ten Caucasian suspects—even if they are male, because that could potentially bring a familial connection to light. Obviously, we can’t rule anyone out based on the fact that their DNA is
not
on the card, but if we find a match then we have a pretty clear winner.”

“We’ll get the DNA,” McMullan said. “What’s your next move?”

“Well guys, I’m at a fork in the road. I have exhausted all of the assays that can be done to the card using non-destructive methods. I have not found any prints, which doesn’t surprise me. I’m sure your perp probably had the brain to wear gloves when handling the document.

“I
could
dust the card for prints with fluorescent powder and look using the gooseneck—that would be the most sensitive way to examine it for fingerprints. But that would contaminate the card, and if we
did
pick up a print, I bet it would match the hair sample so it would not give us any new information.

“So I have decided go a different route instead. I’m going to proceed with the ESDA. This will also damage the document, but it might pick up a trace of another writing or other indentation. So it could give us a
unique
piece of information. If your perp is a scientist or a doctor, as the lab coat fiber suggests, then he or she probably writes on a million things a day. We might get something from this.”

“Sounds good,” Bob Wachsman said. “Make it happen. What about the tracing of the postage? Linguistics? Handwriting?”

“Useless. The language is a mixture, the handwriting is a mystery, and Mason tracked the IBI of the postage stamp as far as he could, which wasn’t very far. It was mailed in Phoenix. That’s all we know.”

“Great,” said Wachsman. “So basically, our perp is anyone in Arizona.”

“Or anyone in San Diego with a car,” Gilman added.

“Or anyone in the world who’s not afraid to fly,” Teresa corrected.

D
ECEMBER 4, 2015
9:04 A.M.
EST

In the main forensics laboratory at the USPIS, Teresa reached into a plastic bag with a gloved hand. She gently pulled out the White House greeting card and then took a deep breath. After a moment to ensure the entire experiment was ready to go, she laid the card, opened, onto a flat surface in front of her. Instantly, the force of a vacuum sucked the card to the surface where it formed a seal.

Teresa worked expertly and quickly. The ESDA—electrostatic detection apparatus—would pick up invisible impressions in the paper. But the longer the card sat over the vacuum, the less sensitive the assay would become as the force of the vacuum increasingly flattened the impressions in the document. Teresa laid a thin layer of plastic film over the card and the vacuum immediately pulled the film taught. With a hand-held corona wire, she began to deposit a negative electrical charge to the entire surface of the plastic.

Then she waited. The time frame for the experiment was absolutely critical to maximize the negative charge while minimizing the damage done to the document by the force of the vacuum.

Teresa took pride in her skill with the ESDA. When intuition told her she was at the critical moment, she retrieved a vial of what appeared to be colored powder. In fact, the vial was filled with tiny, positively charged glass beads, coated with liquid toner. Quickly, she poured the beads over the plastic, where they automatically distributed to neutralize the charge applied to the document.

Gradually, a series of impressions developed as the beads were sucked into the lowest points on the document. The first indentations shown were those produced by the Arabic text, which became crisper before Teresa’s eyes as if an invisible hand had come in with a second pen and precisely traced the writing.

A moment later, a second set of impressions began to emerge.

Teresa began to grin, and then chuckle. “Damn, I’m
good
,” she said aloud. She reached into a drawer and grabbed a sheet of sticky, transparent film, from which she then removed the plastic backing to expose the tacky surface. Carefully, to avoid introducing air bubbles between layers, she laid the film over the newly created trace to preserve it.

D
ECEMBER 7, 2015
7:45 A.M.
PST

In a San Diego hotel room, Roger Gilman sat on the bed cross-legged, surrounded by pages and pages of documentation. On the notepad in his lap was a sketched Venn diagram. In one circle, the agent had written the names of suspects who were female and Caucasian—women whose DNA could match the hair sample Teresa had found in the greeting card. At the top of the list was Katrina Stone. Several other names were scrawled beneath that of Stone in the circle: Stone’s Russian graduate student, Oxana Kosova, the heavy metal postdoc’s soon-to-be ex-wife, Angela Fischer, and his crazy stripper groupie, Lisa Goldstein.

Family. Stone had both a daughter and a sister. Her mother was in the beginning of stages of Alzheimer’s disease—not a likely suspect, but still ambulatory. Stone’s ex-husband had remarried. Kimberly Stone. Another Caucasian female.

In a second circle of the Venn diagram, Gilman had written the names of suspects who would wear a lab coat or other white standard-issue uniform. Katrina’s ex-husband, Tom Stone, had been included. He was a medic. Stone’s other female student, Li Fung, was not Caucasian but she did fit into the second circle. So did the rest of Stone’s staff.

Asked to provide DNA, Li had willingly submitted as had Joshua Attle. Jason Fischer had said, “Fuck you—come back with a court order,” without looking up from his experiment. Todd Ruddock had provided the sample along with a middle finger, and then cheerfully requested with his charming British accent, “Now bugger off, will ya?” Angela Fischer had agreed to provide a sample and then slapped Gilman across the face when he plucked the hair from her head.

Gilman had not managed to locate Lisa Goldstein. According to another stripper at the club where she worked, Lisa had a tendency to go on “vacation” with some of her “clients” and would probably be back at some point.

The area of overlap between the two circles contained only two names—only two Caucasian females who would wear lab coats. Oxana Kosova and Katrina Stone.

A third, non-overlapping circle was reserved for suspects who had no obvious ties to either the hair sample or the fiber. The ISIL network, which had been silent on the matter since day one of the investigation. Other international terrorist organizations. Domestic terrorists. Also in the third circle was the phrase “2000 Hispanic Prisoners,” and beneath that, “Prisoners’ Victims.”

Lawrence Naden was, indeed, sitting in a prison cell in Texas. Not a suspect. Gilman had written his name outside of all circles and then drawn a direct line to the name of Katrina Stone. One woman in the center of the diagram. One woman at the center of it all.

Gilman reflected back on his short, wonderful visit to Washington, D.C. and sighed.