“Not if we don’t have free will.”
A slight pause. “Dr. Libet’s experiments.”
“Yes.”
She shook her head. “This afternoon I looked over the articles you posted in the electronic files. There are any number of precipitating factors that could have produced the precognitive neural activity that he found: participant expectation, mental rehearsal, goal orientation to either impress the researcher or confound the experiment. Besides, there’s a burgeoning field of research that seems to indicate that there’s no such thing as the unconscious.”
“But, Lien-hua, there are actions we do that we’re not consciously aware of.”
“Yes, but rather than a duality between the conscious and unconsciousness, it’s likely the brain processes information along a continuum, and that intentionality occurs at differing points depending on the stimuli involved and the complexity of the decisions being made.”
That made sense to me, seemed almost self-evident. “Okay, but consider how some people are interpreting Libet’s findings. What if you believed that free will really was an illusion? That instinct trumps conscious intention? That we’re hardwired to unequivocally act certain ways when exposed to certain stimuli at certain times? Courts have already ruled in favor of this defense.”
She was quiet.
“You read about those rulings? In the files?”
She took an uncertain breath. “I did.”
“So,” I said, “assuming we interpreted the findings as some people are—that behavior is directly and fixedly caused by genetic and neurological factors—then, if we understood enough about the brain, we could tell by genetic or neurological testing who would be a psychopath.” I glanced at her. “For argument’s sake.”
“Putting epigenetics aside, the fact that behavior and environment can alter epigenomes, all right, I’ll go along with that.”
“Tie that in with the in-vitro testing . . .” Margaret’s words about society’s changing views on the right to life came to mind.
Justice reform.
Congressman Fischer’s policy: a more progressive approach to curbing criminal behavior.
And the pieces slid into place.
“Lien-hua, here it is. Test the unborn, find out who’s going to grow up to exhibit psychopathic behavior—”
“And abort them,” she said softly, echoing my conclusion.
Motives.
That can change everything.
“Get rid of serial killers,” she said, “before they ever kill. Cut down on crime by eliminating potential criminals.”
“Preemptive justice.”
The death penalty. For crimes that had never been committed.
“If you agree that abortion is morally tenable,” Lien-hua said sensitively, knowing how tender a subject it was because of how close Christie had come to aborting Tessa, “and assuming you concur with the verdict that the courts have started giving—that in some cases we’re not morally responsible for our behavior because it is, for lack of a better term, instinctual, then the reasoning makes perfect sense. Tell a mother her child is going to grow up to be another Jeffery Dahmer or Sevren Adkins and who wouldn’t terminate the pregnancy?”
“But it wouldn’t stop at psychopathology,” I said.
“No.” Her voice was soft, strained. “It would not. Pedophiles. Rapists. Where do you draw the line? Maybe people who’ll grow up to be manic depressive or inclined to drug addiction—”
“But if there is no free will, there is no line.” I thought of the countries that pressure women to abort their baby girls—the most lethal kind of sex discrimination in the world. “Get rid of anyone whom those in power don’t feel would be good for society.”
“No.” Lien-hua shook her head. “This is crazy. You can’t determine what someone will do, only what they might be prone to do. We’re free to choose, to act or not to act.”
“Not if you interpret Dr. Libet’s findings as some people are.”
“The neurological tests could never be that conclusive.”
“They’ve already been conclusive enough to get people off for first-degree murder. I don’t think this is much of a jump. It’s just social engineering in the name of justice reform. And as the house minority leader, Fischer is powerful enough to actually push something like this through Congress.”
A pause.
Then she said, “Aren’t people supposed to have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? We have a right to make our own choices. To determine our own future.”
“But what if we can’t? If free will and moral responsibility are only illusions?”
“Then pursuing happiness would be an illusion too.”
“And so would liberty,” I said.
The comment brought a stretch of palpable silence.
I took the exit to the Academy.
Earlier, when I was at the command post, I’d tracked the relationships forward in time. Now with a renewed sense of urgency, I mentally did so backward.
Rodale to Lebreau.
Lebreau to Basque.
Basque to Lansing.
Lansing to Vice President Fischer.
Vice President Fischer to . . .
“During the assassination attempt,” I said, “there were two rooms on the eighth floor that were used—do we know if they were both paid for by Hadron Brady?”
“Remember? The hotel didn’t keep the records that far back.”
Who would?
Who would keep the—
“No,” I breathed, thinking aloud. “We don’t have records of the rooms, but there are records of the payments.”
“No, Pat, they’re all gone. They—”
“But yet they exist.”
She looked at me curiously. “What are you thinking?”
“At six hundred dollars per room most people wouldn’t have paid for their stay in cash.”
Then it hit her. “Credit cards.”
“Yes.”
“Aha.” A slight smile. “Since 9/11 the government has required all credit card companies to keep records of all transactions for ten years to help track terrorism suspects.”
“Exactly. We won’t be able to tell who stayed in which room, but we can find out the names of people who charged a room at the Lincoln Towers Hotel on March 15 or 16th six years ago.”
“And we can see if a person from the suspect list used a card to pay for a room,” she finished my train of thought.
“Yes. Or someone named Patricia E.”
She tugged out her phone. “Pat, I have to say, the way you string things together sometimes . . . I don’t know, you remind me of Sherlock Holmes.”
“Don’t tell that to Tessa. She might just agree with you.”
“There you go.”
“Trust me. From her it would not be a compliment.”
“We’ll need warrants.”
“Then we’ll need Margaret,” I replied.
100
1 hour left . . .
8:29 p.m.
Margaret came through for us.
It’d taken her less than five minutes to call a judge and get the warrants needed to contact the four largest credit card companies and begin the process of pulling up the credit card charges on the dates we were looking at.
I turned onto the road that led to the Academy. The security checkpoint lay a quarter mile ahead.
Lien-hua phoned Angela to get her team started on the project and found out she was in the middle of reanalyzing Mollie Fischer’s laptop—apparently, another technician had failed to follow up on the emails sent and received, and Angela was left picking up the pieces.
When Lien-hua hung up, she said to me, “She sounded a little overwhelmed.”
“Imagine that.”
I drove up to the gate, only one car in front of me.
Sergeant Eric Hastings, the young Marine who’d been working Tuesday evening when I’d arrived with Tessa for the panel discussion, and had also noted the discr
epancy with Annette Larotte’s plates, was finishing checking the driver’s license of a man in the Toyota minivan just in front of us.
As he waved them through, I eased forward.
“Evening, sir,” he said as he approached my window.
“How are you, Sergeant.” It was more of a greeting than a question.
“I’m good, sir.”
He finished verifying our creds, and as Lien-hua and I were putting them away, I realized Hastings looked slightly disappointed as he inspected the inside of the car. I wondered if it was because my cute stepdaughter wasn’t with me. The father in me didn’t like that possibility, but for the moment I held back from commenting. Now wasn’t the time.
Not now, but later. Eric’s gotta be at least three years older than she is . . .
He opened the gate, told us good-bye, and I drove through.
“I’m concerned,” Lien-hua said. “About Angela.”
I was still caught up in my thoughts about Hastings. “I’m sure she’s okay.”
“Her office is just down the hall from the evidence rooms.”
It was an obvious hint, and I took it. “All right. We’ll swing by and check on her on the way.”
I parked near the FBI Lab’s east wing, and we headed inside.
Brad parked the car.
In one sense, Bowers was right about motives—the offender in this case had more than one. The game wasn’t just about revenge, it was about revealing the bigger picture.
About stopping people from playing God, stopping them from tampering with the fabric of human nature he had designed.
He stepped out of the car.
Brad figured it would be about a fifteen minute walk through the woods to the house, which meant he’d get there just as dusk was deepening into night.
Good. Because he needed it to be dark for the climax.
He sent the text message that would put everything into play, and, carrying the third and final license plate, he entered the forest.
Angela has a big heart but usually wears a slightly concerned expression. Late thirties. Slightly overweight. Thick glasses. Big loopy earrings. Kind but anxious eyes.
Three computer screens sat on the desk in front of her. The one on the left was scrolling through hundreds of names, presumably from the credit card search. The right screen was filled with tiny icons of live video feeds from the mass transit system, scanning faces.
The center screen showed a spam email ad.
I wondered about the letter permutations, but for the moment, I didn’t ask.
Angela glanced at us only momentarily. She looked more worried than normal.
“Are you all right?” Lien-hua asked.
“Take a look at this.” She directed our attention to the middle screen, then slid the ad to the left to more clearly reveal a timer I hadn’t noticed when we first walked in.
A countdown.
Endgame: 49 minutes 15 seconds
Endgame: 49 minutes 14 seconds
Endgame: 49 minutes 13 seconds
Immediately, I thought of the traces of military grade C-4 found in the back of the van the killers had used.
“A bomb?” I said.
“I don’t know,” Angela replied. “The timer was embedded in the email I pulled up.”
“When did the countdown start?” Lien-hua asked.
“The message arrived earlier this afternoon, at 3:29.”
Endgame: 48 minutes 53 seconds
Lien-hua looked at the computer’s clock, did a quick calculation. “So 9:29. But what happens then?”
“It might be nothing,” Angela said.
“No,” Lien-hua replied. “It’s something.”
An explosion?
Another murder?
What’s the endgame?
Taking into consideration the C-4 and the explosion that occurred at the gas station last night—
Endgame: 48 minutes 22 seconds
“Could this laptop itself be an explosive device?” I said.
Angela shook her head. “I inspected it inside and out this morning. It’s just a laptop, nothing more.”
“Is it possible it’s a detonator though?” Lien-hua asked. “Or could it be used to initiate a detonation sequence?”
A slight hesitation. “It did send an auto reply to the ad.”
I was a bit surprised she hadn’t already looked into it. “Pull it up.”
The reply appeared, mostly techno-jargon, but the subject line included a “return to sender” notice. That was all.
“Return to sender,” Lien-hua said reflectively. “If there is a bomb, it could be a message: ‘return to sender,’ i.e. ‘return to God.’”
That seemed to be on track with the way these killers thought.
“Can you back trace this?” I asked Angela. “Find out where the ad was sent from, or who received the reply?”
Endgame: 47 minutes 4 seconds
She typed, then said, “The ad was sent to this computer from a Motorola Droid.” She pointed to the longitude and latitude coordinates on the screen.
Lien-hua drew out her phone and called the command post to have them send a car to the downtown DC location.
I leaned over Angela’s desk. “Can you tell where the reply went? Who received it?”
Angela explained something about a mail server host and a Cybrous 17 cellular modem relay sending out bits of code that could have been accessed from anywhere. “We might be able to trace it, but it’ll take time. An hour, maybe more.” She tapped at her keyboard. “I’ll get a team on it.”
An hour.
That’s too long . . .
“You’re sure there’s nothing explosive in this laptop?” I asked her.
“Yes.” But she sounded more uncertain this time. “I guess you can have the bomb squad check it out though, just in case.”
Lien-hua nodded, ended one call, made the other. My attention went back to the computer monitors. “Do we have anything on Basque or Adkins?”
“No. But I did finish those permutations for you.” Angela tapped at her keyboard, and the middle screen switched to a seemingly endless display of letter combinations.
“I think you should stick with interpreting it, ‘I promised you are,’” she said. “Lacey analyzed the other letter combinations that contain actual words, but she thinks that the letters in their original order make the most . . .” She paused for a long time and stared at the screen, at a small portion of the list that contained nearly 120,000,000 sets of letters.
“What is it?”
“Patricia E.,” she muttered. “How could I have been so stupid.”
“You know who Patricia E. is? Who is she?”
Angela pulled up Lacey’s permutations calculator and typed in the name PATRICIAE.
Instantly, thousands of nine-letter combinations began scrolling down the screen.
Angela tapped the keyboard, paused the list. Scrolled up a few dozen lines. Then pointed.
ARIAPETIC.
“An anagram,” I whispered. “Angela, you’re a genius.” I tried to process the implications. Calvin had uncovered the clue about Patricia E. three weeks ago, which meant that somehow he knew about these crimes.
Or the killers knew about his note.
But how . . . ?
“The bomb squad’s on the way,” Lien-hua said, pocketing her phone.
“Angela found Aria Petic,” I told her.
“Where?”
“Not where, who,” Angela said. “It’s Patricia E.” She explained the connection but was eyeing Mollie’s laptop computer uneasily the whole time. “Listen, if this is a bomb I don’t want it anywhere near Lacey.”
She had a good point. If the laptop was an explosive device, it didn’t make sense to leave it in the building. “I’ll take it to the parking lot,” I said.
“No, Pat. Just leave it,” Lien-hua objected. “The bomb squad will be here any minute.”
“Angela already checked the laptop this morning,” I said. “T
here’s no indication that it’s a bomb; all we have is this timer. Besides, it’s been shuffled around all day and there’s still over forty minutes before the countdown ends. I’ll be fine.”
I donned latex gloves to avoid leaving yet another set of prints on the laptop. “Call Cassidy and Farraday,” I told Lien-hua, “and find out where they are. It might be good to . . . touch base.”
She was quiet, then pulled out her phone. “Be careful.”
“I will.”
“Please don’t blow yourself up.”
“I won’t.”
Day folded in on itself across the bottom of the sky. A sliver of sunlight fingered out from beneath the clouds and then it was gone.
And then it was night.
Brad was surprised that Detective Warren was here; he’d expected Tessa to be alone, but really, it was perfect. He couldn’t have planned a more fitting ending to the game.
He knelt beside the rear bumper of Cheyenne’s car, unscrewed the plates.
He could see the two of them through a slit in the living room curtains and was tempted to smile, to gloat, but held back, stayed attentive. What he had in mind was so elegant, so devastating, no one would see it coming.
The rematch he’d challenged Bowers to.
Eight months in the making.
And now Detective Cheyenne Warren would play one of the most important roles.
He finished with the plates, returned to the woods. Pulled out his Walther P99.
And sent the final text message to the next victim.
101
34 minutes left . . .
8:55 p.m.
While I waited for the bomb squad, I phoned the command post and told them to check for a bomb in the handicapped-accessible van, the Honda Accord that had been left in front of police headquarters, all related crime scenes, the congressman’s home, and to notify every agency working even peripherally on the task force to put them on alert.
Despite all of these steps, however, considering the way these killers worked, if they truly had left a bomb somewhere, I didn’t expect it to be someplace obvious.