I raised my hand, gaining the chief's attention. At her nod, I asked, “Wouldn't it be wise to turn this case over to the Centers for Disease Control, since the victims died from infectious diseases?”
Chief Peyton nodded. “I've sent the case files, including each victim's full medical reports, to my contact at the CDC. But at this point, I'm not ready to drop our investigation. The CDC will tackle it from its angle, and we'll continue from ours.”
Having two federal agencies investigating the same case seemed like a waste of resources to me, but who was I to judge? I was, after all, nothing but a lowly summer intern. I supposed the chief wasn't too eager to hand off the unit's first case, because that might prove the unit wasn't really necessary.
And where would that leave us?
Out of a job, that was where.
“Sounds good to me.” I glanced down at my notes, trying to figure out what we might do next. I had no idea. Since learning I'd be working for the FBI this summer, I'd watched every cop/FBI/PI show on TV. Those television cops/agents/ private investigators made it look so freaking easy.
“We're going to work this case like it's a serial murder. Which means we need to find the connection between the three victims,” Chief Peyton said. “We'll start with victimol-ogy. Why did these three women die? I'm going to split up the team.” She pointed at me and JT. “Skye, JT, I want you to take the Arlington victim.”
I glanced at JT. His gaze met mine, and something sparkled in his eyes. I felt my cheeks warm. I hoped they weren't Day-Glo red. “Yes, Chief.”
“Fischer, I know you have your hands full, reviewing other cases for the unit. But we need your help with this. I'd like you to take the Baltimore victim. I'll take the second, Hannah Grant. Hough'll stay here and lend support.” Chief Peyton stood. “I want to know everything about those three women. Where they work and live, what they eat for breakfast. Who their friends and enemies are. Everything.” After a beat, she smiled. “Good luck.”
Orders assigned. Of course, I was paired off with the one man I shouldn't be left alone with.
“So ...” I fell into step beside JT as we strolled out of the room. When he stepped around a trash can, my shoulder bumped his arm. Another rush of heat blasted to my face. It was pathetic. I was pathetic. I hoped he didn't notice. “Where do we start? We have a corpse with no identification on it. How will we figure out who she is, let alone what she eats for breakfast?”
“By now, she must have been reported missing. We'll begin by looking into new missing persons reports.” Instead of going to his desk, JT turned toward a doorway I hadn't noticed before.
Inside. Nirvana! The IT nerd jackpot. The unit's analyst Brittany had a wall full of monitors, all displaying something different. Being something of a computer geek myself, I was in awe.
“Hey, Hough,” JT said. “Can you give me a list of all new missing persons reports in Maryland, Virginia, and DC?”
“Sure. On it.” Fingers flew across the keyboard to the sound of snapping gum. Several screens flickered and pictures blinked across the screen. Done with her rapid-fire commands, she spun around and smiled at JT, pushing a pair of hot pink framed glasses up a pert nose. “Couldn't you give me something a little more challenging?”
Not as young as I'd first thought she was, Brittany looked to be more my age than a teenager. It was her funky Forever 21 style that had thrown me off. I could take a few hints from her.
“How about female, ages twenty-five to forty?” JT asked.
“Done.” A couple of taps and the printer behind us whirred as it powered up to print out the report. “You're in luck. There's only five.”
JT glanced over his shoulder at the printer. “Great. Now we just need photographs.”
“Let me see what I can do.” Brittany's fingers danced over the keyboard. A Facebook page popped up. “Here's one of them, a Maryanne Levinstein.”
Standing behind Brittany, I squinted at the screen. The crime scene photograph in the file wasn't the best, so I had no idea if Maryanne Levinstein was our victim or not. I shook my head. “What do you think, JT?”
“Hmm. Not sure yet. Can you check the profile for more pictures, Hough?”
Brittany clicked the tab, but the photo section was blocked. “You have to be a friend to view them. Let me see what I can do... .” A second later, the folder opened, revealing over twenty images of the woman, smiling in every one of them. In some, she was posing with other women; in a few, with a man; and in a lot, she was with a couple of kids. It really hit home then that this woman, who might be dead now, had once been a mother, a wife, a sister, someone important to somebody. And those somebodies would hurt like I had when my father died.
If
she was our victim.
This morning, I'd been skeptical and hadn't taken the case as seriously as I should have. But these pictures made it more real to me.
Unfortunately, even though I was taking the case much more seriously now, I felt useless. I wasn't a hotshot FBI agent. My ridiculous IQ, my knowledge of foreign languages, psychology, mathematics, and science wasn't doing me a damn thing. My head was full of useless facts like the incubation period of the GBV-C virus and how to speak in Ket. While Brittany and JT were actually working, I was standing there like a dork, being useless.
“I don't think Maryanne Levinstein's our victim. But I'll give the name to the lead detective and let him check it out.” JT swiped the printout off the printer's tray and starred the name. Frowning, he read through the list. “We have Hannah Grant's address. Hough, can you run these addresses, see if any of them are in the same area as Grant's?”
Brittany nodded. “Sure. Give me a minute.” A few more taps, and she had all five addresses plotted on the map, along with Grant's, whose address was indicated by a little red virtual pushpin.
JT pointed. “We should start with that one.” He pointed at the little yellow pointer closest to the red one. “Deborah Richardson.” He handed the list to me. “Let's start by faxing this to the BPD.”
“I'll do it.” Heading for the door, I asked, “Are we going to wait until someone verifies the victim's identity before we get in touch with the family?”
“We have to wait.” JT nodded.”Unless we find something more concrete. But it won't take long for the detective to check it out. In the meantime, we can do some work on this end.”
“You'd be surprised how much dirt I can dig up on a person,” Brittany boasted, her smile stretching from ear to ear, her eyes flicking over to me. It made me wonder if she wasn't talking about me, instead of our victims.
Feeling slightly violatedâand I wasn't even sure if I shouldâI headed out of Brittany's computer cave to fax the list of potential victims to the Baltimore detective. That menial task done, I headed back toward Brittany's office. At the sound of her giggle, though, I stopped and peered in.
JT was standing very close to Brittany, looking over her shoulder. Brittany was looking up, into his eyes; the smile that had been devious was now dazzling.
It felt like somebody had kicked me in the gut.
“Shit,” I muttered under my breath as I backed slowly from the door. There was no way I was walking in on that ... whatever it was.
Instead, I went back to my desk. My Netbook had been cleared to use on the network, so I flipped it open and Google Mapped Deborah Richardson's address, using Street View to get a good look at the house. While I knew Google Maps wasn't always 100 percent correct in identifying the exact address, it was still worth checking. It wasn't usually off by much. The building looked very ordinary: a typical middle-class vinyl-sided Colonial on a typical street. The backyard was adjacent to a large park. Nothing suspicious there. Next I mapped Hannah Grant's residence, alsoâassuming Google was correctâa suburban home. The brick-and-vinyl Colonial was also located very close to a parkâthis one with a playground, outdoor skating rink, and nature trails.
Could I have found something?
When JT finally emerged from Brittany's office, I waved him over.
“I was wondering what happened to you,” he said, leaning a hip against my cubicle wall. He dropped his notebook on my desk.
Hoping I was hiding my uneasiness, I motioned toward my computer screen. “I was making myself useful while you were busy... . Er ... I found something.”
“Yeah? So did we. You first.” He set a flattened hand on my desktop and leaned over my shoulder, just like he had with Brittany. I decided it was annoying.
I shifted slightly to the left, away from him, even though there were a few bits of my anatomy that liked being in close proximity to some of his. Those parts weren't the most intelligent. “If Deborah Richardson is one of our victims, and Google mapped their homes correctly, two out of three victims live in homes with lots that are adjacent to a park,” I told him, pointing at the map displayed on my computer's eight-inch screen.
“Really?” His brows rose as a look of surprise spread over the face I was trying hard not to admire. Evidently, he hadn't uncovered the same fact I had. “We found out Deborah Richardson works less than half a block from where our Jane Doe collapsed. She's a secretary for a church. I'm confident enough that she's our victim. I'm not waiting for confirmation. Let's head out.”
There can be no good without evil.
âRussian Proverb
5
Have you ever been really bothered by something, and then been disturbed by the fact that it bothered you in the first place? This wasn't a first for me, but it was the most frustrating time. And annoying. And irritating.
When I closed my eyes, I saw in my head Brittany's big, girly grin. It made me grit my teeth. The fact that it bothered me so much made me even madder. Thus, I probably wasn't the best company during the drive to Deborah Richardson's hometown. I had no idea if JT noticed or not. He didn't say anything.
By the time JT's car rolled up the Richardsons' driveway, I didn't need to know the lead detective had called JT to confirm her identity. The cars parked out in front of the house told the whole story.
JT parked. We hurried up to the house.
Inside, we found a tired man in his midthirties with a pale face, made paler by bloodshot eyes. He was talking to a detective, arms crossed over his chest.
“Agent Jordan Thomas and Sloan Skye,” JT said to the detective.
The detective nodded. “Agent?”
“FBI,” JT explained.
“Agent Thomas, this is Trey Chapman,” the detective said. “And I'm Detective McRoy.”
JT offered a hand to McRoy first, then Chapman. “Sir, we're very sorry for your loss.”
The man blinked. His lips quirked. Not in a smile, but in a grimace. He sniffled. “Thank you. This is all such a shock.”
“I'm sure it is.” I offered him my hand next, and he accepted it, giving it a firm shake.
JT pulled his notebook from his pocket. “We're going to do our best to find out what happened to your ... ?”
“Fiancée,” Chapman finished. “We've been engaged for over two years.” He sighed, shoved his hands through his hair, and mumbled something under his breath.
I didn't catch what he'd said. Sure wish I had.
McRoy checked his phone. “I've gotta take this call. I'll be in touch, Mr. Chapman, as soon as I have any more information.”
“Thank you, Detective.” Chapman turned to JT. “I don't understand. Why all the fuss? FBI? Debbie got sick and she ... and she died. There's no crime to solve.... Is there?”
“We're not saying there is, sir. We're just checking out some information that may or may not be related to your fiancée's death.”
“What information?” Chapman crossed his arms over his chest.
“I'm sorry, but I can't tell you that.” JT flipped to a fresh page in his notebook. “Would you mind answering a few questions for us?”
“I ... don't know. Do I need a lawyer?” He looked at me, as if I would tell him whether he was under any kind of suspicion or not. What was I supposed to say?
“You don't have to answer any question you're not comfortable with,” I told him. That, I figured, was a safe answer.
Chapman gave me another look, then nodded. “Okay.”
I glanced around the living room. “Do you mind if I take a look around the house while you're talking to Agent Thomas? See if I can find anything that might tell us how your fiancée became ill?”
He scowled. “IâI guess that would be okay.”
I gave him a reassuring smile. “Thank you.”
Now what? I had permission to search the house, and I had no freaking idea what I was looking for. Because my time was limitedâI couldn't wander around all dayâI headed upstairs to the victim's bedroom first, thinking I'd start in one of the most private parts of her home.
Her bedroom was tidy, the bed made. There were no medicine bottles on the nightstand.
This room looked nothing like mine when I was sick.
I wandered into the bathroom, still not sure what I was looking for. It was spotless too, nothing out of place. I felt kind of creepy taking a peek in her medicine cabinet, but I needed to see if she had any medications that might indicate she was treating symptoms of dengue hemorrhagic fever. I knew the symptoms could appear anywhere from three to fourteen days after infection, but they were severe. Chills, fever, rash, vomitingâeventually leading to a shocklike state. I don't know how anyone could ignore those kinds of symptoms.
I found a bottle of expired over-the-counter pain reliever and a brand-new, unopened box of cold tablets. No antibiotics. Not even a bottle of Pepto.
Was it possible she'd felt no symptoms until immediately before she'd died?
I wandered out into the hallway, checked the second bedroom, which looked nothing like the rest of the house, from what I'd seen. With the dark walls, clutter, and clothes strewn about, I surmised it was the habitat of a teenager. I confirmed it with a quick look at the desk. Buried under a mountain of books and papers, CDs and DVDs, was a photograph of a blond girl with braces; her arms were flung over the shoulders of two girlfriends.
Not wholly convinced a person couldn't catch a disease in that room, I headed down the hall to the third bedroom, which had been converted into a cozy home office. The desk's top was clear of clutter, the laptop shut off, the cover shut. Behind the desk, the window's shades were up. The house sat so close to its neighbor, I could make out the details of the Justin Bieber poster hanging on the hot pink wall in what must've been a kid's bedroom next door. I moved closer to the window to get a better look.
Was this bedroom, with its bed piled high with stuffed animals and its desk cluttered with the trappings of a childâa bug house, the Potato Head family, and a plush unicornâthe average room of a kid?
When I was younger, I'd been anything but average. And now I assume, my room had been as unusual as myself. My walls hadn't been papered with pages ripped out of teen magazines, like this one. The yellow wallsâpainted that shade because my mother had read yellow stimulated brain cellsâhad been completely obscured by prints by Renoir, Gauguin, and Monet, long before I'd graduated from elementary school. My desk had been buried under a mountain of inventionsâgadgets and gizmos I'd erected from disassembled small appliances.
There'd been a very noticeable lack of stuffed critters on my bed.
Allergies. Polyester-filled plushies were dust mite magnets.
Something thumped downstairs, and I tugged the string, lowering the blinds, turning back to the task at hand. Hoping our victim might keep a journal on her computer, I opened it and powered it up. Luck was on my sideâshe hadn't set up a password.
I was in.
The wallpaper was a photograph of Deborah Richardson and the blond-haired teenager from the photograph in the messy room. First thing I checked was her Web browser. My fave Web sitesâthe ones I visited every dayâlaunched automatically when my browser opened. If my luck continued, Deborah Richardson's would do the same thing.
Bingo.
Deborah was an eBay shopper. Her Yahoo! mail page loaded. I skimmed the messages in her in-box. Spam. She'd left nothing unread before she died. That told me she'd signed on and opened her e-mail that morning before leaving for work. I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, so I shut down the computer. There didn't seem to be anything useful on it.
Out in the hallway, I met JT.
“Find anything?” he asked, chewing on the end of his pen.
“Nothing. It's like she woke up that morning and everything was normal. She checked her e-mail, made her bed, got dressed, and headed for work, just like any other day. I don't see any sign that she was sick, not even some aspirin. I don't know what we're looking for.”
He smacked his notebook with his pen. “The fiancé didn't give me much to work with either.”
“There is a teenager living here too, though. Maybe we could talk to her, ask if she noticed her mother being sick.”
“Yes, Chapman told me. She's a counselor at a summer camp. She had to go up a couple of weeks before camp starts for training.” He motioned toward the stairs with a tip of his head. “Ready to head out?”
“Yeah, I guess so.” I clomped down the stairs after him, trying not to notice how broad his shoulders looked from that angle. “You said she died from complications of dengue hemorrhagic fever. What exactly killed her?”
“The ME hadn't completed a full autopsy yet, of course, but liver damage was the early diagnosis.” Pausing midway down the staircase, he turned to look up at me. “I think I saw a neighbor at home. Maybe she noticed something. Let's go talk to her.”
“Okay.” I followed him down the remaining stairs, sort of glancing this way and that. I was hoping if there was something out of the ordinary in the house, it would catch my eye. In the foyer, we said good-bye to Trey Chapman, after having verified that the daughter, Julia, had been away since the beginning of last week and wouldn't be returning until late tomorrow. Then I officially gave up; my first search for clues had been an utter failure.
So far, I was about as useful to the FBI as a freezer to an Eskimo.
Outside, JT pointed at the house on the east side of the Richardsons' home, the one I'd been peeping into earlier. “The neighbor was working on the flower beds. I saw her from the window.”
We followed a stone path around the side of the neighbor's house. JT stopped at the wooden gate closing off the backyard. He called out, “Excuse me, ma'am?”
After a little bit of rustling, a woman shuffled around the corner. She tipped her head and pushed back the brim of her straw gardening hat to wipe her forehead with a gloved hand. “Yes?”
JT flashed his credentials. “Agent Thomas, with the FBI. We'd like to ask you a couple of questions, if you don't mind.”
“Sure.” The woman wandered toward us. She looked puzzled as she stopped at the gate and draped a hand over its top. “How can I help you? This won't take long, will it? I have to go to work in a while.”
“Not more than five minutes, tops. Did you happen to notice anything unusual about your neighbor in the past couple of days?” He pointed at Deborah Richardson's house.
She thought for a moment, shook her head, then glanced at the victim's home, as if it might tell her something. “No. Not that I can think of. Her daughter, Julia, has been gone. She's a summer camp counselor. With her away, the house has been quieter than normal. Though Debbie keeps to herself, anyway. Why?”
He toyed with his spiral notebook as he asked, “Did you know she died yesterday?”
The woman's eyes widened. Her gloved hand smacked over her mouth. “Died?” After a beat, she added, “That poor child, losing her mother. Was she ... murdered?”
“There's nothing to suggest it was murder, ma'am,” JT said.
“Then why is the FBI investigating?” She glanced at me.
“We're just following up on some information that may or may not be related to her death,” I said, repeating what JT had told Chapman earlier.
“This is very surprising.” The woman chewed her lower lip. “Did you talk to the boyfriend? If you're looking for someone suspicious, I'd check him out first.”
“What makes you say that?” I asked, slanting a glance at JT.
Chances were, our victim hadn't been murdered, but had simply ignored her symptomsâhow and why?âand had died when she started bleeding internally. But Chief Peyton had decided we were treating this case like a murder investigation. So, that was what I was going to do. If nothing else, it could prove to be good practice for when I got my job with the BAU.
A suspicious boyfriend could be a good lead in a murder investigation.
“Well”âthe woman tapped her chin with an index fingerâ“on those police shows, isn't it always the husband or boyfriend who kills the victim?”
I nodded. “Generally, yesâ”
“I think they were having troubles,” the neighbor said. “It was strange. He seemed to be living with her. But only for a month or so. I believe he moved out only last week.”
“Moved out?” I repeated, giving JT a pointed look.
JT's lips thinned. His neck turned red. He swung around and glared at Debbie Richardson's house.
Trey Chapman's car was gone.
The neighbor continued talking. “Yes, I heard some fighting. And then I saw him packing up his car. As far as I can tell, he hasn't been back since.”
“He was in the house today,” I told her.
She grimaced. “Really? That surprises me. I don't think the breakup was a friendly one.”
Now I was confused. Trey hadn't mentioned that he was an
ex
-fiancé. I kicked myself for not looking in the bedroom closet. That would've told us if he was living there or not. I could say 100 percent for certain that I hadn't noticed any man gear in the master bathroom. No shavers, shaving cream, aftershave, hair products. No toilet seat left up. That should've raised some red flags.