Mindhunters 4 - Deadly Intent (7 page)

He wrestled it out of its tracks and eased it out of the cabinet so he could see what was secreted there. A clear ziplock bag was duct taped to the back metal plate. “I’ve got something here.” He was aware of the immediate interest his words elicited from his companions even as he gently worked the bag free of its attachment.

Macy and Travis crowded closer as he opened the bag and extracted the large folded paper inside it. He handed the bag to Macy and unfolded the pages. The three of them stared at what appeared to be a blueprint of the security schematics of the Mulder estate.

“Jackpot,” muttered Kell. There was no legal way for Hubbard to have acquired copies of the specs of Mulder’s security. Either he’d somehow gotten them from the security company that had sold the billionaire the system or he’d stolen them from Mulder. Either way, their presence was incriminating.

“Let’s start bagging and tagging evidence,” suggested Travis. “We’re about done here, aren’t we?”

“Why don’t you check out the garage first?” Kell rose, folding the sheets and handing them to Macy to be replaced in the bag. “That’s listed on the warrant, right? This place should have a basement. I’ll look through that. Macy, get pictures of every room, and especially on every piece of evidence we’re going to be collecting. Oh, go through the garbage first. We need to . . . what?” Belatedly, he noted the looks he was getting from the other two.

“Nothing,” she said with that snippy little tone that dripped with the King’s English. “Perhaps we could run out and get you coffee, too.”

The suggestion had him trying, and failing, to recall when he’d last eaten. “Not a bad idea, but we really don’t have time. We can grab a sandwich on our way back, though.”

“You’re not running this op, Burke.” Travis’s dry tone succeeded in distracting him from his stomach. “I think that’s what your partner’s trying to point out, with more subtlety than I’d use.”

“Well, Jesus.” Mystified, he put his hands up in surrender. “You want to check for a basement while I go outside, I’m fine with that. And you”—he shot Macy a look—“go ahead and do whatever the hell it is that you want to.”

“If I did,” she informed him as she swept by, “you’d be bleeding.”

He made a what’d-I-do gesture to the agent, who just gave him a smug smile as he followed her into the hallway.

“I’ll take the garage.”

“Good idea,” he muttered, wondering what the hell that had been about. Okay, so he’d been accused of being less than diplomatic before, but someone had to take the lead. Sitting down and negotiating who does what just wasted time, and he hadn’t been kidding about being hungry. He hadn’t eaten since grabbing something from an all-night drive-through on the way to Manassas this morning.

Mood slightly soured, he went to the drawers of the dresser to check them more thoroughly before heading downstairs. Pretty unlikely there’d be any more secret info taped behind or under drawers, but it bore checking out. He’d learned the value of thoroughness through his long years with Raiker.

Diplomacy was a lesson he’d failed to learn from his boss, since Raiker was frequently devoid of the quality himself.

He pulled the dresser out a bit from the wall to peer behind it, found nothing. Certain it was a waste of time, he did the same thing to the bed so he could look behind the head-board.

“Burke.”

The voice was Macy’s, sounding closer than he’d expected. She was still somewhere upstairs. “Yeah.”

“Come look at this.”

“I will.” He moved toward the door and into the hallway. “Without complaint, and without getting all bent out of shape about being told what to do, I’ll willingly follow your order. ’Cuz that’s the kind of guy I am. That’s what teamwork is all about.”

There was no response to his gibe, which should have warned him. But Macy was frequently silent in the face of his remarks because, he figured, she was more used to dull lifeless guys who talked only about stocks and the weather. Her response was often easy to read, though, and he’d be lying if he denied taking a twisted pleasure in making the color flare in her creamy cheeks.

But the expression on her face when he found her, crouched on the bathroom floor, had all thoughts of teasing wiped from his mind.

“I saw this first,” she said without preamble and shifted slightly so he could crouch beside her. Not much bigger than a pinhead, it would be tough to identify the stain on the tile without the magnifying glass she’d taken out of her evidence kit.

“Blood?”

“I thought it could be. But I didn’t see any more spots on the floor. So I started looking inside the tub. Check out the hem of the shower curtain. That’s how I found it. Shut like that.”

Interest sharpening, he pulled the curtain partly open and looked first at the tub. It was clean. Far cleaner than it would have been at his place if he didn’t have a twice-monthly cleaning service, because—although he was handy enough with a vacuum and dust cloth—bathrooms grossed him out. Even his own.

Turning his attention to the inside of the shower curtain, he opened it wider and stepped inside the tub wearing the shoe covers he’d donned after taking off his boots inside the door. With a sweep of his arm he closed the curtain again and began inspecting it. He saw what she’d discovered at its hem, although if he hadn’t known what he was looking for, it would have taken him longer.

Again, it would require testing to be sure, but it looked like blood. Flecks of it on the bottom seam. None on the face of the curtain itself. None on the tile along the three interior walls. Maybe because someone had done some deliberate cleaning. But to get to the hem, they would have had to turn up the bottom edge, and they’d been too careless or in too much of a hurry to bother.

Her earlier mention of the neatness of the place took on new meaning. Dread pooled in his gut. Pulling the curtain open again, he looked at her and saw the trepidation he was feeling mirrored on her face. “We’d better get a call in to Raiker. Tell him to have Whitman send the crime scene evidence recovery unit over here when they’re done at Mulder’s.”

Chapter 3

Macy clicked through the digital pictures she’d taken at Hubbard’s and downloaded onto her laptop once they’d returned to the estate. It was well after midnight and exhaustion was creeping through her system. She wanted to think she was successful at hiding it but wasn’t certain how long she’d remain coherent. Because she knew which ones the men would be most interested in, she started with the photos taken in the bathroom.

“Damn small,” muttered Whitman, squinting at the screen. She flipped to the ones taken of the shower curtain when Kell had turned up the edge for her. “If it does turn out to be blood, we’ll be lucky to have enough for ABO blood typing and a DNA analysis.”

“You might get more after the crime techs get done with the shower drain and trap,” she said, her voice tight. There was still the possibility that the spots might not be blood at all. That they would end up belonging to the owner of the house. Or even a woman friend, who’d cut herself shaving and left behind evidence of the wound. But that wasn’t the scenario that was playing out in her head, and she knew it wasn’t the one any of the others in the room were worrying about either.

“We found a smear of blood on a bedsheet in the girl’s room, too,” Whitman announced tersely. Macy’s gaze met Raiker’s and he gave a small nod. So he’d known about it. Hopefully he’d been kept fully in the loop in their absence. The knot in her stomach drew tighter.

As if recognizing that, Raiker said, “Ellie keeps a pair of scissors on her nightstand. She’s been doing a lot of paper cutting and folding artwork. Her mother said she found it calming. The scissors are the only item her parents can determine that are missing from her room. She may have wounded her assailant, which would be a break for us. Techs didn’t find any other blood, but if the scissors were dropped afterward, before being collected and taken away with her, that would account for the stain on the sheet.”

“Or he might have used them to subdue her.” Agent Travis spoke the words that everyone else was thinking.

“As well as this was planned out, no way he intended to attack her in her own bed,” Kell stated. The stubble that was beginning to shadow his jaw was a shade darker than his hair. The seemingly random observation had Macy giving herself a mental shake. She was more tired than she’d thought if she was noticing anything about Kellan Burke other than his annoying habits, which were legion. “He’d have come prepared, maybe with tape or a gag, some way to bind her, but he had a specific method in mind to get her out of here quickly and silently. If he was smart—and so far we have no reason to believe otherwise—he’d have drugged her. Instant submission, no battle. He wouldn’t have needed the scissors. Likely he took them away from her.”

But not, Macy thought darkly, before blood had been drawn. From Ellie or her attacker?

“That’s how we figure it, too.” Whitman loosened his tie. The top button of his shirt had already been unfastened.

She clicked through the pictures until she came to the thermal coffee mug on the counter in Hubbard’s kitchen. “We bagged this to get a sample of Hubbard’s DNA. We also brought the toothbrush from his bathroom. Seminal stains showed up on the bed in the master bedroom in the house.” And she refused to read too much into that. Would Hubbard really have brought the girl back to a familiar location to rape her when there was an imminent threat of exposure?

The neighbors had seen nothing. But pedophiliac offenders often exhibited poor impulse control, taking chances that seemed too risky to contemplate. The danger increased their pleasure. She forced herself to calculate the timeline, pushing aside assumptions and dread to concentrate on possibilities. He would have had plenty of time to get the girl off the estate, back to his house, attack, and kill her, she realized sickly. If that had been his intention.

But it begged the still unanswered question of who the real target of this crime was—Ellie or her father.

She was wandering too far abroad from the evidence at hand, always a shaky proposition. It led to erroneous assumptions. How many times had she heard Raiker preach that?

“Mr. Mulder has complete files on all his employees. Background checks, DNA profiles, and fingerprints,” Whitman put in tersely.

Concentrating on the pictures, she flipped through to ones showing Hubbard’s living room. “You can see from the floor that the carpet had been recently vacuumed. But the bag in the vacuum cleaner was new. The garbage cans were all empty.”

“Someone took pains to clean up. Or cover something up.” Kell worked his shoulders tiredly. “We bagged his bankbooks and investment information. No record in either of a sudden infusion of cash.”

“That would be too easy,” Travis muttered.

“Any keys that might lead us to a safe-deposit box?”

“Nothing like that,” Agent Travis said. “I figure he’d have taken that with him when he took off. Looked like he packed and left in a hurry.”

“Leaving his birth certificate and account information behind.” She looked at her boss, who showed no signs of weariness. She’d often wondered if the man slept at all. “How long will it take to access his phone records and financial accounts?”

“We should have the warrants for the banks and for cell phone and landline LUDs by noon tomorrow.”

“What about triangulation?” she asked.

“Tried it but struck out. His cell phone is shut off, so there’s no way of pinpointing his location that way.”

“We found his car in the employee’s garage, locked. He only has the one vehicle registered to him, so he found another way off the estate. Has his cell, which he isn’t answering, and according to you, took about half his clothes, but not his bankbooks. He could still transfer his money, I suppose, if he has online banking, but he’d have to figure either way leaves a trail for us to follow.” Raiker toyed with the polished mahogany knob of his cane. “If he’d planned on ransom, leaving the money behind makes more sense. What’s a hundred grand if you plan to ask for ten or twenty times that?”

“But there’s still been no demand?”

Raiker shook his head at Agent Travis’s question. “No. But the techs finally discovered how the security system was circumvented.”

Macy straightened, the news erasing her exhaustion. “How?”

“By checking the computer’s download history.” There was impatience in his expression, in his tone, and she knew intuitively that he thought his own computer techs would have made the discovery hours earlier. “The suspect—presumably Hubbard—covered his tracks, but there was evidence of a software patch downloaded during his shift that caused certain cameras to loop the same scene only between midnight and two A.M. this morning.”

“Shit,” muttered Travis. The agent’s deep-set eyes were shadowed by fatigue. “So much for being foolproof like Cramer claimed.”

“It’s not exactly something your average burglar could pull off,” Raiker said dryly. “Very high-tech. And detailed exactly to match the specifications of this system. Our guy went to considerable expense to acquire the design for the patch, because there’s nothing in Hubbard’s background to indicate he had this sort of expertise.”

Dan Travis wasn’t buying it. “He and Cramer were camera experts.”

“Capable of troubleshooting problems with the cameras and computer feed. But this . . .” Raiker shook his head. “I talked to Gavin Pounds, one of my employees, and described the setup here. He’s a cyber genius. He claims there are only a handful of people in the country capable of designing something so detail-specific, so we can also figure it was expensive. Someone went to a great deal of cost to set this job up.”

“Cost is no object when you’re pulling down billions a year,” Whitman muttered. His reference to the Mulders was clear.

“Or when you hope to recoup that expense and millions more with a ransom demand.” Raiker held up a hand to stem any comments. “Assuming one comes.”

Kell folded his arms behind his head and leaned back in his chair, face tilted toward the ceiling as he mused aloud. “So a few of the cameras are circumvented. Not turned off—there would have been a record of that. But by replaying a different scene, there’d be no pixel change. One of the criteria to trip the alarm isn’t met, allowing the kidnapper to move about the area freely.”