Call to Treason

THIRTY-EIGHT

The McCaskeys did not work very much when they got home.

They sat on the bed, pulled the laptop between them, and reviewed the list of possible suspects: Kendra Peterson, Kat Lockley, Dr. Hennepin. Mike Rodgers had mentioned a reporter, Lucy O’Connor, who covered Congress and arrived very soon after both murders. The McCaskeys had looked up her background. The résumé of everyone who had security clearance to the Capitol was filed online in the eyes-only section of the congressional web site. She wrote for the American Spectator and had a moderately successful syndicated radio talk show. She was a Pittsburgh native who had majored in communication at Carnegie-Mellon University.

“She also took their Interstellar Communication course and grabbed several credits from the Robotics Institute at the university’s School of Computer Science,” McCaskey remarked.

“What does that tell you?” Maria asked.

“She likes to think outside the coconut,” he replied.

The couple went back to the police station. Howell’s people had been doing some of the legwork they needed now. The Metro Police had obtained the addresses, license numbers, and make of car driven by each individual on their list of potential suspects. They also charted the location of security cameras closest to these people: parking garages, apartment lobbies, convenience stores, gas stations, banks, and traffic intersections. The latter were monitored for speeders and potential terrorists moving through the capital. Once the McCaskeys had these sites, they intended to go back out and visit them, borrow the tapes, and have a look for one of those women returning home after the crime.

They fell asleep instead. The days of youthful “forced march” crime-fighting were a thing of the past. The McCaskeys needed rest.

Maria got up at five-thirty the next morning. She showered, made coffee, then woke her husband. McCaskey was not happy to have passed out like that. He joined her in the kitchen at six-thirty. They had coffee and whole wheat toast. By seven o’clock, they were on the road.

McCaskey had not done patrol work since he was a debutant. That was Bureau slang for a first-year agent. He forgot how tiring it could be. Or maybe how much older he was. That aside, it was rewarding work made more so by Maria’s enthusiasm. She loved police work and had an eye for detail unlike anyone he had ever met. She had decided that the killer would have driven from the murder sites. A woman alone, on foot, after dark, was likely to stand out. She might have been noticed from a bar or restaurant or by a passing motorist. That could have helped police determine her direction. If she had taken the Metro, she definitely would have appeared on a security camera. A taxi or limousine service was out of the question. Drivers paid attention to the people who got into their cars. Part of that was fear and part of it was bragging rights in case they happened to pick up a celebrity.

Assuming the killer was driving, she would have done so slowly. She would not have wanted to risk being stopped by the police. They might ask where she had been. If the killer had shared a drink with Wilson, the police might have smelled it and insisted on a sobriety test.

There were a great many assumptions in their scenario. But experience, deductive reasoning, and good instincts could be as important to an investigation as facts, especially in a case such as this where there was very little hard data. McCaskey was thinking about that as they drove from site to site. His Op-Center ID got him access to the videotapes or digital records. None of them proved to be helpful. There was no sign of the cars they were looking for.

Maria was at the wheel. As McCaskey watched familiar storefronts and offices slip by, he had a troubling thought. A century ago, the booksellers, diners, attorneys, government offices, and banks would have been especially vulnerable to fire. Today, it was a new kind of fire that could destroy them. The kind that had crippled Op-Center. He wondered if there would ever be a time when people did not have to fear life as much as they feared death.

Not the way we do things now, he told himself.

Funds to fight these dangers were allocated by political need instead of by threat assessment. People like himself, Maria, and Detective Howell could not do the job America was counting on them to do.

“Do you think the killer might have rented a car?” Maria asked.

McCaskey looked at his wife. “I’m sorry?”

“The killer,” Maria repeated slowly. “Do you think she might have rented a car?”

“I would be very surprised if she did,” he said. “Assassins don’t like to leave a paper trail.”

“This assassin did not expect to be exposed,” Maria pointed out.

“That is true.”

“And she certainly would have gone in with a fake ID,” Maria went on. “An experienced killer would have several, I’m sure.”

“I suppose we can try that search if this doesn’t get us anywhere,” McCaskey said. “But there have got to be hundreds of rental facilities in the D.C. metro area. It will take days to visit them all, and what do we tell them when we do?”

“We show them pictures of all the women and see if they look familiar. Or better yet, we can see if any of them show up on security cameras. None of those women would have had a reason to rent a car.”

“Yes, we could do that,” McCaskey said.

That was another difference between today and his days as a rookie G-man. Twenty-odd years ago, at least a dozen agents would have been assigned to a case like this. Now there were two.

“Darrell, were you all right a minute ago?” Maria asked.

“Sorry?”

“You went away from me.”

“Yes,” her husband said. “I was thinking, that’s all.”

“What about?” Maria asked.

“The pork barrel,” he said with a little laugh.

“Is that a restaurant?”

“In a manner of speaking,” McCaskey replied. He loved his beautiful, sweet, Spanish wife. She was so worldly, so tough, and so very linear. “A person of influence takes a lunch tray to his senator and gets plates full of federal funds. It’s another name for patronage.”

“I see,” Maria said. “It is the same as what bookmakers in Madrid call el roulette del amigo.”

“That’s exactly what it is. The roulette wheel of a friend,” McCaskey said. “The fix is in, the outcome predetermined.”

“Why were you thinking about that?”

“Because Op-Center was a victim of pork barrel politics. Maybe Paul is right, doing what he’s doing. If we had played the system better, we would have more people looking for a killer. And that should be our bottom line, should it not? Protecting law-abiding citizens.”

“That is my religion,” she said simply.

“Well put.” McCaskey looked out the window again. He noticed they were nearing Lafayette Park. “We’re near the Hay-Adams. Why don’t we go back there? Walk around, see if there is anything we may have overlooked.”

“All right,” she said.

That was the beauty of having married a cop. He might have to explain colloquial English to her, but he did not have to explain the intangibles of their lives and work. She got that.

They drove to the hotel, its tawny facade gleaming warmly in the morning light. They parked and decided to walk along Farragut North. The White House shone through the trees of Lafayette Park. McCaskey could see the press corps gathered in tents on the east side. The president was probably heading to the airport. It was too early in the week for Camp David. He remembered when the press looked for stories instead of handouts. There was a time when someone would have sniffed out the new relationship between the White House and Op-Center, exposed it, and not been afraid to write about it. Access to news-makers. A different kind of pork barrel.

McCaskey took his wife’s hand. She gave it an encouraging squeeze. She seemed to sense the frustration he was feeling with this case and with the situation at Op-Center.

“We’ll get her,” Maria said.

“Thanks. I believe that,” McCaskey replied.

Maria stopped suddenly. She looked ahead. “No, I mean we will get her.”

“I don’t follow.”

“I was just thinking about the assassin, what I would do if I had just killed someone at the hotel,” Maria said. “I would be undistracted by conscience or the late hour. My only concern would be getting away quick and clean. That means I would be parked as close to the hotel as possible, on a relatively dark street.”

“Of course.”

“I would also have parked where there are the fewest eyeballs,” Maria said. “Where would that be?”

“The side of the hotel by Lafayette Park,” her husband said, “near where we parked.”

“Yes. Darrell, do you think any of the White House reporters might have been there? Maybe one of them doing a live report for CNN?”

“Very possibly,” he agreed. “But they would have been facing the White House, not the park.”

“Perhaps they turned on their cameras early.”

McCaskey looked in that direction. He did not think there was a chance of that, though he could not rule it out. Then something occurred to him. Something that made the pact with the devil suddenly seem more inviting.

“We may not need them,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because if the killer came this way, someone else may have gotten a good look at her,” McCaskey said.

Without saying anything else, he borrowed Maria’s cell phone and walked briskly toward the park.