Love me to death

TWELVE

Lucy had heard Kate come in late, and hoped she’d get a chance to talk to her about Morton’s files first thing in the morning, but while Lucy showered, Kate left. She’d sent her a text message on her cell phone:

I’ll be at Quantico all day. We’ll talk later. Love you, sis.

— Kate.

“Kate.” Lucy shook her head, her smile more bittersweet than happy. She loved her sister-in-law so much, which made the lies that much harder. She had to find a way to forgive her, and Dillon, or she wouldn’t be able to live under the same roof. More than that, she didn’t want this distrust to become a chasm between them, but she didn’t know how to get rid of it. It was easy to say “I forgive you,” but it was much harder to feel it. She prayed time would help.

She went downstairs and heard the thump of the newspaper hitting the front door as she poured a cup of coffee. Lucy rarely read the paper, but her brother Dillon was old-fashioned, maintaining a subscription to a physical newspaper rather than reading online the way Lucy and Kate preferred. The papers had stacked up in his study, and Lucy picked the Saturday morning paper off the stoop to add to the five that were already there. She couldn’t miss the small headline in the bottom right corner.

American University Student Killed in Robbery

Possible drug deal gone bad. Story B-3.

She brought the paper to the kitchen table. Normally she didn’t care about drug-related crimes, but since a student from a nearby college was involved, it piqued her interest.

The story was shocking.

WASH DC–In a crime all too common in DC, an American University student was gunned down at approximately 9:45 p.m. Thursday night on the 900 block of T Street.

Bradley Harper Prenter, 25, had been at Club 10 prior to the murder, according to DC police. He left with a woman at approximately 9:30 p.m. According to witnesses, a man who appeared to know the woman confronted Prenter in the alley, but an eyewitness who asked to remain anonymous said that after a brief confrontation, Prenter left the alley alone. The man and woman, who authorities are looking for as possible witnesses, left in the opposite direction. Police sources would not confirm nor deny the eyewitness account.

Prenter was shot at point-blank range and was missing his wallet when a couple walking their dogs found him lying next to his vehicle, a late model Porsche.

Prenter was convicted of two sexual assaults in 2008 and was paroled three months ago from the Maryland Correctional Institution at Hagerstown. One DCPD officer who spoke on condition of anonymity said possible drugs were found on his person.

“Our lab is testing a clear liquid packaged in small, plastic vials that were found on the deceased.”

When pressed, the officer stated that the packaging was similar to how date-rape drugs such as ketamine, Liquid Ecstasy, or Rohypnol might be packaged.

Police are looking for any witnesses who may have spoken to or seen Prenter at the club, or who may know the woman who was seen leaving with Prenter. Please contact DCPD Hot Tips line.

Liquid date-rape drugs. Lucy dry heaved, waves of first fiery heat then icy cold coursing through her nerve endings. Her skin turned clammy, and she stumbled as she stood and ran to the bathroom, fearing she’d get sick.

Her stomach tightened painfully, but she put her head between her legs and breathed deeply until she felt the sensation pass. She ran cold water into the sink and washed her face, drenching a paper towel and putting it on the back of her neck.

She wanted a shower, the urge to scrub herself clean almost overpowering. But she’d showered only thirty minutes ago, and she wouldn’t give in to this unnatural obsession with cleanliness. Instead, she washed her face and hands long enough for her fingers to turn red. Her stomach ached and she leaned against the counter, willing herself to pull it together.

She needed to get a grip. How could she be an FBI agent when a news article could send her into a tailspin?

Focus.

Prenter was robbed. D.C. was a violent city. How many murders last year? Two hundred? More than one every other day. One forcible rape each day. Robbery and assault was astronomical, dozens every day.

Club 10.

Why was he at Club 10 when he was supposed to be in Fairfax meeting her fictitious cyber-ego? By 9:45 when he was killed, he should have been on his way to jail. What happened?

Cody would have told her had he known, wouldn’t he? He was a D.C. cop; how could he not know?

But he didn’t work homicides specifically. He was patrol, so even if he’d heard about the robbery he’d have no reason to ask about the victim’s identity.

She had to talk to him, but she needed more information about the murder.

Lucy dressed quickly and left. She needed answers. Though it was Saturday, the morgue was still open to employees, and often the autopsy file included a copy of the police report. Having a plan settled her stomach and gave her the determination she needed to get through the rest of the day.

And, despite her alarm, she was more than happy to have something to focus on other than Roger Morton and what Kate found-or didn’t find-on his computer.

Noah Armstrong wasn’t surprised that Kate Donovan beat him to Quantico Saturday morning. She hadn’t wanted to leave last night, but he’d convinced her that if she didn’t get a couple of hours’ sleep, she’d be no good to him. By the time they had all the material transported to Quantico, logged into evidence, and processed it had been nearly two a.m. Now was not the time to cut corners. If Morton had indeed been working with a partner and that partner was setting up an illegal porn site, if they didn’t preserve the chain of evidence, some creep might walk on a technicality. Nothing they found in these files would be admissible if they screwed up the basics.

Kate understood that, even though it obviously frustrated her.

“When did you get here?” He put his briefcase down on the small worktable in the corner of the windowless cave where Kate worked. The room was large but packed with electronics and computers, some working, some not, all taking up space. Noah would go stir-crazy down here; Kate seemed in her element.

“Seven,” she replied, fixated on the screen in front of her. It was running through numbers and letters at a great speed; she couldn’t possibly be reading anything.

“What are you doing?”

“Breaking Morton’s code. It’s not a complex one; I have a program that will have it soon-it’s only been running for ten minutes. I copied the drive first, so I’m not even working off the original data in case he has a Trojan set up to erase data. But he was never that smart back then. Trask was the brains.”

“Trask?”

“Adam Scott. He went by the name Trask.”

“What about the disks?” Noah asked. “Do you want me to get started on them?”

“I set Hans up next door.”

“Dr. Hans Vigo?”

“Yeah-that’s okay, right? You said you were working with him.”

Noah didn’t have a specific problem. “You could have asked me first.”

“I should have. I’m sorry.” She glanced at him. “Really. But this case-I made a huge mistake six years ago when I was part of the plea agreement. I have to find these answers, for Lucy. I’m not taking over, and I’ll try not to step on your toes, but Hans is one of the few people I know who can view the data on multiple levels-risk assessment of the victims, legal or illegal porn, child endangerment. Plus he knows the players from the years I was tracking Adam Scott and Roger Morton before Paige was killed.”

“I understand.” He sat down in a metal chair next to Kate. “I need to follow up on something today, but I need to know for sure that I can trust you.”

She looked at him. “If you didn’t trust me, why did you let me work the data?”

“Because I heard you were the best.”

Her lips curved up slightly. “True.”

“So I need you, but I also know you have a history with Morton and a relationship with his victim. Whatever you find, I want to know. Everything.”

She nodded, but Noah couldn’t read her blank expression to discern if she would hold to their agreement. “I can tell you from looking at the physical files that he was copying disks manually onto his computer. He had a system that is very straightforward-after he viewed the disk and presumably imported it, he marked it with a code. ‘X’ is straight, soft-core porn. ‘XX’ is straight, hard-core. ‘XXX’ is violent hard-core, possibly nonconsensual. ‘WC’ is webcam, probably hidden webcam or homemade sex tapes. The ‘WC’ is rated by the fetish-up-skirt, hidden videos, et cetera. It’s become all the rage now for teenagers to record themselves having sex and post the tapes on the Internet.” She shook her head. “They really don’t understand what they’re doing with their future.”

She handed Noah a sheet. “Hans wrote that when he got here a few hours ago. It gives us a cheat sheet of priorities.”

“What’s ‘P’ stand for and why is it in red?”

“Anything with a ‘P’ means a minor likely under the age of fourteen is involved. Hans sent those immediately to our child pornography task force. They can run them through their offender database, which will save us a lot of time and give us a better chance to save some of them. However, Morton wasn’t creating these files. He was creatng a clearinghouse of sorts, which makes tracing the evidence to the source next to impossible.”

Very little riled Noah; crimes against children was one of the few things that made him see red. While the FBI and local law enforcement had made great strides in investigating and prosecuting child pornography, the sheer number of cases was staggering. If they couldn’t identify the victim or the offender, there was little they could do except put the images in their database in case they popped up again. Working cybercrimes against children was emotionally the hardest job in the Bureau, hands down, and one of the few squads that agents could transfer out of without difficulty.

Kate said, “I’m not going to do anything stupid, Noah. I understand the trust you’ve placed in me, and believe me that I want to stop whoever Morton was working with as much as you do. The legal way.”

Noah stood. “I hope to be back before long. When Abigail went to the motel yesterday, the part-time clerk was there. Today the manager is back, and he’s the one who checked Morton in. I hope he has more information, but yesterday we got squat.”

Though Lucy’s internship was part-time Monday through Friday, most full-time morgue staff rotated shifts, so she knew nearly everyone who worked there. She always made it a point to talk to everyone, even though her position wasn’t permanent. She found that she could learn far more about a job, the real job, if she befriended people.

She also learned that no one cared about the details of why she wanted to look at files, so when she walked into the intake room to pull the file on Brad Prenter no one questioned her. If someone had, she’d have come up with something plausible-such as making sure she’d filled out forms right. But no one questioned what she did.

The autopsy had been done yesterday afternoon, and she was correct-the body was scheduled for pickup by a local funeral home on Monday morning. Because it was a homicide, all evidence was in the evidence room. Clothing and other contents on Prenter’s body were still in the drying chamber. They had to dry the clothing and then comb it for any trace blood evidence. The articles would be packaged for possible trial.

Crime scene photos and the corpses that surrounded Lucy when she worked at the morgue didn’t bother her, but this was different: in a weird way, she had known Brad Prenter. He’d been out Thursday night because he thought he was meeting her alter ego, Tanya. A chill went through her body, causing the hair at the base of her skull to rise as she opened the file and saw a picture of his body on the autopsy table. A DVD was attached to the file-homicide autopsies were routinely recorded.

She couldn’t view the DVD without breaking the evidence seal, so she put that aside and read the report. Three entry wounds to the abdomen fired from two to four feet away. No exit wounds. Bullets had been sent to the laboratory, standard procedure for ballistics testing. They’d also go to the FBI to add to their database and run against other ballistic reports to determine whether the gun had been used in a previous crime-solved or unsolved.

According to the pathologist, the wounds to the torso were fatal-the liver had been hit, a lung, and the stomach-but the killer had also shot Prenter in the back of the head at an angle that would have had Prenter on his knees. He died instantly from that final shot.

Three bullets to the front, then one in the back. Lucy closed her eyes to picture a possible scenario. Killer faces Prenter-either Prenter knew him and didn’t try to run, or the killer startled him and shot him without giving Prenter the chance to run. Prenter falls to his knees, suggesting a low-caliber bullet. Higher-caliber bullets would most likely force the victim back, not down.

Then the killer walked around and shot Prenter in the back of the head. To ensure he was dead.

But Prenter would have died anyway. Probably in minutes. Had Prenter known his killer and the killer feared he’d say his name? Was the overkill to make sure he died before his body was found?

A copy of the evidence log was in the file, including the whereabouts of each piece recovered. Items found on Prenter’s body were here at the morgue or the lab, though from experience Lucy knew that some personal effects and drugs would be separated and sent to the laboratory or evidence room. Vials found in his pants had been sent to the lab for analysis, but the results weren’t back yet. Blood samples-they’d done a standard tox screen in the autopsy room and already had his alcohol content, just barely legally drunk, low enough that he shouldn’t have been grossly intoxicated.

A copy of the initial police report was included, but not any of the follow-up investigation. Damn, she really wanted to see the rest of the police report and hoped Cody would get it for her. Was it asking too much? She hoped not; she didn’t want to abuse their friendship, but she had to know what had happened with Prenter.

Something felt very wrong, and until she knew the circumstances surrounding his murder she wouldn’t let it go.