Mortal Faults

21

The briefing was held in the squad room at eight thirty p.m. after three hours at Andrea Lowry’s house, during which time Tess had told her story and Andrea had told hers, and nobody, it seemed, had poked any holes in either narrative. Outside the house, the media gathered like sharks scenting blood-first one mobile news unit cruising up to the yellow ribbon at the crime-scene perimeter, then a second and third, until all of L.A.’s major TV stations were represented, along with two news radio stations, the L.A. Times, and the L.A. Daily News. Eventually a police officer placated the journalists with a hurried outdoor news conference in which he described the attack as a random home invasion foiled by an armed householder. The presence of the FBI at the scene went unmentioned, and no one among the reporters noticed it.

All of that, along with the work of a team of criminalists who tagged and tagged every spent shell and recoverable bullet, was now over, and Hauser’s squad, minus six members who remained in Andrea’s neighborhood, had reassembled in the bullpen on the seventeenth floor of the federal building, where Hauser was sketching out a geometrical diagram on a whiteboard.

“We’re kicking this operation into higher gear,” he said briskly. “From here on, it’s a three-pronged strategy. I’ve broken it out in boxes.” He tapped the board. “First, surveillance. Whitley and Conklin are in the house next door. Davis and Palumbo are parked down the street in an undercover van. Rice and Bowles have separate posts in other vehicles. I doubt the subject is going anywhere tonight, but as of tomorrow we’ll have a minimum of three additional vehicles in the vicinity, ready to conduct clandestine mobile surveillance whenever she goes out. From now on, she never leaves our sight. I want to know where she is at all times, and who she’s talking to, if anyone. Only agents who were not at the crime scene are eligible for surveillance duty. If you were there, she probably got a look at you, which means she may be able to ID you. We do not want her aware of our interest.”

Surveillance wasn’t limited to visual contact. During the search of Andrea’s house, a technical agent had bugged her phone and planted a miniature camera in the living room. The transmitters’ signals would reach the house next door, where the closest surveillance agents were stationed. It was all legal, the warrant obtained telephonically earlier that day.

“So we have eyes and ears on Lowry. That’s our first avenue of investigation. Number two, we work the assault. Identify the assailants, learn who hired them. We’re guessing it was Reynolds, but he may be working through intermediaries. Maybe he has underworld contacts, either old friends of his from when he grew up or people he met while he was a D.A. Look into any possible connections between Reynolds and criminal elements, but be discreet. We don’t want him to know we’re on his tail. That leaves the third investigative avenue. We need to look deeper into MEDEA. We need to know what happened twenty years ago, how much of Andrea’s story is true.”

The meeting broke up, with Hauser reassigning Tess and Crandall to the assault case now that they were unsuitable for surveillance duty. “We’ve got the Santa Ana R.A. working it tonight,” he told them, meaning the FBI’s resident agency, a subsidiary branch of the regional field office. “Tomorrow you can see what they’ve turned up. For now, get some sleep.”

Tess couldn’t sleep, not yet. She had an appointment with Abby.