Wyatt led her over to the body just off the sidewalk. The victim was sprawled on his back, police uniform torn open where the EMTs had tried to revive him. The edges of the blood pooled on the frozen ground around him were already drying in the cold.
“Officer Frank Graham, seven years on the force. He was on the radio with dispatch when he saw someone painting what he thought was graffiti on the Einstein Memorial. Dispatcher said that he interrupted the person who then shot him without warning.” Wyatt’s voice fell low with emotion. “He bled out before EMTs could get here.”
Sayer stood over the dead officer, heart beating painfully in her throat. “He have kids?”
“Yeah, one son, living with his ex-wife now.”
“Damn.” She couldn’t help but remember getting the call about her fiancé Jake’s death. She knew exactly what it would feel like for his family to get the call tonight. She shut down the flash of grief that always hit when she thought about Jake and turned to scan the bloody footprints ringing the body. She couldn’t tell if they belonged to the medics or the killer. Something for the evidence team to sort out.
Grim-faced, Detective Wyatt led her toward the Einstein Memorial. “Second victim is why we called you in. Looks like she’s in her late teens. Definitely some ritual elements to the murder. I’ll let you take a look.”
He left it vague and hung back. Sayer appreciated him giving her some space to form her own opinions.
She was drawn toward the statue. The twelve-foot sculpture of Einstein reclined on a curved bench of white stone, holding a book inscribed with three of the physicist’s famous equations.
“‘Joy and amazement of the beauty and grandeur of this world of which man can just form a faint notion,’” Sayer murmured her favorite Einstein quote like a talisman as she approached the memorial.
The bronze figure looked down on a circular star map spread out before him. Almost thirty feet across, thousands of metal studs representing the planets, sun, moon, and stars sparkled on the expanse of lustrous granite.
At the center of the celestial map, a heart-shatteringly small young woman lay on her back. The body was perfect, untouched other than a smear of blood across her lips.
During her career, Sayer had seen plenty of dead bodies and she was good at distancing herself from the horrors of death, but this display turned her stomach. Murder is usually violent, messy, so the purposeful perfection of the girl’s body felt wrong on a deeply instinctual level. Despite Sayer’s roiling stomach, she didn’t look away from the confusing scene.
A large axe was placed in the girl’s right hand. Along the white granite bench, the words “as above, so below” were painted in blood.
But the most unusual things at the scene were the nine carved figurines, each no more than a foot tall, crouched in a circle around the body. Sayer stepped closer to get a better look. The small statues had sharp teeth protruding beneath short animal snouts. Their primate bodies hunched forward, humanlike, hands resting on their knees.
Nine baboons encircled the girl like an audience observing her in death.
ALBERT EINSTEIN MEMORIAL, WASHINGTON, D.C.
Sayer stood at the edge of the star map, taking it all in. She was frustrated by the fact that Director Anderson clearly didn’t intend to assign her a partner for this case. He knew this was going to be one of those cases that had no good outcome. Even if she caught the killer tonight, a cop and a girl were dead in a way that would draw endless media speculation.
And Anderson clearly wanted Sayer to bear the brunt of that scrutiny by herself.
The Bureau was still recovering from the recent scandal that resulted in the forced departure of Assistant Director Holt, one of Sayer’s mentors at the FBI. Director Anderson had pushed for both Holt and Sayer to be fired, though she still didn’t fully understand why. With political maneuvering and adept media manipulation, he’d managed to get rid of Holt. Sayer had held on to her job by the skin of her teeth.
Maybe this was his next attempt to paint her as incompetent, setting her up to take on a difficult-to-solve, high-profile murder.
“None of that political bullshit matters now,” Sayer said to herself as she pulled her thick curls up into a wrap and put paper booties over her heavy boots. When the photographer finished getting the aerial shots, she carefully stepped over the carved baboons to reach the dead girl.
Detective Wyatt stayed back, watching Sayer work.
“Her wrists look like they were bound,” she noted as she pulled on gloves and gently pressed the girl’s fingers into the mobile scanner.
After she scanned the fingerprints, Sayer gestured to the sidewalk. “How could no one notice this? We’re right across from the Mall, not exactly off the beaten path. He took one hell of a risk.”
They were less than twenty feet from Constitution Avenue, one of the central thoroughfares of Washington, D.C. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was just across the street, one of the most popular destinations on the National Mall.
“Maybe the unsub doesn’t care if he gets caught,” Detective Wyatt said.
Sayer nodded. She was already building an image of the unknown subject—the unsub. She needed to know what she was up against and the thought of a fearless killer sharpened her hunter’s instinct.
“That looks like a purposeful smear of blood on her mouth.” The detective pointed to the cupid’s heart of blood at the center of the girl’s lips.
Sayer just nodded again, still processing the scene in her mind. She stepped back outside the ring of baboons and went over to the writing on the bench.
“‘As above, so below,’” she read out loud. The words appeared to be written in blood and were already drying into a deep rust color. She searched for the terms on her phone and got hundreds of hits. Too much to sort through out here in the cold.
Sayer stepped even farther back to observe the scene as a whole while the Evidence Response Team and medical examiner continued their painstaking job of gathering the smallest trace evidence that might lead to the unsub.
She let her mind free-associate, listing all the bizarre elements of the scene. Baboon figurines. An axe. Words written in blood. Why here at the foot of the Einstein statue? Was the physicist important to the killer? Or maybe the National Academy of Sciences? Clearly these were ritualistic elements, but what did they mean? She tried to think of any religion that might involve axes and baboons, but couldn’t think of anything. Even Satanism didn’t fit.
With no answers evident, she watched the FBI teams expertly processing the scene, doing their jobs with calm efficiency. Sayer muttered, “Come on,” under her breath, willing her team to find something to help her catch the monster who did this.
ROAD TO FBI HEADQUARTERS, QUANTICO, VA
Almost an hour later, the sky was still clear as Sayer rode toward the FBI Headquarters at Quantico. The frigid air cut through the edges of her riding jacket. Patches of black ice turned the highway into a deadly obstacle course, forcing her to drive half the speed limit.
She was shivering by the time she parked her Silver Hawk in the almost empty parking lot. Hoping to knock some of the chill from her bones, Sayer stomped her way into the building and, out of habit, hurried up to Assistant Director Holt’s office. The office was dark and empty. She had momentarily forgotten that the assistant director was gone.