Unsure if she should check in with Director Anderson, she decided to hold off until after the task force meeting.
Surely the director of the FBI doesn’t need an update every hour, Sayer thought as she headed down to her office.
Ezra waited at her desk, thermos in hand. With bright blue hair and half a dozen piercings, he looked more like a D.C. hipster than an FBI data analyst. Bright neon blue zebra stripes decorated his prosthetic legs, matching his hair.
Sayer gratefully accepted the thermos of scalding coffee. “I owe you my firstborn.”
Ezra snorted.
“So where are we?” she asked.
“I’ve got the task force together and they’re assembling now. The bodies are on the way here and they should get started on the autopsy of the girl soon. I’ve got two analysts on the blood writing and weird shit left at the scene. We’ve requested a profile, but I haven’t heard back from the Behavioral Analysis folks.” His blue hair flopped forward and he blew it up out of his eyes.
“Any ID on the girl yet?”
“Not yet. I ran her prints with no luck. We’re working on DNA. Should have results soon. I’ve got background on the dump site and some photos cued up to show the task force whenever you’re ready.”
“Thanks, Ezra. Let’s call the task force meeting at”—Sayer looked at the time—“one o’clock. That gives me twenty minutes to look over everything before we start.”
“As you wish.” Ezra doffed an invisible hat. His prosthetics clacked metal-on-metal as he pulled himself up with his cane. Still relatively new to walking with the double prostheses, Ezra moved with jerky but confident steps down the hall.
Sayer looked down at her empty desk and realized there was nothing new for her to review. Her phone rang and she answered the unknown caller, hoping for a lead.
Instead, she recognized Subject 037’s low voice.
“Hello, Sayer.”
“What is it?” she said sharply, not in any mood to engage in the kind of banter he would want.
“My, my, testy. I was only calling to wish you luck on your new case…”
Sayer took a deep breath. She was actually considering asking for funding to do an in-depth case study of 037. He was dangerous but fascinating and she didn’t want to destroy her ability to study him further by telling him to fuck off.
“I’m about to step into a meeting,” she managed to say.
“Of course. I’ve been keeping tabs on you and just heard that you’ve been assigned the dreadful murders downtown. So tragic.” His voice dripped with sympathy that Sayer knew was completely manufactured. As a full-fledged psychopath, 037 didn’t experience normal human emotions.
Sayer almost asked him what he meant when he said he was keeping tabs on her, but decided she didn’t really want to know right now. Not for the first time, she considered tracing his calls. With her resources at the FBI, it wouldn’t be difficult to find out his true identity. But when he agreed to be part of her research on noncriminal psychopaths, they had both signed an agreement that guaranteed his anonymity. It would be a huge ethics breach to break that agreement and she just couldn’t bring herself to do it.
“I won’t keep you,” he said. “I just wanted to express my condolences to the families of those poor victims.” He chuckled his low laugh and then hung up.
Shaking her head, Sayer shifted her focus back to the case and looked through the crime scene photos as they came in from the field. Though she didn’t really want to, she also listened to the heartbreaking recording of Officer Graham being shot. The sound of him dying and the indecipherable singsong chant on the tape made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.
But they had no ballistics on the bullet that killed the officer, no autopsy reports, no ID on the girl. She loathed this moment in every investigation when she didn’t have actionable information, but still felt the burning need to be doing something.
Her phone buzzed with an incoming photo and Sayer expected it to be additional crime scene photos so she was momentarily jolted at the sight of her family gathered around Tino’s massive dinner table. Eighteen-year-old Adi’s mussed pink hair fell over her face, covering half of her beaming smile. Sayer’s adopted daughter had just found out a few weeks before that she was accepted early admission to Stanford and she hadn’t stopped smiling since. She was heading to California the next morning to check out the campus.
Sayer’s nana smiled in her calm, knowing way, her arm wrapped protectively over Adi’s shoulder. Her small gold and pearl earrings matched the simple necklace that fell over her black cashmere sweater. Despite being in her seventies, Nana always looked like she’d just stepped out of a Chanel ad.
Tino’s bristly mustache and wire glasses made her neighbor look more like an Argentinian philosopher than a chef and former army interrogator. He wore a similarly beaming smile, one hand resting on Vesper’s head. The silvery, three-legged dog’s goofy canine smile peeked just above the edge of the table. They had both officially become a K9 therapy team and Sayer would swear that Vesper was as thrilled as his humans.
Adi’s accompanying text said, Went ahead with our celebration meal without you. Missed you! Hope to see you before I head to Stanford tomorrow. xoxo
A faint smile danced across Sayer’s lips before she forced herself to think about the dead girl on the cold stone.
She was relieved when Ezra texted, The ME pulled a print off Jane Doe’s cheek! I’m in the conference room running it now.
Sayer hurried toward the small command center hoping for a quick break in the case.
FBI COMMAND CENTER, QUANTICO, VA
Sayer knew as soon as she entered the small command center that it wasn’t good news.
“No match in AFIS.” Ezra frowned. The Automated Fingerprint Identification System allowed him to search tens of millions of prints across the nation. “I’ve got a program crawling all other publicly accessible databases, but that’ll take an hour or two.”
“Damn, a quick match would’ve been nice,” Sayer said, sitting at the head of the large conference table. “We sure it’s the killer’s print?”
“Well, it was on her cheek that was otherwise perfectly clean. Like so clean he must’ve wiped her down.”
Sayer grunted understanding and spent the next few minutes looking through her painfully thin stack of notes.
Frowning again, Ezra went back to clacking away at his computer.
People began to filter in for the task force meeting and, at 1:00 A.M., Sayer stood up at the head of the room to quiet the gathered agents. Ezra, three FBI analysts, four field agents, and two DCPD officers were all clearly ready to start.
Sayer nodded to Ezra to put up the first photo. She’d worked with him long enough to know that she could just follow his lead.
The low buzz of chatter died down at the sight of the dead D.C. police officer. Being shot at random was the worst fear of any law enforcement officer and the sight of his body sent an involuntary shudder through everyone there.
“Okay, so we’ve got a double murder. At 9:26 P.M., Officer Frank Graham came upon what he believed was someone painting graffiti on the grounds of the National Academy of Sciences. He was actually on the radio with the dispatcher when he confronted the killer and was shot without warning. There’s nothing to indicate he was specifically targeted. The dispatcher he was on the phone with reported hearing a ‘chanting song’ being sung right after he was shot. We’ve got a recording of the murder. Ezra?”