“I told you,” Bell shouted back, “it was a tactical clusterfuck to walk in.”
“Then what do you call driving in with all the cars committed so there’s no vehicle perimeter?”
“A fucking car wouldn’t have done any good when he headed for the woods, Detective.”
“And yours wasn’t much good when it came to capturing him alive, Agent.”
“Oh, please.”
“You recklessly caused the death of the one person who might have told us how to stop this terror plot. Vaja was twenty yards from heading into our roadblock. Why the hell didn’t you just let him go?”
“Because I am not going to-and never will-leave anything to chance. He dealt the play. I brought him down.”
“You certainly did. And now where are we?”
“Easy to throw blame, huh? Especially when you start to believe your own press. You think you have the smarts to figure it all out, but you can’t, so you disrespect me. Heat, you need to remember what every good investigator knows: You cannot get the whole picture-ever. There’s always going to be something that surprises you. Something you never saw coming. Or believed possible. Better pray it doesn’t kill you.”
Heat shrugged herself loose from her protectors and walked away to cool off.
With their prime suspect too dead to interrogate, the investigation suffered a forced reboot into forensic mode. The best of the best from Homeland Security showed up in a caravan of unmarked white panel trucks. Callan shooed the Staties and locals out of the area, fearing they’d probably trample more evidence than they found. Heat cut her own detectives loose to head back to the Upper West Side and keep working the Rainbow case. Certainly the looming catastrophe of a mass bio attack had tacitly dwarfed the serial killer investigation, but it had not set it aside. Death goes on.
“You don’t need to stay, either,” she told Rook.
“You going to be all right?”
“I already am. I just lost it. Past history,” she said. “Done.”
Rook studied her as only he knew how, searching Nikki’s eyes with a tender, caring appraisal that made her feel more human just for his closeness. Satisfied enough with what he saw, he said, “Truth is, I can stay here and be told to wait in a car, or spend the evening in my own office pulling together research for a new article I’m going to pitch Monday morning.” He smoothed a lock off her forehead with his fingertips. “And take that as a vote of confidence, Detective Heat, that there will, indeed, be a Monday morning.”
As he walked off, though, he couldn’t resist a parting Rook-shot. “That is, if you live upwind of New York. I hear Edmonton is lovely this time of year.”
A troop of cyber and bioforensics technicians joined their Homeland Security counterparts who distributed themselves throughout the house and kennel. They performed basic searches for material evidence, plus fingerprints, computer assessment, bioagent and chemical sampling, and photo-documentation. There was even an expert to blow the safe embedded in the floor of the master bedroom closet.
“By the way, safe’s empty,” Callan told Heat after the all clear. In the second bedroom, which Nikoladze had set up as a home office, he pointed to the overflowing wire basket under the shredder. “Motor on that thing is still warm. It appears the good doctor had a bit of a confetti party before we arrived.”
“Vaja knew we were coming,” said Nikki.
“He sure knew enough to hide in the kennel,” said Bell. She had been keeping her distance since their altercation, but professionals had a way of clearing air-or at least setting personal ugliness aside-in favor of a mission. “That could be because he spotted us, maybe caught a reflection of binoculars from the hill, you never know.”
“And it is possible he was a compulsive shredder,” offered Callan.
Heat said, “But put both together, and what do you think?”
“I think we keep looking,” said Bell.
The kennel disturbed Heat in a way that caught her by surprise. The Georgian shepherds all had been rounded up and taken to a local shelter for care and examination, so the long, vacant barracks with the pea green walls lit by harsh fluorescents gave off an eerie morgue vibe. It could have been Room B-23 at OCME, except it was above ground. There was only one cage, in the near corner. The dogs slept in a series of individual open pens that ran the length of the east wall; each had a waist-high enclosure that had been left open to give them freedom to roam.
As Heat walked the length of the outbuilding with Callan and Bell, she had the morose sense that she was retracing the steps of Nicole Bernardin the way she had only theorized in the bull pen with her squad. On that night a month before, Nicole would have been alone, snooping for evidence of Tyler Wynn’s deadly plot. It cost the agent her life. At the far end, they reached a wall of supply shelves full of dog food, vitamins, and grooming supplies. Beside it sat a bulkhead door. It didn’t exist in the zoning blueprints they had acquired, and it looked like it led to a basement. “Sorry, sir… ladies,” said the man in the white biohazard coveralls and gas mask. “No entry without a moon suit.”
“You guys love your drama,” said Callan. “This what you call an abundance of caution?”
“Sir, this is what we call saving your life. Our crew down in the basement has encountered evidence of bioagents.”
“I don’t know about you,” said Heat, “but I’m all for the moon suit.”
A few minutes later, after donning protective suits, including gas masks attached to metal air tanks on backpacks, they descended the aluminum steps to the basement in which Dr. Vaja Nikoladze, internationally acclaimed biochemist, Soviet defector, and peace activist, had built his laboratory to culture biological agents for terror. Nikki thought, This is a James Bond villain’s lair with bad lighting.
In size, it equaled the footprint of the building above and housed a fully stocked scientific lab, complete with test tubes and beakers, a centrifuge, and thermo-glass isolation chambers with safety glove sets built into the front panels. Four high-tech refrigeration units had labels stuck to the doors, but instead of the Little League pictures or dental appointment reminders found on most reefer doors, the labels were in Latin-some of the names Heat recognized from the CDC research she’d been reading: Bacillus anthracis; Vibrio cholerae; Ricinus communis; Filoviridae Ebola; Filoviridae Marburg; Variola major. Like sentries along a countertop stood numerous hermetically sealed, cylindrical stainless steel containers, each slapped with a bright orange sticker displaying the universal symbol for biohazard. “Love the stickers,” said Bell, her voice muffled by the mask. “As if he didn’t know what he was handling.”
“The question remains,” said Nikki. “Who was he handling it for? We still need to find them.”
Heat and the DHS agents left the basement to the technicians and their sampling equipment, ascending the steps burdened by the worst piece of news: There was a gap in the row of sealed canisters, and the space was marked with a circular ring left on the counter. It appeared that one of the twenty-gallon containers had been removed and was unaccounted for.
Topside, a forensic specialist on his knees inside the cage called them over. She indicated the drain in the floor and said, “This cage has been hosed and scoured with a laboratory grade solvent. It’s going to make DNA sampling a bear.” Then she rose and beckoned them to a spot on the inside cage wall where she held up an instrument that appeared to be an oversized cell phone. The plasma screen filled with an extreme close-up of the grating with a video-enhanced quality. “See what I’m picking up here?”
“That blood?”
“It is. And, unless one of those dogs is this tall, it’s probably human. I’ll swab and test.”
“Nicole Bernardin would have been the right height,” said Heat. “And she had a stab wound that would have been in her back about there.”
“I could see someone backing into that and leaving a smear,” said the forensic tech. “I’m also picking up fibers. Do you have the clothing from your victim?”