“Hi,” the bearded guy said, smiling at him. He wore a gray baseball cap with the brim pulled low over his eyes, and the gray Sorkin Cleaning Services uniform. “I’m the replacement they sent over.”
“You’re early.” Crenshaw pawed through the papers on his desk and found the memo. “Yeah. Here it is. Your company called it in this afternoon. Said they’d be sending in somebody new tonight.”
“That’s me.” The bearded guy tapped the plastic photo ID clipped to his uniform pocket.
“Let me get the number off your badge. You can sign in here.”
The guy didn’t use the pen chained to the sign-in clipboard, but instead drew one out of his own pocket and scribbled his name. Crenshaw leaned forward, checked the photo on the badge against the guy’s face, then took down the name and number on it and entered them next to the signature.
“Okay, that’s all I need Mr. Dantes.”
“Just call me Edmond.”
Crenshaw glanced at the guy and returned his smile. “Well, Edmond, I suppose you need help finding your way around here.”
“No problem. I can figure it out if there’s a directory.”
The security guard pointed. “Right over there near the elevators.”
“Thanks. I won’t be long,” Dantes said. “I’ll leave some things upstairs, but then I have to go back to the office and get some stuff I forgot.”
“Sure.” Crenshaw reached under his desk, pulled a key off a hook, and handed it to the cleaning man. “Here’s a copy of the master. You can just walk right around the metal detector.”
“I appreciate your help. Well, I’d better get to it. See you in a bit.”
He watched the guy head off toward the elevators, whistling. Crenshaw shook his head. Amazing that anybody could enjoy such a job.
*
This would be tricky.
He emerged from the elevator with his latex gloves on. He rolled the trash bin down the hallway, noting the position and angles of the various closed-circuit cameras. He needed to find just the right spot.
He did. The angle of the overhead camera in the reception area of the Commonwealth Attorney’s office appeared to leave a blind spot to the right of the receptionist’s desk. He also noticed the very tall, broad-leafed potted plant standing in the corner. He dragged the plant to where it would block even more of the camera’s line of sight.
He pushed one of the chairs from the waiting area and positioned it beside the reception desk, facing the entrance. Then he rolled his trash container into the blind spot and carefully tipped it to the floor. After he slid out Valenti’s body, he used scissors from the receptionist’s desk to cut away the plastic tarp. He heaved the corpse onto the chair, tying it in position with a cord he’d found days ago in a Dumpster.
Then he used tape from the desk to stick a copy of the Inquirer article to Valenti’s shirt, just above the bullet hole. Beneath it, on Valenti’s lap, he carefully placed a much older news clipping.
It reported the tragic discovery of the body of Roberta Gifford. For a few seconds, he looked at the face of the girl in the photo.
Then he pulled a small digital camera from his pocket and began snapping photos.
When he was done, he tossed the tarp, scissors, tape, and everything else he had used or touched into his trash container. Before he left, he checked the whole area carefully. He kept the gloves on as he took the cart back down to the lobby.
“All done?” the guard asked him when he dropped off the key at the security desk.
“For the time being.”
*
Across town, in a warehouse area, he stopped in an alley that he had checked earlier. He got out and stripped the magnetic janitorial sign from the side of the van, replacing it with a larger, gaudier one advertising a nonexistent nightclub in Baltimore. He snapped a plastic cover off the license plate, revealing a different, equally phony number from Maryland.
He headed north out of Alexandria. In a few miles, he pulled off the George Washington Parkway into the Gravelly Point parking area near Reagan National Airport. He waited for the noise to subside as a jet glided down the Potomac just a few hundred feet away and landed on the nearby runway.
From the glove compartment he took a hand-held recorder and a disposable cell phone. Replacing the battery in the phone, he powered it on and dialed a second disposable cell, hidden in another location. That one was set for call forwarding, to the night desk at the Inquirer. But the call would go first through a “spoof” website, so that a different phone number would show up on the editor’s Caller ID. The number was that of Youth Horizons in Alexandria.
He liked that touch. In any case, the police would never track the calls to him-especially after he destroyed and dumped both phones within the hour.
When he heard the night guy at the paper pick up, he pressed the “play” button on the recorder. His voice, electronically distorted by the spoof site, told the astonished editor exactly what would be found in the Alexandria courthouse.
FOURTEEN
Alexandria, Virginia
Wednesday, September 10, 1:30 p.m.
It wasn’t the best of days for the Alexandria Police Department.
As supervisor of the Violent Crimes Unit, Ed Cronin stood beside two of his superiors: the police chief and the deputy chief of the Investigations Bureau. Inside a conference room of their headquarters just off the Capital Beltway, under the TV camera lights and reporters’ probing eyes, they manned a podium spiked with microphones, fielding embarrassing questions to which they could give only awkward answers.
He felt particularly sorry for his chief. The man was trying to back-pedal away from the press statement that he had issued earlier that morning. But it was hard to do, because that statement had been a lie, and now he was caught in it.
Last night, a reporter at the Inquirer was tipped about the stiff in the courthouse, and he showed up with a photographer. The guard at the front desk had no clue what the hell they were talking about. He made them wait while he went upstairs to check out their crazy story.
Then rushed back to phone it in.
Since it was obvious from the m.o. that Valenti’s murder was connected to Bracey’s, the investigators didn’t want details to leak out, details that could be useful later when questioning suspects. So, this morning-in answer to the front-page story in the Inquirer -the chief issued a flat denial that any messages had been left by the killer or killers at either crime scene.
But around noon, the Inquirer and other media outlets received anonymous phone calls directing them to envelopes left at various places around the District. Inside, they found photos of Valenti’s body posed in the Commonwealth Attorney’s office, including a close-up shot of the newspaper clipping taped to the corpse.
Naturally, this caused a sensation, and it forced the chief to call this second news conference to rationalize his deceptive remarks at the first. Cronin was relieved not to be fielding any of those questions-they were the chief’s problem. But the reporters finally got around to singling him out.
“Nan Lafferty, the Post, for Sergeant Cronin: Have you been able to connect the two shootings as having been done with the same weapon?”
No, two different guns. “I’m sorry, but I can’t get into issues of physical evidence.”
“A follow-up, if I may,” the woman continued. “You have at least one eyewitness, the guard in the lobby, and the courthouse has plenty of security cameras. Will you be releasing a description or video footage of the suspect to the public?”
The commander of the Investigations Bureau leaned into the fountain of mics. “Yes. We’re processing the footage and expect to release a clip and some stills for you in another few hours, along with some additional details from the witness.”