“Fine. Tell them you’re working directly for Secretary Johnston. We’ve got a mission. Suffice it to say, it’s probably one of the most important missions you’ll ever undertake. Take it seriously.”
22
It took agent Aaron Pilcher almost an hour to race from the U.S. Immuno facility to Washington, D.C., spending most of it on his cell phone shouting orders. When he finally reached the address Derek Stillwater had given him, he realized instantly that something had gone wrong. Although there were FBI vehicles, most importantly an ERT van, there were also half a dozen D.C. police vehicles. Shit, he thought. How did they get involved?
He climbed out of his Ford Taurus, badge hung on a laniard around his neck. Simultaneously he was approached by a uniformed D.C. cop and an FBI agent in a three-piece suit.
“Sir,” the cop began, “this is a crime scene—”
”He’s with us,” the agent said, identifying himself as Agent Ron Tittaglia. “Agent Pilcher, your line’s been busy. We’ve got a situation here.”
Pilcher sighed. He glanced at the cop. “I’ll get with you in a minute.”
The cop, a middle-aged guy with flinty gray eyes and gray sideburns, hesitated. Pilcher raised his badge. “FBI. National security. Shoo!”
With a sneeze that sounded an awful lot like a muffled “fuck you,” the cop went off to inform his superiors that another federal pain-in-the-ass was here to muck things up.
Pilcher turned back to Tittaglia. “What’s going on?”
“When the ERT team and my group showed up this place was swarming with local cops. Seems some doctor from Walter Reed got shot a couple hours ago.”
“Here?”
“No, over on 19th, by Reed. Name was Austin Davis.” Tittaglia took a deep breath, organizing his thoughts. He was short and wiry with curly graying hair and a bristly mustache.
“So—”
”They got witnesses who saw the shooting. Saw some guy they think might be a Derek Stillwater jump into a Chevy Blazer during or after the shooting and disappear. He was supposedly meeting Davis at a local pub, Jimmy’s. One of the wits got the plate number on the Blazer.”
“Do they think Stillwater shot this doctor?” Pilcher asked, glancing around at the cops. He saw a couple he thought were detectives talking earnestly to the uniform he had blown off. It was only a matter of time before he got hauled into this and he wanted to see the scene first.
“Not as far as the D.C. cops can tell,” Tittagia said.
“Good. Tell me as we go to the scene.”
Tittaglia led him toward the entrance. “The D.C. cops would gladly pin Davis’s death on Stillwater right now, but they claim he’s just a witness. They got a real reliable witness who said it looked like Stillwater was being bracketed after the doc got popped.”
“Jesus, what did he grab hold of?”
“Who?”
“Stillwater. He’s with Homeland Security. One of those troubleshooters.”
Tittaglia led him up the stairs. “No shit?”
“No shit. He called in the scene here. So why do the cops—”
”The two patrol guys found Stillwater in that Chevy Blazer. They had a BOLO on the plates. When they tried to take him in for questioning he resisted arrest. One of the patrols has a sprained wrist and a broken jaw from where Stillwater kicked him when he jumped over the truck.”
Pilcher stopped on the second floor landing and focused his gaze on Tittaglia. “He jumped over the Blazer?”
“Well,” Tittaglia said with a shrug. “Over the hood of the Blazer. To listen to these cops talk, Stillwater was Superman or something. One drew down on him and the other was trying to take Stillwater’s gun when he overpowered them and ran. One chased him, but he went over a fence and disappeared. They shot at him and it looks like they hit him. There’s a blood trail, but it disappears.”
“They think somebody picked him up?”
They continued climbing the stairs. Tittaglia shrugged again. “Either somebody picked him up or he ducked into a phone booth and used his cape to fly away. They sent out a bunch of cops looking, but he’s gone.”
“Okay. I’ll think about that later. What about the scene, the apartment. Is it secure?”
Tittaglia gestured to the third-floor doorway. “Yeah, secure. This is our terrorist hit, right? It got a name yet?”
“Nobody’s told me. It’ll be something like Project Bloodstream or something.”
“Sure,” Tittaglia said. “Anyway, the ERTs headed up here right away while the rest of us screwed around with the D.C. cops, pissing over turf. They didn’t come up here. Good thing, too. This is a major clusterfuck. Even knowing what’s going on, well, sort of knowing what’s going on, I gotta say this looks bad. If the locals tied this apartment to Stillwater, they’d turn it into a massive man hunt. He is Homeland, right?”
Pilcher and Tittaglia stopped outside the doorway to apartment 302. Pilcher squinted, cocking his head at the agent. “He is. An expert on biowarfare. He told me there’s a witness whose fingerprints we—”
”We got ‘em. Had ‘em rushed over to the lab ASAP. They’re running them now.”
“Fine. What did she—”
He stepped into the room and froze, his heart sinking. He should have put it together. Tittaglia had all but shouted it in his face.
“Your witness is dead,” Tittaglia said. “And it looks like Stillwater tortured her to death.”
Pilcher stared at the mess in apartment 302, trying to get a handle on what he was seeing. Wondering, even more strongly than he had before, what the deal was with Derek Stillwater. At U.S. Immuno and later at the Scully house he hadn’t acted much like an investigator. He had acted like a man seeing his worst nightmares come to life. Pilcher frowned over Spigotta’s comment that the USAMRIID people who knew Stillwater thought he had seen too much, that he was flaky.
Flaky, he thought.
The table and chairs had been overturned as if during a fight. Three living room lamps had been dumped on the floor, their cords torn out of the bases. A dead woman lay neatly on the kitchen floor. Too neatly. She lay on her back, arms by her side. There were marks on her wrists that suggested they had been bound with the lamp cords. Probably the legs, too, though the cords were now tossed carelessly in the corner. A clear plastic freezer bag was crumpled next to the cords and a cellular phone that appeared to be broken in three pieces. Pilcher thought it was Stillwater’s.
What happened here?!
The person in charge of this ERT team was a no-nonsense woman with black hair cut so short she was almost bald. She stood eye-to-eye with Pilcher and said, “We’ll have to get the local M.E. to do a post — that’s not our deal, as you know. My guess is she was tied to one of those chairs with the light cords. Somebody used the plastic bag to suffocate her, torture her, maybe, into talking.”
“You think she did?”
The tech stared at him. “I don’t know. But she died from it. And I can’t be sure, but I’ve got to wonder why if she died and her killer planned it that way, why he untied her and laid her out like this, unless it’s positioning, you know, like some sexual serial killers do? Posing their victims’ bodies? But this doesn’t feel like that to me. I may be reading too much into it. This is our terrorist thing, you said.”
“Yeah. The guy here was following a lead of some sort.”
“Yeah. The files, I bet.” She pointed to a series of manila folders now in clear evidence bags.
“Can I look?”
“Wear gloves.”
Pilcher took the files, donned rubber gloves and flipped through the evidence, frowning. Lots of photographs, but he didn’t like them. Something about the files, the excellent photographs but sketchy documentation in Russian. It struck him as being wrong. Too much of one type of information, not enough of another. He wasn’t sure what or why, but they made him suspicious. He wondered if they had made Stillwater suspicious.