Anna found herself wishing she could talk to Jack about it. Not only because he was the prosecutor whose judgment she most trusted. She instinctively wanted his input on all of her most important decisions. She would have to figure this out herself. She was determined to prove she could do it without him.
Anna called Carla, who listened carefully and gave her sound advice. Ultimately, they decided to search Vale’s house first. If that provided enough corroboration of Nicole’s story—if they found photos of Caroline tacked up all over his walls, for example—they would arrest him.
Sam made a series of phone calls to her FBI supervisors, hashing out an Operations Plan and getting a SWAT team pulled together. By twelve-thirty
A.M
., Anna had finished writing the affidavit in support of the warrant to search Brett Vale’s home. She called the duty judge, apologized for waking him up, and told him that Samantha would come over to swear out the warrant. By 1:45
A.M
., Samantha had returned from the judge’s home with a signed search warrant. By two-thirty, a team of MPD officers and FBI agents had assembled in the war room. The officers planned the execution of the warrant and finished off the cupcakes.
Brett Vale rented an apartment on the top floor of a converted three-story rowhouse near Eastern Market. Officers called up floor plans of Vale’s building and records of everyone who lived there. Each floor constituted its own one-bedroom unit. The lower two condos were also rented by Capitol Hill staffers. There’d been no 911 calls to the building over the last ten years, and none of the residents had a police record. People who worked in political jobs were always thinking of the Senate confirmation hearings they hoped to have someday and keeping their records clean for that golden moment. Anna hoped the atmosphere would make the search less dangerous for the team.
Still, they would go prepared. The SWAT team would carry Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns; Sam’s search team would carry their sidearms. It sounded like a lot of firepower to search the home of one Capitol Hill staffer. But after Pleazy’s house, Samantha was taking no chances.
By five-fifteen
A.M
., Samantha, McGee, and the other officers headed down the elevators, out the front doors, and to the curb. The eastern horizon was just starting to turn from black to gray. They would raid Vale’s house at precisely six
A.M
.—the earliest moment allowable under the terms of the standard “daylight hours” search warrant. Most of the officers piled into a couple of unmarked white vans parked in front of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, across the street from the Building Museum. McGee unlocked his Crown Vic, and Anna started to climb in when Samantha put a hand on her shoulder.
“I can’t let you come,” Samantha said. “I’m sorry.”
Anna stood up with surprise. She’d figured she was part of the team. “I won’t get in your way.”
“I know. You’re an asset. Truly.” That was the most effusive Anna had ever heard Sam. “But I have to do this one by the book, no frills and no extras.”
“Even after everything yesterday?”
“Especially after everything yesterday.” Samantha smiled and lowered her voice. “I have to get my mojo back.”
“I won’t touch your mojo.”
“Look, I need these guys to respect me. Not be thinking of me getting my ass saved by a lawyer. Anyway, we need you by a computer, ready to look up anything if a legal issue comes up, ready to whip up that arrest warrant if we find enough at his house. I’m counting on you to make those lightning-quick ninja-lawyer moves.” Sam smiled at her. “Okay?”
“Okay.” Anna sighed. She could see Sam’s point. It would be good to have someone in the office on standby.
“Get a little rest,” Samantha added. “I guarantee I’ll call if we need you.”
Anna nodded. But she didn’t head off right away. She stood for a few minutes in the warm night air, watching as the officers drove north on 4th Street. It wasn’t because she really wanted to go with them on the search warrant.
What she wanted was to go back to Jack’s house, curl up next to him, and go to sleep. She wanted to tell him what had happened and hear his reaction. She even wanted to have him scold her for taking another dangerous field trip.
No. She tried to restoke the righteous anger she’d felt earlier today, when Jack was being so stubborn and blind at Main Justice. But all she felt was a bone-deep exhaustion and the creeping fear that, maybe, she had also been in the wrong.
Brett Vale peered
around his Smart car. It was parked on F Street, across from the Building Museum and spitting distance from the FBI’s Washington Field Office. Through the lens of his Canon EOS 40D, the camera he preferred for shooting at night, he watched the officers drive away on 4th Street. He briefly wondered where the group was heading so early in the morning. But that wasn’t what interested him. What really interested him was that Anna Curtis now stood on the empty street corner, alone. He turned the lens back to her slim, solitary figure. She looked so lonely and vulnerable, standing in the yellowish glow of the streetlight. He had to suppress a giggle. It was perfect.
Thursday
43
T
he sky was the medium shade of gray that meant the sun would peek over the horizon any minute. It was 5:59
A.M
., and except for a lone jogger, this residential street on Capitol Hill was quiet. The sidewalks were lined with well-maintained redbrick rowhouses, many of which were divided into two- or three-unit condos. Residents here were highly educated and house proud but, as congressional staffers, not affluent.
The SWAT team trotted toward Vale’s rowhouse, through the front door, and up the steps to the third floor. Sam followed them. Four additional officers guarded the perimeter of the building. The SWAT team would enter and clear the place; then a separate team led by Samantha would do the search. Usually SWAT wouldn’t let the case agent enter with them. But Sam had insisted.
They stood in front of Vale’s door and waited for their watches to read six o’clock. Then they knocked. Announced, “FBI! We have a warrant! Open up!” Counted to thirty. No answer. Took the battering ram to the door. Flooded into the apartment, guns drawn, high-beam flashlights shining around, shouting for anyone inside to come out. Samantha strode in behind them.
As soon as she entered, she flinched at the sight of a blond woman sitting on the couch. The SWAT members saw it, too. Beams from half a dozen flashlights flicked over and settled on the back of the blonde’s head.
“Stand up! Hands up!” a SWAT guy shouted at the blonde. The woman didn’t move. “Dammit, hands up!”
The woman was perfectly still. The SWAT officer swung around and pointed his submachine gun at her face.
“Holy fuck,” he said.
Sam strode over and followed the beam of his flashlight. The blonde on the couch was not a person but a full-sized mannequin
wearing a blond wig. She was dressed in an ivory skirt suit similar to the one Caroline wore when she was killed. Her blue eyes stared blankly ahead. The mannequin’s vacant gaze made Samantha shiver.
From the other rooms, guys were shouting, “Clear.” A couple minutes later, the SWAT leader pronounced, “All clear.” No one was home. Samantha snapped on the panel of lights at the front door.
The SWAT leader pointed her to the bedroom. Another blond mannequin, this one in a lacy black teddy, lay in the bed. In the dining room, a third dummy in jeans and a white sweater sat at the table. The doll’s hands had been carefully positioned around a mug and her head slightly tilted to one side, as if she were listening intently to someone on the other side of the table. Sam guessed that was where Vale sat.
But where was he?
Not SWAT’s problem. Their job was to clear the apartment. The mannequins did not constitute a threat. The SWAT team bade their goodbyes and took off. Sam’s own team would do the search. She radioed them in. Then she walked around the apartment, soaking it all up.
The bachelor pad was stark and neat. The walls were white; the couch beneath the first mannequin was black leather. A sleek black Polk entertainment system dominated one side of the room. Abstract black-and-white photos hung on the walls. The living room had a cathedral ceiling that must have been a bump up from the original rowhouse’s. Sam’s heels clacked on the polished wood floors as she looked around. The overall impression was an exhibit in a modern-art museum.
Sam cursed when she saw that there weren’t pictures of Caroline pasted all over the place. When Nicole had mentioned that, Samantha recalled the homes of a few stalkers she’d investigated before: photos haphazardly tacked up over a desk in a chaotic shrine. That wasn’t the case here. And if Nicole was wrong about that, what else had she gotten wrong? There would be major problems if the witness who was the basis for their warrant proved unreliable.
Sam chewed her lip and gazed at the arty picture hanging over the fireplace. It was an enormous black-and-white photograph of a
smooth white hillside in front of a black sky—artistic, sensual, and abstract. On closer inspection, she saw it wasn’t a hillside. It was the curve of a woman’s hip contrasted against dark sheets.
Sam looked more closely at the other matted, framed photos. One was a woman’s mouth, full and sensual, gleaming with shimmery lipstick. Samantha recognized the mouth. It was Caroline McBride’s. She glanced back at the other pictures and realized they were all Caroline. Here was an artful section of her calf; here was the back of her neck; here were her hands. Farther down the hallway, the images were less abstract, more recognizable. In a series of three framed prints in the hallway, Caroline window-shopped through Georgetown, apparently unaware that she was being followed.
As an evidentiary matter, it was a bonanza. Vale had not only been stalking her, he’d been photographing it. Samantha directed a tech to photograph all the pictures as they were hung on the walls, then seize them as evidence. Nicole had been right. Samantha exhaled a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
Where was the guy’s camera? Samantha directed all of the officers to look out for one. As her team searched room by room, she simply browsed, getting a feel for the obsessively neat man who lived here. His closet was hung with neatly pressed and starched clothes. Even his underwear was folded into perfect tighty-whitey squares.
A small leather tray on his dresser held change but no wallet. Wherever he was, he had his wallet with him. In his medicine cabinet were bottles of Xanax and some herbal energy mega-supplements from a sketchy-sounding website.
If the apartment were a treasure map, the kitchen was where the X would go. Samantha opened the oven and found what would be the center of her homicide case against Brett Vale: A Fendi purse sat on the top oven rack.
Sam signaled the tech to take a photograph. Then, with gloved hands, she took out the purse and opened it up. There was a matching wallet. Inside was Caroline McBride’s Georgetown ID. Vale must have picked up the purse as he ran away. And then he hadn’t been able to bring himself to throw it out.
Sam looked at the picture of the pretty student whose life had
ended at the Capitol. Before she was a homicide victim—before she was Washington’s most expensive escort—Caroline McBride had been a smiling, hopeful girl on her first day of college.
A voice interrupted her thoughts. “We got it.”
Sam looked up from the wallet. Steve Quisenberry was holding up a fancy black camera with a big telephoto lens.
“Where was it?” she asked, setting down the wallet and taking the camera.
“Front hall closet. There are a few more and a bunch of memory cards. Guy likes cameras.”
Sam didn’t know much about photography, but this Nikon looked expensive. It was large and black, with a lens big enough to wrap your hand around and a screen on the back for viewing pictures. Samantha flicked it on. She scrolled through the pictures on the screen going backward, through the date stamps, seeing the older ones first.
The first photographs were of a stone mansion surrounded by a garden of flowers. The sky was dark, but the lights blazed in the first-floor windows. Samantha recognized the house.
“That’s Madeleine Connor’s place,” Quisenberry said.
“Yeah.” Samantha nodded. “And look at the time stamp.”
The orange text on the corner read 8/7/12. The night the madam had been killed.
“He killed Madeleine Connor so we wouldn’t learn about his relationship with Caroline.” Samantha said the words slowly, trying out the theory. “But what did he do with her record books? Are they here?”
“Haven’t found ’em.”
Sam kept flipping through the pictures on the Nikon. Now there were photographs of a young blond woman on the street. At first Samantha thought they were more pictures of Caroline. They had the same far-off voyeuristic feel as the ones Vale had mounted on his walls. But the woman’s hair was slightly different, the features distinct. By the third photo, Samantha realized that these were not pictures of the dead escort—the subject of these photos was Anna Curtis.
One after the other, Samantha paged through shots of the pretty prosecutor: getting into the Dodge Durango with Samantha, walking alone on Pennsylvania Avenue, standing outside the main Justice Building with Jack.
Yesterday.
Vale must have staked out the U.S. Attorney’s Office, photographing and following Anna as she came and went.
“Oh, shit,” Samantha said.
She unclipped her phone and called Anna. There was no answer.
44
J
ack walked down the hall in his pajama bottoms and poked his head into Olivia’s room. “Morning, kiddo. Time to get dressed.”
Olivia was playing with Kara and Darren, her favorite African-American Barbie dolls, by her Dream House in the corner. The dolls were having an argument about whether or not to get married. Olivia looked up at him and nodded somberly. “Can Anna help me get dressed today, Daddy?”