thought existed only in the accounts of Saudi oil princes.
Their family would continue happily after he was gone, his suffering long forgotten. The loss of his own family so many years before might have tipped another man over the edge, but even with a past tinged with such sadness Tyrell had carried on stoically until now.
“Who pulled your chain?” Lopez asked as she glided elegantly toward him and tossed a fat wad of papers onto his desk.
“Powell,” he said. “What are these?”
“Results of the ICMP search. Worth a look, if I were you.”
Tyrell reluctantly picked up the papers and sifted through them.
“Fourteen possible matches,” he observed, scanning images of individuals broadly matching the search criteria he had advised.
“Fifteen, actually, but one of ’em turned up dead this morning over in Prince George’s with a bullet through his skull.”
“Any links?”
“Nope, he was a loner and bum,” Lopez said. “He’s not a match.”
Tyrell scanned the rest of the sheets, and then began recognizing images. “That’s one of our guys.”
“I put the other two with him at the back,” Lopez smiled brightly.
Tyrell scanned the next two sheets quickly before looking up at her. “When were they reported missing?”
“All three of them vanished from the DC area in the last three weeks. Two are more or less regular guys, some petty misdemeanors between them. But our man Alpha was straight as an arrow, not so much as a parking ticket on record.”
“I’ll be damned, abduction. And in this case that means homicide.”
“You wanna get ready to give me an even bigger pat on the back?”
Tyrell leaned back in his chair and grinned at his beaming colleague. There weren’t many people who could make him smile these days, but Lopez could.
“Go for your life.”
“I called the examiner’s office and got Fry back on the line, had him run a quick analysis of the hydrogen sulphide he found in Alpha’s body. Fry couldn’t trace it to an origin because the component chemicals are common enough, so I ran the results of his autopsy through the database instead to see what came up.”
“Stop tugging my dick and cut to the chase.”
“MPD recorded an identical trace mixture in the blood pathology of a victim who turned up on Fourth District two weeks ago. They were unable to determine anything except that it probably occurred as a result of an unspecified medical procedure.”
“Another cold lead?” Tyrell asked.
“Well, the victim doesn’t recall much about the procedure itself.”
Tyrell almost fell out of his chair. “The victim’s alive?”
“He is. He’s a twenty-six-year-old former crackhead from Columbia Heights, an African American of Ethiopian descent, apparently. The Heights are not our zone so we don’t have any jurisdiction.”
“Is he a reliable witness?” Tyrell demanded, ignoring her last comment.
“The kid’s not quite all there, Lucas. Whatever he went through must’ve scrambled his brain. He’s been sectioned into a private hospital.”
“Goddamn,” Tyrell murmured. “You did good, Nicola.”
“Maybe,” Lopez said. “However, the subject’s history doesn’t match our victim in any way. He’s a first-rate gang color from the Heights, well known to the MPD before this happened.”
Tyrell looked back at the three missing-persons sheets. “Who were these guys?”
Lopez frowned as she glanced at the pages.
“Well, all of them had families and, holy of holies, Alpha had thigh surgery in his early twenties after an automobile accident. The serial code matches the titanium pin pulled by Dr. Fry. The families have been informed and Fourth District PD is talkin’ to them right now.”
Tyrell felt a sinking melancholy as he considered the loss that the families would be feeling.
“What did they do for a living?”
“That’s the weird thing,” she replied. “Two of the guys worked construction, but Alpha was some big-shot scientist, a man named Joseph Coogan. He had a PhD in biochemistry and had worked at MIT of all places.”
Tyrell took a deep breath before heaving himself out of his chair.
“Let’s go and see what our survivor has to say for himself.”
NEW COVENANT CHURCH
IVY CITY, WASHINGTON DC
Kelvin Patterson sat in silence in the broad office that dominated the rear of the purpose-built church. Broad windows behind him looked out over the distant rolling plains of New Jersey beyond the surface of the Potomac River, the light reflected off the water shimmering across the wall of the office. The towering chrome crucifix dominated the wall to his right, looming over a small altar, while before him on his mahogany desk a monitor beside a large bronze eagle displayed a newsfeed showing Senator Isaiah Black being interviewed by jostling news