Unsolved (Invisible #2) - James Patterson Page 0,70
a serial murderer.
Even if you catch him, you’ll never convict him. Dr. Lia Janus could be right about that. But I’ll worry about a conviction later.
The parking-lot video is stopped at the moment when the wheelchair man—Darwin—first enters the picture. He was smart, avoiding the camera until he had no choice, and even at that point he was already turned so that he was captured only briefly in profile before he turned his back and moved down toward Nora Connolley’s car. But the brief profile glimpse isn’t much.
“Nothing,” Rabbit says, looking over my shoulder at the computer screen. “Between the baseball cap, the wraparound sunglasses, his jacket collar pulled up—”
“And his face turned away,” I add.
“Facial recognition won’t have anything to play with. We can’t see his face.”
And certainly there’s no moon on his face, whatever that might mean.
I sit back in my chair. “COPD,” I say. “Of all the luck. Mayday has a lung disease that could’ve caused his death.”
“Is it luck?” Rabbit asks. “Or is it deliberate? Is he picking out victims that way? So the autopsies won’t be conclusive? So there will be an alternative possible cause of death?”
The thought occurred to me too—that Darwin was choosing people with medical problems that could disguise their murders, even after an autopsy. But I just don’t see it. “Darwin couldn’t have known Mayday had COPD. It doesn’t even seem like Mayday knew it. It hadn’t been treated. He wasn’t receiving medical care. No,” I say, shaking my head, “Mayday wasn’t someone Darwin chose after lengthy research. He didn’t choose him at all. He needed Mayday’s spot across from the payday-loan store to do surveillance before the bombing. And he had to kill Mayday because Mayday had seen Darwin’s face.”
Rabbit moans in agreement.
“There’s gotta be something on this video,” I say, trying to recapture the momentum. “What about the wheelchair itself? Anything distinctive?”
Rabbit hums as she leans forward.
“We know it’s automated,” I say. “He wasn’t rolling it by hand. The little control thing—the joystick?—must be on the right side, because I can’t see it on the left. Is that unusual?”
“A right-handed remote? Wouldn’t think so. Actually, I have no idea.”
Me either. “We can’t tell the color from a black-and-white image. You see anything that looks like a brand-name label on there?”
She doesn’t. I don’t either. The picture is too grainy.
“Seems like a nice one,” she says. “It has front and rear wheels. When I had knee-replacement surgery, they put me in a simple two-wheeler that I had to roll myself, and the wheels were skinny. And the seat sure as heck wasn’t leather. This is a four-wheeler, and those back wheels are thick enough to be bicycle tires.”
“Okay.” I nod. “So we have a four-wheel, leather, remote-powered wheelchair. And we think he’s local, so—Virginia? Maryland? Everyone in a wheelchair who lives in Virginia or Maryland or the District of Columbia. Who has a moon on his face.”
Rabbit is silent, unmoving.
“Am I missing something?” I ask.
“Hang on.” She leans closer. “What is…that? On the…left arm of the chair.”
“His arm is on the left arm of the chair. His forearm and elbow—”
“No, underneath. The arm of the chair. It’s leather.”
“Yeah, that seems right.” I look closer. I see something too. Something on the leather arm…like…
“Like a sticker,” Rabbit says. “A bumper sticker. A decal. Zoom in.”
I do as she asks, but when the camera zooms forward, the image only gets blurrier.
“Let’s send it to the lab,” I say.
“Lab, schmab.”
Rabbit and I both turn around. Eric Pullman looks like a Howdy Doody puppet, his chin perched on the top of his cubicle divider as he peers down at us.
“Pully,” says Rabbit, “aren’t you supposed to be minding your own business and solving the Citizen David case?”
His grin is so wide, his eyes practically disappear. “Give me the rest of the day with that image,” he says, “and I’ll tell you what it is.”
69
IN ONE of the Bureau’s myriad conference rooms, Dwight Ross, Elizabeth Ashland, and I sit, turned toward the screen on the wall, where Dr. Olympia Janus has just completed her summary.
Dwight lets out a sigh of disgust. “So, Agent Janus, best guess is natural causes.”
“Best guess,” Lia says, no longer at the morgue. She’s now at the FBI field office in Chicago, and the image is much better than it was over our Skype call earlier today, but her message is no better, and it’s even more depressing to hear it the second time.