The People vs. Alex Cross (Alex Cross 25)

“Five, six months ago? One of my techs was out doing a residential satellite install in Gaithersburg. She’s in the house not ten minutes, comes out, and the van’s gone. Boosted in broad daylight. They disabled the tracking device. Six weeks go by, and the company’s written it off, figured it was looted and chopped up for parts. But then we get a call. Pennsylvania state troopers found it abandoned in long-term parking at the Harrisburg airport. It’s crazy, but they didn’t take a thing. That van was as clean and shipshape as it was when it was stolen. Someone just took it for a joyride.”

“No,” Sampson said. “Someone took it to kidnap two teenage girls who a

re still being held captive and terrorized to satisfy the twisted fantasies of Internet trolls.”

“Oh,” Potter said, his face turning pale. “I had no idea.”

“Who was the driver the day it was stolen?” I said.

“Lourdes Rodriguez,” he said. “One of my best employees ever.”

“Can we talk with Ms. Rodriguez?”

“She doesn’t work here anymore,” Potter said. “Lucky gal inherited a pile of money from a great-uncle and took this job and shoved it a few months ago.”

Sampson said, “I guess the glamour of being a satellite installer wasn’t enough to keep her on the Dish Network career path.”

The store manager gave him an odd look, said, “Who could blame her?”

“No one,” I said. “You have contact information for Ms. Rodriguez?”

“I’m sure I do somewhere.”

“Could you do us a solid and dig it up?”

Potter’s nose twitched as if he thought the task beneath him, but he went inside.

“Why take nothing?” I said.

“How many people without training know how to install satellites?” Sampson said. “And I can’t imagine they’re easy to sell on the black market. They say Dish all over—”

“Agent Mahoney?” Karen Getty, an FBI crime scene tech, called out.

Getty was standing at the rear of the van wearing disposable white coveralls, latex gloves, and blue booties over her shoes. The two rear doors of the van were open, revealing shelves, boxes of supplies, six satellite dishes, and stacked rolls of cable.

“You’re going to want to see this,” Getty said.

We all went to the rear of the van, which looked spotless.

“Kill the lights,” she said.

The interior lights died. So did the spots brought in to illuminate the search. She picked up a bottle marked LUMINOL and started spraying it around.

Luminol is a compound that glows when it’s exposed to certain substances, like the iron in hemoglobin. When someone tries to clean up blood, traces of it are left behind; spray that area with luminol, and the chemical glows blue for a brief period.

There were a few blood spatters immediately visible on the van floor close to the doors. The more Getty sprayed, the more spatters appeared, until it looked like a starry night had been superimposed on the van’s floor, ceiling, and walls.

“What the hell is that?” Potter said. The manager had come up behind us.

Sampson looked at him and said, “Evidence of a slaughter.”

CHAPTER

95

THE NEXT MORNING, Sampson and I drove to the address of the woman who’d been driving the van the night it was stolen. Lourdes Rodriguez lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, on the eighth floor of a large, midpriced, brick-faced apartment building.

At the locked front door, we buzzed Rodriguez’s apartment number, 805, and got no answer. We figured that with an apartment building that big, there might be a live-in superintendent, and we lucked out when Arnie Feiffer answered our ring and soon buzzed us in.