Chapter 3: A Few Thorns of Our Own
Bullpen, Hoover Building
Monday, 31 May 2004
8 am
Myles headed for the Bullpen in much better shape than he'd thought possible in the midst of such a case. Elizabeth had gone home at 10, since she had a seminar this morning before her appointments, but her presence last night had made the difference. His evening had been restful, his sleep dreamless, and he was ready to dive back into work with a vengeance.
Dimitrius, writing something on the board as Myles entered, looked over at him with a knowing smile. "Told you," he said quietly, grinning.
Myles altered his course toward his desk just enough to take him close to the older agent. "You did," he replied, lowering his voice as well. "And lunch is on me today, as thanks." He shed his suit coat, tossed it onto his chair, flipped open a file and rolled up his sleeves while he was reading it. He then picked it up and swung around.
"All right," he addressed the room. "What have we got new this morning?"
Tara was just finishing up stapling printouts as they gathered around. "That query you had me run?" she started, handing copies around. "The last two years' worth of mail orders from all the companies in the US that carry black roses. There weren't as many as I thought, but there's still a lot to go through."
"And," Bobby commented with a sigh, "odds are, ninety percent of them are little old ladies trying to impress the rest of their Garden Clubs." His tone indicated he didn't relish spending all day on the phone.
"Well, little old ladies or not," Jack grinned, "it needs to get done. Let's get to it."
Everyone called off a page to work on and headed for their desks— all except Myles. He was still standing by his desk, looking at the autopsy reports. He seemed completely lost in thought.
After a moment, Bobby looked up. "Patton not joining his troops in the trenches, mate?" he quipped.
Myles blinked, looked at the Aussie hard for a minute, then said, "Bobby, come with me."
The tone of his voice brought heads up all around, and even Levi was sufficiently spooked to place a paw on Sue's knee to get her attention. Myles strode out of the room and Bobby, with a raised eyebrow at Jack on his way by, followed without a word. They could tell he was gearing up for a verbal battle.
"Uh-oh," Tara said, "I wondered how long this would take."
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Myles was waiting for him in one of the conference rooms, his arms folded, staring out the window. Bobby leaned against the table, trying to gauge exactly how angry the blond agent was, and how far he could push before Myles rammed him up against a wall. He was generally pretty accurate— he'd only gotten to that wall once in the nearly four years they'd worked together.
Suddenly, Myles whirled to face him. "You're the chemist in our little group. Is there anything found naturally that could be distilled or otherwise turned into an injectable anticoagulant?"
The retort on Bobby's lips died instantly. "I— excuse me?"
"You heard me. Is there any way the Black Rose could cook up a batch of his very own 'bleeders' brew'?" Myles was dead serious, and Bobby realized the Harvard grad hadn't even heard his snide comment in the Bullpen.
The Aussie shook his head slightly, then stared into space for a moment, thinking. "I'd have to do a little checking on that, but it's possible. Where'd this idea come from, anyway?"
Myles slapped the autopsy report against the table and leaned forward on his hands. "Because that's the first thing they should have been able to trace in all this. If the Rose was buying it somewhere, it would leave some kind of a trail. If it was disappearing from a hospital or a clinic, somebody would have reported it, certainly after that little tidbit was released to the media. But there's been nothing. I want to know why."
Bobby stared at him for a minute, stunned again at just how deeply his colleague was diving into the intricacies of this case, without the characteristic sarcasm that always seemed, strangely, to keep them all balanced on the keenest edge of their game. Then he nodded. "I'll go check with a friend of mine in the Biochemistry department at Georgetown. If anyone would know how to brew up a mix of something like that, she would." Myles motioned go with his hand, and Bobby headed for the door.
"Oh, Bobby?" Myles hadn't moved.
"Yeah?"
"'Patton' will join his troops when he's finished with the battle plans, if that's all right with you." It was accompanied by an almost-grin, but the Aussie knew he'd struck a nerve just the same.
He nodded, sketched a salute at his friend, but the derisive tone was gone. "Righto, General Sir. I'll let you know what I find out."
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Bobby was back a couple of hours later; his friend at Georgetown University was doing a little research and would have an answer for him tomorrow. After his report, he grabbed a sheet of mail orders without complaint and got busy. By now Myles was working on that same project as well.
After a long day on the phones, they were all worn out, so they called it a night. Before he left, Myles spent another several minutes staring hard at the board, trying to figure out what he was missing. It was starting to eat at him that something was just beyond his reach.
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Tuesday wasn't much better. Bobby and Jack came back from the university with less than satisfying news.
"It's more possible than I'd thought, and easier," Bobby said. "To the tune of a saline solution mixed with aspirin and warfarin." He paused to spell it for Sue. "It's prescribed for patients at risk for blood clots, which can cause strokes."
"But it's also used in your garden-variety rat poison," Jack continued. "You get someone with even a bit of chemistry knowledge, they can distill out the water-soluble portions of the rat poison, until it's just the warfarin."
"Shelley said it'd make the warfarin even more effective to mix it with aspirin, which is also a blood thinner," Bobby resumed. "The aspirin would just about double the efficiency of it."
"So there's no way to trace it," Dimitrius sighed, glancing over at Myles. He could see the vise starting to tighten on the taller agent's nerves as every possible lead came up empty.
"What did we end up with on the mail orders?" His voice revealed his tension as well.
Tara answered. "We still have a couple of pages to take care of, but so far nothing suspicious. Pretty much like Bobby said – 'little old ladies trying to impress their Garden Clubs.'"
Myles sighed. "I don't suppose ERT has come up with anything new?"
Jack shook his head. "If they have, they aren't telling us. I think Melanie's getting tired of me calling every hour."
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The frustration continued through Wednesday and Thursday as well. Every hour ticked off was one step closer to another murder, and there was nothing to go on. Finally, they resorted to an all out free-for-all session over Chinese takeout Thursday evening. No idea would be considered too far-fetched to bring up.
Something, somewhere, had to give. Jack just hoped fervently that it wasn't going to be one of his team. The "countdown to disaster syndrome" was getting to all of them, but one colleague in particular was taking the brunt of it.
He watched Myles now, as the chatter wound back and forth across the room. The blond agent hadn't touched his food, and was staring off into space, absently twirling one of his chopsticks between his fingers. His expression indicated that he was listening intently to the ideas being tossed out, but nothing was clicking and it was slowly driving him to the edge.
More than once in the past four days, Jack had seriously considered reassigning the case to someone else. But he knew that if he did, Myles would take it as a personal failure and likely be worse than he was right now. He'd wait another day or so; if things got worse, he'd go talk to Garrett about it.
He stretched, listening as the banter blended together in his thoughts, became one mind…
"Maybe the Rose has something against Ivy League? Harvard's in Cambridge, then Princeton?"
"Where does that leave Baltimore and DC? Johns Hopkins might be prestigious, but it's not Ivy League."
And Princeton's the only city where the victims were on a college campus."
"Well, how about just big cities? It does look like the Rose is working his way down the Eastern seaboard?"
"Then why Cambridge? You want a big city, Boston's right next door. And why skip New York?"
"Okay, apparently our connection isn't in the cities."
"What about that weird anticoagulant? If he's going to kill them anyway, why go to the trouble? Why not simply rip open their throats?"
Jack jumped on that one and came out of his thoughts quickly. "You're right, Lucy. Why not simply rip open their throats? It's this precision that gets me wondering. The Rose obviously has an agenda— there's too much careful planning in this, so that nothing is traceable, yet the victims seem to be random."
There was silence in the room as they all let that sink in, and Jack took the opportunity to steal a glance at Myles. The chopstick had stopped twirling, and a blue-grey glare seemed to be boring its way through the wall. After a moment, the blond agent slowly pulled his feet off his desk and sat up, still staring at the wall, but Jack suspected that something had triggered a thought. "Myles?" he asked. He then motioned to the others to keep going with the current train of brainstorming.
Bobby picked up the signal immediately, and just started talking, letting the idea flow freely. "He picks out two girls in each city, for whatever reason. They're all mid-twenties to early thirties, all work in some kind of service-geared job. Ellen Nichols and Nancy Davis, in Cambridge, were a paralegal and an insurance agent, respectively."
"Esther Johnson was a graduate student at Princeton, in their Psychology department, and Leslie Dentin was an undergraduate in Education. Both of them were found in classroom buildings that were pretty much empty on the night in question. The Rose didn't want an audience."
Tara joined in. "In Baltimore, Elaine Foster was an interior decorator for the wealthier end of the city, found in a park where she often walked at night, but not many others did. The other victim, Amanda Dearborn, was a teacher, but—"
"Their professions had nothing to do with it." The soft voice startled them all into realizing just how quiet Myles had been all day. "They have nothing to do with it." He was still staring at the wall.
"Then what—" Bobby started to ask a question, then realized he didn't know what to ask after such a declaration.
Myles finally turned to them all, but he was looking straight at Dimitrius. "They're symbols."
The older agent's eyes got wide and he sat forward in his chair. "The Rose is hunting, and these are merely markers." Myles nodded.
Lucy waved a hand. "Okay, woah and back up. You lost me."
"Same here." It came from Bobby, Sue and Tara in chorus.
Myles cocked an eyebrow at Jack, who thought hard for a minute. "You mean, he's setting something else up, something that has nothing to do with any one of these girls, but somehow has something symbolic to do with all of them. His agenda is still somewhere down the road."
The taller agent nodded. "And we have no idea what that agenda is. But he chose Cambridge, Princeton, Baltimore and Washington DC for a specific reason. And he bothers with the anticoagulant because it allows all the life to drain from his victims, slowly, torturously if they'd been conscious. It's symbolic. If I had to wager a guess, it would be that if he reaches his intended target, he won't be so merciful. Whoever it is will be fully conscious for whatever he has planned."
Bobby's eyes were wide now as well. "So, if he sticks to his schedule, Sunday will be another 'calling card;' the exact same thing we saw with Eve Harcourt. Then what? Is he done?"
"He's either done, in which case he'll zero in on his prey next, or he has more cities to mark up before he's done," Dimitrius said gravely.
"So how can we stop him? We can't very well watch every woman in the DC area." Sue replied.
Myles turned and looked at the board and the table full of case files. He pointed to it as he turned back to face Sue. "The answer is in there somewhere. Finding it is our only chance."
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He'd declined to go home that evening, but chose instead to grab a few hours sleep on a cot in the lounge. It wasn't that he wouldn't have loved to spend another quiet evening with Elizabeth, but he felt he needed to stay and find some way to break through the wall surrounding them on this case.
It's not like I've been very good company the past two evenings anyway, he thought as he stared at the dark ceiling. She could probably use a break.
He finally drifted off after a half hour of tossing and turning….
Eve Harcourt's lifeless body stared up at him from the floor of the mall offices area, blood now flowing from her throat like a river. He backed away, only to bump into something else at his feet. He spun around and saw six more bodies, all freshly bleeding, staring at him in accusation. He looked around for a way out, but every door was shut and sealed. Blood was now up to his ankles. He turned around and saw a door that hadn't been there before, and he leapt for it, skidding slightly. It gave way, and he ran through it, slamming the door shut and leaning against it, trying to slow the pounding of his heart. Then a soft sound behind him made him turn— and gasp.
He was in a garden. Beautiful roses surrounded him, every color of the spectrum, it seemed. They were in full bloom, carefully cared for, utterly perfect. He walked toward them, through them, marveling at the contrast between the scene he'd just left and this one.
Suddenly, the roses opened into a small clearing. There, in the middle of it, was a stone bench with an eighth woman lying on it. He didn't recognize her, but she was very beautiful. Her eyes were closed, and a bouquet of white roses were loosely held in her hands, as if she'd fallen asleep while admiring them. He was drawn to her, even though some distant part of him was screaming to stay away.
He knelt down next to her. As he reached for her slim hand, he heard a whisper echo across the garden:
O, snatched away in beauty's bloom,
On thee shall press no ponderous tomb;
But on thy turf shall roses rear
Their leaves, the earliest of the year;
And the wild cypress wave in tender gloom:…
He watched in horror as vines began to shoot out of the ground all around the bench, twining around the woman's body, sealing her in. Just as they were about to reach her face, her eyes opened.
Emerald green eyes...her hair turned raven's wing black, and blood-red tears streamed down her cheeks as the vines burst forth into roses. Black roses. A high-pitched laugh screeched across the sky as the vines closed over Elizabeth's face...
Myles shot up off the cot, gasping for air. It took him a minute to register where he was, and every technique he'd learned in counseling to stave off a genuine panic attack. After a few minutes, he got up and went into the bathroom to splash some cold water on his face. Here we go again, he thought as he surveyed the haunted eyes in the mirror. It always came back to someone I knew showing up in my nightmares. I never realized how much I HATED working in VCD— until now.
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Bullpen, Hoover Building
Friday, June 4 20047 p.m.
Myles had sent everyone else home again, but he still couldn't shake the feeling that he was missing something. He'd been over every report a dozen times at least, had spent so much time staring at the map and photos on the board that he could see them even when his eyes were closed.
He leaned back in his chair for a moment, running his hands through his hair and stretching a bit, trying to work a kink out of his neck. It didn't work— partially because the physical kink was only half the problem. It was Friday night; if the Black Rose held to his schedule, another body would turn up in less than 36 hours, and they had no idea who would be the victim or where they would be found. He had no idea who or where, and it was eating at him like a colony of ants across his skin.
He stood abruptly, trying to shake off the frustration, pacing in an attempt to outdistance it. One dead-end lead after another. Who is this nutcase, what does he or she want? Where's the pattern? A serial killer always has a pattern. Something, one small detail I'm missing. Why these women, these cities, why, why, WHY? He doubled up a fist and drove it into the filing cabinet.
"Did that help?" A soft voice reached him, and he spun around to see Elizabeth leaning against the door frame.
"No!" It came out before he could stop it, and the rest followed as his frustration found a target and zeroed in. "Nothing helps! We have everything we can find on this guy, everything I need to get inside his head and I'm hitting a brick wall! And nothing you, or anyone else, can do or say can change that! He's still out there, he's still hunting, and we're this close to losing another life to this idiot's sick head!"
"You're doing the best you can, Myles." Her voice was even. "No one can expect more than that."
"It's not whether or not someone expects it, Elizabeth! It's what I have to do! Those girls didn't expect to die, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. It doesn't matter what limits I think I have, I have to get past them and I can't."
She surveyed him thoughtfully for a moment. "Why do you have to do this alone? Where's the rest of the team?"
"I sent them home," he replied flatly, turning away. "I needed the quiet to think."
"Just because you're the case agent, it doesn't mean you have to do all the thinking." She put a bit of force into her voice to try to get her point across.
It was apparently the wrong moment, because he swung around, leveled a finger at her and growled, "I don't need an analysis, Elizabeth. So drop it."
"I'm not trying to—"
He cut her off. "Yes. You are."
"Now we're back to you reading my mind?" she snapped before she could bite it back. "We know how well that went the last time."
The retort stopped him only for a second. Then he turned, wrenched his chair out and dropped into it, picking up the reports again. "I have work to do."
She walked over to him, dropping a parcel onto his desk. "Fine. You want solitude, you've got it. There's dinner, by the way. I simply thought you could use a break from the hell you're putting yourself through. But you're enjoying it far too much. Good night." She strode out, not even giving him a backward glance.
Myles stared after her for a moment, not even fully realizing what had just happened. Then the rage at himself and the whole situation resurfaced and he slammed his fist against the filing cabinet again. It didn't help any more than it had the first time; still full of frustration, he bent back to the reports, scouring them yet again for the one detail he knew he was missing.