I gave them both a kiss good-bye, and kept on moving, out the back door.
CHAPTER
92
SHEILA BISHOP’S APARTMENT WAS HALF OF A TURRETED BRICK AND STONE town house on the north side of Logan Circle. Other than a handful of people watching their dogs run around John Logan’s statue, and the usual daytime traffic, it was quiet when I got there. No reporters, anyway. That was a relative blessing.
Most of the investigative team was on-site, along with the Mobile Crime Unit from Forensics. They had techs in blue windbreakers on the front door, up and down the stairs, and all over the master bedroom, where Ms. Bishop’s body had been discovered by a housekeeper a few hours earlier.
That’s also where I found Valente. He was kneeling by the body, and looking from Ms. Bishop to each of the doors and windows when I came in.
She’d been shot once in the chest, and by all appearances had collapsed in front of the open double doors of her walk-in closet. I couldn’t say for sure, but it looked like Ms. Bishop was wearing the same clothes she’d had on when she left Dr. Creem’s house.
A Barneys shopping bag was on the bed, with her evening gown and shoes inside. And according to Valente, the tub in the adjoining bathroom was just under half full.
“Looks to me like she came in, left the bag on the bed, and started drawing a bath,” he said. “Then she comes back out here to get undressed, and bam. He’s waiting for her in the closet. No signs of forced entry, either. Creem could have easily had a key to this place.”
Most of what Valente had worked out made sense to me—except for the part about Creem himself.
“I watched him put her in a cab at three in the morning,” I said. “He didn’t go anywhere after that. At least not before five. There’s no way he could have beaten her over here.”
“I guess the question then is time of death,” Valente said.
“That’s one question,” I said.
“Detectives?”
Errico and I both turned around to see Manny Lapore, one of the forensic techs, standing in the door to the bathroom. He was holding up a clear acrylic lifter with the dark impression of a handprint on it. Even at a glance, the print was too big to have come from Ms. Bishop.
“I got this off the bathroom tile over the tub,” Lapore said. “There’s a couple of matching partials on the hot and cold taps, too. Could be something.”
My first thought was that the killer had gone in to turn off the tub, to avoid an attention-drawing flood in the bathroom. My second thought was that it seemed like a pretty sloppy mistake—unless he just didn’t care. Or wasn’t thinking straight.
We followed Lapore downstairs to see what, if anything, this print turned up. With the mobile automated fingerprint ID scanners we’re now using, a process that used to take hours—not to mention a trip to the lab—can happen anywhere, and in a matter of minutes. I didn’t even have time to check in with Bree before Lapore had found a match and was printing off the results.
“Here’s your guy,” he said, handing me the report. “Does the name Joshua Bergman mean anything to you?”
CHAPTER
93
I CAUGHT UP WITH BREE ON THE PHONE WHILE VALENTE AND I DROVE FROM Logan Circle over to M Street, where Josh Bergman lived. There was no new word about Ava. It was all eerily quiet on that front.
Meanwhile, I had to focus on this if I could.
It can take an hour or more to pull SWAT together, but that was time we didn’t have. Instead we dispatched a quick in-house team for the operation. Within thirty minutes, we had five tactically trained officers with one sergeant all ready to go in a parking lot on Water Street, a block from Bergman’s building.
Bergman had a high-dollar loft on the top floor of a converted flour mill, from Georgetown’s nineteenth-century industrial days. Word from our spotter, stationed on the roof behind his, was that Bergman seemed to be home alone.
After a fast briefing with Commander D’Auria, we piled into two plain white panel vans and pulled around the block. The drivers stopped in front, the van doors slid open, and we made a beeline for the entrance.
Besides the half dozen tactical personnel, the entry team included me, Valente, and two more D-1 detectives from Major Case Squad, winding our way up the three flights of stairs to the top. We had officers stationed around the block, EMTs on standby, and D’Auria with a small crew in a mobile command center back down on Water Street.
The breach team was armed with AR-15 rifles and SIG P226 sidearms. Tasers and pepper spray were standard issue as well.
I had my Glock out, for the first time since I’d been reinstated. All of us wore Kevlar, too. We had more than enough manpower to take Bergman in, but he was very possibly armed and dangerous. Maybe also a little desperate. He might try to get off a few shots of his own.
When we got to the third-floor landing, the sergeant at the head of the line wagged two fingers at a pair of officers, who came forward with the forty-five pound battering ram they’d carried up. Everyone was wired with headsets, but the protocol was for radio silence once we’d entered the building.