“Figured out what?” I demanded.
The FBI agent pulled out an iPad and called up every picture Mulch had sent me so that they were all visible, side by side. He held the screen out to me. I couldn’t bear to look at them until he said, “Notice anything odd when you look at them all at once?”
Steeling myself, ignoring the pain in my skull, I forced my gaze onto Nana Mama’s corpse, and then Bree’s, Damon’s, Jannie’s, and Ali’s. They were all in virtually the same position.
“Mulch killed them in a ritualistic manner,” I said. “Fetishizing their death.”
“I thought about that,” Ava said.
I looked at her again, this time in surprise. “You did?”
“I used to listen to you talk to Bree about your jobs,” she said defensively. “And, I dunno, the pictures seemed too ritualistic.”
Before I could reply, Sampson twirled his finger, said, “Get to it, Ava.”
Ava nodded, stepped up beside the bed. She took the iPad from Mahoney, tapped at the screen, and then turned the device so I saw it horizontally. The pictures of Bree and Jannie showed in split screen one atop the other. Ava gestured to the gunshot wounds, said, “They’re the same.”
“Of course they look alike,” I said. “He shot them in the same place.”
“They’re the same,” she insisted, and then pointed to the blood pooled around their faces. “It’s pretty much the same here, too, like the same amount of blood, and the shape of it. And notice these spatters?”
I didn’t see it at first, but then I flashed on my nightmare, and how Mulch had told me to assume the same position in that perfect puddle of blood. My subconscious had seen what Ava had seen. It had been trying to tell me the same thing.
I nodded in shock. “They’re nearly identical.”
Sampson said, “Ava spotted it, snuck out, and brought your phone to my house. I’d been at work with Ned since you gave me Nana Mama’s phone yesterday evening. Billie brought Ava to us downtown, and she quickly convinced us after we blew the pictures up on a computer screen.”
Mahoney nodded. “I had the skeleton crew on duty at Quantico do a quick analysis to confirm our take. There’s no doubt that every one of those pictures was Photoshopped. A very good job, but Photoshopped.”
A glimmer of optimism began to glow in my chest. Was it possible? Were they alive? Could they be?
Chapter
111
Then the skeptic in me took hold, said, “Why would Mulch do this?”
“Trying to break you, I suspect,” Mahoney said.
“But why?” I insisted.
“You’ll be able to ask him when we find him,” Sampson said. “And by the way, we believe his name is not Thierry Mulch. It’s Preston Elliot; he’s a graduate student in computer science at Georgetown.”
My head hurt again. “Wait, what?”
Mahoney said, “John called me right after you gave him Nana Mama’s phone. We’ve been on Mulch ever since, and on you, by the way.”
I squinted at him. “How’s that?”
“Well, what did you think, that we weren’t going to get your house under surveillance?” the FBI agent replied. “We had two teams trailing you on your long walk last night. We honestly had no idea what you were up to, and you weren’t answering your phone, so we figured Mulch had contacted you and you were going to meet him.”
It took a few moments for that to sink in, but then I said, “But how do you know Mulch’s real name is Preston Elliot?”
“DNA, luck, a sex crimes report out of Alexandria, and complaints in Georgetown and Bethesda,” Sampson replied, frowning. “But not in that order.”
He explained that one of the first things he and Mahoney had done was to run criminal database searches on Thierry Mulch.
Sampson added, “We got our first break through a rape case in Alexandria last week. A woman named Claudia Dickerson, twenty-eight, a CPA, reported that a man who kept referring to himself as Mr. Mulch had attacked her and her boyfriend, Richard Nelson, at her front door. Mulch forced them inside her apartment, knocked Nelson cold, and then raped Ms. Dickerson from behind. She never saw his face, but he left DNA.”