“I wouldn’t doubt it,” I said, and laughed.
This was getting out of hand, though. I knew about crazy hours as well as the next guy, but leaving the house before Nana Mama even gets her kitchen up and running for the day? That is the definition of “early.”
Chapter 68
ALL OF THE EARLY-MORNING buses were lined up on the street outside Union Station when I got there.
Sampson had already shut down the rear terminal, and there were traffic cops in orange vests everywhere, pointing people to where they needed to go. One more colossal headache, but at least it wasn’t mine.
I pulled around back and walked up from street level to the cavernous main deck of the parking garage. Sampson was waiting for me with a large coffee in each hand.
“I’m hating this one, sugar. Hating it real bad,” he said, handing over my morning fuel.
We walked toward the back, where I could see a row of big brown Dumpsters against the wall on the H Street side. Only one of them was sitting open.
“Nude this time,” Sampson said. “And the numbers are all down her back. You’ll see. Also, it looks like she was stabbed instead of beaten to death. All in all, a real nasty scene.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s do this. See what we’ve got.” I slipped on my gloves and stepped up to survey the damage.
She was facedown on top of the refuse inside — mostly bags of garbage from the terminal. The numbers were etched into her skin in two parallel rows on either side of the spine. It wasn’t an equation, though. This was something else.
N38°55’46.1598"
W94°40’3.5256"
“Are those GPS coordinates?” I said.
“Be curious to see where they point, if they are,” Sampson said. “This guy’s evolving, Alex.”
“Anyone move the body?”
“ME still hasn’t gotten here. I don’t know what the holdup is, but I don’t think we should wait anymore.”
“I agree. What a way to start the day. Give me a hand here.”
We both took a deep breath and climbed up into the Dumpster. It was hard to maneuver with the shifting bags underfoot, much less try to maintain the scene. As quickly as we could, we got a grasp of the victim and gently turned her over.
What I saw there knocked me right back on my ass. I leaned over the edge of the Dumpster and, for the first time in a long while, nearly lost the contents of my stomach.
Sampson was right there with me. “Alex, you okay? What’s going on?”
The taste of metal filled my mouth; I felt dizzy from the rush of adrenaline, from being blindsided so badly.
“She’s an agent, John. At the Bureau. Remember her? The DCAK case? It’s Anjali Patel.”
Chapter 69
POOR ANJALI.
And goddamnit! How did this happen? How the hell could it?
There’s something inescapable about knowing the victim of a homicide, especially a killing as brutal as this. Unwelcome questions kept pushing to the surface: Did she see it coming? Did she suffer much? Was it over quickly for her?
I tried to remind myself that any precision knife work would have been postmortem, but that thought was cold comfort right now. Besides, the best I could do for Patel was to focus on my job and on this crime scene as objectively as possible under the messed-up circumstances.
Right away, I got on the phone to the ME’s office. I wanted to make sure Porter Henning was assigned to this one, and also to find out what the hell was taking them so long. They should have been here by now. Hell, I was.
Sampson took down the numbers we’d found on Anjali’s back and got on his BlackBerry to see what he could find out about them in the short term.