Call to Treason - Tom Clancy [109]
They fell asleep instead. The days of youthful "forced march" crime-fighting were a thing of the past. The McCaskeys needed rest.
Maria got up at five-thirty the next morning. She showered, made coffee, then woke her husband. McCaskey was not happy to have passed out like that. He joined her in the kitchen at six-thirty. They had coffee and whole wheat toast. By seven o'clock, they were on the road.
McCaskey had not done patrol work since he was a debut ant That was Bureau slang for a first-year agent. He forgot how tiring it could be.
Or maybe how much older he was. That aside, it was rewarding work made more so by Maria's enthusiasm. She loved police work and had an eye for detail unlike anyone he had ever met. She had decided that the killer would have driven from the murder sites. A woman alone, on foot, after dark, was likely to stand out. She might have been noticed from a bar or restaurant or by a passing motorist. That could have helped police determine her direction. If she had taken the Metro, she definitely would have appeared on a security camera. A taxi or limousine service was out of the question. Drivers paid attention to the people who got into their cars. Part of that was fear and part of it was bragging rights in case they happened to pick up a celebrity.
Assuming the killer was driving, she would have done so slowly. She would not have wanted to risk being stopped by the police. They might ask where she had been. If the killer had shared a drink with Wilson, the police might have smelled it and insisted on a sobriety test.
There were a great many assumptions in their scenario.
But experience, deductive reasoning, and good instincts could be as important to an investigation as facts, especially in a case such as this where there was very little hard data. McCaskey was thinking about that as they drove from site to site. His Op-Center ID got him access to the videotapes or digital records. None of them proved to be helpful. There was no sign of the cars they were looking for.
Maria was at the wheel. As McCaskey watched familiar storefronts and offices slip by, he had a troubling thought. A century ago, the booksellers, diners, attorneys, government offices, and banks would have been especially vulnerable to fire. Today, it was a new kind of fire that could destroy them. The kind that had crippled Op-Center. He wondered if there would ever be a time when people did not have to fear life as much as they feared death.
Not the way we do things now, he told himself.
Funds to fight these dangers were allocated by political need instead of by threat assessment. People like himself, Maria, and Detective Howell could not do the job America was counting on them to do.
"Do you think the killer might have rented a car?" Maria asked.
McCaskey looked at his wife. "I'm sorry?"
"The killer," Maria repeated slowly. "Do you think she might have rented a car?"
"I would be very surprised if she did," he said. "Assassins don't like to leave a paper trail."
"This assassin did not expect to be exposed," Maria pointed out.
"That is true."
"And she certainly would have gone in with a fake ID," Maria went on.
"An experienced killer would have several, I'm sure."
"I suppose we can try that search if this doesn't get us anywhere,"
McCaskey said. "But there have got to be hundreds of rental facilities in the D.C. metro area. It will take days to visit them all, and what do we tell them when we do?"
"We show them pictures of all the women and see if they look familiar.
Or better yet, we can see if any of them show up on security cameras.
None of those women would have had a reason to rent a car."
"Yes, we could do that," McCaskey said.
That was another difference between today and his days as a rookie G-man. Twenty-odd years ago, at least a dozen agents would have been assigned to a case like this. Now there were two.
"Darrell, were you all right a minute ago?" Maria asked.
"Sorry?"
"You went away from me."
"Yes,"