First Daughter - Eric van Lustbader [20]
"I'd like to see some hard evidence—"
"The E-Two cards on the bodies of our fallen soldiers aren't enough for you?" Garner rose and, with him, Nina.
The atmosphere had deteriorated from unpleasant to toxic. Jack went to the window, stood staring out at the neat manicured lawns.
He gathered himself. "I need to see where it happened."
"Of course." Nina nodded. "I'll take you."
"I know the way."
Garner's knife-edge smile just barely revealed the tips of white, even teeth. "Of course you do. Nevertheless, I'll accompany you."
SIX
LIGHT, MELANCHOLY as a ghost, tiptoed into the room through a pair of mullioned windows. It was northern light, dismal, vagrant, at this time of year almost spectral. Hugh Garner had peeled back the yellow-and-black tape that marked the boundary of the crime scene like an admonishing finger, but as he was about to step across the threshold, Jack blocked his way.
Jack snapped on latex gloves. "How many people have been through here?"
"I don't know." Garner shrugged. "Maybe a dozen."
Jack shook his head. "It looks like a shit disco in here. You sure took your time getting me over here."
"Everything in this 'shit disco' was tagged, photoed, and bagged without your expertise. You read the reports," Garner said with peculiar emphasis.
"That I did." Jack knew by now that the only thing keeping Garner from kicking his ass off the grounds was the president-elect. Even the president couldn't say no to Edward Carson without looking like something you picked up on the sole of your shoe.
"If you find anything—which I seriously doubt—it'll be analyzed by our SID division at Quantico," Garner said. "Not only is it the best forensic facility in the country, but the security is absolutely airtight."
"Is that where you sent the two bodies?"
"The autopsies were done by our people, but the bodies are housed locally." Garner took out a PDA, scrolled through it. "At the offices of an ME by the name of—" He seemed about to read off the name but, struck by a sudden idea, turned the face of the PDA so Jack could read it.
"Egon Schiltz," Jack said, his brain vainly trying to decode the scrawly squiggles on the PDA screen. Mercifully, his guess was more than a shot in the dark. Schiltz was medical examiner for the Northern District of Virginia. Despite sharp political differences, they had a friendship that went back twenty years.
Returning his attention to the present, Jack entered the room, carefully placing one foot in front of the other until he stood in the center. It was perhaps twenty by twenty, he estimated, not small by dorm standards. But then, Langley Fields wasn't a standard college. You got what you paid for, in all areas.
The floor was plush wall-to-wall carpet. Beds, dressers, chairs, lamps, desks, closets, sets of shelves—there were two of almost everything. Alli's laptop, its hard drive ransacked by IT forensics, sat on her desk. The shelf above her bed was a clutter of books, notes, pins, pennants, first-place trophies she'd won for horseback riding and tennis. She was an athletic girl and intensely competitive. He took several steps closer, saw the bronze medal for a karate competition, and couldn't help feeling proud of her. Owing to her diminutive size and with Schiltz's daughter in his mind, he'd convinced her to take it up in the first place. His eyes passed over the spines of the books—there were textbooks, of course, as well as novels. Jack had been taught to locate a spot outside himself on which to fix his rabbity mind. The point was fixed. Like a spinning dancer trained to concentrate on a single point in the distance in order not to lose his balance or grow dizzy, it was essential that Jack concentrate on the point and stay