Hand of Fate (10 page)

She was sure the authorities would get in touch with Phil in Tigard, or whoever it really was. But in her gut, Cassidy knew that this guy would turn out to be no one, nothing. Just someone guilty of the same thing he was accusing Jim Fate of: riling everyone up.

Cassidy carried the radio into the bathroom with her as she tried to make herself look less like a zombie. One by one listeners poured out their horror at Jim's death, their disbelief that he had been murdered, their memories of past shows, and their theories about who was behind it all. Lots of theories. Cassidy paid particular attention to these, because she was developing her own theories. Some muttered darkly about the government, rival talk show hosts, a rather generic "them," and even space aliens.

One man said he thought that Congressman Glover, who had been a nonstop target of Fate's for the past few weeks, must have hired an assassin to "take him out." Another pointed to the family of Brooke Gardner. The young mother had killed herself the summer before after Fate aggressively questioned her about the whereabouts of her missing baby. Cassidy knew a lot about the case because she had covered it too. The thought gave her pause. If Jim had been targeted for his coverage of that story, could she be the next target?

Cassidy thought about it and then shook her head. She was letting paranoia get the best of her. Still, if anyone knew whether she should be worried, it would be Nicole and Allison. Whether it was terrorism or not, they were sure to be in the thick of this. She sent them a quick text message, suggesting that they look more closely at Glover and the Gardners.

But there was yet one more theory that Cassidy heard, a theory that seemed to leave Victoria at a loss.

"I think it was you," Cynthia from Vancouver told Victoria. "You finally took care of him. You squashed him like the vermin he was." "Me?" Victoria's voice cracked.

"We've all heard you guys fight on air. We heard how he treated you. He never let you get a word in edgewise. Well, good for you for finally standing up to him."

Chapter
16

Portland Field Office, FBI

Nic spent the early part of the morning at Jim Fate's autopsy. The observation suite was crowded with representatives from an alphabet soup of local, state, and national law enforcement as well as public health agencies.

Even though the air in Jim's studio had tested negative for sarin, the examiners took no chances. The forensic pathologist and his assistant wore yellow Tyvek suits and white helmets with their own air supply hoses snaking up their backs. The helmets made them look like spacemen. They also wore rubber aprons, shoe covers, and heavy gloves. Even with all these layers, they worked as quickly as possible, because the CDC had warned them that sarin could penetrate rubber and be absorbed through skin. To minimize the risk, they had begun by washing Jim Fate's corpse--which looked pale and vulnerable and sadly human--with a 5 percent hypochlorite solution.

Of course, washing the body meant there was also a chance that they would wash away hairs, fibers, chemicals, and other trace evidence. But the FBI still had the package the poison had been mailed in. In balancing risk versus reward, safety won out.

As soon as the autopsy was done, Nic drove back to the FBI Portland field office to head up the first meeting of the hastily assembled tas
k f
orce. The conference room was jammed. As a sign of how seriously they were taking this attack, top brass at the FBI had flown out specialized personnel from Quantico and headquarters to assist and evaluate. Senior officials from Homeland Security were also on hand. For now, the outsiders were taking a watch-and-wait approach. If it wasn't sarin, they would turn back around and fly back to Washington. If it was, then they would already be in place to swing into action.

Most members of the Portland FBI's evidence recovery team were also at the table, including Leif, who was the ERT's leader. There were also representatives from local and regional law enforcement, the Oregon Health Department, the post office, and more. Nic was thrilled to see Allison there, which meant she had been assigned as the lead prosecutor, and the two of them would work the case together. Catching Nic's eye, Allison gave her a smile so subtle that to an observer it might have looked like a simple widening of the eyes. For both of them, this was a case that could be the high--or low--point of their careers.

One question was on everyone's mind. Was this an act of terrorism? Or were they looking at a simple homicide?

Nic started off by explaining the findings from the autopsy to the circle of alert faces. "Unfortunately, the immediate autopsy results were inconclusive. Some evidence points to sarin, but some doesn't. For instance, the first responders reported that Fate's face was dry. Sarin pretty much switches all your systems to a permanent on, so his eyes and nose should have been running like faucet, and he should have been drooling. But there was no evidence of that."

"Have you thought that maybe Fate died so fast that his tear ducts didn't have time to kick in?" Special Agent Heath Robinson asked.

It was a fair question, but one with a more pointed history behind it. Heath had asked Nic out a dozen times, and even tried to kiss her at a party last New Year's Eve. At the time Nic had told him, truthfully
,
that she didn't date. Since then she had caught wind of a few whispers about her being a lesbian or a man-hater or both. She was pretty sure that Heath was the source.

"That is, of course, a possibility," Nic said evenly. "It's just one piece of the evidence. Another is that Tony--that's Tony Sardella, the medical examiner," she explained for the benefit of the outsiders--"Tony says the corpse had miosis, meaning the pupils were like pinpricks. That is consistent with sarin. Unfortunately it's also consistent with a lot of other poisons. And the lungs were congested, but again that could point to sarin or a dozen other things. The one thing that made Tony wonder was that there was no"--Nic consulted her notes--"no intense postmortem lividity." Lividity was the purplish skin stains seen on the underside of a corpse, where blood settled.

"He says that if it was sarin, the lividity should have been much more pink, but the stains were the typical purple color. Again, not conclusive. We're waiting on the results of the initial tox screens, and we should get those sometime soon. There wasn't enough time for anything to get into his urine, so they're only running tests on his blood."

Nic was beginning to think that the cause of death was going to be solved not with scalpels and saws on the autopsy table, but with microscopes in a lab.

"One thing we do know is that the air in the studio tested negative for sarin. But that test was conducted over an hour after the body was removed. It's conceivable that Fate inhaled most of the dose, and the rest was dispersed when the first responders got there and opened the door to the studio?'

"How about his coworker?" Allison asked. "Victoria--" She consulted her notes. "Victoria Hanawa. I saw her outside the studio, being hosed down by the hazmat team."

"The hospital kept her for a few hours as a precaution, but all test
s w
ere negative," Nic said. She looked at the end of the table. "What about the package and its contents, Karl? Any sign of sarin?"

He shook his head. "Initial tests were negative, but we're running a more sophisticated battery."

"What was the delivery device?" Nic asked.

"A modified smoke grenade." Karl held up a printout. It showed a photograph of a black cylinder with a wire trigger loop. "It was in one of those envelopes with a red string you pull to open. The end of that string was tied to the trigger of the smoke canister. So when Fate pulled the string and opened the package, the contents of the smoke canister sprayed directly into his face."

Nic thought they were finally catching a break. "Okay, who uses those--military, law enforcement? Can we trace it?"

Karl had a drooping, lined face that made him look like a hound dog. Exhaustion and frustration only heightened the resemblance. His mouth turned down.

"That's what I thought too. But it turns out that smoke grenades are also used by serious paintballers. They're available all over the Internet. Some sellers only deal with professional personnel who have been vetted in advance. But for every one of those, there are a dozen sites who just want a purchaser to click on a box that says they're eighteen or older."

"What about markings on the canister? Lot numbers, manufacturer's name, anything like that?" asked Dwayne Flannery, a Portland police officer.

Karl said, "There are some numbers on the canister, and we're trying to trace them, but it looks like a lot of this stuff is sold as surplus that changes hands dozens of times. And/or it's sold in big lots that are broken down again and sold individually. I've talked to a couple of sellers. Their record keeping seems deliberately vague, like if the
y d
on't keep track of what they sell, then they can't get in trouble for what someone does with it." Karl measured a space with his hands. "The canister itself was fairly small, about the same length as a paperback book. That's one reason they packed them together, so that anyone who handled the package wouldn't get suspicious."

"And then there's the book itself,"said Owen Simmons, a Multnomah County sheriff. "Remember that movie Talk Radio? It was based on a real case, and later they put out a book. The same book they sent Fate. Alan Berg was a Denver talk show host who was gunned down in his driveway in the early 1980s by neo-Nazis. Maybe it's a sign that we're looking at some kind of extreme right-wing group like The Order?"

"Except Fate was pretty conservative himself," Heath said. "Maybe the left-wingers have decided to play catch-up. He certainly ticked enough of them off."

"Or it could be just one guy, trying to throw us off the scent by putting that book in," Leif said. "Have you ever listened to his show? Probably every day Fate made somebody mad enough to at least think about killing him. He even taunted listeners who threatened him. He had something he called the Nut of the Day award. Maybe one of those guys snapped."

"We're just beginning to follow up on the NOD winners," Nic said. "If yo.0 want to call them winners. Unfortunately, the records the station kept about their actual identity are spotty. And in a lot of cases they were anonymous, which let them be even more outrageous." She turned to Rod Emerick, another FBI special agent. "How about fingerprints?"

"No latents on the canister or the book. The envelope had a dozen fingerprints on it. We'll be printing everyone at the radio station as well as the carrier and the sorters at the mailing facility. But whoever prepared this clearly wore gloves. Unless we catch a lucky break, I would say that we're not going to get a match on IAFIS."

IAFIS, or the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, was the FBI's national fingerprint and criminal history system. It was the largest biometric database in the world,with fingerprints for more than fifty-five million criminals.

"We also recovered one piece of what might be carpet fiber. If we're lucky, we can get a hit on FACID."

FACID, or the Forensic Automotive Carpet Fiber Identification Database, was still being developed by the FBI's Laboratory Division. Once a carpet fiber was analyzed, it was possible to search by fiber type, color, or microscopic characteristics to see if there was a match. That was if it came from a vehicle. There was no comparable database for other carpet fibers, as there were far too many. In that case, the only means of identifying it would be to find the suspected source and compare the two.

"And how about you, Sam?" Nic asked the task force's representative from the post office. "What have you been able to find out about the postmark?"

When Sam Quinn spoke, his voice cracked a little. He flushed. It was clear that this meeting was one of the more exciting things that had ever happened to him. "There's been some water damage to the postmark, but it appears to have originated in the New York zip code where the publisher is located. The postage is made up of three stamps that have been canceled as part of a continuous design with the postmark. Oddly enough, the cancellation stamp is also known to collectors as 'the killer.-- His chuckle sounded forced.

No one else smiled.

"That means the gas grenade could have been mailed in New York, possibly from the publisher's mailing room. Or someone could have intercepted the package from the publisher, removed the original contents, and replaced them. The publisher uses a variety o
f d
ifferent stamps and envelopes, so they can't tell us if this was one of theirs or not. The publisher tells us they are definitely not mailing out copies of Talk Radio--it wasn't even published by them, and the book is more than a decade old--but it looks like they might have a harder time figuring out if they did do some kind of recent mailing to Fate."

"How about the mailing label, Jun?" Leif asked Jun Sakimato, their resident paper specialist. "Did it come from a color printer?"

The public wasn't generally aware, but most color laser printers did more than just print party invites and color-coded bar charts. They also secretly encoded the printer's serial number and manufacturing code on every document they produced. The millimeter-size yellow dots appeared about every inch on the page, nestled within the printed words. While originally put in place to catch counterfeiters, the hidden markings had also helped Jun crack a kidnapping case earlier in the year.