It took Kane three tries to get through to Dohenny and when he finally connected the agent just rattled off an address and hung up. The Taft House was the sort of neighborhood bar and grill that you could find in any city in America, solidly middle class, reasonably priced and with a kitchen just big enough to serve a good burger and decent fries. When Kane arrived it looked like a war zone. The local cops had been posted at the exits with orders that no one without a badge was to enter or leave.
Inside two teams of agents were working their way through the patrons and staff with each person being separately interviewed by each team to make sure that nothing was missed. One squad of crime scene techs processed the ladies’ room while the body still lay in the center of the floor awaiting clearance from the coroner’s assistant. A second team had finished processing the rear door and was now working on the tables that had been occupied by the three patrons who left shortly before the body was discovered. The first team to finish their assignment would move into the parking lot where they would photograph every license plate and collect every cigarette butt and gum wrapper.
Kane found Dohenny in the corner nervously talking into his phone. The agent saw Greg and held up one finger.
“Yes, I’ve got a team on that. . . . No, no cameras in the bar. . . . Right, look Kane’s here.” Dohenny gave Greg a quick glance. “OK.” Dohenny disconnected and slipped the phone into his pocket.
“What happened?” Kane asked, trying to tune out the frantic activity around them. Dohenny unconsciously wiped his sweating forehead and pulled out his notes. Kane recognized it as a defensive measure, a security blanket since Kane was sure that the details of tonight’s events were burned into Dohenny’s brain.
“The subject and Agent Emerson arrived at approximately eight-fourteen,” he began, reading from his pad in a clinical tone. When he got to his description of the murder scene Kane interrupted Dohenny’s report.
“Any prints on the plastic bag?”
“No.”
“If his prints weren’t found on the bag then we’re not going to find them anywhere else. Nobody heard anything?”
“They had a basketball game on the flat screen behind the bar.”
“Any obvious trauma to Agent Emerson?”
Dohenny shook his head. “Something like a blackjack might not have broken the skin. We won’t really know until the M.E. takes a close look at the body.”
“Any neighborhood cameras?” Kane asked.
“I’ve got guys walking both sides of the street. No ATMs or traffic cams in the area.”
Kane’s eyes glazed over for a moment then he muttered “Shit!” half under his breath.
“What?”
“This guy’s no nut job. He’s a pro and he’s not going to make any stupid mistakes.”
“Because he used a plastic bag and didn’t leave any prints?” Dohenny asked.
“Because he used a piece of string to secure the bag around Emerson’s neck.” Kane read the confusion on Dohenny’s face and continued. “Anybody but a pro would use tape to secure the bag. It’s automatic, but a pro knows that a small length of tape is hard to carry unless you roll it up and then it’s a pain to unroll, and tape will trap lint and threads and even skin cells. It’s a CSI’s dream, plus you can match the end you’ve got with the end still on the roll if the doer is stupid enough to keep it around. On top of that if this were some guy with standard military training he’d have slit your agent’s throat instead of planning things thoroughly enough to bring the bag with him. The fact that he used a bag and then secured it with twine instead of tape tells me that we’ve got the real deal here.”
“No one’s infallible and from here on it just gets harder for him.”
“How’s he going to contact you?” Kane asked, suddenly changing the subject.
“What?”
“The girl has no intrinsic value. She’s just a bargaining chip, so who does he negotiate with?”
“She’s got the judge’s numbers on her phone. We’re setting a trap on all of Hopper’s lines.”
“Her phone is dead?”
Dohenny nodded. “He must have removed the battery and the SIM card. I figure the judge will get a call from some burner phone which will give us a chance to at least track the number back to the store that sold it.”
“That’ll be a dead end,” Kane muttered, his mind already someplace else.
“We could get lucky.”
“If our killer’s phone was bought sooner than three months ago I’ll eat my hat. No, my guess is that our guy’s got a dozen of them stockpiled from mom and pop stores all over the East Coast.” Kane stared blindly toward the door, then frowned.
“What?”
“Exactly. What? – What’s he after? What does he expect to accomplish by taking the daughter?”
“You said it yourself. She’s his bargaining chip. Hopper recuses himself from the Hoffkemper case and he lets the girl go.” Kane shook his head. “Why not?”
“What if after he lets her go Hopper unrecuses himself?”
“Could he do that?”
Kane shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess it would be up to the Chief Justice. But if you were doing this would you take the chance? Think about it. You go to all this trouble. You kill a Secret Service agent and you kidnap the daughter of a Supreme Court Justice and then you say, ‘Promise me that you won’t vote’ and Hopper says, ‘OK, I promise’ and you just let her go and hope that Hopper is a man of his word? Does that sound like a good idea?” Kane nervously tapped his fingers against his thigh. “I don’t see it. He’s got something else planned, something that he thinks is absolutely going to take Hopper out of the case.”
“His resignation from the court?” Dohenny suggested.
“Assuming he would resign and even if he did, that’s still not 100%. The country would be outraged. Theoretically, the President could re-appoint Hopper to fill the vacancy once they had the daughter back. The Senate could confirm him in a day if they were pissed off enough.”
“You think she’s a lure,” Dohenny said in almost a whisper. “You think he’s going to use her to force Hopper to be someplace where he thinks he’s got a shot at him.”
“That’s the only way this makes any sense,” Kane said. “If–” Kane was interrupted by a tone from his phone. “It’s Senator Denning,” Greg told Dohenny, and tapped the ‘accept’ button.