“I’m trying to be careful with assumptions.”

Apart from the subway cameras, which hadn’t yielded anything, I tried to think of a way to verify if he was the same individual, but at the moment, I couldn’t come up with anything definitive.

++++

SWAT went in and, less than a minute later, called for us to enter.

“She’s in the bedroom,” Agent Raudsepp informed us grimly. “And she’s not gonna get up. Ever.”

Expecting to find Julianne Springman’s body, Ralph and I entered the room, but it wasn’t Julianne that we saw. Instead, Sasha MacIntyre’s corpse lay on the bed.

Still clothed, missing only her shoes.

The plastic bag still cinched lethally over her head.

Even a cursory look around made it clear that she had not died here. The video of her suicide had been filmed in an office with different flooring and a desk in the background. There was nothing like that in this bedroom.

Obviously, she’d been moved, brought here to Julianne’s apartment for reasons I couldn’t even begin to imagine.

“Where does this leave us?” Ralph said quietly.

“Let’s get NYPD to canvass the neighborhood. Maybe someone saw something that’ll help us identify who brought her in here. CCTVs, personal cell phone videos—whatever we can get.”

“These guys are good. I’m not holding my breath.”

“Neither am I.”

While we waited for the Evidence Response Team to show up, Ralph and I took a careful look around the apartment, searching for any clues as to Julianne’s whereabouts.

Nothing appeared unusual or all that revelatory: her clothes were arranged neatly in the closet, the dresser drawers hadn’t been rifled through, the papers on her desk were all in order.

No calendar, date books, or daily organizers.

No notes on her fridge that gave anything away.

The computer needed a password, but I was no hacker, so that wasn’t going to happen.

However, beside the keyboard lay a pile of printouts and articles about the novelist Timothy Sabian.

I flipped through them as Ralph came up with a well-worn copy of Sabian’s novel Cold Clay.

“It looks like Julianne is a real fan of this guy,” he said.

“That’s the author that Tessa went to see last night.” I had no idea what to make of that. “I think we should pay him a visit.”

When the ERT showed up, we heard from DeYoung that the senator was going to be swinging by the Field Office at eleven to see about the progress of the investigation into his son’s death. I still wasn’t sure why he’d acted so strangely after I spoke with him at his house—calling the press conference and offering that reward.

Maybe it wasn’t strange after all. Maybe it was just desperation.

Regardless of his reasons, now we had to deal with the ramifications.