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“Exactly.”
“But no prints, fibers, nothing like that? Nothing left behind?”
“Not a damn thing.”
Rachel walked to the closet door, which was standing open. The interior showed no signs of a fight; clothes hung perfectly and the bins and boxes along the top shelves were perfectly aligned and straight. However, she did figure that the perfect opportunity for an attacker to sneak into the bedroom and take Dr. Willis unaware would be when she was in this closet. Rachel stepped back out and turned casually, as Dr. Willis might have on the night she died. The window was about five feet to the right, beside a tall bureau. The bed was even further away, which meant it would not have gotten in the attacker’s way. The only question that remained was if the killer had intended to shove Willis out of the window or if it had just happened in the heat of the moment. With no indications of a struggle within the room, it was going to be pretty much impossible to ever know for sure.
“Everything I read indicated that she had been on a video call with some colleagues,” Rachel said. “Is that correct?”
"It is. We've had other agents reach out to the people she spoke with. None of that mentioned anything about Dr. Willis, mentioning she might be in danger. In fact, they said spirits were high."
Rachel exited the bedroom and made her way into the large area that Dr. Willis had apparently been using as an office. She stood behind the chair she assumed Willis had been using for the video call, getting a good look at the work area. The laptop was still open. There was a stack of four different folders to the right of the laptop. To the left, there was a small notepad with just a few things written down on it. Rachel read them to herself, unable to make sense of it.
Dean would know? / PR out of NY…maybe need S. Catron. / TOKYO. One more time.
“Any idea what any of this means?” she asked Sullivan.
“The S. Catron is Sean Catron. He works with medical teams and insurance companies on rolling out effective public relations campaigns. A lot of people accuse him of being a Big Pharma shill. The reference to Tokyo is all about a team Dr. Willis and her crew were working with to do a triple-check on an anti-aging development they’d been working on. And I see your look…you’re impressed that I know all of this. But I only know it because I literally just read the file half an hour ago when I knew you were coming. I can email it to you if you want.”
“That would be great.” She recited her email address to him as she studied the work setup. When she was done, she said, “would you happen to have a pair of evidence gloves on you?”
“I do, actually.” He fished around in his other inner jacket pocket and pulled out two sets. He handed one over to her and then began slipping on a pair for himself. “Again,” he added as Rachel took her set, “don’t be too impressed. I just wasn’t sure how deep into this you wanted to go. So I thought I’d be as prepared as possible.”
“I appreciate it,” she said. “Gloves aren’t typically something I have on me even when I am on the clock.”
Rachel began to thumb through the folders stacked by the laptop. The first one was filled with data print-outs. She had absolutely no idea what she was looking at. She did know that some of them were medical records of some kind because Lord only knew how many of those she’s subjected herself to over the past year or so. The first folder contained roughly fifty pages and they all looked the same A few of them had been marked with small post-it markers and tabs.
“According to the team working with Willis,” Sullivan said, “everything here is data and reports on the experiments and lab results they’ve been conducting over the past six months. All of it is about anti-aging, but beyond that, I'm clueless."
“Yeah, same here,” Rachel said as she started looking through the second folder. At first, this folder contained more of the same. Just print outs and graphs, reams of technical data and jargon from reports and lab results.
“Did you hear about another murder in the area, a woman named Jane Adler?” Sullivan asked.
“No. Who is that?”
“She was killed five days ago. She was a doctor, but the sort that spends most of her time in labs rather that hospitals and operating rooms from what I understand. Most recently, she’d been working in a local lab. Something to do with stem cell research.”
“And the media didn’t latch on to that?”
“For about a day. It surprised me because the use of stem cells…that usually stirs up controversy. Good for clicks and views, you know?”
She did find this interesting and was all but certain the two would be connected. Stems cells, after all, were often mentioned in the same conversations and anti-aging drugs and medical breakthroughs in terms of making people appear younger. But she had to focus on one thing at a time, so she continued studying the material in the folders.
As she neared the back of the second folder, her eye saw something that was a bit outside of what she’d been seeing in these papers. She went past it at first but stopped her thumbing and went back to it. The page in question showed three different charts, and each chart showed what she assumed was levels of some kind. They rose and fell and were explained with a series of numbers, percentages and long, complicated medical terminology. She’d seen at least fifty of these same pages so far, but these were just barely different.
At the bottom of the second read-out, the terminology and series of numbers was different. To make sure she was right, she randomly looked at three she’d already viewed. Each one was adorned with an eighteen-digit number, followed by what resembled a small barcode, and then two more series of numbers—one seven digits long, and the other four digits long.
But on the one that stood out, those numbers and barcode-like object were gone. In their place was three rows of characters that looked like absolute nonsense at first. But as she actually took the time to study them, she thought it resembled code—the sort used to build software. But, no…that wasn't quite right. She wasn't one hundred percent certain, but she thought it might be some sort of encrypted code or message.
She opened her mouth to call over Sullivan, wanting to get his opinion. But before she could, she saw something else at the bottom of the page.
“Sullivan…the pictures I’ve seen of Dr. Willis show her as having brown hair. Would you agree with that?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Why?”
Using her glove pinky, Rachel lifted the loose hair she’d seen along the bottom of the page—the one page that had seemed to stand out from all of the rest.
“Because it seems someone with short, grey hair had been looking through all of this recently.”
