by Steven James
Using my phone I photographed the pages.
Since the book hadn’t been randomly discarded on the body, but carefully squared up and positioned there, it would make sense that it was turned to these specific pages for a reason as well.
Questions scampered through my mind: Did the offender follow Jerome home? Was he waiting for him when he arrived here? How did the killer—or killers—know that Jerome drove the truck for us, that the lawnmower business was a front? Why these pages? Is he taunting us? Mocking us? Saying his crime will remain unsolved?
“Have you ever seen anything like this?” Natasha asked, drawing me out of my thoughts. She was staring at the arrows driven though Jerome’s eyeballs.
“No.”
“Who would be capable of . . . ?” Her voice trailed off into a grim silence.
I said nothing.
In truth, we are all capable of evil. That’s the thing. We’re all made of the same material. Though some people might be predisposed toward certain types of behavior, no one is predestined to act on his desires.
We choose.
And all of us have it within ourselves to choose evil.
Who’s capable of something like this?
Well, the unsettling truth, the fact that no one really wants to admit: any one of us is capable of it, given the right circumstances.
Or the wrong ones, depending on how you look at it.
I didn’t bring that up, but just said, “What can you tell me about time of death?”
“The ME will have to narrow things down, but based on lividity and body temp I’d say Jerome died early this morning—probably somewhere between two and four a.m. We can tell by the blood spatter and the amount of bleeding around the wounds that they—”
“Were not postmortem,” I said.
“That’s correct.”
“Cause of death from the arrows?”
“Could be from shock—depends on if he was dead when those arrows were driven in there. It appears that whoever did this knew what he was doing, how to make Jerome suffer but keep him alive.”
One of the ERT members bumped into me, causing my arm to brush against my wounded side.
Pain streaked through me and I had to stop and take a couple deep breaths to calm myself.
I rested my arm against the wall, trying to hide the pain from the other people in the room.
“You okay?” Natasha asked.
“Yeah.”
Just a few more minutes, then I really needed to be on my way.
To get my mind off the pain, I focused my attention on the numbers that had been written in the column. I showed the people in the room the book’s page. “Do these mean anything to you?”
People shook their heads. Everyone was quiet.
I evaluated the number sequence:
6'3" 2.53 32
The first set of numbers was written as a height—my height, actually—but what about the others?
Weight? Age?
The volume of something?
A mathematic equation of some sort?
I tried to think of both the hidden and the obvious, playing with the numbers, adding, subtracting, multiplying them, looking for a pattern, but nothing seemed to click. Nothing hidden came to mind.
So, what about the obvious?
It’s seven numbers.
A phone number?
I tapped it into my phone. No one picked up and it went to a generic voicemail. I identified myself as a federal agent and left a message for the person to call me back, then I phoned Angela to have Lacey tackle the number pattern. “Online searches, street addresses, equations, phone numbers, anything.”
“Gotcha.” Angela was chronically overworked. Though she did her best to hide how stressed she was, I could hear exhaustion in her voice. And this week, with everything that was going down, it was only going to get worse.
“And,” she added, “I’ll have her check different iterations of those numbers and Jerome’s phone records, his credit card statements, birthdays, anniversaries of those close to him—see what we can pull up.”
“Great. Talk to you soon.”
After we ended the call I got right back on the line, this time with Ralph. “We need to find out when Jerome was last seen alive. And let’s locate an expert on Native American weaponry. I want to know what the difference between a hatchet and a tomahawk is.”
“Why?”
I summarized the scene, then explained, “With the arrows, if that thing’s a tomahawk we need to figure out—”
“What kind of message he was trying to give us.”
I would leave the specifics of that up to Lien-hua and the other profilers. “Right.”
End call.
Careful not to disturb any evidence, I spent a few more minutes looking around the room, but finally pain and common sense got the best of me and I left Natasha and her unit to process the scene.
Todd Foster, the paramedic who’d somewhat protestingly lent me his Windbreaker, was still outside the HRT’s barricade, waiting by the ambulance with his partner.
I returned the jacket to him, and after texting my wife and daughter to let them know that I was on my way to Tanner Medical Center, I climbed in and we took off.
8
Lien-hua was waiting for me at the emergency-room entrance when we arrived. She was three years younger than I was, and I’d been impressed with and attracted to her from the first moment we met just under two years go. “How are you?” she asked urgently.
“I’m okay. Is Tessa here?”
“She texted that she was on her way, said something about Melody dropping her off so she could pick up her car.”
Melody Carver was pretty much the total opposite to Tessa. Boy bands instead of death metal. Cosmo instead of Kierkegaard.
But they’d become friends at the end of the school year and had been hanging out during the summer. Tessa isn’t the world’s most social girl and, frankly, I was glad she’d made at least one friend since we moved here from Denver last winter.
The paramedics had called ahead with my name and condition and there was a young doctor of Middle Eastern descent waiting for us. I’ve been here once or twice and I knew him.
When Habib saw the bandage around my vest and the metal jutting out of it, he just shook his head. “I’m not sure if I should say it’s good to see you again or not, Agent Bowers.”
“Let’s call it good, Habib. And I told you last time, you can just call me Pat.”
“Well, let’s see what we have here.”
After removing the bandages and before getting the vest off, he had to pry the metal free and, to put it lightly, that did not feel warm and fuzzy. He gave my side a cursory inspection, then, after packing the lacerations to keep the bleeding down, ordered a chest X-ray to make sure that the shards hadn’t punctured a lung.
The X-rays went surprisingly fast, and, thankfully, they didn’t show any lung damage. Habib motioned for me and Lien-hua to follow him. “Well, let’s stitch you up. Come along, then.” He started down the bright white, too-clean hall. “Come.”
After leading us to an exam room, he left us alone while he went to get some supplies.
It wasn’t even noon yet, but it felt like a week had passed since I’d kissed my wife good-bye and left for work earlier this morning.
Sometimes the most eloquent things are shared when you’re not saying anything, and now she put her hand on mine and we sat together in silence, the unspoken language of the moment enveloping us.
It felt like a necessary interlude, a chance to process some of the emotions from the morning, to separate ourselves at least a little from the pain of loss.
Death comes to us all, almost always unbidden, almost always unwelcome, and almost always too soon. I’ve been to more than my share of crime scenes, autop
sies, and funerals and it never gets easier. It just never does.
Even being at hospitals like this brings harsh memories to mind.
In my classes at the Academy I’m always on the lookout for the new agents who are the most troubled by death.
Those are the ones I want working out in the field rather than behind desks somewhere, because as soon as we forget what’s at stake in our cases—the value and dignity of human life, the primacy of justice, the pursuit of the truth—we’ve taken the first step toward letting the criminals win.
I want it to be hard for our agents to do this job, hard for them to sleep at night. The curse of empathy is the most necessary one of all for effective investigators.
* * *
At last Lien-hua broke the silence and quietly asked me to tell her about my visit to Jerome’s house. After I’d filled her in, she said, “Arrowheads and a tomahawk?”
“Well, we’re checking to see if it was a tomahawk, but that’s what it looks like, yes.”
“We need to look at the personal narrative he’s working from—the significance of the book, the series of numbers, why he would torture Jerome like that.”
Motives.
Not my deal.
I’m more interested in why the offender was here at this time, in this specific place, and what that might tell us about the environmental cues and his cognitive map to show us where he might be based out of, rather than trying to guess what was going through his mind as he planned for or committed the crime.
“And the scene,” she went on, “the posing; it’s about appearances to him.”
“Staging” refers to altering a crime scene after the fact to make it look like it was a different crime than it was; “posing” is altering the scene so that it sends a specific message to law enforcement or meets a specific need for the offender. It’s not always easy to tell the difference between staging and posing. Sometimes, it can only be seen in hindsight, after you know the specifics of a case.
“Yes,” I said, trying to affirm her approach. It was not the time to argue about our different perspectives on criminology.
“The numbers,” she reflected, “could they be referring to pages in the book? For example, pages 63, 253, and 32, or maybe 6, 32, 5, 332—some combination like that?”
“That’s a good thought. I’ll look into it when we get home, see what material those pages covered.”
“You don’t think . . . I mean, with your book being left there, and opened to pages about critiques of your approach . . . and . . .”
“What?”
“Basque?” Her voice was hushed.
“Well, if it is him, he has certainly changed his MO.”
Richard Basque was a serial killer I’d apprehended early in my career back when I was a detective with the Milwaukee Police Department.
Last year while he was serving the thirteenth year of his sentence, his lawyers convinced the courts to hold a retrial because of some testimony discrepancies and controversial DNA evidence. Subsequently Basque was found not guilty and released.
But being found not guilty by our courts didn’t make him any less guilty for the crimes he’d actually committed, and since he’d been freed his body count had only continued to rise.
His typical MO: abduct young women, then methodically cut out their lungs and intestines and eat them while keeping the victims alive for as long as possible. We knew he was responsible for the deaths of more than twenty people and suspected him in the deaths of at least twenty more.
Last spring he’d gone after Lien-hua and Tessa and they’d both nearly been killed—Lien-hua from being stabbed in the chest, Tessa from drowning. I fired at him—three shots center mass—and he fell into the Potomac. We never found his body.
And neither did we find the Kevlar vest of one of the FBI Police officers he’d killed earlier that night.
Since then, whenever I had the chance, I’d been scouring case files of missing persons and homicide investigations from around the country, searching for any sign that Basque was still out there somewhere, still active, still killing, but so far I hadn’t found any evidence that he was still alive.
However, until we found his corpse, his case remained open and I was doing my best to stay current and informed on the search for him.
“Setting explosives?” I said, picking up my train of thought where I’d left off. “And the connection to Native American weaponry? He’s never done anything like that before. And torturing Jerome without, well . . .”
“Without eating him.”
“Yes. It’s not like Basque.”
“I agree. But what you told me the killer—or killers—did to Jerome . . . if it’s not Basque, then we’re looking at someone who’s just as . . .”
She paused to think about the right word to use and I ran through some in my mind: twisted, deranged, demented.
It surprised me a little when she said, “Someone just as possessed by evil.”
“That’s a good way to put it.”
Habib returned with a suture kit, bandages, and several syringes. A young, wide-eyed nurse who didn’t look much older than Tessa stood beside him.
My attention was on the syringes. “Um, I should be alright,” I told him. “Maybe you could just stitch up the—”
“I need to numb the area where I’m going to put the stitches in. You know the routine.”
“He’s not a fan of needles,” Lien-hua explained, more to the nurse that we didn’t know than to the doctor that we did.
“Just give me a sec.” I took a calming breath and carefully lay on my left side so he could work on my right one.
Not long after we’d met, Lien-hua had tried to probe into my childhood to find the reason for my aversion to needles, asking me if I’d maybe had a bad experience with them once.
“Who’s ever had a good one?” I’d replied.
Habib removed the now-bloody bandages that he’d put in place earlier.
He steadied the needle against my side.
The young nurse tried to be helpful and told me reassuringly, “This will only prick a little.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
I tried to focus on happy, cheery thoughts until it was over. Rainbows and cheeseburgers and Lollipop Mountain.
Didn’t work.
Never does.
To numb the whole area Habib needed to stick me four times for each laceration. I tried not to keep track, but when someone pierces a needle through your flesh it’s hard not to notice.
After the area was prepped, he started cleaning out the largest wound and I heard Tessa down the hall, telling the receptionist that she was the daughter of the FBI agent who’d just been brought in and that she was here to see me.
“You’ll need to wait here until I can—”
“Patrick?” Tessa hollered into the hallway. It sounded like she was opening doors, checking each room on her way toward us. “Where are you?”
The receptionist tried calling her back, but that was going to be useless.
“In here,” I said, loud enough for my voice to carry into the hall.
A moment later my daughter appeared at the doorway to the exam room as Habib tugged the needle through to stitch up the cut.
“Oh. Ew.” She closed her eyes. “I think I’m gonna be sick.”
“Hi, Tessa,” I said. “It’s good to see you.”
She opened her eyes again but squinched up her face in disgust. “You said on the phone they were little cuts.”
“They are. I mean, it’s just that the stuff that had cut me—”
“Was still sticking out of you.”
“Yes.”
“That’s just not right.”
“Have a seat.”
“Okay.”
There was one extra chair in the room and she tilted it toward
the wall where she wouldn’t have to watch the doctor work, took a seat, then touched back a stray wisp of her midnight black hair. Shoulder length—just long enough to hide behind when she wanted to. She’d recently added a dark blue streak along the right side that looked surprisingly good on her.
Today she wore skinny jeans and a faded gray long-sleeve T-shirt with the skull-shaped logo of Trevor Asylum, one of her favorite thrasher bands, on the front of it. Pierced nose. Eyebrow ring. A bevy of bracelets. Deep blue fingernail polish that matched the colored streak in her hair.
The sleeves of her shirt covered the scars on her arm from her cutting days, as well as the raven tattoo she’d snuck out and gotten while I was occupied with a case when we were in San Diego together last year.
Tessa was a paradox to me. She was, at the same time, one of the most resilient and one of the most emotionally scarred people I’ve ever met. She’d grown up without a dad, watched her mom die of breast cancer, and then, when she finally did meet her biological father, she was present when he was killed in a shoot-out.
She had a sea inside of her with deep currents she’d never shared with anyone. I tried to keep the door open for her to talk to me, but there are some things I imagined she would never feel comfortable sharing with anyone.
Though I hadn’t brought her up, over the past couple years I’ve come to care about her like a real dad would, with a love that, as Lien-hua once put it, is at the same time one of the fiercest and the most tender things in the world.
Before I met Tessa I wouldn’t have had any idea what that meant.
Now I did.
For someone as into Gothic horror stories as Tessa was, real blood made her queasy. But after all she’d been through, all the suffering she’d seen, it made sense.
She glanced again at Habib, then tried directing her attention at the wall, but there was a picture of a human body’s circulatory system, and she finally sighed and found a place near the sink to stare.
Habib suggested that she might want to find a seat in the waiting room.
“That’s my dad. I’m not going anywhere—unless I have to puke, I mean, then I might have to find a bathroom somewhere or something.”
The nurse opened her mouth slightly as if she were going to offer a comment, but in the end she just went back to assisting Habib in cleaning the wounds and in dabbing up some blood that was seeping through the stitches he’d just finished sewing.