by Steven James
Alexei Chekov was halfway through the Grand Inquisitor scene in The Brothers Karamazov when he heard from Valkyrie asking him to come in and clean up a mess.
“You remember Kirk Tyler?” the voice said.
“I’m familiar with him, though we’ve never actually met.” Alexei’s English was impeccable, as was his Russian, Arabic, and Italian. When Valkyrie had first contacted him, he’d noticed a sentence structure that suggested someone who’d either studied in or grown up in the States. Because of this Alexei had chosen American English for their conversations.
“I’m afraid you won’t have the opportunity.”
“He disappointed you.”
“Yes.”
Alexei placed a bookmark and set down the novel.
Valkyrie.
In early Norse mythology, a Valkyrie was a goddess who flew over the battlefields deciding who would live and who would die—a job strikingly close to his own. The myths evolved over time and turned Valkyries into beautiful, angelic creatures who rewarded fallen heroes in paradise.
Death and rewards. Who lives and who dies—the ultimate decision.
Valkyrie filled Alexei in concerning Dashiell Collet and his daughter and all that had happened at the warehouse. “It’s not far from where you are,” Valkyrie explained. “I want you to dress Dashiell’s gunshot wounds, take care of Tyler’s body, then call an ambulance for Mr. Collet. I want him alive in case we need to speak with him again.”
Valkyrie’s comment about the warehouse being nearby told Alexei that his own location wasn’t as secret as he’d thought it was, and he realized that he might have underestimated Valkyrie, a person he had never met, didn’t even know the identity of.
“What about the girl?”
“She’ll wake up in an hour or two. I’m afraid the man who tried to abduct her won’t be so lucky.”
Alexei knew a little about the calculated synchronization of Valkyrie’s work, and he imagined that the would-be abductor’s Bluetooth earpiece had been wired to detonate just as Kirk’s phone had been.
He tried not to picture what the girl would see beside her when she awoke.
Over the years Alexei had developed a professional objectivity toward these things, but still, images like the one Erin would awaken to were deeply disturbing, and he found himself sympathizing with her, for the nightmares that would undoubtadly chase her for the rest of her life. Maybe he could get there before she awoke, move her someplace safe.
“Do you need me to clean that up as well?”
“I’ll have someone else take care of it. Just get to the warehouse. Tonight I’ll have a plane take you to Alexandria, Virginia. I want you to have a chat with Rear Admiral Alan Colberg. Tell him we need the access codes to the station. He’ll know what you’re talking about.”
“All right.”
“By the way, providentially, Tyler had a Tanfoglio with him. I know you lost one last year in Italy. Keep it. It’s yours. For the inconvenience of being called upon so late in the evening.”
Once again, impressive. How Valkyrie could have known about the incident in Italy was a mystery to Alexei. He had the sense that Valkyrie had mentioned it just to show him that his past was no secret. “I don’t use guns,” he replied. “Not anymore.”
“Not since your wife’s death.”
How?
“Yes.”
A pause. “Of course. Contact me when you’ve finished with Colberg.”
“I will.”
The conversation ended.
Though Alexei did not carry a handgun, he did carry something else.
He slipped the cylindrical object into the breast pocket of his suit coat and left for the warehouse.
Valkyrie should not have known about the Tanfoglio or about Tatiana’s death. It showed Alexei that Valkyrie had pried into his past, and when people poke around like that, they inevitably leave evidence of their presence.
On the way out the door, Alexei put a call through to one of his contacts in the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence directorate, to see if he could find out who might be using the code name Valkyrie.
Based on the work Alexei needed to do at the warehouse, the flight time to Virginia, and the time change, he anticipated that the rear admiral would be just sitting down for breakfast when he arrived.
Hopefully, Colberg would be cooperative and Alexei wouldn’t have to put the object he now carried in his pocket to use.
1
18 hours later
Thursday, January 8
Lorelette Mobile Home Park
Merrill, Wisconsin
4:21 p.m.
I scanned the trailer park through the binoculars I’d borrowed from FBI SWAT Team Leader Torres.
Most of the task force had agreed that we should go in light, but FBI Director Wellington didn’t want to take any chances. So, even though we hadn’t been able to confirm that Travis Reiser was actually in the trailer, she’d ordered a full SWAT team present on site.
Now I was a quarter mile away with Team Leader Antón Torres, a rock-jawed jock I’d worked with on a dozen previous cases, by my side.
Eight inches of crusty snow covered the ground, but mounds at least four feet deep lay pushed up on the shoulders of the roads and at the ends of the parking areas.
A low pressure system was sweeping down from Canada, leaving a foot of snow in its wake. It would arrive tomorrow afternoon, and I was glad we were here today and not in the thick of the storm.
Most of the trailers in the park had paint that was faded or peeling, ripped screen doors, or rusted sheet-metal roofs telegraphing the economic demographic of the people living here. Nearly a third of the sixty trailers had abandoned toys, discarded sleds, or half-melted snowmen sandwiched in the tight quarters between the homes. A lot of children lived in this park. Not good.
The sun edged toward the bottom of the sky, lengthening the late-day shadows around us. Nearby, Torres’s snipers waited for his go-ahead to take up position before twilight swallowed the park.
“Well?” he asked.
Once again I directed my gaze at the yellow single-wide trailer where we believed Reiser was staying. “Still no movement.”
“His car is there.”
“Yes.” An eyewitness had seen Reiser enter the trailer last night. I didn’t need to tell Antón that. We’d gone over all this earlier.
I handed him the binoculars, and while he studied the trailer I surveyed the area, noting entrance and exit routes and evaluating their relationship to the roads that wandered through this part of the county.
“All right.” Torres set down the binoculars. “What are you thinking?”
“I see four possible exit routes.” I gestured toward the west end of the park. “There, near the quarry, but if we put Saunders and Haley on the ridge, they’ll have that one covered; the main entrance, one sniper can take that. There’s a break in the metal fence to the south, but it looks like Reiser would need to cross the field behind his trailer to get there, so, unlikely.” I pointed to the east. “I’d say that based on the layout of the park, if he rabbits he’ll most likely head south, past that home—”
“With the snow angels.”
“Yes.”
Torres’s jaw was set. “Kids are easier to handle than adults.”
“And Reiser is experienced. He’ll know it’s a lot harder for snipers to take a shot if they see a child in the scope along with the target.”
“They’ll hesitate.”
I nodded.
He studied the park. “I’m telling you, Pat, you have an instinct for this. You should’ve been SWAT instead of all this theoretical geospatial bull—” He cut himself off mid-curse, no doubt realizing that he was inadvertently turning his compliment into an insult. He corrected himself: “I’m just saying.”
“I appreciate it.”
Actually, the FBI’s SWAT program wouldn’t have been a bad choice, but I was born to work for the Bureau’s National Center for the Analysis of Viol
ent Crime, or NCAVC, and the last ten years had been a perfect fit for me.
“I’ll go in first,” I said.
He shook his head. “The director was clear. She wanted us to send in SWAT before you or Jake access the trailer.”
“That’s not the way to play this.” This was not the only thing I disagreed with the director on. “People react in kind. When they feel threatened, they respond accordingly. You go in heavy, he’s going to respond to meet the threat. I can talk him out.” My experience as a field agent and as a homicide detective before that gave me street cred with Torres, and he didn’t argue with me, just took a moment to peer through the binocs again. “Those are trailer homes,” I added. “A shoot-out would mean—”
“Yeah. Rounds flying through the walls,” he said grimly.
While he considered what I’d said, Agent Jake Vanderveld, the NCAVC profiler who was working this case with me, sauntered toward us. Broad shoulders. Blond hair. Meticulously trimmed mustache. I was thirty-seven, he was a few years younger. He nodded a greeting and slapped Torres on the shoulder.
“Where’re we at?” Jake asked.
“Still deciding.” Torres lowered the binoculars.
“Play it safe, Antón,” I said. “Have people in place, but then—”
He made his decision, shook his head. “No. I’m not comfortable with it. I want my men in there first. You can follow close, right after the team, but I want to secure the premises first.”
“Hang on,” Jake spoke up, a little too authoritatively. “This is all a game to Reiser. He’ll want to taunt Pat.” Jake had helped lead us here and knew Reiser’s file better than almost anyone. “If we send in a man in civilian clothes, Reiser’ll think he has the upper hand. Play to his weakness, his arrogance, and you’ll get close.”
It was unusual for me and Jake to agree about anything, but apparently this time we were on the same wavelength.
Torres worked his jaw back and forth for a moment, then let out a small sigh. “All right. Listen. I go in with you, Pat. But I enter the trailer first.”
“Plainclothes?” I said.
He nodded.
“Agreed.” I stood. “And Travis Reiser might be the only key to finding Basque, so tell your team minimum force. We need to take him alive.”
“That’s not the priority here.”
Basque had eluded us for six months now, and if we were right about Reiser, he might flip on Basque, turn him in. “Keep him alive, Antón.”
“If this little prick takes any aggressive action, we’re dropping him.”
Though I wanted more reassurance that the SWAT team would hold off from taking Reiser down, they’d been trained, as I had, to fire at a target until it’s no longer a threat. That wasn’t the outcome I was looking for, but I knew Torres was right. You don’t take chances, especially with someone like Reiser.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We all quieted our cells, one of the SWAT guys distributed radios to us, small, nearly invisible patches you wear just behind your ear, and while Torres changed into civilian clothes, I went to get some body armor.
2
Torres by my side.
Reiser’s pale yellow trailer sixty meters ahead of us.
The air—crisp, bitingly cold.
We knew if we pulled our guns at this point it would increase our perceived threat level, so we kept them holstered as we walked, as we scanned the area. “So, you asked her yet?” Torres said, keeping his voice low.
“Asked her?”
“Lien-hua.”
I glanced his way. “Who told you about that?”
“Little birdie.”
“Ralph.”
“Okay, a big birdie.”
I went back to scrutinizing the park. “If you must know. I’m waiting for the right time.”
“The right time.”
“Yes.”
“I’m telling you, don’t be nervous, bro. You’ll do fine.”
“I’m not nervous.”
“Mm-hmm.” He crunched along the road beside me, sturdy, confident but not brash. I realized I was glad he was with me. “Just don’t put it off too long. You only live once, you know.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Forty meters to Reiser’s trailer.
Though I didn’t want to, I eased aside thoughts of Lien-hua and carefully observed the park.
Despite the weather, several small faces were staring at me through the torn screen door of the trailer home that lay directly across the road. Abruptly, a woman pulled the children back into the shadows and swung the screen door, then the trailer door shut.
I didn’t like this.
Any of it.
The trailer park brought back a swarm of dark memories from a crime scene fourteen years ago when I was a Milwaukee police detective and was forced to view the kinds of things no one should ever have to see: the body of Jasmine Luecke in her trailer home—or more precisely, what was left of her body, laid out gruesomely in the hallway.
The aftermath of one of Richard Devin Basque’s crimes.
There were sixteen victims that we knew of. All young women. He kept them alive for as long as twelve hours while he surgically removed their lungs piece by piece and ate them, making the dying women watch as he did.
When I finally cornered him in an abandoned slaughterhouse in Milwaukee, he was holding his scalpel over his final victim, Sylvia Padilla. She was still alive when I arrived. Which, even after all these years, made the memory even more troubling.
Thirty meters.
I hadn’t been able to save her—I doubted anyone could have—but I did manage to apprehend Basque, and he was eventually convicted, sent to prison, and spent thirteen years behind bars, most of it in solitary confinement.
But then, just over a year ago, the Seventh District Court announced Basque was going to receive a retrial after “a careful review of the culpatory DNA evidence and eyewitness testimony pertinent to the case.”
And unbelievably, at the conclusion of his retrial last May, he was found not guilty and released from prison with official apologies from the judge, the warden, and even the governor.
Less than a month later, Basque started killing again.
This time with an accomplice.
Fifteen meters to the trailer.
Upon review of the digitized case files, Jake discovered that DNA found at the scene of the June homicide matched previously unidentified DNA at four of Basque’s earlier crimes, and that’s what led us to Travis Reiser.
I was forced to concede that Basque might have had an accomplice all along.
Since June I’d linked three other murders to Basque and Reiser, and if they really had been working together from the start, I couldn’t help but wonder how many other crimes Reiser might have committed by himself in the years since Basque’s arrest and initial conviction.
“Listen,” I said into my mic. “This man can lead us to Basque. Be prudent. Don’t get trigger happy.”
In the silence following my words, Torres reiterated, “You heard him. Wait for my signal.”
The team confirmed over the radios that they understood, and Torres and I arrived at Travis Reiser’s jaundice-colored trailer. “Puke yellow,” Torres muttered. “How appropriate.”
We took the steps up to the front door slowly, but my heart was racing.
My friend Ralph Hawkins—an ex-Army Ranger who now headed up the NCAVC, and apparently the guy who’d mentioned my engagement plans to Torres—once told me that fear was one of the key ingredients to courage. “If your life’s in danger and you’re not afraid,” he said, “you’re just a freakin’ moron, and you’re a liability.”
Right now I was not a liability.
I knocked. “Travis, are you home?”
No answer.
“Mr. Reiser,” I said. “Please open the door.”
Still no reply. No movement inside the trailer.
A nod from Torres and we drew our weapons.
He carried a Glock 23, I unholstered the .357 SIG P229 I’ve carried with me ever since starting in law enforcement fifteen years ago. Reliable. Accurate. An old friend. It felt at home in my hand.
I tried the doorknob. Locked.
We had a warrant to search the premises, but if you break down a door, you run the risk of contaminating evidence or inciting adversarial action, so it’s always better to find an alternative. However, in this case, that wasn’t going to happen. I signaled for Torres to move aside, then positioned myself in front of the doorway.
I kicked the door hard, holding nothing back, planting my heel directly next to the lock. It blistered apart, the door flew open, and Torres whipped through the entrance. I followed closely on his heels.
The living room was dark, lit only by the muted daylight that managed to seep through the heavy curtains drawn across every window. The trailer smelled of mold, of cigarette smoke, of stale beer.
No sign of Reiser.
Torres hooked left toward the bathroom, I moved right, down the short hallway to the bedroom.
The door was closed.
“Travis?” Gun ready, heart racing, I pressed it open.
The room was strewn with dirty clothes and discarded Michelob cans. A mattress lay flopped on the floor, covered with a crumpled mess of sheets and blankets. An old TV sat on a wooden crate in the far corner. To the left, a small dresser was pressed against the wall near the closet, which I now approached.
I raised my SIG just below eye level. High ready position.
Opened the closet door.
Clothes, shoes, boxes. That was all.
I let out a small breath then looked around the room one more time. Nothing.
He wasn’t here.
Just moments ago, I’d been amped with anticipation, but now I felt the all-too-familiar plummet of disappointment that comes from running into an investigative dead end. Highs and lows. The roller-coaster ride of hot adrenaline and cold letdown. Story of my life.
When I returned to the kitchen I found Torres waiting for me.
“Place is empty, Pat.”
“Right.”