by Steven James
More cops on the way to the house.
“And so they fled into the cool, Maryland night as the man who was about to find the three bodies entered the house.”
She heard the words as if they were being read by an actor on one of the audio novels she liked to listen to while commuting to work. Then Brad spoke to her from the edge of the forest. “I wish we could stay.”
She opened her eyes. The headlights from the car were halfway up the driveway.
“Just once,” Brad went on. “To watch when the police arrive. To see their faces.”
“It’s too much of a risk.”
“I know. But just once. To watch.”
She handed him silence.
“I’m just saying, it would be nice.” He sounded slightly defeated now, and she enjoyed the fact that she could control him so easily, steer his emotions up or down as she pleased . . .
But on the other hand, she had to admit that it would be nice to watch. “I’ll see if I can come up with a way,” she told him.
That seemed to satisfy him. He waited for her to lead him along the trail.
He followed her obediently, through the forest, toward their waiting car. Within a matter of minutes the officers would find Philip Styles in the kitchen, leaning over the body of his wife. The young mechanic would be arrested and, in time, tried and then convicted of three murders he didn’t commit. Another perfect crime.
As Astrid led Brad deeper into the woods, she considered all that they had just accomplished.
Police find what they expect to find, and since nearly 75 percent of murdered women are killed by their husbands or lovers, the cops wouldn’t bother to look any further than the plethora of physical evidence: two 911 calls from a frantic housewife, Philip’s blood-spattered clothes hastily tossed into the fireplace, his gun—the murder weapon—conveniently wiped of prints, and even, in a very real sense, a witness: the emergency services dispatcher who heard the final shot right after the woman said that her husband was going to kill her.
It wasn’t a mountain of evidence, but it was more than law enforcement gets for most crimes. Along with Philip Styles’s history of drug abuse and domestic violence, it would be more than enough.
It was no mistake that she and Brad had chosen Maryland for this crime. The state still had the death penalty.
Since Philip would never be able to afford a competent lawyer, and his overworked, underpaid state-appointed attorney would almost certainly encourage him to plead out rather than go to trial and face the needle, the best he could hope for was life without the possibility of parole.
And that’s just what she’d wanted, because, for her, it was even more satisfying sending them to prison than watching them die. Because then the power she had over them never went away. Just grew stronger with time.
To think.
To think that by wearing a pink housecoat, firing a gun into the wall, and making two 911 calls she’d orchestrated sewing shut the rest of Philip’s life.
Ten years, thirty, fifty, however long he might survive.
The thrill of controlling someone else’s destiny so completely, so absolutely, was intoxicating, overwhelming.
Arousing.
She paused and faced Brad, pulled him close, and kissed him deeply, letting her hand trail along the ragged scars that covered his neck and left cheek. They were deep and discolored and seemed to frighten most people, but she had always acted as if they didn’t bother her, and perhaps that was one of the reasons he was so obedient to her—he believed that she accepted him as is. Something all human beings desire.
Within the hour they would find a place to make love, and it would be as good as it was each time when the game was over, but tonight she didn’t want to wait. She let one hand slide down his back and explore his firm, toned body.
He gently eased away from her. “We should get out of the woods first.”
She caught the double meaning of his words and smiled. Get out of the woods first. Yes. Brad, the cautious one.
She kissed him one final time, and then led him down the trail toward the car that she’d hot-wired earlier when she borrowed it from a DC Metro parking lot.
When they reached the edge of the forest, he said, “I’ve been thinking.”
“Yes?”
“I’ve got an idea for the next one. Something we should try.”
They arrived at the car.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
It might be nice to let him plan one; at least to hear what he had to say. “Well, then, I’m all ears.”
And then, the loving couple left to find a furtive place to consummate the evening, and she listened attentively as her partner, in both crime and love, outlined his idea for the next perfect night they would spend together.
The next perfect date.
Game number five.
1
Two weeks later
Saturday, May 31
St. Ambrose Church
Chicago, Illinois
6:36 p.m.
Dr. Calvin Werjonic’s body lay grim and still in a lonely casket at the front of the church. I stood in line, nine people away from him, waiting for my chance to pay my last respects to my friend.
The air in the church tasted of dust and dead hymns.
Having spent six years as a homicide detective and the last nine as an FBI criminologist, I’ve investigated hundreds of homicides, but I’ve never been able to look at corpses with clinical objectivity. Every time I see one, I think of the fragility of life. The thin line that separates the living from the dead—the flux of a moment, the breadth of eternity contained in the single delicate beat of a heart.
And I remember the times I’ve had to tell family members that we’d found their loved ones, but that “their condition had proved to be fatal,” that “we’d arrived too late to save them,” or that “we’d done all we could but they didn’t make it.” Carefully worded platitudes to dull the blow.
Platitudes that don’t work.
On all too many prime-time crime shows when investigators arrive at a scene and observe the body, they crack jokes about it, prod at it like a piece of meat. Cut to commercial.
But that’s not the way it is in real life.
The line eased forward.
Death isn’t trite because life isn’t, and the day I stop believing that is the day I’ll no longer be any good at my job.
Another person stepped away from the casket, and I realized I could see part of Calvin’s face, wrinkled and drawn and tired with the years. His skin was colored artificial-Caucasian-white with makeup that was meant to help him look alive again but only served to make him look like a mannequin, a pale replica of the man I’d known.
At seventy-two he’d been twice my age, but that hadn’t gotten in the way of our friendship. When we first met, he was my criminology professor; eventually he became my advisor, and by the time I graduated with my doctorate in geospatial investigation, he was one of my closest friends.
He died two days ago after spending ten days in a coma.
A coma he shouldn’t have been in.
Though not officially consulting on the case, Calvin had independently started tracking a brutal killer I was looking for in Denver. The man, who called himself Giovanni, had gotten to Calvin, attacked him, drugged him. And after Giovanni was caught—managing to kill two SWAT officers during his apprehension—he refused to tell us what drug he’d used.
Despite the best efforts of the Denver Police and the FBI, we weren’t able to extract the information or identify the drug, and since Calvin was already weak from a losing battle with congestive heart failure, he’d passed away.
His condition had proved to be fatal.
We’d arrived too late to save him.
We’d done all we could but he didn’t make it.
Platitudes.
That don’t work.
Three people in front of me.
The line was moving slower than I’d expect
ed, and I glanced at my watch. My seventeen-year-old stepdaughter Tessa was waiting for me in the car. Ever since her mother’s funeral last year, death has troubled her deeply, overwhelmed her. So even though she knew Calvin and had wanted to come in, she told me she couldn’t. I understood.
We had less than an hour to get to our 7:34 p.m. flight from O’Hare. It would be tight.
Just one person in line.
Before slipping into the coma, Calvin had uncovered a clue that was apparently related to the Giovanni case but also touched on the most famous case of my career—the murder and cannibalism of sixteen women more than a decade ago in the Midwest. The clue: H814b Patricia E.
A psychopath named Richard Devin Basque had originally been convicted of the crimes but had recently been retried right here in Chicago in the light of new DNA analysis, and found not guilty. And now he was free.
I arrived at the casket.
It’s a cliché to say that the dead look like they’re asleep. It’s a way to romanticize death, an attempt to take some of the sting away. If you talk to any law enforcement officer, medical examiner, or forensic scientist they won’t talk like that because they know the truth.
The dead don’t look like they’re sleeping; they look dead. Their bodies stiffening in twisted, blood-soaked ways. Their skin pasty and gray, sloughing off the corpse, or clinging to it in rotting, reeking patches. Sometimes their skin is twitching and moving because of a thick undercurrent of squirming insects inside the body.
There’s no mistaking death for sleep.
So now, I saw Calvin’s forever-closed lips. His quiet eyes. The makeup that’s meant to hide the wrinkles and the evidence of his deterioration.
The truth of life is so harsh, so brutal, that we do everything we can to ignore it: we are born, we struggle, we endure, we die, and there’s nothing left to show we were ever here but a few ripples, a few possessions that the people left behind squabble over, and then everyone moves on.
Dust to dust.
Ashes to ashes.
The grim poetry of existence.
I placed a hand on the cool, smooth wood of the casket.
Earlier, I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t cry, but as I thought of Calvin’s life and all that it had meant to so many people, I felt my eyes burning.
I stepped away.
Aiming for the lobby, I eased past the other mourners, nodding to some of them, laying a gentle hand on an elbow or shoulder to comfort family members or friends as I headed toward the door.
As I passed through the door I found that the lights in the lobby had been dimmed and it appeared vacant, but as I neared the exit I heard a man call my name.
He was standing half hidden in the shadows, lingering near the roped-off steps to the balcony. His face was shrouded, but I recognized the voice and felt a surge of anger as I realized who he was—the man I’d found thirteen years ago with the scalpel in his hand, bent over his final victim, the man a Chicago jury had acquitted last month.
Richard Devin Basque.
2
He approached me.
“I can only imagine,” he said, “how hard this must be for you.” He wore a somber gray suit jacket, and his dark European good looks made him appear thirty, ten years younger than his actual age. A powerful man threaded with deep muscles, he paused less than a meter from me. “I understand you two were very close. My prayers are with you.”
Just before his retrial, he’d conveniently “trusted in Jesus.”
Good timing.
Tactics. Games.
Anger invaded my grief and I no longer felt like crying. I felt like taking Basque down. Hard.
“I suggest you step aside,” I said.
He hesitated for a moment and then did as I suggested.
During his retrial there’d been an attempt on his life by the father of one of the young women he’d butchered. I’d managed to stop the gunman, but in the process his gun had discharged and the man had been fatally wounded.
As he lay dying, he’d begged me to promise that I’d stop Richard Basque from ever killing again, and I’d promised—hoping that a guilty verdict would settle the matter so I wouldn’t have to take things into my own hands.
Then Grant Sikora died in my arms.
And less than two weeks later, Basque was found not guilty.
I could only guess that he’d shown up tonight because he knew I’d be at Calvin’s visitation and just wanted to taunt me.
He has every right to be here. He’s a free man.
I felt fire raging through me and I realized that if I stayed here in the lobby any longer, I would do something I would live to regret.
Or maybe I wouldn’t regret it at all.
I started for the door, then paused.
An idea.
Turned.
The shadows looked at home surrounding Basque.
“Who is Patricia E.?” I asked.
“Patricia E.?”
“Yes.”
His gaze tipped toward the doors to the sanctuary, where two people were exiting. It didn’t look like they noticed us. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He gave me a slow wide smile that, despite his leading-man good looks, appeared reptilian in the dim light. “That’s always been the problem between us, hasn’t it? A lack of trust. You never believed I was innocent, you never believed—”
“Quiet.”
He blinked.
Then I edged closer, lowered my voice to a whisper. “I’m going to be watching you, Richard. I know you killed those women. I’m going to find Patricia, and if she’s not the key, I’ll find whatever else I need. Don’t get too comfortable on the outside. You’re going back to your cage.”
He watched me quietly, no doubt hoping to rattle me. I denied him the satisfaction, just studied him with stone eyes.
“Prison is only a state of mind,” he said, playing the role of the unaffected. “But where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” Coming from him, the words sounded like a mockery of both freedom and God.
A cold and final option occurred to me as I stood here beside him in the secluded corner of the lobby.
Right now, right now. Take him down. You could end it forever.
Despite myself I felt my hands tightening into fists.
Basque seemed to read my thoughts. “You can feel it, can’t you?” His tongue flicked across the corner of his lips. “I didn’t used to think you were capable of it, but now—”
“You have no idea what I’m capable of.”
Something passed across his face. A flicker of fear. And it felt good to see.
A few seconds is all you need—
A slant of light from the side door cut through the lobby.
“Patrick?”
I glanced toward the door and saw my stepdaughter Tessa enter the church. “Are you ready to—”
“Go back to the car.” My tone was harsher than a father’s voice should be.
Then she noticed Basque, and in the angular swath of light, I could tell by the look on her face that she recognized him.
She edged backward.
I gestured toward the street. “I’ll be right out. Go on.”
Her eyes were large and uneasy as she backed away, letting the door swing shut by itself, slicing the daylight from the church.
Basque gave me a slight nod of his head. “I’ll be seeing you, Patrick.”
Leave now, Pat. Step away.
“I’ll look forward to it.”
I found Tessa outside, her shoulder-length black hair fluttering around her face in a tiny flurry of wind. “Was that him?”
“No.”
“Yes it was.”
I led her toward the rental car. “Let’s go.”
“You stink at lying.”
“So you’ve said.”
Only when I reached the door did I realize my hands were still clenched, fists tight and ready. I shook out my fingers, f
lexed them, but Tessa saw me.
“Yes.” I opened the car door. “It was him.”
We climbed in, I took my place behind the wheel, and for a long moment neither of us spoke. At last I started the engine.
“It’s not over, is it?” Her voice was soft, fragile, and made her sound much younger than she was.
I took a breath and tried to say the right thing, the noble thing, but I ended up saying nothing.
She looked my direction. “So, what happens now?”
“We grieve,” I said. “For Calvin.” But that’s not what I was thinking.
Those were the last words either of us spoke for the rest of the drive to O’Hare Airport.
3
Ten days later
Tuesday, June 10
Interstate 95
39 miles southwest of Washington, DC
6:19 p.m.
A restless sky overhead. No rain yet, but a line of thunderstorms was stalled over DC and it didn’t look like it’d miss us. At least the storm would break the stifling June humidity.
The exit to the FBI Academy lay less than two miles away.
Tessa sat in the passenger seat and quietly scribbled a few letters into the boxes of a New York Times crossword puzzle, her third for the day.
“What’s a seven-letter word,” she said, “for the ability to recall events and details with extraordinary accuracy?”
“Hmm . . .” I thought about it. “I don’t know.”
She pointed to the boxes she’d just filled in. “Eidetic.”
“If you already knew the answer, why did you ask me?”
“I was testing you.”
“Really.”
“Seeing if you were eidetic.”
“Maybe I was testing you too,” I said.
“Uh-huh.” The sign beside the highway signaled the exit to the Quantico Marine Corps Base. “It’s just ahead.”
She folded up the crossword puzzle and stared out the windshield at the anvil-shaped clouds looming in the darkening sky.
Tonight’s panel discussion was an official Bureau function so I’d asked her to take out her eyebrow ring and lose the black eye shadow. She’d obliged, but only after giving me a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me teenage girl look.