by Steven James
“Yeah, I mean, I was thinking I might take the VRE train to the city. Maybe see if I can get a reader’s card for the Library of Congress. I hear they’re pretty cool about giving them out to students. Is that all right?”
The Library of Congress was the biggest library in the world. A bibliophile’s paradise. I knew it was her mandatory mecca for the summer. She’d talked to me earlier about getting a reader’s card to get access to the main reading room, so her request wasn’t a surprise.
As I ripped open the letter I realized I couldn’t think of any good reason not to let her go, except that I didn’t really like the idea of her wandering around the District of Columbia alone.
Ease up. She’s seventeen.
“Sure, that’s fine. I’m teaching most of the day tomorrow anyway.” Then a thought. “I’ll be in class from 8:00 to 11:00, and then from 2:00 until 5:00. I have a meeting in between there, but I should have enough time to sneak to DC, grab lunch, and get back to the Academy. What do you say? Hang out together for lunch?”
You’ll never make it, Pat. Not with the briefing . . . the drive alone could take you—
“Lunch.” A slight pause. “Yeah.”
Good.
I’d find a way to make it to DC in time.
After an awkward moment, she headed for her room, but I called after her. “You sure you’re feeling okay?”
She didn’t turn around. “Yeah.”
“I love you,” I said.
Her bedroom door swung open. “You too.”
She went in, clicked it shut.
Yes, definitely spend some time talking tomorrow.
I slipped the envelope’s contents into my hand and scanned the pages.
And felt my throat tighten.
The letter was from a law firm representing Paul Lansing.
He was taking me to court to get custody of his daughter.
14
I’d only been in the DC area for a couple weeks, not long enough to get to know any lawyers, but Ralph had lived here for the last decade.
I speed-dialed him, and he answered after two rings. “Yeah?” His voice was hushed.
“You still at the primate center?”
“Naw. I’m at home. Tony’s in bed.” Tony was Ralph’s eleven-year-old son. A boy Tessa called “a Cheetos-eating, soccer-playing, video-gaming fool.”
“Sorry to call so late.”
“What’s up?”
“I think I need a lawyer.”
A pause. I had the sense that he was repositioning the phone. “What do you need a lawyer for?”
I told him about the letter from Lansing’s law firm. “Here’s the thing: I’m her legal guardian, so I don’t think there should be any prob—”
“This guy is her father, Pat.”
“I know, but he was never in the picture.”
“Did he want to be?”
An uncomfortable memory squirmed through me.
Last month Tessa had found an old letter that Christie had kept in which Paul begged her not to abort her unborn child. He’d promised to help raise the baby, but Christie hadn’t wanted him to be a part of their lives and had moved away, then raised Tessa alone.
“That’s not the point, Ralph.”
“The court always favors blood relatives. You know that. And she’s still a minor.” His voice had softened, and I didn’t sense that his sympathy right now was a good sign. “You will need a lawyer,” he said. “A good one.”
Not what I’d wanted to be hearing. “You know of any?”
“Most of the ones I know don’t do divorces, custody, any of that stuff. It’s all criminal law.” He thought for a moment. “Hang on a sec. Let me talk to Brineesha.” I heard him turn away from the phone and exchange a few indecipherable words with his wife, then he was back on the line with me. “Brineesha says hi.”
“Hi, back.”
“I’ll tell her. Anyway, she might have someone for you. One of her friends from work—Tracy—I guess she just went through a divorce, messy custody battle, the whole thing. Whoever Tracy’s lawyer was seemed to be really sharp. Brin says she’ll ask her for the name first thing in the morning when she gets to the bank.”
At least it was a start. “Tell her thanks.”
“Hey, don’t worry about this thing, okay? It’ll work out.” His assurances seemed to be having the opposite effect on me.
“Yeah.”
“See you at 11:30 tomorrow. My office.”
“All right.”
Astrid led Brad down the steps to the basement.
Where they were keeping the woman.
“How was it for you?” she asked him. “Tonight, I mean? Being able to watch?”
“It was everything I’d hoped it would be.”
She’d been watching things too, from a rather unique vantage point. “The video feed to that store was a great idea,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“You got the footage I asked for? Afterward?”
He held up his phone.
“Good.” She took it from him. Slipped it into her pocket.
She had to admit, Brad’s plan was by far their most devastating and brazen one yet. There were a few holes that she would fill in over the next two days, but overall he’d done a satisfactory, even admirable, job, and she was quite proud of him. Two more people would die, and the FBI would never suspect her or Brad of anything.
“How did you learn to reroute the video like that to the television store?”
“Research.”
“Research?”
“A job I had before my accident.”
He left it at that, and she sensed it was awkward for him to go on. He’d never told her how he got his scars, but ever since the two of them had first met, it’d been evident to her that the memory was painful.
She decided not to press the issue at the moment.
They reached the bottom of the stairs and went to the room Brad had recently remodeled.
Last month, he’d asked her if they could move some of their work to the house. She hadn’t liked the idea at first, but he’d been persistent, and when she realized it would be harder to travel after the baby was born, she’d given him permission.
He’d spent the last few weeks working on the room. She’d allowed him free rein, and in the end had been surprised by how thorough he’d been in designing it so that it could serve an array of troubling purposes. He’d even made the room soundproof and added a drain to the floor to make cleanup easier.
For her, the excitement came from the feeling of control, not from inflicting physical pain. Brad, on the other hand, had recently become more and more fascinated with that secondary aspect of their hobby.
His choices for outfitting the room reflected that.
She opened the door.
Brad stood quietly beside her as she made sure the woman was safely tucked away for the night.
When Astrid was done, she locked the door behind them and took Brad upstairs.
Just knowing that the woman was down there, helpless, captive, afraid, only served to add to the thrill, and when Astrid reached the bedroom door, she slid seductively in front of her man. “Ready?”
“I’ve been looking forward to this all day.”
And as their prisoner in the basement cried futilely for help, upstairs in the bedroom, the midnight games began.
15
Wednesday, June 11
491 Riley Road
Stafford, Virginia
5:03 a.m.
I woke up irritated, the letter from Paul Lansing’s lawyers on my mind.
And the Mollie Fischer case as well, only a few strides behind it in the race for my attention.
And Calvin’s death.
And Basque, of course, the ghost of flesh and blood from a time in my life I thought I’d left behind, lurking, always lurking, in the background.
“Promise me you won’t let him do it again,” Grant Sikora had begged me as he lay dying.
�
��I promise,” I’d said.
My thoughts circled around everything, evaluating what was at stake in each case, wondering again how Lansing’s lawyers could have known our address, sorting, analyzing. All of the issues seemed like cables tightening inside of me, tugging my thoughts in opposite directions.
Too many things to deal with.
My life in a nutshell.
Even though I knew Brineesha wouldn’t have arrived at work yet, I checked my messages to see if, for some reason, she might have called with the lawyer’s name and number.
She had not.
I looked over my email—nothing important.
Since I didn’t need to leave for the Academy until about 7:30, I changed, threw myself into a workout—a thirty-minute run, twenty max-out sets of pull-ups on a tree branch at the edge of the property, and then crunches until I could barely sit up.
But it didn’t clear my mind.
A shower.
Breakfast.
After downing some oatmeal and a banana, I grabbed a cup of Lavado Fino coffee from Venezuela and my laptop, and headed for the back deck.
Though barely 6:30, the morning was full of the smells of summer—freshly cut grass, warm sunshine, and steel-blue sky. The slightly fishy smell of a nearby lake.
Songbirds jabbered in the trees.
Steam from my coffee curled, wispy and smoke-like from the cup, then faded away, caught in the soft breath of wind, disappearing into the moment.
I sat there, just being in the stillness, in the gentle opening arc of the day. I’ve never been one to meditate, but I’ve always been drawn to the clarity that solitude brings.
A small touch of calm in the middle of my tempest life.
A chance to think.
When the DEA moved their Basic Agent training to Quantico a few years ago, one of their crime scene analyst instructors and friend of mine named Freeman Runnels had bought this house. Really, it’s more of a cabin—rustic framing, thick oak doors, handmade cherry furniture.
However, this summer he was on assignment in Panama, and when he heard I was teaching for three months at the Academy, he’d graciously offered to let Tessa and me stay here. “Just water the plants,” he’d said, and we agreed.
The ten-acre plot was mostly wooded, except for a stretch of lawn here behind the house. An old rock wall, about waist high, skirted along the edge of the woods that lay maybe thirty meters from the deck.
Tessa isn’t exactly the outdoorsy type, but she values her privacy, and when she saw the property and found out that a Virginia Railway Express station was just a fifteen-minute walk away, she’d said, “I guess this’ll be okay.” Which in Tessa-speak means, “Sweet. I’ll be able to go to DC whenever I want.”
I clicked to the online case files to see if we had any updates on Mollie Fischer’s homicide.
The complete police report wasn’t posted yet, no statements from the keeper or the security guard, and, while it annoyed me, it didn’t surprise me. Law enforcement officers are notoriously slow in filling out paperwork. It’s the one part of our job no one seems to like. Including me.
However, I was glad to see that the crime scene photos had been uploaded.
Ninety-four of them.
I scrolled through the jpegs.
No pictures of Mollie alive, only of her dead.
First, hanging from her wrists, then lying on the straw. Photos of her wounds, the restraints, the dead chimps, the entrance and exit doors. Six separate photos of the eyeball Lien-hua had found lying in the straw, a bloodshot orb with a pale blue iris and a ragged penetralia of optic nerve from where the organ had been tugged from—
A small flicker of movement near a break in the rock wall caught my attention.
The leaves parted, and a white-tailed deer stepped delicately into the field.
When I was a teenager growing up in Wisconsin, my father had introduced me to the unofficial religion of the state—deer hunting. And, from what I could remember about the growth cycles of deer, I figured this doe was maybe two or three years old.
She meandered into the yard, silent as a heartbeat, nibbling at the grass until something spooked her and she froze, her head raised, her ears pricked upright.
Maybe she’d caught my scent.
I sat still, watching.
She stayed stationary for only a moment, then whatever had startled her must have seemed too threatening, and she abruptly took off, bolting across the far side of the yard, her tail flagging, until she disappeared into the morning shadows in the woods just past the end of the wall.
A moment of tranquility, of grace, overcome by fear. The jittery race for survival. Life running from death.
Always running.
Always being chased.
I looked at the pictures again.
A race we all lose.
Like Calvin did.
Like Mollie Fischer.
Like so many victims I’ve seen over the years.
Their dead staring eyes. Their quiet, gray lips.
And their shattered, grieving families.
I thought about those platitudes that don’t work as I watched my coffee’s ghostly thin steam curl and then fade into the morning air, then mouse-clicked away from the grisly crime scene photos.
My thoughts returned to Basque.
Ever since his release, he’d been at the center of a media whirlwind. His initial conviction, subsequent retrial, and not-guilty verdict just seemed to be too big of a story for the press to let die, and since he was still in their watchful eye, I doubted he would do anything blatantly illegal, at least in the immediate future.
So I’d been careful and meticulous rather than hurried and sloppy in my research regarding the clue Calvin left: H814b Patricia E.
But so far I’d been unsuccessful in finding her.
If she was even a real person.
If she was even a witness.
Or a victim.
Or alive.
I pulled up my notes.
At first I’d dabbled with the idea that the note was a word play of some sort: H814b—“Height won four be” or “Hate one for bee”—but no combinations of the words seemed to make sense.
The sequence didn’t have enough digits to be a phone number. It wasn’t an address, at least not in the United States. It wasn’t a Dewey decimal number.
After exhausting my ideas I’d contacted Angela Knight, one of the Bureau’s top cybercrime analysts, who also has a knack for cryptanalysis.
We’d tried searches involving every combination of Patricia we could think of: Patty, Patsy, Tricia, Trisha, Trish; and yes, my own name, just for kicks: Pat, Patrick, Rick, Eric, Ricci, Erica.
And so on.
Nothing had come up.
We’d done metasearches through all the data collected at Giovanni’s and Basque’s crime scenes for possible relationships to the name or letter-number sequence. Nothing solid.
Angela suggested that it might be a password for one of Calvin’s computer files or for a website he might have visited, but when we did a digital data analysis of everything on his three computers and cross-referenced the letters and numbers to all the websites he’d visited, addresses in his address book, and numbers stored on his cell phone, we came up blank.
I scoured my files, looking for anything we might have missed until 7:30.
Nothing.
I rubbed my head.
Went back inside the house.
As I gathered my things to leave for my class at the Academy, I noticed a voicemail from Ralph: “Hey, man, Brin went to work early, found her friend, just called. Missy Schuel. That’s her name. The lawyer. I don’t have a number, but she’s got an office on 11th St. NW. See you at 11:30.”
I looked up the number, phoned her, left my name and number as well as a brief summary of my situation, then asked her to call as soon as possible. Then I stuffed the letter from Lansing’s lawyers into my computer bag so I could refer to it to answer any questions she might have.
> Finally, before heading to class, I left a note for Tessa: “Call me. We’ll set up a time and place to meet for lunch.” I thought about adding, “There’s some stuff we need to talk about—like your dad trying to take you away.”
But that’s not the kind of thing you tell someone in a note.
Computer bag in hand, I left for the Academy.
16
Astrid and Brad had met on DuaLife, a website on which you create avatars, or online identities, and live another life as anyone you choose. Marry, if you want to. Have children, get divorced, start over. Whatever you like. You could be a man or a woman, straight or gay, young or old.
A prostitute.
A banker.
A priestess.
Or a serial killer.
Or a victim.
She’d found Brad on one of the newer continents, one that was designed to cater to the unique tastes of adults.
But it wasn’t cybersex that brought them together.
She’d been experimenting at the time, exploring ways to control and manipulate people, and ended up deciding to be the continent’s first female serial killer.
Of course, since the site’s users have invested so much time—and in some cases, money—into creating their online lives, you can’t just kill the other avatars without asking for permission or negotiating with their NowLife creators.
So, counting on the fact that, even in DuaLife, people would want their fifteen minutes of fame, Astrid had posted a notice that she was looking for volunteers who wanted to be lured in, overpowered, and then slaughtered.
And she’d been right about people wanting their moment in the sun. Two men and one woman had responded almost immediately.
Those had been her first few games.
But it was only online.
Only imaginary.
And besides, none of those first three victims had been all that relationally or intellectually engaging and, as a woman with an IQ of 142, Astrid started longing for someone a little more intriguing to kill. Then, in one of her online chats with potential victims, she met Brad.
The Brad avatar was a twenty-eight-year-old oncologist. A fundamentalist Mormon who’d never married, he enjoyed hiking, golf, college football, and reading philosophy.