by Steven James
And she believed she knew what lay inside.
The passage of time began to erase the weakness that had been pinning her to the ground. She could move her head more easily now, and she felt her strength gradually returning to her legs, her arms. She could wiggle her fingers and tip her feet to the side.
Misty moonlight soaked the forest all around her.
Though she wasn’t strong enough to sit up, or fight, or run, at least she was finally able to think more clearly.
“What are you doing?” Her voice sounded weak. Distant. As if someone else were saying the words for her.
“I’m finishing what I started when I first found you on DuaLife.” He was still digging with the garden tools. “When I first chose you.”
“No,” she muttered. “I chose you.”
“Yes,” he said ambiguously, but she could tell he wasn’t actually agreeing with her. “For a while I was concerned that you might catch on, guess my intentions, predict the ending.” He was troweling out dirt as he spoke. “But it looks like you must have been too distracted by your little power trip to notice.”
He finished his work in the hole, set the trowel and brush aside.
She tried to make her voice sound steady, controlled, authoritative. “Take me back home. We’ll talk about this at the house.”
He walked around her so that he was no longer between her and the hole. Then he knelt beside her. “Do you know what causes fear?”
She was trying to gather her strength to sit up. “Brad, take me home.”
“When a person feels threatened in that place—that physical, emotional, or psychological place—”
“Brad—”
He put a finger to her lips. “Threatened in that place where she feels the most secure, there, in that moment, fear is born. And the more profound her sense of safety, the more acute the fear.”
“No,” she said. “It’s . . . you don’t understand—”
Softly, he brushed aside a fleck of dirt that must have dropped onto her cheek while he was shoveling. “That power, that sense of absolute mastery over life and death that you’ve become so addicted to, let’s see how you handle the opposite.”
He slid one hand beneath her back, the other beneath her legs, and lifted her.
She tried to squirm free but hadn’t yet regained enough strength. “I don’t . . .” Her words faded away. “I have to tell you something . . .”
He carried her toward the hole. “Yes?”
“I’m pregnant, Brad. Stop this. Now.”
He set her down beside the hole, but he did not reply, simply straightened out her arms and legs.
“I’m going to have your baby.”
The smell was terrible, overpowering.
She saw him reach to the side, into the darkness, retrieve a gag.
“I said I’m pregnant!”
He was leaning over her. “Astrid, you know how this goes. The victim begs, grovels, tells the oppressor whatever she can think of to get him to change his mind, but it’s not going to work. We both know it doesn’t—”
“I’ll prove it.” Desperation shot through her words. “Take me home!”
He paused and seemed to consider her request.
“It’s true,” she said. Despite herself, her voice cracked. “Please, please.”
“If you are telling the truth, if you really are pregnant, then this night will be even more special to me.” He bent over her and stretched out the gag. “Two for the price of one.” And before she could cry out or yell for help, he forced the gag into her mouth and secured it in place.
“Welcome to the fishbowl.”
Then he rolled her face-first into the hole.
On top of the rotting corpse.
77
She would have screamed if she were not gagged.
She tried to push herself up, struggled to, but was still too weak, and he was pressing her down firmly, a knee bent against the small of her back.
“Astrid, I’d like you to meet Riah Everson,” he said. “She was a thirty-eight-year-old mother of three. Died from a head injury two days ago after she slipped on a doll that her youngest daughter left at the top of the stairs.”
Her cheek was resting against the moist skin of the corpse’s face. Desperately, desperately, she struggled to get away, but the lingering sedative and his weight pinned her down. Two fat grubs wriggled across the dead woman’s putrid skin, and she felt them squirm momentarily against her own cheek before dropping out of sight.
Again she felt like retching, again she did not.
He was positioning her right arm, laying something across her wrist, but he must have seen her throat clench. “It was a little hard to figure that part out. With the smell, I knew you’d instinctively regurgitate, and with that cloth in your mouth, you’d choke on your vomit and die. And that’s really not what we’re looking for here.”
She felt a strap tighten around her wrist. She tried, tried, tried to pull free, but he’d buckled it securely in place. Fastening her wrist to something beneath her.
The arm of the dead woman.
Another scream erupted from her throat but went nowhere.
“There aren’t many drugs that paralyze the gag reflex. I’m not sure the Dotracaine I gave you will work. It’s supposed to last sixteen hours. Let’s hope so.”
She frantically twisted her head to the side to try and work the gag loose, but it did not come free, and from seeing the proficiency of his work in the past, she doubted she would ever be able to get the gag off without the use of her hands.
He was holding down her other arm now, binding it to Riah Everson’s. “I wish I could take credit for this idea, but actually the Romans came up with it. They would strap a corpse to the back of a guilty man and make him carry it around until he was dead as well. They didn’t understand infection back then, but they did understand death. The Romans were also fans of crucifixion. They did not let the guilty get off lightly.”
He was almost done with her left arm. She tried to yank it free from his grip. Useless.
“Remember Saint Paul? We spoke about this on Wednesday. He referred to this technique: ‘The evil I do not wish, this I do. I am a wretched man! Who will rescue me from this body of death?’ You see how he does that? The body of death? It’s a play on words—sin metonymically becomes the dead body he’s carrying around.”
He tugged the second strap tight. Buckled it.
Then went to work on her legs.
78
After Brad finished with her ankles, he looped the final strap under the neck of the dead woman, and then around the neck of his lover.
As he did, Astrid, who was lying facedown, managed to lift her cheek slightly away from the corpse. Brad grabbed a handful of her hair and forced her head down to keep her face properly positioned as he buckled the strap around her neck with his other hand.
He didn’t want to constrict Astrid’s breathing so he was gentle, careful, as he bound her neck to the neck of Riah Everson’s corpse.
Then he let go of her hair, stood, and pulled out his cell phone to get some video.
For later.
He made sure he got some close-ups. Thousands of law enforcement officers would eventually watch this tape in the classrooms of the FBI Academy, and he wanted to make sure they would be able to get a good look at Astrid’s pretty, terror-stricken face.
At last he pocketed the phone and went for the shovel. “Just so you know.” He tossed a shovelful of dirt onto her legs. “I won’t put any soil over your face. I don’t want you to suffocate. And it’s not too cold tonight, so hypothermia might not be an immediate concern. It’ll probably end up being the scavengers that bother you the most. I imagine there’s plenty of them in a body farm. With the degree of Riah’s decomp, it shouldn’t take them long to arrive. I’m afraid that by this weekend, you’ll be a permanent addition to this farm.”
He packed some dirt around Astrid’s ankles and wrists to make certain she wouldn’t be able
to wiggle free.
“By the way,” he said, “I never had a pet Sheltie.” He was snugging the dirt around her feet. “No dog, although there were times when I entertained myself with some of the neighborhood cats.”
He could tell she was trying to cry out, and he was pleased by how little sound she was able to make.
After satisfying himself that she was secure, he tossed a thin layer of dirt across her, scattered the remainder of the soil nearby, and spread leaves over the area to hide the evidence of the shoveling.
At last he stood back and studied his work.
Astrid’s head was still visible, but unless you knew where to look, it wasn’t something you would notice. Her back was jerkily rising and falling as she drew in short, frantic breaths. Based on the rapidity of her respiration, he guessed that she might hyperventilate, but he’d studied human anatomy enough to know that even if she did pass out, she would almost certainly regain consciousness again. At least for the first ten or twelve hours. The human body is amazingly adept at survival.
He began to gather his things.
She had suited him well in the role he’d chosen her to play.
Yes.
He’d killed before he met her, of course he had, but this had been the longest, the most exquisite game yet—all of that time playing the submissive one, the easily controlled, subservient one, all of it had paid off so nicely in gaining her implicit trust.
Danger and play.
Yes.
Exquisite.
Astrid tried to cry out again, but it wasn’t possible. She would never make another recognizable sound, never say another word.
He leaned over her one last time. “At first I was planning to take you to the basement, to the room I spent so much time remodeling, but then I decided it would be more fun like this.” He ran his hand softly through her hair. “And it was more fun this way, wasn’t it?”
She tried to shake his hand free. Failed.
As he’d planned for this night, he’d anticipated seeing panic in her eyes, but the depth of terror and final desperation he now saw in her moonlit face was even more satisfying than what he’d imagined.
A tear slanted down the side of her nose, and he gently wiped it away. “Sleep tight, Astrid.”
Then he picked up the shovels and trowel and walked through the fog-enshrouded moonlight to the car.
No, this wasn’t the climax to the story.
Things were just beginning to get interesting.
79
14 hours left . . .
Friday, June 13
7:29 a.m.
Considering all the traumatic experiences Tessa had been through during the last couple days, I knew she needed sleep, so I was careful not to wake her as I put on some coffee.
Stepping into the bathroom, I took my meds and checked the gunshot wound. My arm ached, of course, but the pain had morphed from sharp blasts of fire to a deep tenderness that ran all through the left side of my body. A thick, continuous blur of pain that was impossible to ignore.
The wound itself had been draining overnight, and the bandages were now blood-soaked. I spent some time cleaning the wound, put some topical antibiotic on both the entrance and exit holes, then wrapped the arm with fresh bandages—but all of that served to make the wound itself tender and sore all over again.
As I ate breakfast, I tried to direct my attention away from my arm.
Curious about the gas station explosion, I checked the online news and discovered that the body of the young man who’d been working at the gas station, Juarez Hernandez, had been found behind the sales counter.
No sign of foul play.
That’s what they said.
Another death.
Another dose of grief for another distraught family.
As I considered the possible implications of the explosion, I checked my email and noticed a message from Margaret notifying all the task force members about an 11:00 meeting at the command post. Our paths hadn’t crossed since Rodale had put me back on the case, and I assumed she would not be thrilled by his decision, but I decided not to worry about that unless she brought it up.
Thankfully, another instructor was covering my classes again today, so that would give me the chance to focus the majority of my day on the case—even though, admittedly, I wasn’t thrilled that the other instructor was Jake Vanderveld.
After uploading the files from Rodale and the financial reports from Fischer onto the task force’s command level database, I reviewed the updates to the case. I remembered that a gas station receipt had been found in the van parked at the hotel, and when I pulled up the jpeg of it, I saw that it was from the same gas station that had exploded.
Knowing how these killers worked, I suspected they had left that receipt in the van on purpose, just to taunt us.
Or to give you a clue to another crime they’re planning to commit.
A future crime.
They left the receipt from the gas station, then killed Juarez . . . left Mahan’s car, then killed him later that night . . . left Mollie’s purse, then killed her the next day.
Hmm.
I was reminded again of Adkins, the only murderer I’d ever faced who’d followed this pattern of leaving clues to future victims, but he was dead after an ambulance chased him to the bottom of a North Carolina gorge. Perhaps someone had found access to his case files and was imitating his pattern.
I spent more than an hour looking into that possibility but found nothing, and at 9:02 I was scrolling through yesterday’s DNA reports from the lab when my phone rang.
Caller ID told me it was Angela Knight.
When I answered she didn’t waste any time: “I found Richard Basque.”
“What?” Immediately, I moved toward the back deck so if Tessa woke up she wouldn’t overhear the conversation. “You found him? Where?”
“He’s here, in DC—or at least he was an hour ago.”
“Where is he now?”
“I’m not sure.”
I was on the deck now, closing the door behind me. “How do you know he was in the city?”
“At first when you asked me to look for him, I did the usual—you know, looked for GPS, credit card use, reviewed airline flight manifests, routine traffic stops—nothing. I even tried the defense system’s satellite video archives to see if we had footage of his car leaving Chicago; they started keeping old footage, you know—”
“Yes, for six months. I know.” I was anxious to hear how she’d found him. “So you found his car?”
“No, that’s the thing. I didn’t.” I heard her yawn and ended up doing so myself. Power of suggestion. She went on, “So I turned to the next best thing—”
“Mass transit surveillance.”
“Yes.” She sounded disappointed that I’d guessed what she was going to say. “I started a metasearch of the twenty largest US cities’ transit video footage since Tuesday. You can’t even imagine how long it takes to access some of that data. The bandwidth most of those cities still use is from—” She yawned again.
“How long have you been up, Angela?”
She thought. “I’m not sure. Anyway, there he was, walking through the Metro Central Station in DC at 7:31 this morning. I know that’s over an hour and a half ago. Sorry I didn’t catch it earlier.”
I didn’t think she needed to apologize for anything. “No, you did great. Are you sure it’s him?”
“Eighty-four percent. According to Lacey.”
Her computer. Good old Lacey.
“Did you tell Ralph yet?” I asked.
“I thought I’d let you do that. Considering you’re the one who asked me to locate Basque.”
I tried to process what she’d told me within the broader context of the case. “All right. Anything on Patricia E.?”
“Pat, I’m way behind here,” she said, which was not exactly an answer. “Just before I punched in your number, I got word that Metro found a stolen car with Mollie Fischer’s laptop in the backseat
, and guess who gets to do the data recovery?”
“They found the computer?”
Oh yes, good.
Things were popping.
“Yes, and you’re gonna love this—the car is sitting in front of police headquarters.”
Why didn’t that surprise me.
“Who found it?”
“Lee Anderson.” He was the Metro PD officer who’d shuttled me from the hospital to my car Wednesday afternoon. The one who’d been surprised by my take on motives when we first met.
“Call me if you find anything, Angela. Thanks again. You’re the best there is.”
Another yawn. Once more I found myself following her lead. I wished she would stop doing that. “See you soon, Pat.”
“Okay.”
End call.
Obviously, in order to understand the foot traffic patterns as well as the potential pedestrian entrance and exit routes from the car, I needed to have a look at the vehicle and evaluate its orientation in respect to the neighboring streets as well as its actual distance from the entrance to the police headquarters. However, I didn’t want to leave Tessa here alone, especially after yesterday when Lansing cornered her at the hotel. In addition, even though Basque had never threatened her in any way, just knowing that he was in the vicinity made me uneasy.
But I couldn’t take Tessa to a secondary crime scene that was still being actively processed.
Figure that out in a few minutes.
First things first.
I punched in Ralph’s number, and he listened in cold silence as I explained that Angela Knight had found Basque.
“You should have told me yesterday that you had her working on this.”
“It wasn’t exactly aboveboard,” I said. “I didn’t want to involve you.”
“You involved her.”