by Steven James
Still no answer from Doehring.
“No, it’s late. You need to—”
“I’m coming, Patrick.” Her words were unequivocal and she edged past me, making her way toward the passenger door.
The call went to Doehring’s voicemail: I told him to send a car to look for Lien-hua’s Hyundai Genesis coupe beside the park where we’d had the picnic and—if it wasn’t there—to put out an attempt to locate and call me right away if it was found. I left the license plate number, then turned to Tessa. “Really, this is—”
“Look. I lost my mom. I lost my dad. You two are the only . . .” She was obviously struggling with what to say. “You’re not the only one who loves her, okay? Now let’s go.”
I said nothing, just slid into the driver’s seat, backed up the Jeep, and the two of us took off for the hospital.
As I saw how worried and afraid she was, I remembered her words from earlier about Lien-hua and how glad she was that we were all together. Tessa would find out about Lien-hua’s condition sooner or later, and I realized it would probably be best if she heard it from me now. So, although I was still reluctant to give her specifics, I summarized everything I knew about what had happened.
“What?” Tessa exclaimed. “She was stabbed? Where?”
“In the chest.”
A long silence. “Patrick, that’s . . .”
“Yes. I know.” Though I had no way of knowing if it was true, I told her, “She’s going to be okay.”
Another pause. “Do they know who did it?”
“No. Not yet.”
“But you’re going to find him, right?”
“Yes.”
“And what?”
“What do you mean?”
“What are you going to do when you find him? You gonna bring him in?”
It didn’t surprise me that Tessa was pursuing this line of questioning. She’d been living with me while I worked some of the most brutal cases of my career. The limits and bounds of justice were things we’d talked about a lot over the last year.
In fact, the night her father was killed trying to protect her from a psychopath who’d set his sights on her, she’d been the one to fire the shot that killed the offender just as he was about to murder her. For months she’d barely slept, but she told me on more than one occasion that she was glad she’d done it, that a part of her—a part that frightened her terribly—had actually enjoyed squeezing the trigger that day.
Justice doesn’t always have clean hands, and we all have dark desires clawing at our wills. I knew that all too well from my job. Now as we spoke, I sensed where she was going with this. “I’ll make sure he pays for what he did,” I told her evenly.
“You’d better.” Her jaw was set. She let the rest go unsaid, but I could tell we were on the same page. She didn’t want me to bring him in. She wanted a different kind of justice.
And so did I.
I merged onto the beltway.
Ten minutes to St. Mary’s.
5
We exited onto Pennsylvania, and I was reassuring myself that things were going to be okay when Doehring finally returned my call.
He filled me in: the man who’d struck Lien-hua with his vehicle told the responding officers that she’d mentioned an apartment nearby. “He was distraught,” Doehring told me, “said she ran right in front of his car. Her wrists were bound behind her.”
I was holding the phone with one hand, the steering wheel with the other. I felt both hands tighten as he said that. “What else?”
“No one was there in the apartment. Lien-hua had ligature marks around her neck. She was strangled, probably with a belt of some type. She was stabbed in the right thigh and the right side of her chest. Punctured her lung.” The officer from earlier hadn’t mentioned a wound in her leg.
Doehring hesitated and I could sense that there was something he wasn’t telling me.
“What did you find in the apartment?” I asked.
“Among other things, a scalpel. And one of the burners on the stove was still on, a frying pan on top of it.”
“Basque.” The word slipped out before I realized it, and out of the corner of my eye I noticed a wash of fear cross Tessa’s face. Over the years I’d been careful to keep the details from her, but the media had been thorough in covering Basque’s crimes, and she knew all too well what he did to the women he abducted.
“There were bloody bandages too,” Doehring explained. “We tested the DNA right away. It’s confirmed. It’s him. Apparently, she wounded him.”
Over the last twenty years the science of DNA identification has evolved exponentially, and being able to test it on-site and run the results through the system has been one of the great breakthroughs of the last two years for law enforcement. It wasn’t available everywhere yet, but it was here in the nation’s capital.
I’d caught Basque early in my career while I was still a homicide detective in Milwaukee. He’d been tried, convicted, and then served thirteen years in prison before managing to swing a retrial last year. Based on controversial forensic evidence and conflicting eyewitness testimony, he was found not guilty and released.
Soon after his release, he slaughtered the law professor who’d done the legal work that ended up helping free him. That was last spring. He hadn’t slowed down since then, leaving a string of bodies across the Northeast. I fatally shot his partner in January, but even though we’d been close to catching Basque on three separate occasions, he always managed to slip away.
No one knew for sure how many people he’d killed, but based on evidence from unsolved homicides back in the Midwest and here in the DC area, I put the number close to forty.
As far as I knew, Lien-hua was the first woman to ever survive being attacked by him.
If she really does survive after all.
No, she would be okay.
She would.
After I hung up with Doehring, Tessa said to me, “St. Mary’s is a teaching hospital.”
“Yes.”
“So Lien-hua’s getting the best medical care in the region, right?”
I could tell she was trying to convince herself of the same thing I was trying to convince myself of.
“That’s right.”
Then we were both quiet. I sped down the street that led to the hospital and squealed to a stop just outside the emergency room doors.
As Tessa and I entered the building, I told her she needed to stay in the waiting room, but she shook her head. “No, I’m—”
I laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I promise I’ll come and get you as soon as I find out how she is. But you need to stay here right now.”
“Why?”
“Because . . .” If Lien-hua is as bad off as I think she might be, I don’t want you to see her, I thought, but said, “Because I need to make sure she’s in a condition first where she can see visitors.”
Tessa opened her mouth as if she were going to reply, then closed it again. I think she caught the deeper gist of what I was saying.
“What am I supposed to do out here?”
“You believe in prayer, you told me that, right?”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“Now would be a good time.”
I held her for a moment to try to reassure her, and then I saw Doehring approaching.
“Text me right away.” Her eyes went to a sign on the wall prohibiting cell phone use in the hospital, but she ignored it. “As soon as you know anything.”
I ignored it as well. “I will.”
Lieutenant Cole Doehring stopped in front of us. He’d been a cop for two decades and had the look of a tough, 1930s boxer about him; still, he was a pushover when it came to relating to his two young daughters—a side of him that he tried to keep hidden from other cops. I respected him, even though I didn’t always agree
with his traditional approach of looking for means, motive, and opportunity when it came to tracking offenders.
Those were not the things I relied on—especially not motives, since they’re nebulous, hard to pin down, impossible to identify with any degree of certainty, aren’t required to be shown in court, and focusing on them rather than on the timing and location of the crime more often than not slows down or derails investigations.
I hurried with Doehring down the hall toward the operating room. “Who’s working the apartment?” I asked him. “Metro PD or the FBI?”
“Our guys are there now. I called the Bureau to get the ERT out there too. Cassidy and Farraday are on the way.”
“Good.”
The ERT, or Evidence Response Team, is the Bureau’s forensics investigation unit. Although the attack on Lien-hua was technically under the jurisdiction of the Washington, DC, Metro Police Department, since she was a federal agent, the Bureau’s involvement in the investigation went without saying—especially if her assailant was Basque, who was number three on our Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.
• • •
Lien-hua was still in the operating theater when we arrived.
One of the nurses led Doehring and me quietly up a short set of steps to a landing with a wide window allowing a view of the surgeons at work. “They told us they were hoping to have her out within the hour,” she explained.
“So that’s good news, right?” I said.
She didn’t reply right away. “Yes. That’s good news. Often thoracic surgery like this can last up to six hours or more.”
Just seeing Lien-hua there, the tube in her throat, the doctors bent over her chest, was hard enough, but seeing the blood, so much blood, was almost unbearable.
Blood.
I’ve seen too much of it in my career. Too much suffering. Too much death.
I didn’t want to think about that, but it struck me that in America, death is sanitized. There’s a disconnect. To a certain extent Tessa and her vegan friends realized that in a way so many of us don’t. We don’t think about where meat actually comes from: our beef doesn’t have hair on it, our bacon doesn’t have hooves, the chicken nuggets we buy at the drive-through don’t look anything at all like chickens.
And as far as the death of people is concerned, we prefer to either avoid the topic altogether or speak in euphemisms: “He passed away,” “The tumor was inoperable,” “We weren’t able to resuscitate him,” “There was nothing we could do.” Those phrases are supposed to make it easier than the stark, honest truth.
I’m not sure they do the trick, but I do know that we all tend to do whatever we can to try to ignore the fact that death is the default setting for the universe, that it’s on our heels and gaining on us every moment. In this job, you end up using those euphemisms to try to help others, but you know the game all too well, and they don’t work when you tell them to yourself.
I tried my hardest to focus on the fact that Lien-hua was in the hands of the region’s best surgeons, of people who were going to save her, but images of death just wouldn’t leave me alone.
Too much death.
A few years ago I went to Mumbai, India, to train their police force on principles of environmental criminology. As we were leaving the airport, traffic on our street came to a standstill because of a funeral. Six men were carrying the corpse of a young woman on a funeral pyre that was balanced on their shoulders. Her body lay on a pallet showered in flower petals. The people wailed and wept publicly as they passed. No hiding their grief. Nothing sanitized. No euphemisms.
Definitely not like in America.
Stop thinking about dead bodies, Patrick! Lien-hua’s going to be okay.
As I watched the doctors work on her, I wanted so badly to help her, but right now there was really nothing I could do.
Prayer didn’t sound like such a bad idea after all, but I figured God didn’t need me to fold my hands or close my eyes to know what I was crying out for in my heart. Instead, I could do what I was made to do. Maybe that would be the best kind of prayer of all.
“CSIU is there now?” I said to Doehring. “At the apartment?”
“Yes.”
“Alright.” I pulled out my phone. “Good.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Help them find Basque.”
6
My cell phone was not your typical phone.
It’d been issued to me from a branch of the Department of Defense that I consult with called the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The agency specialized in using geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT, to monitor military hot zones, find terrorist training camps, identify nuclear research facilities in rogue nations, target laser-guided weapons systems, and coordinate troop movements.
Not only did the phone contain the typical array of high-end law enforcement apps (like an infrared camera and a touch screen that could scan fingerprints and pull up names through AFIS), it also had a real-time defense satellite feed and a 3-D hologram projector.
By accessing the world’s most advanced geospatial digital mapping program, the Federal Aerospace Locator and Covert Operation Network, or FALCON, I could visually soar through a 3-D landscape of any geographic region on the planet. FALCON contained a degree of detail Google Earth just might reach in ten or fifteen years.
And when I had video footage of the interior of a building to work with, the phone could project and manipulate a 3-D view of the structure’s interior.
That’s what I was about to do right now.
• • •
Doehring and I found an empty exam room and I reached Tanner Cassidy, one of our ERT agents and a good friend of mine, at the scene.
“I need you to take some video for me, Cassidy. Give me some eyes on what we have there.”
“Right.”
Normally I would visit the scene myself, ideally at the same time of day as the crime, to gain a better understanding of the spatial relationships between the location and its surroundings and to identify potential entrance and exit routes. If there was time I’d also inspect the light conditions at the time of the offense, study the area’s road layout, and survey the demographics of the neighborhood and the local land-use and traffic patterns.
It’s all part of the deal with environmental criminology and geospatial investigation, my two specialties.
Right now, however, with Lien-hua in surgery, I wasn’t about to drive to the apartment. Cassidy and I had done this before at crime scenes and we had a system. If he fed me the video, I could use my phone’s hologram projector to re-create a 3-D map of the apartment, and if I had enough video or used the defense satellites, I could get a visual of the surrounding streets and perhaps get an indication of the direction Basque might have fled.
Cassidy went to his phone’s video app, and his squarish face, studious, careful eyes, and unruly brown hair came into view. He was forty-one, experienced, sharp, and I was glad he was on the case. “How is she, Pat?”
“She’s in surgery. They think she’ll be out within the hour.”
“Any idea if . . . ?”
“It’s looking more optimistic than it did at first.”
“That’s good to hear.” But he sounded only slightly relieved.
“Yes. So what do we have?”
“Basque left prints, DNA; the question isn’t really who was here, but where did he go?”
“Well, let’s figure that out.”
Cassidy turned the camera to face the room. I set my phone on the exam bed and turned on the hologram function.
Immediately, a bluish spread of hologram lines appeared two feet above the bed, and as Cassidy turned in a circle, the layout of the apartment and its contents, including the furniture, appeared, and in a matter of seconds the 3-D image of the apartment’s interior emerged.
I drew my forefin
ger and thumb across the phone’s screen to zoom out to get more perspective on the apartment, then turned them to rotate the image so I could take in the place’s spatial layout. The overturned end table in the living room indicated that there’d been a struggle.
“Is her phone there?”
“Her phone?”
“She had her phone with her, made a 911 call. Is it there; can you see it anywhere?”
He took a few moments to look around and then told me that no, he did not see it.
“If Basque took it and didn’t remove the battery, we might be able to trace its location. Can you call that in? Have Angela get on it?”
“Yes.”
He spoke to an agent beside him to have her contact Angela Knight in Cybercrime, then he got back on the line with me.
After I had a clear idea of the layout of the apartment I told Cassidy, “Okay, walk down the hall for me, the one Lien-hua took, and then step outside. Let’s get a look at the street. Take me around the block.”
He did as I requested, and within a few minutes I had a detailed visual of the streets surrounding the apartment building. I noted where Lien-hua had been struck by the car in reference to the room Basque had taken her to.
By overlaying FALCON’s satellite imagery of that neighborhood and inputting the location where Lien-hua was found, I was able to identify the three most likely routes Basque might have used to flee the scene.
Environmental criminology studies the nexus of timing and location in a criminal event, the reason the offender might have chosen it (perhaps for seclusion, convenience, familiarity, or expediency), and the spatial and temporal factors that come together when crimes occur. Geospatial investigation analyzes the distribution patterns of serial offenses to try to deduce the offender’s most likely anchor point, or home base.
The key to understanding a criminal event isn’t trying to guess why the offender might have engaged in it but rather examining why he might have done so in that specific place, at that specific time. It’s always about timing and location, not psychological guessing games into motive or intent.