by Steven James
“Tell me.”
He indicated toward the window, and we crossed the room for a little privacy. Ralph kept his voice low. “We have video of Basque leaving the Cleveland Park Metro station earlier, at six.”
“That would be when he went to the park to abduct her.”
“There’s more. Traffic cams caught the license plate of a stolen car eight blocks away from the apartment after the abduction and traveling east.”
“Which street?”
“Benning Road.”
Basque liked toying with law enforcement, and I could picture him going from one means of transportation to another, one car to another, not just to elude capture, but to lead us on an elaborate chase.
“You said cameras, so we know which direction he headed?” My phone vibrated, and I saw a text from Doehring that he was on his way up and that Honeycutt was at one of the hospital’s other entrances.
“Using the shots from the traffic cams,” Ralph went on, “Angela tracked the car to a water treatment plant in southeast quadrant of the city. SWAT’s on its way over there now.”
“He’s there? We know he’s there?”
He shook his head. “No idea. That’s as much as we have.”
I felt the twitch, the tightening of my focus and the sharpening of my senses that I always feel when the hunt is on. Even if Basque wasn’t there, we might be able to find something either in the car he’d stolen or at the site that could lead us to him.
He might have just gone there to switch vehicles.
“Have them check with the plant employees to see if any other cars were taken.”
“Right.” Then he added, “I overheard the doc. She’s doing okay?”
“It sounds like it. Yes.”
“Then I’m heading to the plant.”
I gestured for Brineesha to lead Tessa to the hallway, asked the doctor to join Ralph and me by the window, then asked him softly, “Tell me straight—how’s she doing?”
“The stab wound isn’t as life-threatening as we first thought it might be. She also has a tib-fib fracture—um, that is—”
“Her tibia and fibula,” I interjected somewhat impatiently. I’d been around injured victims all too often, and a long time ago when I still lived in Milwaukee I’d dated a medical student.
“Yes. We’ll keep a close eye on the swelling to make sure she doesn’t develop compartment syndrome. If it doesn’t need to be surgically reduced we’ll wait until her chest tube is out before casting her leg.”
It’s common for pedestrians who are hit by moving vehicles to careen up the hood and impact against the windshield with their shoulders. I asked, “Her clavicles—either one broken?”
“No. She impacted with the right one, there’s some swelling but it’s nothing serious. And it doesn’t look like there’s going to be any nerve damage in her leg. I’d say, overall, she was lucky. Right now she just needs to rest.”
“How long will she be in here?” Ralph said.
“I can’t say for sure. For thoracic surgery like this, we’re usually looking at four to six days. And then we’ll need to put that cast on. After that, she should be able to leave in twenty-four hours or so.”
“So, barring any complications, up to a week.”
He nodded. “Barring any complications.”
Ralph glanced at his watch, and I could tell he was anxious to get going.
“Hang on a sec,” I told him.
I was torn. I wanted to be here when Lien-hua woke up, but I also wanted to find Basque.
The nurse had left the bedside and I took Lien-hua’s hand again.
“Go get him, Patrick.” It was Tessa, who’d reentered the room and had obviously been listening in.
“How did you—”
“You guys suck at whispering.” She came to my side. “She’d want you to go. You know that. Brineesha and I will be here. Remember what you said in the car? What we talked about earlier?”
She was referring to our conversation about what I’d do when I caught the guy who’d attacked Lien-hua. I’d told her that I would make sure he paid. “You’d better,” she’d replied. And neither one of us had been talking about bringing Basque in.
“Let me think.”
“You heard Dr. Frasier; she’s recovering. And she just needs to sleep.”
After another moment of internal debate, I made my decision and leaned close to Lien-hua. “I’m going after him. Tessa’s here. So is Brineesha. I’ll be back as soon as I can. I love you.”
Then I kissed her cheek, stood, and said to Ralph, “Okay, let’s see if he’s still at that water treatment plant.”
I took one more look at Lien-hua lying there with the chest tube draining blood from where she’d been stabbed, then I left with Ralph to go take down the guy who’d done this to her.
10
We took a police chopper, used the hospital’s landing pad. Doehring joined us.
It was possible all this was a ploy, so before we left, we stationed two additional officers outside Lien-hua’s door just to make sure there was no way for Basque or any accomplices he might have been working with to gain access to her and finish the job he’d started in that apartment.
• • •
As we flew over the city, my hand glanced against the holster of my .357 SIG P229. Most agents these days had moved to Glocks, but the Bureau had also approved SIGs and I was glad. This gun and I went back a long way.
I couldn’t help but think back to the one time, the only time, it’d ever jammed on me, that afternoon I arrested Basque in an abandoned slaughterhouse on the outskirts of Milwaukee.
He’d come under suspicion because he frequently flew on business trips to the same cities where young women were disappearing or showing up dead. When I found him in the slaughterhouse, he was bent over his next victim, scalpel in hand. She was still alive, but would bleed to death only minutes later because of her extensive, gruesome injuries.
Basque shot at me, missed, and I tried to return fire, but that’s when my gun jammed. He fired again, sending a round through my shoulder. During the fight that ensued, he also stabbed me in the right thigh, just a few inches higher than he’d stabbed Lien-hua’s leg earlier tonight—now that I thought about it, it looked like my fiancée and I were going to have matching scars.
After I’d cuffed Basque and gone to help the dying woman, he’d said to me, “I think we may need an ambulance, don’t you, Detective?” Then, after I failed to save her, I dragged him to his feet to read him his rights and he said softly, “I guess we won’t be needing that ambulance after all.”
That’s when I lost it.
I punched him in the jaw, sending him smashing to the concrete floor of the slaughterhouse. Then I was on him and punched him again, shattering his jaw—but even with the broken jaw he was able to get out one more sentence: “It feels good, doesn’t it, Detective? It feels really good.”
A rush of shame swept over me. He was right; it did feel good to dip into the dark, animalistic part of myself, if only for a moment. Violence without restraint or remorse. The truth became clear to me: I was capable of the kind of acts that shocked me most, the ones I assured myself that I could never do.
Shooting that killer had felt good to Tessa in a perverse, savage way, and similarly, physically assaulting Basque, hearing the bones in his jaw crack, had felt good to me.
It wasn’t justice, it wasn’t self-defense, it was something a lot more primitive than that.
It’s unsettling to discover how much we all have in common with the people I hunt.
Afterward, when I filled out my report, I’d stared at the papers for a long time, evaluating exactly what to write. These were the forms that would be used in court.
I faced a dilemma: tell the whole truth about physically assaulting him and risk that he would get off, or tell
the truth up to a point and let justice be done.
In the end I simply wrote that there was an altercation and that the suspect’s jaw was broken during his apprehension. Later, Basque inexplicably claimed it’d happened when I swung the meat hook at him. I’d done it to distract him. But the meat hook never hit him at all.
Why he said that was still a mystery to me.
In fact, I could come up with only one reason: he knew he was going to be put away and it was a power play, something to hold over me while he was in prison.
But motives are always a mystery.
Especially those of a psychopath.
• • •
SWAT was already there when our pilot settled the chopper onto the water treatment plant’s parking lot.
While it’s true that there’s often a sense of rivalry between law enforcement agencies, I’d never had any issues with the DC Metropolitan Police Department, and now Brian Shaw, the SWAT commander, approached us.
Too much time has passed, Pat, Basque’s not going to be here.
Yeah. That was probably right.
But maybe it wasn’t.
“We’re ready to go in,” Shaw told us.
So am I.
“Good,” I replied.
As he brought us up to speed, I noticed a map of the building’s schematics spread out on the hood of a car a few feet away. Two SWAT officers had flashlights out and were leaning over it, studying it. I committed the blueprint to memory.
When I asked Shaw for a vest, Ralph must have realized what I had in mind, because he nodded for him and Doehring to give us a second alone. After they stepped away, Ralph said, “Let SWAT do this, Pat. They’ll get—”
“I’m going in with the incursion team.”
He shook his head. “No, you’re not. We’re gonna do this by the book.” He put one of his mammoth paws on my shoulder. “I know you’re—”
I moved his hand away. “If he attacked Brineesha like he did Lien-hua, what would you do?”
“I’d kill him, but—”
“Alright.”
“But I’d also expect you to stop me. You don’t need me to tell you that.”
From our history working together, I knew Ralph wanted to take Basque down almost as much as I did, but I also understood that in his current position at the Bureau he had to follow protocol.
So do you.
Yeah, well, that’s never been my specialty.
“I get it,” I told him.
He eyed me squarely. “I’m not gonna say I know what you’re going through right now, okay? But you’re playing right into his hands.”
“How’s that?”
“Why do you think he went after Lien-hua? She’s never worked his case. He went after her to hurt you, to make you stupid with rage.”
“Yes,” I acknowledged. But I wasn’t really focused on what he was saying. I was busy studying the geography of the land surrounding the treatment plant and comparing it with what I knew of the region’s neighboring roads and traffic patterns, trying to form a map of the area in my mind.
“Are you hearing me, Pat?”
Sometimes anger hones my senses, sometimes it blurs my vision. Nothing seemed blurred at the moment. “Okay,” I told him.
“Okay?”
“He went after her to hurt me. I get it. I hear you.”
“And we do this by the book?”
I tried to lie to him, to tell him that yes, I would do things by the book, that I would follow protocol and trust that the very system that’d let Basque out of prison would do its job this time around, but those weren’t the words that came out of my mouth. “If I get him alone, Ralph, I can’t promise you that I’ll bring him in alive.”
He worked his jaw back and forth. “You’re not where you need to be right now. We send in SWAT. We let ’em do their job.”
Discussing this with him was just wasting precious time and that wasn’t helping anything. “Okay. I get it.” But I’d already decided what I was going to do.
He evaluated that, then gave me a nod and strode over to talk to Doehring and Shaw. I unholstered my gun and walked directly toward the building’s front entrance.
“Get back here, Agent—” someone called, but that’s all I heard, because by then I was stepping into the water treatment plant and letting the door swing shut behind me.
11
I leveled my SIG in front of me.
The lights inside the building were off, but I found a switch beside the door, flicked it up, and a string of overhead fluorescents blinked on.
It took my eyes a moment to get used to the sudden, stark light, but based on the blueprints, I already knew where I was—a small reception area with two hallways, one to the right, the other to the left.
If Basque really did come in here, I doubted he was going to hang out in one of the offices. By leaving that car outside in plain sight it sure seemed like he was taunting us. But regardless, I didn’t believe he would’ve come in here unless he had a plan to get away undetected.
I mentally reviewed the building’s schematics—the layout of the offices, the orientation of the hallways, the location of the filtration chambers, the labyrinthine network of passageways housing the pipes, ducts, and electrical lines that ran beneath the structure. Actually, that’s where I was heading, because that’s where I’d be able to access the drainage tunnels that led away from the plant.
From the schematics, I hadn’t been able to tell if the tunnels carried waste or water—or nothing at all—but they did radiate away from the building, and if I were Basque, that’s where I would have gone to slip past SWAT’s perimeter.
Cautiously, I passed through the hallway toward the east stairwell, but when I got there, the lights above the stairs didn’t work. I tried them again. Nothing.
I took that as a good sign. At the moment I couldn’t think of any other reasonable explanation for why these lights weren’t working than that someone flipped a breaker. And if that were true, it meant that a person had passed through here to the breaker boxes on the lower level, precisely where I was heading.
SWAT hadn’t pursued me; I wasn’t sure why, but I was glad they hadn’t moved in yet. If Basque was here, it gave me a chance to be alone with him and that was just what I wanted.
I pulled out my Mini Maglite and the beam slit the darkness in front of me. Using my left hand to steady the flashlight and my right to direct my gun, I descended the stairs.
“Richard?” I didn’t know if calling his name would do any good, but considering our history, I figured he just might reply. “I want you to step out and show me your hands.” My words echoed eerily through the narrow stairwell but were met only with silence.
I called out for him two more times, but no one replied.
At the bottom of the steps, I turned right and entered the sublevel’s maze of narrow winding passages. There were no overhead lights down here, but sporadic bulbs hung from the ceiling, and red warning lights glowed near some of the gauges and electrical control panels, lending a dim, eerie mood to the walkway.
Pipes, thick bundles of cables, and water filtration lines snaked above and beside me through the cramped passage. An electrical panel just to the left of the stairwell had twelve breakers turned off. I flicked them back on, and the stairwell lights came on.
Okay, so someone definitely had been down here.
I wasn’t sure how to actually get to the tunnels that ran beneath this level, but from the schematics, I knew where one access point would be—around a bend to the left, about thirty meters ahead of me.
A chug of adrenaline pumped through me, and admittedly, it felt good. I don’t mind teaching classes at the Academy or analyzing computer models of the progression of serial crimes, but I’d rather be out here in the field any day, face-to-face with why I do what I do.
An
d there’s no better feeling than bringing someone like Basque in.
Or taking him down.
“You knew those intersections would have traffic cameras, didn’t you?” I proceeded around the bend. “Why did you choose that route? So we could track you?”
Nothing.
He’ll be long gone, Pat. There’s no way he would linger around here, not when he left that car out front. He’d know law enforcement would be all over this place.
Yes. All that was true.
But the breakers were flipped. Someone had come down here.
There was no stairwell to the tunnel system beneath the plant, but I did find a hatch about the size of a manhole cover on the floor.
Beneath it I heard the muffled sound of flowing water, or possibly sewage, passing by, and I realized I might’ve been completely off-track with what I was thinking—the tunnel below me might be entirely filled with water.
I slipped the Maglite between my teeth so I could use my left hand to tug the hatch’s cover free while keeping the SIG aimed down the hole with my right.
The cover was heavy, but manageable, and a moment later I was staring down into the tunnel.
It looked like it was approximately three meters to the bottom, or at least to the water that was rushing past. It was hard to tell how deep the current was, but based on the curvature of the corrugated-metal tunnel, I guessed the water would reach nearly to my knees.
Quite possibly the tunnel served to help channel floodwater away from this low-lying area of the city after storms. However, at the moment I didn’t care why this tunnel system was here, as long as it didn’t fill up with water while I was inside it.
A rusted ladder led down along the side of the tunnel. The sound of the flowing water was loud enough to make me think it wouldn’t do a whole lot of good to call out for Basque, so, still gripping the flashlight in my teeth to free up my left hand, and keeping my SIG in my right, I scrambled down the first few steps, then leapt to the bottom.