by Steven James
I landed with a splash. The water wasn’t quite as deep as I’d thought it would be, but it still reached to the middle of my calves. Though the current wasn’t strong enough to sweep me off my feet, it was stiff enough to make me realize I’d need to be careful when I moved forward.
Grabbing my light again, I visually swept the tunnel to the right, saw nothing, then directed both the beam and my SIG down the tunnel to my left.
And I saw a man about thirty meters away, just on the edge of the flashlight’s beam.
He was facing me, but turned and disappeared down a side tunnel before I could identify for certain that it was Basque. I yelled for him to stop and the words reverberated off the metal walls with a coarse, hollow sound before being quickly overcome by the noise of the rushing water.
I sprinted after him as fast as I could through the rapidly flowing current.
12
A dot of light bobbed in front of me, indicating where the man was running.
I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions, but obviously all the evidence pointed to this guy being Basque. If it really was him, I didn’t need to see him to picture him: Caucasian, six-two, athletic build, dark hair, striking features, piercing aquamarine eyes. He could have stepped off the cover of GQ magazine, but beneath his impressive exterior was one of the vilest hearts of anyone I’d ever encountered.
Lien-hua shot him. He’s injured. You can catch him.
The damp smell of mold and decay filled the tunnel, while the sound of the splash and flow of water echoed off the tunnel’s metal walls, slightly disorienting me.
I’d been running for maybe sixty or seventy meters when the light ahead of me went out. I turned off my flashlight as well, hoping to pick up movement of the light again, but all I saw was uninterrupted blackness before me. Light back on, I pushed forward, and a few moments later I arrived at an intersection.
Alternating my Maglite back and forth between the two tunnels, I saw nothing to indicate which direction the man I was pursuing might have fled.
No sign of anyone.
The building’s schematics hadn’t included the tunnels this far from the structure itself, and even taking into account the geography of the surrounding area, there was no way to know which of the two tunnels might lead the most directly to the outside world.
Two tunnels.
One veering left, the other right.
The tunnel to the left leveled off, allowing less water to pass by.
My first thought: That water dissipates eventually; you’d be able to hear him running. He would take the one that would hide the sound of his footfalls—he’ll stay in deeper water.
But then a second thought: No, Pat, he would know you’d think that.
I equivocated.
Go. Hurry. Decide!
The water rushing past me had to go somewhere or else it wouldn’t be able to have such a strong current. At some point it had to empty into a drainage ditch or the Anacostia River. Taking a moment to orient myself, I guessed it might lead toward the grove of trees I’d seen earlier, east of the plant.
Knowing he would have to exit the tunnel system somewhere, I chose the tunnel carrying the swifter current and flew down it.
The musty air down here reminded me of that day when I first caught him in the slaughterhouse.
He abducts women, he eats them, he kills them. That’s what he was going to do to Lien-hua.
Anger flared inside me.
Ralph had said that Basque was trying to make me stupid with rage. Well, maybe that was true. And maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. I recalled my words to Ralph: “If I get him alone, I can’t promise you that I’ll bring him in alive.”
No.
No, I couldn’t make a promise like that to Ralph or to myself.
After two more bends I still hadn’t seen any flicker of light or any indication that the man had come this direction, and I was beginning to think I’d probably chosen the wrong passage when I saw the water disappearing down a metal grate in front of me.
Sticks, waterlogged garbage, and half a dozen dead rats lay compressed in a pile above the two-meter-wide grate, forced there by the current. I could only guess that the water pouring out of sight probably channeled into an underground stream leading to the Anacostia.
If the man I was chasing had pushed that grate aside and dropped in there to escape, this debris would’ve been disturbed and the grate wouldn’t have been pushed back into place.
If he came this direction, he would have had to pass by it.
I inspected the floor of the tunnel beyond the place where the water went down the drain and I saw what I was looking for—wet sole impressions.
I dashed forward until the sound of the water draining through the grate behind me began to fade, but when I paused to listen, I heard no footsteps, just that faint echo of churning water and my own ragged breathing.
Pressing on, I cornered a bend in the tunnel and nearly smacked into a locked metal gate that reached from the bottom of the tunnel to the top.
The tunnel terminated a few meters beyond the rusted steel bars, opening up into the night, and from the looks of it, the tunnel ended halfway up an embankment. I guessed that during storms it would feed overflow water into a streambed or drainage ditch below.
A light snapped on outside the tunnel on the left side of the embankment and a voice of someone out of sight called to me, “Did she survive?”
I recognized the speaker right away.
Yes, without a doubt, it was Richard Basque, and he had made it past the gate.
13
I grabbed the bars to get to him, but the gate only rattled harshly against its chain when I did. Not even Ralph could’ve wrenched it free. The lock looked new, which made me think that Basque must have been prepared for this—chaining and locking the gate behind him as he fled.
It was a keyed lock rather than a combination one, and that might actually play to my favor.
I’m pretty good with locks, and although I didn’t have my lock pick set with me, I did have a pen. And it had a spring inside.
“From where I was standing, Pat,” Basque said, “it looked like that car hit her pretty hard.”
He was around the corner; I still couldn’t see him. Still had no shot.
I slipped the pen out.
He used your name. He knows it’s you back here.
But my light had been in his eyes when I first got into the tunnel. How did he know I was the one who’d followed him? He heard you calling? Or maybe he was watching through a window in the front of the building and saw you enter?
Right now it didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting to him.
Since he was standing to the side of the tunnel, he wouldn’t be able to see me work on the lock. Transferring my gun to my left hand, I jammed the flashlight under my armpit to free up my right hand so I could pick the lock. It was a little awkward, but there was no way I was going to holster my weapon right now.
“So, did she survive?”
“Richard”—I was not going to talk with him about Lien-hua—“if you turn yourself in, I’ll see what I can do to get you the death penalty.” I unscrewed the pen’s top and pulled out the spring, straightened it, and set to work.
“Is that your idea of reverse psychology?” There was disconcerting familiarity in his voice.
“Back to solitary confinement? Spending the rest of your life in a cell the size of a walk-in closet? Just one hour a day alone in the yard to exercise?” I was working on the lock the whole time I spoke. “Is that what you want? And there aren’t even any good ways to kill yourself in there—except maybe chewing through your wrists to the arteries. I wonder, even being the way you are, would you have the nerve to do that?”
He went on unfazed, “That stab wound was pretty deep, Pat. There must have been a lot of int
ernal bleeding. It would have made her lungs quite moist. I prefer them that way.”
Rage cut through me, and I tried my best to keep it out of my voice. Mentally reviewing the footage from the apartment, I said, “I saw the overturned end table.”
I focused, focused, focused, keeping my fingers steady, but it didn’t seem like I was making any progress. “There was a scuffle, wasn’t there? You couldn’t even stop her when her hands were restrained behind her? That must be a little humbling.”
A slight pause. “Aesop,” he said. “‘The Hare and the Hound.’ Do you know the story?”
“Remind me.”
This lock was just not cooperating.
Come on!
“A hound was chasing a hare. All afternoon he tried to catch him but he couldn’t. A shepherd was watching the whole time, and when the dog finally gave up and went home without the rabbit, the shepherd laughed and said, ‘I used to think you were faster than the hare. But now I know the truth—the hare’s faster than you are.’ But the hound replied, ‘No, you don’t understand. It’s one thing to run for your dinner; it’s another to run for your life.’”
“So you have the advantage? That’s your point? That you’re more motivated to get away than I am to catch you?”
“You work a lot of cases, Patrick. I’m just another meal to you.”
“You don’t know me as well as you think.”
There was another beat of silence. “Well, in that case, I guess the chase is on.”
Yes, it is.
Oh, yeah, it’s rabbit season.
His light flicked off and there was a soft swish of movement through the underbrush.
Working as fast as I could on the lock, I called, “I’m coming for you, Richard.”
“I’m counting on it.” His voice was fainter now; he was getting away.
I jiggled the thin wire futilely in the lock. Every second I wasted here he was getting farther—
The mechanism clicked.
The lock opened.
Unthreading the chain, I threw my weight against the gate. It flew open and, flashlight in one hand, SIG in the other, I dashed to the tunnel’s terminus and swept my gun to the side where Basque had been. No one. The bank above me angled up steeply into the night. He must have scrambled down to the streambed to flee.
I leapt off the lip of the tunnel and made my way down the embankment.
Using the Maglite, I scanned the woods all around me.
No sign of him.
I pushed my way into the underbrush, looking for footprints or snapped twigs that might have indicated which direction he’d fled, but found nothing.
A strip of woods stretched before me. I took a second to replay the twists and turns I’d made through the building, through the passageway beneath it, and through the drainage tunnels. I calculated that I was about a quarter mile southeast of the perimeter SWAT had set up.
I whipped out my cell and speed-dialed Ralph.
He answered, blurted out a string of expletives. “Pat, I told you not to—”
“Later. Listen: he was here. He’s close. We can still catch him.”
“Where are you?”
I relayed my location. “We need to get choppers in the air, and I want a team over here. Now. Get this whole area cordoned off. There’s a residential neighborhood about half a kilometer east of me.” I caught myself—Ralph always gave me a hard time about using the metric system, so I translated for him: “About three-tenths of a mile east of here. He might have another car waiting. He would have thought of a way out of here.”
Thankfully, at least for the time being, Ralph didn’t hassle me for pursuing Basque. I knew that as my supervisor, he might be obligated to write me up, but we could both deal with that later.
End call.
Why was Basque still in that tunnel when I arrived? Surely he’d had enough time to get away.
He was facing you when you first shone the light at him, Pat. He was monitoring that tunnel.
Yes, he was. He was waiting down there for someone to pursue him.
There were twelve north-facing windows in the water treatment facility that would have afforded someone inside the building a view of the entrance I’d used. He must have been watching, waiting for someone to come in, just to lure that person to follow him. Really, since radio and cell communication would have been impossible in the tunnel, it was a perfect escape route.
Maybe it was about the chase to him after all.
A game of cat and mouse.
Or, in this case, dog and hare.
Actually, come to think of it, dogs were not a bad idea.
I put a call through to Shaw to get a K-9 unit out here to track Basque. “Have them get his scent from the driver’s seat of the car.” Metro PD used Belgian Malinois, and they were some of the best-trained ones I’d seen.
“Roger that.”
I pocketed my phone and scrutinized the forest again.
The residential area lay to the east. A deepening cove of woods loomed before me. To the west, a broad field eventually met up with a sprawling industrial district.
It would make sense for Basque to disappear into the forest, but I was more concerned that he might go toward the homes to the east. With civilians potentially at risk, protecting the people who lived here took precedent over tromping through the woods trying to find him in the dark.
As I ran toward the neighborhood, I called Shaw again to confirm we were getting roadblocks set up. “And I don’t care how late it is, I want officers to go door-to-door to interview and warn residents.”
Let’s see how fast you can run after all, Richard.
As sirens cycled through the night, I bolted toward the nearby neighborhood to search for the hare.
14
It was really hard for Tessa to be here in this hospital room.
Even though gothic horror was her favorite genre of literature, and thrasher metal her favorite type of music, and even though she was a cutter, blood in real life made her seriously queasy, graveyards freaked her out, and hospitals made her think of the long days sitting beside her mom as she weakened, slipped into a coma, and died.
No, hospitals were definitely not on Tessa’s top-ten list of favorite places to be.
And now, here, tonight, she was terrified that Lien-hua might die. She’d already seen her mother and her father die—her mother from cancer, her father from a bullet meant for a killer.
After their deaths, it seemed like pain had become permanently etched across the surface of her life—almost as if it were engraved indelibly on her heart. Over the last six months things had improved a little, but the pain was still there, and time didn’t seem to quiet it but only served to bring the ridges of it more distinctly to the surface.
So now Tessa sat quietly with Mrs. Hawkins beside the bed.
Lien-hua lay asleep, her heartbeat monitor pulsing evenly, a chest tube that Tessa kept trying not to look at, but found herself eyeing nevertheless, trailing out of her torso to a machine that drained blood from her lungs to keep them from filling with fluid.
The doctors had assured them that Lien-hua was on her way to recovery, but seeing her lying there like that, it was hard to believe.
Over the last couple years Tessa had taken to calling Agent Hawkins and his wife by their first names and now she said, “Brineesha, I was praying for her, but I’m not sure God was listening.”
She expected Brineesha to reassure her that of course God was listening, of course he was, but she didn’t do that at all. “Tessa, I’m not sure if you know this, but Tony was three months premature.”
Okay, not the reply she was expecting.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Honey, that boy weighed only two pounds and two ounces when he was born. We didn’t think he was going to make it a week.”
/> Ah. The point of the story became clear. “And you prayed for him, and he recovered, is that it?”
She shook her head. “The more I prayed, the worse he got. Only when I stopped praying, only then did he get better.”
Tessa looked at her curiously. “Are you saying prayer didn’t help?”
“I’m saying it didn’t help when I wanted it to.”
Tessa didn’t reply, and in the silent wake of Brineesha’s words their attention shifted back to Lien-hua. It seemed to Tessa that she’d never seen anyone who was alive lie so still.
The point of Brineesha’s story seemed to be: hang in there, God will help Lien-hua eventually, in his own time. But Tessa knew enough about life to know that things didn’t always work out like that. They definitely hadn’t worked out like that two years ago for her mom.
Maybe God had his reasons, but look at the world closely enough and you can’t help but come away wondering why he seems so random in the prayers he does answer, and so, well, capricious in the ones he does not.
As Tessa tried to sort all that through, she watched Lien-hua lie there so still. Apart from her chest rising and falling, she didn’t move at all. Didn’t even stir.
++
We didn’t find him.
Not in the neighborhood, not in the industrial district or the woods. We didn’t find any sole impressions in the mud near the stream or any broken twigs that might have indicated his path through the forest. Even the dogs came up empty.
I had the thought that Basque might have slipped back through the steel gate after I exited, so we searched the network of tunnels but found nothing. If he had doubled back, he must have found another way out. The dogs couldn’t track any scent through the flowing water, and a detailed search of the water treatment facility came up empty.
He was like a poltergeist from a horror movie, a phantom that leaves traces of its presence only when it wants to and then dematerializes again into thin air. But Basque wasn’t a ghost. He was a real person of flesh and blood who’d slipped past us. Again.