by Steven James
In many places in India it’s considered an insult to the driver to wear a seat belt: a way of telling him, “I don’t think you’re a good enough driver to keep me safe. I don’t trust you with my life.” Keith and Vanessa saw no need today to insult Baahir, so they didn’t buckle up.
After a cordial greeting, Baahir asked them in his clipped English, “To the facility?”
“Yes,” Vanessa replied. “As quickly as possible.”
“Two hundred seventy-five kilometers . . .” Both Keith and Vanessa had been there numerous times before and knew the distance already, but clearly Baahir was calculating in his head. “On these roads, with this traffic, that may take four hours. Perhaps longer.”
“Let’s just get going,” Vanessa said.
Baahir edged the car into the stream of traffic, nearly taking out a helmetless couple whipping past on a motorcycle, and then he directed the car north, toward Kadapa.
17
Saturday, April 6 6:13 a.m.
There is terror, sometimes, in dreams.
Though you know they aren’t real, couldn’t possibly be real, they seem real. And while there’s an ontological difference between what seems real and what is real, what, at its core, is the experiential difference?
People with hallucinations, or those playing virtual reality video games, or even people dreaming, all experience thought, emotion, exert will, and create memories. The same parts of the brain light up in “virtual” experiences as they do in “real-life” ones.
Although dreams and hallucinations might not happen per se, to your mind it’s as if they did. And so, if your mind experiences something, who’s to say it’s not an actual experience?
Because of all that, in my dream my terror is real.
I’m in my car again at the park just after our picnic. Lien-hua is climbing into her coupe.
But this time, rather than drive away from her, I glance at my rearview mirror and see her slip into the driver’s seat. It strikes me that I haven’t told her I love her. I’m on my way to her car to do so when I see Basque attack her.
I sprint toward her car and throw open the door and grab Basque and beat him in the face, beat him like I did when I first arrested him back when I was a homicide detective. But now I do more. I drag him from the car and slam his head against the pavement again and again until he’s no longer moving.
Then I turn to the car and check on Lien-hua.
But I am too late.
Her head is lolling forward, her neck still strapped to the headrest. In desperation, I work the belt loose and pull her from the car and yell her name and start chest compressions and rescue breaths to get her breathing again.
And then, because it’s a dream, logic evaporates and Christie, my dead wife, is standing beside me, and I hear her say, “You waited too long, Pat.”
And as I watch, Lien-hua’s skin turns to bluish gray. Before my eyes, her moldering flesh becomes mottled with the color of death, her eyes stare unblinkingly at the sky, and her jaw drops open.
I stumble backward.
“No, Lien-hua, no!” I hear myself cry.
It’s too late, Pat. You waited too long!
Then Basque rises from the pavement, his face a mess of blood and jutting bones, and he brushes himself off and smiles. Then he shrinks, morphing into the form of a rabbit, and scampers away.
“Pat,” a voice calls. Christie. It must be Christie, because Lien-hua is dead.
They’re both dead! They’re—
“Pat?”
When I open my eyes, I’m in the hospital room and early morning light is seeping through the window. My heart is slamming hard against the inside of my chest, and shivers run through me as the dream world that seemed so real—that was so real—slowly fades into a memory that succeeds in already scarring my day.
“Pat, are you okay?” Lien-hua is staring at me concernedly. “You were shaking. In your sleep. I was calling for you.”
“Yes.” The dream still hovers around me. I try to calm my quick and tense breaths.
“You sure you’re alright?”
I flexed my fingers so she wouldn’t notice that they were shaking, then I laid them on my legs and repositioned myself so I could look at her. For her sake, I made myself smile.
“I’m okay.”
“You’re a terrible liar, Pat.”
“So Tessa tells me.”
Lien-hua knew I was a restless sleeper, that nightmares all too often chased me from real life into my dreams. “What happened in your dream?”
With her background in psychology and her expertise in profiling, she often asked me this question. Though I tended to view dreams as merely a way that my subconscious was sorting through my experiences from the day, she always seemed to pull something deeper from the images in them.
However, today I wasn’t about to tell her that I’d dreamt that she was dead and that it was my fault because I’d been too busy beating Basque to death.
“It’s okay,” I explained. “It was mostly about the things that happened last night.”
“They wouldn’t let you go.”
“No.” I took a deep breath and changed the subject. “How are you feeling today?”
“Pretty sore. So, tell me about your dream.”
“Lien-hua—”
“You cried out my name while you were sleeping. You said, ‘No! Lien-hua, no!’ What was happening, do you remember?”
I really did not want to do this. “Let’s just not worry about—”
“Humor me.”
After a moment’s hesitation, I said, “I dreamed you died.”
“I see.”
“And it was my fault—because I was preoccupied with Basque. But it means nothing. It was just a dream.”
A pause. “Yes. It was. So don’t worry about me, okay? I’m going to be alright.”
“I know. It’s just that—”
There was a knock at the door and a waifish Hispanic nurse pressed it open slightly but paused politely before entering. I made sure the blanket was covering my bare legs. She had a grin that was just way too broad for this time of day, and I whispered to Lien-hua, “Okay, I’m a little frightened.”
“Why’s that?”
“She’s got ‘I’m a Morning Person’ written all over her.”
“You stole that line from Tessa, I can tell.”
“That is possible, yes.”
Lien-hua invited the nurse in, she entered, greeted us enthusiastically, spent a few minutes checking Lien-hua’s vitals, then informed us that this was the day that the Lord had made. “Let us rejoice and be glad in it!” she chimed.
Admittedly, a little rejoicing and thanksgiving couldn’t hurt anything, but maybe not with this woman’s degree of chipperness.
Lien-hua asked her if they could up her pain meds, and the nurse agreed to see what she could do. “Would you like breakfast in the meantime?”
“I don’t really have an appetite right now.”
“Just call down when you’re ready.”
“Thanks.”
She gently patted Lien-hua’s shoulder. “Get some rest.”
“I will. Thanks.”
After Nurse Perky had excused herself and left the room whistling, Lien-hua and I were silent for a few moments.
“So, the pain,” I said, “it’s worse than it was yesterday?”
“Yes,” she told me. “It is.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
She shook her head. “No. But, just . . . thanks for being here.”
I wanted to help her, but felt inadequate, powerless. “Of course.”
She put her hand on mine. “By the way, I like you with the scruffy, five-o’clock-shadow look.”
I rubbed my hand across my face. Definitely some stubble there. “It’s been a couple five
o’clocks by now.”
She saw me uneasily eyeing the IV needle in her arm. To put it mildly, needles are not my thing. Ever since I was a kid, they’ve made me more than a little squeamish.
“Don’t look at it, Pat. It’ll just make it worse.”
I shifted my gaze. “Right.”
“You’re not going to pass out on me now, are you?”
Well . . .
“Course not.” I brushed a strand of hair from her eye. “What about you? The pain?”
“I’ll be alright. It was a bit of a rough night, but I think I’ll feel better if I can get some more sleep.”
I’d had my phone on vibrate while I slept, and now I noticed a text from Angela Knight asking me to call her. Angela’s face was on the screen beside the text, and Lien-hua noticed. “Go ahead,” she said. “She usually gets off work at seven.”
Angela worked in the Bureau’s Cybercrime division and was one of the first people I always contacted when I needed some intel fast. Despite the fact that she was perpetually overworked and behind, she somehow always found a way to get me the information I needed when I needed it.
She was a bit of a character, though. She’d named her computer Lacey and referred to her as if she were a colleague rather than a machine. It made conversations a little awkward sometimes, and neither Lien-hua nor I had ever quite gotten used to it, but we’d learned it was best to just work with it.
I speed-dialed Angela’s number, and the phone rang eight times before she picked up. “This is Angela.” She sounded as weary as Lien-hua looked.
“Angela, it’s Pat. How’s Lacey?”
“Tired. How’s Lien-hua?”
“Recovering. I’m with her right now.”
“Can I talk with her?”
“Sure. I think so.”
I handed the phone to Lien-hua, and after she’d convinced Angela that—considering everything—she was doing well, I accepted the phone again and Angela said, “You wanted Saundra Weathers’s number. There’s no landline, but Lacey found an unlisted cell number.” She told it to me. “She lives in Chesapeake Beach, Maryland.”
That was about thirty-five miles southeast of DC, plenty close enough for Basque to have traveled to last night. He could have made it over there after he fled the water treatment plant. “We still have some agents watching her house?”
“As far as I know, but I’ve been a little swamped here.” I heard her yawn. “Oh, I analyzed the audio of the 911 call Lien-hua made last night. When I enhanced it, I could hear a male voice—I’m not sure if it’s Basque or not. Listen.”
She tapped at Lacey’s keyboard and a moment later the audio began. It was a little faint and staticky but I could make out a voice: “Just relax, Lien-hua. It’ll be over in a few seconds.”
“Yeah.” I felt a slice of fresh anger cut through me. “That’s Basque. What else?”
“That’s all I have for you right now.”
“Can you have Lacey send me that audio file, as well as the traffic camera and Metro station footage you reviewed last night? I want to see if there’s anything in them that might lead us to Basque.”
“Sure.”
After we’d ended the call, Lien-hua shook her head. “It just sounds so weird when you refer to Lacey as if she were a real person.”
“Angela gets offended if I don’t.”
“I know, but sometimes I think we’re feeding her delusion.”
“I don’t think it’s a delusion. Just a quirk.”
“Well,” she acknowledged, “I suppose we all have our share of those.”
It was nice, steering away from the case for a moment. “What are mine?”
“Your quirks?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you love your little Mini Maglite, you like to say, ‘Everything matters,’ whenever you’re working a case, and you’re a coffee snob.”
“Snob is a little strong.”
“Uh-huh, so are your views about Starbucks. So what about me?”
“Let’s see . . . You always set your alarm clock to a prime number, you’re very peculiar about your flower arrangements, and you have a weakness for watching nineties romance movies while overindulging on Fritos.”
“They’re yummy.”
“Yes, they are.”
The conversation fell into a lull, and I thought back to last night, when I first heard the news that she’d been attacked. I’d rushed out of the house right away. Now I realized that I’d left my laptop both on and plugged in. I wished I had it with me, but at least I could access my files remotely with my phone.
I went to the bathroom to get dressed. Maybe when Tessa came by later she could bring my computer and a dry set of clothes. Though mine were drier this morning, they still carried the damp, rangy smell of the water from the drainage tunnels I’d traversed through last night.
Lien-hua did her best to get comfortable, then closed her eyes and told me she was going to try to get some rest. Actually, I was glad she needed to sleep, because it gave me a chance to make some calls.
So that I wouldn’t disturb her while I was talking on the phone, I slipped into an empty room just down the hall. I confirmed that there were still agents outside Saundra’s house, then contacted the Lab to find out if they’d lifted anything from the novel or the other items in the car Basque had stolen. Finally, I phoned Doehring to get an update on the case from his end.
Here’s what we knew:
(1) Yes, the agents were in place at Saundra’s house as I’d requested, but she wasn’t home and hadn’t been last night when they arrived. Neighbors said she’d taken her daughter camping in West Virginia for the weekend. No one had been able to reach her on her cell phone.
The neighbors had seen her packing the car yesterday afternoon to leave for their trip, which didn’t completely quell my suspicions that Basque might have gotten to her and her daughter, but it did quiet them a little bit. Regardless, if Basque had a connection with Saundra, it was possible she might know something about his whereabouts. I called FBI Headquarters to get an agent assigned to put some calls through to her family and friends to find out where she might have taken her daughter.
(2) The Lab found prints on the novel, but they didn’t match Basque’s or those of the woman who owned the car he’d stolen from a parking garage. Interestingly enough, they didn’t match any of the prints we had on file.
(3) There was no evidence in the apartment that Basque had taken any other women there. I decided to proceed with the working hypothesis that it was not the anchor point for his crimes.
(4) Doehring informed me that despite a careful inspection of Lien-hua’s car, the other car Basque had used, the mechanic’s garage, the water treatment plant, and the apartment where he’d taken her, the team didn’t find anything that gave us a clue as to where he might have gone after he left the drainage tunnels beneath the facility.
(5) Officers had been combing the woods since dusk and hadn’t come up with anything that indicated where Basque had gone.
Back in Lien-hua’s room again, I used my phone to remotely log into my computer, then I pulled up the case files on Basque’s previous crimes.
No criminal thinks of everything. Nobody can plan for every contingency, and eventually it’ll catch up with you and you’ll leave something behind. You’ll overlook one little detail, and it’ll haunt you the rest of your life as you sit in your prison cell and think about what you did: If only I’d thought of that one thing. If only I’d planned a little better, thought things through a little more.
My job was to find out what Basque had overlooked.
• • •
All people form cognitive maps of the areas they frequent. These mental maps skew toward the places we’re familiar with. By studying the travel patterns of the victims of serial crimes and analyzing the places where their lives inter
sected with the offender’s, I’m able to use algorithms developed by my mentor, Dr. Werjonic, to work backward to locate the most likely home base, or anchor point for the offender’s crime spree.
The more locations I have to work with, the more accurate the geographic profile can be.
This analysis is what lies at the heart of my specialty, geospatial investigation.
Over the last year I’d worked on a geoprofile of the most likely anchor points for Basque’s crimes and the previous homicides in our region that we suspected him of, but so far that hadn’t led us anywhere. However, now, with the crimes he’d committed last night, I had a number of new locations to input into my geospatial analysis: the park, the apartment, the water treatment plant, the Metro stations, the site where we’d found Lien-hua’s car.
I plugged in the numbers and set to work.
18
Nothing.
I kept coming up empty and two hours later I still hadn’t found anything helpful. I closed my eyes and rubbed them in frustration.
An hour ago Dr. Frasier had come in and given Lien-hua some more pain medication and since then she’d remained asleep.
Thankfully.
And I’d been able to keep my eyes off the needle in her arm.
Thankfully.
My stomach had been grumbling for a while, so after giving the analysis a few more minutes and failing to come up with anything significant, I took the opportunity to trek down to the cafeteria and grab some oatmeal, a banana, and a bagel for breakfast.
I passed on the coffee, though. I’m brave enough to lead climb in Yosemite, go mano a mano with serial killers, and navigate a teenage girl’s mood swings, but I’m nowhere near brave enough to drink hospital cafeteria coffee.
Returning to the empty room down the hall from Lien-hua, I tried Saundra Weathers’s cell number but no one picked up. I left my name and number and requested that she return my call as soon as she could.
I decided it might not be best to leave a voicemail that I was the one who’d found Mindy Wells’s body in the tree house all those years ago, so I avoided that topic and just told her I was with the FBI and that this concerned an ongoing investigation.