The King

by Steven James

  “Call Doehring,” Ralph suggested. “Have him check the home owners and see if any red flags come up. Also, maybe run vehicle registrations from the residents of those addresses.”

  “Good. And let’s focus on the homes with the easiest access to the highway, as Lien-hua suggested.”

  After a few phone calls and a little calculating, we were able to decrease the number of likely homes to twenty, which was at least manageable.

  Going door-to-door asking questions was old-school and tedious, but more often than not that’s how cases are untangled. One question, one person at a time.

  And besides, it felt good to be doing something tangible to eliminate possibilities rather than just looking at the case from one side of a computer screen.

  With traffic, I figured visiting the homes might take two or three hours.

  Unless, of course, we found Basque at one of the houses first.

  43

  3:34 p.m. 6 hours until the drowning

  As Tessa was walking to her car, she saw Aiden approaching her and she couldn’t help but feel an immediate swallow of nervousness. She wanted to talk to him, of course she did—but since she still had nothing to share about her graduation talk, she had no idea what to say.

  “So”—he was smiling in that totally disarming, melting way—“any ideas?”

  “Ideas?”

  “About the speech.”

  “Oh. Right . . . No. Not really.”

  “I was thinking about it. Maybe you should tell people to be true to themselves, you know, follow their hearts, pursue their dreams. That sort of thing.”

  “Don’t you think that’s a little clichéd?” The words just came out and she wished right away she could have taken them back.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “I just . . .” She remembered a discussion she’d had with Patrick last year. “Aren’t there times when you need to be true to something bigger than yourself?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, let’s say pedophiles. They follow their hearts, they definitely pursue their dreams. I don’t know for sure, but I’ll bet if you asked them they’d say they’re being true to themselves, that they were born the way they are.”

  “You mean like gay people are?”

  What? Where did that come from?

  “I’m not saying gay people are or aren’t born that way.”

  “But pedophiles are?”

  “I’m just saying that they would claim to just naturally be attracted to—”

  “Kids.”

  Okay, this conversation was definitely not one she’d been expecting to have. “Yeah. To kids.”

  He looked at her a little strangely and she could only guess it was because she’d sort of refuted what he’d suggested by bringing up pedophiles pursuing their dreams.

  Oh, that was just stellar, Tessa. That’s really going to move things along with this guy!

  “Um . . .” she began, “I was just . . . that was a bad example.”

  He was quiet. “Well, I guess you might need to go in a little different direction then.”

  “No, no, no. I think you might have it. Dreams. You know, pursuing your dreams, telling people to pursue their dreams.”

  Yeah, right. That is so lame.

  “Okay.”

  She bit her lip.

  Say something!

  But she didn’t. She couldn’t think of any way to climb out of this.

  “Let me know, okay?” Aiden said. “If you want to catch up, throw some ideas around.”

  His words were spoken respectfully enough, but his body language was all wrong. Everything about his tone of voice and his posture said, “This whole offering-to-help-you thing was probably not such a good idea, now that I think about it.”

  “Yeah,” she replied feebly. “Okay. I’ll let you know.”

  And, of course, after all that, he said nothing about prom.

  Pedophiles pursuing their dreams?! What is wrong with you!

  He left, and the officer who was supposed to follow her home watched her from his supposedly undercover car nearby.

  She strode toward him and he opened his window. “Enough already!” she shouted. “I’m fine!”

  Okay, maybe not the best way to talk to a cop, but thankfully he let it pass and didn’t hassle her. Maybe Patrick had warned him about her. Who knows.

  Who cares.

  She got into her car and took off to see Lien-hua.

  Let the cop follow if he wanted to, whatever.

  Pedophiles? Really?!

  She let out a deep breath, and then smacked the steering wheel.

  Truthfully, though, despite how annoyed she was by what she’d said to Aiden, she was having a hard time discounting it. And it wasn’t just pedophiles, after all. She’d talked with Patrick about this stuff before: serial killers follow their hearts, rapists pursue their dreams, the Nazis were true to themselves.

  So there you go.

  People left to themselves without restraint.

  Becoming monsters.

  Okay, here’s a great speech: The Three Ultimate Keys to Success. (1) Don’t pursue your dreams; (2) stop following your heart; and (3) be careful not to be true to yourself. And, oh, yeah, P.S.—All is meaningless.

  The most antigraduation speech in the history of graduation speeches.

  That would go over brilliantly.

  44

  4:34 p.m. 5 hours until the drowning

  Ralph and I had been knocking on doors for nearly two hours and hadn’t found anything that might lead us closer to Basque. Now we were leaving the last house that looked like a candidate in the hot zone north of DC, and both of us were feeling a little frustrated.

  He hated battling rush-hour traffic, so he went to the passenger side, tossed me the keys, and told me, “You drive. My gift is patience.”

  “Your gift is patience?”

  “Yeah. I just haven’t gotten around to opening it yet. Take the wheel.”

  In the car again, I said, “So, you ready to head east? The hot zone out past Andrews?”

  “Hmm . . . What about retracing Basque’s route? The one he drove the other night on the way to the water treatment plant?”

  Not a bad idea. We were deliberating which direction to take things when Doehring radioed with an update.

  Tips had been coming in ever since we put out word to the media that Basque had fled from the water treatment facility, and all afternoon Doehring and the team had been following up on them. Just minutes ago they’d found an apartment rented under the name Anthropos Phagein by someone who fit Basque’s description. Gavin had been looking into the etymology of words related to “cannibal,” as I’d suggested at the NCAVC meeting, and had found that “anthropos” meant “human” and “phagein” meant “to eat.” Together they were the root words for “anthropophagy.”

  Another word for cannibalism.

  “Where is it?” I asked.

  “Southwest DC.” He told me the address; he didn’t have to tell me it wasn’t anywhere near any of the hot zones I’d come up with. “We have officers there now, but the place is empty—not even any furniture.”

  Ralph said, “Why’s Basque using names that are traceable?”

  “Because,” I answered, “he wants me to chase him. It’s all about the hunt.”

  All.

  About.

  The hunt.

  Think, Pat. Pull this together.

  The algorithms I was using might identify where someone currently lived or where he used to reside, but there was no guarantee that Basque would still be using that apartment right now. Taking into account this newly discovered apartment and the one he’d taken Lien-hua to, it seemed that he was moving around the city to elude capture.

  Or maybe
to give you more sites to chase him.

  So, go and visit the empty apartment or hit the third hot zone?

  I quickly evaluated things.

  “You say the place is empty?” I asked Doehring.

  “Yeah. We’ll get the forensics guys out here, but other than that, I’m not sure what to tell you.”

  As much as I wanted to get a visual on the third hot zone, any way you cut it, finding this apartment was a break in the case and I wasn’t going to let that pass us by.

  “We’re on our way over,” I told him. “We’ll be there as soon as we can.”

  ++

  Richard became reasonably proficient at freeing himself from the plastic flex cuffs.

  Good.

  Because it was time to go.

  After putting in brown contact lenses and using a fake mustache and some latex face makeup to alter his features, he fitted a suppressor onto the modified, threaded barrel of his Sigma. With the subsonic ammo he was using, he would be able to fire the gun in the residential area without any worry of being heard.

  Leaving his pickup in the garage, he chose his anonymous-looking Mazda sedan and left for Saundra Weathers’s home in Chesapeake Beach.

  He had the rope from the magic store with him. He also had his butterfly knife in his pocket.

  Although he was going to play things by ear, he was planning to show up and explain that Saundra’s literary agent had hired him as a surprise to perform for the children.

  As he drove, he ran through what he would do if he found that Saundra’s house was under surveillance. He might need to abandon the idea of doing the rope tricks until he got Noni and her mother back to his place.

  But he was flexible. He was willing to adapt. Whatever it took to see this through to the end.

  45

  5:34 p.m. 4 hours until the drowning

  The apartment reminded me of the one Basque had taken Lien-hua to last Friday—dingy, cramped, and cheap. However, this place was devoid of furniture and didn’t look like it had ever been used.

  By the time Ralph and I had gotten here, the crime scene guys had already confirmed Basque’s prints on two of the doorknobs, but were still dusting for other prints to see if they could identify any victims he might have brought here or coconspirators he might have worked with in his crimes.

  In the movies, killers always leave behind an orgy of evidence when they abandon their secret lairs—photos, newspaper clippings, bundles of receipts that have their credit card information on them, and so on. I’ve only seen that happen in real life three times in my entire career. And it wasn’t happening today.

  No photos.

  No clippings.

  No receipts.

  No computer with a recent browsing history prominently displayed for us to use.

  Nothing like the movies.

  I pulled out my laptop and plugged this location in to the geoprofile.

  What are you missing? What clue are you overlooking here?

  As I perused the case information, that sporting goods store I’d thought of while teaching my class came to mind once again. It was a point of connection, but we had no surveillance footage from it, no video.

  Video . . .

  I remembered what I’d spoken with Ralph about earlier—getting CCTV security footage of businesses near the parking garage where Basque stole the car from that he drove to the water treatment facility.

  Maybe we could do that with the places of business near Erikson’s Sporting Goods too. The store was in a minimall across the street from a gas station that had been the site of two robberies over the last year. I wondered if one of their cameras might be directed east, where the sporting goods store’s parking lot was.

  I phoned Angela and told her what I was thinking.

  “I’ll get Lacey on it,” she said. “Do you have a specific day you want me to check first?”

  “Let’s start with the days preceding the disappearance of the woman who worked there.”

  “This could take a while, Pat—if they’ve even kept footage that far back.”

  “Yeah,” I acknowledged. “I know.”

  About twenty minutes later, one of the rookie officers brought over a stack of fast-food burritos and we met outside the apartment to attack our dinner. We must have all been hungry, because no one really spoke until we were nearly finished.

  “Well?” Ralph checked the time on his cell. “There isn’t much more we can do here, Pat. What are you thinking? Stay and keep running the numbers, or do it on the road? I’ll even offer to drive; you can analyze.”

  “Good. We’re close to the route Basque took to the water treatment plant. Let’s retrace it like you suggested earlier, then go to the last hot zone.”

  Clouds were starting to move in and rain was predicted, but I figured we would have plenty of daylight to finish up before it got dark.

  “Right.” He crumpled up his burrito wrapper and landed it in a trash can four meters away. “Let’s move.”

  ++

  Richard arrived at Saundra Weathers’s home in Chesapeake Beach, the house with the red and pink balloons on the mailbox to make it immediately apparent to the parents of the children who were invited to the party which house it was being held at.

  Two men in a nondescript black sedan were parked across the street.

  Richard had been around law enforcement officers enough to know an undercover, unmarked car when he saw one. But just to be sure, he cruised past and glanced toward it. The man in the driver’s seat was sipping from a truck stop coffee cup; the passenger was speaking into a radio.

  That was enough for Richard.

  So, Patrick must have made the connection to Saundra after all.

  Well-done, old friend.

  It looked like Richard needed to take care of the two men here before crashing Noni’s party.

  And he had just the way to do that.

  But he needed to get pulled over by another officer first.

  46

  6:34 p.m. 3 hours until the drowning

  We finished retracing the route and parked at the water treatment plant.

  It hadn’t started to rain yet, but seeing the clouds swirling and mounting above us, I was reminded of Tessa staring at the sky when we had our picnic Friday at the park where Basque attacked Lien-hua. A thought hit me: most likely Richard wouldn’t have made a move on her there unless he had some familiarity with the park, the sight lines, the road layout.

  Which would mean Rock Creek Park was in his awareness space, too.

  If he knew that area, then—

  I recalled my lecture, the slide of the woman’s body that had been found near the trailhead there in February. That crime didn’t fit Basque’s MO, but neither did strangling his victims like he’d done with Lien-hua. Studies on serial rapists have found that there’s a stronger correlation between the locations of the crimes than to the similarity of the MO of the crimes. The jury was still out, but some indications pointed toward it being true of serial killers too.

  I sat on the bumper and flipped open my laptop.

  “Pat, you’ve got that look in your eye,” Ralph said.

  “That’s because I think I may know where our hare’s been running.”

  There was a set of unidentified prints on the novel.

  He weaves everything together.

  He’s been taunting you from the beginning with the other attacks.

  It’s all about the chase.

  No, I don’t believe in coincidences.

  I looked up Brandi Giddens’s case files to get the address of the Upper Marlboro, Maryland, apartment she’d lived in, then I radioed Doehring. “Cole, see if you can pull up a set of prints from Brandi Giddens, the college girl we found last February over in Rock Creek Park.”

  “Prints?”

 
; “I want to know if they match the ones on the novel from the car at the water treatment plant.”

  It took him a second to process that. “You really think Basque has been playing us all this time?”

  “I think it’s possible. Let’s find out.”

  In the shadow of the water treatment plant where Basque had slipped away Friday night, Ralph and I began to review the Giddens murder case files, looking for clues regarding Brandi’s travel patterns and Basque’s previous crimes to see if we could find a place where they intersected.

  47

  7:34 p.m. 2 hours until the drowning

  What’s the one type of car you can steal and then drive with little or no risk of being pulled over?

  A police car.

  And that’s what Richard Basque was going to acquire.

  But as it turned out, he didn’t need to get pulled over himself first, because he found a Maryland State Police officer who’d set up a speed trap and lay in wait, nearly hidden in a pull-off on the highway.

  Richard slowed to a stop behind the squad. Rather than get out and approach the cruiser and perhaps arouse suspicion, he waited for the officer to leave the squad to come to him.

  As the man did so, Richard eyed him carefully.

  Yes, he looked just about the right size.

  His uniform would work just fine.

  ++

  The first dots of rain fell just as we got word from Doehring that the prints matched.

  “Okay,” I said to Ralph. “Brandi had marsh biota on the bottom of her shoes. She’d been near a marshland within twelve hours of her death.” I had my laptop out and was scrolling over a map of the DC area. “Joint Base Andrews would create a mental barrier in someone’s cognitive map of this area.”

  “Make it seem farther to get to the city?”

  “Yes, if the offender lived on the east side of the base . . .” I was studying the exits off Pennsylvania Ave/Maryland 4 near the Patuxent River Park. “Basque knows how I think. He would try to hide his home base by scattering his crimes as randomly throughout the region as he could, but—”