by Steven James
The line eased forward.
Death isn’t trite because life isn’t, and the day I stop believing that is the day I’ll no longer be any good at my job.
Another person stepped away from the casket, and I realized I could see part of Calvin’s face, wrinkled and drawn and tired with the years. His skin was colored artificial-Caucasian-white with makeup that was meant to help him look alive again but only served to make him look like a mannequin, a pale replica of the man I’d known.
At seventy-two he’d been twice my age, but that hadn’t gotten in the way of our friendship. When we first met, he was my criminology professor; eventually he became my advisor, and by the time I graduated with my doctorate in geospatial investigation, he was one of my closest friends.
He died two days ago after spending ten days in a coma.
A coma he shouldn’t have been in.
Though not officially consulting on the case, Calvin had independently started tracking a brutal killer I was looking for in Denver. The man, who called himself Giovanni, had gotten to Calvin, attacked him, drugged him. And after Giovanni was caught-managing to kill two SWAT officers during his apprehension-he refused to tell us what drug he’d used.
Despite the best efforts of the Denver Police and the FBI, we weren’t able to extract the information or identify the drug, and since Calvin was already weak from a losing battle with congestive heart failure, he’d passed away.
His condition had proved to be fatal.
We’d arrived too late to save him.
We’d done all we could but he didn’t make it.
Platitudes.
That don’t work.
Three people in front of me.
The line was moving slower than I’d expected, and I glanced at my watch. My seventeen-year-old stepdaughter Tessa was waiting for me in the car. Ever since her mother’s funeral last year, death has troubled her deeply, overwhelmed her. So even though she knew Calvin and had wanted to come in, she told me she couldn’t. I understood.
We had less than an hour to get to our 7:34 p.m. flight from O’Hare. It would be tight.
Just one person in line.
Before slipping into the coma, Calvin had uncovered a clue that was apparently related to the Giovanni case but also touched on the most famous case of my career-the murder and
cannibalism of sixteen women more than a decade ago in the Midwest. The clue: H814b Patricia E.
A psychopath named Richard Devin Basque had originally been convicted of the crimes but had recently been retried right here in Chicago in the light of new DNA analysis, and found not guilty. And now he was free.
I arrived at the casket.
It’s a cliche to say that the dead look like they’re asleep. It’s a way to romanticize death, an attempt to take some of the sting away. If you talk to any law enforcement officer, medical examiner, or forensic scientist they won’t talk like that because they know the truth.
The dead don’t look like they’re sleeping; they look dead. Their bodies stiffening in twisted, blood-soaked ways. Their skin pasty and gray, sloughing off the corpse, or clinging to it in rotting, reeking patches. Sometimes their skin is twitching and moving because of a thick undercurrent of squirming insects inside the body.
There’s no mistaking death for sleep.
So now, I saw Calvin’s forever-closed lips. His quiet eyes. The makeup that’s meant to hide the wrinkles and the evidence of his deterioration.
The truth of life is so harsh, so brutal, that we do everything we can to ignore it: we are born, we struggle, we endure, we die, and there’s nothing left to show we were ever here but a few ripples, a few possessions that the people left behind squabble over, and then everyone moves on.
Dust to dust.
Ashes to ashes.
The grim poetry of existence.
I placed a hand on the cool, smooth wood of the casket.
Earlier, I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t cry, but as I thought of Calvin’s life and all that it had meant to so many people, I felt my eyes burning.
I stepped away.
Aiming for the lobby, I eased past the other mourners, nodding to some of them, laying a gentle hand on an elbow or shoulder to comfort family members or friends as I headed toward the door.
As I passed through the door I found that the lights in the lobby had been dimmed and it appeared vacant, but as I neared the exit I heard a man call my name.
He was standing half hidden in the shadows, lingering near the roped-off steps to the balcony. His face was shrouded, but I recognized the voice and felt a surge of anger as I realized who he was-the man I’d found thirteen years ago with the scalpel in his hand, bent over his final victim, the man a Chicago jury had acquitted last month.
Richard Devin Basque.
2
He approached me.
“I can only imagine,” he said, “how hard this must be for you.” He wore a somber gray suit jacket, and his dark European good looks made him appear thirty, ten years younger than his actual age. A powerful man threaded with deep muscles, he paused less than a meter from me. “I understand you two were very close. My prayers are with you.”
Just before his retrial, he’d conveniently “trusted in Jesus.”
Good timing.
Tactics. Games.
Anger invaded my grief and I no longer felt like crying. I felt like taking Basque down. Hard.
“I suggest you step aside,” I said.
He hesitated for a moment and then did as I suggested.
During his retrial there’d been an attempt on his life by the father of one of the young women he’d butchered. I’d managed to stop the gunman, but in the process his gun had discharged and the man had been fatally wounded.
As he lay dying, he’d begged me to promise that I’d stop Richard Basque from ever killing again, and I’d promised-hoping that a guilty verdict would settle the matter so I wouldn’t have to take things into my own hands.
Then Grant Sikora died in my arms.
And less than two weeks later, Basque was found not guilty.
I could only guess that he’d shown up tonight because he knew I’d be at Calvin’s visitation and just wanted to taunt me.
He has every right to be here. He’s a free man.
I felt fire raging through me and I realized that if I stayed here in the lobby any longer, I would do something I would live to regret.
Or maybe I wouldn’t regret it at all.
I started for the door, then paused.
An idea.
Turned.
The shadows looked at home surrounding Basque.
“Who is Patricia E.?” I asked.
“Patricia E.?”
“Yes.”
His gaze tipped toward the doors to the sanctuary, where two people were exiting. It didn’t look like they noticed us. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He gave me a slow wide smile that, despite his leading-man good looks, appeared reptilian in the dim light. “That’s always been the problem between us, hasn’t it? A lack of trust. You never believed I was innocent, you never believed-”
“Quiet.”
He blinked.
Then I edged closer, lowered my voice to a whisper. “I’m going to be watching you, Richard. I know you killed those women. I’m going to find Patricia, and if she’s not the key, I’ll find whatever else I need. Don’t get too comfortable on the outside. You’re going back to your cage.”
He watched me quietly, no doubt hoping to rattle me. I denied him the satisfaction, just studied him with stone eyes.
“Prison is only a state of mind,” he said, playing the role of the unaffected. “But where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” Coming from him, the words sounded like a mockery of both freedom and God.
A cold and final option occurred to me as I stood here beside him in the secluded corner of the lobby.
Right now, right now.
Take him down. You could end it forever.
Despite myself I felt my hands tightening into fists.
Basque seemed to read my thoughts. “You can feel it, can’t you?” His tongue flicked across the corner of his lips. “I didn’t used to think you were capable of it, but now-”
“You have no idea what I’m capable of.”
Something passed across his face. A flicker of fear. And it felt good to see.
A few seconds is all you need A slant of light from the side door cut through the lobby.
“Patrick?”
I glanced toward the door and saw my stepdaughter Tessa enter the church. “Are you ready to-”
“Go back to the car.” My tone was harsher than a father’s voice should be.
Then she noticed Basque, and in the angular swath of light, I could tell by the look on her face that she recognized him.
She edged backward.
I gestured toward the street. “I’ll be right out. Go on.”
Her eyes were large and uneasy as she backed away, letting the door swing shut by itself, slicing the daylight from the church.
Basque gave me a slight nod of his head. “I’ll be seeing you, Patrick.”
Leave now, Pat. Step away.
“I’ll look forward to it.”
I found Tessa outside, her shoulder-length black hair fluttering around her face in a tiny flurry of wind. “Was that him?”
“No.”
“Yes it was.”
I led her toward the rental car. “Let’s go.”
“You stink at lying.”
“So you’ve said.”
Only when I reached the door did I realize my hands were still clenched, fists tight and ready. I shook out my fingers, flexed them, but Tessa saw me.
“Yes.” I opened the car door. “It was him.”
We climbed in, I took my place behind the wheel, and for a long moment neither of us spoke. At last I started the engine.
“It’s not over, is it?” Her voice was soft, fragile, and made her sound much younger than she was.
I took a breath and tried to say the right thing, the noble thing, but I ended up saying nothing.
She looked my direction. “So, what happens now?”
“We grieve,” I said. “For Calvin.” But that’s not what I was thinking.
Those were the last words either of us spoke for the rest of the drive to O’Hare Airport.
3
Ten days later
Tuesday, June 10
Interstate 95
39 miles southwest of Washington, DC
6:19 p.m.
A restless sky overhead. No rain yet, but a line of thunderstorms was stalled over DC and it didn’t look like it’d miss us. At least the storm would break the stifling June humidity.
The exit to the FBI Academy lay less than two miles away.
Tessa sat in the passenger seat and quietly scribbled a few letters into the boxes of a New York Times crossword puzzle, her third for the day.
“What’s a seven-letter word,” she said, “for the ability to recall events and details with extraordinary accuracy?”
“Hmm…” I thought about it. “I don’t know.”
She pointed to the boxes she’d just filled in. “Eidetic.”
“If you already knew the answer, why did you ask me?”
“I was testing you.”
“Really.”
“Seeing if you were eidetic.”
“Maybe I was testing you too,” I said.
“Uh-huh.” The sign beside the highway signaled the exit to the Quantico Marine Corps Base. “It’s just ahead.”
She folded up the crossword puzzle and stared out the windshield at the anvil-shaped clouds looming in the darkening sky.
Tonight’s panel discussion was an official Bureau function so I’d asked her to take out her eyebrow ring and lose the black eye shadow. She’d obliged, but only after giving me a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me teenage girl look.
“If they ever make eye-rolling an Olympic sport,” I’d told her, “you’d be a gold medalist.”
“How clever,” she’d mumbled. “Do you write your own material or do you hire out?”
I’d opened my mouth to respond but couldn’t come up with anything witty on the spot, and that seemed to please her.
I’d decided to ignore her black fingernail polish but did ask her to kindly dress up a little, and rather than her typical black tights or ripped jeans, she’d grudgingly put on a wrap-around skirt and a long sleeve charcoal button-down shirt that hid the line of two-inch scars on her right arm that bore witness to her self-inflicting stage.
Leather and hemp bracelets encircled her left wrist, a few steel rings hugged her fingers.
Paradoxically, this girl who couldn’t care less about being cool had managed to define her own avant-garde style-Bohemian light goth. A free spirit, whip-smart, and cute in a slyly sarcastic way, she’d become the person I cared about more than anyone else in the world, now that my wife Christie was gone.
I took the exit and Tessa looked my way. “You promise we’re not going to drive past the-”
“Don’t worry.” I knew what she was referring to. We’d talked about it earlier. “We won’t be anywhere near it.”
Silence.
“I promise.” I took a sip of the coffee she’d bought for me twenty minutes ago at an indie coffee shop on the outskirts of DC.
“Okay.”
The FBI Academy had recently started a body farm on the east side of the property, similar to the famous Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Research Facility in Knoxville, Tennessee.
So now, in a back corner of the campus, dozens of corpses lay in various states of decay. Some in car trunks, others in shallow graves, others in streams or ponds, others in shadowed forests or sunny meadows-all positioned to give us an opportunity to study how decomposition rates, insect activity, and scavenger-initiated disarticulation vary for different means of body disposal. A real-world way to advance the field of forensic taphonomy-the science of understanding how dead organisms decay over time.
Even though I’d never had any intention of taking Tessa there, it’d been her biggest concern ever since I invited her to attend tonight’s panel discussion.
I sipped at the coffee, and this time she watched me carefully.
“Well?” she asked.
“What?”
“The coffee.”
“I’m not going to do this, Tessa.”
“Admit it. I got you this time.”
“I don’t have to prove any-”
“You have no idea what kind of coffee it is.”
I took another sip. “Yes, I do.”
“Now you’re stalling.”
“Let’s see. Full-bodied and smooth. Low-toned with expansive acidity. Complex flavor. Slightly earthy, a hint of dried figs and a deep, velvety complexion-Sumatra. I’m guessing shade-grown, the Jagong region along the northern tip of the island.” I took another sip. “You put some cinnamon in it to confuse me.”
She said nothing.
“Well?”
“You need to get a life.”
4
Christie and I had met in the spring, married in the fall, and only nine weeks after the wedding, she found the lump in her breast. She passed away before the one year anniversary of the day we met.
Tessa had grown up without ever meeting her father, and, regrettably, things had been strained between us from the start. Then after Christie died, it only got worse.
In time, though, Tessa and I started to feel comfortable around each other, even close-until a few weeks ago when she stumbled across her mother’s diary and discovered that her biological father was alive and well and living off the grid in the mountains of Wyoming.
Her real father.
At first when she’d asked to meet him, I’d been hesitant to say yes, but of course I couldn’t deny her the chance to meet her dad. So, we’d visited him, and despite my reservations, Paul Lansing
seemed like a good man. Reclusive and private but hard-working and honest. A sculptor, a carpenter, a man who preferred living off the land. Paul and Tessa seemed to hit it off, and meeting him had only served to make things more complicated between Tessa and me.
Some people might have questioned my decision to do a background check on him, but as her legal guardian, more than anything in the world I wanted Tessa to be safe. As Calvin used to say, “Truth is not afraid of scrutiny.” So, if Paul had nothing to hide, he had nothing to fear.
Paul’s record was spotless, maybe a little too spotless, so I remained somewhat uneasy about him. Until we knew more, I decided to let Tessa email him, as long as I reviewed her emails first to make sure nothing personal-a phone number, address, or anything about my job-inadvertently made their way into the messages. Tessa didn’t like it, but until I knew for sure I could trust him, I wasn’t going to take any chances.
It wasn’t clear to me what role he wanted to play in her life, but ever since that trip to Wyoming I’d noticed a crack forming in the foundation of my relationship with Tessa. The past had climbed into our lives and wedged itself between us.
“You’re glad to be back, aren’t you?” she asked, interrupting my thoughts.
I glanced at her.
“For the last couple weeks. Teaching this inter-session thing.” She pointed to the sign at the entrance to Quantico. “You’re glad to be back here, at the Academy.”
“For the summer; it’s just for the summer.”
“I know.”
A pause.
“Why do you say that-that I’m glad to be back?”
“You’re easy to read.”
Currently we live in Denver, having moved from New York City after her mother’s death. Now, as I answered her question, I opted for the nickname I’d affectionately given her last year. “Yes, Raven, it feels like I’m coming home.”
She was quiet then, and I wondered whether she was thinking about Denver, or New York, or possibly one of the small towns in Minnesota where she’d lived as a child.
“That’s good,” she said simply.
I had the urge to ask her what felt like home to her, but I wondered if it might somehow relate to her finding her dad, so I held back and she quietly unfolded the newspaper to finish her puzzle while I pulled into the line of cars waiting to be cleared to enter the Marine Base.