by Steven James
When Astrid was done, she locked the door behind them and took Brad upstairs.
Just knowing that the woman was down there, helpless, captive, afraid, only served to add to the thrill, and when Astrid reached the bedroom door, she slid seductively in front of her man. “Ready?”
“I’ve been looking forward to this all day.” And as their prisoner in the basement cried futilely for help, upstairs in the bedroom, the midnight games began.
15
Wednesday, June 11
491 Riley Road
Stafford, Virginia
5:03 a.m.
I woke up irritated, the letter from Paul Lansing’s lawyers on my mind.
And the Mollie Fischer case as well, only a few strides behind it in the race for my attention.
And Calvin’s death.
And Basque, of course, the ghost of flesh and blood from a time in my life I thought I’d left behind, lurking, always lurking, in the background.
“Promise me you won’t let him do it again,” Grant Sikora had begged me as he lay dying.
“I promise,” I’d said.
My thoughts circled around everything, evaluating what was at stake in each case, wondering again how Lansing’s lawyers could have known our address, sorting, analyzing. All of the issues seemed like cables tightening inside of me, tugging my thoughts in opposite directions.
Too many things to deal with.
My life in a nutshell.
Even though I knew Brineesha wouldn’t have arrived at work yet, I checked my messages to see if, for some reason, she might have called with the lawyer’s name and number.
She had not.
I looked over my email-nothing important.
Since I didn’t need to leave for the Academy until about 7:30, I changed, threw myself into a workout-a thirty-minute run, twenty max-out sets of pull-ups on a tree branch at the edge of the property, and then crunches until I could barely sit up.
But it didn’t clear my mind.
A shower.
Breakfast.
After downing some oatmeal and a banana, I grabbed a cup of Lavado Fino coffee from Venezuela and my laptop, and headed for the back deck.
Though barely 6:30, the morning was full of the smells of summer-freshly cut grass, warm sunshine, and steel-blue sky. The slightly fishy smell of a nearby lake.
Songbirds jabbered in the trees.
Steam from my coffee curled, wispy and smoke-like from the cup, then faded away, caught in the soft breath of wind, disappearing into the moment.
I sat there, just being in the stillness, in the gentle opening arc of the day. I’ve never been one to meditate, but I’ve always been drawn to the clarity that solitude brings.
A small touch of calm in the middle of my tempest life.
A chance to think.
When the DEA moved their Basic Agent training to Quantico a few years ago, one of their crime scene analyst instructors and friend of mine named Freeman Runnels had bought this house. Really, it’s more of a cabin-rustic framing, thick oak doors, handmade cherry furniture.
However, this summer he was on assignment in Panama, and when he heard I was teaching for three months at the Academy, he’d graciously offered to let Tessa and me stay here. “Just water the plants,” he’d said, and we agreed.
The ten-acre plot was mostly wooded, except for a stretch of lawn here behind the house. An old rock wall, about waist high, skirted along the edge of the woods that lay maybe thirty meters from the deck.
Tessa isn’t exactly the outdoorsy type, but she values her privacy, and when she saw the property and found out that a Virginia Railway Express station was just a fifteen-minute walk away, she’d said, “I guess this’ll be okay.” Which in Tessa-speak means, “Sweet. I’ll be able to go to DC whenever I want.”
I clicked to the online case files to see if we had any updates on Mollie Fischer’s homicide.
The complete police report wasn’t posted yet, no statements from the keeper or the security guard, and, while it annoyed me, it didn’t surprise me. Law enforcement officers are notoriously slow in filling out paperwork. It’s the one part of our job no one seems to like. Including me.
However, I was glad to see that the crime scene photos had been uploaded.
Ninety-four of them.
I scrolled through the jpegs.
No pictures of Mollie alive, only of her dead.
First, hanging from her wrists, then lying on the straw. Photos of her wounds, the restraints, the dead chimps, the entrance and exit doors. Six separate photos of the eyeball Lien-hua had found lying in the straw, a bloodshot orb with a pale blue iris and a ragged penetralia of optic nerve from where the organ had been tugged from A small flicker of movement near a break in the rock wall caught my attention.
The leaves parted, and a white-tailed deer stepped delicately into the field.
When I was a teenager growing up in Wisconsin, my father had introduced me to the unofficial religion of the state-deer hunting. And, from what I could remember about the growth cycles of deer, I figured this doe was maybe two or three years old.
She meandered into the yard, silent as a heartbeat, nibbling at the grass until something spooked her and she froze, her head raised, her ears pricked upright.
Maybe she’d caught my scent.
I sat still, watching.
She stayed stationary for only a moment, then whatever had startled her must have seemed too threatening, and she abruptly took off, bolting across the far side of the yard, her tail flagging, until she disappeared into the morning shadows in the woods just past the end of the wall.
A moment of tranquility, of grace, overcome by fear. The jittery race for survival. Life running from death.
Always running.
Always being chased.
I looked at the pictures again.
A race we all lose.
Like Calvin did.
Like Mollie Fischer.
Like so many victims I’ve seen over the years.
Their dead staring eyes. Their quiet, gray lips.
And their shattered, grieving families.
I thought about those platitudes that don’t work as I watched my coffee’s ghostly thin steam curl and then fade into the morning air, then mouse-clicked away from the grisly crime scene photos.
My thoughts returned to Basque.
Ever since his release, he’d been at the center of a media whirlwind. His initial conviction, subsequent retrial, and not-guilty verdict just seemed to be too big of a story for the press to let die, and since he was still in their watchful eye, I doubted he would do anything blatantly illegal, at least in the immediate future.
So I’d been careful and meticulous rather than hurried and sloppy in my research regarding the clue Calvin left: H814b Patricia E.
But so far I’d been unsuccessful in finding her.
If she was even a real person.
If she was even a witness.
Or a victim.
Or alive.
I pulled up my notes.
At first I’d dabbled with the idea that the note was a word play of some sort: H814b-“Height won four be” or “Hate one for bee”-but no combinations of the words seemed to make sense.
The sequence didn’t have enough digits to be a phone number. It wasn’t an address, at least not in the United States. It wasn’t a Dewey decimal number.
After exhausting my ideas I’d contacted Angela Knight, one of the Bureau’s top cybercrime analysts, who also has a knack for cryptanalysis.
We’d tried searches involving every combination of Patricia we could think of: Patty, Patsy, Tricia, Trisha, Trish; and yes, my own name, just for kicks: Pat, Patrick, Rick, Eric, Ricci, Erica.
And so on.
Nothing had come up.
We’d done metasearches through all the data collected at Giovanni’s and Basque’s crime scenes for possible relationships to the name or letter-number sequence. Nothing solid.
Angela suggested that it might be a password
for one of Calvin’s computer files or for a website he might have visited, but when we did a digital data analysis of everything on his three computers and cross-referenced the letters and numbers to all the websites he’d visited, addresses in his address book, and numbers stored on his cell phone, we came up blank.
I scoured my files, looking for anything we might have missed until 7:30.
Nothing.
I rubbed my head.
Went back inside the house.
As I gathered my things to leave for my class at the Academy, I noticed a voicemail from Ralph: “Hey, man, Brin went to work early, found her friend, just called. Missy Schuel. That’s her name. The lawyer. I don’t have a number, but she’s got an office on 11th St. NW. See you at 11:30.”
I looked up the number, phoned her, left my name and number as well as a brief summary of my situation, then asked her to call as soon as possible. Then I stuffed the letter from Lansing’s lawyers into my computer bag so I could refer to it to answer any questions she might have.
Finally, before heading to class, I left a note for Tessa: “Call me. We’ll set up a time and place to meet for lunch.” I thought about adding, “There’s some stuff we need to talk about-like your dad trying to take you away.”
But that’s not the kind of thing you tell someone in a note.
Computer bag in hand, I left for the Academy.
16
Astrid and Brad had met on DuaLife, a website on which you create avatars, or online identities, and live another life as anyone you choose. Marry, if you want to. Have children, get divorced, start over. Whatever you like. You could be a man or a woman, straight or gay, young or old.
A prostitute.
A banker.
A priestess.
Or a serial killer.
Or a victim.
She’d found Brad on one of the newer continents, one that was designed to cater to the unique tastes of adults.
But it wasn’t cybersex that brought them together.
She’d been experimenting at the time, exploring ways to control and manipulate people, and ended up deciding to be the continent’s first female serial killer.
Of course, since the site’s users have invested so much time-and in some cases, money-into creating their online lives, you can’t just kill the other avatars without asking for permission or negotiating with their NowLife creators.
So, counting on the fact that, even in DuaLife, people would want their fifteen minutes of fame, Astrid had posted a notice that she was looking for volunteers who wanted to be lured in, overpowered, and then slaughtered.
And she’d been right about people wanting their moment in the sun. Two men and one woman had responded almost immediately.
Those had been her first few games.
But it was only online.
Only imaginary.
And besides, none of those first three victims had been all that relationally or intellectually engaging and, as a woman with an IQ of 142, Astrid started longing for someone a little more intriguing to kill. Then, in one of her online chats with potential victims, she met Brad.
The Brad avatar was a twenty-eight-year-old oncologist. A fundamentalist Mormon who’d never married, he enjoyed hiking, golf, college football, and reading philosophy.
Of course, in NowLife, he might have been a forty-five-year-old Buddhist single mom who liked classic movies and judo.
Or anyone else.
That was part of the fun. A whole new life played out in your imagination.
Though it was possible that in NowLife he might be a woman, in their initial emails, Brad had responded to her questions in a way that seemed unmistakably masculine. He also appeared to exhibit the qualities she was looking for in a NowLife man.
Sometime after meeting him online, she’d begun to wonder what it would be like playing these games of life and death and destiny on real people.
She’d invited him to her DuaLife apartment and was getting him drunk so she could more easily subdue him before killing, but that’s when she started to have second thoughts.
“Why do you want to die at my hand?” she’d asked him. “Why do you want me to kill you?”
“Because you’re a woman.”
“A woman?” On her computer screen she saw that he had finished his vodka. She poured him another.
He took a sip. “In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote, ‘A real man wants two things: danger and play. Therefore he wants woman as the most dangerous plaything.’”
“So, to a man, a woman is a plaything?”
“Yes.” He downed his drink. “And the more dangerous she is, the more desirable. The greatest danger, the greatest pleasure.”
“But I would be the one playing with you.”
“Yes,” he’d typed.
When he didn’t elaborate, she’d responded, “I thought you believed in God, and yet you read Nietzsche? The man who said ‘God is dead’?”
“You can find flowers even in a field of weeds.”
So.
Nice.
Perhaps it was time to see if Brad might just be the one to partner with her. She’d typed, “How much danger and play can you handle?”
And after a pause he’d replied, “How much are you offering?”
Oh yes.
“I think it’s time we met,” she typed. “In person.”
And so they had.
And sex had followed. And so had love. And now, though she hadn’t yet told him, so would a child.
A new family grown from their DuaLife encounter.
As they’d gotten to know each other, they’d chosen to keep using their DuaLife names, rather than use their real ones. A way to extend the fantasy. To keep the illusion alive.
DuaLife.
NowLife.
Becoming one and the same thing.
It hadn’t taken them long to learn the art of killing, and then the art of setting others up for their crimes.
She’d found that, just like his avatar, the NowLife Brad believed in God, and yet, despite his religious convictions, he seemed surprisingly willing to take the life of other human beings whenever she required him to do so.
Now, as she lay in bed with him, she slid her hand to her stomach, where their child was growing. A second heartbeat inside of her. The child of their passion and desire.
A new life. To be taught and molded. Just like her man.
He stirred.
“You’re sleepy this morning,” she said.
“I killed two people last night. That can really take the life out of you.”
“Ha.” She smiled. “Doesn’t God say killing is wrong?”
“No one acts in complete congruence with his convictions.” He still sounded half asleep. “Admittedly, this is one area I need to work on.”
She ran her fingers through his hair. “That sounds like a line from a made-for-TV movie. That’s not enough of a reason. Not for you. There’s more to it, isn’t there?”
“Saint Paul wrote, ‘That which I do, I don’t understand. For I do not do the good I wish, but the evil I do not wish, this I do. I am a wretched man! Who will rescue me from this body of death?’ The inner war is the burden of all who believe.”
She trailed her finger along the edge of his scars. “Brad, Brad, Brad, you are my little enigma, aren’t you?”
A slight hesitation, perhaps a hint of intimidation. “Do you know anyone who is not?”
“Not?”
“An enigma.”
“Well, if you’re right about God, darling, I imagine you’ll go to hell for the things you’ve done.”
He was quiet.
“Any quotes on that? On the enigma of hell?”
He thought.
She smiled. “I got you this time.”
“Francios de Fenelon.”
“Who’s Francois de Fenelon?”
“He was a priest in the seventeenth century. He observed that you can see God in all things but never so clearly as when you suffer.
Perhaps hell, where people suffer the most acutely, is where they begin to see him the most clearly.”
She laughed at the absurdity of using a priest to justify a journey to hell in order to discover God. Only Brad could come up with something like that. “Well,” she said. “If God exists-”
“There is no ‘if.’”
“If he does”-and she let him know by her tone of voice that the subject was not up for debate-“and if people become more aware of him in hell, then I expect both of us will be quite the experts on him someday.”
“I expect we will.”
After a few more minutes of letting him hold her, she rose, telling him that he could sleep in if he wanted, that she would get everything ready.
“Thank you.”
“I’ll see you at 2:00.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll take care of the alley video?” she said.
“The surveillance camera will be looping through previous footage when you arrive.”
“And the door?”
“I’ll leave it propped open.”
She flipped open the laptop belonging to the woman in the basement, downloaded the video Brad had taken last night from his cell phone, then she put the computer in the van.
Hopped into her car.
And left for work.
17
The FBI Academy
Classroom 317
7:46 a.m.
Death.
That was the agenda for today.
This morning, videos of murder, then a visit to the body farm this afternoon.
Over the years, the Bureau has collected thousands of DVDs and video tapes from crime scenes, from secret stashes of killers and videos from certain websites we’ve learned to monitor.
We have the world’s largest collection of videos of humans dying at the hands of others.
Disturbing.
But, unfortunately, necessary.
We show these videos to the New Agents and National Academy students so they can understand the true nature of those we hunt. We make the agents and law enforcement officers watch real people die in painful slow motion, rewind, pause, replay.
So that they’ll know.
Really know.
Some victims beg, others bribe. Men make threats they must certainly know they’re incapable of carrying out. Women try to barter, offering their bodies and vowing not to tell.