No one was at Radar’s house.
Ralph radioed me that he’d spoken with the principal again and, providentially, she’d been able to stop Gayle Walker and Angie just as they were leaving car line. “A squad’s on the way to pick them up.”
“But Tod’s not with them?”
“No.”
I was parked beside the curb in front of Radar’s home, trying to figure out what the next step should be. Calvin had been quietly working through Euclidean distance and linear decay models, and now he said, “I might have something, my boy. The west side of the city. Industrial district.”
“His anchor point?”
“It’s the best I can do with the data we have.”
“You sure about this?”
“Not at all.”
If Radar and Tod weren’t here and Gayle and Angie were safe, then sitting around waiting for something to happen wasn’t doing anyone any good.
You still don’t know if there’s one offender or two. Basque might have Tod. The timing from when he left the acquisitions firm works.
If anything came up here with Radar, I could always come back, but if Basque was our guy and he’d gone to the anchor point for his crimes, we might have a chance at tracking him down. And even if he wasn’t there, if we could somehow locate it, there might be something there that could lead us to him.
I radioed Ralph, who said he’d station another car at the house, then I pulled onto the street.
The industrial district Calvin was speaking of wasn’t far.
“Alright,” I said to Calvin. “Which street?”
“Head toward Bracken Street. We’ll see what we can find out from there.”
I called in to have squads focus the APB search for Basque’s car in that area of the city.
As we drove, Calvin tried to explain his calculations, but most of it was beyond me. As far as I could see, the labyrinth was just becoming more and more complex.
We were failing, yes.
But it didn’t seem like we were doing so on our way to success.
Five minutes later as we were about to turn onto Bracken Street, we got word that the more directed, focused search had produced results.
Two officers had spotted Basque’s car about a half mile from us in the parking lot of a textile factory. A squad was there now and the officers were checking inside the factory.
I said to Calvin, “I doubt he’d park right in front of the building where he takes his victims.”
“I concur. I believe he would want seclusion. And taking potential victims to a working factory would provide very little isolation.”
“He could take them to someplace private, restrain them, drive the car to another location.”
“And then return on foot.”
I got on the radio again, gave dispatch our location, and asked if they could identify any abandoned buildings or closed businesses nearby.
“How nearby?”
“Half a mile.” I figured we could start with that, move out from there.
After a moment of checking, the dispatcher told me there was an abandoned slaughterhouse less than a quarter mile away.
That worked for me as a place to start.
I whipped the car around the corner and found the side street we were looking for.