Ralph cussed.
He hadn’t been able to get to a car in time or maneuver past the news vans fast enough, and the moving truck had disappeared before he could catch it. He hadn’t even been able to identify which company it was from.
He had local law enforcement send some cars out looking for it, then returned to the SWAT van.
A call was waiting for him from Gabriele at the department. She asked about Radar and Pat, he told her what she needed to know, then asked her to get some officers to start calling moving companies that had trucks out today. She informed him that Richard Basque had been transported to the Milwaukee Regional Medical Center for surgery on his broken jaw.
“Do we know the name of the victim yet?”
“Not yet. But she has a tattoo on her left ankle. A custom job. We’re calling parlors now to try to find out who did the artwork.”
Ralph thought about Tod, about the victim, about what he could do right now. He told Gabriele, “I’m gonna go talk to Basque.”
Then he hung up and took off.
Joshua left the boy in the moving truck in the parking lot of the Kohl’s department store where he’d purchased the shoes earlier in the day and where his car was waiting for him.
An anonymous phone call to the police would lead them to the truck, which he’d rented under a false name. They would find Tod Walker in the back, safe and sound.
Once in his own vehicle, Joshua turned on the police scanner and heard that a man named Richard Basque had been arrested at a slaughterhouse in Milwaukee. By the sound of it, by the description of what he’d done to the woman, Joshua realized it was almost certainly the man who’d killed the women in Ohio and Illinois, the Maneater.
The suspect had been transported to the medical center to be treated for “injuries sustained during his apprehension.”
Joshua had a decision to make: stay clear of Basque or go and meet him.
If he’s transferred to jail, you might not get another chance.
Perhaps the safer choice would be to lie low, see how things played out, but the desire that’d been lurking inside him for so long, the one that’d led him to orchestrate all of this-that overriding longing to meet someone like himself, a partner, someone who would understand him-was so overpowering that in the end Joshua couldn’t hold himself back.
Once he was on the road, he called in Tod’s location from his portable phone, then directed his car toward the Milwaukee Regional Medical Center.
While we flew to the hospital, I tried to piece the case together.
Who was capable of doing something like this? Committing these crimes this week?
Everyone is capable of the unthinkable, Pat. All of us are, you told Taci that yourself.
Motives.
You can never untangle people’s motives.
But who? Who was he?
He knows the city, knows that neighborhood near the train yards…He went to Pewaukee to steal the Taurus…He got the mattresses from the mission…
According to Calvin, our guy used that boxcar as his anchor point and most likely lives or has an activity node in the Franklin Heights area.
Everything matters.
Yes, and he knows drugs, had access to Propotol, could’ve met Adele when she was in Milwaukee after that fender bender.
After she was taken to the hospital.
Wait.
The kidnapper got his hands on an amputation saw, had a connection to the homeless mission-they offer free medical care.
A doctor could’ve gotten into the school, convinced that secretary that he needed to talk to the Walker children.
Oh, there was definitely something I needed to check on.
We were close to the medical center. I could call it in as soon as we landed.