14 hours left…
Friday, June 13
7:29 a.m.
Considering all the traumatic experiences Tessa had been through during the last couple days, I knew she needed sleep, so I was careful not to wake her as I put on some coffee.
Stepping into the bathroom, I took my meds and checked the gunshot wound. My arm ached, of course, but the pain had morphed from sharp blasts of fire to a deep tenderness that ran all through the left side of my body. A thick, continuous blur of pain that was impossible to ignore.
The wound itself had been draining overnight, and the bandages were now blood-soaked. I spent some time cleaning the wound, put some topical antibiotic on both the entrance and exit holes, then wrapped the arm with fresh bandages-but all of that served to make the wound itself tender and sore all over again.
As I ate breakfast, I tried to direct my attention away from my arm.
Curious about the gas station explosion, I checked the online news and discovered that the body of the young man who’d been working at the gas station, Juarez Hernandez, had been found behind the sales counter.
No sign of foul play.
That’s what they said.
Another death.
Another dose of grief for another distraught family.
As I considered the possible implications of the explosion, I checked my email and noticed a message from Margaret notifying all the task force members about an 11:00 meeting at the command post. Our paths hadn’t crossed since Rodale had put me back on the case, and I assumed she would not be thrilled by his decision, but I decided not to worry about that unless she brought it up.
Thankfully, another instructor was covering my classes again today, so that would give me the chance to focus the majority of my day on the case-even though, admittedly, I wasn’t thrilled that the other instructor was Jake Vanderveld.
After uploading the files from Rodale and the financial reports from Fischer onto the task force’s command level database, I reviewed the updates to the case. I remembered that a gas station receipt had been found in the van parked at the hotel, and when I pulled up the jpeg of it, I saw that it was from the same gas station that had exploded.
Knowing how these killers worked, I suspected they had left that receipt in the van on purpose, just to taunt us.
Or to give you a clue to another crime they’re planning to commit.
A future crime.
They left the receipt from the gas station, then killed Juarez.. . left Mahan’s car, then killed him later that night… left Mollie’s purse, then killed her the next day.
Hmm.
I was reminded again of Adkins, the only murderer I’d ever faced who’d followed this pattern of leaving clues to future victims, but he was dead after an ambulance chased him to the bottom of a North Carolina gorge. Perhaps someone had found access to his case files and was imitating his pattern.
I spent more than an hour looking into that possibility but found nothing, and at 9:02 I was scrolling through yesterday’s DNA reports from the lab when my phone rang.
Caller ID told me it was Angela Knight.
When I answered she didn’t waste any time: “I found Richard Basque.”
“What?” Immediately, I moved toward the back deck so if Tessa woke up she wouldn’t overhear the conversation. “You found him? Where?”
“He’s here, in DC-or at least he was an hour ago.”
“Where is he now?”
“I’m not sure.”
I was on the deck now, closing the door behind me. “How do you know he was in the city?”
“At first when you asked me to look for him, I did the usual-you know, looked for GPS, credit card use, reviewed airline flight manifests, routine traffic stops-nothing. I even tried the defense system’s satellite video archives to see if we had footage of his car leaving Chicago; they started keeping old footage, you know-”
“Yes, for six months. I know.” I was anxious to hear how she’d found him. “So you found his car?”
“No, that’s the thing. I didn’t.” I heard her yawn and ended up doing so myself. Power of suggestion. She went on, “So I turned to the next best thing-”
“Mass transit surveillance.”
“Yes.” She sounded disappointed that I’d guessed what she was going to say. “I started a metasearch of the twenty largest US cities’ transit video footage since Tuesday. You can’t even imagine how long it takes to access some of that data. The bandwidth most of those cities still use is from-” She yawned again.
“How long have you been up, Angela?”
She thought. “I’m not sure. Anyway, there he was, walking through the Metro Central Station in DC at 7:31 this morning. I know that’s over an hour and a half ago. Sorry I didn’t catch it earlier.”
I didn’t think she needed to apologize for anything. “No, you did great. Are you sure it’s him?”
“Eighty-four percent. According to Lacey.”
Her computer. Good old Lacey.
“Did you tell Ralph yet?” I asked.
“I thought I’d let you do that. Considering you’re the one who asked me to locate Basque.”
I tried to process what she’d told me within the broader context of the case. “All right. Anything on Patricia E.?”
“Pat, I’m way behind here,” she said, which was not exactly an answer. “Just before I punched in your number, I got word that Metro found a stolen car with Mollie Fischer’s laptop in the backseat, and guess who gets to do the data recovery?”
“They found the computer?”
Oh yes, good.
Things were popping.
“Yes, and you’re gonna love this-the car is sitting in front of police headquarters.”
Why didn’t that surprise me.
“Who found it?”
“Lee Anderson.” He was the Metro PD officer who’d shuttled me from the hospital to my car Wednesday afternoon. The one who’d been surprised by my take on motives when we first met.
“Call me if you find anything, Angela. Thanks again. You’re the best there is.”
Another yawn. Once more I found myself following her lead. I wished she would stop doing that. “See you soon, Pat.”
“Okay.”
End call.
Obviously, in order to understand the foot traffic patterns as well as the potential pedestrian entrance and exit routes from the car, I needed to have a look at the vehicle and evaluate its orientation in respect to the neighboring streets as well as its actual distance from the entrance to the police headquarters. However, I didn’t want to leave Tessa here alone, especially after yesterday when Lansing cornered her at the hotel. In addition, even though Basque had never threatened her in any way, just knowing that he was in the vicinity made me uneasy.
But I couldn’t take Tessa to a secondary crime scene that was still being actively processed.
Figure that out in a few minutes.
First things first.
I punched in Ralph’s number, and he listened in cold silence as I explained that Angela Knight had found Basque.
“You should have told me yesterday that you had her working on this.”
“It wasn’t exactly aboveboard,” I said. “I didn’t want to involve you.”
“You involved her.”
A pause. “Yes. I did.”
“If Basque’s lawyer finds out about this, and it comes back to bite us in the butt-”
“I know. Don’t worry. I’ll take the heat, but you remember the promise I made to Grant Sikora. I need to stop Basque.”
“Right now you need to let me worry about him.”
It wasn’t the time to argue with my friend. “All right.”
Last year when Sevren Adkins was murdering young women in the southeast, Ralph had been the one who called me in to help, so I took a moment to mention the observation that the killers seemed to be leaving clues to future crimes just as he had.
He was quiet. “They never found his body, Pat.”
“Ralph, there was barely anything left of the ambulance.”
He didn’t reply.
“No one could have survived a fall like that.” But even as I said the words I remembered hearing about instances of parachutists who’d survived falls from thousands of feet when their chutes didn’t open.
“You should keep it open as a possibility,” he said.
Part of me knew he was right, part of me didn’t even want to entertain the prospect that Sevren was still alive.
Theorize, evaluate, eliminate possibilities.
“I’ll have the lab go back over all DNA and prints,” I said. “We’ll look for any other evidence that he might have surfaced somewhere since October. What about Basque? Are you going to stay up there or come back?”
I expected, of course, that he’d tell me he was going to be on the next flight to DC, but instead there was a long pause. “Last night Kreger uncovered some correspondence that Basque and his lawyer had with Professor Lebreau a couple years ago when they asked her to reevaluate their case.”
“I remember when it hit the news,” I said. “She was an anti-death penalty advocate.”
“Crusader,” he corrected me. “Anyway, we’re looking into all that. Seems he’s written to her off and on over the years. We’re not sure if she wrote him back. If I find any evidence that Basque contacted her since his release it might give us something to go on. Until then, we still don’t have anything solid that ties him to Lebreau’s disappearance.”
“Except the timing.”
“Yes.”
“And these connections from their past.”
“You and I both know that’s not enough to bring him in. And if we question him without anything but assumptions and-”
“Yeah. I know. The press will have a field day.”
“And his lawyers will too.”
He thought for a moment. “Here’s how this’ll go down. I’ll stay up here for now and follow up on Basque and Lebreau’s address book contacts in the DC area, talk with some of her friends, see if there’s anyone they might have gone to the Capital to visit. In the meantime, we’ll have Metro PD look for his car, monitor those mass transit videos.” He took a breath. “How’s that scratch on your arm, anyway?”
“It’s fine. By the way, that was just plain rude when you yanked out that IV.”
“Man up. When I was a Ranger we used to-”
“No alpha Ralph stories, please. You heard we located Mollie’s body yesterday?”
“Yeah. At the hotel. It’s all over the news.”
“Anderson found her laptop this morning in a car parked in front of police headquarters.”
When Ralph heard the location he cussed under his breath. “So, you looking into that?”
“Well, I’d like to, but Tessa’s dad has been contacting her. He knows where we’re staying, so I don’t want her here at the house alone, however, as far as I know, they’re still processing the scene so I can’t take her with me.”
He thought for a moment. “What about Brineesha? They know each other, and Brin’s not working today. Shouldn’t be a problem.”
Actually, Ralph’s wife would be perfect.
“I’ll give her a shout,” I said. “Thanks.”
We agreed to keep each other in the loop, then he hung up.
I contacted Brineesha and set everything up: I’d drop Tessa off at their house at 10:15, they’d hit the mall-oh, Tessa would just love that-then, after my briefing, I’d meet up with them at the food court at about 2:00.
It would give the two of us just enough time to get to Missy Schuel’s office by 2:30 and touch base with her before the 3:30 custody meeting.
Whew.
Based on Missy’s reaction yesterday when I’d told her that I was coming to the custody meeting, I could only imagine what she would say when I showed up with Tessa, but this was about Tessa’s future, her life, and I wanted her to be present.
All of that, later.
I gave the command post a quick call to get Sevren Adkins’s name on the radar screen. “See if he’s shown up anywhere in the system since last fall. ViCAP search, AFIS, CODIS, the whole deal.”
“Yes, sir.”
After ending the call I glanced at my watch and saw that it was already 9:16. Normally, it’s a forty-minute drive to Ralph and Brineesha’s house from here, but with Friday morning traffic it would take even longer, and Tessa still wasn’t out of bed.
10:15 would be tight. I headed to her room to wake her up.
Which might very well be the most challenging thing I would do for the rest of the day.