The Rook (4 page)

“Nothing.” I shook the thought loose. I could come back to it later, after she was in bed. “Anyway, when I compare all those factors to the traffic patterns at the time of the crime, the layout of the roads, bridges, bodies of water, demographics, population distribution, I can begin to … well, you get the idea. Most investigators ask,

‘Why did this happen?’ or ‘What was the offender thinking?’ or

‘How could anyone do such a thing?’ But I ask, ‘When was the offender here?’ ‘Where did he go?’ and ‘Where is he now?’ That’s environmental criminology in a nutshell.”

She studied the table. Looked at the salt and pepper shakers, the keys, the salad bowl, the circle of oil, the coffee creamer. “And you got a doctorate in this?”

“Well, yes, I—”

“How many years of school was that again?”

“OK. So, the aquarium. Sharks. I heard the Sherrod Aquarium has more than a dozen different species—”

“So, you don’t look for motive?”

If only more investigators were as persistent as she was. I tapped my finger against the table. “Not so much. No.”

“Why not?”

“Trying to guess someone’s motives always ends up being nothing more than speculation, Tessa. It’s based on inference rather than deduction, on intuition rather than evidence, and there’s no way to confirm or to refute your guesswork. I’m an investigator, not a mind reader.”

“What does Agent Jiang think of that? It’s a sore spot, isn’t it?

Between the two of you?”

This conversation was going farther and farther astray. “We hold each other in high regard.”

“So I’ve noticed,” she said under her breath.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.” She took one final gulp of her root beer. “So, can you tell where the next fire is gonna be?”

I shook my head. “No. Like I mentioned before, I work backward to try and find the home base of the offender. I don’t do so well with predicting the future.”

“But try. I mean, if you were going to.”

“I can’t predict the future, Tessa.”

“OK.” She flew her eyes to the other side of the room. “Whatever.”

“You can pout all you like, it’s not going to help me predict the future.”

“Fine. Whatever. I’m not pouting.”

Still no eye contact.

Then she added quiet, nonchalant humming.

Wonderful.

OK. Fine. I studied the table, moved a few more objects around to represent the different fires so far.
If I were going to predict the next fire, where would it be?
I leaned over the empty salad bowl and checked the sight lines, then used my dessert fork to verify the distances between the fire sites represented on the table.

A few ideas. Nothing solid.

She watched me playing with the silverware and seasonings. “A doctorate, huh?”

“Listen.” I took the napkin and wiped the oil off the table. “Do you want any dessert?”

She seemed to be considering it when one of the servers paused beside her and lowered a platter of the pork tenderloin with mango and pineapple sauce onto the table next to us.

Tessa grimaced. “Ew, that is so disgusting.” I noticed that she pulled back one of the rubber bands she wore around her wrist and snapped it against her skin. “The poor pig. You can still see the blood.”

Slaughterhouses.

Yes, you can. You can still see the blood.

“I think I’m gonna be sick.” She stood. “Let’s go.”

“I need to pay,” I said.

“I’ll wait for you outside.” She grabbed the khaki canvas satchel that she uses as a purse and hurried for the door.

After taking care of our bill, I stepped outside and found Tessa waiting beneath one of the orange-yellow vapor streetlights nearby.

She was writing something in the small notebook she often carries with her. When she saw me, she surreptitiously slipped the pen and notebook back into her satchel.

I decided not to pry.

The wind had picked up even more since we’d entered the restaurant, and it whipped her shoulder-length black hair around her head in a small frenzy. “So,” she said. “How many people were in there when we left?”

“Tessa, I don’t want to do this.”

“Sure you do, c’mon.”

“Let’s go, OK?”

She folded her arms. Leaned against the streetlight. I knew she wouldn’t budge until I answered her.

“All right. Sixty-two.”

“When we entered?”

“Forty-nine. How did you know I’d keep track?”

“It’s what you do. Which one of the servers worked there the longest?”

“Tessa—”

“You don’t know, do you? That’s why you’re avoiding the question.”

“Allison Reynolds. She was the one with six piercings in her left ear, three in her right. Based on her route proficiency, I’d say she’s been working at Geraldo’s for over two years. I heard a few snatches of dialogue. She’s from the Midwest, most likely south-western Michigan or northern Indiana.”

After a quiet moment. “You can’t turn it off, can you?”

I drummed an anxious finger against my leg. “You ready to go?”

“I don’t really want to go back to the hotel yet.”

I thought for a moment. I don’t remember exactly when, but at some point in the last couple months, I’d first started calling Tessa

“Raven.” She’d always reminded me of a raven, and sometimes the nickname just slipped out, as it did now, “Well, then, Raven, how about a walk beside the world’s only ocean?”

She shrugged. “I guess so.”

We grabbed our windbreakers from the car and found a stretch of sand that was damp enough to walk on easily but not so close to the water that we would have to be constantly avoiding the in-coming waves. We walked for a while, side by side, but also oceans apart. Every once in a while, a rogue wave would slap farther up the shore than the others and we’d scurry up the beach to stay out of its path.

Mists carried by the steady surf began curling around us.

After one of the bolder waves had chased us up the beach, Tessa said softly, “So do you ever wonder what it would be like? Being one of them? You know. On the other side? An arsonist, a killer, something like that? The people you help the cops find?”

Everyone is on the side of being human, of being fallible, but I knew what she meant. “Sometimes I do. Sometimes I wonder those kind of things. But I try not to get caught up dwelling on them.”

“It’s scary to think about, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” she said. “I’m glad you’re not like them.”

“Thank you.” A dim silence spread between us.

“Right?” She stopped walking and waited until I’d stopped as well. She stared at me through the moonlight. “You’re not like them, are you?”

“No, of course not.” I couldn’t tell her what was really bothering me. It was something I’d never told anyone. “Of course I’m not like them.”

It feels good, doesn’t it?

Yes, it does.

She stood there, a raven in the moonlight. “Something’s bothering you, isn’t it? Tonight, I mean?”

Sometimes I wish she wasn’t quite so astute. “I’m sorry, Tessa.

He’s been there, in the back of my mind. It doesn’t mean you’re not important—”

“The arsonist?”

“That’s right.”

And it was true, I was thinking about the arsonist. But it wasn’t the whole truth.

I was also thinking about someone else.

Richard Devin Basque.

We walked for half an hour, talking some, but mostly keeping our thoughts to ourselves. The moon inched its way higher into the sky, and eventually we sat down on some dry sand next to a clump of sea grass that the waves had deposited on the shore earlier in the day.

And as we sat together on the sand, I let my thoughts take me back thirteen years to my early days as a detective in Milwaukee; to the night I arrested Richard Devin Basque in that abandoned slaughterhouse on the outskirts of Milwaukee.

Even though I was on the beach, I could see the slaughterhouse all around me. Dusky sunlight slanting through the windows. Huge, rusted meat hooks hanging from the ceiling. The image of a man holding a scalpel, standing over the bleeding woman. She was still alive, choking on her own blood. That was the most disturbing part of all to remember.

The doctors never could explain how she survived as long as she had.

Then, the moment outside of time when I ordered him to drop the knife, to back away, and how he just stood there instead, holding the red glistening blade, staring at the barrel of my gun.

I yelled again, followed procedure after procedure, warning after warning, until at last he spun, took three steps, then pivoted with a Smith & Wesson Sigma in his hand and fired. Missed.

I pulled the trigger of my .357 SIG P229, but for the first time in my career my gun malfunctioned, refused to fire. I lunged to the side as he took another shot, pegging my left shoulder, sending a bright splinter of pain riding up my neck, across my chest. I rolled to my feet, rushed him, and swung one of the meat hooks at his face. When he ducked out of the way, I threw my arms back and tackled him.

As we crashed to the concrete floor, I could hear the moist sounds of the woman struggling for breath only a few feet away, gasping, coughing.

Dying.

Basque drove the scalpel into my right thigh, but I knocked his gun away, and as he crawled for it, I snagged his arm and twisted it behind his back, my shoulder and leg screaming at me the whole time.

Pinned him to the ground.

Cuffed him.

Then, I shoved him aside, and as I bent to help the woman, I heard him say softly, “I think we may need an ambulance, don’t you, Detective?” I could hear a smirk in his voice.

I tried to help her, tried to save her, but the bleeding was coming from so many places it was impossible to stop. There was nothing I could do, nothing anyone could have done.

The scalpel was still in my leg, but if I removed it, the wound would bleed badly. It throbbed as I awkwardly dragged Basque to his feet to read him his rights.

I couldn’t help but take note of his face. Hollywood handsome, and yet possessed with pure evil. He was staring at the motionless, blood-soaked body of the woman. “I guess we won’t be needing that ambulance after all.”

And that’s when it happened.

Something inside of me snapped.

Rage and fear cascading through me. Rage, because of what he’d done to her. Fear, because if humans were capable of doing that, and I was human …

Well.

I lost it.

I punched him as hard as I could in the jaw. The force of the blow sent him spinning to the ground. I dropped to my knees beside him and raised my fist. Punched him again. Drew my fist back, ready to unload a third time.

When I was training for law enforcement, my instructors taught me to control myself. To avoid getting emotionally involved. But sometimes you can’t help it. The violence and suffering get to you.

And in that moment, I was ready to hit him again and again and again until I’d made him suffer as much as the woman he’d just killed. Part of me wanted to take the scalpel and cut him. Cut him just like he’d cut her.

He gazed at me and licked at the hot blood on his lips. “It feels good, doesn’t it, Detective? It feels really good.”

It feels good, doesn’t it?

And the thing I’ve never told anybody, never mentioned in any of my reports, was that it did. It did feel good when I hit him. A rush of fire and anger and power. And, to a certain part of me, it would have felt good to grab the scalpel and keep going, to give in to the primal drift in my soul. Part of me would have enjoyed the savagery.

I didn’t answer him that day, but I think my silence spoke my thoughts.

Later, Basque told the interrogating officers that he’d broken his jaw when the meat hook hit him in the face. And that’s what went in the case files and I didn’t correct them. So for the last thirteen years, by his silence and mine, we’ve shared a secret that has frightened me more than any killer I’ve ever faced. The secret that it felt good to take a step in the direction of evil. Yes, it did.

I found out later that the woman’s name was Sylvia Padilla. She was his sixteenth victim.

At least, that’s how many we know about.

And that day, as she died beside me and I saw the extent of the horrors one human being could do to another, a cold shiver burrowed its way deep into my soul and has wormed around inside of me ever since.

A shivering reminder of how close I came to becoming what I hunt.

Tessa’s comments in the restaurant and on the beach had struck a nerve, because this month, after more than a dozen years on death row, Richard Devin Basque was being retried as the result of some DNA test discrepancies. And since I’d only caught him at the scene, not in the act of murder, the case wasn’t going to be a slam dunk.

My buddy Agent Ralph Hawkins would be testifying tomorrow.

The trial would probably go on for months, and eventually I would be called in to testify too. But that’s not what was bothering me as I sat beside my stepdaughter. I was thinking of the secret I shared with Basque.

That, yes, it felt good.

“You’re not like them, are you?” she’d asked me.

And I’d told her no.

But maybe I am.