The King

  “I don’t know, I—”

  “Pat, stop being stubborn.”

  “I’m not stubborn. I’m strong-willed.”

  “I see.”

  I took a breath and considered her antilingering request. “You sure?”

  “Yes. Maybe you can bring me something for lunch from that burger place you like so much. That one near the Academy. I always forget the name of it.”

  I doubted that was true; I figured she just wanted me to say it. “Billy Bongo’s Burger Hut?”

  “That’s the one. I’ll take a grilled chicken salad.”

  “You don’t go to Billy Bongo’s for a salad.”

  “I have to watch my figure.”

  “I can take care of that for you.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  I took her hand in mine.

  I already knew what I would get from Billy Bongo’s, and undoubtedly so did Lien-hua: an Ultimate Deluxe Classic Cheeseyburg Extreme, curly fries, and a medium Cherry Coke. I have a weakness for cheeseburgers—I guess that can count as a quirk too. Either way, it definitely isn’t an ideal food choice, living with a vegan animal rights activist daughter.

  At last I gave in. “Okay. It’s a deal.”

  After making her promise that she would call me right away if she needed me—if she needed anything—I got in touch with Dr. Neubauer, told him about the change of plans, then I gave Lien-hua a kiss and left the hospital.

  I’d just slipped into my car and was starting the engine when Saundra Weathers returned the call I’d put through to her yesterday morning.

  27

  “I was gone for the weekend, just got the message you left me,” she said. “You mentioned your name, Patrick Bowers. Are you the same Patrick Bowers I’m thinking you are?”

  “From Horicon.”

  “So that is you. And you’re an FBI agent now?”

  “I’ve been with the Bureau for ten years.”

  “The last I heard you were a homicide detective in Milwaukee.”

  “I was on the force there for six years before joining the FBI.”

  “And you sent those two agents here? The ones who are outside my house parked at the curb right now?”

  “Yes.” I assumed they must have introduced themselves when she arrived home, told her only what they were supposed to—that her name had come up in an investigation and they were there “as standard operating procedure.”

  To help transition to the reason I’d asked her to call, I said, “I saw that two of your books have hit the New York Times bestseller list. Congratulations.”

  “Thank you.” She quickly brushed the compliment aside. “So you’re the same Patrick Bowers who found . . . Well, who found that girl. Back when we were in high school.”

  “Yes, I am. Miss Weathers, I would—”

  “Saundra. Please.”

  “Saundra, have you ever heard of Richard Basque?”

  “The serial killer? Doesn’t he eat the people he kills?” Since she lived in the region, and considering the media coverage of his crimes, I wasn’t surprised she was familiar with who he was.

  “He does.”

  “Is that what this is about? That’s the investigation my name came up in?”

  “Last night a copy of one of your books, On My Way to Dying, was found in a car he’d stolen.”

  She didn’t say anything. “And?”

  “And I have reason to believe that he left it there for me to find. Since your family owned the land bordering the marsh, you and I are connected—in a way—through the death of Mindy Wells. I don’t believe it was a coincidence.”

  “That book has sold over five hundred thousand copies, Patrick. Are you sure it didn’t just belong to the person who owned the car?”

  “We contacted her. It isn’t hers.”

  A moment passed. “Saundra, I’m wondering if you’ve noticed anything unusual lately. Any strange phone calls, anyone you didn’t recognize watching you or coming by your house? Anything at all?”

  “No. Nothing like that. You think he might be coming after me?” Surprisingly, she didn’t sound either shocked or afraid, more curious than anything.

  “I’m not saying that at all.”

  “Then why are the agents outside my house?”

  “As a precaution.”

  “A precaution against what?”

  “Basque is an extremely dangerous man. Anyone he’s had contact with could be in danger.”

  “So I’m in danger?” Again she sounded more intrigued than afraid.

  “There’s no evidence to suggest that you are, but I’m going to ask you to call me if you see or hear anything out of the ordinary. And I’d like to keep those agents assigned to you.”

  “As a precaution.”

  “Yes. Will that be acceptable to you?”

  “For how long?”

  “That’ll depend on how our investigation progresses. But I think it’s better to—”

  “What? Be safe than sorry?”

  “To cover all our bases.”

  She didn’t reply right away and I sensed that she was gearing up to argue with me, but in the end she didn’t. “They can stay.”

  “Thank you.”

  Then she abruptly returned the conversation to what had happened in Horicon. “Do you ever think about that day? About that girl in the tree house?”

  Yes. All the time.

  “Yes. Do you?”

  “Yes. I guess that’s what led me to become a crime writer. After being there, you know, in town when it happened. Maybe writing has been my way of trying to sort all that out. Is that why you got into law enforcement?”

  “I’m really not sure,” I told her truthfully.

  We were both silent for a moment and then she said, “I’ll contact you if I hear or see anything. But I’d like to ask you something in return.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That you’ll call me if you find out anything more. I have a little girl. You understand.”

  “I won’t be able to give you specifics concerning the investigation, I hope you can understand that, but if we find out anything more regarding the novel or if we find out Basque has taken any kind of special interest in you, I’ll call you right away.”

  “Alright. Thank you.”

  We ended the call and as I drove home, Saundra’s question plagued me: “Is that why you got into law enforcement?”

  Yes, maybe it was.

  • • •

  At home, I looked up the info the team had gathered on Saundra Weathers and her soon-to-be-six-year-old adopted daughter. Someone had tracked down press photos from Saundra’s last book-release party.

  Just like I remembered her from high school, Saundra had a slim, pretty face and an earnest gaze. Noni was a slight Ethiopian girl with a cute smile that was made even more endearing because she was missing one of her front teeth.

  I worked late, entering information corresponding to Lien-hua’s cognitive map of DC into the geoprofile to see if I could identify anywhere her life might have intersected with that of the other victims or with the regions we were looking at for Basque. It seemed pretty clear that he hadn’t chosen her because of expediency or opportunity but because of her connection with me, but I didn’t want to discount anything, so I took a careful look at her data.

  It didn’t lead anywhere, but while I was going through the files again, I was reminded of a connection two of the victims had.

  One of them worked at a sporting goods store where another had bought fishing tackle. It was a small, privately owned store and didn’t have any security cameras on-site—I’d looked into that months ago. But this location seemed to be the only one where these two women’s lives intersected. I reviewed the interviews with the store owner again, but didn’t come up with anything.
r />   Offenders who are peripatetic—in other words, who commit crimes while traveling through an area—skew the results of geoprofiles. However, in the case of Basque, he had committed enough other crimes in the DC area that it was highly unlikely he was just traveling through.

  Also, as I’d promised to do at our briefing, I studied the cognitive maps of the previous victims in relationship to my own. The travel pattern data from my life and from Lien-hua’s helped narrow down the places where Basque’s anchor point might be and moved the hot zone on the east of the city farther out, past Joint Base Andrews, and a few miles south.

  After uploading the information to the online case files for the rest of the team to access, I reviewed my notes for tomorrow’s eight-o’clock forensic palynology lecture at the Academy, until exhaustion finally overtook me and I fell asleep.

  28

  Monday, April 8 7:02 a.m.

  Richard Basque awakened to the sound of his two pit bulls snarling restlessly, agitated, in the yard near the edge of the Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary where he lived.

  He peered out the window and saw that one of them had killed a rabbit and the two dogs were tearing it apart. Beyond them, the languorous wetlands stretched back more than a mile before dissipating and merging with the Patuxent River.

  He’d chosen this location carefully. The flowage gave him a place to dispose of bones after he and his dogs had each had their fill of the meat he brought back to the house.

  He went into the kitchen and put on some coffee.

  Richard had read both of Patrick’s books on geospatial investigation and knew all about his specialty of tracking the locations of the home bases of serial offenders. Bowers had a PhD in environmental criminology and put it to good use.

  Because of that, Richard had been careful not to leave any discernible pattern for him to track. He made sure to take the people he abducted to random locations—or he brought them back here, where he could dispose of their remains in the marsh in places where they would never be discovered.

  No, the apartment he’d taken Lien-hua to was not one he’d used before, and not one he’d planned to use again.

  He cracked an egg, tipped it into a bowl, and whisked it lightly.

  Sausage was also on the menu. A special recipe he’d come up with himself.

  • • •

  There was nothing in Richard’s childhood that would lead you to believe he would grow up to become what he was.

  No abuse.

  No absentee father or overbearing mother.

  No warning signs. As a child he’d never started fires, tortured animals, or had problems with bed-wetting—the triad of characteristics that so many serial killers, for whatever reason, share.

  He grew up in a modest home with nurturing parents and a younger sister whom he had always loved—and still did. He did well in school, found success in the workplace, and then somewhere along the line developed a liking for human flesh.

  People want to find something essentially different about serial killers—that they were abused, or are genetically predisposed to act the way they do, or perhaps had a brain injury or something along those lines.

  Some people believe spiritual forces are at play—demonic possession and the like—because then, if the behavior was caused by the environment or predestined in their genes or could be blamed on the devil, then other people—normal people—wouldn’t have to be afraid that they might one day become like those who torture and kill and rape and cannibalize their victims.

  In a way, Richard was thankful for the teachers he’d had during his formative years, thankful that they’d been so nonjudgmental and hadn’t tried to impose their values on him, but just taught him that every culture has its own norms and mores and that we should accept all of them as equal. And they emphasized how important it was that he clarify his own “personal values.”

  And, of course, they’d told him over and over to feel good about himself. That seemed to be very important to them.

  So now he had a healthy self-esteem—he wasn’t proud of who he was, nor was he ashamed of it. He simply felt good about himself just as his teachers had encouraged him to do all those years.

  And Richard’s values had become quite clarified.

  Quite clarified indeed.

  Yes, he was grateful for an educational system that had helped steer him away from feeling shame over the personal values he felt so strongly drawn to. He had taken those experts’ advice to heart.

  • • •

  Certainly, when it comes to genetic makeup, the deck was stacked against some people, but Richard had always known the truth: people like him choose to become what they are. It’s an act of the will, pure and simple. Jeffrey Dahmer, Albert Fish, Andrei Chikatilo, they might have felt a compulsion to do as they did, but ultimately they all made the decision to act on it. To blame genes or upbringing or the devil was to shift responsibility and diminish the accountability of the people making the choices, committing the crimes.

  After all, as philosophers throughout the ages have noted, the definition of freedom is the ability to do otherwise. If you have no choice in a situation, you aren’t free. So if there is such a thing as free will, killers choose their path and deserve to be held responsible. On the other hand, if there isn’t such a thing as free will, why would anyone be held accountable or punished for anything, since he wouldn’t have had a choice in the matter and had no power to resist the temptation?

  Richard knew these things, knew that everyone has, within himself, both the potential for evil and the potential for good. We are, each of us, free to follow socially constructed moral tenets. And we are free to do otherwise.

  Everyone is.

  Maybe the most frightening thing about killers is not what they have done, but that, given the right circumstances and stressors, everyone is capable of doing the very same things.

  • • •

  Richard turned on the burner, got out the frying pan, and thought back to his encounter with Patrick at the water treatment plant Friday night.

  After Lien-hua escaped, he’d left bread crumbs for Bowers to follow—her car in that garage, going through intersections with traffic cameras, parking outside the water treatment facility.

  Bowers had followed the trail faithfully, determinedly, just like the hound in the fable.

  Richard had known all along that he was not just another meal to Bowers, but to hear him say it, yes, that was encouraging: to hear Patrick vow to take him down just reaffirmed their symbiotic relationship—the pursuer and the pursued, the chaser and the chased.

  Each derived meaning from the pursuit: the hare escapes, but then ventures back into the hound’s territory. The hound returns home disappointed, not just that he did not catch the hare, but that the chase is over for the day.

  And yes, in this case the hare was going to venture into the hound’s realm once again.

  Richard wondered if the Bureau was following up on the novel he’d left in the car at the plant. He assumed that Patrick would make the connection, but he couldn’t be sure. Sometimes little things like that slipped through the cracks.

  Well, either way, it was not the time to be careless.

  Yes, he would visit the mystery writer tomorrow night, would attend her daughter’s six-year-old birthday party. Even if the Bureau decided to assign protection to her, he had in mind a way to get to her and to the girl.

  Richard had never eaten a child before.

  But there’s a first time for everything.

  He would leave the girl’s remains in a tree house. That would have special meaning to Patrick.

  So.

  Tomorrow at five.

  To get ready for it he needed to do a little shopping, and then he could spend some time practicing a few new tricks.

  He finished cooking the sausages and ate them slowly, savoring every bit
e. After taking some antibiotics and changing the dressing on his gunshot wound, he went online, looked up the location of the store he would be visiting later in the day, and entered the address into his phone. When he was done, he glanced out the window and saw his two dogs, snouts bloody from their kill, stalking along the edge of the marsh looking for more game.

  29

  The New Agents gathered in my room on the second floor of the classroom building at the Academy.

  The class of fifty, all dressed in their required attire of dark blue polo shirts and khakis, was unusually quiet as they filed in.

  I figured they’d heard about what had happened with Lien-hua and were trying to figure out the best way to ask me about her condition, so I started class by giving them a quick update. “The surgery went well and Agent Jiang is recovering.” I told them about her injuries. “The doctors are hoping she’ll be released by the end of the week.”

  One young woman in the back row flagged her hand in the air.

  “Yes?”

  “I heard it was Richard Basque—that he’s the one who did it.”

  “It was.”

  New Agents aren’t allowed to work on any cases until after they graduate, but the assistant director in charge of the Academy encouraged us to read them in as much as possible on ongoing cases, as long as they didn’t discuss them outside the classroom. “Think of them as residents in surgery,” he told us. “The only way they’ll learn is if they actually pick up a scalpel.”

  Not the image I wanted in mind as I talked about Basque, but I slid it aside and took the opportunity to fill in the class on what we knew regarding the case, and on the investigative procedures we’d followed Friday night in tracking Basque to the water treatment plant.

  It was a natural lead-in to today’s lecture. “Rather than trying to understand criminal events from a sociological perspective, I think the most effective framework for understanding them is to approach them from a geographical one instead.”

  This wasn’t necessarily a popular view at the Academy, or at NCAVC, but I figured it’s only fair to let your students know where you’re coming from.