However, this summer he was on assignment in Panama, and when he heard I was teaching for three months at the Academy, he’d graciously offered to let Tessa and me stay here. “Just water the plants,” he’d said, and we agreed.
The ten-acre plot was mostly wooded, except for a stretch of lawn here behind the house. An old rock wall, about waist high, skirted along the edge of the woods that lay maybe thirty meters from the deck.
Tessa isn’t exactly the outdoorsy type, but she values her privacy, and when she saw the property and found out that a Virginia Railway Express station was just a fifteen-minute walk away, she’d said, “I guess this’ll be okay.” Which in Tessa-speak means, “Sweet. I’ll be able to go to DC whenever I want.”
I clicked to the online case files to see if we had any updates on Mollie Fischer’s homicide.
The complete police report wasn’t posted yet, no statements from the keeper or the security guard, and, while it annoyed me, it didn’t surprise me. Law enforcement officers are notoriously slow in filling out paperwork. It’s the one part of our job no one seems to like. Including me.
However, I was glad to see that the crime scene photos had been uploaded.
Ninety-four of them.
I scrolled through the jpegs.
No pictures of Mollie alive, only of her dead.
First, hanging from her wrists, then lying on the straw. Photos of her wounds, the restraints, the dead chimps, the entrance and exit doors. Six separate photos of the eyeball Lien-hua had found lying in the straw, a bloodshot orb with a pale blue iris and a ragged penetralia of optic nerve from where the organ had been tugged from A small flicker of movement near a break in the rock wall caught my attention.
The leaves parted, and a white-tailed deer stepped delicately into the field.
When I was a teenager growing up in Wisconsin, my father had introduced me to the unofficial religion of the state-deer hunting. And, from what I could remember about the growth cycles of deer, I figured this doe was maybe two or three years old.
She meandered into the yard, silent as a heartbeat, nibbling at the grass until something spooked her and she froze, her head raised, her ears pricked upright.
Maybe she’d caught my scent.
I sat still, watching.
She stayed stationary for only a moment, then whatever had startled her must have seemed too threatening, and she abruptly took off, bolting across the far side of the yard, her tail flagging, until she disappeared into the morning shadows in the woods just past the end of the wall.
A moment of tranquility, of grace, overcome by fear. The jittery race for survival. Life running from death.
Always running.
Always being chased.
I looked at the pictures again.
A race we all lose.
Like Calvin did.
Like Mollie Fischer.
Like so many victims I’ve seen over the years.
Their dead staring eyes. Their quiet, gray lips.
And their shattered, grieving families.
I thought about those platitudes that don’t work as I watched my coffee’s ghostly thin steam curl and then fade into the morning air, then mouse-clicked away from the grisly crime scene photos.
My thoughts returned to Basque.
Ever since his release, he’d been at the center of a media whirlwind. His initial conviction, subsequent retrial, and not-guilty verdict just seemed to be too big of a story for the press to let die, and since he was still in their watchful eye, I doubted he would do anything blatantly illegal, at least in the immediate future.
So I’d been careful and meticulous rather than hurried and sloppy in my research regarding the clue Calvin left: H814b Patricia E.
But so far I’d been unsuccessful in finding her.
If she was even a real person.
If she was even a witness.
Or a victim.
Or alive.
I pulled up my notes.
At first I’d dabbled with the idea that the note was a word play of some sort: H814b-“Height won four be” or “Hate one for bee”-but no combinations of the words seemed to make sense.
The sequence didn’t have enough digits to be a phone number. It wasn’t an address, at least not in the United States. It wasn’t a Dewey decimal number.
After exhausting my ideas I’d contacted Angela Knight, one of the Bureau’s top cybercrime analysts, who also has a knack for cryptanalysis.
We’d tried searches involving every combination of Patricia we could think of: Patty, Patsy, Tricia, Trisha, Trish; and yes, my own name, just for kicks: Pat, Patrick, Rick, Eric, Ricci, Erica.
And so on.
Nothing had come up.
We’d done metasearches through all the data collected at Giovanni’s and Basque’s crime scenes for possible relationships to the name or letter-number sequence. Nothing solid.
Angela suggested that it might be a password for one of Calvin’s computer files or for a website he might have visited, but when we did a digital data analysis of everything on his three computers and cross-referenced the letters and numbers to all the websites he’d visited, addresses in his address book, and numbers stored on his cell phone, we came up blank.
I scoured my files, looking for anything we might have missed until 7:30.
Nothing.
I rubbed my head.
Went back inside the house.
As I gathered my things to leave for my class at the Academy, I noticed a voicemail from Ralph: “Hey, man, Brin went to work early, found her friend, just called. Missy Schuel. That’s her name. The lawyer. I don’t have a number, but she’s got an office on 11th St. NW. See you at 11:30.”
I looked up the number, phoned her, left my name and number as well as a brief summary of my situation, then asked her to call as soon as possible. Then I stuffed the letter from Lansing’s lawyers into my computer bag so I could refer to it to answer any questions she might have.
Finally, before heading to class, I left a note for Tessa: “Call me. We’ll set up a time and place to meet for lunch.” I thought about adding, “There’s some stuff we need to talk about-like your dad trying to take you away.”
But that’s not the kind of thing you tell someone in a note.
Computer bag in hand, I left for the Academy.
16
Astrid and Brad had met on DuaLife, a website on which you create avatars, or online identities, and live another life as anyone you choose. Marry, if you want to. Have children, get divorced, start over. Whatever you like. You could be a man or a woman, straight or gay, young or old.
A prostitute.
A banker.
A priestess.
Or a serial killer.
Or a victim.
She’d found Brad on one of the newer continents, one that was designed to cater to the unique tastes of adults.
But it wasn’t cybersex that brought them together.
She’d been experimenting at the time, exploring ways to control and manipulate people, and ended up deciding to be the continent’s first female serial killer.
Of course, since the site’s users have invested so much time-and in some cases, money-into creating their online lives, you can’t just kill the other avatars without asking for permission or negotiating with their NowLife creators.
So, counting on the fact that, even in DuaLife, people would want their fifteen minutes of fame, Astrid had posted a notice that she was looking for volunteers who wanted to be lured in, overpowered, and then slaughtered.
And she’d been right about people wanting their moment in the sun. Two men and one woman had responded almost immediately.
Those had been her first few games.
But it was only online.
Only imaginary.
And besides, none of those first three victims had been all that relationally or intellectually engaging and, as a woman with an IQ of 142, Astrid started longing for someone a little more intriguing to kill. Then, in one of her online chats with potential victims, she met Brad.