Or maybe I wouldn’t regret it at all.
I started for the door, then paused.
An idea.
Turned.
The shadows looked at home surrounding Basque.
“Who is Patricia E.?” I asked.
“Patricia E.?”
“Yes.”
His gaze tipped toward the doors to the sanctuary, where two people were exiting. It didn’t look like they noticed us. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He gave me a slow wide smile that, despite his leading-man good looks, appeared reptilian in the dim light. “That’s always been the problem between us, hasn’t it? A lack of trust. You never believed I was innocent, you never believed-”
“Quiet.”
He blinked.
Then I edged closer, lowered my voice to a whisper. “I’m going to be watching you, Richard. I know you killed those women. I’m going to find Patricia, and if she’s not the key, I’ll find whatever else I need. Don’t get too comfortable on the outside. You’re going back to your cage.”
He watched me quietly, no doubt hoping to rattle me. I denied him the satisfaction, just studied him with stone eyes.
“Prison is only a state of mind,” he said, playing the role of the unaffected. “But where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” Coming from him, the words sounded like a mockery of both freedom and God.
A cold and final option occurred to me as I stood here beside him in the secluded corner of the lobby.
Right now, right now. Take him down. You could end it forever.
Despite myself I felt my hands tightening into fists.
Basque seemed to read my thoughts. “You can feel it, can’t you?” His tongue flicked across the corner of his lips. “I didn’t used to think you were capable of it, but now-”
“You have no idea what I’m capable of.”
Something passed across his face. A flicker of fear. And it felt good to see.
A few seconds is all you need A slant of light from the side door cut through the lobby.
“Patrick?”
I glanced toward the door and saw my stepdaughter Tessa enter the church. “Are you ready to-”
“Go back to the car.” My tone was harsher than a father’s voice should be.
Then she noticed Basque, and in the angular swath of light, I could tell by the look on her face that she recognized him.
She edged backward.
I gestured toward the street. “I’ll be right out. Go on.”
Her eyes were large and uneasy as she backed away, letting the door swing shut by itself, slicing the daylight from the church.
Basque gave me a slight nod of his head. “I’ll be seeing you, Patrick.”
Leave now, Pat. Step away.
“I’ll look forward to it.”
I found Tessa outside, her shoulder-length black hair fluttering around her face in a tiny flurry of wind. “Was that him?”
“No.”
“Yes it was.”
I led her toward the rental car. “Let’s go.”
“You stink at lying.”
“So you’ve said.”
Only when I reached the door did I realize my hands were still clenched, fists tight and ready. I shook out my fingers, flexed them, but Tessa saw me.
“Yes.” I opened the car door. “It was him.”
We climbed in, I took my place behind the wheel, and for a long moment neither of us spoke. At last I started the engine.
“It’s not over, is it?” Her voice was soft, fragile, and made her sound much younger than she was.
I took a breath and tried to say the right thing, the noble thing, but I ended up saying nothing.
She looked my direction. “So, what happens now?”
“We grieve,” I said. “For Calvin.” But that’s not what I was thinking.
Those were the last words either of us spoke for the rest of the drive to O’Hare Airport.
3
Ten days later
Tuesday, June 10
Interstate 95
39 miles southwest of Washington, DC
6:19 p.m.
A restless sky overhead. No rain yet, but a line of thunderstorms was stalled over DC and it didn’t look like it’d miss us. At least the storm would break the stifling June humidity.
The exit to the FBI Academy lay less than two miles away.
Tessa sat in the passenger seat and quietly scribbled a few letters into the boxes of a New York Times crossword puzzle, her third for the day.
“What’s a seven-letter word,” she said, “for the ability to recall events and details with extraordinary accuracy?”
“Hmm…” I thought about it. “I don’t know.”
She pointed to the boxes she’d just filled in. “Eidetic.”
“If you already knew the answer, why did you ask me?”
“I was testing you.”
“Really.”
“Seeing if you were eidetic.”
“Maybe I was testing you too,” I said.
“Uh-huh.” The sign beside the highway signaled the exit to the Quantico Marine Corps Base. “It’s just ahead.”
She folded up the crossword puzzle and stared out the windshield at the anvil-shaped clouds looming in the darkening sky.
Tonight’s panel discussion was an official Bureau function so I’d asked her to take out her eyebrow ring and lose the black eye shadow. She’d obliged, but only after giving me a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me teenage girl look.
“If they ever make eye-rolling an Olympic sport,” I’d told her, “you’d be a gold medalist.”
“How clever,” she’d mumbled. “Do you write your own material or do you hire out?”
I’d opened my mouth to respond but couldn’t come up with anything witty on the spot, and that seemed to please her.
I’d decided to ignore her black fingernail polish but did ask her to kindly dress up a little, and rather than her typical black tights or ripped jeans, she’d grudgingly put on a wrap-around skirt and a long sleeve charcoal button-down shirt that hid the line of two-inch scars on her right arm that bore witness to her self-inflicting stage.
Leather and hemp bracelets encircled her left wrist, a few steel rings hugged her fingers.
Paradoxically, this girl who couldn’t care less about being cool had managed to define her own avant-garde style-Bohemian light goth. A free spirit, whip-smart, and cute in a slyly sarcastic way, she’d become the person I cared about more than anyone else in the world, now that my wife Christie was gone.
I took the exit and Tessa looked my way. “You promise we’re not going to drive past the-”
“Don’t worry.” I knew what she was referring to. We’d talked about it earlier. “We won’t be anywhere near it.”
Silence.
“I promise.” I took a sip of the coffee she’d bought for me twenty minutes ago at an indie coffee shop on the outskirts of DC.
“Okay.”
The FBI Academy had recently started a body farm on the east side of the property, similar to the famous Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Research Facility in Knoxville, Tennessee.
So now, in a back corner of the campus, dozens of corpses lay in various states of decay. Some in car trunks, others in shallow graves, others in streams or ponds, others in shadowed forests or sunny meadows-all positioned to give us an opportunity to study how decomposition rates, insect activity, and scavenger-initiated disarticulation vary for different means of body disposal. A real-world way to advance the field of forensic taphonomy-the science of understanding how dead organisms decay over time.
Even though I’d never had any intention of taking Tessa there, it’d been her biggest concern ever since I invited her to attend tonight’s panel discussion.
I sipped at the coffee, and this time she watched me carefully.
“Well?” she asked.
“What?”
“The coffee.”
“I’m not going to do this, Tessa.”
“Admit it. I got you this time.”
“I don’t have to prove any-”
“You have no idea what kind of coffee it is.”
I took another sip. “Yes, I do.”
“Now you’re stalling.”
“Let’s see. Full-bodied and smooth. Low-toned with expansive acidity. Complex flavor. Slightly earthy, a hint of dried figs and a deep, velvety complexion-Sumatra. I’m guessing shade-grown, the Jagong region along the northern tip of the island.” I took another sip. “You put some cinnamon in it to confuse me.”