“I need you to take some video for me, Cassidy. Give me some eyes on what we have there.”
“Right.”
Normally I would visit the scene myself, ideally at the same time of day as the crime, to gain a better understanding of the spatial relationships between the location and its surroundings and to identify potential entrance and exit routes. If there was time I’d also inspect the light conditions at the time of the offense, study the area’s road layout, and survey the demographics of the neighborhood and the local land-use and traffic patterns.
It’s all part of the deal with environmental criminology and geospatial investigation, my two specialties.
Right now, however, with Lien-hua in surgery, I wasn’t about to drive to the apartment. Cassidy and I had done this before at crime scenes and we had a system. If he fed me the video, I could use my phone’s hologram projector to re-create a 3-D map of the apartment, and if I had enough video or used the defense satellites, I could get a visual of the surrounding streets and perhaps get an indication of the direction Basque might have fled.
Cassidy went to his phone’s video app, and his squarish face, studious, careful eyes, and unruly brown hair came into view. He was forty-one, experienced, sharp, and I was glad he was on the case. “How is she, Pat?”
“She’s in surgery. They think she’ll be out within the hour.”
“Any idea if…?”
“It’s looking more optimistic than it did at first.”
“That’s good to hear.” But he sounded only slightly relieved.
“Yes. So what do we have?”
“Basque left prints, DNA; the question isn’t really who was here, but where did he go?”
“Well, let’s figure that out.”
Cassidy turned the camera to face the room. I set my phone on the exam bed and turned on the hologram function.
Immediately, a bluish spread of hologram lines appeared two feet above the bed, and as Cassidy turned in a circle, the layout of the apartment and its contents, including the furniture, appeared, and in a matter of seconds the 3-D image of the apartment’s interior emerged.
I drew my forefinger and thumb across the phone’s screen to zoom out to get more perspective on the apartment, then turned them to rotate the image so I could take in the place’s spatial layout. The overturned end table in the living room indicated that there’d been a struggle.
“Is her phone there?”
“Her phone?”
“She had her phone with her, made a 911 call. Is it there; can you see it anywhere?”
He took a few moments to look around and then told me that no, he did not see it.
“If Basque took it and didn’t remove the battery, we might be able to trace its location. Can you call that in? Have Angela get on it?”
“Yes.”
He spoke to an agent beside him to have her contact Angela Knight in Cybercrime, then he got back on the line with me.
After I had a clear idea of the layout of the apartment I told Cassidy, “Okay, walk down the hall for me, the one Lien-hua took, and then step outside. Let’s get a look at the street. Take me around the block.”
He did as I requested, and within a few minutes I had a detailed visual of the streets surrounding the apartment building. I noted where Lien-hua had been struck by the car in reference to the room Basque had taken her to.
By overlaying FALCON’s satellite imagery of that neighborhood and inputting the location where Lien-hua was found, I was able to identify the three most likely routes Basque might have used to flee the scene.
Environmental criminology studies the nexus of timing and location in a criminal event, the reason the offender might have chosen it (perhaps for seclusion, convenience, familiarity, or expediency), and the spatial and temporal factors that come together when crimes occur. Geospatial investigation analyzes the distribution patterns of serial offenses to try to deduce the offender’s most likely anchor point, or home base.
The key to understanding a criminal event isn’t trying to guess why the offender might have engaged in it but rather examining why he might have done so in that specific place, at that specific time. It’s always about timing and location, not psychological guessing games into motive or intent.
So now, as I considered that, I reminded myself that Basque had gotten her into the apartment building after he abducted her.
Knowing Lien-hua, if she were conscious she would have fought him off and not allowed him to get her in there. We knew she’d been strangled, so the most likely scenario: he’d knocked her out by strangling either before she left the park or when she arrived at her home.
Cassidy ascertained that no wheelchair had been found in the apartment, so that meant Basque would have most likely carried her inside, or at least supported her, perhaps pretending to anyone who might’ve seen him that she was drunk.
“We’ve talked to the neighbors, I assume?” I asked Cassidy. “To see if anyone saw Basque enter or leave the building?”
“No one saw anything.” I didn’t see his face, but I heard his voice. “But then again, this neighborhood isn’t exactly the kind of place where anyone ever sees anything, if you know what I mean.”
“I do.”
“We found two bullet holes in the hallway, but so far it hasn’t led us anywhere.”
“And we haven’t found Lien-hua’s car yet?”
“No. Metro PD searched the whole neighborhood for six blocks out. Parking garages too. Nothing.”
Interesting.
Basque would have likely parked close enough to the building so that he wouldn’t have had to carry or support Lien-hua very far to get her inside.
Yes, that was interesting.
Also, he would have known that after we found her we would immediately put out an attempt to locate on her car, so I couldn’t imagine he would have driven it very far before abandoning it or switching to another vehicle.
Of course, he might have fled on foot, or taken a taxi and risked having the place where he was dropped off identified, but that would mean he carried her more than six blocks. Knowing how he’d avoided capture in the past, I started with the hypothesis that he would have had a vehicle of his own close by so that he could trade it off for Lien-hua’s as soon as possible.
“Check with the neighbors, see if anyone’s missing a car.”
“You’re thinking he might have stolen one?”
“It’s a possibility we need to eliminate.”
But still, what about Lien-hua’s car? Where is it?
I couldn’t be sure, but considering travel times from her apartment to this location and the length of time she’d been in surgery, Basque would have most likely abducted her at the park rather than where she lived.
Immediately, I thought of checking the Metro stations’ security cameras to get a bead on when he might have entered or left any of the stations. Considering Cassidy was on the phone with me, I told Doehring the idea. “We’ll want the footage both before and following the abduction. Angela Knight at the Bureau can run it through facial recognition. Depending on the download time, we should have the results within the hour. Tell her it concerns the attack on Lien-hua and it’ll move to the top of the stack.”
He called it in.
Okay, if they haven’t found her car anywhere nearby, where would Basque have left it?
Somewhere close by where no one would see him switching vehicles.
A parking lot?
No, then we would have found it already.
An abandoned warehouse? A garage?
I used FALCON and the hologram to sweep around the neighborhood and found a garage four blocks away on a side street. I told the address to Doehring and directed him to get a car over there right away. While he radioed dispatch, I kept searching, and found two other potential spots where Basque might have left a vehicle.