“He’s there? We know he’s there?”
He shook his head. “No idea. That’s as much as we have.”
I felt the twitch, the tightening of my focus and the sharpening of my senses that I always feel when the hunt is on. Even if Basque wasn’t there, we might be able to find something either in the car he’d stolen or at the site that could lead us to him.
He might have just gone there to switch vehicles.
“Have them check with the plant employees to see if any other cars were taken.”
“Right.” Then he added, “I overheard the doc. She’s doing okay?”
“It sounds like it. Yes.”
“Then I’m heading to the plant.”
I gestured for Brineesha to lead Tessa to the hallway, asked the doctor to join Ralph and me by the window, then asked him softly, “Tell me straight — how’s she doing?”
“The stab wound isn’t as life-threatening as we first thought it might be. She also has a tib-fib fracture — um, that is—”
“Her tibia and fibula,” I interjected somewhat impatiently. I’d been around injured victims all too often, and a long time ago when I still lived in Milwaukee I’d dated a medical student.
“Yes. We’ll keep a close eye on the swelling to make sure she doesn’t develop compartment syndrome. If it doesn’t need to be surgically reduced we’ll wait until her chest tube is out before casting her leg.”
It’s common for pedestrians who are hit by moving vehicles to careen up the hood and impact against the windshield with their shoulders. I asked, “Her clavicles — either one broken?”
“No. She impacted with the right one, there’s some swelling but it’s nothing serious. And it doesn’t look like there’s going to be any nerve damage in her leg. I’d say, overall, she was lucky. Right now she just needs to rest.”
“How long will she be in here?” Ralph said.
“I can’t say for sure. For thoracic surgery like this, we’re usually looking at four to six days. And then we’ll need to put that cast on. After that, she should be able to leave in twenty-four hours or so.”
“So, barring any complications, up to a week.”
He nodded. “Barring any complications.”
Ralph glanced at his watch, and I could tell he was anxious to get going.
“Hang on a sec,” I told him.
I was torn. I wanted to be here when Lien-hua woke up, but I also wanted to find Basque.
The nurse had left the bedside and I took Lien-hua’s hand again.
“Go get him, Patrick.” It was Tessa, who’d reentered the room and had obviously been listening in.
“How did you—”
“You guys suck at whispering.” She came to my side. “She’d want you to go. You know that. Brineesha and I will be here. Remember what you said in the car? What we talked about earlier?”
She was referring to our conversation about what I’d do when I caught the guy who’d attacked Lien-hua. I’d told her that I would make sure he paid. “You’d better,” she’d replied. And neither one of us had been talking about bringing Basque in.
“Let me think.”
“You heard Dr. Frasier; she’s recovering. And she just needs to sleep.”
After another moment of internal debate, I made my decision and leaned close to Lien-hua. “I’m going after him. Tessa’s here. So is Brineesha. I’ll be back as soon as I can. I love you.”
Then I kissed her cheek, stood, and said to Ralph, “Okay, let’s see if he’s still at that water treatment plant.”
I took one more look at Lien-hua lying there with the chest tube draining blood from where she’d been stabbed, then I left with Ralph to go take down the guy who’d done this to her.
10
We took a police chopper, used the hospital’s landing pad. Doehring joined us.
It was possible all this was a ploy, so before we left, we stationed two additional officers outside Lien-hua’s door just to make sure there was no way for Basque or any accomplices he might have been working with to gain access to her and finish the job he’d started in that apartment.
As we flew over the city, my hand glanced against the holster of my .357 SIG P229. Most agents these days had moved to Glocks, but the Bureau had also approved SIGs and I was glad. This gun and I went back a long way.
I couldn’t help but think back to the one time, the only time, it’d ever jammed on me, that afternoon I arrested Basque in an abandoned slaughterhouse on the outskirts of Milwaukee.
He’d come under suspicion because he frequently flew on business trips to the same cities where young women were disappearing or showing up dead. When I found him in the slaughterhouse, he was bent over his next victim, scalpel in hand. She was still alive, but would bleed to death only minutes later because of her extensive, gruesome injuries.
Basque shot at me, missed, and I tried to return fire, but that’s when my gun jammed. He fired again, sending a round through my shoulder. During the fight that ensued, he also stabbed me in the right thigh, just a few inches higher than he’d stabbed Lien-hua’s leg earlier tonight — now that I thought about it, it looked like my fiancée and I were going to have matching scars.
After I’d cuffed Basque and gone to help the dying woman, he’d said to me, “I think we may need an ambulance, don’t you, Detective?” Then, after I failed to save her, I dragged him to his feet to read him his rights and he said softly, “I guess we won’t be needing that ambulance after all.”
That’s when I lost it.
I punched him in the jaw, sending him smashing to the concrete floor of the slaughterhouse. Then I was on him and punched him again, shattering his jaw — but even with the broken jaw he was able to get out one more sentence: “It feels good, doesn’t it, Detective? It feels really good.”
A rush of shame swept over me. He was right; it did feel good to dip into the dark, animalistic part of myself, if only for a moment. Violence without restraint or remorse. The truth became clear to me: I was capable of the kind of acts that shocked me most, the ones I assured myself that I could never do.
Shooting that killer had felt good to Tessa in a perverse, savage way, and similarly, physically assaulting Basque, hearing the bones in his jaw crack, had felt good to me.
It wasn’t justice, it wasn’t self-defense, it was something a lot more primitive than that.
It’s unsettling to discover how much we all have in common with the people I hunt.
Afterward, when I filled out my report, I’d stared at the papers for a long time, evaluating exactly what to write. These were the forms that would be used in court.
I faced a dilemma: tell the whole truth about physically assaulting him and risk that he would get off, or tell the truth up to a point and let justice be done.
In the end I simply wrote that there was an altercation and that the suspect’s jaw was broken during his apprehension. Later, Basque inexplicably claimed it’d happened when I swung the meat hook at him. I’d done it to distract him. But the meat hook never hit him at all.
Why he said that was still a mystery to me.
In fact, I could come up with only one reason: he knew he was going to be put away and it was a power play, something to hold over me while he was in prison.
But motives are always a mystery.
Especially those of a psychopath.
SWAT was already there when our pilot settled the chopper onto the water treatment plant’s parking lot.
While it’s true that there’s often a sense of rivalry between law enforcement agencies, I’d never had any issues with the DC Metropolitan Police Department, and now Brian Shaw, the SWAT commander, approached us.