Right now it didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting to him.
Since he was standing to the side of the tunnel, he wouldn’t be able to see me work on the lock. Transferring my gun to my left hand, I jammed the flashlight under my armpit to free up my right hand so I could pick the lock. It was a little awkward, but there was no way I was going to holster my weapon right now.
“So, did she survive?”
“Richard”—I was not going to talk with him about Lien-hua—“if you turn yourself in, I’ll see what I can do to get you the death penalty.” I unscrewed the pen’s top and pulled out the spring, straightened it, and set to work.
“Is that your idea of reverse psychology?” There was disconcerting familiarity in his voice.
“Back to solitary confinement? Spending the rest of your life in a cell the size of a walk-in closet? Just one hour a day alone in the yard to exercise?” I was working on the lock the whole time I spoke. “Is that what you want? And there aren’t even any good ways to kill yourself in there — except maybe chewing through your wrists to the arteries. I wonder, even being the way you are, would you have the nerve to do that?”
He went on unfazed, “That stab wound was pretty deep, Pat. There must have been a lot of internal bleeding. It would have made her lungs quite moist. I prefer them that way.”
Rage cut through me, and I tried my best to keep it out of my voice. Mentally reviewing the footage from the apartment, I said, “I saw the overturned end table.”
I focused, focused, focused, keeping my fingers steady, but it didn’t seem like I was making any progress. “There was a scuffle, wasn’t there? You couldn’t even stop her when her hands were restrained behind her? That must be a little humbling.”
A slight pause. “Aesop,” he said. “‘The Hare and the Hound.’ Do you know the story?”
“Remind me.”
This lock was just not cooperating.
Come on!
“A hound was chasing a hare. All afternoon he tried to catch him but he couldn’t. A shepherd was watching the whole time, and when the dog finally gave up and went home without the rabbit, the shepherd laughed and said, ‘I used to think you were faster than the hare. But now I know the truth — the hare’s faster than you are.’ But the hound replied, ‘No, you don’t understand. It’s one thing to run for your dinner; it’s another to run for your life.’”
“So you have the advantage? That’s your point? That you’re more motivated to get away than I am to catch you?”
“You work a lot of cases, Patrick. I’m just another meal to you.”
“You don’t know me as well as you think.”
There was another beat of silence. “Well, in that case, I guess the chase is on.”
Yes, it is.
Oh, yeah, it’s rabbit season.
His light flicked off and there was a soft swish of movement through the underbrush.
Working as fast as I could on the lock, I called, “I’m coming for you, Richard.”
“I’m counting on it.” His voice was fainter now; he was getting away.
I jiggled the thin wire futilely in the lock. Every second I wasted here he was getting farther—
The mechanism clicked.
The lock opened.
Unthreading the chain, I threw my weight against the gate. It flew open and, flashlight in one hand, SIG in the other, I dashed to the tunnel’s terminus and swept my gun to the side where Basque had been. No one. The bank above me angled up steeply into the night. He must have scrambled down to the streambed to flee.
I leapt off the lip of the tunnel and made my way down the embankment.
Using the Maglite, I scanned the woods all around me.
No sign of him.
I pushed my way into the underbrush, looking for footprints or snapped twigs that might have indicated which direction he’d fled, but found nothing.
A strip of woods stretched before me. I took a second to replay the twists and turns I’d made through the building, through the passageway beneath it, and through the drainage tunnels. I calculated that I was about a quarter mile southeast of the perimeter SWAT had set up.
I whipped out my cell and speed-dialed Ralph.
He answered, blurted out a string of expletives. “Pat, I told you not to—”
“Later. Listen: he was here. He’s close. We can still catch him.”
“Where are you?”
I relayed my location. “We need to get choppers in the air, and I want a team over here. Now. Get this whole area cordoned off. There’s a residential neighborhood about half a kilometer east of me.” I caught myself — Ralph always gave me a hard time about using the metric system, so I translated for him: “About three-tenths of a mile east of here. He might have another car waiting. He would have thought of a way out of here.”
Thankfully, at least for the time being, Ralph didn’t hassle me for pursuing Basque. I knew that as my supervisor, he might be obligated to write me up, but we could both deal with that later.
End call.
Why was Basque still in that tunnel when I arrived? Surely he’d had enough time to get away.
He was facing you when you first shone the light at him, Pat. He was monitoring that tunnel.
Yes, he was. He was waiting down there for someone to pursue him.
There were twelve north-facing windows in the water treatment facility that would have afforded someone inside the building a view of the entrance I’d used. He must have been watching, waiting for someone to come in, just to lure that person to follow him. Really, since radio and cell communication would have been impossible in the tunnel, it was a perfect escape route.
Maybe it was about the chase to him after all.
A game of cat and mouse.
Or, in this case, dog and hare.
Actually, come to think of it, dogs were not a bad idea.
I put a call through to Shaw to get a K-9 unit out here to track Basque. “Have them get his scent from the driver’s seat of the car.” Metro PD used Belgian Malinois, and they were some of the best-trained ones I’d seen.
“Roger that.”
I pocketed my phone and scrutinized the forest again.
The residential area lay to the east. A deepening cove of woods loomed before me. To the west, a broad field eventually met up with a sprawling industrial district.
It would make sense for Basque to disappear into the forest, but I was more concerned that he might go toward the homes to the east. With civilians potentially at risk, protecting the people who lived here took precedent over tromping through the woods trying to find him in the dark.
As I ran toward the neighborhood, I called Shaw again to confirm we were getting roadblocks set up. “And I don’t care how late it is, I want officers to go door-to-door to interview and warn residents.”
Let’s see how fast you can run after all, Richard.
As sirens cycled through the night, I bolted toward the nearby neighborhood to search for the hare.
14
It was really hard for Tessa to be here in this hospital room.
Even though gothic horror was her favorite genre of literature, and thrasher metal her favorite type of music, and even though she was a cutter, blood in real life made her seriously queasy, graveyards freaked her out, and hospitals made her think of the long days sitting beside her mom as she weakened, slipped into a coma, and died.
No, hospitals were definitely not on Tessa’s top-ten list of favorite places to be.
And now, here, tonight, she was terrified that Lien-hua might die. She’d already seen her mother and her father die — her mother from cancer, her father from a bullet meant for a killer.