After their deaths, it seemed like pain had become permanently etched across the surface of her life — almost as if it were engraved indelibly on her heart. Over the last six months things had improved a little, but the pain was still there, and time didn’t seem to quiet it but only served to bring the ridges of it more distinctly to the surface.
So now Tessa sat quietly with Mrs. Hawkins beside the bed.
Lien-hua lay asleep, her heartbeat monitor pulsing evenly, a chest tube that Tessa kept trying not to look at, but found herself eyeing nevertheless, trailing out of her torso to a machine that drained blood from her lungs to keep them from filling with fluid.
The doctors had assured them that Lien-hua was on her way to recovery, but seeing her lying there like that, it was hard to believe.
Over the last couple years Tessa had taken to calling Agent Hawkins and his wife by their first names and now she said, “Brineesha, I was praying for her, but I’m not sure God was listening.”
She expected Brineesha to reassure her that of course God was listening, of course he was, but she didn’t do that at all. “Tessa, I’m not sure if you know this, but Tony was three months premature.”
Okay, not the reply she was expecting.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Honey, that boy weighed only two pounds and two ounces when he was born. We didn’t think he was going to make it a week.”
Ah. The point of the story became clear. “And you prayed for him, and he recovered, is that it?”
She shook her head. “The more I prayed, the worse he got. Only when I stopped praying, only then did he get better.”
Tessa looked at her curiously. “Are you saying prayer didn’t help?”
“I’m saying it didn’t help when I wanted it to.”
Tessa didn’t reply, and in the silent wake of Brineesha’s words their attention shifted back to Lien-hua. It seemed to Tessa that she’d never seen anyone who was alive lie so still.
The point of Brineesha’s story seemed to be: hang in there, God will help Lien-hua eventually, in his own time. But Tessa knew enough about life to know that things didn’t always work out like that. They definitely hadn’t worked out like that two years ago for her mom.
Maybe God had his reasons, but look at the world closely enough and you can’t help but come away wondering why he seems so random in the prayers he does answer, and so, well, capricious in the ones he does not.
As Tessa tried to sort all that through, she watched Lien-hua lie there so still. Apart from her chest rising and falling, she didn’t move at all. Didn’t even stir.
We didn’t find him.
Not in the neighborhood, not in the industrial district or the woods. We didn’t find any sole impressions in the mud near the stream or any broken twigs that might have indicated his path through the forest. Even the dogs came up empty.
I had the thought that Basque might have slipped back through the steel gate after I exited, so we searched the network of tunnels but found nothing. If he had doubled back, he must have found another way out. The dogs couldn’t track any scent through the flowing water, and a detailed search of the water treatment facility came up empty.
He was like a poltergeist from a horror movie, a phantom that leaves traces of its presence only when it wants to and then dematerializes again into thin air. But Basque wasn’t a ghost. He was a real person of flesh and blood who’d slipped past us. Again.
During the search, I texted Tessa half a dozen times to find out about Lien-hua’s condition, but her only reply was that she still hadn’t awakened.
More often than not, working with the media backfires, but tonight we put out word for them to inform the public that Basque was at large and in the vicinity. I honestly wasn’t sure how much good it would do, but right now the team thought it was the best chance we had of finding Basque. And, reluctantly, I had to agree with them.
Ralph and I touched base, and I recounted the search through the tunnels beneath the water treatment plant, outlining the specific course I’d taken while pursuing Basque. Shaw was standing nearby. “That’s a lot of tunnels to remember,” he said. “You sure you didn’t get turned around down there?”
“I’m sure.”
A pause. “Okay.”
“Trust me,” Ralph said, “Pat’s good with directions.”
Latex gloves on, I took some time to inspect the car Basque had driven to the facility. Inside, I found two empty water bottles, a number of crumpled-up napkins and discarded fast-food wrappers, three fashion magazines from last year, and a beat-up mass-market version of a crime novel.
And that’s what caught my attention.
The novel, On My Way to Dying, was written by Saundra Weathers, a mystery writer who’d grown up in my hometown of Horicon, Wisconsin.
She was a year older than I was, but besides being from the same town, we were linked in another way, a macabre connection that not too many people knew about.
When I was a junior in high school, an eleven-year-old girl who’d recently moved to town with her parents disappeared while walking home from school. The next day, I was the one who found her body in an old tree house on the edge of the vast marsh just outside of Horicon. The girl had been raped and then killed by a man I tracked down nearly a decade later while I was a homicide detective in Milwaukee.
Saundra’s parents owned the land that bordered the marsh.
And now, here was one of her books in the car Basque had stolen.
It might have been a coincidence that this specific book just happened to be in this specific car at this specific time, but I don’t believe in coincidences.
I flipped through the novel to see if there were any underlined words, highlighted passages, or dog-eared pages that might have been clues left intentionally or unintentionally by Basque about where his burrow really was, but I didn’t find anything.
The Lab could analyze the book and the rest of the items in the car. Maybe they’d be able to pull something up. I put a call through to FBI Headquarters to find out where Saundra Weathers lived. “Basque has worked with partners in the past. I want some agents to check on her and then watch her house tonight. I’ll be in touch with her in the morning.”
“Yes, sir.”
Finally, after more than an hour of searching the area and finding no clues whatsoever about which direction Basque might have gone, Ralph told me to get my butt back to the hospital, that they could finish the search out here.
“It’s dark, we’re not coming up with anything, and you need to be there with your fiancée.”
Even though I was more than ready to change out of my wet clothes, I wanted to see Lien-hua a lot more than I wanted to switch outfits.
And truthfully, she wasn’t the only one I was concerned about. Tessa was used to staying up late, but I’m sure she was stressed. It was almost two o’clock, and she’d be useless unless I got her home to bed.
The chopper pilot needed to stay on hand in case Ralph and the rest of the team came up with anything, but one of the SWAT guys who wasn’t involved in the search lived near the hospital and offered to give me a ride.
“I’ll catch up with you later,” Ralph told me. But before I left, he pulled me aside. “Pat, you can be headstrong, I get that, but the next time I make it clear to you that I don’t want you accessing a potential crime scene, you don’t access it. Period. End of story.” Then he sighed. “As if you’re gonna listen to that anyway.”
“You would have done the same thing, Ralph.”
He scoffed, and I took that as a form of agreement.
“Just don’t do anything stupid that would screw up our case against this guy,” he said.