That was about thirty-five miles southeast of DC, plenty close enough for Basque to have traveled to last night. He could have made it over there after he fled the water treatment plant. “We still have some agents watching her house?”
“As far as I know, but I’ve been a little swamped here.” I heard her yawn. “Oh, I analyzed the audio of the 911 call Lien-hua made last night. When I enhanced it, I could hear a male voice — I’m not sure if it’s Basque or not. Listen.”
She tapped at Lacey’s keyboard and a moment later the audio began. It was a little faint and staticky but I could make out a voice: “Just relax, Lien-hua. It’ll be over in a few seconds.”
“Yeah.” I felt a slice of fresh anger cut through me. “That’s Basque. What else?”
“That’s all I have for you right now.”
“Can you have Lacey send me that audio file, as well as the traffic camera and Metro station footage you reviewed last night? I want to see if there’s anything in them that might lead us to Basque.”
“Sure.”
After we’d ended the call, Lien-hua shook her head. “It just sounds so weird when you refer to Lacey as if she were a real person.”
“Angela gets offended if I don’t.”
“I know, but sometimes I think we’re feeding her delusion.”
“I don’t think it’s a delusion. Just a quirk.”
“Well,” she acknowledged, “I suppose we all have our share of those.”
It was nice, steering away from the case for a moment. “What are mine?”
“Your quirks?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you love your little Mini Maglite, you like to say, ‘Everything matters,’ whenever you’re working a case, and you’re a coffee snob.”
“Snob is a little strong.”
“Uh-huh, so are your views about Starbucks. So what about me?”
“Let’s see… You always set your alarm clock to a prime number, you’re very peculiar about your flower arrangements, and you have a weakness for watching nineties romance movies while overindulging on Fritos.”
“They’re yummy.”
“Yes, they are.”
The conversation fell into a lull, and I thought back to last night, when I first heard the news that she’d been attacked. I’d rushed out of the house right away. Now I realized that I’d left my laptop both on and plugged in. I wished I had it with me, but at least I could access my files remotely with my phone.
I went to the bathroom to get dressed. Maybe when Tessa came by later she could bring my computer and a dry set of clothes. Though mine were drier this morning, they still carried the damp, rangy smell of the water from the drainage tunnels I’d traversed through last night.
Lien-hua did her best to get comfortable, then closed her eyes and told me she was going to try to get some rest. Actually, I was glad she needed to sleep, because it gave me a chance to make some calls.
So that I wouldn’t disturb her while I was talking on the phone, I slipped into an empty room just down the hall. I confirmed that there were still agents outside Saundra’s house, then contacted the Lab to find out if they’d lifted anything from the novel or the other items in the car Basque had stolen. Finally, I phoned Doehring to get an update on the case from his end.
Here’s what we knew:
(1) Yes, the agents were in place at Saundra’s house as I’d requested, but she wasn’t home and hadn’t been last night when they arrived. Neighbors said she’d taken her daughter camping in West Virginia for the weekend. No one had been able to reach her on her cell phone.
The neighbors had seen her packing the car yesterday afternoon to leave for their trip, which didn’t completely quell my suspicions that Basque might have gotten to her and her daughter, but it did quiet them a little bit. Regardless, if Basque had a connection with Saundra, it was possible she might know something about his whereabouts. I called FBI Headquarters to get an agent assigned to put some calls through to her family and friends to find out where she might have taken her daughter.
(2) The Lab found prints on the novel, but they didn’t match Basque’s or those of the woman who owned the car he’d stolen from a parking garage. Interestingly enough, they didn’t match any of the prints we had on file.
(3) There was no evidence in the apartment that Basque had taken any other women there. I decided to proceed with the working hypothesis that it was not the anchor point for his crimes.
(4) Doehring informed me that despite a careful inspection of Lien-hua’s car, the other car Basque had used, the mechanic’s garage, the water treatment plant, and the apartment where he’d taken her, the team didn’t find anything that gave us a clue as to where he might have gone after he left the drainage tunnels beneath the facility.
(5) Officers had been combing the woods since dusk and hadn’t come up with anything that indicated where Basque had gone.
Back in Lien-hua’s room again, I used my phone to remotely log into my computer, then I pulled up the case files on Basque’s previous crimes.
No criminal thinks of everything. Nobody can plan for every contingency, and eventually it’ll catch up with you and you’ll leave something behind. You’ll overlook one little detail, and it’ll haunt you the rest of your life as you sit in your prison cell and think about what you did: If only I’d thought of that one thing. If only I’d planned a little better, thought things through a little more.
My job was to find out what Basque had overlooked.
All people form cognitive maps of the areas they frequent. These mental maps skew toward the places we’re familiar with. By studying the travel patterns of the victims of serial crimes and analyzing the places where their lives intersected with the offender’s, I’m able to use algorithms developed by my mentor, Dr. Werjonic, to work backward to locate the most likely home base, or anchor point for the offender’s crime spree.
The more locations I have to work with, the more accurate the geographic profile can be.
This analysis is what lies at the heart of my specialty, geospatial investigation.
Over the last year I’d worked on a geoprofile of the most likely anchor points for Basque’s crimes and the previous homicides in our region that we suspected him of, but so far that hadn’t led us anywhere. However, now, with the crimes he’d committed last night, I had a number of new locations to input into my geospatial analysis: the park, the apartment, the water treatment plant, the Metro stations, the site where we’d found Lien-hua’s car.
I plugged in the numbers and set to work.
18
Nothing.
I kept coming up empty and two hours later I still hadn’t found anything helpful. I closed my eyes and rubbed them in frustration.
An hour ago Dr. Frasier had come in and given Lien-hua some more pain medication and since then she’d remained asleep.
Thankfully.
And I’d been able to keep my eyes off the needle in her arm.
Thankfully.
My stomach had been grumbling for a while, so after giving the analysis a few more minutes and failing to come up with anything significant, I took the opportunity to trek down to the cafeteria and grab some oatmeal, a banana, and a bagel for breakfast.
I passed on the coffee, though. I’m brave enough to lead climb in Yosemite, go mano a mano with serial killers, and navigate a teenage girl’s mood swings, but I’m nowhere near brave enough to drink hospital cafeteria coffee.
Returning to the empty room down the hall from Lien-hua, I tried Saundra Weathers’s cell number but no one picked up. I left my name and number and requested that she return my call as soon as she could.