Despite their dismal reputation, Ralph was a faithful Nationals fan and was eyeing the screen intently. He offhandedly commented about how much he wished he could have been at the game.
Tessa cringed.
“What?” he said.
“Baseball.”
“Baseball?”
“Yeah. Ew.”
He furrowed his eyebrows. “What do you have against baseball?”
“Oh,” I cautioned, “don’t even get her started.”
“What? How did I not know this?” He turned toward Tessa. “Seriously, you don’t like baseball?”
“Ralph,” I said, “I’m telling you, you don’t want to—”
“Who doesn’t like baseball?”
Tessa raised a finger into the air.
Oh, boy. Here we go.
“Think of it like this,” she said. “Let’s say no one in America ever heard of it before, right? And you’re trying to sell them on the idea: ‘Oh, this’ll be great. We’ll have these eight guys dress up in dorky-looking knee pants and stand around a field and scratch their crotches while two other guys play catch. We’ll give those two clever names: the catcher and the pitcher.’”
“Um…” Ralph began.
“‘Then we’ll have someone swing a stick at the ball. Half the time he’ll miss, but once in a while he’ll hit it. Then the game of catch turns into a game of tag. We’ll go back and forth taking turns and after seven rounds of this we’ll just acknowledge how brain-numbing it all is and have a sing-along.’ I mean, are you kidding me?”
“It’s not that bad.” He sounded a bit like a boy who’d gotten caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “I mean, it’s not as good as football, but…”
“And”—she was just getting warmed up—“unlike most sports, where you have to actually be successful to be considered great, in baseball you get to be an all-star if you manage to hit the ball just one-third of the time. Not like in school, where a thirty-three percent will buy you another year in fourth grade. Nope. We wouldn’t want to raise the bar too high or anything, considering we’re only paying the guys ten mil a year. I mean, can you imagine a surgeon who’s successful a third of the time getting that kind of a salary? Or how about a pilot who manages to land on the runway one out of every three attempts? Wow. Give that guy a raise, he’s an all-star!”
She took a breath, but didn’t pause long enough for Ralph to get a word in edgewise. “And if watching some guy miss the ball isn’t exciting enough for your television audience, every few minutes we’ll cut to shots of a bald, middle-aged guy chewing bubble gum. He gets paid hundreds of thousands of dollars — or probably more — to make the monumental decision about which of the guys in the knee pants gets to throw the ball next.”
“It’s not always easy to know which pitcher to send in,” Ralph countered.
“Uh-huh. It’s the only sport where one of the main goals is to have nearly everyone fail. The announcers actually sound excited when no one is able to accomplish anything. I mean, every batter is missing the ball and the announcers are alclass="underline" ‘It’s a great pitcher’s duel!’ Really? That’s what you call it when everyone sucks except the pitchers? And if things get really bad, they’ll exult, ‘We might have a no-hitter on our hands!’ Only sport where people get so worked up over so much failure.”
“Did you just say ‘exult’?” Ralph asked.
“Sorry.” Suddenly, she looked self-conscious. “It means to feel, show, or exclaim jubilation, usually over an accomplishment of some kind.”
“Yeah, no, I know that. It’s just — I’ve never heard anyone actually use it in a sentence before.”
“It sorta just came out.”
“So what sport do you like?”
“Reading.”
“Reading’s not a sport.”
“It oughtta be. It’s more exciting to watch than baseball.”
Ralph opened his mouth as if he were going to reply, but then he must have thought better of it, because he said nothing, just walked over and, looking somewhat defeated, plopped onto the chair by the window.
That afternoon we did not watch the baseball game.
Tessa’s school was in the process of transitioning to e-books, but her class still used printed texts and she’d brought four of them along and spent her time studying. To put it mildly, she did a good job of remembering what her teachers said in class, but I was proud of her for not sloughing off her work like she must certainly have been tempted to do this late in her senior year, especially now that she’d handed in her senior project for her AP Lit class, which was half of the semester grade for her least-favorite teacher, Mr. Tilson.
Ralph and I used my laptop to review the case files, analyzing the revised geoprofile and looking carefully at the relationships between the travel route Basque had taken and the locations of his previous crimes.
Time slipped away; evening approached. When Lien-hua wasn’t resting, she was offering Ralph and me a profiler’s perspective on the investigation. Officially, profilers don’t solve cases — they help eliminate suspects — but Lien-hua hadn’t gotten that memo and had helped solve any number of them in her time in the NCAVC.
“It’s not going to end for Basque,” she said. “He’ll feel irritated that he wasn’t able to kill me. That won’t be acceptable to him. He’ll be more determined than ever.”
“He’ll try to hurt Pat some other way?” Ralph said.
“Yes.”
“The author of the novel?” I asked, but thought, Tessa?
Lien-hua shook her head. “That’s impossible to say.”
Tessa had her earbuds plugged in her ears but even from across the room I could hear the coarse sounds of one of her screamer bands scratching harshly out of them.
I made a decision that either I would be watching her or she’d be under police protection until we could bring Basque in.
Considering the circumstances, it didn’t take me long to clear it with Ralph. He assured me that he’d work things out with the Bureau and with Doehring and I thanked him. He didn’t bring up the mounds of paperwork he would face or the budgetary issues he would need to iron out and I wasn’t surprised one bit.
When Brineesha got off work, she joined us.
It wasn’t something I really wanted to get into, especially with Tessa here, but somehow we got to talking about how clever criminals are, how they can be a lot more imaginative than investigators.
“How so?” Tessa, who had set her iPod aside, asked.
Experienced criminals know you use whatever you have on hand as a weapon. Before they were banned, forks were one of the most popular weapons in prisons. I’d seen firsthand what kind of damage the tines of a fork could do when they were jammed into someone’s eye, or through his cheek, or into his chest. Not pretty.
I decided not to bring up the fork incidents and moved on to something harmless. “Well, for example, to get cell phones, prisoners have a partner wrap padding around it, sew it into a football, and then cover the football with artificial turf so it’ll match the grass in the yard. They just throw it over the wall, the guy inside retrieves it from the yard, and voilà.”
“Huh,” Brineesha said, “that is clever.”
“Last year I interviewed Lester Berring, a serial arsonist who operated mainly in New York State.”
“I remember hearing about that,” Tessa said. “When was that? Maybe…”
With her memory it didn’t shock me that she recalled the case. “He was caught eight years ago,” I said. “He used everything from fingernail polish to cough syrup to nondairy coffee creamer as accelerants.”
“Coffee creamer?”