Yes, maybe it was.
At home, I looked up the info the team had gathered on Saundra Weathers and her soon-to-be-six-year-old adopted daughter. Someone had tracked down press photos from Saundra’s last book-release party.
Just like I remembered her from high school, Saundra had a slim, pretty face and an earnest gaze. Noni was a slight Ethiopian girl with a cute smile that was made even more endearing because she was missing one of her front teeth.
I worked late, entering information corresponding to Lien-hua’s cognitive map of DC into the geoprofile to see if I could identify anywhere her life might have intersected with that of the other victims or with the regions we were looking at for Basque. It seemed pretty clear that he hadn’t chosen her because of expediency or opportunity but because of her connection with me, but I didn’t want to discount anything, so I took a careful look at her data.
It didn’t lead anywhere, but while I was going through the files again, I was reminded of a connection two of the victims had.
One of them worked at a sporting goods store where another had bought fishing tackle. It was a small, privately owned store and didn’t have any security cameras on-site — I’d looked into that months ago. But this location seemed to be the only one where these two women’s lives intersected. I reviewed the interviews with the store owner again, but didn’t come up with anything.
Offenders who are peripatetic — in other words, who commit crimes while traveling through an area — skew the results of geoprofiles. However, in the case of Basque, he had committed enough other crimes in the DC area that it was highly unlikely he was just traveling through.
Also, as I’d promised to do at our briefing, I studied the cognitive maps of the previous victims in relationship to my own. The travel pattern data from my life and from Lien-hua’s helped narrow down the places where Basque’s anchor point might be and moved the hot zone on the east of the city farther out, past Joint Base Andrews, and a few miles south.
After uploading the information to the online case files for the rest of the team to access, I reviewed my notes for tomorrow’s eight-o’clock forensic palynology lecture at the Academy, until exhaustion finally overtook me and I fell asleep.
28
Richard Basque awakened to the sound of his two pit bulls snarling restlessly, agitated, in the yard near the edge of the Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary where he lived.
He peered out the window and saw that one of them had killed a rabbit and the two dogs were tearing it apart. Beyond them, the languorous wetlands stretched back more than a mile before dissipating and merging with the Patuxent River.
He’d chosen this location carefully. The flowage gave him a place to dispose of bones after he and his dogs had each had their fill of the meat he brought back to the house.
He went into the kitchen and put on some coffee.
Richard had read both of Patrick’s books on geospatial investigation and knew all about his specialty of tracking the locations of the home bases of serial offenders. Bowers had a PhD in environmental criminology and put it to good use.
Because of that, Richard had been careful not to leave any discernible pattern for him to track. He made sure to take the people he abducted to random locations — or he brought them back here, where he could dispose of their remains in the marsh in places where they would never be discovered.
No, the apartment he’d taken Lien-hua to was not one he’d used before, and not one he’d planned to use again.
He cracked an egg, tipped it into a bowl, and whisked it lightly.
Sausage was also on the menu. A special recipe he’d come up with himself.
There was nothing in Richard’s childhood that would lead you to believe he would grow up to become what he was.
No abuse.
No absentee father or overbearing mother.
No warning signs. As a child he’d never started fires, tortured animals, or had problems with bed-wetting — the triad of characteristics that so many serial killers, for whatever reason, share.
He grew up in a modest home with nurturing parents and a younger sister whom he had always loved — and still did. He did well in school, found success in the workplace, and then somewhere along the line developed a liking for human flesh.
People want to find something essentially different about serial killers — that they were abused, or are genetically predisposed to act the way they do, or perhaps had a brain injury or something along those lines.
Some people believe spiritual forces are at play — demonic possession and the like — because then, if the behavior was caused by the environment or predestined in their genes or could be blamed on the devil, then other people — normal people — wouldn’t have to be afraid that they might one day become like those who torture and kill and rape and cannibalize their victims.
In a way, Richard was thankful for the teachers he’d had during his formative years, thankful that they’d been so nonjudgmental and hadn’t tried to impose their values on him, but just taught him that every culture has its own norms and mores and that we should accept all of them as equal. And they emphasized how important it was that he clarify his own “personal values.”
And, of course, they’d told him over and over to feel good about himself. That seemed to be very important to them.
So now he had a healthy self-esteem — he wasn’t proud of who he was, nor was he ashamed of it. He simply felt good about himself just as his teachers had encouraged him to do all those years.
And Richard’s values had become quite clarified.
Quite clarified indeed.
Yes, he was grateful for an educational system that had helped steer him away from feeling shame over the personal values he felt so strongly drawn to. He had taken those experts’ advice to heart.
Certainly, when it comes to genetic makeup, the deck was stacked against some people, but Richard had always known the truth: people like him choose to become what they are. It’s an act of the will, pure and simple. Jeffrey Dahmer, Albert Fish, Andrei Chikatilo, they might have felt a compulsion to do as they did, but ultimately they all made the decision to act on it. To blame genes or upbringing or the devil was to shift responsibility and diminish the accountability of the people making the choices, committing the crimes.
After all, as philosophers throughout the ages have noted, the definition of freedom is the ability to do otherwise. If you have no choice in a situation, you aren’t free. So if there is such a thing as free will, killers choose their path and deserve to be held responsible. On the other hand, if there isn’t such a thing as free will, why would anyone be held accountable or punished for anything, since he wouldn’t have had a choice in the matter and had no power to resist the temptation?
Richard knew these things, knew that everyone has, within himself, both the potential for evil and the potential for good. We are, each of us, free to follow socially constructed moral tenets. And we are free to do otherwise.
Everyone is.
Maybe the most frightening thing about killers is not what they have done, but that, given the right circumstances and stressors, everyone is capable of doing the very same things.
Richard turned on the burner, got out the frying pan, and thought back to his encounter with Patrick at the water treatment plant Friday night.
After Lien-hua escaped, he’d left bread crumbs for Bowers to follow — her car in that garage, going through intersections with traffic cameras, parking outside the water treatment facility.