Bowers had followed the trail faithfully, determinedly, just like the hound in the fable.
Richard had known all along that he was not just another meal to Bowers, but to hear him say it, yes, that was encouraging: to hear Patrick vow to take him down just reaffirmed their symbiotic relationship — the pursuer and the pursued, the chaser and the chased.
Each derived meaning from the pursuit: the hare escapes, but then ventures back into the hound’s territory. The hound returns home disappointed, not just that he did not catch the hare, but that the chase is over for the day.
And yes, in this case the hare was going to venture into the hound’s realm once again.
Richard wondered if the Bureau was following up on the novel he’d left in the car at the plant. He assumed that Patrick would make the connection, but he couldn’t be sure. Sometimes little things like that slipped through the cracks.
Well, either way, it was not the time to be careless.
Yes, he would visit the mystery writer tomorrow night, would attend her daughter’s six-year-old birthday party. Even if the Bureau decided to assign protection to her, he had in mind a way to get to her and to the girl.
Richard had never eaten a child before.
But there’s a first time for everything.
He would leave the girl’s remains in a tree house. That would have special meaning to Patrick.
So.
Tomorrow at five.
To get ready for it he needed to do a little shopping, and then he could spend some time practicing a few new tricks.
He finished cooking the sausages and ate them slowly, savoring every bite. After taking some antibiotics and changing the dressing on his gunshot wound, he went online, looked up the location of the store he would be visiting later in the day, and entered the address into his phone. When he was done, he glanced out the window and saw his two dogs, snouts bloody from their kill, stalking along the edge of the marsh looking for more game.
29
The New Agents gathered in my room on the second floor of the classroom building at the Academy.
The class of fifty, all dressed in their required attire of dark blue polo shirts and khakis, was unusually quiet as they filed in.
I figured they’d heard about what had happened with Lien-hua and were trying to figure out the best way to ask me about her condition, so I started class by giving them a quick update. “The surgery went well and Agent Jiang is recovering.” I told them about her injuries. “The doctors are hoping she’ll be released by the end of the week.”
One young woman in the back row flagged her hand in the air.
“Yes?”
“I heard it was Richard Basque — that he’s the one who did it.”
“It was.”
New Agents aren’t allowed to work on any cases until after they graduate, but the assistant director in charge of the Academy encouraged us to read them in as much as possible on ongoing cases, as long as they didn’t discuss them outside the classroom. “Think of them as residents in surgery,” he told us. “The only way they’ll learn is if they actually pick up a scalpel.”
Not the image I wanted in mind as I talked about Basque, but I slid it aside and took the opportunity to fill in the class on what we knew regarding the case, and on the investigative procedures we’d followed Friday night in tracking Basque to the water treatment plant.
It was a natural lead-in to today’s lecture. “Rather than trying to understand criminal events from a sociological perspective, I think the most effective framework for understanding them is to approach them from a geographical one instead.”
This wasn’t necessarily a popular view at the Academy, or at NCAVC, but I figured it’s only fair to let your students know where you’re coming from.
“Different types of serial offenses have different spatial clusters. Generally, the closer the crimes are to each other, the closer they are to the offender’s anchor point — basically the location from which he bases his criminal activity.”
“His home,” a young man in the front row offered.
“Yes, often, but it might be his place of work or a relative’s, friend’s, or lover’s house where he spends a significant amount of time.”
He looked slightly confused. “But that’s assuming people have stable travel and movement patterns. Right?”
“Back in 2008, Northwestern University tracked the movement of more than a hundred thousand Europeans for six months through their cell phones — Europe, because it would have been illegal in the U.S. Privacy issues. In any case, they confirmed all the major premises of environmental criminology. People’s habits and patterns are relatively stable. We consistently travel the same routes through the same cities and frequent the same stores, clubs, gas stations, pharmacies, and, at least to a limited extent, vacation spots.”
I thought of the case again, the victimology information I’d studied.
The three potential anchor points I’d come up with for Basque seemed to hover before me, as if they were etched there in midair.
The sporting goods store had no video camera…
That might be why he chose it. So that he wouldn’t appear on any footage.
I tried to stay focused but I found myself distracted as I went on.
“Which leads us to the implications this study has on investigative theory. Rather than ask why the offender committed this crime, we accept that, for whatever reason — even perhaps a reason that’s unclear to him — he was motivated to act in that way. We ask, ‘Why then?’ ‘Why there?’ ‘What is the balance of rewards versus risks that led that offender to make the choice to commit this crime in this specific place at this specific time?’”
I pulled out my laptop, which was wirelessly connected to the video screen in the front of the room.
“And one of the ways we can place an offender at the scene of a crime at a specific place and time is through forensic palynology.” I tapped at the keyboard and projected a slide of an enlarged pollen grain.
“Palynology is the study of the distribution patterns of pollen and spores. The characteristics of the pollen can reveal the genus and species of the plants they come from.”
Slide number two.
“Plants produce millions of pollen grains that are carried by the wind, on people’s clothing, on everything. In fact, pollen can be lifted by the wind up to forty thousand feet in the air and can even cross oceans. Those are the smaller ones; the bigger spores will just drop to the ground. The more ornamentation they have, the more likely they are to be carried by the biotic vector of insects and birds.”
Before clicking to slide three, I warned the New Agents to prepare themselves. “It’s a crime scene. And it’s not pleasant.”
I went to the slide: the unsolved homicide of college student Brandi Giddens, who’d been found in February at the park where Tessa, Lien-hua, and I had picnicked on Friday.
The slide contained the graphic, grisly image of Brandi’s disarticulated corpse.
Even after all these years, seeing images like this wasn’t easy for me. Whether that was a strength or a weakness, I’ve never been able to figure out.
A mind that is all logic is like a knife that is all blade.
There wasn’t any chance of that at the moment.
Some of the New Agents looked troubled. Others looked intrigued. From my experience, the first group would make the best agents.
“By looking at the sediment on the bottom of this woman’s shoes we could tell she had been near wetlands or a marsh sometime during the last day of her life. The pollen told us it was here in the DC area. Clothes act as a pollen trap and people are walking pollen collectors. One square centimeter on your clothes could have twelve hundred or more pollen grains, depending on the season. They’re also trapped in your hair and nostrils. Taken together, studying the pollen collected on — and in — an individual, gives us the floristic signature for the day, where that person has been the last twenty-four hours.”