Tessa and I concurred.
The two women didn’t finish their five pieces of cake, but I looked at it as my duty to thoroughly taste-test each of mine.
After the impromptu cake tasting, I asked Tessa if I could borrow her lighter, which she somewhat embarrassedly handed over, then I requested that she give Lien-hua and me a few minutes alone.
I didn’t know if she had a backup lighter. “No fresh air,” I told her.
“Gotcha.”
She stepped out of the room.
“What do you need the lighter for?” Lien-hua asked me.
“In a sec. First, I need to tell you about my meeting with Margaret.”
When I’d finished summarizing the situation concerning Margaret’s brother, Lien-hua said, “Clear it with her. Maybe I can help with the profile — if you do end up suspecting foul play.”
“Good idea.”
I put the call through to Margaret right away, and she approved the idea as long as it wasn’t “too taxing on Agent Jiang.” I handed the phone to Lien-hua, who reassured her that she was ready to get back to work.
After we’d hung up, Lien-hua said, “Now, what about that lighter?”
Weddings in America tend to have a lot of white, but in China red is a much more prevalent color. Now I palmed the red candle I’d brought in and tried to make it appear magically in my hand.
“You need a little more work at that,” Lien-hua said good-naturedly.
“I’m better at picking pockets than sleight of hand.”
“Not a skill you should probably be advertising.”
“In any case…” I held the candle up. “We spoke about getting one of these for the wedding. A unity candle.”
“I remember.”
“And remember in the park when we were talking? Till death do us part?”
“Yes.”
“And then later in the hospital you said that when Basque attacked you it was like time stretched out and you saw how—”
“How unfathomable it is.” She was not quite whispering. “Yes. And how brief.”
For a moment we were both silent.
I laid the candle in her hand and gently curled her fingers around it. “Most people just light these at their weddings. I’d like us to light this one whenever we want to remember that we’re one, that we have a lifetime of unfathomable moments together.”
“Every time?” she asked.
“Every time.”
We probably weren’t supposed to be doing this in a hospital, but following protocol has never exactly been my specialty. I flicked out the lighter’s flame and Lien-hua held up the candle, and then said softly, “I have a feeling we’re going to go through a lot of candles.” There was a delicate intimacy to her words that held the promise of forever.
“Sounds like my kind of life.”
And there, in the candlelight of our unity, I kissed her.
And the moment welcomed me into it and stretched into one that I planned to hold on to forever.
Tessa returned a few minutes later, saw the burning candle, and didn’t ask, but she smiled a little and that was nice to see.
After all that cake sampling, Lien-hua and Tessa didn’t have any appetite left for supper, but I managed to eat the meal the hospital staff brought up for Lien-hua so it wouldn’t go to waste.
Before Tessa and I left, I told Lien-hua I’d look over the police reports regarding Corey Wellington’s death and let her know if there was anything suspicious.
On the way to the car, I returned Tessa’s lighter to her. “I really don’t want you smoking.”
“I know.”
“So, are we cool?”
A pause. “Do you want me to lie and tell you I’ll never smoke again?”
“I don’t want it to be a lie.”
She said nothing and I said nothing as we drove to pick up her car and head home.
Saundra Weathers had spent the day reading through the two true crime books about Richard Basque that she’d purchased at the mall.
And, honestly, after finding out what the man had done to his victims, she was having second thoughts about her comfort level should the killer actually try to contact her.
However, she reassured herself that the two agents outside her home wouldn’t let anything happen to her.
Or to her daughter, Noni.
Richard finished up with the young man from the magic store.
It’d turned out to be messier than he thought it would be. He’d started out with the rope, but in the end, had moved on to the blade he carried. However, he’d been careful to keep the blood off his clothes. So, no harm done.
He found a DVD that taught how to escape from handcuffs, both metal handcuffs and plastic flex cuffs. It was a skill he’d always wanted to have and he figured it might come in handy if things didn’t go according to plan tomorrow.
Then, so that he could practice at home, he helped himself to a few pairs of different types of handcuffs and shackles that were stocked on the shelf.
Before leaving the magic shop, he scrawled four words in the man’s blood on the floor in the back room, then he straightened his shirt and went home to his dogs to practice his tricks for tomorrow night.
37
The files from the Atlanta Police Department concerning Corey Wellington’s death were waiting for me in my e-mail in-box when I arrived home.
After checking the online reports to see if Agent Hammet had posted any updates on the calls she’d been making to the people close to Basque’s previous victims, and finding that she had not, I turned to Corey’s files.
Even though I’d never met him, as I looked over the police reports I couldn’t help but feel a sense of grief and loss.
Mostly I work homicides, but I’ve been called in to look over all too many suicide cases over the years and I’ve never gotten used to them. Seeing the corpse, knowing that the person did this to himself in whatever manner he’d chosen — a self-inflicted gunshot wound, an overdose, hanging, or, as in this case, a stab wound up into the chest — makes me feel a visceral sweep of sadness.
You can’t help but wonder what drove the person to such an extreme act, to actually end his own life. You can’t help but wonder those things.
If this one is even a suicide at all.
Many times it’s depression, just as Corey evidently suffered from. Sometimes it’s disappointment or grief. I’ve worked suicides in which someone lost a job and killed himself, or lost a loved one and couldn’t stand the thought of living without her.
I consulted on one case in which a teenage girl slit her wrists and bled to death in her bathtub because she saw that her boyfriend had changed his status on Facebook from “in a relationship” to “single.” One of the most tragic suicides I’ve ever run into was a father who took his own life when none of his children wished him a happy Father’s Day. He left them a note telling how disappointed he was in them, how it was their fault. But he had the date wrong. Father’s Day wasn’t for another week.
It’s deeply disturbing to think about how many people in the world are dying inside, screaming for someone, anyone, to care, reaching out again and again, sometimes to the hand that slaps them, because, all too often, without that hand they have nothing at all.
And eventually they stop reaching out altogether.
I directed my attention to the fatal knife wound.
It looked like it was consistent with a self-inflicted one that would be caused by leaning forward and thrusting the blade up into your abdomen toward your heart.