We finished retracing the route and parked at the water treatment plant.
It hadn’t started to rain yet, but seeing the clouds swirling and mounting above us, I was reminded of Tessa staring at the sky when we had our picnic Friday at the park where Basque attacked Lien-hua. A thought hit me: most likely Richard wouldn’t have made a move on her there unless he had some familiarity with the park, the sight lines, the road layout.
Which would mean Rock Creek Park was in his awareness space, too.
If he knew that area, then—
I recalled my lecture, the slide of the woman’s body that had been found near the trailhead there in February. That crime didn’t fit Basque’s MO, but neither did strangling his victims like he’d done with Lien-hua. Studies on serial rapists have found that there’s a stronger correlation between the locations of the crimes than to the similarity of the MO of the crimes. The jury was still out, but some indications pointed toward it being true of serial killers too.
I sat on the bumper and flipped open my laptop.
“Pat, you’ve got that look in your eye,” Ralph said.
“That’s because I think I may know where our hare’s been running.”
There was a set of unidentified prints on the novel.
He weaves everything together.
He’s been taunting you from the beginning with the other attacks.
It’s all about the chase.
No, I don’t believe in coincidences.
I looked up Brandi Giddens’s case files to get the address of the Upper Marlboro, Maryland, apartment she’d lived in, then I radioed Doehring. “Cole, see if you can pull up a set of prints from Brandi Giddens, the college girl we found last February over in Rock Creek Park.”
“Prints?”
“I want to know if they match the ones on the novel from the car at the water treatment plant.”
It took him a second to process that. “You really think Basque has been playing us all this time?”
“I think it’s possible. Let’s find out.”
In the shadow of the water treatment plant where Basque had slipped away Friday night, Ralph and I began to review the Giddens murder case files, looking for clues regarding Brandi’s travel patterns and Basque’s previous crimes to see if we could find a place where they intersected.
47
What’s the one type of car you can steal and then drive with little or no risk of being pulled over?
A police car.
And that’s what Richard Basque was going to acquire.
But as it turned out, he didn’t need to get pulled over himself first, because he found a Maryland State Police officer who’d set up a speed trap and lay in wait, nearly hidden in a pull-off on the highway.
Richard slowed to a stop behind the squad. Rather than get out and approach the cruiser and perhaps arouse suspicion, he waited for the officer to leave the squad to come to him.
As the man did so, Richard eyed him carefully.
Yes, he looked just about the right size.
His uniform would work just fine.
The first dots of rain fell just as we got word from Doehring that the prints matched.
“Okay,” I said to Ralph. “Brandi had marsh biota on the bottom of her shoes. She’d been near a marshland within twelve hours of her death.” I had my laptop out and was scrolling over a map of the DC area. “Joint Base Andrews would create a mental barrier in someone’s cognitive map of this area.”
“Make it seem farther to get to the city?”
“Yes, if the offender lived on the east side of the base…” I was studying the exits off Pennsylvania Ave/Maryland 4 near the Patuxent River Park. “Basque knows how I think. He would try to hide his home base by scattering his crimes as randomly throughout the region as he could, but—”
“Nothing’s random.”
“No, not when it comes to choosing the sites of your victims’ homes or their travel patterns.”
We called Angela and found that she’d received the video footage from the gas station’s archives and Lacey was still analyzing it.
With cloud cover, I couldn’t use FALCON to evaluate the prospective homes in the hot zone east of Andrews, specifically those near the rivers and neighboring marshlands.
So, as Ralph and I took off, I used the next-best thing.
Google Earth.
Richard eased the patrol car around the corner and onto Spring Street, where Saundra Weathers lived with her young daughter.
The body of the officer whom he’d just killed lay safely stashed in the trunk. Richard had been quick about dispatching him, careful to keep blood off the uniform.
Now he confirmed that the two UC agents — or perhaps police officers — were still parked across the street in Saundra’s relatively vacant, placid neighborhood.
He pulled alongside the curb behind the undercover car.
Richard decided not to use his butterfly knife, but rather to shoot both men in the head with the suppressed Sigma.
When you see a squad drive up behind you, it’s natural to think that a police officer rather than a fugitive serial killer is going to step out of the driver’s seat. Richard was banking on the fact that these two men would be blinded by their preconceptions and wouldn’t see him for who he truly was. He didn’t need much time, just a second or two, and then it would all be over.
Perception determines expectation.
He still had on his perfunctory disguise, but since law enforcement officers almost always have short hair, he tucked his hair up beneath the dead officer’s hat.
Being approached by an officer of the law, the two men wouldn’t unholster their weapons, since it could create an immediate misunderstanding.
His plan: have the driver roll down his window, lean into the car, fire two shots, and be done with it.
That quick. That simple.
Most likely they would have their IDs out before he could even tell them the lie that there’d been a report of two suspicious men sitting in a black sedan near a little girl’s house.
The driver rolled down the window as Richard neared his door, and, just as he’d anticipated, both men had their creds out when he bent to speak with them.
“Officer,” the driver began, “we’re federal—”
But that’s all he got out.
The bullet did its job well and Richard shot the other agent in the face before he could even reach for his weapon.
With the suppressor, the sound of the shots was barely a whisper — not nearly loud enough for any neighbors to hear. None of the dogs on the block began to bark.
The two dead agents slumped forward and Richard positioned them so they wouldn’t be visible from Saundra Weathers’s porch.
Yes, there was some blood spatter on the passenger-side window, but most of the mess was on the seat and he figured he would be fine.
After a moment of consideration, he tipped the head of the driver back and licked off the blood that was oozing from the bullet wound in his forehead.
He savored the moment, then reminded himself that there would be plenty more in store tonight once he got the woman and her daughter back to his place.
Richard leaned the corpse’s head forward again, then walked past the mailbox with the red and pink balloons tied to it and strode up the driveway toward the front door.
Though he was wearing a fake mustache and dressed as a police officer, he ducked his head slightly as he neared the house so that if Saundra was looking out the window she wouldn’t be able to identify him — if she even knew what he looked like.
Things had gotten later than he had originally planned, and he guessed that the other children at the party would’ve been close to the age of Saundra’s daughter, probably in kindergarten too. And by this time on a school night, they would almost certainly all be gone.