But he had his Sigma and butterfly knife and he would take care of a few extra little lambs if he needed to.
He knocked and a moment later Saundra opened the door. “Yes?”
Looking past her, he saw wrapping paper on the floor, Dixie cups and paper plates covered with cake crumbs lay on the end table and footrest in front of the couch. No other children were present, just Noni, playing by herself with a Barbie doll next to a newly opened dollhouse.
“Ma’am,” he said to Saundra, “we have reason to believe Richard Basque is in the area. Agent Bowers has requested that we bring you and your daughter over to the station until we can ascertain that the neighborhood is safe.”
She glanced past him toward the car containing the corpses of the two dead agents. Richard didn’t have to turn around to realize that she was almost certainly noting that it looked empty.
“They’re sweeping the neighborhood,” he told her.
Saundra nodded nervously.
“Why don’t you go ahead and get your daughter. I’ll bring my car up to the house.”
Another nod; then she went to get Noni.
The rain started.
We passed the Air Force base. Using Google Earth I chose Wrighton Road as the first place to investigate. It led toward the marshlands and yet was close to the highway and we knew Brandi had a cousin in the neighborhood.
48
Richard started the engine and eased onto the street.
Saundra Weathers and her daughter were tucked in the back of the squad behind the police cage partition.
He wasn’t sure if either of them suspected anything yet, but in the rearview mirror he noticed Saundra studying his face, and then drawing her daughter close and wrapping an arm around her. “Which station are you taking us to?” she asked him.
“It’s safest if we head over to DC.”
“DC?”
“Yes. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.”
She said nothing, but he saw the change in her eyes.
Oh, yes. She knew.
Now she knew for sure.
He took off his hat and let his hair fall free.
Saundra felt terror tighten like a thick fist in her gut.
Oh, dear God, what have you done!
This man was Richard Basque, the cannibal, the killer, and he hadn’t just gotten her, he’d gotten her daughter too.
The two agents must be dead. He must have killed them. He must have—
Just like he’s going to kill you.
And Noni.
A deep chill corkscrewed through her.
The squad’s doors didn’t open from the inside. She was trapped.
She debated whether she should try to talk to him now, try to negotiate with him, but she couldn’t stand the thought of saying anything that might frighten her daughter.
Instead, she decided she would bide her time, and then, when he’d taken them to wherever they were going, she would quietly offer to let him do whatever he liked to her — whatever he liked — if he would only let Noni go free.
It might accomplish nothing, might not do any good at all, but it was the only thing she could think of to save her daughter.
It was as if she’d stepped into one of her own novels. And she knew, if she were writing the narrative of this night, how it would inevitably turn out, even if she pleaded with her captor.
And she prayed that, in this case, life would not imitate art.
We didn’t even have a chance to stop at any of the homes I had in mind.
Angela called and told us that Lacey had found Basque on the CCTV footage from the gas station. “I’m sending you the file now, but I’ll stay on the line, talk you through what we know.”
A moment later the video arrived and I tapped the space bar to start it.
The footage was from an exterior camera and showed the gas station’s pumps in the foreground. The sporting goods store’s parking lot lay across the street.
An older-model blue Chevy pickup drove up to Erikson’s Sporting Goods and Richard Basque stepped out. He turned briefly as he locked the car and that’s when his face was visible.
“That’s what Lacey caught,” Angela said. “Facial rec. So, he goes inside and returns to the car six minutes later, climbs in and drives away. For now I edited out the part while he’s inside. I’ll send you the complete file too, though.”
Just as she told me that, the video flickered briefly and then showed Richard exiting the store carrying a small paper bag. He slipped into the truck and left the parking lot.
“You ran the plates?” I asked her.
“Yes. Registered to Armin Meiwes.”
I just shook my head. Meiwes was a killer and cannibal from Germany who’d put out an ad on the Internet looking for “a well-built 18 — to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed.” Astonishingly, a man named Bernd Jürgen Brandes answered the ad and Meiwes filmed himself killing and eating Brandes. Why didn’t it surprise me that Basque had chosen Meiwes’s name as another of his aliases.
“An address?”
“One that doesn’t exist in Alexandria.”
I replayed the footage.
The truck had a hitch and brake light wires for pulling a trailer.
“Have Lacey see if anyone has bought a fishing license or registered a boat under Meiwes’s name. Maybe we’ll get lucky and get an actual address.”
I scrutinized the video and saw a sticker in the pickup’s rear window. Zooming in on it, I said, “That sticker in the window. What is that? A parking sticker from a college?”
“I’m not sure…” A moment passed as she studied it herself. “It looks like it might be.”
With the angle of the vehicle and the glare from the sunlight, it was impossible to read the writing, but it appeared to contain an image of a fish leaping out of the water.
“A state park sticker?”
“Maybe. I’ll have Lacey do an image-based search online, see what we can pull up. Anything else?”
“See if you can find out what Basque bought when he went inside that store.”
After the call, Ralph asked me, “What do you want to do?”
“Pull over. I want you to watch this too.”
49
Over the last twenty minutes we went through the complete footage twice and the edited version close to a dozen times and didn’t see anything that seemed significant. I was about to suggest we move on when Ralph reached over and paused the video. “Hold it. What is that?”
“Where?”
“On the hood.”
I zoomed in.
“Man,” he said, “that is one big streak of bird poop.”
I couldn’t help but think of the picnic with Tessa and Lien-hua, when Tessa had joked about a bird pooping on my sandwich.
“You grew up right next to Horicon Marsh,” Ralph said half jokingly. “You gotta be an expert on goose poop, see if you can identify the bird, maybe lead us to—”
“That isn’t from a goose.” I thought back to all of my years fishing with my dad and my brother in Wisconsin. “It’s from a heron. Taking off. At least, that’s my best guess.”
He eyed me dubiously. “Okay, so you’re a sharp guy, but how could you possibly know that?”
I pointed. “Just like blood spatter. If the bird was stationary, then the excrement would be in a—”
“Ah. I get it. In one spot, a circle, something like that. Sure. But since this is a streak, the bird had to be flying.”