I tried to catch my breath.
The shift in the headlights caught my attention as the bank gave way. My car came rolling toward me in a landslide of mud and uprooted marsh grass. Instinctively, I grabbed Basque’s body and lurched backward in the mud, dragging him to the side as the car sluiced down the bank and landed with a thick, heavy splash in the marsh almost exactly where we’d been wrestling with each other.
Basque was a big man, and it wasn’t easy getting him to shore. At last, I flopped him onto the bank and stood peering down at his motionless body.
The squad remained at the top of the embankment, but the headlights had stopped moving and I assumed the cruiser must have become lodged against one of the trees bordering the road.
There was just enough light to see the outline of Basque lying at my feet.
The sirens drew closer.
I could remove the cuffs. No one needed to know exactly how this had all played out. My report could simply state that we struggled, that as we fought he tried to drown me and though I was able to free myself, he was killed in the process.
When I’d first captured him fourteen years ago, I’d told the truth but not the whole truth about what had happened in that abandoned slaughterhouse. I’d let my most basic instincts of violence and fury take over and found pleasure in giving them free rein.
The battle I’d been fighting inside of myself ever since that day raged inside me still.
Revenge isn’t your duty, justice is.
I knew that, yes, I knew it but—
I stared at Basque, lying dead at my feet.
And, as much as I wanted to, as much as the shadows called to me, I realized I couldn’t do it, not again. I couldn’t let the truth get blurred, not like it was the first time when I caught him.
Not again.
Justice doesn’t always have clean hands.
But it should.
So, in the mud and in the rain, I knelt, and I shoved at his abdomen until the water spewed from his mouth, and I did chest compressions and resuscitation breaths against his shattered, bloody mouth — made even harder by the wound in his jaw — and after about thirty seconds, I brought him back, turned him onto his side so he could cough up the marsh water and blood without aspirating on them, and I brought Richard Basque, the man I’d wanted for so many years to kill, back to life.
To prove to myself that I wasn’t like him.
Or at least, to attempt to.
52
Over the last couple minutes, half a dozen police cars and two ambulances had arrived. Basque had been loaded onto one of them, his wrists and ankles strapped down securely. Two officers sat beside him to make sure he didn’t somehow pull free and escape. The stab wound in his jaw was not life-threatening, but was undoubtedly painful. The gunshot wound in his side was bleeding heavily, having ripped open during our struggle.
Well, too bad.
After confirming that they weren’t going to take him to St. Mary’s, the hospital where Lien-hua was, I retrieved my SIG from where it’d fallen on the road when I was fighting Basque, then I went back to the house and found Ralph sitting on the porch with a paramedic kneeling beside him inspecting the jagged, gaping bite wound on his right forearm.
Through the living room window I could see Saundra and her daughter sitting on the couch, a female officer with them, no doubt asking the kinds of questions it would have been awkward for a male officer to ask.
While the paramedic tried to convince Ralph to ride back to the hospital with him, I watched the taillights of the police escort and the ambulance carrying Basque rumble away in the rain, down the road that led alongside the marsh.
We had him, finally had him, the man who’d taken the lives of so many, the man who’d tried to kill Lien-hua. And even though we’d managed to get here in time to save Saundra and her daughter, sadness still weighed down on me.
We’d discovered the body of the missing Maryland State Police officer in the trunk of the squad. And we received word from the Chesapeake Beach Police Department that the two agents who’d been stationed outside Saundra’s house were both dead.
In just the last few hours, Basque had taken the lives of those three men and he had been about to cannibalize and kill a mother and her little girl.
I tried to hold myself back from asking the obvious question—“Why?”—but it was hard. Motives are so indecipherable, so elusive. And yet, it’s human nature to try to figure out what they are.
And despite myself, I found that I was doing that now. I kept coming back to the fact that we were dealing with an elaborate chase reaching back at least to February, to Brandi Giddens’s death.
Her prints were on the novel in the car.
Her body was left in the park where Basque tried to kill Lien-hua.
It was a long, convoluted trail that ended here tonight.
A chase through time and space.
The hound and the hare.
Tessa was always trying to get me to learn investigative techniques by studying Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional detective Auguste Dupin, and now I thought of something Dupin had said in one of Poe’s stories.
In “The Purloined Letter,” when faced with an inexplicable crime that had completely baffled the police, Dupin noted that the most frightening criminal of all is “an unprincipled man of genius.”
That was Basque: a man of sweeping intelligence, but with no conscience, possessed only by the insatiable desire to kill.
An unprincipled man of genius.
“I’m fine,” Ralph was telling the paramedic. “My wife’s a nurse. She can look at this when I get home. I’m not gonna go to the hospital.”
“Agent Hawkins,” the EMT argued futilely, “I really think—”
But Ralph raised a hand to cut him off. “Just clean it out and wrap it up so it doesn’t bleed so much. It’s just a scratch.” A ragged chunk of meat was missing from his arm. It was not just a scratch.
I figured this argument might go on for a while.
“I’m going inside for a minute,” I told him.
The lights in the house were on, and the entryway felt almost cozy and inviting — until I remembered whose house I was standing in.
In contrast to the squalid apartment where he’d taken Lien-hua, Basque’s home here on the edge of the wetlands was clean, neat, and rustic, with handmade cherrywood furniture that matched the log cabin — esque feel of the place. The soft smell of pine and a hint of fireplace smoke gently permeated the air.
I stepped into the hall.
Thinking about the vile things Basque had done over the years, what he was capable of, sent a shiver running through me. He was a psychopath, or a sociopath, or whatever term you preferred, yes, he was that, but he was not some kind of fairy-tale monster, he was just as human as anyone.
And that was the most troubling part of all.
At times each one of us pokes around the rubble of our dark desires, seeing how far we can wander into the nightmare and still remain who we are.
Like I had in the marsh not more than ten minutes ago.
It would be easy, so easy, to get lost there in the shadowlands that lie inside of me.
When you spend as much time as I have tracking people through the territory of the damned, you can never entirely shake off the shadows — they become part of you. And sometimes it’s hard to find your way back home again.
The thought troubled me deeply.
I told myself once again that I wasn’t like Basque, that no one was.
But, in a sense, I am, we all are.
Saundra and Noni were still seated on the couch, the female officer speaking softly with them.
Miss Weathers looked shaky and had one arm around her daughter, who was leaning against her side staring wide-eyed around the room.