The last forty-eight hours had passed in a blur.
The rain returned yesterday and settled drearily over the nation’s capital. It was a gray, somber rain that made it seem like the sun couldn’t possibly exist beyond the thick slabs of clouds hanging so heavily in the sky.
Between yesterday afternoon and this evening, there’d been four funerals for the men who’d lost their lives on Tuesday in Basque’s killing spree: the Maryland State Police officer, the two federal agents, and a young man who was working at a magic shop on the coast. At first we didn’t know that homicide was related to the others, but when I saw on the news that there’d been a message written in blood in the back room of the store and I heard what the words were, I knew the killer was Basque.
The message read: I remember my tail.
The snake in the fable would never forget, and neither would Basque.
And neither would I.
I had made it to three of the funerals — the ones for the two agents and the slain officer.
There are many times when second thoughts become chains on your soul. You scour the past, looking for that small decision you could have made, that tiny choice that would have turned out to be monumental. “If only” becomes the catchphrase that echoes through every moment, every hour. Was there something I could have done to save those men?
You could have found Basque sooner.
But we had him now. Since he was such a high-profile criminal we were holding him at the undisclosed detention facility below FBI Headquarters on the Federal Triangle in downtown DC. It was only recently built and was located beneath the three underground levels of parking. The area was so classified that even most of the people in the building didn’t know what that newly added lower level of the building contained.
Doctors had treated the gunshot wound Basque had sustained in his right side when Lien-hua shot back through the seat of her car at him. His stabbed jaw and shattered teeth hadn’t posed any real threat, just cosmetic damage. From what I heard, he was recovering fine. I wasn’t sure if I was happy to hear that or not.
So far he’d refused to talk to anyone, including his court-appointed legal counsel.
Corey Wellington’s funeral was also held yesterday in Atlanta. Margaret flew down for it. Though the cable news networks were clamoring for an interview, she hadn’t granted any. It was still officially considered a suicide. The last time I spoke with her was this morning, and I had nothing substantial to report.
The bright spot yesterday was Lien-hua’s release from the hospital — minor compared to everything else that was going on, but it was at least one thing to be thankful for.
For the time being at least, instead of going back home, she’d moved into the one-bedroom apartment in the basement of Ralph and Brineesha’s house. With her injuries and crutches, she wasn’t able to navigate any stairs and there was a lower-level entry, unlike at her place. We’d discussed her staying at my house, but this way she would also have a resident nurse in Brineesha in case there were any health concerns that came up regarding her recovery.
Both of our families — her brothers and my relatives — were excited, relieved, thrilled that she was on her way to recovery.
Earlier today, I visited the sites of the two apartments Basque had used. I spent more than an hour at each location but didn’t take anything away from them clue-wise, just a reminder of how thankful I was that he was finally in custody.
Regarding the investigation into the suicides, the Calydrole pills that had been found at the apartment of Natalie Germaine’s boyfriend had arrived in DC this morning and both FDA and PTPharmaceuticals were studying their chemical composition. The team at the FBI Lab was also working on their own inspection, as well as a forensic analysis of the packaging — prints, DNA, and so on.
This morning we’d reviewed the information about the side effects of Calydrole. The FDA requires every antidepressant medication to carry a warning that some adolescents and children may be at increased risk of suicide while taking the medication. The official disclaimer on Calydrole warned: This drug may lower your immunity to certain diseases, cause impotency, abdominal bleeding, dizziness, and nausea. Sometimes fatal events can occur. It may increase the risk of suicide in certain people.
Talk about covering your bases, that about did it.
To put it bluntly, our team hadn’t made much progress at all in unraveling the suspicious circumstances related to Corey Wellington’s death.
Even with Angela’s and Lacey’s help, we came up short in finding any other suicides that might have been related to the two we knew about. Missing packets of depression medication at the sites of suicides was just not the kind of information that was typically recorded on police reports.
Killing yourself doesn’t usually initiate as much investigation or scrutiny as cases in which someone else murders you. Generally, in cases judged to be suicides, police investigations are brief, the reports are succinct and more often than not, rather incomplete.
We had, however, pulled up a more detailed background on Corporal Keith Tyree. I’d managed to locate one photo of him in Moscow with Nikolai Demidenko, a known associate of one of the world’s most infamous terrorists — an assassin named Alexei Chekov, but better known throughout the international counterterrorism community by the code name Valkyrie.
I’d encountered Chekov last winter during an ecoterrorist plot to take over a Navy communication base in the Midwest. As it turned out, Alexei had actually helped us thwart that attack, but since then he’d been responsible for the deaths of scores of innocent people, having masterminded, among other things, a bombing at an elementary school in Kenya, at least half a dozen suicide bombings throughout the Middle East, and the assassination of Olivia Tonneson, the U.S. ambassador to Egypt.
I’m no expert on split-personality disorders, but after Chekov killed his wife he suffered some sort of mental break. In the end, the darker side of who he was had emerged and taken over.
I wasn’t sure who scared me more, Chekov or Basque. Chekov probably knew more ways to kill you, but Basque knew how to keep you alive while he slowly ate your internal organs, and I couldn’t think of many things more disturbing than that.
Chekov spoke four languages, had any number of false identities, was an experienced hacker, and was one person who had the resources and contacts to wipe Tyree off the grid.
We didn’t have enough yet to know anything definitive, but cases are built on threads of evidence. You weave them together until you can see the broader context, and right now the threads were starting to wind into a strand that led back to Chekov.
So, while the search into Tyree’s background went on, in light of all that’d happened, we’d rescheduled my meeting with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jason Kantsos for tomorrow at one o’clock.
My insurance company was working on getting me a new car, for now I had a rental.
Ralph bought me a new Maglite, since mine was lost in the marsh.
We replaced Lien-hua’s missing cell phone. And the two of us burned the unity candle more than a few times to celebrate our moments together.
We’d all had a chance to process what’d happened on Tuesday, and though there was by no means any closure, life, as it has to, was starting to move forward, one slow, unsteady step at a time.
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Hoping to clear my head, I went for an early morning swim at the YMCA ten minutes from our house.