“St. Mary’s.”
Tessa was in the living room rewatching the movie The Dead Girl. As I hurried past her on my way to the garage, I signaled that I was heading out. She must have seen the concern on my face and guessed that something serious had happened, because she gave me a worried look and asked softly, “What is it?”
“We’re sending a car to pick you up,” the officer told me over the phone.
“I don’t need one,” I informed him, while quietly trying to wave off Tessa’s concern. “I’m on my way.”
“What happened?” she pressed me.
I turned from the phone and told her, “Just a sec, Tessa.”
He finished by telling me that Lieutenant Doehring would meet me at the hospital.
I knew Doehring. He was a good cop; however, I wasn’t about to wait until I got to the hospital before finding out more, so as soon as the officer ended the call, I found Doehring’s number on my phone’s contact list and called it.
While I waited for him to answer, I hurried to the garage and punched the door opener. As the door rattled upward, Tessa appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. This time palpable fear ran through her words. “It’s something bad, isn’t it?”
For a second I was tempted to downplay what’d happened, to reassure her that everything was fine, but as she and I had talked about earlier, Lien-hua was about to become part of our family and, in a very real sense, already was.
“It’s Lien-hua,” I said. “There was an accident.” This wasn’t the time to get into the specifics of the attack, so I left out the rest, especially the part about her being stabbed.
“What kind of accident?”
“She was hit by a car.”
A terrible look fell across her face. “Is she…?”
“It sounds like she’s hurt pretty badly.” Doehring still hadn’t picked up. “She’s in surgery.”
Tessa must have set her purse just out of sight before coming to the doorway, because now she reached to the side and grabbed it, then joined me in the garage. “I’m coming.”
Still no answer from Doehring.
“No, it’s late. You need to—”
“I’m coming, Patrick.” Her words were unequivocal and she edged past me, making her way toward the passenger door.
The call went to Doehring’s voicemaiclass="underline" I told him to send a car to look for Lien-hua’s Hyundai Genesis coupe beside the park where we’d had the picnic and — if it wasn’t there — to put out an attempt to locate and call me right away if it was found. I left the license plate number, then turned to Tessa. “Really, this is—”
“Look. I lost my mom. I lost my dad. You two are the only…” She was obviously struggling with what to say. “You’re not the only one who loves her, okay? Now let’s go.”
I said nothing, just slid into the driver’s seat, backed up the Jeep, and the two of us took off for the hospital.
As I saw how worried and afraid she was, I remembered her words from earlier about Lien-hua and how glad she was that we were all together. Tessa would find out about Lien-hua’s condition sooner or later, and I realized it would probably be best if she heard it from me now. So, although I was still reluctant to give her specifics, I summarized everything I knew about what had happened.
“What?” Tessa exclaimed. “She was stabbed? Where?”
“In the chest.”
A long silence. “Patrick, that’s…”
“Yes. I know.” Though I had no way of knowing if it was true, I told her, “She’s going to be okay.”
Another pause. “Do they know who did it?”
“No. Not yet.”
“But you’re going to find him, right?”
“Yes.”
“And what?”
“What do you mean?”
“What are you going to do when you find him? You gonna bring him in?”
It didn’t surprise me that Tessa was pursuing this line of questioning. She’d been living with me while I worked some of the most brutal cases of my career. The limits and bounds of justice were things we’d talked about a lot over the last year.
In fact, the night her father was killed trying to protect her from a psychopath who’d set his sights on her, she’d been the one to fire the shot that killed the offender just as he was about to murder her. For months she’d barely slept, but she told me on more than one occasion that she was glad she’d done it, that a part of her — a part that frightened her terribly — had actually enjoyed squeezing the trigger that day.
Justice doesn’t always have clean hands, and we all have dark desires clawing at our wills. I knew that all too well from my job. Now as we spoke, I sensed where she was going with this. “I’ll make sure he pays for what he did,” I told her evenly.
“You’d better.” Her jaw was set. She let the rest go unsaid, but I could tell we were on the same page. She didn’t want me to bring him in. She wanted a different kind of justice.
And so did I.
I merged onto the beltway.
Ten minutes to St. Mary’s.
5
We exited onto Pennsylvania, and I was reassuring myself that things were going to be okay when Doehring finally returned my call.
He filled me in: the man who’d struck Lien-hua with his vehicle told the responding officers that she’d mentioned an apartment nearby. “He was distraught,” Doehring told me, “said she ran right in front of his car. Her wrists were bound behind her.”
I was holding the phone with one hand, the steering wheel with the other. I felt both hands tighten as he said that. “What else?”
“No one was there in the apartment. Lien-hua had ligature marks around her neck. She was strangled, probably with a belt of some type. She was stabbed in the right thigh and the right side of her chest. Punctured her lung.” The officer from earlier hadn’t mentioned a wound in her leg.
Doehring hesitated and I could sense that there was something he wasn’t telling me.
“What did you find in the apartment?” I asked.
“Among other things, a scalpel. And one of the burners on the stove was still on, a frying pan on top of it.”
“Basque.” The word slipped out before I realized it, and out of the corner of my eye I noticed a wash of fear cross Tessa’s face. Over the years I’d been careful to keep the details from her, but the media had been thorough in covering Basque’s crimes, and she knew all too well what he did to the women he abducted.
“There were bloody bandages too,” Doehring explained. “We tested the DNA right away. It’s confirmed. It’s him. Apparently, she wounded him.”
Over the last twenty years the science of DNA identification has evolved exponentially, and being able to test it on-site and run the results through the system has been one of the great breakthroughs of the last two years for law enforcement. It wasn’t available everywhere yet, but it was here in the nation’s capital.
I’d caught Basque early in my career while I was still a homicide detective in Milwaukee. He’d been tried, convicted, and then served thirteen years in prison before managing to swing a retrial last year. Based on controversial forensic evidence and conflicting eyewitness testimony, he was found not guilty and released.
Soon after his release, he slaughtered the law professor who’d done the legal work that ended up helping free him. That was last spring. He hadn’t slowed down since then, leaving a string of bodies across the Northeast. I fatally shot his partner in January, but even though we’d been close to catching Basque on three separate occasions, he always managed to slip away.
No one knew for sure how many people he’d killed, but based on evidence from unsolved homicides back in the Midwest and here in the DC area, I put the number close to forty.
As far as I knew, Lien-hua was the first woman to ever survive being attacked by him.