by Steven James
“Uh-huh. And that must be why you wear your gun when you open the door to let any of ’em in, and why you always happen to offhandedly-on-purpose mention that you track serial killers and sexual offenders for a living and that if you set your sights on someone he’s going down.”
“I don’t think I ever put it quite like that.”
That brought an eyebrow raise.
“Just looking out for you.”
“Uh-huh.” Her attention shifted past my shoulder toward the forest, where I now saw Lien-hua emerging from the woods on the walking trail.
Even from here her Asian poise and athletic grace were striking. For her it couldn’t have been one of the milder martial arts; it had to be kickboxing. We spar sometimes, but I try to avoid it as much as possible—even though I’d never admit that to her. Three years younger than I am, she’s beautiful, intuitive, cool under pressure, and I’d been attracted to her from the moment our paths first crossed eight months after Christie’s death.
Dressed in black jeans and a green button-down shirt, Lien-hua smiled as she approached, and after a quick kiss she took a seat beside me.
Over the last week she’d been in London teaching a class for Scotland Yard on criminal profiling, and apart from Skyping, we hadn’t seen each other since last Saturday. After bringing us up to speed on her trip, she asked me, “So, did you finish sending them out?”
“The invitations?”
“Yes.” Absentmindedly, she massaged her engagement ring with the thumb and forefinger of her right hand.
“I was going to mail them out yesterday, but when I stopped by the printing place to pick them up I noticed they’d spelled your name wrong: Jang instead of Jiang. They promised to have the new ones printed up by Monday.”
She mulled that over. “We should’ve mailed those out weeks ago, Pat.” She politely left out the fact that I’d been the one responsible for getting them out earlier, but we were pretty much behind in everything, and she hadn’t even decided on a maid or matron of honor yet, so I didn’t feel quite so bad.
“It should be okay,” I said. “Everyone who matters already knows when we’re getting married. We could just not send the invites out at all. That way we could weed out all the—”
“Careful now, dear. Be nice.”
“I’m just saying.”
I rummaged through the picnic basket for the rest of our food and overheard Lien-hua ask Tessa quietly, “So, did he ask . . . ?”
I caught sight of Tessa shaking her head.
“Don’t worry,” Lien-hua had lowered her voice to a whisper. “He will.”
Did he ask . . . ?
Ah, prom.
Yes. A week from today.
The puzzle with Aiden wasn’t so hard to decipher after all. It annoyed me that I hadn’t figured that one out right away.
Only seven days away.
Unfortunately, time was running out on that one.
Tessa, a vegan, used her flatbread to scoop out a dollop of hummus. Even after living with me for three years, she still hadn’t gotten used to the idea that I actually ate things that used to have faces, and I noticed her eyeing me unhappily as I took a bite of my bird-poop-free ham sandwich.
I took the opportunity to pour a glimmer of champagne into Lien-hua’s glass, and then tipped some into mine as well. Tessa held out her half-finished can of root beer. “You can top this off for me too, Dad.”
“Mm-hmm. I don’t think so.”
“You two are FBI agents. It’s not like I’m gonna get in trouble for—”
“Sorry, dear, no champagne. Not today.” Then I raised my glass. “A toast. To us. To becoming a family.”
Lien-hua lifted her glass, Tessa raised her can of soda and said, “Dum vivimus vivamus.”
Both Lien-hua and I looked at her quizzically, and when I asked for a translation she looked suddenly self-conscious that she’d said it. “Umm . . . ‘While we live, let us live.’”
“While we live,” Lien-hua repeated softly, “let us live. Yes. I like that. That’s my kind of toast.”
We repeated Tessa’s Latin toast and tapped glass against glass and glass against can, then drank, and in that moment, despite the grisly cases I had on my plate at the Bureau, despite all the death and gore I deal with every day, sitting there in the park with the clouds overhead and the cherry trees in full bloom nearby and the two people who mattered most to me in all the world beside me, the moment bordered on perfection in a way that so few moments in my life ever have.
While we live, let us live.
Yes, let us live.
• • •
After we’d finished eating and twilight began to descend, we packed up and headed toward the deserted road where Lien-hua and I had left our cars.
“We still on for tomorrow morning?” Lien-hua asked Tessa. “The cake tasting?”
“So you were serious?”
“Of course. I need to decide on the wedding cake and I could really use someone to help me try the samples at the bakeries I’m considering.”
Despite Tessa’s strongly held beliefs about a plant-based diet, when it came to chocolate cake she had a marked weakness and somehow managed to overlook the fact that animal by-products were used in cake batter. “Are you thinking chocolate?”
“I’m thinking chocolate.”
“We just swing by bakeries and sample cake?”
“Pretty much. Is eleven o’clock alright?”
To put it lightly, Tessa was no early riser, and eleven on a Saturday was going to be pushing it. But it sounded like this time around she was properly motivated.
“Sure. Yeah. I can deal with tasting cakes for an hour or two.”
“Let’s hope we find one we like before two hours of cake tasting or I’ll never fit into my wedding dress.”
I caught myself picturing how stunning Lien-hua was going to look in her wedding dress—even despite a bit of cake tomorrow—and tried to not let it distract me too much.
It wasn’t easy.
We arrived at my Jeep. Tessa told Lien-hua good-bye, then climbed in, and I took both of Lien-hua’s hands in mine. “So, cake tasting?”
“It’ll give us a little time together. Just us girls. Besides, there’s something I need to talk with her about.”
“And that is?”
She looked at me wryly. “You’ll find out when the time comes.”
“Secrets, hmm?”
“Possibly.”
I remembered last week when Tessa started riffing on why couples break up, and she told me girls like guys who are dangerous; guys like girls who are mysterious. “It’s simple. If you’re a guy, stop playing it safe all the time and learn to risk more than you can afford to lose. If you’re a girl, stop trying to get a guy by opening up to him. What really drives him mad is when you make him keep wondering about you. Relationships fall apart when the guy turns into a wimp or the girl has no more secrets.”
Nicely done for a teenager.
“Well,” I said to Lien-hua, “I guess a few secrets are okay.” Her deep ebony eyes drew me in and wouldn’t let me go, and finally I just whispered to her how much I’d missed her.
“I missed you too.”
We were silent for a long time, and when she finally spoke, her voice was soft and delicate and feminine in a way she was not ashamed of, a way that made my heart beat even faster. “I love you so much, Pat.”
I wanted to spend time with her tonight, just the two of us, but our schedules weren’t making that possible, and I could hardly wait until tomorrow evening, when we were planning a little alone time.
I took her in my arms. “I love you too.”
“Just think, next month it’ll be official—till death do us part.”
“Till death do us part,” I said softly, and it was not just a wish, but a promise
.
Then we kissed, she left for her car just down the road, and I slid into my Jeep beside Tessa.
During the picnic I’d gotten a couple texts regarding some current cases. I hadn’t wanted to interrupt our time together earlier by responding to them, but now I took a few seconds to read them over. As I did, Tessa said, “You two were meant for each other. Really.”
“I was meant for your mom, too, Raven.” The nickname I’d given her based on her obsession with Poe, her free-spirited nature, and her sweeping black hair, just came out. She’d even gotten a raven tattoo when we were in San Diego last year.
“Yeah,” she said, “I know. I didn’t mean it in any weird way.” She let her voice trail off. “I just . . . I can’t believe it’s been two years already since she . . . I mean, since she’s been gone. Sometimes it seems like forever ago when she died and sometimes it seems like it was just yesterday. That doesn’t make any sense, but . . .”
“No.” I set down the phone. “It makes perfect sense.”
“I’ll always love her, Patrick. Like no one else in the world. No one else, ever.”
“I know.”
“But I’m really glad Lien-hua is here now. She’s a good influence on you. You can be a bit impetuous at times, left to yourself.”
“Impetuous?”
Her eyes widened in mock surprise. “Um—yeah. Anyway, there’s going to be three of us again. You know, a family.” Though she didn’t often open up to me like this, I knew that she’d always wanted two parents around, and the family I’d formed with her mom had ended way too prematurely.
“There’s three of us now,” I told her. “We don’t have to wait for a ceremony to feel like a family.”
Tessa looked thoughtfully out the window toward the trees, then back my way. She gave me a tiny, soft smile—something I rarely saw, and I couldn’t shake the thought that at least here, now, on this night, everything seemed right in the world.
2
He was in the backseat of her coupe.
That’s how he got to her.
He knew this park well and had been watching the picnic from behind a tree on the far side of a small rise near the edge of the forest. Considering what he was about to do, there was something tragic about the scene, about the three of them talking and smiling and raising a toast, so oblivious, so unaware of what this evening was going to bring. How it would change everything.
Their last idyllic moments together.
The small thrill he felt while watching them, the thrill that came from knowing the grief that lay in store, was an aspect of his nature he was neither proud of nor ashamed of. A sadist? Perhaps. Yes, that was the preferred term out there, but he was most definitely not the cartoonish chortling, hand-wringing kind of sadist or the panting torture-porn addict who sits in his basement surfing the Web with a towel in one hand, his mouse in the other.
No, what he felt was just an extension of schadenfreude, that secret, private pleasure everyone feels—but that most people are disinclined to acknowledge—when they see other people fail or suffer.
Philosophers and ethicists have identified the universality of this feeling; he simply allowed himself to feel what was natural to our species. And why should he take pride in that? Or conversely, feel any shame?
In a sense, since he embraced his natural tendencies and instincts so unreservedly, he was more fully, more completely human than those who live in denial of who they would be if only they were to give free rein to their deepest, most primal human desires and fantasies. Or, in other words, if they allowed themselves to truly be what evolution had shaped and intended them to be from the beginning—the planet’s most cunning, calculating, ruthless predators.
Now, as Agent Jiang approached the car, he slipped down in the backseat, out of sight. To his advantage, the windows were tinted, which was part of the reason he’d chosen this approach when he decided to go after her.
He had skills, and picking the lock to get inside hadn’t been difficult. Neither had it taken him long to disable the horn and the GPS.
Though it was by no means his preference, he was prepared to take care of things here if he needed to. He was very particular about his knives and had his limited-edition Benchmade 42-101 Gold Class Bali-Song butterfly knife with him. Really, however, he was hoping to just get her unconscious, and then transport her back to the apartment, where he could take his time with her.
He was partial to intestines, and he liked them fresh and warm, so he would keep her alive throughout the night—perhaps longer, depending on how everything played out. He figured he would probably enjoy her for at least twelve hours before he let her expire.
He was looking forward to her lungs too.
Those were always a close second.
Tomorrow he would leave her remains on Bowers’s doorstep. It would serve as a small recompense for the thirteen years he’d stolen from him. It wasn’t by any means a fair trade, but these types of things could never be balanced so metaphysically as that. In any case, he decided that after Agent Jiang was dead, he would call things even and go his own way.
No hard feelings.
But the hunt wouldn’t be over. He knew that much. For Bowers, the hunt would never be over.
So there was fun in that too. In the chase.
The driver’s door lock beeped as Agent Jiang remotely unlocked it. He tightened his grip on the ends of the leather belt in his hands.
He’d never chosen this method before, never tried to strangle someone into unconsciousness in exactly this manner. It would be a delicate balance between making her pass out and damaging her windpipe so much that she died on the spot. After all his years of lifting weights he knew he needed to be careful so that he didn’t kill her too quickly. Then after she blacked out he would administer the drugs that would keep her unconscious while he took her back to his place.
The door opened and she settled into the front seat.
The instant she closed the door he sat up, flipped the belt in a loop around her neck, and slid the free end through the buckle, encircling both her neck and the base of the headrest.
He cinched it tight.
There.
He yanked hard, and with her airway closed off, she couldn’t gasp for breath, let alone call for help, and it was almost remarkable how quietly she was choking.
Yes.
Looking into the rearview mirror, he could see her clutch at the belt with her left hand as she tried desperately to jam her fingers beneath the leather to pull it away far enough to get a breath. She turned her head to the side to try and beat the choke, but he snugged the belt tighter to make sure that wasn’t going to happen.
Ten, fifteen seconds and she would be out. Twenty at the most.
In order to free up his hands, he secured the belt by buckling the clasp through one of the holes he’d punched into the leather, then reached past her and tilted the rearview mirror so he could watch her as she passed out.
She really was beautiful. Yes, he was going to enjoy working on her.
Farther up the road, Special Agent Bowers was pulling away in his Jeep, and it lent a touch of sad irony to the moment—as Lien-hua faded into unconsciousness she was actually watching her lover, the only one who could save her, drive away, undoubtedly thinking that she was safe and sound in her car.
Apart from a few parked cars down the way, there were no other vehicles on the road, no one else was going to help her.
As she fought for breath, he leaned forward and gently stroked her perfect cheek with the back of his fingers. “Just relax, Lien-hua.” He touched a strand of hair away from her eye. “It’ll be over in a few seconds.”
He could see that she was growing weaker, still trying futilely to breathe, still grasping at the belt with her left hand, but struggling less against the inevitable.
Yes, she was using her left hand
to try to free herself.
Her left hand.
But not both hands.
All at once, he realized that something didn’t fit. She was right-handed, he knew that already—
Then her right elbow jutted out to the side, almost like a delicate wing, and a split second too late, he knew what she had done.
He was flipping out his butterfly knife to finish her when he heard the gunshot, saw the back of the seat puff open, felt fire slice through both his side and his back where the bullet had entered and then exited his torso.
Positioning the edge of the blade against the front of her neck, he was about to slice her throat, but he didn’t need to after all, because her arms dropped to her sides and her head dipped forward as she slipped into unconsciousness.
He retrieved her gun, left the belt in place around her neck, and folded up his knife, then stepped out of the car and gazed up and down the road.
No one. Bowers was gone. The road was empty.
He waited a few more seconds just to make sure Agent Jiang wasn’t faking it, then he opened the driver’s door and loosened the belt. As he removed it, her body slumped limp and helpless against the steering wheel.
He felt her pulse to make sure he wouldn’t need to resuscitate her and found that she was indeed still alive.
Good.
Warm blood was quickly spreading in a widening red stain across his shirt. The bullet had entered just below his ribs. Because of his interests, he knew anatomy quite well and calculated that the wound wouldn’t be life-threatening, but it would need to be treated.
Gently, he wrapped the belt around his own abdomen to cover the bullet’s entrance and exit wounds and tightened it enough to stem the bleeding until he could get to the apartment and stitch it up.
He produced the hypodermic needle and injected the Propotol into Agent Jiang’s neck.
With the gunshot wound in his side, moving her into the passenger seat took longer than he would have liked and it hurt terrifically, but he kept from wincing. Thirteen years in prison had taught him how to handle pain, and he had been hurt worse than this before.
He duct-taped her ankles and her thighs together, then bound her wrists behind her back, just in case she did by some chance awaken before he reached the apartment. He didn’t think she was the kind of woman to scream for help or beg for mercy, so he didn’t bother to gag her.
