The King

by Steven James

  So now, as I considered that, I reminded myself that Basque had gotten her into the apartment building after he abducted her.

  Knowing Lien-hua, if she were conscious she would have fought him off and not allowed him to get her in there. We knew she’d been strangled, so the most likely scenario: he’d knocked her out by strangling either before she left the park or when she arrived at her home.

  Cassidy ascertained that no wheelchair had been found in the apartment, so that meant Basque would have most likely carried her inside, or at least supported her, perhaps pretending to anyone who might’ve seen him that she was drunk.

  “We’ve talked to the neighbors, I assume?” I asked Cassidy. “To see if anyone saw Basque enter or leave the building?”

  “No one saw anything.” I didn’t see his face, but I heard his voice. “But then again, this neighborhood isn’t exactly the kind of place where anyone ever sees anything, if you know what I mean.”

  “I do.”

  “We found two bullet holes in the hallway, but so far it hasn’t led us anywhere.”

  “And we haven’t found Lien-hua’s car yet?”

  “No. Metro PD searched the whole neighborhood for six blocks out. Parking garages too. Nothing.”

  Interesting.

  Basque would have likely parked close enough to the building so that he wouldn’t have had to carry or support Lien-hua very far to get her inside.

  Yes, that was interesting.

  Also, he would have known that after we found her we would immediately put out an attempt to locate on her car, so I couldn’t imagine he would have driven it very far before abandoning it or switching to another vehicle.

  Of course, he might have fled on foot, or taken a taxi and risked having the place where he was dropped off identified, but that would mean he carried her more than six blocks. Knowing how he’d avoided capture in the past, I started with the hypothesis that he would have had a vehicle of his own close by so that he could trade it off for Lien-hua’s as soon as possible.

  “Check with the neighbors, see if anyone’s missing a car.”

  “You’re thinking he might have stolen one?”

  “It’s a possibility we need to eliminate.”

  But still, what about Lien-hua’s car? Where is it?

  I couldn’t be sure, but considering travel times from her apartment to this location and the length of time she’d been in surgery, Basque would have most likely abducted her at the park rather than where she lived.

  Immediately, I thought of checking the Metro stations’ security cameras to get a bead on when he might have entered or left any of the stations. Considering Cassidy was on the phone with me, I told Doehring the idea. “We’ll want the footage both before and following the abduction. Angela Knight at the Bureau can run it through facial recognition. Depending on the download time, we should have the results within the hour. Tell her it concerns the attack on Lien-hua and it’ll move to the top of the stack.”

  He called it in.

  Okay, if they haven’t found her car anywhere nearby, where would Basque have left it?

  Somewhere close by where no one would see him switching vehicles.

  A parking lot?

  No, then we would have found it already.

  An abandoned warehouse? A garage?

  I used FALCON and the hologram to sweep around the neighborhood and found a garage four blocks away on a side street. I told the address to Doehring and directed him to get a car over there right away. While he radioed dispatch, I kept searching, and found two other potential spots where Basque might have left a vehicle.

  That’s when we got word from a nurse that they were finishing up surgery and would be taking Lien-hua to post-op. Relief swept over me.

  “So she’s alright?”

  The nurse gave me a slight smile meant to reassure me. “If there were any immediate concerns, they would address them in surgery.”

  “Can I see her then? In post-op?”

  “I’m sorry, we don’t allow visitors in there.”

  “I’m not just a visitor.”

  “I’m sorry.” And she sounded like she was. “It’s just not allowed.”

  I texted Tessa to tell her what I knew, and then, hoping to finish up here while Lien-hua was recovering, I went back to work with a renewed sense of focus.

  The first two sites came up empty, and I was thinking I might be on the wrong track entirely when Cassidy informed me that an officer had just located Lien-hua’s car at the third location, a mechanic’s garage six blocks away.

  As soon as Cassidy arrived on-site he relayed the video. There was a fresh oil spot three meters from her car.

  Hoping that it might be a unique blend of motor oil or tell us something about the type of vehicle that it was used in, I told him to take a sample and get it to the Lab right away to have them analyze it.

  He took footage of the interior of Lien-hua’s car, but there was nothing immediately evident that might lead us to Basque. However, there was a large smear of blood across the backseat and a bullet hole through the front and back seats. That explained the bloody bandages at the apartment.

  So, she’d shot him.

  Yes, Lien-hua. Nice work.

  Would Basque chance going somewhere to have the wound treated?

  I doubted that he would. Almost certainly he’d know that police are dispatched to the hospital whenever someone comes in with a gunshot wound, but still, checking hospitals couldn’t hurt. I had Doehring call it in.

  Cassidy took me on a video walk-around of the garage, but I saw nothing else that might indicate where Basque had gone.

  Doehring returned from the hallway and told me he’d gone down to the nurses’ station to get word on Lien-hua. “After post-op they’re taking her to 414 in the ICU. Hopefully within the next fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  I checked my texts and saw that Tessa hadn’t replied.

  Considering how quickly she usually responded to texts, and taking into account that she’d told me to contact her right away when I knew anything, I was surprised. The girl was so proficient at texting that she could do it without even looking down at her phone. Maybe she was praying and had turned her text notifications off, but why would she do that if she was expecting to hear from me?

  I told Doehring, “I’m gonna go touch base with Tessa. I’ll meet you in the ICU.”

  He acknowledged that, I texted her again that I was on my way to the waiting room, then I stepped onto the elevator and punched 1 to get to the first level of the hospital, where I’d left my daughter.

  7

  Tessa wasn’t there.

  In fact, only one couple—an elderly man and woman with matching wedding rings—sat in the waiting room. The woman had a bloodied dishrag draped over her arm from some sort of cut, but apparently not one serious enough to get her in right away. When I asked them if they’d seen a teenage girl in here, they told me they’d just arrived and were sorry, but no, they hadn’t.

  After checking my texts again and finding that Tessa still hadn’t replied, I spoke with the receptionist and she told me that she remembered a girl sitting in the corner but couldn’t remember her leaving.

  “When did you last see her?”

  “Just a few minutes ago. I think.”

  Of course, it was possible that Tessa had turned off her phone, but considering the circumstances, I found that highly unlikely. I tried calling her but she didn’t answer and I left her a voicemail to call me.

  A few thoughts began to form in my head and none of them were good.

  A woman was leaving the restroom just down the hall and I asked her if there was a girl in there. “Eighteen, about your height, black hair?”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t see anyone.”

  “Do you mind checking again? Please?”

>   It looked like she did mind, but she returned to the bathroom regardless and a moment later reemerged. “Nope. No one.”

  I walked outside to see if Tessa might’ve left to get some air or to sneak a cigarette, a habit she’d picked up recently and tended to slip into when she felt stressed or overwhelmed.

  Once she’d said to me that smoking is suicide, it just takes longer than a gun, but now that she’d given up cutting, it seemed she still had the need for some self-destructive behavior, though, to me, cutting might actually have been preferable to lighting up. I’d confronted her about the smoking; she told me she was trying to stop.

  In any case, she wasn’t outside, but a Metro PD officer was. With the attack on Lien-hua it didn’t surprise me that Doehring had upped the law enforcement presence here at the hospital. The officer told me he hadn’t seen anyone leaving, just going inside. “This older couple. And another officer. Just a little while ago.”

  “Another officer?”

  “Yup.”

  “Do you know him?”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  I felt a shiver that I couldn’t contain.

  A disguise? Could Basque have been that second officer?

  It was inconceivable that Basque would have come in here, or that he would be able to get to Tessa. She never would have stepped outside or left by another hallway with him.

  But still . . .

  I quelled the thought.

  After a quick call to hospital security to have them review the footage of the front entrance, I phoned dispatch and asked them for the name of the officers at the hospital. They told me there were two—Langston Honeycutt and Aleck Kane. Officer Kane was the man beside me.

  I told the dispatcher to send some cars to comb the area near the hospital and gave them a description of Tessa. Then I called Doehring to see if Honeycutt was with him.

  “No. I’ll look into it, though. Find out where he is.”

  “Any word on Lien-hua?”

  “I haven’t heard anything else.”

  At the moment there wasn’t much more I could do down here in the lobby. Obviously, Tessa wasn’t here and standing around waiting for her to come back wasn’t going to help anything. I texted her again, telling her to call me right away, then asked the receptionist to keep an eye out for her.

  “Where’s post-op?” I asked.

  She pointed. “Third floor, halfway down the hall on the east wing. But they don’t allow visitors in with the patients.”

  “Okay.” I turned to go.

  “I said they don’t allow visitors.”

  “Good.” I held my creds up to her. “I’ll make sure there aren’t any there.”

  A group of people had gathered in front of the elevators and I shouldered past them, threw open the door to the stairwell, and took the stairs two at a time toward the third floor.

  8

  Four minutes ago Tessa had left the lobby.

  Earlier she’d told Patrick that she would pray, and she had. But the whole time she’d been unsure what to say. And even though she was usually pretty good with words, that’s not really how her prayer had come out. It was more like a screech in her soul that went beyond language—sort of like fear wrapped in a desperate kind of love, but she hoped that God wouldn’t hold her lack of eloquence against her.

  Her mom was dead.

  Her dad was dead.

  All she had was Patrick and Lien-hua.

  So, oh yeah, she’d prayed.

  And the fact that she hadn’t really known what to say bugged her. But then she thought that if it’s true what they say, that ninety percent of communication is nonverbal, that most of it comes through in body language, gesture, posture, facial expression, eye contact, and inflection, then why wouldn’t our prayers, our communication with God, be the same way? Why should words suddenly matter so much, especially to someone who’s so good at reading hearts?

  But in the end, praying—the right words or not—hadn’t been enough, and Tessa felt like something terrible might happen to Lien-hua while she was stuck out there in the waiting area, and she couldn’t bear the thought of that.

  So, while the receptionist was looking over some paperwork, Tessa had slipped into the hallway, walked to the nearest nurses’ station, and asked what room Special Agent Lien-hua Jiang was in.

  The woman looked at her skeptically. “Are you a relative?”

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “And how are you related to Ms. Jiang?”

  The words came out before Tessa was really aware of it, and it both surprised her and did not surprise her when she said them: “She’s my mom.”

  9

  They’d already left post-op to take Lien-hua to her room, so I headed directly toward 414.

  As I was stepping out of the stairwell, I saw Tessa in the hallway in front of me.

  “Hey,” I called, and she stopped and faced me. “What are you doing up here?” My words were sharper than I intended them to be. “I told you to wait in the lobby.”

  “I couldn’t just sit around doing nothing.”

  “Tessa, you have to—”

  “Let’s not do this right now. Okay? I get it. Just . . . how is she?”

  Why didn’t she text you? She could have done it at any time!

  Of course, part of me was relieved to see her, but part of me was angry because she’d made me search for her. “From what I heard, surgery went well. I went looking for you. I was worried.” Though I was trying my hardest, my words still had an edge to them, however it was concern, not anger, that lay beneath them.

  Tessa said nothing, but gave me a look that made it clear she didn’t understand my tone. But she couldn’t possibly have known what was going through my head concerning Basque when I’d found that she wasn’t in the lobby.

  We passed down the hallway toward the room. We were halfway there when a gruff voice rumbled behind me, “Pat.”

  I turned and saw my friend Special Agent Ralph Hawkins come lumbering our way, his wife, Brineesha, beside him.

  Tessa and I paused to let them catch up.

  “What do we know?” Ralph asked me.

  “They were bringing her up here. She might be in the room already. I’m not sure.”

  The four of us proceeded and I eased the door open but saw that room 414 was empty. “She should be here any minute. I was just telling Tessa that surgery seemed to go faster than they anticipated.”

  An ex-Ranger and still a bodybuilder, Ralph seemed to fill the entire hallway. We’d first worked together to solve a series of homicides and mutilations back when I was still a detective in Milwaukee, fourteen years ago. As it turned out, Basque had been the man responsible for the murders we were investigating.

  After that case, Ralph encouraged me to join the Bureau, and now, as the head of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, or NCAVC, he was officially my boss. He was also my best friend.

  Brineesha edged around him to peer into the room. A slim, confident African-American woman with a no-nonsense attitude, she worked as a nurse at a hospital across town and called the shots in the family despite the fact that Ralph was the most alpha male guy I’d ever met.

  Ralph and Brineesha had one son who was twelve, and they’d just found out that they had a baby girl on the way. Over the last year Brineesha and Lien-hua had grown close, and I could see deep concern etched across her face.

  Tessa gestured down the hallway, and when I followed her gaze I saw a doctor coming our way, walking beside a gurney being pushed by an orderly. A nurse walked beside them. I couldn’t tell who might be on the gurney, but guessed it was Lien-hua. The four of us started toward them.

  “I heard she was hit by a car,” Brineesha said, “and—”

  “She was stabbed too,” Tessa said soberly.

  “Yes. Ra
lph told me.”

  “By Basque.”

  “Yes.”

  We were close enough now for me to see. It was Lien-hua on the gurney.

  She was on oxygen, had a chest tube, and it looked like she was asleep.

  Even before I could ask him, the doctor leading the crew assured us, “Surgery went well.” He was a studious-looking man, mid-fifties, with white hair that had a windblown, Einstein-ian look to it. That, along with his rumpled clothes, made me wonder how long he’d already been on his shift. “We gave her something to help her rest.”

  It seemed odd that they’d give a sedative to someone right after she awoke from anesthesia, but with a thoracic injury that severe, she probably did need to sleep.

  “I’m her fiancé,” I told the doctor as I went to Lien-hua’s side and took her hand. “Pat Bowers.”

  While he was introducing himself as Dr. Frasier, the attending surgeon, Ralph got a call and stepped away. Frasier looked at me over the top of his wire-rimmed glasses and gave me a reserved smile. “The good news is, her injuries weren’t as extensive as we initially thought. No arteries were nicked in her leg. She has a pneumothorax or—”

  “A collapsed lung,” Tessa said.

  He looked a little surprised that she would know that. “Yes.”

  I suspected most teenagers wouldn’t have any idea what a pneumothorax was, but I would’ve been surprised if Tessa hadn’t known.

  As we passed through the hallway back toward the room, Brineesha told the nurse beside me that she was a nurse as well, and they spoke softly about some of the specifics regarding Lien-hua’s injuries.

  It bothered me that Dr. Frasier had said, “The good news is . . .” And I was waiting for the other shoe to drop—What’s the bad news?—but just as I was about to ask him, I thought that if Lien-hua wasn’t all the way out it was possible she would hear me, and I didn’t want her to overhear any bad news, so I held back.

  Instead, I told her that I was here and that I loved her and—perhaps somewhat prematurely—that she was going to be fine.

  We entered the room, the nurse and the orderly transferred her onto the bed, then tilted it into a slightly inclined position. Ralph returned to my side. “Pat”—his voice was soft, meant only for me—“we might have something.”