The King

by Steven James

  “No, I’ll talk to him. If you can get him that’d be great.”

  A couple moments later Sean was on the line, and after I’d summarized Lien-hua’s condition, he told me how relieved he was that she was recovering, then said softly, “I found him, Pat.”

  “You found him?”

  “Derek Everson.”

  When he told me the name, I felt a chill.

  Back when we were teenagers, Sean, who’s two years older than I am, was driving me home after a New Year’s Eve party when he swerved, hit a patch of ice, and struck another vehicle. The driver of the other car was killed. Her name was Nancy Everson and she had a twenty-two-year-old son named Derek.

  Sean had some drinks at the party—that much I’d known—but exactly how much, I didn’t.

  He told the responding officers that he’d swerved to miss a deer. It seemed almost certain that the officers would have given him a sobriety test of some sort, but I couldn’t remember them doing so. If they did, it didn’t lead them to disbelieve his story.

  Only last winter did I learn that there was no deer, that for two decades Sean had been living with the guilt of losing control of the car while he was intoxicated and striking Nancy Everson’s car and fatally wounding her.

  In Wisconsin there’s no statute of limitations on first-degree reckless vehicular homicide. However, in January, after Sean told me the truth about the accident, he also told me he’d decided to tell the woman’s son, Derek, the truth as well.

  The man could have pressed charges, and based on Sean’s confession, my brother might realistically have gone to prison for up to twenty years.

  At the time, Sean had thought Derek lived in Green Bay, Wisconsin, but it turned out he’d moved.

  Sean had been looking for him ever since.

  And now, apparently, he’d found him.

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “Yes.”

  My anxiety level was rising quickly. “And?”

  “When I told him, he just sat for a long time without saying anything. Then he looked at me and I honestly didn’t know what he was going to say, didn’t know if I might be facing prison time or not. I thought he might hit me, threaten me, whatever, but he didn’t do any of those things. He just stared at me and asked me point-blank why I’d waited so long before telling him.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him I was afraid. Simple as that. I just told him straight out that I was scared. And he asked me if I wanted to hear him say that he forgave me. I didn’t know which direction he was going with that—if that’s what he was planning to say or not. I just told him, ‘Only if you do.’”

  Sean paused, I waited, and finally he said, “He told me his mother was a good woman, that she died long before she should have. And then he told me he could see by looking in my eyes that I’d already served enough time for what had happened. It was his way of saying he forgave me.”

  “That took a lot of courage,” I said, “for both of you.”

  “Well, I know it did for him. I’m just glad it’s finally in the past. I’m not sure if it belongs there, but I’m glad that’s where it is.”

  Christie used to say that forgiveness is the first step toward peace, and now, hearing what Sean said, I couldn’t help but agree with the sentiment.

  We closed up the conversation and I promised to keep him informed about Lien-hua’s progress.

  • • •

  After my fiancée and I had processed what Sean had said, she mentioned that she was finally hungry, and I used the room’s phone to request lunch for her.

  A few minutes after the food arrived, so did Ralph and Tessa.

  21

  My daughter carried a vase of elaborately arranged flowers. “These are from Brineesha and me.” Tessa knew about Lien-hua’s penchant for flower arranging and sounded a little worried that she wouldn’t be satisfied with the arrangement. “I hope you like ’em.”

  There were lotuses and chrysanthemums in the vase, and I knew it was no accident. Lien-hua’s name meant “lotus,” and her twin sister Chu-hua’s name meant “chrysanthemum.” Chu-hua had been murdered when she and Lien-hua were twenty-three, and Tessa knew how much chrysanthemums meant to my fiancée.

  “They’re exquisite.” Lien-hua accepted the flowers from Tessa. “Really. They’re beautiful.”

  Ralph laid my laptop down and flopped a set of clean clothes onto the chair. “I had to get these for you. Tessa refused to go in your room. Said she was scared of what might crawl out from under the bed.”

  “It’s not that bad in there.”

  Ralph scoffed. “Depends on your definition of ‘bad.’”

  “I thought you were supposed to be so brave? I thought you ate the smell of fear for breakfast?”

  “It’s lunchtime.”

  Tessa snickered, and I noticed Lien-hua look away from me and smile.

  I cleared my throat slightly. “Just give me a sec to change.”

  • • •

  Using Lien-hua’s bathroom, I cleaned up, put on the dry clothes, and when I returned to the room I saw that the television was on. A commercial for this afternoon’s opening-day matchup between the Nationals and the Cubs promised to be “an epic opening to an exciting season.”

  Despite their dismal reputation, Ralph was a faithful Nationals fan and was eyeing the screen intently. He offhandedly commented about how much he wished he could have been at the game.

  Tessa cringed.

  “What?” he said.

  “Baseball.”

  “Baseball?”

  “Yeah. Ew.”

  He furrowed his eyebrows. “What do you have against baseball?”

  “Oh,” I cautioned, “don’t even get her started.”

  “What? How did I not know this?” He turned toward Tessa. “Seriously, you don’t like baseball?”

  “Ralph,” I said, “I’m telling you, you don’t want to—”

  “Who doesn’t like baseball?”

  Tessa raised a finger into the air.

  Oh, boy. Here we go.

  “Think of it like this,” she said. “Let’s say no one in America ever heard of it before, right? And you’re trying to sell them on the idea: ‘Oh, this’ll be great. We’ll have these eight guys dress up in dorky-looking knee pants and stand around a field and scratch their crotches while two other guys play catch. We’ll give those two clever names: the catcher and the pitcher.’”

  “Um . . .” Ralph began.

  “‘Then we’ll have someone swing a stick at the ball. Half the time he’ll miss, but once in a while he’ll hit it. Then the game of catch turns into a game of tag. We’ll go back and forth taking turns and after seven rounds of this we’ll just acknowledge how brain-numbing it all is and have a sing-along.’ I mean, are you kidding me?”

  “It’s not that bad.” He sounded a bit like a boy who’d gotten caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “I mean, it’s not as good as football, but . . .”

  “And”—she was just getting warmed up—“unlike most sports, where you have to actually be successful to be considered great, in baseball you get to be an all-star if you manage to hit the ball just one-third of the time. Not like in school, where a thirty-three percent will buy you another year in fourth grade. Nope. We wouldn’t want to raise the bar too high or anything, considering we’re only paying the guys ten mil a year. I mean, can you imagine a surgeon who’s successful a third of the time getting that kind of a salary? Or how about a pilot who manages to land on the runway one out of every three attempts? Wow. Give that guy a raise, he’s an all-star!”

  She took a breath, but didn’t pause long enough for Ralph to get a word in edgewise. “And if watching some guy miss the ball isn’t exciting enough for your television audience, every few minutes we’ll cut to shots of a bald, middle-aged guy c
hewing bubble gum. He gets paid hundreds of thousands of dollars—or probably more—to make the monumental decision about which of the guys in the knee pants gets to throw the ball next.”

  “It’s not always easy to know which pitcher to send in,” Ralph countered.

  “Uh-huh. It’s the only sport where one of the main goals is to have nearly everyone fail. The announcers actually sound excited when no one is able to accomplish anything. I mean, every batter is missing the ball and the announcers are all: ‘It’s a great pitcher’s duel!’ Really? That’s what you call it when everyone sucks except the pitchers? And if things get really bad, they’ll exult, ‘We might have a no-hitter on our hands!’ Only sport where people get so worked up over so much failure.”

  “Did you just say ‘exult’?” Ralph asked.

  “Sorry.” Suddenly, she looked self-conscious. “It means to feel, show, or exclaim jubilation, usually over an accomplishment of some kind.”

  “Yeah, no, I know that. It’s just—I’ve never heard anyone actually use it in a sentence before.”

  “It sorta just came out.”

  “So what sport do you like?”

  “Reading.”

  “Reading’s not a sport.”

  “It oughtta be. It’s more exciting to watch than baseball.”

  Ralph opened his mouth as if he were going to reply, but then he must have thought better of it, because he said nothing, just walked over and, looking somewhat defeated, plopped onto the chair by the window.

  • • •

  That afternoon we did not watch the baseball game.

  Tessa’s school was in the process of transitioning to e-books, but her class still used printed texts and she’d brought four of them along and spent her time studying. To put it mildly, she did a good job of remembering what her teachers said in class, but I was proud of her for not sloughing off her work like she must certainly have been tempted to do this late in her senior year, especially now that she’d handed in her senior project for her AP Lit class, which was half of the semester grade for her least-favorite teacher, Mr. Tilson.

  Ralph and I used my laptop to review the case files, analyzing the revised geoprofile and looking carefully at the relationships between the travel route Basque had taken and the locations of his previous crimes.

  Time slipped away; evening approached. When Lien-hua wasn’t resting, she was offering Ralph and me a profiler’s perspective on the investigation. Officially, profilers don’t solve cases—they help eliminate suspects—but Lien-hua hadn’t gotten that memo and had helped solve any number of them in her time in the NCAVC.

  “It’s not going to end for Basque,” she said. “He’ll feel irritated that he wasn’t able to kill me. That won’t be acceptable to him. He’ll be more determined than ever.”

  “He’ll try to hurt Pat some other way?” Ralph said.

  “Yes.”

  “The author of the novel?” I asked, but thought, Tessa?

  Lien-hua shook her head. “That’s impossible to say.”

  Tessa had her earbuds plugged in her ears but even from across the room I could hear the coarse sounds of one of her screamer bands scratching harshly out of them.

  I made a decision that either I would be watching her or she’d be under police protection until we could bring Basque in.

  Considering the circumstances, it didn’t take me long to clear it with Ralph. He assured me that he’d work things out with the Bureau and with Doehring and I thanked him. He didn’t bring up the mounds of paperwork he would face or the budgetary issues he would need to iron out and I wasn’t surprised one bit.

  When Brineesha got off work, she joined us.

  • • •

  It wasn’t something I really wanted to get into, especially with Tessa here, but somehow we got to talking about how clever criminals are, how they can be a lot more imaginative than investigators.

  “How so?” Tessa, who had set her iPod aside, asked.

  Experienced criminals know you use whatever you have on hand as a weapon. Before they were banned, forks were one of the most popular weapons in prisons. I’d seen firsthand what kind of damage the tines of a fork could do when they were jammed into someone’s eye, or through his cheek, or into his chest. Not pretty.

  I decided not to bring up the fork incidents and moved on to something harmless. “Well, for example, to get cell phones, prisoners have a partner wrap padding around it, sew it into a football, and then cover the football with artificial turf so it’ll match the grass in the yard. They just throw it over the wall, the guy inside retrieves it from the yard, and voilà.”

  “Huh,” Brineesha said, “that is clever.”

  “Last year I interviewed Lester Berring, a serial arsonist who operated mainly in New York State.”

  “I remember hearing about that,” Tessa said. “When was that? Maybe . . .”

  With her memory it didn’t shock me that she recalled the case. “He was caught eight years ago,” I said. “He used everything from fingernail polish to cough syrup to nondairy coffee creamer as accelerants.”

  “Coffee creamer?”

  “Nondairy. It’s surprisingly flammable. Rip a packet open, flick the powder into the air as you light a match beneath it, and watch what happens. People in prison sometimes light other guys on fire with it. Forget nondairy, stick to the real stuff. Trust me.”

  Just a little friendly conversation here. About how to burn people alive.

  Perfect.

  Brineesha leaned forward. “I once heard that prisoners put fruit in fire extinguishers and let it ferment to make booze. They use grapes, peaches, apples, anything they can sneak out of the mess hall. That true?”

  “That’s true,” Ralph answered. “And then there’s the weapons they make in prison. Of course, they always try to get into the kitchen—knives, stirring spoons, all that kind of stuff. Guys have been beaten to death with soup ladles. Remember that time you got called in, Pat, to investigate that guy who’d apparently been stabbed by his cell mate, but there was no murder weapon found?”

  “Um, I’m not sure we need to talk about that one.”

  But that didn’t deter him. “Man, they had nothing. Then you noticed that white powder on the floor of his cell.”

  “Ralph, we really don’t need to—”

  “What was it?” Tessa asked. “Cocaine? An OD?”

  “Nope,” Ralph said proudly on my behalf. “Mashed potatoes.”

  “Mashed potatoes?”

  “Actually, powdered mashed potatoes. After Pat learned that the guy had checked out a magazine from the prison library and hadn’t returned it, you had him, didn’t you, Pat?”

  I was getting nowhere here. “I guess so. Yes.”

  Brineesha looked at us curiously. “You lost me somewhere between the mashed potatoes and the library.”

  Lien-hua was still just lying there propped in her bed, listening quietly.

  “Well”—Ralph was enjoying this a little too much—“the guy mixed the mashed potatoes in his sink while his roommate was asleep. Then he twisted the magazine to a point, dipped it into the mashed potatoes, and let it dry under his cot. The starch in the mashed potatoes acted as a hardening agent.”

  Tessa muttered, “He made a paper shiv.”

  “In a sense, yes.” Ralph just wasn’t going to give this up. “He stabbed his cell mate in the throat so he couldn’t cry out, then in the abdomen so he’d bleed out more quickly. And then to hide the evidence—”

  “Okay, okay. We can—”

  “Let me guess,” Tessa said reflectively. “After the murder he what? Soaked the magazine in the toilet and, once it was soggy enough, ripped it to pieces and flushed it down piece by piece?”

  “Yes,” I said, “and I have to say it frightens me a little that you figured that out so quickly.”

 
“Anyway”—it was Ralph again—“the point is, nearly anything can become a weapon in the wrong hands. A pocket Bible soaked in water and then slipped into a sock can make a pretty effective bludgeon. Screwdrivers, machine parts, sharpened toothbrushes, they all work well.” He pointed to his neck. “A pencil in the throat, right here.”

  “Ralph. Thanks, I’m sure we—”

  But he twisted his finger to show the action of stabbing someone right where the wound would need to be. “Medical personnel can stop the bleeding on the outside, but not on the inside. The person drowns in his own blood.”

  I held up both hands. “Let’s change the subject.”

  “By the way,” Tessa said to Ralph, “I’m glad I’m not locked up with you.”

  He grinned slightly, accepting that as a compliment.

  “Tessa,” Brineesha told her, “I hope you weren’t taking notes.”

  “I promise not to make a dagger out of mashed potatoes or burn someone alive with nondairy coffee creamer.”

  “Well,” I said in a very responsible, fatherly way, “I’m glad to hear that.”

  • • •

  Before Ralph and Brineesha left, he set up a two-o’clock meeting tomorrow afternoon at the NCAVC headquarters, which was about ten minutes from Quantico. Yes, the briefing would be on a Sunday, but in this job you work when you need to and grab time off when you can.

  After dinner, Lien-hua told me to head home. At this point her condition wasn’t really life-threatening, and when she pointed out that I’d gotten less than four hours of sleep last night, I had to agree that I needed to give it a go in my own bed rather than trying to sleep here again on the chair in her room.

  I made certain an officer was assigned to guard Lien-hua’s room, and then Tessa and I left for home.

  22

  I threw my dirty clothes in the wash, and when I met up with Tessa again she was in the kitchen pulling off a strip of Saran wrap to cover a plate of leftover spaghetti and meatless marinara sauce so she could microwave it without the sauce splattering all over.

  The plastic wrap twisted into a useless mess. She sighed, ripped it off, and tried again with the same result. “Okay, so we can build a computer the size of your fingernail that can pilot a probe to Neptune, but we can’t design a Saran wrap box cutter-blade-thing that actually rips this stuff off in a straight line?”