by Steven James
“Different types of serial offenses have different spatial clusters. Generally, the closer the crimes are to each other, the closer they are to the offender’s anchor point—basically the location from which he bases his criminal activity.”
“His home,” a young man in the front row offered.
“Yes, often, but it might be his place of work or a relative’s, friend’s, or lover’s house where he spends a significant amount of time.”
He looked slightly confused. “But that’s assuming people have stable travel and movement patterns. Right?”
“Back in 2008, Northwestern University tracked the movement of more than a hundred thousand Europeans for six months through their cell phones—Europe, because it would have been illegal in the U.S. Privacy issues. In any case, they confirmed all the major premises of environmental criminology. People’s habits and patterns are relatively stable. We consistently travel the same routes through the same cities and frequent the same stores, clubs, gas stations, pharmacies, and, at least to a limited extent, vacation spots.”
I thought of the case again, the victimology information I’d studied.
The three potential anchor points I’d come up with for Basque seemed to hover before me, as if they were etched there in midair.
The sporting goods store had no video camera . . .
That might be why he chose it. So that he wouldn’t appear on any footage.
I tried to stay focused but I found myself distracted as I went on.
“Which leads us to the implications this study has on investigative theory. Rather than ask why the offender committed this crime, we accept that, for whatever reason—even perhaps a reason that’s unclear to him—he was motivated to act in that way. We ask, ‘Why then?’ ‘Why there?’ ‘What is the balance of rewards versus risks that led that offender to make the choice to commit this crime in this specific place at this specific time?’”
I pulled out my laptop, which was wirelessly connected to the video screen in the front of the room.
“And one of the ways we can place an offender at the scene of a crime at a specific place and time is through forensic palynology.” I tapped at the keyboard and projected a slide of an enlarged pollen grain.
“Palynology is the study of the distribution patterns of pollen and spores. The characteristics of the pollen can reveal the genus and species of the plants they come from.”
Slide number two.
“Plants produce millions of pollen grains that are carried by the wind, on people’s clothing, on everything. In fact, pollen can be lifted by the wind up to forty thousand feet in the air and can even cross oceans. Those are the smaller ones; the bigger spores will just drop to the ground. The more ornamentation they have, the more likely they are to be carried by the biotic vector of insects and birds.”
Before clicking to slide three, I warned the New Agents to prepare themselves. “It’s a crime scene. And it’s not pleasant.”
I went to the slide: the unsolved homicide of college student Brandi Giddens, who’d been found in February at the park where Tessa, Lien-hua, and I had picnicked on Friday.
The slide contained the graphic, grisly image of Brandi’s disarticulated corpse.
Even after all these years, seeing images like this wasn’t easy for me. Whether that was a strength or a weakness, I’ve never been able to figure out.
A mind that is all logic is like a knife that is all blade.
There wasn’t any chance of that at the moment.
Some of the New Agents looked troubled. Others looked intrigued. From my experience, the first group would make the best agents.
“By looking at the sediment on the bottom of this woman’s shoes we could tell she had been near wetlands or a marsh sometime during the last day of her life. The pollen told us it was here in the DC area. Clothes act as a pollen trap and people are walking pollen collectors. One square centimeter on your clothes could have twelve hundred or more pollen grains, depending on the season. They’re also trapped in your hair and nostrils. Taken together, studying the pollen collected on—and in—an individual, gives us the floristic signature for the day, where that person has been the last twenty-four hours.”
I went through what we’d deduced about the woman’s last twenty-four hours based on the pollen and spores we’d collected from her corpse.
Next slide: an air filter from a 1991 Dodge conversion van. I explained that the first time I worked with Dr. Neubauer was five years ago, when I was consulting with local law enforcement in North Carolina, trying to work out the timing and location of a kidnapping near Durham.
“When Dr. Neubauer found out the kidnapping was in the spring he was thrilled. He e-mailed me, asking if I’d thought about pollen. I called him and asked how pollen was going to help find the kidnapper. Then he asked me if I had any air filters.”
Now I recounted the conversation as best I could remember it:
“Air filters?”
“Yes. Any vehicles involved with the crime?”
“We have a van the kidnapper used.”
“Perfect. I’ll need the air filter.”
“I’m not sure I’m really following you here.”
“Pollen gets caught up in vehicles’ air filters. Since the van was used during the spring—when plants are flowering—we can study the pollen in the air filter and work backward to figure out the region the vehicle was in and possibly even the route the vehicle took—”
“Based on the pollen trapped in the filter.”
“Yes. Well, I say we can use that air filter, I haven’t done that type of work yet. But theoretically, I can.”
“And,” I told the New Agents, “he did. It helped us solve the case.”
Afterward, though I was no expert, I fielded their questions about palynology as best I could. Then they asked me again about Basque, about how to catch him. Obviously, they were more interested in the hunt for one of the best-known and highest-profile fugitives in the country than in pollen and spores.
I pointed out that, despite our best efforts, criminals always have the advantage in at least three ways. “First, they have more to lose. We keep our jobs, they keep their freedom or, in some cases, their lives.”
In a sense, the fable Basque had told me was right—they are just another meal to us.
At least, to most of us.
“Second, criminals don’t play by the rules. We have to follow protocol, conscience, regulations, policies, procedures, ethics, all those things. It’s like trying to win a basketball game in which you have to follow the rules, but your opponent can carry the ball, run out of bounds, and never foul out. That’s what it’s like on the streets, every day. Can anyone think of number three?”
I was encouraged when the woman who’d first asked about Basque responded. “Criminals can choose the time and location for their crimes, but the investigator has to follow around after they’ve occurred.”
“That’s right. Until we catch them, they’re always one step ahead. Predicting when and where a crime is going to occur is terribly difficult, and despite what you might see in the movies, it’s extremely rare.”
“So with the odds stacked against us like that,” she asked, “how can we win?”
We declare that it’s rabbit season.
“We let it matter enough to make sure we don’t lose.”
Lien-hua’s words came back to me: “You’re saying the hound can be more motivated when he has enough anger to drive him.”
Yes, enough anger.
To drive.
Me.
Although it didn’t take us into new territory, I gave them the chance to pull out their scalpels on Basque’s case, so to speak. Afterward, we took a short break. I wanted to find out how Lien-hua was, but I couldn’t text her because her cell was still missing—taken somewhere by Basque—and I
didn’t want to call her hospital room phone in case she was sleeping, so I texted Brin instead and almost instantly she replied that Lien-hua was fine and was asleep.
I checked in with Ralph to see if the team had come up with anything since yesterday afternoon’s meeting. The call went to voicemail, I left a message, and then waited for the New Agents to return from their break.
But the map of the hot zones continued to hover in the air in front of me, mocking me, challenging me to decipher it.
And, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t seem to do it.
Maybe I just needed a little more anger to drive me toward the hare.
30
Tessa had a ton on her mind.
Not only was there Lien-hua’s recovery, but also just the fact that Richard Basque had attacked someone so close to Patrick and her. It was all terribly disquieting.
There was also the awkward conversation she’d had with Patrick the other night about going to church. It’d started out just as a question she had, but had turned into something where she basically said he didn’t care what she ended up believing in, which she knew was not the case.
Of course she knew he wanted her to believe the right things, the true things.
And then there was the whole deal with this stupid graduation speech. It made her physically ill just to think about it, about getting up in front of all those people.
Yes, definitely bail on the speech.
What about Aiden?
Yeah, what about Aiden?
Prom was Friday. He’d broken up with Tymber Dotson a month ago, and Tessa had heard he wanted to ask her instead, but so far—nothing. Nada. Not even any serious flirting. Time was not on her side, and she had just about the worst history in the world getting asked out by guys who were not total losers.
If she ended up getting asked out at all.
She’d dated guys throughout high school but had never been to prom before and she hated that it bothered her, but it did. Despite how self-assured she felt in other areas of life, when it came to guys she felt so needy and unsure of herself. It was weird and it annoyed her. She’d done everything she could think of to get over it, but nothing worked and that just made it bug her worse.
And now it was looking like she would go all the way through high school without ever getting asked out to prom.
She didn’t know why she’d gotten the vibe that Aiden wanted her to give this speech, but it had definitely been there ever since he’d found out she’d been asked to write it.
Deal with that later. Just get out of the speech first.
She decided that right after AP Lit with Tilson she would tell Assistant Principal Thacker that she wasn’t going to do it.
Oh, joy.
AP Lit with Tilson.
That was just plain brutal.
He was always trying to impress the students, embarrassing those he didn’t like or who weren’t as dialed into his version of what English Lit was supposed to be all about.
His version.
Normally she held back from mixing things up with him, but there were a few times when she couldn’t help it and ended up disputing him.
Last week, for example. After he’d had Shaleigha Gage, the valedictorian, explain a poem that no one else in the class really seemed to get, he’d said, “Thank you for unpacking the meaning of that poem for us.”
And Tessa had said, “Excuse me.”
“Yes?”
“It’s not a poem. Not anymore. Not to us.”
“And what do you mean by that, Miss Ellis?”
“As soon as you can explain a poem, it stops being a poem and becomes nothing more than a lesson. After you cut out its heart to get a good look at it, you kill the mystery. All you have left is a corpse of words. Poems are meant to be experienced, not explained.”
Oh, Tilson really loved that.
But she didn’t regret saying it at all. Sometimes you need to speak up when you come face-to-face with sciolism.
She headed for Trig. After that, lunch, then Tilson, then meeting with Thacker to tell him she wasn’t going to do that speech.
An afternoon chock-full of things to look forward to.
++
I was at the drive-through window of Billy Bongo’s Burger Hut when Ralph called to bring me up to speed.
I handed over my credit card and waited for the food while he filled me in: “The background checks on people named Loudon or Caribes didn’t give us anything. It doesn’t look like Basque has used that alias before—at least not in renting or buying any apartments, condos, homes within a hundred miles of here. Nothing on the other iterations of ‘cannibal’ either. Cassidy did find where Basque purchased the lock, however. I’ll send you the location so you can add it to your geoprofile.”
“Anything else?”
“Nothing major. I’ll e-mail you everything we have.”
“Ralph”—I had a thought—“I’d like us to take a closer look at the location where that car was when Basque stole it. Maybe there’s a video camera from a nearby business that might have caught someone walking toward that parking garage or frequenting the area.”
“It might be in his awareness space.”
“Spoken like a true geographic profiler.”
“I’ve been hanging around you way too long.”
“There could be worse fates.”
“Name one,” he said.
“Having to watch baseball with Tessa.”
“Good point.”
We ended the call, I picked up the food and aimed the car for the hospital.
31
Saundra Weathers went to the basement and unlocked the trunk where she kept the newspaper articles.
The conversation with Patrick Bowers last night had gotten her thinking about when she was a senior in high school and that eleven-year-old girl had been murdered.
She never allowed Noni to see what was inside this trunk, so thankfully her daughter was in kindergarten for the day.
Saundra tipped the lid open.
When Mindy Wells was killed, Saundra had followed the story in the papers every day and had clipped all of the newspaper articles about it.
Now she paged through them.
There weren’t any crime scene photos or anything like that, but there were several pictures of Mindy—reproductions of the school photographs taken at the beginning of the year, one of the tree house where her body had been found, one of the school, one of the girl’s mother at the courthouse, and one of the tire impressions in the muddy road that led along the edge of the marsh.
That was the road the killer had used to get to the tree house when he took Mindy Wells out there so that he could be alone with her.
The man did unspeakable things to her before he killed her. Things that had seared the consciousness of that small town for years.
Last Christmas, Saundra had been back to visit her parents and she’d found out that, for a lot of people in Horicon, the memory of Mindy’s death still hadn’t healed.
A little girl with her whole life ahead of her.
Patrick Bowers’s name was mentioned in the articles, but there wasn’t much about him.
Saundra remembered him, though, since he was the starting quarterback of the football team and Mindy had disappeared during the week leading up to the state semifinals.
She was a senior, he was a junior, but everyone at the school knew Patrick Bowers.
Based on how well he played that year, he probably could have played college ball, but he didn’t go out for the team his senior year.
No one knew why, but back then people speculated that it was because of finding that girl’s corpse right before the state semifinal game, that it had been too much of a shock and had turned him away from football.
Saundra let her finger graze across the photo of M
indy Wells.
Someone’s daughter.
She shuddered to think what the girl’s parents went through.
Eight years ago her husband had left her after she found out she was pregnant. He’d said he wasn’t ready to become a dad; however, she’d pointed out that since she was pregnant he was already a dad and by leaving, he was just showing that he wasn’t man enough to face the responsibilities of being one.
When she miscarried her baby girl, it almost destroyed her.
Two years later, while adopting Noni, she’d learned a lot about all the hoops people have to jump through for overseas adoptions. In fact, it took nearly a year and two trips to Ethiopia before she got approval and was finally able to bring Noni home.
Since her second book had just hit the New York Times bestseller list, money hadn’t been a big hurdle for her, but being a single mom and battling depression had been.
But the journey to adoption wasn’t as rocky for her as it was for most adoptive parents.
The wait time for getting your child was typically twice as long as her wait and for most families who wanted to adopt, it was cost-prohibitive. That’s why Saundra had started her foundation—to provide money for parents who wanted to do overseas adoptions from Africa.
But lately Saundra’s books hadn’t been doing as well—with the emergence of online booksellers and e-publishing, publishing houses weren’t giving big advances anymore, even to authors like her who had a track record. Money might have been down, but the need for would-be parents hadn’t gone away, and neither had her passion to help them adopt orphans from Africa—kids who would likely starve to death if they weren’t adopted.
It broke her heart to think about the fact that in Africa more than ten million children were growing up without parents. It was almost as if the future had been ripped out of an entire continent by war and disease.
No, admittedly, she wasn’t able to make a big dent in the problem, but every adoption was one more life saved.
One.
More.
Life.
