The King

by Steven James

  “Nothing’s random.”

  “No, not when it comes to choosing the sites of your victims’ homes or their travel patterns.”

  We called Angela and found that she’d received the video footage from the gas station’s archives and Lacey was still analyzing it.

  With cloud cover, I couldn’t use FALCON to evaluate the prospective homes in the hot zone east of Andrews, specifically those near the rivers and neighboring marshlands.

  So, as Ralph and I took off, I used the next-best thing.

  Google Earth.

  ++

  Richard eased the patrol car around the corner and onto Spring Street, where Saundra Weathers lived with her young daughter.

  The body of the officer whom he’d just killed lay safely stashed in the trunk. Richard had been quick about dispatching him, careful to keep blood off the uniform.

  Now he confirmed that the two UC agents—or perhaps police officers—were still parked across the street in Saundra’s relatively vacant, placid neighborhood.

  He pulled alongside the curb behind the undercover car.

  Richard decided not to use his butterfly knife, but rather to shoot both men in the head with the suppressed Sigma.

  When you see a squad drive up behind you, it’s natural to think that a police officer rather than a fugitive serial killer is going to step out of the driver’s seat. Richard was banking on the fact that these two men would be blinded by their preconceptions and wouldn’t see him for who he truly was. He didn’t need much time, just a second or two, and then it would all be over.

  Perception determines expectation.

  He still had on his perfunctory disguise, but since law enforcement officers almost always have short hair, he tucked his hair up beneath the dead officer’s hat.

  Being approached by an officer of the law, the two men wouldn’t unholster their weapons, since it could create an immediate misunderstanding.

  His plan: have the driver roll down his window, lean into the car, fire two shots, and be done with it.

  That quick. That simple.

  Most likely they would have their IDs out before he could even tell them the lie that there’d been a report of two suspicious men sitting in a black sedan near a little girl’s house.

  The driver rolled down the window as Richard neared his door, and, just as he’d anticipated, both men had their creds out when he bent to speak with them.

  “Officer,” the driver began, “we’re federal—”

  But that’s all he got out.

  The bullet did its job well and Richard shot the other agent in the face before he could even reach for his weapon.

  With the suppressor, the sound of the shots was barely a whisper—not nearly loud enough for any neighbors to hear. None of the dogs on the block began to bark.

  The two dead agents slumped forward and Richard positioned them so they wouldn’t be visible from Saundra Weathers’s porch.

  Yes, there was some blood spatter on the passenger-side window, but most of the mess was on the seat and he figured he would be fine.

  After a moment of consideration, he tipped the head of the driver back and licked off the blood that was oozing from the bullet wound in his forehead.

  He savored the moment, then reminded himself that there would be plenty more in store tonight once he got the woman and her daughter back to his place.

  Richard leaned the corpse’s head forward again, then walked past the mailbox with the red and pink balloons tied to it and strode up the driveway toward the front door.

  Though he was wearing a fake mustache and dressed as a police officer, he ducked his head slightly as he neared the house so that if Saundra was looking out the window she wouldn’t be able to identify him—if she even knew what he looked like.

  Things had gotten later than he had originally planned, and he guessed that the other children at the party would’ve been close to the age of Saundra’s daughter, probably in kindergarten too. And by this time on a school night, they would almost certainly all be gone.

  But he had his Sigma and butterfly knife and he would take care of a few extra little lambs if he needed to.

  He knocked and a moment later Saundra opened the door. “Yes?”

  Looking past her, he saw wrapping paper on the floor, Dixie cups and paper plates covered with cake crumbs lay on the end table and footrest in front of the couch. No other children were present, just Noni, playing by herself with a Barbie doll next to a newly opened dollhouse.

  “Ma’am,” he said to Saundra, “we have reason to believe Richard Basque is in the area. Agent Bowers has requested that we bring you and your daughter over to the station until we can ascertain that the neighborhood is safe.”

  She glanced past him toward the car containing the corpses of the two dead agents. Richard didn’t have to turn around to realize that she was almost certainly noting that it looked empty.

  “They’re sweeping the neighborhood,” he told her.

  Saundra nodded nervously.

  “Why don’t you go ahead and get your daughter. I’ll bring my car up to the house.”

  Another nod; then she went to get Noni.

  ++

  The rain started.

  We passed the Air Force base. Using Google Earth I chose Wrighton Road as the first place to investigate. It led toward the marshlands and yet was close to the highway and we knew Brandi had a cousin in the neighborhood.

  48

  8:34 p.m. 1 hour until the drowning

  Richard started the engine and eased onto the street.

  Saundra Weathers and her daughter were tucked in the back of the squad behind the police cage partition.

  He wasn’t sure if either of them suspected anything yet, but in the rearview mirror he noticed Saundra studying his face, and then drawing her daughter close and wrapping an arm around her. “Which station are you taking us to?” she asked him.

  “It’s safest if we head over to DC.”

  “DC?”

  “Yes. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.”

  She said nothing, but he saw the change in her eyes.

  Oh, yes. She knew.

  Now she knew for sure.

  He took off his hat and let his hair fall free.

  ++

  Saundra felt terror tighten like a thick fist in her gut.

  Oh, dear God, what have you done!

  This man was Richard Basque, the cannibal, the killer, and he hadn’t just gotten her, he’d gotten her daughter too.

  The two agents must be dead. He must have killed them. He must have—

  Just like he’s going to kill you.

  And Noni.

  A deep chill corkscrewed through her.

  The squad’s doors didn’t open from the inside. She was trapped.

  She debated whether she should try to talk to him now, try to negotiate with him, but she couldn’t stand the thought of saying anything that might frighten her daughter.

  Instead, she decided she would bide her time, and then, when he’d taken them to wherever they were going, she would quietly offer to let him do whatever he liked to her—whatever he liked—if he would only let Noni go free.

  It might accomplish nothing, might not do any good at all, but it was the only thing she could think of to save her daughter.

  It was as if she’d stepped into one of her own novels. And she knew, if she were writing the narrative of this night, how it would inevitably turn out, even if she pleaded with her captor.

  And she prayed that, in this case, life would not imitate art.

  ++

  We didn’t even have a chance to stop at any of the homes I had in mind.

  Angela called and told us that Lacey had found Basque on the CCTV footage from the gas station. “I’m sending you the file now, but I�
�ll stay on the line, talk you through what we know.”

  A moment later the video arrived and I tapped the space bar to start it.

  The footage was from an exterior camera and showed the gas station’s pumps in the foreground. The sporting goods store’s parking lot lay across the street.

  An older-model blue Chevy pickup drove up to Erikson’s Sporting Goods and Richard Basque stepped out. He turned briefly as he locked the car and that’s when his face was visible.

  “That’s what Lacey caught,” Angela said. “Facial rec. So, he goes inside and returns to the car six minutes later, climbs in and drives away. For now I edited out the part while he’s inside. I’ll send you the complete file too, though.”

  Just as she told me that, the video flickered briefly and then showed Richard exiting the store carrying a small paper bag. He slipped into the truck and left the parking lot.

  “You ran the plates?” I asked her.

  “Yes. Registered to Armin Meiwes.”

  I just shook my head. Meiwes was a killer and cannibal from Germany who’d put out an ad on the Internet looking for “a well-built 18 – to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed.” Astonishingly, a man named Bernd Jürgen Brandes answered the ad and Meiwes filmed himself killing and eating Brandes. Why didn’t it surprise me that Basque had chosen Meiwes’s name as another of his aliases.

  “An address?”

  “One that doesn’t exist in Alexandria.”

  I replayed the footage.

  The truck had a hitch and brake light wires for pulling a trailer.

  “Have Lacey see if anyone has bought a fishing license or registered a boat under Meiwes’s name. Maybe we’ll get lucky and get an actual address.”

  I scrutinized the video and saw a sticker in the pickup’s rear window. Zooming in on it, I said, “That sticker in the window. What is that? A parking sticker from a college?”

  “I’m not sure . . .” A moment passed as she studied it herself. “It looks like it might be.”

  With the angle of the vehicle and the glare from the sunlight, it was impossible to read the writing, but it appeared to contain an image of a fish leaping out of the water.

  “A state park sticker?”

  “Maybe. I’ll have Lacey do an image-based search online, see what we can pull up. Anything else?”

  “See if you can find out what Basque bought when he went inside that store.”

  After the call, Ralph asked me, “What do you want to do?”

  “Pull over. I want you to watch this too.”

  49

  9:12 p.m. 22 minutes until the drowning

  Over the last twenty minutes we went through the complete footage twice and the edited version close to a dozen times and didn’t see anything that seemed significant. I was about to suggest we move on when Ralph reached over and paused the video. “Hold it. What is that?”

  “Where?”

  “On the hood.”

  I zoomed in.

  “Man,” he said, “that is one big streak of bird poop.”

  I couldn’t help but think of the picnic with Tessa and Lien-hua, when Tessa had joked about a bird pooping on my sandwich.

  “You grew up right next to Horicon Marsh,” Ralph said half jokingly. “You gotta be an expert on goose poop, see if you can identify the bird, maybe lead us to—”

  “That isn’t from a goose.” I thought back to all of my years fishing with my dad and my brother in Wisconsin. “It’s from a heron. Taking off. At least, that’s my best guess.”

  He eyed me dubiously. “Okay, so you’re a sharp guy, but how could you possibly know that?”

  I pointed. “Just like blood spatter. If the bird was stationary, then the excrement would be in a—”

  “Ah. I get it. In one spot, a circle, something like that. Sure. But since this is a streak, the bird had to be flying.”

  “Anyone who’s been around blue herons enough can tell you that they often leave a white trail behind when they’re taking off. It’s distinctive. This vehicle was parked near a river, lake, or marsh where a heron would be taking off.”

  “The Patuxent River?”

  “Maybe . . .”

  Blue herons. A sticker of a fish leaping out of the water. Wrighton Road. Marsh biota on Brandi’s shoes. A hitch and brake light wires, perfect for pulling a fishing boat.

  Nothing solid, just clues. But arrows that were all pointing in one direction: a wetlands.

  As I was studying the map more carefully, Angela called back. “The sticker, it’s from a private boat landing near the Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary.”

  “You said a private boat landing?”

  “Just for people in that residential area.”

  “That’s it. Give me the neighborhood and get me a list of names. Now.”

  ++

  Richard turned onto Blue Shirt Road toward his home on the eastern fringes of the sanctuary and let his thoughts scamper ahead of him to all that the evening held in store.

  ++

  Angela found the list, but no names popped out to us and there was nothing yet on what Basque might have purchased in the sporting goods store.

  But we had the neighborhood and everything pointed to it as a potential anchor point for Basque.

  Basque would want isolation, a place to take his victims, dispose of bodies.

  One street wove back into the very edge of the wetlands.

  Blue Shirt Road.

  I hung up and punched my finger against my laptop screen and said to Ralph, “We start there, at the end of the road, and then move through the area house by house.”

  ++

  Richard pulled into his driveway.

  He removed the fake mustache, contacts, and peeled off the latex from his cheeks.

  As he exited the squad, he shielded his face from the driving rain, and was welcomed by his two pit bulls. They were kill dogs and he called them off so they wouldn’t attack either of the two prizes now in the backseat as he moved them into the house.

  When he opened the squad’s door and brought Saundra out, she offered herself to him, told him she’d do anything he wanted if only he would let Noni go.

  With a straight face he told her convincingly that if she cooperated he wouldn’t harm her daughter in any way. After that, it was not difficult to get her into the house.

  Once he had her in the living room, the rope around her wrists and ankles made sure she wasn’t going to go anywhere. He tied her in such a way that she would never be able to fight back as Agent Jiang had done on Friday.

  Then he went back to the car to get the girl.

  He would do her first.

  Let her mother watch as he did.

  ++

  8 minutes

  I parked beneath the dark tunnel of branches arching over the road. The embankment led down to the marsh on the right side, a thick tangle of trees rose on the left.

  A torrent of rain was slashing down all around us, most likely obscuring, to anyone in the house, the sound of our approach up the road.

  A Maryland State Police car was parked in front of the garage. Ralph put in a call to Headquarters to find out the name of the officer who lived here.

  A jon boat on a rusted trailer sat beside the woodshed.

  ++

  Richard left the girl tied up beside her mother in the living room, and went to the kitchen to heat up the frying pan.

  ++

  There were no law enforcement officers living at this address.

  Quickly, we ran the plates: they belonged to a Maryland State Police officer who hadn’t been in touch with dispatch in over ninety minutes. I tried to reach the two agents guarding Saundra’s house but they didn’t pick up. Neither did Saundra when Ralph phoned her.

  “He’s here,” I said. “He’s got
her here.”

  Headlights off, Ralph angled the car to block the road while I called for backup. Then he turned off the engine.

  I wondered how many women Basque might have brought here, how many corpses might lie at the bottom of the dark water of that marsh.

  Anger and revulsion rose inside me.

  And the anger was just what I needed.

  “Don’t tell me to wait around until backup gets here,” I said.

  Ralph was already unholstering his weapon. “Last thing on my mind.”

  Guns out, we stepped into the rain.

  The night was filled with the damp, pungent smell of the stagnant water of the wetlands.

  Ralph gestured for me to go around to the back of the house, that he would take the front. Both of us had our flashlights off, using the dim porch light oozing through the rain to guide our way.

  We were halfway to the house when, somewhere above the sound of the rain pelting the ground, I heard attack dogs—at least two of them, barking viciously, rushing toward us through the night.

  50

  5 minutes

  Pit bulls.

  The porch light illuminated part of the lawn and we were still pretty much hidden in the darkness, but I could make out one of the dogs cornering the house and coming my way. I heard another somewhere in the dark near Ralph.

  Pit bulls can be trained not to bite, not to kill, but they’re not naturally docile animals. Once they latch onto you, they do not let go.

  And they go for the throat.

  I doubted Basque would have pit bulls that were friendly, and the way these dogs were snarling they didn’t sound tame at all.

  The dog sprinted toward me.

  Instinctively, I raised my weapon.

  I shouted, tried to call it off, but that did nothing to slow it down. I fired and the bullet grazed its flank as it leapt into the air. Shielding my neck with my left forearm, I was about to fire again when the dog jerked to the side in midflight as the dampened echo of a gunshot reverberated through the rain.

  In the bleary light, I could see the dog lying dead at my feet, its head a mess of splintered bone and dark blood rinsing off into the mud.

  I pivoted toward Ralph.