Opening Moves (40 page)

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to find Radar.”

Joshua wanted to see if his wife could record the news for him this afternoon. He tried the home number, but she wasn’t there. He gave her a ring at the real estate office. They told him she’d stepped out earlier, but that they were expecting her back any time and would give her the message.

Okay, if she didn’t get back to him, watching it live would have to be enough.

He drove the boy, who was safely tucked in the back of the moving truck, toward the bank in Wales.

87

3:25 p.m.

1 hour until the gloaming

I went to grab my things. Ralph called over to me and told me that neither Tod’s teacher nor the principal could give us anything on the man except that he was “big and white.” No one had been able to locate Mrs. Unger.

I tried Radar on the radio one last time.

Still nothing.

Tod was missing and all I could think of was that box Radar had been holding, and of the finger the kidnapper had left behind in Carl Kowalski’s refrigerator and what he’d done to Colleen and Adele.

He abducts. He makes demands. He mutilates his captives. And he’s escalating.

What? What would he have asked Radar to do?

Honestly, I had no clue.

When Radar left, he’d implied that he was going to his house, so I decided to try there first. From here I could get there just as quickly as if we dispatched a car. And he was my partner. I wanted to be the one there if something bad really was going down. I asked Ralph to stay on top of things here and to call me if we heard from Radar.

Calvin saw me getting ready to go and when I mentioned vaguely that I was following up on a lead, he surprised me and offered to come with me.

“I can’t do that.”

“Actually, my boy, you can, as long as I’m not in the front seat.”

I wished he didn’t know so much about law enforcement.

“I’m sorry, I—”

“You drive,” he said, as if that were a choice. “I’ll bring my computer. With the information your team pulled up on Basque’s activity nodes, I’m close to formulating a crude model of his cognitive map.”

“You can work on that here.”

“But you can’t get my results in real time.”

“Can you find him? Can you predict where he might’ve gone?”

“No. But I might be able to find his anchor point.”

I rubbed my head and tried to think things through.

It was possible that Basque had something to do with what was going on with Radar and Tod. I wasn’t sure how, but I was willing to do whatever it took to find them, especially if, as I feared, something bad had happened to Tod.

This was way unorthodox, but Calvin would be safe in the back of the car and I could pick his brain as we drove.

“Don’t tell anyone I’m doing this.”

He closed up his laptop and headed with me for the elevators. “Mum’s the word.”

88

No one was at Radar’s house.

Ralph radioed me that he’d spoken with the principal again and, providentially, she’d been able to stop Gayle Walker and Angie just as they were leaving car line. “A squad’s on the way to pick them up.”

“But Tod’s not with them?”

“No.”

I was parked beside the curb in front of Radar’s home, trying to figure out what the next step should be. Calvin had been quietly working through Euclidean distance and linear decay models, and now he said, “I might have something, my boy. The west side of the city. Industrial district.”

“His anchor point?”

“It’s the best I can do with the data we have.”

“You sure about this?”

“Not at all.”

If Radar and Tod weren’t here and Gayle and Angie were safe, then sitting around waiting for something to happen wasn’t doing anyone any good.

You still don’t know if there’s one offender or two. Basque might have Tod. The timing from when he left the acquisitions firm works.

If anything came up here with Radar, I could always come back, but if Basque was our guy and he’d gone to the anchor point for his crimes, we might have a chance at tracking him down. And even if he wasn’t there, if we could somehow locate it, there might be something there that could lead us to him.

I radioed Ralph, who said he’d station another car at the house, then I pulled onto the street.

The industrial district Calvin was speaking of wasn’t far.

“Alright,” I said to Calvin. “Which street?”

“Head toward Bracken Street. We’ll see what we can find out from there.”

I called in to have squads focus the APB search for Basque’s car in that area of the city.

As we drove, Calvin tried to explain his calculations, but most of it was beyond me. As far as I could see, the labyrinth was just becoming more and more complex.

We were failing, yes.

But it didn’t seem like we were doing so on our way to success.

Five minutes later as we were about to turn onto Bracken Street, we got word that the more directed, focused search had produced results.

Two officers had spotted Basque’s car about a half mile from us in the parking lot of a textile factory. A squad was there now and the officers were checking inside the factory.

I said to Calvin, “I doubt he’d park right in front of the building where he takes his victims.”

“I concur. I believe he would want seclusion. And taking potential victims to a working factory would provide very little isolation.”

“He could take them to someplace private, restrain them, drive the car to another location.”

“And then return on foot.”

I got on the radio again, gave dispatch our location, and asked if they could identify any abandoned buildings or closed businesses nearby.

“How nearby?”

“Half a mile.” I figured we could start with that, move out from there.

After a moment of checking, the dispatcher told me there was an abandoned slaughterhouse less than a quarter mile away.

That worked for me as a place to start.

I whipped the car around the corner and found the side street we were looking for.

89

3:56 p.m.

29 minutes until the gloaming

The slaughterhouse loomed in front of me, a giant black corpse of a building.

I parked, then called dispatch and requested backup and an ambulance. They asked if there was a victim. “Not that I know of.”
It’s possible Tod is here.
“But I want to be prepared if there is.” They told me one would be here in four to five minutes.

Yesterday at the farmhouse in Fort Atkinson I’d needed to wait for backup because I feared that Mallory might be in danger. There, we rolled in with sirens blaring. Here, I’d come in quietly. As far as I could tell, I had the element of surprise on my side.

And I was going to use it.

“Calvin, you’re staying here.”

“On your toes in there,” he cautioned me.

“Right.”

I left him by the car and went to find a way into the slaughterhouse.

Radar rolled to a stop in the bank’s parking lot.

He took a deep breath, paused for a moment to try to calm his nerves, then went inside to meet the kidnapper’s demands.

I ended up having to crawl through a broken window on the second floor. Fortunately, the climb hadn’t been hard at all, nothing compared to the bouldering problems at the gym.

Gun out, I descended the stairs.

The slaughterhouse looked as though it hadn’t been used in years, but still somehow, the air was filled with the damp smell of decay and rot, as if death had never left this place.

My thoughts raced. I couldn’t keep them still and they flipped through all that we knew about the crimes this week, the earlier homicides, the missing persons.

Locations and travel routes.

Trying to thread everything together.

The mattresses…the mission on West Reagan Street…the location of Basque’s car…

I reached ground level. Abandoned offices on my left. Dull patches of light fighting their way through the grimy windows.

No sign of anyone. No sounds except for water dripping somewhere out of sight. As I moved forward, half a dozen rats scurried across the concrete floor in front of me.

I passed through a long narrow corridor that led to a winding chute that cows would’ve evidently been led along on their way to the slaughter.

There was an opening up ahead on my left that appeared to lead to the pens where Brantner Meats used to keep their cattle.

As I was approaching it, I heard the sounds.

Maybe someone gasping; I couldn’t be sure. Whatever it was, someone was hurt and the wet, strangled cough that followed sent an unsettling chill dipping into my stomach.

I leveled my gun and edged forward, peering around the corner.

And saw him.

Basque.

He was holding a scalpel, standing over a woman. Blood all over her, spread across her neck and chest and abdomen.

I whipped around the corner. “Drop the knife! Back away from her!”

He was only four, maybe five meters away.

He did not comply, just stood as still as death and looked at me thoughtfully.

“Hands up! Back away from the woman, Richard!” But he didn’t move, he just eyed me, the blade dripping red at his feet. His gaze was fastened on my gun, as if he were curious about it, as if it were something he’d never seen before and he was wondering what exactly it was for.

I stepped closer to him, reminding myself that backup was on its way. “Richard, drop that knife and put your hands in the air.”

Above us, on long tracks, hung rusted meat hooks, somber and still—which only served to make the scene more macabre.

Another step.

Careful, Pat.

All at once Basque spun and started for the far door. Barring an immediate and direct threat to someone’s life, I wasn’t about to shoot him in the back, but I could catch him and I could take him down. I yelled for him to stop even as I dashed toward him.

But after we’d both gone only a few steps, he spun and fired a handgun at me, but he was off balance and missed. I squeezed the trigger, but my SIG refused to fire. Odds were ten thousand to one against it, but it jammed now when I needed it most and before I could process that, he shot at me again. This time he hit my left shoulder, sending me spiraling sideways, off balance. I landed hard on the ground, and hot pain exploded from my shoulder and seared through my whole body.

Judging from the pain coming from both the anterior and the posterior of my shoulder, it was probably a through and through, entering just below the bone of my shoulder and exiting near my armpit. I still had mobility of my arm, but it was sure going to hurt to move it.

Too bad.

I jumped to my feet and rushed him, snagging one of the meat hooks hanging above us as I did. I swung it fiercely toward him and it traveled down the track even faster than I thought it would. Basque managed to dodge it, but while he was distracted it gave me just enough time I needed to close the space between us, and then I was on him, tackling him just like I’d taken down Vincent Hayes on Sunday night. My shoulder screamed at me as we collided with the concrete.