Steven James - The Queen

“The right time.”

“Yes.”

“I’m telling you, don’t be nervous, bro. You’ll do fine.”

“I’m not nervous.”

“Mm-hmm.” He crunched along the road beside me, sturdy, confident but not brash. I realized I was glad he was with me. “Just don’t put it off too long. You only live once, you know.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Forty meters to Reiser’s trailer.

Though I didn’t want to, I eased aside thoughts of Lien-hua and carefully observed the park.

Despite the weather, several small faces were staring at me through the torn screen door of the trailer home that lay directly across the road. Abruptly, a woman pulled the children back into the shadows and swung the screen door, then the trailer door shut.

I didn’t like this.

Any of it.

The trailer park brought back a swarm of dark memories from a crime scene fourteen years ago when I was a Milwaukee police detective and was forced to view the kinds of things no one should ever have to see: the body of Jasmine Luecke in her trailer home-or more precisely, what was left of her body, laid out gruesomely in the hallway.

The aftermath of one of Richard Devin Basque’s crimes.

There were sixteen victims that we knew of. All young women. He kept them alive for as long as twelve hours while he surgically removed their lungs piece by piece and ate them, making the dying women watch as he did.

When I finally cornered him in an abandoned slaughterhouse in Milwaukee, he was holding his scalpel over his final victim, Sylvia Padilla. She was still alive when I arrived. Which, even after all these years, made the memory even more troubling.

Thirty meters.

I hadn’t been able to save her-I doubted anyone could have-but I did manage to apprehend Basque, and he was eventually convicted, sent to prison, and spent thirteen years behind bars, most of it in solitary confinement.

But then, just over a year ago, the Seventh District Court announced Basque was going to receive a retrial after “a careful review of the culpatory DNA evidence and eyewitness testimony pertinent to the case.”

And unbelievably, at the conclusion of his retrial last May, he was found not guilty and released from prison with official apologies from the judge, the warden, and even the governor.

Less than a month later, Basque started killing again.

This time with an accomplice.

Fifteen meters to the trailer.

Upon review of the digitized case files, Jake discovered that DNA found at the scene of the June homicide matched previously unidentified DNA at four of Basque’s earlier crimes, and that’s what led us to Travis Reiser.

I was forced to concede that Basque might have had an accomplice all along.

Since June I’d linked three other murders to Basque and Reiser, and if they really had been working together from the start, I couldn’t help but wonder how many other crimes Reiser might have committed by himself in the years since Basque’s arrest and initial conviction.

“Listen,” I said into my mic. “This man can lead us to Basque. Be prudent. Don’t get trigger happy.”

In the silence following my words, Torres reiterated, “You heard him. Wait for my signal.”

The team confirmed over the radios that they understood, and Torres and I arrived at Travis Reiser’s jaundice-colored trailer. “Puke yellow,” Torres muttered. “How appropriate.”

We took the steps up to the front door slowly, but my heart was racing.

My friend Ralph Hawkins-an ex-Army Ranger who now headed up the NCAVC, and apparently the guy who’d mentioned my engagement plans to Torres-once told me that fear was one of the key ingredients to courage. “If your life’s in danger and you’re not afraid,” he said, “you’re just a freakin’ moron, and you’re a liability.”

Right now I was not a liability.

I knocked. “Travis, are you home?”

No answer.

“Mr. Reiser,” I said. “Please open the door.”

Still no reply. No movement inside the trailer.

A nod from Torres and we drew our weapons. He carried a Glock 23, I unholstered the. 357 SIG P229 I’ve carried with me ever since starting in law enforcement fifteen years ago. Reliable. Accurate. An old friend. It felt at home in my hand.

I tried the doorknob. Locked.

We had a warrant to search the premises, but if you break down a door, you run the risk of contaminating evidence or inciting adversarial action, so it’s always better to find an alternative. However, in this case, that wasn’t going to happen. I signaled for Torres to move aside, then positioned myself in front of the doorway.

I kicked the door hard, holding nothing back, planting my heel directly next to the lock. It blistered apart, the door flew open, and Torres whipped through the entrance. I followed closely on his heels.

The living room was dark, lit only by the muted daylight that managed to seep through the heavy curtains drawn across every window. The trailer smelled of mold, of cigarette smoke, of stale beer.

No sign of Reiser.

Torres hooked left toward the bathroom, I moved right, down the short hallway to the bedroom.

The door was closed.

“Travis?” Gun ready, heart racing, I pressed it open.

The room was strewn with dirty clothes and discarded Michelob cans. A mattress lay flopped on the floor, covered with a crumpled mess of sheets and blankets. An old TV sat on a wooden crate in the far corner. To the left, a small dresser was pressed against the wall near the closet, which I now approached.

I raised my SIG just below eye level. High ready position.

Opened the closet door.

Clothes, shoes, boxes. That was all.

I let out a small breath then looked around the room one more time. Nothing.

He wasn’t here.

Just moments ago, I’d been amped with anticipation, but now I felt the all-too-familiar plummet of disappointment that comes from running into an investigative dead end. Highs and lows. The roller-coaster ride of hot adrenaline and cold letdown. Story of my life.

When I returned to the kitchen I found Torres waiting for me.

“Place is empty, Pat.”

“Right.”

Dirty dishes filled the sink. Beside them I noticed a wooden block bristling with knives. Basque and Reiser typically chose scalpels and knives rather than guns, and I tried not to consider the grisly thought that these blades had been used for something other than cutting vegetables or fruit here in the kitchen. The Bureau’s Evidence Response Team would find out. “Have your team check the rest of the park,” I told Torres.

Based on what I knew about Basque and Reiser, it would’ve been unlikely for Travis to bring a body back to his home, but still, I found myself carefully sniffing the musty air. I caught no hint of the odor of human decomposition.

It wasn’t my job to process evidence, the ERT would do that, but I didn’t want to contaminate anything before they arrived. I holstered my SIG, turned on my phone, and pulled on a pair of latex gloves. Then I went to the ashtray beside the couch and inspected the burnt ends of the butts. All cold.

Torres spoke into his mic. “Sweep the rest of the park. Cordon it off. You know how much is riding on getting this right. No mistakes.”

Then he called in for local PD to send marked cars to the roads leading from the park.

I studied the room. Cheap cabinets, a Formica kitchen table, countertops strewn with unopened mail-two bills, a paycheck from the factory, two credit card offers. The most recent postage was stamped on Tuesday.

Yet he entered the trailer last night.

According to the eyewitness.

Something to follow up on.

Just as I started looking through the bathroom cabinet, my phone rang. This cell was a temporary replacement for a prototype of a new smart phone the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency had been letting me use. Last week I hadn’t been quite gentle enough when I slammed it onto my kitchen table after a rather big setback on a case. So now, for the time being, I was left without my 3-D hologram projector for mapping crime scene locations. I don’t have a very good history with phones. Hopefully I’ve learned my lesson.