Steven James - The Bishop

“I’ve been looking forward to this all day.” And as their prisoner in the basement cried futilely for help, upstairs in the bedroom, the midnight games began.

Wednesday, June 11

491 Riley Road

Stafford, Virginia

5:03 a.m.

I woke up irritated, the letter from Paul Lansing’s lawyers on my mind.

And the Mollie Fischer case as well, only a few strides behind it in the race for my attention.

And Calvin’s death.

And Basque, of course, the ghost of flesh and blood from a time in my life I thought I’d left behind, lurking, always lurking, in the background.

“Promise me you won’t let him do it again,” Grant Sikora had begged me as he lay dying.

“I promise,” I’d said.

My thoughts circled around everything, evaluating what was at stake in each case, wondering again how Lansing’s lawyers could have known our address, sorting, analyzing. All of the issues seemed like cables tightening inside of me, tugging my thoughts in opposite directions.

Too many things to deal with.

My life in a nutshell.

Even though I knew Brineesha wouldn’t have arrived at work yet, I checked my messages to see if, for some reason, she might have called with the lawyer’s name and number.

She had not.

I looked over my email-nothing important.

Since I didn’t need to leave for the Academy until about 7:30, I changed, threw myself into a workout-a thirty-minute run, twenty max-out sets of pull-ups on a tree branch at the edge of the property, and then crunches until I could barely sit up.

But it didn’t clear my mind.

A shower.

Breakfast.

After downing some oatmeal and a banana, I grabbed a cup of Lavado Fino coffee from Venezuela and my laptop, and headed for the back deck.

Though barely 6:30, the morning was full of the smells of summer-freshly cut grass, warm sunshine, and steel-blue sky. The slightly fishy smell of a nearby lake.

Songbirds jabbered in the trees.

Steam from my coffee curled, wispy and smoke-like from the cup, then faded away, caught in the soft breath of wind, disappearing into the moment.

I sat there, just being in the stillness, in the gentle opening arc of the day. I’ve never been one to meditate, but I’ve always been drawn to the clarity that solitude brings.

A small touch of calm in the middle of my tempest life.

A chance to think.

When the DEA moved their Basic Agent training to Quantico a few years ago, one of their crime scene analyst instructors and friend of mine named Freeman Runnels had bought this house. Really, it’s more of a cabin-rustic framing, thick oak doors, handmade cherry furniture.

However, this summer he was on assignment in Panama, and when he heard I was teaching for three months at the Academy, he’d graciously offered to let Tessa and me stay here. “Just water the plants,” he’d said, and we agreed.

The ten-acre plot was mostly wooded, except for a stretch of lawn here behind the house. An old rock wall, about waist high, skirted along the edge of the woods that lay maybe thirty meters from the deck.

Tessa isn’t exactly the outdoorsy type, but she values her privacy, and when she saw the property and found out that a Virginia Railway Express station was just a fifteen-minute walk away, she’d said, “I guess this’ll be okay.” Which in Tessa-speak means, “Sweet. I’ll be able to go to DC whenever I want.”

I clicked to the online case files to see if we had any updates on Mollie Fischer’s homicide.

The complete police report wasn’t posted yet, no statements from the keeper or the security guard, and, while it annoyed me, it didn’t surprise me. Law enforcement officers are notoriously slow in filling out paperwork. It’s the one part of our job no one seems to like. Including me.

However, I was glad to see that the crime scene photos had been uploaded.

Ninety-four of them.

I scrolled through the jpegs.

No pictures of Mollie alive, only of her dead.

First, hanging from her wrists, then lying on the straw. Photos of her wounds, the restraints, the dead chimps, the entrance and exit doors. Six separate photos of the eyeball Lien-hua had found lying in the straw, a bloodshot orb with a pale blue iris and a ragged penetralia of optic nerve from where the organ had been tugged from A small flicker of movement near a break in the rock wall caught my attention.

The leaves parted, and a white-tailed deer stepped delicately into the field.

When I was a teenager growing up in Wisconsin, my father had introduced me to the unofficial religion of the state-deer hunting. And, from what I could remember about the growth cycles of deer, I figured this doe was maybe two or three years old.

She meandered into the yard, silent as a heartbeat, nibbling at the grass until something spooked her and she froze, her head raised, her ears pricked upright.

Maybe she’d caught my scent.

I sat still, watching.

She stayed stationary for only a moment, then whatever had startled her must have seemed too threatening, and she abruptly took off, bolting across the far side of the yard, her tail flagging, until she disappeared into the morning shadows in the woods just past the end of the wall.

A moment of tranquility, of grace, overcome by fear. The jittery race for survival. Life running from death.

Always running.

Always being chased.

I looked at the pictures again.

A race we all lose.

Like Calvin did.

Like Mollie Fischer.

Like so many victims I’ve seen over the years.

Their dead staring eyes. Their quiet, gray lips.

And their shattered, grieving families.

I thought about those platitudes that don’t work as I watched my coffee’s ghostly thin steam curl and then fade into the morning air, then mouse-clicked away from the grisly crime scene photos.

My thoughts returned to Basque.

Ever since his release, he’d been at the center of a media whirlwind. His initial conviction, subsequent retrial, and not-guilty verdict just seemed to be too big of a story for the press to let die, and since he was still in their watchful eye, I doubted he would do anything blatantly illegal, at least in the immediate future.

So I’d been careful and meticulous rather than hurried and sloppy in my research regarding the clue Calvin left: H814b Patricia E.

But so far I’d been unsuccessful in finding her.

If she was even a real person.

If she was even a witness.

Or a victim.

Or alive.

I pulled up my notes.

At first I’d dabbled with the idea that the note was a word play of some sort: H814b-“Height won four be” or “Hate one for bee”-but no combinations of the words seemed to make sense.

The sequence didn’t have enough digits to be a phone number. It wasn’t an address, at least not in the United States. It wasn’t a Dewey decimal number.

After exhausting my ideas I’d contacted Angela Knight, one of the Bureau’s top cybercrime analysts, who also has a knack for cryptanalysis.

We’d tried searches involving every combination of Patricia we could think of: Patty, Patsy, Tricia, Trisha, Trish; and yes, my own name, just for kicks: Pat, Patrick, Rick, Eric, Ricci, Erica.

And so on.

Nothing had come up.

We’d done metasearches through all the data collected at Giovanni’s and Basque’s crime scenes for possible relationships to the name or letter-number sequence. Nothing solid.

Angela suggested that it might be a password for one of Calvin’s computer files or for a website he might have visited, but when we did a digital data analysis of everything on his three computers and cross-referenced the letters and numbers to all the websites he’d visited, addresses in his address book, and numbers stored on his cell phone, we came up blank.