Steven James - The Bishop

“If he does”-and she let him know by her tone of voice that the subject was not up for debate-“and if people become more aware of him in hell, then I expect both of us will be quite the experts on him someday.”

“I expect we will.”

After a few more minutes of letting him hold her, she rose, telling him that he could sleep in if he wanted, that she would get everything ready.

“Thank you.”

“I’ll see you at 2:00.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll take care of the alley video?” she said.

“The surveillance camera will be looping through previous footage when you arrive.”

“And the door?”

“I’ll leave it propped open.”

She flipped open the laptop belonging to the woman in the basement, downloaded the video Brad had taken last night from his cell phone, then she put the computer in the van.

Hopped into her car.

And left for work.

The FBI Academy

Classroom 317

7:46 a.m.

Death.

That was the agenda for today.

This morning, videos of murder, then a visit to the body farm this afternoon.

Over the years, the Bureau has collected thousands of DVDs and video tapes from crime scenes, from secret stashes of killers and videos from certain websites we’ve learned to monitor.

We have the world’s largest collection of videos of humans dying at the hands of others.

Disturbing.

But, unfortunately, necessary.

We show these videos to the New Agents and National Academy students so they can understand the true nature of those we hunt. We make the agents and law enforcement officers watch real people die in painful slow motion, rewind, pause, replay.

So that they’ll know.

Really know.

Some victims beg, others bribe. Men make threats they must certainly know they’re incapable of carrying out. Women try to barter, offering their bodies and vowing not to tell.

Sometimes I wonder how many women actually succeed in exchanging sex for survival. I’ve only seen the videos of those who failed.

In my classes I’ve seen even the most hardened cops, the most experienced investigators from around the world, break in half when they see these videos.

Almost always, whether the victim is compliant or struggling, praying or begging, there’s that moment when he realizes what is about to happen. You see the knowledge of the inevitable pass across his face.

The undeniable truth we spend our lives denying has finally sunk in: death is coming.

The end is here, only moments away.

That look, when he comes to that final chilling revelation, is the most heartbreaking of all to see. The race is over. Life has lost.

I turned on the video projector to cue up today’s first video-a man in San Francisco who did to prepubescent boys the things that nightmares are made of.

For me, the hardest videos to watch are the ones in which people pray, because in so many cases you can see that they really do believe that God will hear them, will intervene, will save them. But in the videos we have here at the Academy, he invariably chose not to.

I often wonder if his silence is proof that he isn’t there. That’s the easy answer, of course. The intellectually facile one, but still, it’s tempting to retreat into skepticism when you see such suffering responded to with silence.

Sometimes I envy people who find a way to live in quiet denial of what we as a species are capable of doing to each other. It’d be so much easier to live with that kind of naivety, closing one eye to the tears of the world, thinking that everything has a Disneyfied ending, a silver lining, a sunset to ride into.

A few months ago when I was speaking with Lien-hua about this, she told me not to dwell on the negative so much.

“I can’t pretend that the world isn’t what it is,” I’d said.

“What do you mean?”

“That these things I see don’t happen, that life is better than this.”

A small pause. “But can you stop pretending that it’s worse?”

It took me a long time to reply. “I’ll try,” I’d said.

And I still am.

I turned on the projector, tapped the DVD’s play button, but the first frame-the one in which the killer zoomed in on the young boy’s frightened eyes staring into the camera-today that image alone was too much for me.

I couldn’t do this. I needed to look away from suffering, at least for the moment.

So I shut off the projector.

Plan B.

Astrid knew that Brad had money; he’d never kept that a secret, although he hadn’t explained where it was from, and she’d never pried.

She’d suspected he’d stolen or extorted it until she saw him working on the computer system at the research facility yesterday. Now she began to wonder if he might actually have earned it as a computer programmer.

Well, what mattered was not where it had come from but what they could do with it if they needed to.

Disappear.

Or, if she needed to, she could do that herself.

Yes, she knew his bank account’s pin number. She’d found it jotted on one of his statements two months ago. And this secret knowledge was a sweet and subtle thing.

Now, as she pulled into the parking lot at work, she thought of what would happen to the woman at 3:00 p.m. as the game moved toward its climax.

Tessa had agreed to meet Paul Lansing on the steps of the Library of Congress at 10:30 sharp. And now as she stepped onto the Amtrak train that would take her to the city, she felt somewhat like she was running away.

She told herself that as soon as she got some answers to the questions she hadn’t felt comfortable bringing up while Patrick was around, she would explain everything to him and things would get back to normal between them.

Through Paul’s emails over the last few weeks she’d found out where he grew up-St. Paul, Minnesota. His pastimes-sculpture (pretty cool), hunting (definitely uncool), hiking, carpentry, and organic gardening (that’s better). His birthday-September 9. And so on.

And on.

But the core stuff went a lot deeper.

That’s the stuff she needed to know.

The train doors closed, and she took a seat.

She’d chosen a T-shirt that left the scars on her right arm visible, the scars she’d given to herself when she was into cutting. A man stared at her now, his eyes lingering on her arm, and then on the oxymoronic words on her shirt: “Anarchy Rules.”

She handled his curiosity with a steady gaze, locking eyes with him until he looked away.

Tessa had saved the biggest questions for a face-to-face meeting with her dad: How long did you date Mom before you slept with her? Did you love her? How come you live by yourself in the mountains? What are you running away from?

It seemed beyond weird to her that a man who lived without a phone or running water, a guy who’d been emailing her from a six-year-old borrowed laptop, had suddenly decided to hop on a plane and fly to the nation’s capital just to see some sculptures that one of his friends had made. She’d have to ask him about that too.

He’d said he didn’t know that Christie ever had her child, that he thought she’d gone through with the abortion she’d been planning. That’s what he’d said, but Tessa didn’t believe him. She’d found the postcard he sent to her mother only a few years ago. If he kept tabs on her mom, how could he not have known about her?

And so, perhaps the most important question of all: why didn’t you ever come to see me after you two broke up?

And then there was Patrick.

She tried to think of a way to politely cancel lunch with him without making him suspicious. And without lying. She’d done enough of that already.

With a lurch, the train left to take Tessa Bernice Ellis to her father.