12:30 p.m.
3 hours until kickoff
The two units who responded found no evidence of Richard Basque at the Bank of America Corporate Center.
The officers stationed outside the building hadn’t seen anyone fitting his description enter or leave. Video footage confirmed that.
I was on the second floor of the Field Office with the Cyber unit and they were analyzing the data on the phone trace.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” the agent who was seated at the computer said. “You’re sure it was him on the phone?”
“It was him,” I said.
The guy shook his head. “It looks like he must have found a way to reroute the call.”
Yes, I thought. That’s what it looks like.
Richard was brilliant and knew his way around computers, but he wasn’t a hacker, and as advanced as the Bureau’s tracking abilities were, I doubted he would’ve been able to get past or manipulate them.
“Get this data to the Cyber Division at HQ,” I said. “Ask for Angela Knight. We need to figure out where Basque was when he made that call.”
I got on the line with Voss, who was still at police headquarters.
“So what do you propose we do?” he asked.
“I go to Independence Square at one nineteen. I meet him.”
It would have been useless for Basque to tell me to come alone. He would’ve known that, no matter what, we were going to be there ready and waiting.
As much as I anticipated that he would know that, I couldn’t shake the thought that he had something in mind. A trap of some kind. A trick he was going to pull.
“We need to be ready for anything,” I told Voss, “but if we shut down the square he’ll never show. We need a response team there. I want undercover agents on the ground, snipers, a—”
“Hang on, now. Snipers? In Uptown Charlotte?”
“I don’t care what strings you have to pull. If you need to have the mayor call FBI Director Wellington, I’ve got her cell number with me. We have to be ready. There’s no telling what Basque has in mind, but I can tell you one thing: He’s not just going to turn himself in.”
It took some convincing, but finally Voss got on board.
As long as Ingersoll’s team was here it made sense to have them, rather than local SWAT, take the lead on this thing, and Voss agreed to contact them.
* * *
When we ended the call, my mind was buzzing. On one front, we had the analysis of the mines. On another, we had the search for Mason. And now, additionally, I had a meeting with Richard Basque thrown into the mix.
“Give me a sec,” I said to the guys who were analyzing the phone data.
I stepped away from the desk and into the hallway by myself.
The conversation I’d had with Ralph earlier this week came to mind—the one in which we’d discussed how it’s impossible to give a hundred percent to both your job and your family.
Well, right now it was just as impossible to give a hundred percent of my focus to only one case.
I tried to sort things out.
Basque helps Mason escape from prison, and then Mason kills Basque’s sister—knowing full well that Basque will come after him when he does.
Despite myself, I couldn’t stop asking why. As futile an exercise as that was, I caught myself trying to guess motives.
Right now you need to focus on Basque. This is something solid. He knows Mason. Maybe he can lead you to him.
Richard had told me on the phone that he had a proposal to make. I wasn’t about to negotiate with him, but I also wasn’t naive enough to think he wanted to meet with me just to unconditionally surrender.
Based on what had happened to Corrine, I imagined that Richard was going to propose something in regard to tracking down Mason.
Maybe he has information he’s willing to share or trade?
But trade for what? He has to know there’s no way we would ever give him immunity.
My thoughts circled around each other, spinning back to the first time I apprehended Richard, back in that abandoned slaughterhouse in Milwaukee fourteen years ago, when I was still a homicide detective.
There was a woman lying there, cut very badly, cut in the way only Richard could cut someone. After I cuffed him I tried to save her, but it was too late. The words he spoke as I went over to try to help her came back to me now: “I think we may need an ambulance, don’t you, Detective?”
I lied to her.
Told her she was going to be alright.
And unlike Stu Ritterman, who died in my arms on Monday morning, that woman didn’t get a chance to share anything with me before she died.
I can still remember standing up, blood dripping from my hands.
Her blood.
Then I turned to Richard.
I lifted him from the concrete where I’d left him while I tried to save her, and I was about to read him his rights when he spoke, his eyes on the woman’s fresh corpse: “I guess we won’t be needing that ambulance after all.”
That did it.
I hit him in the jaw hard enough to send him flying backward onto the ground.
Then I was on him and I hit him again, shattering the bones in the jaw. I was ready to keep going, ready to pull the scalpel out of my leg where he’d stabbed me a few minutes earlier when we were fighting, ready to drive it into his chest or deep into his throat, but then he said those words that I’ve never forgotten and never will: “It feels good, doesn’t it, Detective? It feels really good.”
Yes, it did.
That’s the thing: Unleashing my anger on him did feel good, and it would have felt good to keep going. It was terrifying to realize that I had cords of darkness in my heart that were just as thick, just as unwieldy, just as lethal as those running through the hearts of the people I tracked.
Since then I’ve done my best to convince myself that I’m not like him, but in a very real way, I am.
Basque was no more, no less human than I was.
I was like him. Of course I was.
We all are.
In this business you have to catch yourself before you drift too far.
You have to keep the demons at bay.
And now words came to me, words that unsettled me: You have to keep yourself at bay.
So, that was the first time I faced off with him.
Then last spring, after he’d been set free in his retrial and had started killing again, I caught up with him at the house he was using near a marsh about an hour from DC. We fought there on the shore, and as we did he nearly drowned me, but at last I was able to get him under the water.
And I held him there.
I could have pulled him to his feet, but I waited until he started convulsing.
And then I waited longer, until the convulsions stopped.
Until he drowned.
Moments later, a car came careening down the bank and I hurriedly dragged him to the shore to get his body out of the way.
I waited. He was gone. It was over.
But in that moment, duty and justice wrestled with each other in my heart, deep questions that have no easy answers, questions about who I was, what I was capable of, who I was choosing to become, and although I could have left him dead, I did not.
I’m still not sure if it was a sign of weakness or of strength, but I went ahead and performed CPR. I brought him back.
I wanted justice to prevail. I just wasn’t sure exactly how to help it do so.
If Basque is partially responsible for Corrine’s death, then you are too because you saved his life. If you hadn’t, none of this would’ve happened.
But then, soon after that, when he escaped and took Tessa, when she was drowning and I had to choose between saving her and killing Basque, I squeezed the trigger and sent him reeling backward into the Potomac.
He didn’t have a weapon.
He was ready to turn himself in, but if I’d taken the time to apprehend him, my daughter would have died. I chose to save her. I fired at him.
I had no regrets at the time and I still didn’t.
It was hard to figure out how to feel about him contacting me now.
We hadn’t known for sure whether or not he was alive.
Now we knew.
We hadn’t known how to find him.
Now we did.
And now, finally, I had the chance to end all this and bring him in for good.
* * *
I put a call through to Lien-hua and told her about the meeting. She was quiet, and when I’d finished and she didn’t respond, I said, “Are you okay with this?”
“What happened out there by the river?”
“What?”
“The Potomac. In April.”
“I shot him.”
“Yes.” She said it as if she were both agreeing with me and disagreeing with me at the same time.
“Tessa was in the car,” I said. “Trapped. She was drowning.”
“I know. And you shot him.”
“I had to get to her. I had to save her. And he was . . .”
“He was what? Threatening you? Coming at you? Trying to kill you?”
No. He was surrendering. He was going to let me take him in.
When I said nothing, she continued, “You never told me exactly what happened. Even in the case files it wasn’t a hundred percent clear.”
I heard a voice in my head: You promised you wouldn’t lie to her. That you would tell her the truth no matter what.
But I also wanted to protect her and that might mean not letting her know the kinds of things I was actually capable of doing.
It would have been so much easier if Basque had threatened me, if he’d pulled a gun or a knife. It would have made it a lot easier for me to know how to look at myself.
But he had not.
And I’d squeezed the trigger.
“Well?” she asked.
“I had to take the shot,” I said simply. “And I have to go and meet with him now.”
“You chose Tessa’s life above his.” My wife wasn’t going to let me off the hook.
Truth or not?
“Yes. I did.”
A long silence ebbed between us.
Too long.
I debated what to say, how to defend my decision, but everything I came up with seemed insufficient.
Finally she spoke, and her response surprised me: “You made the right choice.”
“I’m glad you think so.”
“But now, you need to bring him in.”
“I intend to.”
“No. Bring him in, Pat.” She seemed to be choosing her words carefully. “Don’t do something either of us would regret.”
“If I can, yes, I will. I’ll bring him in.”
“Do what you have to do, but don’t let him steal from you the thing you care about most.”
“My family?”
“Your integrity.”
Then, as I tried to process the implications of what she’d just said, she told me that Brineesha was doing alright, but that the doctors wanted to give her some Pitocin to make her contractions stronger. Before I could pivot back to the topic of Basque, Lien-hua was telling me Debra was calling to check on Brin, and then she was wrapping up the call.
After we’d both said our good-byes, I returned to the conference room, informed the team I was taking off, and left for my car.
Lien-hua’s right, you know. You need to bring him in.
Do what you have to do, but don’t let him steal from you the thing you care about most: your integrity.
But was that really what I cared about most?
Or was it my family?
Basque had gone after Lien-hua, tried to kill both her and Tessa, and I would’ve given up anything, and would still give up anything—my integrity, my honor, my life—to protect them.
I wasn’t sure exactly where that left me at the moment, but it did make me feel even more motivated than ever to bring Basque in.
Fourteen years ago it’d felt good to hit him, and earlier this year, it had felt good to shoot him in the chest.
And, honestly, I wasn’t sure if that was because I believed in justice or because I was attracted to the darkness.
They were two ends of the spectrum, and somehow when I faced off with Basque, I found myself with my feet in both places at the same time.
That’s what I thought of now as I got ready to meet him again.
Yes.
Bring him in.
Don’t give in to the demons.
Keep them at bay.
Keep yourself at bay.
Justice.
The darkness.
Do what has to be done.
Okay, I think I will.
We were going to have a team ready, but still it was foolish to think that Basque was just going to walk up to me on the street and turn himself in. He had something up his sleeve.
So I wanted something up mine.
I put a call through to Professor O’Brien, who hadn’t left the UNC Charlotte library yet, and swung by campus while our agents took their positions Uptown at the intersection of Trade and Tryon.
Then I went to assemble with the team before meeting with Richard Basque.