At last I said, “What’s the favor?”
“When you return to the stand tomorrow and Priscilla asks you about what happened in the slaughterhouse…” He paused.
I’d been trying not to think about the trial, and I didn’t like being reminded that I’d be there in less than twenty-four hours.
“Go on.”
“Don’t tell the truth,” Basque said.
His words stunned me. “What?” I stared at the grainy picture on my computer screen and tried to decipher Basque’s expression. Couldn’t.
“When she asks you whether or not you assaulted me, don’t tell the truth.”
“I won’t lie on the stand.”
Why is he asking you to do this?
“You’ve considered it, haven’t you?” Basque said. “I think you have. I’m just asking you to do what you want to do, what your gut tells you to do.”
Cheyenne’s words about following gut instincts immediately came to mind, especially since Basque’s comments struck uncomfortably close to home. “If that’s your only condition then this conversation is over-”
“He’s coming for you, Patrick.” Basque leaned forward and his voice seemed to carry a note of genuine concern. “He’s playing with you. Be careful. He’s got a twist waiting for you at the end that you’d never expect.”
“I’ll take my chances. Good-bye, Richard.”
“I’ll be praying for you. Remember, Exodus 1:15-21. Remem-ber-”
I ended the call. I wasn’t in the mood for Basque’s games. I wasn’t in the mood for any of this.
As I was saving the video and uploading it onto the task force’s online case files, I felt a wave of anger.
Then confusion.
Then something else. Something deeper and more primal-a desire for revenge, for a rough and final justice to be meted out against Giovanni and Basque. And against all who would mock the dying or take innocent life.
And with those feelings, I sensed myself slipping, tumbling toward something I did not want to become. I remembered a time a few months ago when Tessa had asked me if I was like them, like the people I hunt, and I’d had to admit to myself that there’s only a thin line that separates me from them. A single act. A single choice.
Remember who you are, Pat.
Remember.
I stared at my office walclass="underline" my diplomas, my awards.
You’re Special Agent Patrick Bowers with the Federal Bureau of Investigation… the man who caught Richard Devin Basque… criminologist, investigator, author…
My mind tried to dictate my resume, but the words in my head were cut off abruptly when my eyes landed on the spine of Christie’s diary resting on my bookshelf.
And I remembered the most important part of who I am: You are Tessa Bernice Ellis’s stepfather.
I crossed the room and gazed at the worn, leather spine of the diary-it wasn’t one of those small diaries with pages the size of note cards but was the same size as a hardback novel.
Christie was the one who’d first gotten me interested in mysticism and philosophy, and in the last two years I’d read everything I could get my hands on by Guyon, de Fenelon, Merton, and a dozen others. I’d placed Christie’s diary between The Way of Perfection by St. Teresa of Avila and Abandonment to Divine Providence by Jean-Pierre de Caussade, two of my favorites.
I ran my finger along the spine.
The wedding picture of me and Christie sat on the shelf just below the diary. We’d gotten married at a small chapel in Central Park and then stepped outside to have this picture taken. And now, as I looked at her smiling face, I felt the same strange mixture of thankfulness and loss I always feel when I see her.
Christie had chosen Tessa to be her maid of honor. That’s how close they were. That’s how much they meant to each other.
I took the diary from the shelf.
And I left to give it to my stepdaughter.
Unit #14
Safe-Lock Self-Storage
5532 Dayton Street
Denver, Colorado
Giovanni dropped six rats into the aquarium that contained his three remaining Western Diamondback rattlesnakes.
The rats tried to climb the glass.
But the snakes closed in.
Over the next fifteen minutes he let the snakes feed while he extracted the bufotenin from the skin and parotid glands of the ten toads he’d killed, dissected, and pinned out on the board in front of him.
After he’d removed the psychedelic drugs from the toads, he consulted a toxicology textbook to determine how much poison he would need for a lethal dose and found that he had more than enough bufotoxin to kill six people, let alone two.
Reading the description of the symptoms was very informative: hallucinations, vomiting, seizures, paralysis, and then ventricular fibrillation. As one book put it:
Often the hallucinations involve the sensation of bugs crawling across the victim’s skin or out of the bodily orifices. Frequently, those experiencing these symptoms will scratch furiously at their skin or attempt to scrub, slice or burn the bugs away.
So, it looked like the next two victims would die just as dramatically as Simona and Pasquino did in Emilia’s story, the seventh tale told on day four.
Given the delivery method he’d chosen, Giovanni couldn’t be certain if his victims would fatally poison themselves tonight or in the morning, but he was relatively certain that both of them would be dead before noon tomorrow.
Based on their habits, they would be away from home this afternoon. He could place the poison then. And if they changed their pattern, he would alter his plan. Maybe slip over later tonight while they were asleep. Either way, the story would play out just as it was supposed to.
The tragic squeaking and scratching of the last dying rat caught his attention. He watched it until it stopped quivering, just like he’d watched his grandmother stop twitching so many years before.
Finally, the rat stared wide-eyed and unblinking at the world, just like Grandma Nadine had done.
Just like all the people over the years in the different tales he’d told.
The snake opened its jaws and began to swallow its meal.
Giovanni laid the two syringes full of bufotoxin in a narrow metal case, snapped it shut, and slipped it into his duffel bag.
Then he left the storage facility and, since he had a few arrangements to make before the last four stories began, drove to his place of employment where no one knew, no one had any idea, who he really was.
And where, in the greatest irony of all, he was trusted implicitly with people’s lives every day.
70
Tessa was showered, dressed, and sitting at my parents’ kitchen table waiting for me when I arrived at their house with the diary.
She was sipping a glass of chilled orange juice and had a half-eaten grapefruit in front of her, and although I expected her to ask me where I’d been or complain that I’d dragged her out of bed and made her change in the car, all she said was, “So, um… do you have it?”
I couldn’t think of anything touching or profound to say, so I simply handed Christie’s diary to her and watched her reaction.
She accepted it quietly, stared at it. Turned it over in her hands.
Christie had used her diary partly as a scrapbook, pasting snippets of letters, notes, and postcards inside, all of which made the book fat and lumpy and left the binding straining at the lock. But it gave the diary character, and by the look on Tessa’s face, it seemed to appeal to her inquisitive nature.
After a few moments when she didn’t say anything, I asked her, “Where’s Martha?”
“At church.” Tessa still hadn’t looked up from the diary.
“She left you alone?”
“She asked if I wanted her to stay home, but I told her I’d be safe with those two undercover cops in the car across the street watching the house.”
“How did you-?”
She rolled her eyes. “Puh-lease.”
OK, so I would need to have a little talk with those two officers.
“So, you fly out today again?” Tessa was looking at the diary, but speaking to me.