restroom, locked herself in one of the stalls, pulled out her notebook, and let the words that were raging inside her bleed onto the page: in the bin of a thousand heartaches, i place my feathered pain.
Then she stuffed her notebook back into her satchel and snapped rubber bands against her wrist until all the ones she had with her were broken. And then Tessa Bernice Ellis began to cry where no one else could see her, locked inside the shiny steel walls of the bathroom stall.
71
It was hard for me to leave the airport.
After dropping Tessa off, I’d sat in the parking garage for nearly fifteen minutes, wondering if I should go back inside to try and talk with her some more. But I finally realized that I was doing the hardest thing, but the best one. If I went back in there, she wouldn’t learn her lesson. I needed to be firm and stand my ground. Over this past year I’ve been learning that being a dad is a much harder job than catching serial killers. Much, much harder.
And sitting there in the parking garage, I began to realize something else: sometimes when you’re a parent, your love has to be tough and uncomfortable, and it has to sting if it’s going to prove to be real and last for the long haul. Love that’s too timid to ache isn’t love at all.
However, as I left the airport, I knew I wasn’t ready to meet with Margaret yet. So, I decided to do the thing I do best-instead of going to police headquarters, I drove back to the site of Austin Hunter’s death to have a look around.
When I arrived, I parked in the same place Lien-hua and I had parked the previous night when we rushed here to try and find-and then to save-Austin Hunter. I stepped out of the car and visually scanned the area, checking sight lines, comparing the scene now to what it had looked like last night.
Why here? Why did Hunter die here?
I closed my eyes and pictured the roads of San Diego, the arteries of the city, intersecting, interconnecting. I knew Hunter’s cognitive map of the city better than anyone, and now, despite my natural tendencies, I tried to climb into his mind, to think like he did.
But I couldn’t do it.
I tried layering in the locations of the fires, and the address of his apartment, and the trolley depots he’d used to leave the scenes; then I mixed in the wind conditions last night, and the most likely place he would have come ashore after swimming across the bay…
But as hard as I tried, I just couldn’t figure out why Austin Hunter had let the police corner him where they did. He was too smart to get trapped in the middle of a road by mistake. This man had spent two years teaching survival and evasion tactics to Navy SEALs, and this location didn’t seem to make any sense. I knew he wouldn’t have led them to the rendezvous point, that much was for sure. So why here?
I opened my eyes and studied the area again.
The device. He wouldn’t have left Building B-14 without the device.
But he didn’t have any kind of device with him, except for the phone, when the police surrounded him. We could certainly analyze it, but when I’d used it, there didn’t seem to be anything unusual about it. I couldn’t imagine that all this fuss was about a prepaid cell phone.
Austin was a pro.
A pro.
I didn’t know what the device was, or exactly what it did, but if Austin was going to steal it, the device would need to be mobile and, if the size of an MEG machine was any indication, the device would have to be at least large enough to be easily seen.
So, if Austin had it with him, where would he have hidden it?
A place it would be safe.
A place he could get to later.
Just before he was killed, he’d tilted his knife at Lien-hua. I walked to the place where I’d been standing; I pictured where Austin and Lien-hua had been.
“It’s over,” he’d said, but I didn’t think he was talking about his life, and I didn’t think he was threatening Lien-hua.
It’s over.
What’s over?
I glanced at the empty stretch of curb beside me. A car had been there last night. The car with the parking tickets, the one Dunn kicked.
The one he’d ordered taken to impound.
It’s over… It’s over…
Could Austin have been talking about the device? The device is over…
Austin pointed. He pointed.
Oh.
The device is over… there.
Austin had put it in the car.
It was time for me to pay a visit to the police impound yard.
When Tessa finally stepped out of the restroom and walked to her departure gate, she heard the poofy-haired airline lady who was working at Gate 24 announce that their departure time was delayed because of mechanical problems.
Great. Just great.
Tessa pulled out her cell phone and slouched into one of the airport chairs, ergonomically designed to cause permanent back problems. She tried not to think about how stupid the TSA rules about soap were, how stupid this whole trip had been, or how much her tattooed arm was hurting. Or her wrist where she’d snapped the rubber bands.
Or any other part of her body, like specifically, maybe, hello, her heart.
So some of it was her fault. So what? Patrick still wasn’t being fair. He wasn’t. He just wasn’t. She pulled out her phone, scrolled through some of her email, and was texting a couple friends to tell them she was coming back two days early when a white-haired woman sitting in the chair beside her said, “Good afternoon, dear.”
Tessa didn’t want to be rude. “Hi.”
“Are you going to Denver too?”
You think? Could that possibly be why I’m sitting at this gate?
“Um, yeah.”
“I wonder…” The woman had tender wrinkles around her eyes and a soft grandmotherly smile. “I wonder if you wouldn’t mind letting me leave my purse and my bag here? If you wouldn’t care to watch them for a few minutes?” Tessa saw a cane resting beside the woman’s leg. “It’s such a task taking them to and from the bathroom.”
“Yeah, no problem.”
The woman handed her a smile. “Thank you. That’s very sweet of you.”
Then the lady, who was starting to remind Tessa of her second grade teacher, stood up slowly. And, using her cane for balance, she left her purse and her carry-on bag beside Tessa’s chair and walked gingerly toward the restroom.
At the impound yard, I learned that a video camera had been found in the abandoned car’s trunk and had been handed over to the evidence room at police headquarters. I had a feeling it was much more than a video camera.
When I arrived at headquarters, I took my laptop with me to the second floor, walked past the infirmary, and found room 211: the evidence room.
At most police stations, everyone calls this facility “the evidence room” rather than “rooms,” but nearly always, the “room” consists of a maze-like series of many narrow rooms, packed with shelves that are piled high with boxes labeled by year, by case, by type of crime. The officer in charge of the evidence room, a bearded man named Riley Kernigan, who appeared to be serving his last stint with the force before retirement, lowered his
