and Sean had been glad to let me borrow the pickup: “As long as it doesn’t end up like my sled.”
“Gotcha.”
Now, Jake and I were about ten minutes from the sawmill, but so far, nothing had come up on the iPad’s tracking program. Nothing at all.
So maybe this was a fool’s errand. Another dead end.
Maybe.
Maybe not.
I’d spent the first part of the drive giving Jake my account of what happened at the base. In the end, he suggested that Rusk was probably Valkyrie. “He’s a hacker,” Jake said. “He’s got a Carnegie Mellon computer science degree.”
“But it doesn’t fit. He’s a hacktivist, that’s all. There’s nothing else in his background that matches Lien-hua’s preliminary profile for Valkyrie.”
“And what profile is that?”
“She believed Valkyrie would have law enforcement or covert operative training, be highly intelligent, well- traveled, midforties, linguistically skilled. Male.”
“That’s not much, Pat, hardly anything. Maybe Valkyrie is just a code name Manoji was using, or it could’ve been Cassandra after all.”
“That doesn’t explain how Valkyrie showed up in Russia last May. Terry was in a coma and Cassandra was in prison at the time.”
Jake quietly monitored the iPad, and I had the sense he didn’t want to discuss Valkyrie’s identity anymore just then.
Wait.
The mind has to deal with guilt somehow. When it’s overwhelming, escaping reality is sometimes the only choice.
Alexei might still be in the tunnel and offline. Or, he might not be.
Yes. Bait.
“Send me an email,” I said, “asking me to confirm that I know Valkyrie’s identity. Make it seem like I’m about to reveal to the Bureau who Valkyrie is.”
“Send you an email?”
“To my Bureau account. Go ahead. Let’s see how often Alexei checks my messages.”
I found my thoughts flitting through the events of the night, and I remembered that earlier I’d made a mental note to follow up on any videos that might’ve been found of people in the Midwest being killed while Basque was in prison.
“When you’re done with the email, pull up the Federal Digital Database. There are a few things I’d like you to check.”
A couple moments later he finger-scrolled to a browser. “What do you need?”
I gave him the search terms I had in mind-the dates, the locations, the types of weapons, the victimology.
“What are we looking for, exactly?”
“Reiser’s killer.”
We tried a variety of searches but in the end didn’t find anything helpful. If there were more victims, more videos, they hadn’t been found.
Dead end.
“Think this through with me, Jake. Fourteen years ago we discover two sets of DNA at the scene of Basque’s murders but aren’t able to identify the second set until the homicide last June when you matched it to Reiser. Lien- hua and I were wondering if the records could have been falsified.”
“But how?”
“Once Basque got out of prison, if he reconnected with his old partner and that person had access to the records, they could’ve set up Reiser by faking or switching the DNA analysis.”
Jake considered that. “We could pull up a list of people who’ve accessed the case files or DNA records. See if there are any red flags.”
With all of the lawyers, officers, and agents involved, I knew the list would be extensive, but it was worth a look. “Do it.”
We could cross-reference the names against work schedules, the timing of the crimes, their locations, travel times from the crime scenes to people’s residences…
Jake finished typing but said nothing. There was a stalled moment of silence.
“What is it?” I asked.
“One person’s name keeps coming up.”
“Who?”
“Torres.”
“What? Anton?”
“Yeah. He’s been in there half a dozen times. Including earlier this week. On Tuesday.”
“That makes sense,” I said, defending Torres. “He was doing prelim work for the mission on the trailer park.”
“And it looks like he accessed the files two days before I identified the DNA sample last summer.”
Torres was left alone in the kitchen when you and he entered the trailer. He could’ve planted No, it couldn’t be Torres.
Three miles to go. Six, maybe seven minutes.
Torres is the one who told you there was DNA on one of the knives from a murder in DC, he sent you the videos, he lives in DC “Wait a minute,” I said. “The clippings. The news footage. Yesterday you said Reiser was a scrapbooker.”
“Yeah, and the ERT found-”
“Yes, yes, but which news shows? Which papers? It wasn’t just cable news. It was local.”
“Sure, WKOW in Madison, WTMJ in Milwaukee. We went through all this already today, Pat.”
I remembered Lien-hua’s words about someone who seems innocent for the whole story but then turns out to be the killer.
“But if they were local papers, the killer would’ve most likely chosen ones that were delivered to the places he lived…” I was thinking aloud. “Recorded news shows he could watch from home.”
“Okay…?” Jake said expectantly. “And?”
“Torres never lived in Wisconsin or Illinois.” Caught by my thoughts I said, “Oh. Yes. Basque’s partner left his footprints.”
“Where?”
“Here.” I tapped the map on the screen of his iPad. “Everywhere.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s been leaving them all over the place-Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, DC–I just haven’t been studying them carefully enough.”
“You’re not making any sense, Pat.”
“Okay, overlay the people on that list with the locations of-”
The GPS program sounded its alert.
The ankle bracelet was above the surface.
Jake swept his finger across the iPad screen. “Chekov’s at the sawmill,” he announced. “And he’s on the move.”
101
I brought the pickup sliding to a stop on the edge of the lumberyard, and Jake and I leapt out.
“Which way?” I said.
