cred with Torres, and he didn’t argue with me, just took a moment to peer through the binocs again. “Those are trailer homes,” I added. “A shoot-out would mean-”
“Yeah. Rounds flying through the walls,” he said grimly.
While he considered what I’d said, Agent Jake Vanderveld, the NCAVC profiler who was working this case with me, sauntered toward us. Broad shoulders. Blond hair. Meticulously trimmed mustache. I was thirty-seven, he was a few years younger. He nodded a greeting and slapped Torres on the shoulder.
“Where’re we at?” Jake asked.
“Still deciding.” Torres lowered the binoculars.
“Play it safe, Anton,” I said. “Have people in place, but then-”
He made his decision, shook his head. “No. I’m not comfortable with it. I want my men in there first. You can follow close, right after the team, but I want to secure the premises first.”
“Hang on,” Jake spoke up, a little too authoritatively. “This is all a game to Reiser. He’ll want to taunt Pat.” Jake had helped lead us here and knew Reiser’s file better than almost anyone. “If we send in a man in civilian clothes, Reiser’ll think he has the upper hand. Play to his weakness, his arrogance, and you’ll get close.”
It was unusual for me and Jake to agree about anything, but apparently this time we were on the same wavelength.
Torres worked his jaw back and forth for a moment, then let out a small sigh. “All right. Listen. I go in with you, Pat. But I enter the trailer first.”
“Plainclothes?” I said.
He nodded.
“Agreed.” I stood. “And Travis Reiser might be the only key to finding Basque, so tell your team minimum force. We need to take him alive.”
“That’s not the priority here.”
Basque had eluded us for six months now, and if we were right about Reiser, he might flip on Basque, turn him in. “Keep him alive, Anton.”
“If this little prick takes any aggressive action, we’re dropping him.”
Though I wanted more reassurance that the SWAT team would hold off from taking Reiser down, they’d been trained, as I had, to fire at a target until it’s no longer a threat. That wasn’t the outcome I was looking for, but I knew Torres was right. You don’t take chances, especially with someone like Reiser.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We all quieted our cells, one of the SWAT guys distributed radios to us, small, nearly invisible patches you wear just behind your ear, and while Torres changed into civilian clothes, I went to get some body armor.
2
Torres by my side.
Reiser’s pale yellow trailer sixty meters ahead of us.
The air-crisp, bitingly cold.
We knew if we pulled our guns at this point it would increase our perceived threat level, so we kept them holstered as we walked, as we scanned the area. “So, you asked her yet?” Torres said, keeping his voice low.
“Asked her?”
“Lien-hua.”
I glanced his way. “Who told you about that?”
“Little birdie.”
“Ralph.”
“Okay, a big birdie.”
I went back to scrutinizing the park. “If you must know. I’m waiting for the right time.”
“The right time.”
“Yes.”
“I’m telling you, don’t be nervous, bro. You’ll do fine.”
“I’m not nervous.”
“Mm-hmm.” He crunched along the road beside me, sturdy, confident but not brash. I realized I was glad he was with me. “Just don’t put it off too long. You only live once, you know.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Forty meters to Reiser’s trailer.
Though I didn’t want to, I eased aside thoughts of Lien-hua and carefully observed the park.
Despite the weather, several small faces were staring at me through the torn screen door of the trailer home that lay directly across the road. Abruptly, a woman pulled the children back into the shadows and swung the screen door, then the trailer door shut.
I didn’t like this.
Any of it.
The trailer park brought back a swarm of dark memories from a crime scene fourteen years ago when I was a Milwaukee police detective and was forced to view the kinds of things no one should ever have to see: the body of Jasmine Luecke in her trailer home-or more precisely, what was left of her body, laid out gruesomely in the hallway.
The aftermath of one of Richard Devin Basque’s crimes.
There were sixteen victims that we knew of. All young women. He kept them alive for as long as twelve hours while he surgically removed their lungs piece by piece and ate them, making the dying women watch as he did.
When I finally cornered him in an abandoned slaughterhouse in Milwaukee, he was holding his scalpel over his final victim, Sylvia Padilla. She was still alive when I arrived. Which, even after all these years, made the memory even more troubling.
Thirty meters.
I hadn’t been able to save her-I doubted anyone could have-but I did manage to apprehend Basque, and he was eventually convicted, sent to prison, and spent thirteen years behind bars, most of it in solitary confinement.
But then, just over a year ago, the Seventh District Court announced Basque was going to receive a retrial after “a careful review of the culpatory DNA evidence and eyewitness testimony pertinent to the case.”
And unbelievably, at the conclusion of his retrial last May, he was found not guilty and released from prison with official apologies from the judge, the warden, and even the governor.
Less than a month later, Basque started killing again.
This time with an accomplice.
Fifteen meters to the trailer.
Upon review of the digitized case files, Jake discovered that DNA found at the scene of the June homicide matched previously unidentified DNA at four of Basque’s earlier crimes, and that’s what led us to Travis Reiser.
I was forced to concede that Basque might have had an accomplice all along.
Since June I’d linked three other murders to Basque and Reiser, and if they really had been working together from the start, I couldn’t help but wonder how many other crimes Reiser might have committed by himself in the years since Basque’s arrest and initial conviction.
“Listen,” I said into my mic. “This man can lead us to Basque. Be prudent. Don’t get trigger happy.”
In the silence following my words, Torres reiterated, “You heard him. Wait for my signal.”
The team confirmed over the radios that they understood, and Torres and I arrived at Travis Reiser’s jaundice-colored trailer. “Puke yellow,” Torres muttered. “How appropriate.”
We took the steps up to the front door slowly, but my heart was racing.
My friend Ralph Hawkins-an ex-Army Ranger who now headed up the NCAVC, and apparently the guy who’d mentioned my engagement plans to Torres-once told me that fear was one of the key ingredients to courage. “If
