The Last Commandment

by Scott Shepherd

  “He just left my office an hour ago for the airport. He probably isn’t on his plane yet. Maybe we can catch him and see if he can change his plans as well.”

  “I’m not sure we want to overwhelm the poor girl,” said Everett. “Besides, wouldn’t it be wonderful for the three of us to be together? Just the family seeing in the New Year?”

  “It’s a nice thought but—”

  “What’s stopping you, Austin? Your daughter needs you. Come over and be here for her. Set things right between the two of you. Then maybe we can work on Rachel about seeing the light with the good detective.”

  Grant looked at the clock. “It’s already ten. I’m not sure I can get there.”

  “There’s a three o’clock nonstop to Geneva leaving out of Heathrow. You get in at five-thirty and can be at the house around eight. Plenty of time to have a few drinks, eat a nice dinner, and still sing ‘Auld Lang Syne.’”

  “You’ve got it all figured out.”

  “No one’s going to care if you play hooky your last day at the Yard. Just run home, pack what you need—and off you go.”

  “You really think this is a good idea?”

  “It’s our Rachel, Austin. Do you need another reason?”

  Grant was tempted to mention Everett’s house being five thousand feet above sea level but wasn’t in the mood for his brother’s taunts. Besides, how many times had Everett told him his house was on the ground?

  The next thing Grant knew, he told his brother he would come.

  “Fantastic! Rachel will be ecstatic,” said Everett.

  “I certainly hope so.”

  32

  Heathrow was a complete mess.

  Frankel exited the cab at the British Airways terminal to find extremely long lines and impatient passengers. He figured that people were flying all over the world trying to get to some party before the clock struck midnight.

  But he was in no rush to get back to New York. It wasn’t like he was going to stand in Times Square with two million revelers to watch the ball drop and then spend hours trying to get out of the world’s largest human sardine can.

  He didn’t care where he was when the next year started. If it weren’t in a Swiss town at the base of the Matterhorn, where the object of his desire was staying, he might as well spend it cramped up in a coach seat above the Atlantic.

  And that was the fate he seemed headed for. Once he got through the interminable security line and arrived at his gate, he discovered his flight had been delayed four hours because of equipment trouble back in Chicago.

  He plopped down on a chair next to eight-year-old twins, a cute-as-a-button tow-haired British boy and girl totally immersed in a video game and puzzle book respectively while their parents kept looking alternately at their watches, then at the arrival and departure board.

  Frankel took a swig from the Fiji water he’d bought at a kiosk and took out his laptop. His first inclination was to log on to the airport wireless and catch up on the slew of emails he’d ignored since being in the UK, figuring it would eat up time.

  Suddenly he had a different thought. He reached into his carry-on for the Gone with the Wind DVD Everett had given him. Frankel flipped it over to check out the running time—three hours and forty-one minutes. Or, three hours and fifty-four minutes allowing for the overture, intermission, entr’acte (whatever the hell that was), and exit music.

  It certainly beat responding to people he was in no hurry to get back to. He placed the DVD in the disc drive, plugged in earbuds, and hit play. Frankel settled in to see what the big deal was with Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler. He’d been maybe eight when his father dragged him to a Jersey retro house to see it. The only thing he remembered was it being super long and Clark Gable saying he didn’t give a damn to someone.

  It took Grant five minutes to pack a bag once he returned to the Maida Vale house. Given his dislike of higher elevations, he wasn’t a winter sports enthusiast, so he didn’t need to cram a parka or ski clothes in his luggage. He settled for a sweater Allison had given him five Christmases ago and the overcoat he had on.

  He spent more time looking for Everett’s blasted house key.

  Right before they’d hung up, his brother had asked if Grant could stop by the Hampstead house. Everett and Rachel had been in such a hurry to catch their flight the previous day, his brother had forgotten to take his ski boots. “They’re custom made and it’s not like I can head down the slope in my tennies,” Everett had said.

  Why anyone would want to hurl themselves down the side of a mountain was lost on Grant, but he wasn’t going to argue with Everett. It was easier to just get the house key, pop up to Hampstead, grab the damn shoes, and head to Heathrow.

  His brother told him where to find them in the basement and said while Grant was there, he should pull the bottle of ’96 Dom Perignon out of the fridge down there, as he’d been saving it for a special occasion.

  “Seriously?” Grant had asked.

  “It has a ninety-seven-point rating, worth a small fortune. If I’m not going to pop it open to ring in the New Year and celebrate your retirement, when else?”

  Another battle not worth fighting.

  He spent ten minutes turning his kitchen upside down looking for the key Everett had given him way back when, only to remember it was in the top drawer of the desk. Grant sighed, went in and found it, then grabbed his bag and coat.

  The things we do for family.

  He locked up the Maida Vale house, found a cab, and headed up the hill to his brother’s house in Hampstead.

  Frankel put the movie on pause and rubbed his eyes.

  The film certainly took its time to get going. He was already an hour in and nothing had happened. Wasn’t it supposed to be about the Civil War? Where were all the battle scenes? What about all those bodies laid out for as far as the eye could see in the picture on the back of the DVD?

  Instead, there were all these scenes with Scarlett pining after Ashley Wilkes, the man her cousin Melanie was going to marry. Some epic alright. It was giving him an epic headache. He dug into his bag for some Tylenol and washed them down with the water, then looked over to see the twin girl staring at him.

  “Are you sick?” she asked.

  “Nah. Just have a bit of a headache.”

  “If you were, my mummy would make me wear a mask—and I hate wearing masks.”

  “You’re good.” He nodded at the book in her lap. “What’ve you got there?”

  “My puzzles.”

  He saw she was using a red pen to draw lines between a series of dots that turned into various animals. “Connect the Dots. I used to do those when I was your age. Is that your favorite?”

  “I like the hidden ones better,” she told him.

  “Hidden ones?”

  She found a black and white drawing of an English country garden. At the top of the page were the words Hidden Figures and Numbers .

  “See how it looks like a garden? It’s really filled with letters and numbers.” Her eyes suddenly widened. “See, here’s a K!”

  Sure enough, embedded in the whorls of the tree bark was the letter K . The girl circled it in red with glee.

  “And I think that’s an upside down seven right beside it,” Frankel pointed out.

  “It is!” She circled that one as well. “You’re pretty good at this.”

  “Beginner’s luck.”

  The two of them hunted for digits and the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Most were easy to find, especially the numbers, but Frankel held back and let the little girl (whose name was Claire and her brother, whose eyes never left his video game, was Jack) locate the majority, giving her a hint every now and then.

  A few of the letters—the T and X in particular—proved more difficult.

  “That’s because it’s easy for them to look like something else,” said Claire.

  Both letters turned out to be hidden in the lawn, looking more like scribbles than members of the alphabet.


  Eventually, Claire’s folks said they should go eat. They managed to tear Jack away from his video game and Claire thanked Frankel for the puzzle help.

  “My pleasure,” he said and watched them toddle off through the terminal.

  It was a nice distraction but the longer they had played, the more Frankel felt he’d missed something. But for the life of him, he couldn’t remember what it was. The more he taxed his mind, the further it slipped away. It’d probably hit him thirty-five thousand feet in the air where he couldn’t do anything about it.

  He picked up the laptop again and let out a sigh. He hoped the battle would start soon and Scarlett would stop whining. But he highly doubted it.

  Grant let himself into Everett’s house and headed directly into the kitchen. Opening the door next to the pantry, he flipped on the adjacent light switch.

  It illuminated a set of wooden stairs that led down to a rather large basement that ran half the length of the Hampstead house.

  The room wasn’t quite a candidate for that Hoarders show Grant caught a few times on the telly, but there was plenty packed inside. There were stacks of books and an equal number of documents and papers that Everett had stored for years.

  Grant located the ski boots easily enough in a corner. Everett had been very specific about where to find them. He then moved across the room to the large refrigerator sitting flush against the wall.

  Grant knew his brother used it to keep chilled Chardonnays and sparkling wines, to go with the racks of reds above it that composed Everett’s version of a wine cellar.

  Grant threw open the refrigerator door to grab the bottle of Dom.

  The minute Grant was back in the kitchen and had reception, he began dialing. Everett picked up after barely one ring.

  “Don’t you have a three o’clock plane to catch?”

  “Where’s Rachel?” Grant demanded.

  “In the other room. We just got back from our tour,” his brother responded calmly. “I take it you couldn’t find the Dom.”

  “You know bloody damn well I didn’t.”

  “But you found Monte Ferguson,” said Everett.

  Staring at him from inside the cleaned-out fridge, his throat slashed and a Roman numeral IX carved into his forehead.

  Just when he thought this horrendous year couldn’t get any worse, Grant was trying to come to grips with the ghastliest fact of all.

  My brother is the Commandment Killer.

  Everett had been leading him around by the nose from the very beginning.

  Starting in the library down the hall over a game of chess where Everett connected the first three murders he had committed, all the way to stuffing the reporter from the Daily Mail into the fridge in his basement below.

  “Why Ferguson?” asked Grant.

  With countless questions racing through his brain, it was the first Grant thought to utter.

  “Thou shalt not bear false witness,” responded Everett, quoting the Ninth Commandment. “One shouldn’t make up stories about other people.”

  “The interview with Prior Silver?” realized Grant. “But he didn’t even write it. You did!”

  “About time you finally caught on,” Everett taunted. “He might not have written it, but he certainly told that editor of his to go and publish it.”

  Grant remembered Michaels telling him how frightened Ferguson had sounded on the phone. “Because you must have forced him to do it.”

  “I might have been holding a knife to his throat at the time, but he didn’t say no,” Everett said. “I must admit you were getting close when you thought it was Ferguson who made it all up and faked Silver’s suicide.”

  “Right idea, wrong lunatic.”

  Everett chuckled. The fact that his brother didn’t deny it was chilling.

  “You have a twisted sense of logic,” Grant told Everett. “Washed up rock and rollers, priests just doing their job . . .”

  “Means to an end.”

  “Victim number ten?” asked Grant.

  “X marks the spot, as they say.”

  “Care to tell me who?”

  Everett just laughed again. “You’re going to miss your plane if we keep this up,” he said. “And if you’re thinking of calling the Swiss police on your way over here, I would seriously reconsider. Especially if you want to see Rachel. It would be a damn shame if you didn’t—considering how happy she would be to see you.”

  Grant felt his entire body go cold. “You wouldn’t dare, Everett.”

  “I’ve been known to improvise when the need arises. Just ask Sergeant Hawley.”

  “Lay one hand on her and I’ll slit your throat myself.”

  “Like I told you before—don’t make promises you can’t keep, Commander.”

  There was a click, and Everett was gone.

  Grant screamed in anguish at the top of his lungs.

  Rachel had found the cold crisp walk through the quaint streets of Zermatt invigorating. She’d returned to her uncle’s feeling refreshed—her resolutions to keep Frankel and her father in her life gave hope to the new year on the horizon.

  After hanging up her parka in the guest room closet and changing into sweats, she walked into the living room just as her uncle put down his cell phone.

  “Who was that?” she asked.

  “Your father, actually.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Absolutely.”

  But Rachel could see the mischievous look in her uncle’s eye. “What is it?”

  “What’s what?”

  “What aren’t you telling me?” asked Rachel.

  “It was supposed to be a surprise, but you’ll find out soon enough.” Everett made a grandiose gesture. “Your father is on his way here for New Year’s Eve.”

  “Really?”

  “I called and invited him. I wasn’t wrong to do that, was I?”

  Rachel threw her arms around Everett and gave him a big hug.

  “You’re the best uncle ever!”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” he said. “But we should get the garret ready.”

  “The garret?”

  Her uncle pointed toward the ceiling. “The apartment in the attic. It’s where the two of us stayed when we were boys. I thought it might make him feel at home.”

  “Sounds like a splendid idea,” said Rachel. “How can I help?”

  Frankel had paused the movie again at the intermission and was getting another bottle of Fiji water at a nearby kiosk when his cell rang.

  He quickly pulled it from his pocket—hoping it might be Rachel.

  One look at the caller ID told him it wasn’t—but he answered right away.

  “Austin?”

  “I took the chance I’d catch you before your plane left,” said Grant.

  “It got delayed a few hours,” Frankel told him. “What’s going on?”

  He took a seat halfway through Grant’s dumbfounding download because he wasn’t sure his legs could support him under the weight of what the commander was telling him.

  Everett Grant was who they’d been looking for all along.

  As insane as that sounded, there were certain things Frankel realized he couldn’t deny and was already kicking himself about. Starting with the fact that Everett put his brother onto the Old Testament tie-in to the murders.

  “You’ll come to Zermatt with me?” Grant asked.

  “Do you even have to ask?”

  They were going after Rachel.

  He could hear Grant telling the cab driver the quickest way to Heathrow. “I should be there in forty minutes,” Grant said after giving him the Swiss Air info.

  “I’ll have my ticket and meet you at the gate.”

  “Thank you, John.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” responded Frankel. “Did Everett give you a clue as to who he’s going after?”

  “Nothing specific,” said Grant. “All he said was ‘X marks the spot.’”

  X marks the spot, thought Frankel.

  Something ab
out that.

  X marks the spot.

  “John? Are you still there?”

  But Frankel was barely hearing him. He was flashing on the puzzle he had been helping Claire with an hour ago and the thing that had been bothering him.

  Hidden Figures and Numbers.

  “John . . .?”

  And suddenly he had it. Oh shit.

  “I’ll call you right back, Austin. Five minutes.”

  Before Grant could protest, Frankel hung up and went back to his laptop.

  Rachel went up the steps to the attic, her arms laden with a fresh set of sheets, blankets, and pillows.

  She reached out with one hand, turned the doorknob, and stepped into the room that had been refurbished many years before—back when her father and uncle were just little boys.

  It was fairly dark, as the window shades were down.

  She flicked on the light switch. The room was illuminated in a moody glow.

  Rachel gasped and dropped the bedding on the floor.

  And began to sob.

  A distressed Austin Grant was in the back of the taxi thinking of calling the detective back when he received a text from him.

  Grant clicked it open and found Frankel had sent him a picture he hadn’t looked at in least a week. Not since they’d found it in a stolen car in Far Rockaway.

  It was the newspaper photo of Grant that had been crossed out over and over with a black marker.

  Grant was still staring at it when his cell phone rang again.

  “You got what I sent?” asked Frankel the moment that Grant answered.

  “I did. But I’m not exactly sure what you wanted me to see.”

  “It’s the markings, Austin. When you first look at the photo, it seems like a crazy person just went nuts and scribbled all over it in anger.”

  “I hate to say it, but I think you just described my brother.”

  “But these aren’t just scribbles. They’re X s.”

  X s.

  Like the Roman numeral for ten, Grant suddenly realized.

  “And if you take the time to count them,” continued Frankel. “You’ll see there are ten of them. The big one on top—and nine more underneath.”