The Patrick Bowers Files - 05 - The Queen

by Steven James

  “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.

  A few utility lights pinioned high on telephone poles tried to illuminate different sections of the lumberyard, but through the wild, blowing snow, everything looked wispy and half real, more like a painting than reality.

  Pyramids of logs. Lonely buildings. Shadows lurking everywhere.

  Jake glanced at his iPad, then pointed toward the sawmill building, the one with the conveyor belts, sorting stations, high-powered blades, and mammoth grinder that chewed logs into pulp.

  I took the lead, and we crossed the yard quickly but cautiously, weapons out. We’d called Tait on the way to get backup over here, but now Jake phoned him again to confirm they were on the way.

  The lumberyard was vacant. No movement in the night.

  Though I tried to direct all of my thoughts here, now, on finding Alexei, I couldn’t help but think about the Reiser case.

  Torres accessed the files?

  Torres—

  No. That was too obvious. Someone skilled enough to be able to overlay digitized DNA records would be careful enough to use someone else’s ID number. So, a hacker? An FBI agent? Someone who could—

  We reached the sawmill.

  Jake confirmed that the ankle bracelet was inside the building, then slipped his iPad under his jacket. Leaning against the door with my shoulder, I pressed it open and was once again overwhelmed by the smell of sweet pine and sawdust, just like I’d been when I first visited the mill. All the lights were off.

  “Alexei?” I called.

  Silence. No sound except the wind repositioning itself outside, whistling through cracks in the ceiling.

  The killer taped local news shows.

  Clipped local papers.

  Local.

  Reiser lived in La Crosse, Oshkosh, Superior, but the papers and news programs were from Rockford, Milwaukee, Madison—

  Jake found a light switch, and the sawmill flicked into view, illuminated by a series of yellowish bulbs high overhead.

  The ankle bracelet lay less than three meters away on the ground. A handsaw had been discarded nearby.

  “He’s close,” I whispered to Jake, then I called into the cold air of the sawmill, “Alexei!” I scrutinized the area. “Come on out. Don’t make me shoot you.”

  Jake edged left toward one of the workstations.

  Lien-hua noted that the killer would be less dominant, more easily manipulated than Basque . . . He accessed the digitized files, early last summer, right after Dr. Renée Lebreau’s murder, lived in—

  Oh.

  Fire coursed through my thoughts, bringing everything—the facts, the hypotheses, the duty to the truth, bringing it all into focus.

  Sex and violence. The killer’s psychological history will include a close association between sex and violence.

  Be always open to the unlikely.

  I wished I was wrong, hoped I was.

  But—

  Who asked to work the Reiser case? Who first reviewed the digitized case files, matched Reiser’s DNA? Who lived in Rockford and Madison before moving to DC? And in Cincinnati fourteen years ago—

  “Jake,” I said softly. “Where is the Business Courier from? It’s from Cincinnati, isn’t it?” I looked behind me, but he wasn’t there.

  “Jake?” I heard shuffled movement to my right and turned.

  Just in time to see Jake Vanderveld, Basque’s accomplice, bring the shovel down toward my head.

  102

  I woke up on the conveyor belt to the wood grinder. My head was pounding and it took me a moment to regain my senses. When I tried to move, I realized my injured ankle was restrained, plastic-cuffed to the reticulated chain running along the side of the belt.

  Awkwardly, I managed to roll onto my stomach.

  Jake stood beside the control panel ten meters away adjusting the instruments. I felt my pockets; he’d taken my phone, keys, gun. All I had left was my flashlight.

  “Where’s Alexei, Jake?” I touched my head where the shovel had hit me. Couldn’t help but wince.

  Jake looked my way. “Oh, Pat. Welcome back. Haven’t seen Chekov. I’m sure he’s long gone by now.” Both of our guns sat on the workbench in front of Jake. “So, the Business Courier? From when I lived in Cincinnati? That’s what did it, huh?”

  “You should have been more careful with your scrapbooking. You saved the newspaper clippings and recorded local news coverage from the places you lived, not the ones where Reiser did. That’s not a very good way to set someone up.”

  “You couldn’t just leave well enough alone, could you, Pat? The DNA should have been enough. It would have been for most people, but not for you—”

  “Or Lien-hua. She knows too, or she will. She noticed it first.”

  “Lien-hua,” he said slowly. “I see.”

  I suddenly regretted mentioning her name.

  I tugged at my leg. I wasn’t going anywhere. “Counseling rape victims? You got a thrill out of that, didn’t you? Sex and violence. You just like watching women suffer. That’s why you taped Basque killing them. How many other women died while Basque was in prison?”

  “A few.” Then he corrected himself. “More than a few.”

  I felt my anger rising. “Other partners? Accomplices?”

  “None that are still alive.”

  How did he pull this off for so long!

  I remembered my conversation with my brother at lunch yesterday, when I’d considered the fact that every killer, every rapist is friends with someone, is trusted by someone, loved by someone.

  And my conclusion: You can never really know someone, not really; at times every one of us acts in ways that are inconceivable to others, that are unthinkable even to ourselves.

  How true—

  Jake was watching me curiously.

  “So what’s the story you’re going to use?” I didn’t have enough play w
ith my ankle to stand, but I was able to push myself to my knees. “Alexei killed me? You chased him, but he got away? Is that it?”

  “Something along those lines. Maybe that I was searching the sawmill office when Chekov attacked you down here. By the time I heard the motor running and managed to arrive, it was too late to stop your tragic, and rather grisly, death.” He contemplated that for a moment. “I should be able to make that fly. I’m pretty good with this sort of thing.”

  “Why not just shoot me?”

  “Come on, Pat, that really would be hard to explain, besides, by now you should know I like a little spectacle.”

  I thought of the videos, the soft chuckles of the person filming them. “Sooner or later,” I said, “you knew we would’ve caught on that Reiser wasn’t Richard’s partner. That’s why you killed him, so we’d stop looking, right? By killing him, you—”

  “Yes, yes. Case closed. But it didn’t quite work out like that, did it?” Sirens in the distance, still a few minutes out. “Okay, let’s get things rolling.”

  “And Albuquerque and St. Louis—you know which cases I’m talking about—you stalled out those investigations, didn’t you? To give the killers more time.”

  “Really, Pat. You should have been a profiler.” He took a long look at me. “And so, first, though, the matter of Lien-hua. If, as you said, she knows, I’ll have to hand her over to Basque, let him do what he does best. It should make for some really good footage. I always like those Asian girls. The way they writhe.”

  Anger.

  Cutting loose inside me.

  “Mmm. And what about Tessa? What shall we do with her? Oh, she’ll be devastated by the death of her stepfather and his girlfriend. Maybe I could send her the video of Lien-hua’s last few hours?” He paused, seemed to savor the thought. “No, as tantalizing as that is, I think watching that sweet little stepdaughter of yours squirm under Richard’s blade is just too enticing. I think we’ll do her too.”

  Easy, Pat, don’t lose it!

  I saw movement near the doorway, a dark blue parka, and I had an idea. “So you’re saying you’re going to kill a woman, kill a girl, just to watch them suffer? To watch them die?”

  “I can’t think of a better reason.”

  “Killing men isn’t enough for you? You turn to women and children?”

  “Patrick, trust me, the more helpless they are, the more satisfying it is.”

  “That was the wrong thing to say, Jake.”

  “Really?”

  “You’re going to regret threatening Lien-hua and Tessa.”

  He grinned. “Am I?”

  “Yes,” came a voice from the doorway. “Now, step away from the control board.” I heard the sound of a shell being slammed into the chamber of a shotgun.

  Alexei Chekov edged through the doorway, aiming the Remington 870 12-gauge from the gun rack in Sean’s pickup at Jake’s chest.

  He must’ve read my email.

  He’d come back.

  And Alexei Chekov does not take it lightly when people threaten women or children.

  103

  “Step back,” Alexei repeated to Jake. “I mean it.” Maybe Alexei didn’t typically use guns, but I was glad to see him holding one right now.

  Obviously surprised but not appearing intimidated, Jake held up his hands, backed away from the panel.

  “So, you enjoy killing women?” Alexei said. “Watching children suffer and squirm?”

  The smugness on Jake’s face evaporated. He said nothing.

  Keeping the gun on Jake, Alexei called to me, “Who is Valkyrie, Agent Bowers?”

  Oh no.

  Not good.

  Now Jake grinned. “Go on, Pat, tell him the truth. You don’t have any idea who Valkyrie is.”

  Alexei eyed me. “Is that true?”

  Not Terry. Not Cassandra.

  Would Becker have lied while he was dying, his skull crushed?

  No. I doubted that.

  So, not Becker.

  Rusk?

  “Well?”

  My thoughts tumbled over each other, roaming, curling, turning in quick cycles, flipping through the facts. I could feel it. Everything coming together. The clues, the case, like an intricate puzzle, all clicking into place.

  Whoever Valkyrie was he, or she, knew details of this mission, communicated with the Eco-Tech team.

  Code names by high-level operatives are rarely chosen indiscriminately. Valkyrie draws from images of death, eternity, beauty, marriage.

  Fluent in different languages. Male. He has a specialty in communication technology and hacking.

  Yes.

  “Agent Bowers?”

  To find out what lies at the core of someone’s personality, you need to know more than what he wants . . . Only when you know what someone most deeply regrets will you know what matters to him most.

  What he most deeply regrets . . .

  “Tell him, Pat,” Jake called. I said nothing and Jake went on, “In the car, Patrick had me send that email to his account noting that he knew who Valkyrie was—”

  The mind has to deal with guilt somehow. When it’s overwhelming, escaping reality is sometimes the only choice.

  “But he made that up. Just to lure you—”

  “I was speaking with Agent Bowers,” Alexei said coolly. “I’d like you to be quiet now. Quiet alive or quiet dead. You choose.”

  Jake said nothing.

  “Agent Bowers, tell—”

  But before Alexei could finish his sentence, Jake went for his gun, and then I was yelling for Alexei to Get down! but Jake snatched up his Glock, aimed, Alexei fired the shotgun, the slug hit Jake in the torso, and he jerked to the side, crumpling to the ground.

  Even if the magazine of the Remington 870 had a plug, Alexei had at least one shot left before he would need to reload. He turned the barrel toward me. “Who is Valkyrie?”

  Careful, Pat. His GRU psych profile noted his “volatile and irregular temperament.”

  “Alexei,” I ordered, “put down the shotgun and—”

  On the other side of the room I saw Jake rise to his feet and reach for the switch to the pulp grinder.

  “Behind you!” I yelled to Alexei.

  But it was too late. Jake flipped the switch, the engine sprang to life, the blades of the log grinder began to churn, and the conveyor belt I was cuffed to lurched forward, carrying me toward the spinning blades.

  Alexei trained the shotgun on Jake, but Jake fired again, sending him ducking for cover behind a workbench about three meters from the grinder. I could barely hear the shots over the roar of the motor.

  All Jake needed to do was hold Alexei off for a couple minutes. Then I would be dead, backup would be here, and Jake would be the hero—wounded in the line of duty while apprehending an internationally wanted assassin.

  As far as I knew, the only way to turn this wood grinder off was the switch beside Jake.

  It’s like a giant paper shredder.

  And shredders can be jammed.

  Hoping to stop the blade, I aimed my Maglite into the spinning blades, threw it in.

  For a fraction of a second, the machine stalled, but then, with a sheer, screeching noise, the blades chewed through the flashlight’s aluminum casing and batteries, sending shards of metal flying in every direction. Even four meters away I felt some of them blister across my face.

  But it’d worked for a moment—

  I just need something bigger. Something metal.

  I scanned the area for something big enough to stop the blade.

  The conveyor belt took me closer.

  Nothing. Nothing within reach.

  Hurry!

  Closer now. Every second closer.

  Yes!

  I pointed to the shotgun that Alexei held and shouted as loudly as I could for him to throw it to me. I doubted he heard the words, but he must’ve understood my gestures because he heaved the shotgun up to me across the aisle that stretched between us.

  Time see
med to slow as I rode the conveyor belt toward the blades and watched the shotgun rise through the air, parallel to the ground. I gauged my timing, reached for it, snagged the gun from its flight, swung the stock to my shoulder, and pivoted on my knee toward Jake.

  He was eyeing me down the barrel of his Glock—

  I aimed at his face.

  Squeezed the trigger.

  Dropped him.

  Then I spun and faced the shredder again. I raised the shotgun high, targeted the spinning blades, and thrust the barrel into the wood pulp grinder as hard as I could so it wouldn’t get kicked back out.

  With a high-pitched cry, the blades fought to power through the metal, but the barrel was too thick. Still, somehow, the machine managed to draw the gun in nearly two feet before jamming completely. The conveyor belt lurched to a stop, a wisp of sour smoke coughed from the grinder’s engine, and though they strained violently to devour the gun barrel, the blades no longer moved.

  When I looked toward the control panel, I saw that Alexei was already there. He punched the kill switch, and the engine powered down.

  “Nice shot, Agent Bowers.”

  “Nice throw.”

  He bent over Jake’s body. “I really thought that I . . . Aha.”

  He held up the shattered iPad that Jake had stuffed into his jacket when we were just outside the door. The slug had gone through it, but the iPad must have deflected it enough to strike Jake in a place that allowed him to live long enough to try to kill again.

  Sirens. Close. Maybe a mile out, maybe less.

  Alexei approached me. “Do you know who Valkyrie is?”

  I felt my heart hammering.

  He flicked out the bone gun and placed the device’s tip against the bone on the outside of my plastic-cuffed ankle.

  “Alexei, think about this—”

  “I’ll start with the calcaneus and work my way up. Do you know who Valkyrie is or don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  He tightened his grip on the bone gun, positioned it carefully against my heel. “Who is Valkyrie?”

  “You are.”

  Alexei stared at the agent. “What?”

  “You’re Valkyrie. You’re the one who killed Tatiana, and when you did, something happened inside of—”