The Knight

by Steven James

  But as she approached the house she saw that his car wasn’t there.

  Hmm.

  He might be out looking for her. How sweet.

  Well, once she got in the house she could see if he’d left a note for her, and if not, just check her voicemail. She turned on her Blackberry. Punched the garage door opener.

  Cruised inside.

  And then closed the door.

  Tessa hadn’t found any Paul Lansings in Minneapolis, Minnesota, so she’d expanded her search and eventually came up with eighty-two of them scattered throughout the country.

  She knew that her mom had attended college with her dad, so it was easy to see that in each of the cases, either the length of time the men had spent at their current address or their date of birth or the universities they’d attended precluded them from being her father.

  Finally, after the last one didn’t pan out, she let out a frustrated sigh.

  Dora was tweaking her hair. “Nothing, huh?”

  “No.”

  “So what now?”

  Tessa sighed. “I don’t know. It doesn’t look like he’s anywhere online, and it’s not like you can just erase your personal history. Once something gets posted on the Internet . . . You know.”

  Dora shrugged. “Could he have moved out of the country or something?”

  “Maybe.”

  For a moment, Dora found a way to chew her gum silently. “You don’t think, maybe, I mean . . . you know.”

  “What?”

  “You know, that he, um . . . well . . . that he died.”

  That was something Tessa hadn’t allowed herself to consider. “I don’t know,” she said softly. As she thought about that, she noticed that Dora had stopped working on her hair and was just staring blankly into the mirror.

  She gave Tessa a smile, but her eyes betrayed her.

  “What’s wrong?” Tessa asked her.

  “I was just thinking about him dying and I thought about . . . well . . . ”

  “Hannah.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Seriously, Dora. You have to stop beating yourself up about all that. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Dora was quiet.

  “You sent a text message. That’s it. That’s all you did. It was the other girl, the babysitter. She’s the one who left the baby alone . . .” Tessa could see this wasn’t helping, and going on describing everything would probably only make things worse. But before she could think of anything better to say, or consider the dark possibility of her father’s death anymore, she heard the front door pop open, and Patrick calling, “Tessa? Dora? You girls in here?”

  She and Patrick had been through enough hard times together, enough weird stepdaughter/stepfather stuff already. The last thing she needed right now was for him to find out she was looking for her real dad without discussing it with him first.

  She closed the webpage and then yelled down the stairs, “We’re up here.”

  Amy Lynn stepped into the kitchen and set her purse on the table.

  And saw a black duffel bag on the floor, next to the refrigerator.

  What in the—?

  But the footsteps behind her cut her off mid-thought.

  “Hello, Amy Lynn.” She knew the voice and spun and saw a man in a black ski mask. “Welcome to Day Four.”

  She gasped, couldn’t believe who it was, but before she could say a word, before she could move out of the way, he struck her, hard, in the face, and the world went dark.

  The door to Tessa’s room was half open and she could vaguely overhear Patrick opening and closing doors downstairs. He spoke with Martha for a moment, although it was too mumbly to catch what he was saying. Then he came pounding up the stairs and knocked once as he pressed her door all the way open. “Hey, Tessa. Dora.” His eyes scanned the room. He walked over and looked in the closet.

  “You girls all right?”

  OK, so that was a weird question. “Why wouldn’t we be?” she said. She folded her laptop shut. Dora tucked her legs under her on the bed. Tapped her finger anxiously against a pillow.

  “No reason.” Patrick looked like he was trying to figure out what to say next. He crossed the room toward the window. “Your exams go OK?”

  Tessa shrugged. “I guess so. But I might not get an A in chemistry. Just so you know.”

  “Well, that’ll be good for you. A little variety.” He stared intently at the street.

  “Way to steer me toward mediocrity.”

  “Anything I can do to help. Just a sec.” He left the room. The doors on the second floor opened and closed, then he returned and addressed Dora. “Hey, your dad called me. He said he needs to take care of a few things tonight and asked if you could stay here until tomorrow.”

  “Stay here?”

  “Yes. He wanted you to give him a call.”

  Dora looked a little concerned. She pulled out her cell and elbowed past Patrick, who watched her for just a second and then looked back at Tessa.

  “What’s going on?” she said.

  “It’s OK. Everything’s OK.” She could tell he was trying hard to find the right words before continuing. “Are you feeling better? I mean after yesterday, with the diary and everything?”

  “Yeah, of course.” This was definitely not the time to get into all that. “How was the trial?”

  His eyes found the Rubik’s Cube sitting on the bed.

  I didn’t want to talk about the trial.

  I picked up the cube.

  None of the sides were completed, so it didn’t look like Tessa had made much progress. “These things are pretty tough, huh?”

  “I do all right. You didn’t answer my question about the trial.”

  “It went about as well as I expected.” I moved the cube through a few turns then handed it to her. “Show me.”

  She accepted it, flipped it around in her hands, studied it, and then quickly twisted the sides until, only a few seconds later, two of them were solved.

  “That’s great. Good job.”

  “It’s only two sides. Besides, I was cheating. Are they gonna put him away?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “How?”

  “How what?”

  “How were you cheating?”

  Her expression told me that I’d just asked the stupidest question of the week. “I had my eyes open.”

  “Oh, OK . . . and?”

  “There are these kids on YouTube who can do it blindfolded.”

  “Wow.” I took the cube from her again. Scrutinized it. I could hardly believe anyone could solve it blindfolded, unless he’d memorized the pattern of turns. “So have you ever solved the whole thing?”

  “Sure, yeah; it’s not that hard, you just have to understand how the pieces move in relationship to each other; so when will they decide? The jury, I mean?”

  “Tessa, these things take time—”

  Dora appeared beside me. Slipped past me into the room. “He said he’s gonna do all he can to swing by and pick me up. I told him it was no big deal.” She turned to Tessa. “I can borrow some clothes, right?”

  “Yeah, no problem.”

  The girls are fine, Pat. Get back to the case.

  I set the cube on the dresser next to Tessa’s jewelry box, which she must have brought from home while I was in Chicago. “I have to go. I’ll see you two later tonight. If you need anything, call me.”

  “By the way,” Tessa said, “am I ever gonna get my phone back?” “As soon as I can get a new one.”

  Both girls told me good-bye, and I turned to go but stopped mid-stride. “Wait a minute.” I spun, leaned into her room. “What did you just say?”

  “Um, that I want my phone back.”

  “No. About the cube. Just a minute ago. You said something about solving the cube.”

  She looked at me quizzically, almost defensively. “I don’t know. Just that you have to understand how the pieces—”

  “Move in relationship to each other,” I finished her sentence f
or her.

  “Yeah, so what? What’s wrong?”

  “Yes.” Thoughts twisting, rotating, clicking in my mind. “That’s it. You’re a genius.”

  “Yeah, right,” she grumbled. “Stupid tests are skewed toward—”

  “I have to go. I’ll call you later.” My thoughts were spinning forward as I ran down the stairs.

  I could see the pieces of the case—one side of the cube where everything fit together so perfectly: the abandoned mine . . . Cherry Creek Reservoir . . . the travel routes from Denver International Airport to the morgue . . . Elwin Daniels’s credit card purchase of the greyhound—one side solved.

  Yes, on Saturday, all the evidence pointed to the ranch—because that’s where John wanted it to point.

  “Have you figured out how I’m choosing the victims yet?” he had asked me on the phone. “That would really be the key, here.”

  I rushed to the car for my laptop, set it on the kitchen table. Opened it up.

  Relationships.

  Yes, that was the key.

  “What did Giovanni write to you about?” I’d asked Basque.

  “You,” he’d said.

  Yes, yes, yes. The tenth story. Someone gets buried alive.

  My mother entered the kitchen and must have seen that I was in the middle of something because she quietly returned to the living room to work on a crossword puzzle.

  It is essential for the investigator to understand his opponent’s intellect, training, and aptitude and then respond accordingly.

  But I hadn’t been doing that. I’d been investigating John the same way I do other killers: looking at the clues, the patterns, the timing and location of the crimes he’d committed. But John wasn’t like other killers. He was smart, so smart that he’d planned out everything from the beginning.

  And that’s what was going to help me catch him.

  I clicked to the online case files.

  To “Victim Files.”

  Chose “New.”

  John had always been one step ahead.

  Yesterday on the phone, he’d taunted me by saying that the only way to catch him was to move out in front of him—and now I realized that he was right, but he’d made the mistake of letting me know where he was going.

  He wrote to Basque about you.

  He phoned you.

  He chose you.

  The secret to catching him wasn’t going to be studying the victims he’d killed but the ones he’d chosen.

  And the one victim I knew about, the one piece of the puzzle I hadn’t included in the geoprofile yet, was the final victim in the story.

  Me.

  100

  Giovanni left Amy Lynn’s unconscious body, now tightly bound, on the kitchen floor, and carried his duffel bag to the master bedroom.

  He didn’t want their evening together to be interrupted, so he turned on the police scanner he’d brought with him and dialed it to the dispatch frequency.

  Then he pulled ten Chantel candles out of the duffel bag, set them on the dresser.

  Laid the knives that he would be needing next to them.

  And began to light the candles.

  Using FALCON, I brought up a map of Denver and overlaid the crime scene locations and victimology information from all of the other victims so far.

  Then, just like I would have done for any other victim, I plugged my personal data into the geoprofile: my home and work addresses, typical travel routes, routine activity patterns, everything. And since I knew the scope of my geographic patterns better than any other victim I’d ever analyzed, I had the most detailed victimology information of my career.

  At the trial on Friday, I’d told Richard Basque’s lawyer that the more locations, the more accurate the geoprofile can be, and now, by including my data, I hoped I might just have enough information.

  You have to understand how the pieces move in relationship to each other.

  On the flight, when I’d run the numbers, the computer had identified four hot zones, but now when I pressed enter, only one geographic area came up. According to the software’s calculations, there was a 71.3 percent probability that the offender worked in, lived in, or frequented a four-block radius downtown.

  That was good enough for me to roll with.

  I tapped the mouse, and a 3-D image of Denver’s downtown appeared on the screen. Using the cursor like an airplane, I cruised between the buildings. They tilted, pivoted, and slid past me like they would have in a high-end, three-dimensional video game. I studied the orientation of the businesses, apartment buildings, streets.

  Nearly all of the victims’ travel routes—including mine—intersected on the southeast corner of one of those downtown blocks.

  I zoomed in.

  Reviewed the routes again.

  Everything revolved around that one location.

  That’s where our lives touch his. That’s where he’s choosing his victims.

  Oh yes.

  That was it.

  The business on the corner.

  The place the cube clicked together.

  A coffeehouse.

  Rachel’s Café.

  101

  I yanked out Tessa’s cell. Ran to the door. Punched in Cheyenne’s number.

  She answered as the door banged shut behind me. “Hey, I’m on my way, I just—”

  “Meet me at Rachel’s Café. Remember?” I was sprinting to my car. “Where we went the other night. We need to hurry.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “It’s all about the pieces—how they move in relationship to each other.”

  “The pieces? What are you talking about?”

  “How long will it take you to get there?”

  “I don’t know. Fifteen minutes.”

  “Make it ten.”

  I jumped into the car, floored the accelerator, and peeled away from the curb.

  Tessa heard the front door slam, and a moment later Patrick’s car roared into the street. She wondered what was up and headed down the stairs with Dora close behind her. “Does he always act this way?” her friend asked.

  “No. Sometimes he can be a little impulsive.”

  “Oh.”

  Tessa looked around the kitchen, saw Martha in the doorway to the living room. “He took off?”

  “Yes.” A motherly sigh. “Typical. Do you girls need anything?”

  “No, we’re fine,” Tessa said.

  After a light nod, Martha returned to her crossword puzzle in the living room, and Tessa saw Patrick’s computer on the kitchen table. He must have been in such a hurry that he left it.

  He never left his computer behind. Ever.

  Wait a minute.

  Martha had already started on her crossword. Tessa put a finger to her lips to tell Dora to be quiet, then she picked up Patrick’s laptop and surreptitiously returned to her room.

  Very surreptitiously.

  After they were inside and the door was closed, Dora asked, “What are you doing?”

  “Maybe I can’t find my father,” she said. “But Special Agent Patrick Bowers can.” She opened Patrick’s email program, found the email address for the FBI’s cybercrime division, and typed in an urgent request for them to locate the current residence of Paul Lansing, former resident of 1682 Hennepin Avenue East, Minneapolis, MN 55431.

  She glanced up.

  Dora’s mouth was ajar, a glob of gum perched on her tongue. “You’re not seriously going to—”

  Tessa signed the email “Special Agent Patrick Bowers.” She didn’t know his federal ID number but figured that a message coming from his personal laptop would be verification enough.

  Pressed “send.”

  “OK,” Dora said softly. “So, I guess you are.”

  “Now,” Tessa said, “all we have to do is wait. They’re good at their job. Patrick calls them all the time. I’ll bet within an hour we know where my dad lives.”

  102

  Giovanni had used a gag on Amy Lynn Greer without asking for
her permission.

  Now, he stared at her, lying so still on the kitchen floor, hands and feet tied securely behind her back. And he thought of his grandmother on another kitchen floor long ago.

  With sunlight seeping from her.

  He’d seen so much sunlight over the years.

  He knelt beside Amy Lynn and slapped her face to wake her. It would leave a bruise, but in a few hours that wouldn’t matter.

  It didn’t do the trick, though, so he hit her again, harder, and this time she woke with a start. Blinked. Widened her eyes.

  “Don’t worry,” he told her. “I’m not going to kill you.” As he said the words, a thought, a terrible thought, must have crossed her mind because she shrank back as much as she could. Tried to move away from him. “No, I’m not here for that. I’m not going to touch you.”

  Rapid breathing. Eyes searching, hoping for a way out.

  “But although I’m not going to kill you, I’m afraid you will have to die tonight.” She made sounds that might have been her way of trying to cry for help, but because of the gag he couldn’t understand her words. “I chose you to play a lead role in story number nine. You know what that means, don’t you?”

  More muffled sounds. She struggled, but he’d tied her well. A tear squeezed from her left eye.

  “Yes, that’s right. You’ve read the story. You do know: tonight you’re going to kill yourself after you eat the heart of your dead lover.”

  She shook her head desperately, frantically.

  Giovanni looked at his watch. “I sent him an urgent text message on your behalf a few minutes ago telling him to hurry over, so I think he’ll be arriving any minute now.”

  Then he grabbed her ankles and dragged her toward the bedroom. She twisted and struggled; couldn’t pull herself free.

  “I won’t be able to let you hold your hands over your ears, so you’ll probably hear some of the sounds. I’m sorry about that. I apologize in advance.”