by Steven James
But you won’t be here at the end of the day.
Oh yes.
Chicago.
After a quick shower I went online, hoping to switch to a later flight, but there were no openings, which meant I would need to leave for the airport by 2:30, maybe 3:00 at the latest, and that gave me less than nine hours to make some progress on this case before flying to the Midwest.
I was definitely ready for some coffee.
I’d just sent some freshly roasted Peruvian beans through my burr grinder when my unlisted landline rang. Cordless, but an older model. No caller I.D., and since I’d emailed Ralph last night telling him to call my landline if he needed me, I figured it was probably him.
I picked up the receiver. “Pat here.”
“Congratulations.” The caller spoke in a low whisper, the voice electronically disguised. “On getting to the ranch so quickly.”
My thoughts zoomed in, focused to a pinpoint. “John?”
“That’ll do.”
Play this right, Pat. Play this right.
“I’m glad you called.” Knowing how this guy had toyed with Sebastian Taylor and then killed him in his own house, I pulled out my SIG and made sure it was loaded and had a chambered round.
“Yes, well, I thought it was time we spoke.”
I hurried to Tessa’s room. Eased her door open. Walked to her bed. Yes, she was safe. Sound asleep.
I figured John would be too smart for the “So what’s your real name? Where are you calling from? What would you like to talk about?” routine, so I decided on a different approach and said, “We almost had you at the barn.”
“Yes. Almost.”
“Switching shirts was smart. It might have been the only thing that kept me from shooting you.”
“Well, then I’m glad I did it.”
Into the living room.
To the window.
I studied the neighborhood. “I saw the newspaper articles in the bedroom.”
He said nothing.
No unfamiliar cars. No one sitting in the parked cars on the street.
No movement behind the bushes next door, no fluttering curtains in the neighbors’ homes. “Why did you circle my face?” I said.
“I admire you.”
Speech is individualized by vowels, pronunciation, and the suprasegmental phonemes of pitch, stress, and juncture, so as I listened to each of his sentences I tried to catch a sense of John’s pauses, inflection, intonation, cadence, but didn’t notice anything distinctive.
I ignored his comment about admiring me. “We were able to get Bennett out of the barn in time.” As I spoke, I finished checking the house room by room. “Saved Kelsey too. You’re getting sloppy, and I’m coming for you.”
Rather than argue with me, he said, “I wanted to tell you that I’m veering slightly from the text for this next story.”
“Veering?”
As we spoke, I looked in the garage. In the car. Under it.
“Updating,” he said. “Boccaccio wasn’t as politically correct in his collection of tales as today’s audiences would demand. So I’m adapting it to better reflect the diversity of our culture.”
I had no idea what that meant, but I would remember it. I would use it.
Then he added, “Have you figured out how I’m choosing the victims yet?”
I suspected he’d call my bluff if I tried one, so I was straight with him. “Not yet.” I went to the back door of the house, looked into the yard. Clear. “But I will.”
“That would really be the key here, I think. The only way to stop me is to get out ahead of me.”
“I can think of a few other ways.”
A slight pause. “I would congratulate you on rescuing Kelsey, but let’s be honest—that was a fluke. You stumbled onto her by accident.”
“You fled south down the cliffs, didn’t you? Then probably west along that old mining road skirting the national forest. Did you grow up in the area, John? Is that how you know it so well?”
Another pause, and I had a feeling I’d nailed it.
“Remember,” he said, “Kelsey was supposed to die of grief, not hypothermia.”
Check on her, Pat. He’s going after her.
Yes, I would check on her—both her and Bennett—as soon as I was off the phone.
He continued, “And after what she went through Friday night in the morgue—all that time in the freezer with those cadavers—I think there’s a good chance she’ll die of grief after all, and the story will play out like it’s supposed to.”
His words “The story will play out like it’s supposed to” troubled me.
Remember, Pat? He was prepared in the barn. He was ready for you.
If I was reading things right, Thomas Bennett was in grave danger. “Why did you wait so long before opening the door to the cage, John?”
“Ah yes. Gabriotto’s nightmare.”
It was a dream.
It was all a dream.
John went on, “What does he really die of, Patrick?”
No, please.
I grabbed the car keys from the kitchen counter.
“You know, don’t you? It isn’t the greyhound that kills him.”
Get to the hospital. Now.
I flew toward the front door but immediately realized that if John knew my phone number he might know where I lived. I couldn’t leave Tessa here alone. I ran back to her room.
“You’ll need to be calling the hospital now, I suppose,” John said. “To check on Thomas. We’ll talk again. I’m moving up the timetable. Dusk arrives tomorrow, just like it did in London.”
Then he ended the call.
My heart jackhammered.
As I turned on Tessa’s desk lamp, I flipped through my mental catalog of phone numbers. Found Baptist Memorial’s. Punched it in.
It rang, no one answered.
I patted Tessa’s shoulder firmly enough to wake her up, but she groaned and wrapped a pillow around her head.
The phone continued to ring.
Come on. Pick up.
Since I wasn’t on a mobile phone, I couldn’t take the receiver with me in the car. I had to wait in the house for them to answer.
Pick up!
Finally, a receptionist answered, “Hello, Baptist—”
“This is Special Agent Patrick Bowers with the FBI. I need you to send a doctor to check on Thomas Bennett—I don’t know his room number—”
“Sir, I can’t just—”
“And get a doctor to Kelsey Nash in 228. And security to both rooms. Do it!”
A slight hesitancy in the woman’s voice, but she agreed. “Yes, sir.”
I gave her my federal ID number, then tossed the phone onto Tessa’s desk. Shook her again. “Tessa.”
She moaned. “Turn off the lights.”
“You have to come with me. We have to hurry.”
“What are you talking—”
I clutched her arm, and I think I might have scared her because she stopped mumbling, blinked her eyes open, and stared at me. “What’s going on?”
“I need to check on someone at the hospital and I can’t leave you here.”
“Why not?”
Because it might be a trick to get me to leave you alone.
“It’s important. You can drive to my parents’ house afterward. Now, come on.”
She glanced at the bedsheets covering her. “I’m in my pajamas.”
“Grab some clothes. Be quick.” My tone of voice convinced her, and she crawled out of bed. “Where’s your cell?” I asked.
She pointed to the purse on her desk.
I fished out her phone, and while she gathered some clothes I left a voice message for Kurt to get to Bennett’s room ASAP.
“Go in the hall,” she said. “I gotta change.”
“You can change on the way.”
“Um, that would be a no.”
“We’re leaving.” And before she could argue with me anymore, I hustled her to the car.
And I did not drive the legal speed limit on the way to the hospital, but I had a sinking feeling that no matter how fast I drove, I would arrive too late.
66
The doctors didn’t get to Thomas Bennett in time.
The officer who’d been stationed at the door gave me the news as I pushed past him and burst into his hospital room. Denver’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Eric Bender, who was also the father of Tessa’s friend Dora, stood at the foot of the bed where Thomas Bennett’s body lay. I didn’t recognize the doctor and nurse who stood beside him.
“Pat, I was just going to call you,” Eric said somberly.
I walked to Thomas’s bed. His chest was motionless. His face contorted. It looked like he had died in agony. His eyes were closed. His body, still.
So still.
I felt a rising sting of failure, defeat. Somehow John had gotten to him. How? How!
“Was it his heart?” I asked.
Eric nodded. “Pericardial effusion with necrotizing fasciitis.”
I knew that “pericardial” had to do with the heart, and that an effusion was a release of fluid in the body. I didn’t know what necrotizing fasciitis was. “In layman’s terms.”
“Right. Sorry.” He shook his head as if to rebuke himself. “Necrotizing fasciitis is sometimes called ‘flesh-eating strep.’ It’s an infection. Very dangerous. Spreads rapidly. It looks like someone injected the bacteria into the sac that surrounds his heart.”
“The pericardium,” I said.
“That’s right. It’s not that difficult of a procedure; you just need a long needle, insert it under the xyphoid notch—”
“Early this morning he complained of chest pains,” the other doctor interrupted. “We did an EKG, then an ultrasound, and found fluid and air in the pericardium.”
“Necrotizing fasciitis can only be treated by removing the infected tissue,” Eric explained. “But since it was his heart . . .” He didn’t need to go on.
I thought about Boccaccio’s story, Gabriotto’s death.
“So basically it was pus, right?” I said. “He died of pus infecting his heart?”
Both doctors and the nurse were quiet for a moment, then Eric said, “That would be an accurate description of what happened.”
A pus-filled abscess bursting near his heart. Exactly like Boc-caccio’s story.
Anger and desperation rolled through me. I looked from Eric to the other doctor. “But they did blood work and a tox screen last night when he got here, right? Why didn’t they catch it?”
“The lab is twelve hours backed up,” Eric said. “Half of it is still being renovated.”
“We were going to finish the tox screen this morning,” the doctor added.
I cursed loud enough for the nurse to respond by pressing a gentle finger to her lips, and I realized she was probably concerned not just about my language but about me waking other patients on the floor. I stepped back from the bed. Tried to calm down. Refocus.
Movement beside the door caught my attention. The police officer I’d seen in the hallway had entered the room and now looked at me nervously.
“Who was in here last night?” I said.
“No one, sir. I swear.” He pointed to the nurse standing beside me. “Not since she came by two hours ago to check his vitals. And I stayed with her the whole time.”
We would interview the hospital staff who’d been treating Thomas Bennett, yes, obviously we would, but I doubted they had anything to do with his death. Somehow John had managed to get to him.
“What about the officer from the earlier shift? The one you relieved?”
He shook his head and pointed again to the nurse, then to the doctor. “He told me they were the only people who’d been in here.”
I tried to relax, to regroup by letting my mind replay the last twenty minutes—after getting Tessa to the car I’d phoned my mother and arranged for Tessa to stay with her “while I met with the people I needed to” at Baptist Memorial. Then we’d arrived at the hospital, and Tessa, who’d managed to change clothes in the backseat, left for my parents’ house.
I’d made two final calls, one to the Bureau’s cybercrime division to see if they could trace the origin of the last call received on my landline, and then, since John had somehow gotten my phone number and I didn’t want to take any chances that he would get to my family, I called dispatch to have a car stationed at my mother’s place.
And now here I was, in the room beside the body of another man I’d failed to save.
My attempt to calm myself down didn’t work. I slammed my hand against the wall, and the four people in the room stared at me quietly.
“I’m all right,” I said.
No, you’re not.
John’s winning.
Eric discreetly nodded for the others to follow him to the hall, but I said, “No. I’m leaving.”
Then I headed to room 228 to check on Kelsey Nash.
I found Kurt standing outside her room, speaking with a police officer.
“She’s OK,” Kurt announced as I joined them. “The doc is in there now.”
I peeked through the doorway.
Kelsey was reclining on the bed, conscious and aware. A slim middle-eastern woman in doctor’s scrubs bent over her while a male nurse checked Kelsey’s vitals. Kurt motioned for the officer beside us to enter the room, and as the man went inside, he left the door partially open. Kurt stepped back so I could monitor what was happening inside the room while we spoke.
“Bennett died of an infection,” I told him.
“I know. I was just up there.”
I shook my head. “It looks like John covered his bases—whether he died from a dog bite or the infection in his heart, Bennett’s death would still match Boccaccio’s story.”
The doctor wrote a few notes on her clipboard, then made a call from the room’s phone.
“Is Thomas’s wife safe?” I asked Kurt.
He nodded. “Protective custody. They’re bringing her over to see the body. We have a female undercover officer at her house and a car down the street. If John shows up looking for Marianne, we’ll be ready for him. Also, we’re looking into any possible connections between the ranch and the mine. Nothing so far.”
As he finished speaking, the doctor joined us in the hallway. “Ms. Nash is stable,” she said. “The lab just called in, and her blood work came back fine. Physically, she’s recovering very well. But mentally, emotionally . . .” She hesitated. “I don’t know. She hasn’t spoken in almost twenty-four hours. I’m suggesting we put her on suicide watch.”
“Do it,” I said. “Do whatever it takes to help her. She’s our only eyewitness.”
The doctor nodded. “All right. I’ll have her transferred to psych.”
I hated to admit it, but it was true: John had been right about Kelsey too.
She was dying of grief.
After the doctor had left, the officer returned to the hallway, and Kurt gave him specific instructions. “You stay with Ms. Nash every second, even while they’re transferring her to the psych ward.”
“Yes, sir.”
“If anything goes down, anything at all, call me. Got it?”
A nod.
A sad kind of tension crept into the hall, wrapped around us, then Kurt said to me, “I can’t just stand around here. Walk with me to my car.”
We started for the stairs and I asked him if he’d had any luck with the sketch artist last night.
He shook his head. “I wasn’t here. Reggie brought him in, but apparently Kelsey wouldn’t meet with him, and Bennett had nothing new for us to go on. Oh yeah, Missing Persons found out half an hour ago that no one has seen Father Hughes, one of the priests from St. Michael’s, since Tuesday. Apparently, he sent a text message to some relatives in Baltimore, told them he was coming, but never arrived. I’m letting Missing Persons look into it for now. They’re keeping me posted.”
“He disappeared on Tuesday?” I said softly.
“Ye
ah, I know. The timing fits for story number two from The Decameron. I tried calling you this morning to tell you, but your line was busy.”
All at once I realized that Kurt still didn’t know I’d spoken with the killer. “You aren’t going to believe this. John called me.”
“What!”
“I was so focused on seeing if Kelsey was OK that I—”
“Did you get a recording of it?”
“No. Cybercrime is doing a backtrace on it, but I doubt they’ll find anything. I’m betting our guy used a prepaid and tossed it.”
“So what did he say?”
“Taunted me. Hinted at Bennett’s cause of death. I’ll transcribe the conversation. We can circulate it to the team, see if it rings any bells with anyone.”
“You can remember it?”
“Yes.”
“The whole thing? Word for word?”
“Yes.”
A slight pause. “OK.” The stairwell was just ahead. “One more thing: the warrant for the library records is still going through, but we did find out that DU offers two courses on Renaissance Humanist literature. Only college in the state that does. Both classes cover The Decameron. The instructor is an English prof who also teaches a few classes in the journalism department. No one from the suspect list took his classes, but a number of people from the Denver News did: Rhodes, Amy Lynn Greer, at least a dozen others.”
“The prof’s name isn’t John, by any chance?”
We descended the steps.
“No. Adrian, Adrian Bryant. But he doesn’t look good for this. He was out of town yesterday, speaking at a conference in Phoenix, so he couldn’t have been the guy you chased at the ranch.”
Arriving at the first floor, we walked past the nurse’s station. “Do we have actual confirmation that he was there, or just anecdotal?” I asked.
“We’re working on that.” The automatic exit doors slid open in front of us.
We stepped outside.
The day was getting colder. The sky, darker.