The Knight pbf-3

by Steven James

  Since she was unable to offer any resistance, she was pliable, and it was easy for him to position her on her side and drape one of her arms across her husband’s bare chest.

  He tilted her face toward the place where Travis’s head would have been. Her left cheek lay in the pool of congealed blood that had oozed from the damp stump.

  “You’ve kept yourself in very good shape, so that should help. Not as much body fat to insulate you. You’ll be with Travis soon.”

  Despite her paralysis, she was able to make a soft gasping sound that might have been a weak attempt to call for help.

  The sounds reminded Giovanni of the ones his grandmother had made so many years ago. That day in the kitchen.

  After finishing the dishes, he’d called the police and asked them to come because his grandmother wasn’t moving, and he’d told them that he thought he might have killed her with the knife and that there was lots of blood on the floor, all spreading away from her.

  And as he waited for them, he carefully dried the glasses and put them away just like his grandmother had asked him to do before he pushed the knife into her stomach and she drifted, twitching to the floor.

  “He poses no immediate threat to himself or to anyone else, Your Honor. We recommend that the boy receive counseling and be monitored until his eighteenth birthday, and if he appears to be mentally stable, that he be released under his own recognizance. That’s all, Your Honor.”

  “Any closing comments from the prosecution?”

  “We maintain that the boy is extremely disturbed and agree that he be institutionalized and receive the necessary psychiatric care, but this state has a mandatory life sentence for first-degree murder. We request that upon his release from psychiatric care, he serve the remainder of the sentence in prison for this egregious crime.”

  “All right. We will take a brief recess, and I will announce my decision when we resume at one o’clock. Court is now in recess.”

  Over the next few years Giovanni’s lawyers and the judges and all the doctors and counselors told him again and again that he really didn’t understand what he was doing that day in his grandmother’s kitchen. And after a while he almost started to believe them.

  But in truth, deep down, he knew they were wrong. He did understand.

  Yes, he did.

  He had killed his grandmother because he wanted to see what it would be like to watch someone die. To see if it would matter to him, if it would make him feel sad or not.

  And it had not.

  As Giovanni took the sheet that had been covering Travis’s corpse and spread it over Kelsey, tucking it up to her neck, he thought fondly of that summer he’d spent in Kansas when he was eleven. The sunlight and the crickets and the memories. The books that he’d read. The stories he’d learned.

  He rolled the gurney into the freezer and paused to brush a stray lock of hair away from Kelsey’s face.

  For a moment, he listened to the moist sounds coming from her throat, sounds that reminded him of his grandmother, then he left the freezer and latched the door shut behind him.

  After changing back into the custodian’s uniform and placing the doctor’s scrubs in the duffel bag Giovanni drove home, carefully avoiding all traffic light cameras.

  Tomorrow was going to be a busy day.

  18

  Saturday, May 171833 Cherry StreetDenver, Colorado4:59 a.m.

  I did not have pleasant dreams.

  I saw myself in the slaughterhouse again, tracking Basque. The stiff, rigid smell of blood in the air. The distant drip of a leaking pipe echoing through the darkness.

  Meat hooks hung beside me. Swaying, clanking, even though there was no breeze.

  In the dream, I stabbed at the black air with my flashlight, and as I did, a woman emerged. She took one step and then paused and gazed at me with cold, lifeless eyes. I recognized her as Basque’s last victim, Sylvia Padilla. Her torso was ripped open like it had been when I found her. Her face doubly pale, drained of blood by death and washed of color by the flashlight’s beam.

  “Why didn’t you save me, Patrick?” She only mouthed the words, but in the dream I heard them as if she spoke them aloud.

  Cold lips.

  Whispering.

  “Why, Patrick?”

  And then, footsteps behind me. I whipped around, and my light shone on the faces of more walking dead, all approaching me.

  “Why, Patrick?”

  Crowding around me, reaching for me.

  “Why?”

  I pushed them aside, felt my hands smear against their warm, moist wounds, began to run through the dark, my light swinging wildly, shadows splintering, then re-forming, then splintering around me again.

  And then I was sprinting through a field and through time and I was in the tunnel of the gold mine again and I was leaning over Heather’s body and she opened her eyes and then grinned a dead smile and held the terrible heart out to me.

  Her lips, cold lips.

  “For you.”

  But then it wasn’t Heather’s face anymore, but Lien-hua’s, and she was offering me the heart. “Here is my heart, Patrick. For you.”

  The heart reeked of death.

  “No,” I yelled in my dream.

  I stumbled backward.

  She stood up, joined the corpses.

  “No!”

  And they all called to me, their words beating like a dark heartbeat over and over in my head. “Why, Patrick? Why?”

  And then I awoke to a pale shroud of sunlight soaking through the curtains of my room.

  I tried to relax, to let the dream fade away, but it refused to let go of me. I looked at the clock, and even though it was just after five, I didn’t want to go back to sleep and chance tipping into the dream again, so I climbed out of bed.

  The images kept playing like a movie in my head. I slipped into some workout clothes and my rock-climbing shoes and went to the bouldering cave I’d built in our garage-a mini climbing gym with holds bolted to the walls and across the ceiling.

  Since Tessa was sleeping over at her friend Dora Bender’s house, I didn’t have to worry about waking her, so I pulled out my twenty-yearold boombox, popped in some U2, turned it up loud enough to help me forget the dream, moved my car to the driveway, and laid some bouldering mats across the concrete so I wouldn’t hurt myself any more than necessary when I fell.

  After traversing the walls for ten minutes to warm up, I began to cross the ceiling, hanging upside down, fingers gripping the climbing holds, toes wedged into small cracks or against the holds I’d passed.

  Across the ceiling and back.

  Arms pumped. Abs screaming. My side throbbed from meeting the axe handle yesterday, but it wasn’t as sore as I thought it’d be, so I guessed that no ribs were broken. However, it still ached, especially each time I lost my grip and fell from the ceiling onto my back.

  The bouldering pads helped a little, but I could definitely feel the impact.

  I worked the routes for forty-five minutes, but as much as I cranked on the moves, I couldn’t clear my head. So finally, I gave up and went back upstairs to get ready to meet Cheyenne.

  Some people think that an investigator will be immediately reassigned to a different case if a killer mentions his name while corresponding with the authorities or does something to threaten him or his family.

  And while the scenario might make for a good plot for a crime novel or cop buddy movie, it’s not the way things work in real life. Once you start on a case, especially a high-profile case with a serial killer, you stay on it, regardless of how many threatening phone calls, photographs, or recorded messages the killer might send you.

  It has to be this way, otherwise as soon as an investigator started closing in, a killer could simply leave a threatening message or make a taunting phone call and-voila!-the one person who has the best chance of catching him would be reassigned. That’s just not the way it is.

  It’d be too easy for the bad guys.

  However
, it is true that if they mention your name, it gets personal.

  It’d been personal with Taylor and with Basque, and now I felt the same itch, the same intimate anger with this new killer who’d left the recorded message for me in Heather Fain’s mouth.

  As I stepped out of the shower, changed clothes, and grabbed some breakfast, the message kept replaying in my head, making the case more and more personal each time it repeated.

  “I’ll see you in Chicago, Agent Bowers.”

  Maybe coffee would help. Give me a caffeine buzz. Help me think in a new direction.

  I decided on Honduran estate-grown French Roast. After all, if Detective Warren was going to shuttle me around for the morning, the least I could do was offer her sixteen ounces of some world-class coffee. I ground enough for thirty-two ounces, brewed the coffee to perfection, filled two travel mugs-adding a little cream and honey to mine-and had just finished downing a bowl of oatmeal when she arrived at the curb.

  Toting my computer bag and hugging the two travel mugs against my chest, I maneuvered out the door. I’d never ridden with her before, and now I saw that she drove a scrappy 2002 Saturn sedan. Maroon. Scratched up, mud-splattered. Homey.

  Even though it was still early, the sky was already stark and blue, with just a single streak of cirrus clouds layered high in the west. A light, cool breeze wandered through the neighborhood, but other than that, the day had a still, solid feel to it.

  Cheyenne rolled down her window. “Good morning, Pat.”

  “Morning.” I set the cups on the roof and patted her car. “I have to say I figured you for a pickup truck kind of girl.”

  “I’m hard to pigeonhole. Just throw your bag anywhere in the back.”

  I opened the door and realized that following her instructions wouldn’t be as easy as it sounded. The seats and floors were piled with papers, the skeletal remains of at least four trips to KFC, three crumpled shooting range targets, a pair of rusted jumper cables, a mountain bike wheel, a very old pair of men’s cowboy boots that I thought it best not to ask about, and a helicopter flight manual. I motioned toward it. “I didn’t know you flew.”

  “Not quite done with my lessons. Just have to pass my solo.”

  In order to make room for my computer bag I slid the targets aside. They contained some of the tightest center-mass groupings I’d ever seen, so as I positioned my computer bag on the seat I asked her, “How often do you shoot?”

  “Mondays and Tuesdays. I try not to miss a week.”

  After closing the door, I grabbed the travel mugs from the roof and joined her in the front seat. “Looks like you try not to miss the bull’s-eye either.”

  “Part of growing up on a ranch. You need to be able to pick off coyotes from a full gallop.”

  “Don’t tell my stepdaughter about that. She doesn’t believe in hunting: ‘Nothing with a face should ever be murdered.’” I offered her one of the travel mugs. “Coffee?”

  “Naw. I don’t touch the stuff.”

  “Ah, but this is good coffee.”

  “That’s an oxymoron,” she said.

  OK, now that was just uncalled for. “And here I thought you were a woman of discriminating taste.”

  She gave me a furtive glance. “I am. When it comes to some things.”

  OK. This woman was not subtle.

  Before I could give her any sort of witty reply, she slid a manila folder across the dashboard toward me. “Some reading material for the drive.”

  “Thanks.”

  As I picked it up I noticed a St. Francis of Assisi pendant hanging from her rearview mirror. I would never have pegged her for the religious type.

  She really was hard to pigeonhole.

  Cheyenne wove through traffic, hopped onto I-70. “By the way,” she said, “Heather Fain was poisoned. Same poison that Ahmed Mohammed Shokr died of on Wednesday.”

  Ahmed was one of the victims in the double homicide on Wednesday. His girlfriend, Tatum Maroukas, had been stabbed with a sword.

  There are only four ways to poison someone-inhalation, ingestion, injection, and absorption-so I asked Cheyenne, “Do we know how it was administered?”

  “Injected. Potassium chloride.”

  “So,” I mumbled, “they found an overage of intravascular potassium without potassium in the vitreous humor.” It was more of an observation than a question.

  She looked at me quizzically. “How did you know?”

  “It’s a big clue that points to potassium chloride. But also, an obvious one. The killer must have known we’d find it.”

  “You think? I wouldn’t suspect many killers would know something like that.”

  “This guy would. He wants us on his tail.”

  “How do you know he didn’t just make a mistake?”

  “Like you said in the mine the other day: it’s about leaving a message. He’s not trying to cover his tracks, he’s purposely choosing to leave them.”

  She took her time before replying. “One more thing. It was only one woman at the Cherry Creek Reservoir.”

  “At least that’s one bit of good news.”

  Cheyenne was silent for a moment and seemed to be deep in thought, then she said softly, “A ten-year-old girl found the body parts before the killer phoned in the location.”

  I felt my throat tighten. And deep inside of me, in the place that matters most, I vowed to get this guy.

  I opened the folder and began to scrutinize the files.

  19

  6:45 a.m.

  Tessa would have slept in for at least another two hours if Dora’s stupid alarm hadn’t gone off.

  When Dora just rolled over and ignored it, Tessa turned it off herself, then flopped back onto the trundle bed and stared at Dora’s desk. Her computer. The wall.

  Dora’s breathing became steady again.

  Over the past few months her friend hadn’t been getting nearly enough rest.

  So Tessa let her sleep. She needed it.

  Last winter, Dora’s parents had gone on a double date with one of her dad’s friends, Lieutenant Mason, and his wife. The girl who was babysitting the Masons’ baby texted Dora to find out when everyone was supposed to get back and Dora had replied to the text message. While they were texting back and forth the babysitter left the baby alone in the tub. And the little girl had slipped under the water.

  Thinking about it still brought Tessa chills.

  Only a few people knew that it was Dora who’d been texting Melissa, and as far as Tessa knew, she was the only person Dora had talked to about it. “If I hadn’t been texting her,” she’d told Tessa one time, “Melissa would have been paying attention to the baby.”

  “That’s stupid,” Tessa had said. “It’s not your fault.” But it hadn’t helped. Nothing she’d said had done any good, so finally she just didn’t bring it up anymore.

  For a while Tessa lay watching the screen saver on Dora’s computer scroll through pictures of her family. Tessa had never had two parents around, except, sort of, if you counted the couple of months before her mom died when Patrick was with them.

  And all that made it hard to look at the pictures of Dora with her two happy parents.

  Tessa picked up her cell, opened the photo suite, tapped to the cover flow view, and flipped through pics of her mom, hoping it might make her feel better, but it did just the opposite. Eventually, she put the phone down, rolled over, stared at the wall, and waited for her friend to wake up.

  Cheyenne was quiet as we drove toward Sebastian Taylor’s house, and I appreciated the silence because it gave me a chance to review the case files in depth.

  The candles surrounding Heather’s body were Chantels, a brand carried by nearly all candle and department stores; so trying to track down the purchaser was probably a dead end.

  In addition, the recording device could have been purchased at any electronics store, so-just like the candles, almost impossible to track. No prints on the candles or the device.

  The forensics team ha
d been able to determine that the candles had been burning for nearly two hours.

  The time gap between when the candles were lit and the anonymous tip was phoned in would have given the killer enough time to drive almost anywhere in the Denver metroplex.

  The anonymous tip on Friday, the one reporting the location of Sebastian Taylor and Brigitte Marcello’s bodies, had been placed while I was in the courthouse.

  Emergency Medical Services hadn’t been able to track the locations from which either of the calls were made.

  The case files included transcripts of both anonymous 911 calls, and in both cases, the caller had said something that caught my at-tention: “Dusk is coming. Day four ends on Wednesday.”

  The repeated phrases conclusively linked the double homicides on Thursday and Friday, and also sparked my curiosity.

  Dusk is coming…

  Day four ends on Wednesday…

  Dusk… A metaphor for death? A deadline?

  Day four… Days of the month? The length of the crime spree?

  Days of creation, maybe? What did the Bible say God created on day four? Maybe something to do with that?

  I didn’t know. Something to look into.

  As I mulled things over, I paged to the information about the murders at Sebastian Taylor’s house.

  He owned a high-end security system with five video surveillance cameras, three of which had been disabled. The other two only showed brief glimpses of a medium-built man in a ski mask.

  And the killer had made it personal once again: he’d left a note for me on the workbench in Sebastian Taylor’s garage: “Shade won’t be bothering you anymore, Agent Bowers.” So the killer knew that Taylor called himself Shade, and he knew that Taylor had been sending me messages.

  But how? None of that’s been released to the public. And how did he find Taylor?

  I flipped the page.

  After murdering them, the killer had transported Brigitte’s body parts to the lake but left Sebastian Taylor’s body in the garage. And, although on a personal level the scenario disturbed me deeply, on a professional level it intrigued me.