The Knight pbf-3

by Steven James

  “Yeah. I was thinking that new vegan place-Fruition. You know all those signs, ‘Come to Fruition,’ ‘Have you tasted Fruition?’”

  How exciting. Bean curd, spinach, and chickpeas.

  “Are you still at Pandora’s house?”

  “She dropped me off at home.”

  “OK.” I was almost to the morgue. “I can probably be there in about half an hour. You can pack until I arrive.”

  “Well, actually, though, I’m pretty busy.”

  “Oh, really? On a Saturday morning? What are you doing?”

  “Dora gave me this Rubik’s Cube that I’m trying to figure out. And, oh yeah, I’m finishing up this iced triple grande three pump dolce breve with whip, pumpkin pie spice latte before you get here.” She rattled off the name of her drink in one breath.

  I stopped walking and stared blankly at the wall. “You’re kidding me. Please tell me you’re kidding me.”

  “It’s Dora’s favorite. I decided to try one. It’s good. Should I save some for you?”

  This was very troubling. “Admit it. You bought that just to annoy me.”

  I heard her take a sip. “If I did, you deserve it. You’re a coffee snob.”

  “Not snob, connoisseur-wait a minute. Pumpkin pie spice is seasonal. They only serve that in the fall.”

  “They had some in the back.”

  “Oh, please tell me you didn’t.”

  “I did.”

  “You’re drinking mass-produced, factory-packaged coffee that was roasted and ground more than six months ago?”

  I heard her sip again, a big hearty slurp. “Ahh. Yummy. Maybe I’ll go buy you one.”

  “I’ll see you in half an hour for lunch. Get packing. And put that thing down before someone arrests me for child abuse.”

  One more noisy sip. “See you.”

  I arrived at the morgue and found Dr. Eric Bender inside, rolling the as-of-yet unidentified headless corpse out of the freezer.

  After a quick greeting, I filled him in about the woman we’d just rescued. He listened intently, occasionally shaking his head, and when I was done he said, “You mentioned that her name is Kelsey?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then this was her husband.” Eric gestured toward the corpse in front of us. “Travis Nash. He was brought in yesterday morning, myocardial infarction. There was no autopsy ordered, everything pointed to natural causes.” He pulled out a file folder and showed me a picture of Travis before he’d been beheaded.

  “We need to find out what this man really died of,” I said. “But this exam room is now a crime scene-attempted murder. You’ll need to either move him or wait for CSU to get in here.”

  Eric didn’t look happy with that, but he didn’t argue with me. “OK,” he said.

  “Can I have a look at Taylor?”

  Eric nodded and I followed him into the freezer.

  28

  I stared at Taylor’s headless, mutilated corpse. The case files mentioned that he’d been tortured, but I hadn’t realized how extensive the injuries had been until now.

  Eric must have noticed me observing the wounds. “This man did not die quickly,” he said.

  I was mentally reconstructing the way Sebastian Taylor had been attacked, when Eric pointed to the bone protruding from the corpse’s right forearm. “Look here. His ulna is fractured, but there were no contusions near the site of the break. His wrist was also fractured.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I can’t tell for certain from a cursory external observation, but most likely the killer used his bare hands.” He pointed to the break in the forearm. “Based on the angle and severity of that open spiral fracture, the attacker would need to be unusually strong and has probably studied-”

  “Martial arts, close quarters combat, or some type of hand to hand.”

  “Yes.”

  The killer found Taylor… disabled his surveillance cameras. .. possibly has skills in self-defense…

  Military intelligence training?

  Law enforcement experience?

  “OK. Keep me up to speed.”

  He nodded. “I will.”

  I found Cheyenne standing beside the doorway to room 228, texting someone. She looked up as I approached. “Kelsey’s doing a lot better.”

  “That’s great.”

  “They have her on a warm saline IV to raise her core body temp.” She finished sending her text and slid her phone into her pocket. “An officer’s on his way over here to guard the room in case the killer finds out she survived and tries to return to finish what he started.”

  “Good. Did Kelsey give you a description of her assailant?”

  “She wouldn’t talk about it. When I asked her, she just closed her eyes and shook her head.”

  Sometimes victims take weeks before developing enough emotional distance to talk about life-threatening events, so, after an experience as traumatic as getting locked in a morgue, Kelsey’s reaction didn’t surprise me. But it wasn’t going to make our job any easier.

  “We’ll follow up,” Cheyenne said. “If she’s willing to talk, I’ll call for a sketch artist to come in. Oh, and Agent Vanderveld stopped by.”

  “Great.”

  “He seems like a man who is very sure of himself.”

  “That’s one way to put it.” I didn’t really want to talk about Jake. “Hey, let’s have an officer review the hospital’s video surveillance cameras to find out when Kelsey arrived. Maybe there’s some footage of her attacker entering or leaving the hospital.”

  “I’ll get someone on it.”

  I quickly briefed Cheyenne on Kelsey’s husband. She nodded solemnly, then glanced at her watch. “I can’t even imagine what she’s going through. I’m going to stay here for a little while. Whether or not she decides to talk, she needs someone with her right now.”

  “One more thing,” I said. “I need to get home and change. Can I borrow your car?”

  “Anytime.”

  I gave her Kelsey’s wet clothes, she handed me the keys, and I was on my way.

  Since receiving the flowers nearly an hour ago, Amy Lynn Greer had been searching through every article she’d written in the last year, looking for connections to stories about people named John, Jonathan, or Johnson, and had found a few possibilities, but nothing that looked relevant.

  After she’d eliminated the articles that she’d personally worked on, she’d expanded her search to include articles by other journalists.

  Still nothing solid.

  The phrase about telling of others’ tears made her vaguely uneasy, and as an investigative journalist, she didn’t like mysteries that she couldn’t solve.

  A thought that had been nagging her was starting to become more and more intrusive.

  Maybe it wasn’t just a coincidence that she mysteriously received the flowers while her husband and the rest of the crime scene unit were investigating one of the most gruesome crime sprees in Denver’s history.

  She decided to give herself one more hour to see if she could uncover anything about the phrase “Must needs we tell of others’ tears?” and then, even though she wasn’t supposed to, she would call her husband to find out if this might be related to any of the cases he was working on.

  All right, then. One more hour.

  29

  After talking with Patrick on the phone and torturing him about the pumpkin pie spice latte, Tessa had spent some time lounging in her room, listening to music and working on the Rubik’s Cube, but she couldn’t solve it. Even with her eyes open.

  And that really annoyed her.

  She had her iPod docked to her stereo, and when the playlist came to Vigilantes of Love’s Audible Sigh CD, she cranked the music to help her concentrate. A little retro, kind of an R.E. M college rock feel, not quite as edgy as most of the bands she was into, but sweet lyrics. Bill Mallonee was a genius with words.

  When “Black Cloud O’er Me” came on, she couldn’t help but think of her conversation wi
th Patrick. He’d really been into Lien-hua, and even though he was acting like it wasn’t a huge deal, he must have been hurting pretty badly after breaking up with her. Talk about a black cloud.

  Tessa had started getting used to the idea of the two of them being together but had noticed their relationship disintegrating for the last couple of weeks, and it was probably better that they called it quits now, before either of them ended up getting hurt worse. She’d seen lots of kids at school drag things out way too long and then break up. It wasn’t pretty.

  A carnage of hearts.

  Sounded like something Bill Mallonee would write.

  So, do what Pat asked. Pack. Cheer him up.

  Obviously, since they were only going to be out East for three months, they weren’t taking everything, but most of the stuff in their bedrooms needed to go. They’d been clearing out his closet the other night. Maybe she could just finish that before he got home.

  Going into his room had always felt a little weird to her, like some kind of invasion of his personal space, but the longer they lived together, the more OK it seemed to her. Part of being in a family. One of the good parts.

  She stepped inside. Glanced around.

  Rumpled bedsheets on his bed. A half-read copy of Pascal’s Pensees on the end table beside it, rock-climbing gear thrown on the floor under the window. Ansel Adams prints of Half Dome and El Capitan, two of the places he’d climbed, hung on the wall.

  Two photos sat on his dresser. One of the family: Mom, Patrick, and her on the Staten Island Ferry-her mother bald from chemo. The other picture was of him in the Appalachian Mountains when he was a wilderness guide in college. He had a ponytail in the picture, and she’d gotten a ton of mileage out of that.

  Scattered around the room were five heavy-duty cardboard moving boxes.

  She popped open the one next to the closet and found it half full of dog-eared criminology textbooks and back issues of the Journal of Environmental Psychology and the Journal of Forensic Sciences, and a clutter of office supplies just thrown on top-pens, scissors, paper clips, pencil holders, USB cords, rubber bands-a pair of dress shoes, and some crumpled-up dress shirts. How he could be so meticulous in his FBI life and such a slob in his single-guy-at-home life had always been a mystery to her.

  There was still room in the box, though, and she knew they didn’t have a ton of extra moving boxes around so she opened the closet and saw that, apart from a couple pairs of running shoes, and an old backpack, the floor was empty.

  But there was a shelf near the ceiling and some camping stuff sticking over the edge.

  She dragged a folding chair to the closet, stepped up, and yanked down a first aid kit and daypack.

  Only after she’d pulled down the sleeping bag did she see the shoe box shoved against the wall. Between her and the box lay an ocean of thick dust-which was way, way disgusting since the human body sheds over two million dead skin cells every hour and nearly 65 percent of dust found in homes is from human skin.

  Ew.

  Gingerly, she managed to retrieve the box without touching the layer of human remains. Then she stepped off the chair, closed her eyes, and blew the dead skin off the box.

  Eyes open again, she realized it was an old Keds shoe box, which was a little weird since Patrick never had kids and the box wasn’t big enough to hold his shoes.

  There was stuff in it, but by the weight she could tell it wasn’t a pair of shoes. She took one of Patrick’s shirts from his dresser and wiped off the box.

  And noticed her name written in black magic marker on the end.

  But it wasn’t Patrick’s handwriting, it was her mother’s.

  30

  Tessa sat on the bed, the shoe box on her lap.

  Popped it open.

  And found a small stack of postcards, two ticket stubs from a Twins game, three genuine arrowheads, a couple dozen letters stuffed back into their opened envelopes, a bunch of photos, a brochure from the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin, a few pictures that Tessa had drawn when she was a kid with big lopsided hearts and crayoned words that read, “I love you Mommy!!”

  And turtle drawings.

  Eight turtle pictures.

  She’d always liked to draw turtles when she was a kid, probably because they were easy-just make a big circle, then add four feet and a smaller circle on top for the head. Bam. A turtle. When she was a kid, they’d seemed like masterpieces.

  But now she could see how dorky they were.

  Still, when she was a little girl, her mom had always found room for them on the fridge. Always.

  And when Tessa saw the turtle pictures, she knew what kind of collection this was-the one special collection everyone has of the stuff no one else would ever understand. Stupid little things that wouldn’t even bring you a dime at a garage sale, but that you’d go back into a burning building to save.

  Tessa had a box like this too, under her bed.

  But as she flipped through her mother’s memory box, which she named it on the spot, her heart seemed to snag on something inside of her chest.

  Why didn’t Patrick ever give this to you? He knows how much Mom meant to you. Why would he keep this from you?

  Maybe he’d forgotten about it, pushed it way back there one day and it just slipped his mind.

  But maybe not.

  Feeling somewhat betrayed, Tessa filed through the box’s contents more carefully, taking the items out one at a time and placing them on the bed.

  She found a tangled-up kite string and wondered why her mom had kept it. Then she pulled out a shell that she remembered finding during a trip to Lake Superior when she was ten. As she set the shell on the bed, she noticed what lay on the bottom of her mom’s memory box.

  Her fingers trembled.

  A pregnancy test.

  And the little plus sign was still visible, even after seventeen years.

  She picked it up.

  When your mom first looked at this, you were already growing inside her.

  It was an obvious truth, totally obvious, but in that moment, to Tessa, it seemed profound.

  She was holding the first proof her mother ever had that she was going to have a child, a daughter that she would name Tessa Bernice Ellis-Tessa, derived from St. Teresa of Avila, a mystic who was one of her favorite writers, and Bernice, the name of her mom’s grandmother.

  As Tessa stared at the plus sign, she thought of what it would have been like for her mom to look at this-still in college, not married, the guy she’d been seeing a total loser. A man who never became a part of his daughter’s life, never even visited her.

  Not even once.

  Tessa felt the old anger, the old hatred, the old loneliness rising again.

  Even when she was a kid, she’d realized that nearly all of her friends had a dad around somewhere. Even in families where their parents were separated or divorced, the dad would show up occasionally-in the summer maybe for a couple weeks, or on Tuesday nights, or for a couple weekends each month. Sure, not always, but unless he was dead, he was usually a part of their life.

  So when she was about six or seven, she’d asked her mother if her dad was dead.

  At first her mom wouldn’t tell her, but Tessa wore her down until finally she’d said, “I don’t know, Tess. I haven’t seen him since the day I told him I was going to have a baby.” Then she’d held Tessa close-she still remembered that-and her mother had added, “But just because your daddy isn’t here doesn’t mean you aren’t loved. I get to love you double, from both of us.”

  But Tessa had pulled away. “But why did he go away, Mommy? How come he doesn’t come back?”

  Her mom had hesitated at first, then said, “What matters is that I love you and I’m never going to go away. I promise.”

  But then her mom did go away, not on purpose, but even when she was dying, she hadn’t told Tessa any more about her dad.

  Tessa figured that her mom had probably kept the truth about her biological father’s identity hid
den because she didn’t want her to grow up hating him.

  Well, if that was the plan, it hadn’t worked.

  Enough with that.

  She put the pregnancy test down and looked into the shoe box again, and found a neatly folded-up magazine ad for some kind of real estate company. It’d been ripped out of whatever magazine it was from and half of it was missing, but the part that was there had a picture of a blonde-haired girl, maybe four or five years old, trying on what were probably supposed to be her mom’s high heel shoes and necklace. Part of the text of the ad was gone, but the words “homes are not just” were still there. That was it, “homes are not just”… something.

  But what caught Tessa’s attention wasn’t so much the text but the jewelry box that lay on a dresser behind the girl in the photo.

  Wait a minute.

  She looked more carefully at the jewelry box and felt her heart begin to hammer. Then she jumped up and, carrying the picture, hurried to her room.

  To her dresser. To her jewelry box.

  Yes, yes.

  It was nearly identical to the one in the picture. Her mom had given it to her when she was a girl, somewhere around the age of the girl in the magazine ad.

  Is that you? Is it possible? Is that you in the picture?

  No, the hair was different, the girl didn’t really look like her at all, and there was no little mole on the side of the girl’s neck like the one on hers.

  Then why? Why would she give this to you? It can’t just be a coincidence.

  She returned to Patrick’s room and scanned the remaining contents of the shoe box looking for an answer; didn’t find one.

  However, she did find one final thing that made her inordinately curious: a key attached to a key ring with a plastic tag with the number “18” written on one side and the words “For Tess” on the other.

  In her whole life she’d only let one person call her Tess: her mom.

  The key was too small to fit in a normal lock, and even though it was about the same size as the one to her jewelry box, it wasn’t the right shape.