by Steven James
“You can’t get involved with this,” he said. “Not with your husband’s position.”
“I’m already involved. The flowers were sent to me.” Rhodes looked like he was about to respond, but before he could, she added, “Look, I spent all morning following up on this. I know more about it than anyone else. And you’re telling me being knowledgeable disqualifies me from writing about it? What kind of-”
“Amy Lynn, settle down. Let’s just see what the police find out first.” Rhodes rounded his desk and stood beside the window, hands folded behind his back. “The executive board feels that if we move on this too fast there might be legal ramifications. They want us to sit on it until we have something a little more solid.”
“But don’t you see?” she said. “That’s all the more reason to investigate it now, so we can be prepared to run a story when the time comes.”
If the pot of basil was related to the week’s previous murders, she could already envision this story shaping up as a true crime book. This was her chance for a big story, a breakout story, and she wasn’t about to let it slip through her fingers just because the board wanted to play it safe.
“No,” Rhodes said. “I’m sorry.”
Amy Lynn was about to let him know what she thought about him and the executive board but held her tongue and simply said, “All right.”
“Finish the steroids piece, get your weekly column on my desk. I’ll give you till four this afternoon-then we’ll see.”
“Yes. All right. Thanks.” She left his office, brushed past the police officer waiting for her in the hallway and headed for her desk.
No, she wasn’t going to spend the rest of her day writing about a baseball player.
She was going to find John.
37
We split up the research.
Cheyenne took the Alexander paintings, I scoured the Internet for Keats poems that might bear some semblance to the murders, and Jake looked for other literary references to pots of basil or to the message about telling of others’ tears.
Even though Cheyenne had suggested we use the sixth floor conference room because of the computers, it didn’t take me long to realize that they were dinosaurs compared to the laptops the Bureau provided. I switched to my computer, and five minutes later, I noticed Jake had done the same.
Each of us sat in a separate corner of the room and disappeared into our research, and as if by a unanimous, unspoken agreement, we worked quietly for nearly twenty-five minutes typing and surfing and scribbling notes before Jake broke the silence. “Well, let’s see what we have.”
I looked up and saw him gaze from me to Cheyenne.
“Sure, I’ll go first,” Cheyenne offered, but she sounded frustrated. “I looked all over Alexander’s online portfolio and, apart from two pictures that vaguely resemble the view of the mountains near the mine where we found Heather’s body, I’m not seeing any paintings that have a connection to the other murders. Nothing solid at all.”
I tilted my laptop’s screen so I could read it more easily. “Well, I don’t have much either. Just one thing, though. A section of the poem by Keats.”
And then I read aloud,
O Melancholy, turn thine eyes away!
O Music, Music, breathe despondingly!
O Echo, Echo, on some other day,
From Isles Lethean, sigh to us-O sigh!
Spirits of grief, sing not your “Well-a-way!”
For Isabel, sweet Isabel, will die;
Will die a death too lone and incomplete,
Now they have ta’en away her Basil sweet.
I summarized, “The theme of despair runs through almost every line: melancholy, despondence, spirits of grief, the lack of singing, and then a lonely death-just like the killer wanted Kelsey to experience in the morgue.”
“But she’s safe now,” Jake said.
I thought for a moment. “I don’t see this killer giving up that easily.” I turned to Cheyenne. “There’s an officer with her now, at the hospital?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s keep him assigned to her until we catch this guy.”
“All right.” She wrote something on her notepad. “I’ll talk with Kurt.”
“One more thing. Keats mentions ‘Isles Lethean.’ I looked it up: the river Lethe was one of the rivers in Hades. If you drank from it, you would forget your life on earth. You would forget everything.”
“Isles Lethean.” Jake gazed at the wall thoughtfully. “Maybe the UNSUB is perpetrating these crimes to forget something from his past, to cross the river, so to speak.”
Great. UNSUB: Unknown Subject of an investigation. It may very well be the stupidest acronym ever created in FBI history. And that’s saying something.
Jake, of course, loved the term.
He went on, “Maybe he’s trying to find freedom from his own despondence, his own grief.”
There was no way to either prove or disprove his hypothesis, and either way it offered us no specific investigative strategies. After all, who hasn’t dealt with grief? Who doesn’t want to forget painful memories? Most of the Denver metroplex’s 2.8 million people would probably fit that profile.
Still, I let his words pass without comment. “I only managed to get through about thirty of Keats’s poems, but I didn’t find anything helpful in the ones I read.” Then, though I didn’t want to, I admitted the inevitable, “It’s possible we’re on the wrong track entirely, here.”
Jake glanced at his computer screen. “I’m not so sure.” He motioned to the wide screen television monitor mounted on the conference room wall. “Is there a way we can…?”
Cheyenne deciphered his question and stood. “I’ll get it.” She powered on the wall-mounted monitor and then fished a USB cord out of a drawer on a nearby console.
Jake took a moment to connect his computer to the USB port on the table, and just as the image from his laptop appeared on the screen, Kurt eased into the room and took a seat.
“Amy Lynn wanted to be in protective custody,” he said, then looked at me. “A couple of your boys at the field office moved her to a safe house. And Reggie is not happy.”
“So she’s safe,” Cheyenne said. “That’s good. One less thing to worry about.”
Something didn’t seem quite right, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Jake opened a website, and it appeared on the wall monitor.
“One more thing,” Kurt added. “The victimology info you wanted, Pat. Everything we have so far has been uploaded to the online case file archives.”
“Good.” I filled him in on what Cheyenne, Jake, and I had been discussing and then motioned for Jake to resume.
“Here’s what I have.” Jake pointed the cursor to the middle of the webpage. “Nothing on the phrase about tears, but I did find something more about the pot of basil. Keats’s poem was actually based on a story from the fourteenth century about a woman named Isabel who digs up her lover’s body, severs the head, and puts it into a pot, then plants basil over it.” Jake paused, then added, “The story appears in a book that was condemned by the church. It’s called The Decameron.”
I leaned forward.
“A condemned book?” Cheyenne said.
“Yeah. It’s by an Italian author named Giovanni Boccaccio.” He scrolled down the article. “And by the way, Giovanni is the Italian form of-”
“John,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Unbelievable,” Kurt muttered.
John Alexander.
John Keats.
John Boccaccio.
All three of these men had told the story of a disinterred head in a pot of basil: the first through a painting, the second through poetry, the third through prose.
And now here in Denver, we had a killer who called himself John and had reenacted the story in a fourth way: real life.
By signing the note “John” and sending the pot of basil to a reporter, the killer must have known we would eventually make the connection to either Keats, A
lexander, or Boccaccio. I wasn’t sure if I should be impressed by this thoroughness, or insulted by it.
All one elaborate, twisted game.
Jake went on, “Apparently, The Decameron became a source of literary material for other authors, including…” He looked at his notes. “Faulkner, Tennyson, Longfellow, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and of course, Keats-just to name a few. In fact, a quarter of the stories in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as well as its literary structure are based on stories from The Decameron.”
I could hardly believe it. “Chaucer, Longfellow, Shakespeare, they all based stories on Boccaccio’s book? I’ve never heard of him before.”
Jake shook his head. “Neither had I.”
“Wait,” Cheyenne said, somewhat impatiently. “You said the book was condemned by the church?”
Jake scrolled down the webpage. “In 1370 a monk named Pi-etro Petroni wrote to Boccaccio warning him that he would be eternally damned unless he renounced the book. Boccaccio later revised the book, but he never recanted. Soon after that, the pope, let’s see…”
He slid the cursor across the screen until he found his place. “Yeah, Pope Paul IV officially condemned the book, and it was banned from being distributed and read. But that only seemed to make it more popular.”
“No surprise there,” Kurt said. “The best way to sell a book is to get someone to ban it.”
“It’s still on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum to this day,” Jake concluded.
“The Index of Forbidden Books,” Cheyenne said softly. She caught me looking at her questioningly. “Catholic school.”
“All right,” I said to Jake. “Then it must contain something heretical, or maybe satanic. What did the website say about the book’s content?”
He glanced at the notes he’d scribbled on a legal pad beside his keyboard. “The book is about ten people-seven women and three men who are trying to escape the Black Death in the 1300s. In the story, the Plague had infected Florence, and the ten travelers were trying to get to the hills of Fiesole where they could be safe.”
I was amazed at how much he’d been able to uncover in only twenty-five minutes.
After a quick breath, he went on. “During the ten-day trip they agree that every day they’ll each tell one story. And that’s where the title Decameron comes from: two Greek words, deka and haemeron, which mean ‘ten’ and ‘days,’ respectively.”
Ten travelers. Ten stories. Ten days.
Ten candles surrounding Heather Fain’s body.
My heartbeat quickened.
Cheyenne tapped the table impatiently. “Jake, get back to Pat’s question for a minute. If the church condemned the book, what kind of stories did these people tell?”
By her tone, I sensed that investigating a book condemned by the church she’d grown up in was bothering her more than just a little.
“Well, one of these indices lists…” Jake glanced at his computer, and I saw a new webpage appear on the wall monitor. “Yes. Here. It looks like the stories are pretty much about everyday topics: relationships, politics, religion, corruption, grief, and love…”
“So, daily life,” Kurt said.
“Pretty much.”
I still didn’t understand why the church would have condemned the book, but for now at least, the church’s specific reasons for banning it didn’t matter as much as the connection it might have to the case.
“We need to find out as much as we can about the stories in The Decameron,” I said.
Jake shook his head. “These stories aren’t short, and there are a hundred of them. It’ll take us, I don’t know, at least a couple days to wade through all-”
“No,” I said. “Remember the anonymous tips about the bodies: ‘Day Four ends on Wednesday.’ We can skip the rest of the days for now and just focus on the stories told on the fourth day. And we need to hurry. Dusk is coming.”
38
The four of us downloaded the text to The Decameron from the Internet, then Jake offered to investigate the first three stories that were told on the fourth day, Cheyenne took stories four through six, Kurt, seven and eight, and I agreed to study the last two.
Kurt suggested we reconvene in an hour, at 3:30. I figured that the Denver Public Library, which was only a couple of blocks away, would likely have commentaries that might include additional details and background on the stories we were studying, so as the four of us dispersed to do our research, I grabbed my laptop and hit the sidewalk.
Ever since Tessa and Dora had arrived at the house, they’d been lounging on Tessa’s bed, going through the items in her mom’s memory box, and Tessa had been telling her friend stories about the objects she remembered.
The girls were about to start reading the letters when Dora announced that she’d missed lunch and was starving and had to eat something or she was probably going to keel over and die.
Whatever.
But Tessa realized she was pretty hungry too.
So, to the kitchen.
Dora opened the fridge, grabbed a Sprite for herself and a root beer for Tessa. “So he won’t even let you see the diary?”
“Not yet, no.” Tessa dumped some tortilla chips into a giant bowl. Set it on the counter next to a smaller bowl of salsa. “I need to find a way to convince him to give it to me.”
Dora closed the fridge. “How are you gonna do that?”
Tessa shrugged and picked up the bowl of tortilla chips to head back to the bedroom. “I don’t know.” Then she noticed that the bowl was almost as big as the pot of basil had been.
A shiver.
She set it back down.
OK. Think about something else.
She went for two cereal bowls instead, transferred the chips into them, and then stuck the big bowl back in the cupboard. She hadn’t told Dora about the flowerpot and what was probably-almost certainly-inside it. She didn’t even want to think about that. “C’mon,” she said. “Let’s go read those letters.”
They grabbed their snacks and returned to the bedroom. But Tessa noticed she wasn’t nearly as hungry as she’d been a few minutes earlier.
I found the collections of Boccaccio’s writings in the 853s on the third floor of the Denver Public Library, sandwiched between the other volumes of Italian prose.
Of the sixteen books about Boccaccio or The Decameron, twelve were translations, two were comparative literature studies of Boc-caccio’s writings and Chaucer’s, and two focused on Boccaccio’s other works.
None of the library’s five commentaries about The Decameron were on the shelf.
I checked the computerized card catalog and found that all five were checked out, but when I asked the library’s director which patron had them, she told me she couldn’t release that information.
“Yes, you can.” I showed her my FBI badge. “And I’ll need a list of everyone who’s checked them out over the last twelve months.”
She shook her head.
“This is a federal investigation.”
“And this is a public library.” The woman folded her arms. She had a haircut only a librarian could love. “There are laws to protect people’s right to privacy, you know.”
Technically, she was correct, but the right to privacy isn’t a constitutional right, just an imputed right, and can therefore be overridden for things such as terrorist attacks, national security, or imminent threat. “People’s lives are in danger,” I told her.
“So are people’s rights,” she replied stiffly. “Come back with a warrant and we’ll be glad to help you.”
My jaw tightened. Over the years I’ve requested more than my share of search warrants and I knew we didn’t have enough information yet to get one for the library records. Besides, it would take an hour just to fill out the paperwork.
Forget it. You can always follow up on that later. Just get to the stories.
I went back to the 853s and chose the translation with the most footnotes-John Payne’s 1947 translation from Italian into English, rather than the
1942 translation we’d downloaded off the Internet.
Then, I began to read the ninth and tenth stories of the condemned book that had, by all appearances, inspired a man to kill at least seven people so far this week.
Giovanni sat at his desk and thought about the next six hours, thought about the man he was going to abduct and the rather unsettling way he was going to die in story number six: the tale of the greyhound and the convent and the silk sheet that would be covered with soft, graceful rose petals the color of bloody sunlight.
And so.
Giovanni had the straight razor and hypodermic needles with him.
He checked the time: 2:53 p.m.
Thomas Bennett would get off work in less than two hours.
And he would be dead in less than twelve.
It was perfect.
When the authorities had offered Amy Lynn Greer the chance to be sequestered in a safe house for the rest of the day away from the prying eyes of Benjamin Rhodes, it was an offer too good to pass up.
She had her son along, sure, but that wasn’t such a big deal. The safe house was stocked with plenty of children’s videos and toys.
And she had her computer with her.
That was all she needed.
Earlier in Rhodes’s office, the girl whom Agent Bowers had identified as his stepdaughter had become upset when she connected the pot of basil with the name John, and right after that the authorities had hustled the pot away, so Amy Lynn had spent the last hour researching connections between the name “John” and the spice “basil” while her son played with Legos and watched TV in the adjoining room.
And when she found a poem by Keats about a head that was hidden in a pot of basil, she decided it had to be related to the fact that Governor Taylor had been beheaded on Thursday night.
She could hardly believe how big this story was. Even though Sebastian Taylor’s death was receiving nonstop media coverage, as far as she could tell, no one else had made the connection to the pot of basil.
The pot had been sent to her.
The killer had contacted her.
Had chosen her.
She could write the story no one else could ever write.