The Knight pbf-3

by Steven James

  He added a few more details but kept his synopsis brief.

  Then it was my turn.

  “The ninth tale reminded me of a gothic horror story.” I decided to just be blunt. “When Sir Guillaume de Roussillon’s wife sleeps with another man, he kills him, cuts out the man’s heart, and then gives it to the cook to prepare for dinner.”

  “Please tell me they don’t actually eat it,” Cheyenne said softly.

  I pulled out the copy of The Decameron I’d gotten from the library. “It might be best if I just read this section of the story.”

  The lady, who was nowise squeamish, tasted thereof and finding it good, ate it all; which when the knight saw, he said to her, “Wife, how deem you of this dish?”

  “In good sooth, my lord,” answered she, “it liketh me, exceedingly.”

  Whereupon, “So God be mine aid,” quoth Roussillon; “I do indeed believe it you, nor do I marvel if that please you, dead, which, alive, pleased you more than aught else.”

  A deep silence.

  “I’m not surprised this pleases you dead,” Jake said, “which pleased you more than anything else, alive. That’s cold. That’s just brutal. How does the story end?”

  “The woman kills herself by jumping out a window.”

  “Love and tears,” Jake mumbled. “Fits to a tee.”

  “What are you thinking?” Kurt asked.

  “It’s John’s obsession,” Jake said, extemporaneously profiling the killer. “All of these stories are about the tragic consequences of love; all cruel, fatal tales of love and loss. That’s what the phrase refers to: must needs we tell of others’ tears? Through his crimes, John is reenacting the lovers’ tears.”

  No one said anything. Whether it was true or not, it made sense.

  Kurt looked at me. “What about the last story?”

  “This might be the only one that’s not filled with tears,” I said. “In fact, when I was reading it, I was thinking that Boccaccio might have added it just to lighten the mood and maybe transition into the next day’s tales. In any case, no one dies in the last story; however, a man is drugged and sealed in a large crate.”

  “Buried alive?” Cheyenne asked.

  “No, but the way it’s written, you start to think that’s what will happen. But in the end, there’s no tragedy.”

  “Just lessons,” Jake mused. “About love and death.”

  “That’s right.” As I agreed with him, I wondered whether our killer would be content with that ending. I doubted it. “This gives us plenty of specifics to move on,” I said. “The greyhounds, the poisonous toads, the priest.”

  Things were popping.

  So many crimes. So many puzzle pieces.

  “Kurt,” I said, “let’s get a warrant to look over the library’s records and see who’s been checking out Boccaccio’s books. Also, let’s identify which colleges offer courses on Boccaccio or this Decameron book. Start with DU and CU, and move out from there. Our guy might have studied all this on his own, but we can at least compare class rosters with the suspect list.”

  “We’ll go countrywide if we need to,” he said.

  “And we still need to find out who owns the mine where we found Heather’s body. It might give us a lead to finding John.”

  “Jameson’s on it,” he said with a head shake. “But there are hundreds of abandoned mines up there, and most of Clear Creek County’s records still aren’t computerized. It’s a mess. He’s up in Idaho Springs now, going through the county’s plat books one at a time.”

  We were quiet.

  “Jameson knows what he’s doing,” he added. “If there’s anything there, he’ll find it.”

  Jake rapped the table decisively with his knuckle and stood. “I’ll work on the UNSUB’s psychological profile.”

  Cheyenne rose also. “All the stories so far have to do with married couples or love affairs, and the victims have all been couples. Here’s what I’m thinking: our guy is choosing the victims somehow, but there’s no obvious connection between each of the different couples, right?”

  “Not that we know of so far,” I said.

  “And Jake, what did you say? Fatal tales of love and loss?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, who deals the most with a couple’s love and loss? Knows about their loneliness, their grief, their love interests and affairs?”

  “Yes, good,” I said. “A therapist. Or a marriage counselor.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “A counselor’s client list would be confidential; in some cases even family members and spouses wouldn’t know the person was seeing him, and it would make it very difficult for us to link the victims.”

  It seemed like a good angle to me. “Check it out. It might be too obvious of a connection for this guy, but maybe he’s not as smart as I think he is.” I gathered my things.

  “What about you?” Jake asked.

  “The geoprofile.” I headed for the hallway. “I’m going to figure out where John lives.”

  22 minutes later

  4:41 p.m.

  Giovanni stared at the dark, tinted windows of Thomas Bennett’s gray ’09 Infiniti FX50 parked on the second level of the 18th Street parking garage. Because of the tinting, he couldn’t see into the car’s interior-either the front or the backseats.

  Perfect.

  This way he wouldn’t have to wait underneath the vehicle, he could wait inside it.

  Even with the Infiniti’s advanced security system, it took Giovanni less than thirty seconds to pick the lock.

  And less than three minutes to disable the vehicle’s GPS tracking and satellite mapping capabilities.

  He situated himself in the backseat, closed the door, and then took a moment to tilt the rearview mirror so that he’d be able to see Bennett’s face when he climbed into the car.

  He laid the two needles he would be using on the seat beside him.

  It was a short walk from the Wells Fargo building where Thomas Bennett worked to the parking garage, so Giovanni didn’t think he would have to wait long at all for Mr. Bennett to arrive.

  42

  4:46 p.m.

  I was sitting at my desk in my office on the eighteenth floor of the Byron G. Rogers Federal Building, working on the geoprofile.

  And getting more and more frustrated.

  Kurt’s team had done a good job of compiling victimology in-formation: the victims’ street addresses, places of employment and recreation, as well as known abduction sites, and the location where each of the bodies had been found. They’d also analyzed credit card usage and, based on the frequency of the victims’ purchases, identified the locations of the gas stations, grocery stores, night clubs, and pharmacies the people preferred to patronize.

  Still, the first time I ran the data through my FALCON, the Federal Aerospace Locator and Covert Operation Network, the results were inconclusive. As advanced as FALCON’s algorithms and geospatial mapping programs were, I was only able to narrow down the hot zone to about 22 percent of Denver County. Not exactly pinpoint accuracy.

  I was evaluating the possible ways that Denver’s array of one-way roads might be skewing the killer’s perception of the distances between the crime sites when my cell rang. I glanced at the caller ID as I answered.

  Assistant Director Margaret Wellington.

  Great.

  I picked up.

  “Margaret, I don’t have a lot of time right now-”

  “It’s a sign of respect to address someone by her title.”

  My fingers tightened around the phone. “I’m a little busy right now, Assistant Executive Director Margaret Wellington.” I could picture her sitting behind her desk at FBI headquarters: power suit, thin lips, piercing eyes, mousy hair.

  “I’m expecting a full report summarizing yesterday’s shooting at the courthouse to be on my desk by eight o’clock Monday morning.”

  “That seems reasonable. Now-”

  “I’ll also be ordering a full investigation of the i
ncident.”

  A waste of time. The Chicago Police Department already had statements from dozens of eyewitnesses. The only investigation that needed to be done was on how Sikora, or his accomplice, had managed to load the gun before it was delivered to the courtroom.

  “Thanks for letting me know.”

  “Has Jake arrived yet?” she asked curtly.

  “Jake arrived this morning.” How to put this. “And he’s already been an invaluable asset to the investigation.” I realized that the words valuable and invaluable are synonyms, just like flammable and inflammable, but it felt better to describe Jake’s contributions as invaluable.

  She paused, no doubt trying to read any subtext of my words.

  “Do not patronize me, Dr. Bowers. I can make your life miserable.”

  Who am I to argue with that?

  “Margaret, I have to go.”

  “I’m looking forward to you teaching at the Academy this summer.” Derision underscored each of her words. “Just think, we’ll be able to see each other every day for three months.”

  “I can hardly imagine what that’ll be like.”

  Before she could reply I ended the call and put Margaret and her infatuation with paperwork out of my mind.

  I decided to switch strategies on the geoprofile. Maybe if I couldn’t find John’s home base, I could at least narrow down the routes he took to locate and then transport his victims.

  To do that, I reorganized the data and began to study the most likely locations where the victims’ travel patterns might have intersected with the killer’s.

  And the minutes ticked by.

  Thomas Bennett stepped out of the elevator, and Giovanni lowered himself into the thick shadows of the Infiniti’s backseat to make certain he wouldn’t be seen.

  He pulled on his ski mask, unfolded the straight razor, and heard the car beep as Bennett remotely unlocked the doors.

  The man climbed into the driver’s seat.

  Closed the door.

  Slowly, Giovanni sat up and stared at Thomas’s face in the rearview mirror. He was a narrow-jawed man with nervous eyes, and he was so busy fumbling with his keys that he still hadn’t noticed that there was a person watching him in the mirror. Giovanni waited. He wanted Thomas to see that he was not alone in the car.

  Finally, as Thomas slid the key into the ignition, his eyes instinctively found the rearview mirror. “What the-”

  But before he could finish his sentence, Giovanni had already reached around the headrest and pressed the straight razor’s blade against the front of Bennett’s neck. “Hello, Thomas.”

  The man’s lips began to quiver. “Who-”

  “This blade really is sharp, so I’m going to have to ask you to sit still and not fidget. If you move too much, it’ll get messy. Trust me. If you understand, nod slowly.”

  Giovanni eased the blade slightly away from Thomas’s neck while the man nodded stiffly.

  “All right. I’m going to give you a little something to help you relax.”

  His eyes were large with fear. “You can have my wallet, I-”

  “I’m not interested in your money.” Giovanni held the razor blade firmly against Bennett’s neck again to encourage him to remain stationary. “Now, please, just sit still for a moment.”

  Then, watching him carefully in the mirror and holding the blade steady, Giovanni picked up the first needle with his free hand, placed its tip against the left side of Thomas Bennett’s neck “No,” Bennett begged. “Please.”

  “Shh.”

  Depressed the plunger.

  And a few seconds later, after Thomas was unconscious, Giovanni climbed out, shifted him to the backseat, and unbuttoned the man’s shirt to reveal his chest.

  Then he carefully gave him the second injection, rebuttoned the shirt, slid behind the steering wheel, and left for the ranch.

  43

  Ever since my conversation with Margaret nearly forty-five minutes ago, I’d been doing what I used to think I did best.

  I wasn’t so sure anymore.

  No matter how I reworked the geoprofile, I wasn’t coming up with anything solid, and I was running out of ideas.

  Though I hated to admit it, I was starting to believe that John might have skewed the results by randomly selecting his victims and crime scene locations.

  I rubbed my eyes.

  I pushed back from my desk and stood. Stretched my back.

  My eighteenth-story office window stared down at the city of Denver, and I leaned my hand against the glass and let my eyes wander through the maze of mirrored high-rise hotels and banks that make up Denver’s downtown.

  John lived down there somewhere.

  Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was peripatetic, just traveling through.

  The muscles in my arm, my shoulder, my neck stiffened in frustration and anger.

  You have to find him, Pat. You have to bring him in.

  I caught sight of the original Denver courthouse just across the street from my office. It had been built in 1910 as a premier example of turn-of-the-century architecture and as a testament to justice in the West. Even though it was only four stories tall, it was imposing, monumental, and took up an entire city block.

  From my window I could read the frieze inscribed in tall letters, spanning the building just below the roof-Nulli Negabimus, Nulli Differemus, Jutitiam.

  Tessa had studied Latin in middle school, so a few months ago I’d brought her downtown to give her a chance to show off her foreign language expertise. As we’d passed the building I’d looked up and said, “Hey. Isn’t that Latin?”

  But she’d already noticed the words and was working on the translation. “Yeah, but it’s kind of hard to translate.” She sounded frustrated, and I was glad it was at least a little bit of a challenge to her. “I guess maybe it’d be ‘To no one we will deny, to no one we will defer justice.’ But differemus could be translated ‘discriminate.’ So, pretty much it’s saying they won’t deny justice to anyone or discriminate against them.” And then she mumbled, “Yeah. Maybe if you’re rich.”

  Her comment seemed to come out of nowhere, and I had the sense that I should disagree with her about it, but realized that she was at least partly right. So, instead of commenting, I led her around the building to the southwest side to show her the second Latin inscription, but before I could, she pointed angrily at the building. “Can you even believe that?”

  She wasn’t pointing at the Latin phrase.

  “What?” I asked.

  “There.”

  She pressed a light finger against my jaw and turned my head toward the marble lettering above an ornate stone doorway near the corner of the building. The sign had two words: Judges Entrance.

  “It’s been up there for like a hundred years,” she said.

  “So? It’s where the judges go in.”

  “You’re kidding me? It doesn’t bother you?”

  “Why should it?”

  “It’s missing an apostrophe.”

  OK.

  As I was trying to figure out how to respond to that, she scanned the phrase I’d led her to this side of the building to see: “OK. So 211 that one’s from Cicero. It’s a lot more common. We learned it in Latin class. It means, ‘The law does unfairness to no one, injustice to no one.’”

  Injustice to no one.

  So now, as I leaned my hand against the glass and thought of that day with Tessa, Calvin’s words from last night echoed in my mind: “Our justice system is concerned more with prosecutions and acquittals than it is with either truth or justice. You know it’s true. It’s just that we’re reticent to admit it.”

  Tessa might not have agreed with the first inscription, but I was starting to doubt the truth of the second.

  Because sometimes the law is unfair.

  Sometimes justice isn’t carried out.

  As I was considering that, I heard a knock at my office door.

  I turned. “Come.”

  But the door was already
flying open.

  Cheyenne burst into the room and slapped a manila folder onto my desk. “We know who owns the mine.”

  44

  “His name is Thomas Bennett,” she said. “He lives here in Denver; works as a weekend auditor at the Wells Fargo bank. He left work about forty-five minutes ago. Either his cell is off or he’s not answering. It might be nothing, but we can’t get a GPS lock on his car either. His wife said he never turns off his phone and he should have been home by now.”

  I positioned myself in front of my keyboard. “Do you have his home address?”

  “Sure.”

  “Let’s plug it in here, see if he lives in the hot zone. ”

  She gave me the address and while I updated the geoprofile, she told me she hadn’t come up with anything on the therapist or marriage counselor angle. “What about you?” She studied the screen. “Anything?”

  “Not so much.”

  Using a different color for each victim’s travel routes, I overlaid the data onto a three-dimensional map of the Denver metroplex. The result looked like a plate of multicolored spaghetti.

  She pulled up a chair beside me, perhaps closer than she needed to, but I didn’t say anything. “So tell me,” she said. “What am I looking at?”

  I remembered that she was familiar with some of my research, but I also knew that geospatial investigation wasn’t her specialty, so I pointed to the tangle of overlapping colors and said, “I’m trying to find John’s home base, so I input Denver’s most traveled roads based on the typical daily vehicle congestion at the times of the crimes, then I compared that with the victim’s typical travel patterns-but so far, even with Bennett’s address it doesn’t look like the data is complete enough to give us what we need.”

  “OK.” She drummed her fingers on the desk. “Let’s think this through. Location and timing, right?”