by Steven James
“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.
“Yeah, 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.
Kurt gave his watch a quick glance. “I gotta head home. Cheryl’s not too happy about my hours this week.”
As sensitively as I could I said, “So how are things? Any better?”
He wasn’t quick to answer. “They are what they are.” I heard deep remorse in his voice. Then he took a deep breath. “Anyway, I’ll call Jake and Cheyenne; fill ’em in. Don’t forget, we meet at HQ at one o’clock. I know how much you love briefings, and this one’s extra special. Jake’s going to run down the psychological profile of the-”
“Please don’t say UNSUB.”
My comment brought a small but welcome smile. “Killer. So I’ll see you there?”
I didn’t reply.
“Pat?”
“I’m thinking.”
I realized that, given the choice between sitting through a briefing led by Jake Vanderveld and swimming through a pond full of leeches, I’d be looking for my bathing suit. But I didn’t mention that. It didn’t seem like the polite thing to say.
“OK, I’ll see you at one. That should give me enough time. There’s something I want to look into.”
“What’s that?”
“The newspaper articles pinned to the wall at the ranch house all concerned Richard Devin Basque. Since John obviously knows about Basque, I want to find out if Basque knows about John.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“I’m going to have a little chat with my old friend.”
67
Ten minutes after leaving the hospital, I was in my office in the federal building. I turned on my computer’s video chat camera, phoned Ralph, and told him that I needed to do a video conference with Basque. As soon as I’d explained why, he said, “I’ll take care of it. I’m about ten minutes from the jail. I’ll get things rolling; call you back in twenty.”
He called me back in twelve.
“It’s good to go,” he said. “I didn’t mention the subject matter, though. I figured you could bring that up.”
“Good. What about Basque’s lawyer?”
“He said he doesn’t have anything to hide; that he doesn’t want her there. He already signed a waiver.”
Basque was so addicted to control that I wasn’t surprised he didn’t want Ms. Eldridge-Gorman sitting next to him, telling him what to say.
“It’s a power trip for him,” I said to Ralph. “Just knowing that I’m asking for his time probably makes him feel important.”
“Is that profiling I’m hearing from you, Pat?”
“That’s not profiling. It’s called induction.”
“Sounds like profiling to me.”
“It’s not profiling.”
“Pat the Profiler. That’s gonna be your new nickname. Wait till I send out the memo.”
“Could we just focus on the case here?”
Then, through the phone, I heard the sound of a door opening. “Wait,” Ralph said. “I gotta go. They’re ready.”
“I wasn’t profiling,” I said, but he’d already hung up.
Anticipating that I might want to take notes during my conversation with Basque, I positioned a notepad next to my keyboard, directed the camera on my face, and then clicked “record” so I could keep a digital record of our conversation.
By the time I was done getting ready, I heard my computer beep. A gray jail cell wall appeared on the monitor.
Ralph’s head filled the screen. Then the image swung to the left as he centered the computer’s camera on an empty chair. He looked into the camera again. “Almost got it, Pat the Profiler.”
“Could you tilt your head to the side?” I said. “I’m getting an awful lot of glare on this end.”
“Ha. Very funny. Laugh all you want.” His face appeared again. He slid his hand across his head. “It drives Brineesha crazy.”
“Just buy me some sunglasses.”
The image of Ralph’s face was grainy, and because of the delay between the audio and video, I guessed they were using someone’s older, slower laptop. Then I heard the rattle of leg irons and Ralph said, “Here he comes.”
There was a moment of blurry movement as Ralph moved back, then Basque situated himself on the chair and faced the camera.
68
Today, Basque wore an orange prison jumpsuit and not the hand-tailored clothes he’d worn at the trial, and for some reason that brought me a small degree of satisfaction. The door clanged shut as Ralph l
eft.
“Hello, Richard,” I said.
“Agent Bowers.” Even though he was handcuffed, he looked as confident and at ease as ever. “I’d like to thank you again for saving my life. I wouldn’t be here today if you hadn’t responded so quickly.”
My natural response to a comment like that would have been to say, “You’re welcome,” but I held back and simply said, “Yes.”
“Did they find out how Celeste’s father was able to load the gun before it was brought into the courtroom?”
“They’re looking into it.”
“I’m sure they are.” He paused, folded his handcuffed hands on his lap. “Does this chat concern the recent string of murders in Denver that I’ve been hearing so much about?”
“It does.” After the attempt on his life I should have guessed he’d be following the news. “I think you might be able to help us find the killer.” I stopped for a moment and evaluated whether or not to say it. Went ahead: “He reminds me of you, Richard.”
Basque was silent. Finally he nodded slightly. “So, I’m guessing it isn’t motives you’re interested in. What are we hoping to find out here today?”
“He knows about you. We found newspaper clippings of your crimes. He collected them.”
Basque straightened up. “Clippings?”
“Yes. I’m wondering if he ever contacted you.”
Like so many serial killers, Basque had reached celebrity status among a certain aberrant segment of society. From my pretrial briefing with Assistant State’s Attorney Vandez, I knew that thousands of people had written to Basque over the past thirteen years. Last I’d heard, nine women had asked him to marry them when he was released.
I figured I’d give Basque one small clue to see if it helped jog his memory. “This killer, he likes Renaissance literature.”
I’ve only met a few people in my life with a memory as sharp as Basque’s, and now it looked like he was mentally sorting through all of those thousands of letters he’d received in order to identify the man I was referring to. At last, a look of recognition crossed his face. “Giovanni.”
That’s Boccaccio’s first name, the Italian form of John.