The Knight pbf-3

by Steven James

  “Tell me what you know,” I said.

  “Well for starters, I don’t know who he is. Giovanni’s almost certainly not his real name. I never wrote him back.” Basque was as consummate a liar as he was a killer, and even though he sounded like he was telling the truth I wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not. He must have noticed my skepticism. “You can confirm it with the warden,” he said. “Giovanni wrote to me six times, I never replied.”

  I would contact the warden as soon as I could, but for now I wanted to find out as many details as possible from Basque himself.

  “What did he write to you about?”

  Basque wet his lips, stared directly into the camera, and said, “You.”

  69

  My heartbeat seemed to stop for a split second, and when it picked up again it was faster than usual. “What did you say?”

  “Giovanni wrote to me about an FBI agent he was recruiting to play a crucial part in his story. Someone he was planning to bury alive at the climax. Someone he admired.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not enough. It could be any number of people.” I could see the gears turning in his mind. It appeared there was something he wasn’t telling me. “What else?”

  He tapped a finger slowly against his leg. “I’ll help you if you do something for me.”

  “I’m not here to cut deals.”

  “Hear me out. It’s not a deal like you think. It’s a favor.”

  I was tempted to end the call immediately, but then remembered that nothing I’d done so far had slowed down John-or Giovanni or whatever his name was. He always seemed to be one step ahead, just like Basque had been thirteen years ago in the months leading up to the slaughterhouse. In the months so many women died.

  Cold, whispering lips.

  Basque’s victims.

  And now, Giovanni’s.

  So many innocent people, calling to me from their graves.

  Basque stared at me from the cell in Chicago, waiting for my reply.

  At last I said, “What’s the favor?”

  “When you return to the stand tomorrow and Priscilla asks you about what happened in the slaughterhouse…” He paused.

  I’d been trying not to think about the trial, and I didn’t like being reminded that I’d be there in less than twenty-four hours.

  “Go on.”

  “Don’t tell the truth,” Basque said.

  His words stunned me. “What?” I stared at the grainy picture on my computer screen and tried to decipher Basque’s expression. Couldn’t.

  “When she asks you whether or not you assaulted me, don’t tell the truth.”

  “I won’t lie on the stand.”

  Why is he asking you to do this?

  “You’ve considered it, haven’t you?” Basque said. “I think you have. I’m just asking you to do what you want to do, what your gut tells you to do.”

  Cheyenne’s words about following gut instincts immediately came to mind, especially since Basque’s comments struck uncomfortably close to home. “If that’s your only condition then this conversation is over-”

  “He’s coming for you, Patrick.” Basque leaned forward and his voice seemed to carry a note of genuine concern. “He’s playing with you. Be careful. He’s got a twist waiting for you at the end that you’d never expect.”

  “I’ll take my chances. Good-bye, Richard.”

  “I’ll be praying for you. Remember, Exodus 1:15-21. Remem-ber-”

  I ended the call. I wasn’t in the mood for Basque’s games. I wasn’t in the mood for any of this.

  As I was saving the video and uploading it onto the task force’s online case files, I felt a wave of anger.

  Then confusion.

  Then something else. Something deeper and more primal-a desire for revenge, for a rough and final justice to be meted out against Giovanni and Basque. And against all who would mock the dying or take innocent life.

  And with those feelings, I sensed myself slipping, tumbling toward something I did not want to become. I remembered a time a few months ago when Tessa had asked me if I was like them, like the people I hunt, and I’d had to admit to myself that there’s only a thin line that separates me from them. A single act. A single choice.

  Remember who you are, Pat.

  Remember.

  I stared at my office wall: my diplomas, my awards.

  You’re Special Agent Patrick Bowers with the Federal Bureau of Investigation… the man who caught Richard Devin Basque… criminologist, investigator, author…

  My mind tried to dictate my resume, but the words in my head were cut off abruptly when my eyes landed on the spine of Christie’s diary resting on my bookshelf.

  And I remembered the most important part of who I am: You are Tessa Bernice Ellis’s stepfather.

  I crossed the room and gazed at the worn, leather spine of the diary-it wasn’t one of those small diaries with pages the size of note cards but was the same size as a hardback novel.

  Christie was the one who’d first gotten me interested in mysticism and philosophy, and in the last two years I’d read everything I could get my hands on by Guyon, de Fenelon, Merton, and a dozen others. I’d placed Christie’s diary between The Way of Perfection by St. Teresa of Avila and Abandonment to Divine Providence by Jean-Pierre de Caussade, two of my favorites.

  I ran my finger along the spine.

  The wedding picture of me and Christie sat on the shelf just below the diary. We’d gotten married at a small chapel in Central Park and then stepped outside to have this picture taken. And now, as I looked at her smiling face, I felt the same strange mixture of thankfulness and loss I always feel when I see her.

  Christie had chosen Tessa to be her maid of honor. That’s how close they were. That’s how much they meant to each other.

  I took the diary from the shelf.

  And I left to give it to my stepdaughter.

  Unit #14

  Safe-Lock Self-Storage

  5532 Dayton Street

  Denver, Colorado

  Giovanni dropped six rats into the aquarium that contained his three remaining Western Diamondback rattlesnakes.

  The rats tried to climb the glass.

  But the snakes closed in.

  Over the next fifteen minutes he let the snakes feed while he extracted the bufotenin from the skin and parotid glands of the ten toads he’d killed, dissected, and pinned out on the board in front of him.

  After he’d removed the psychedelic drugs from the toads, he consulted a toxicology textbook to determine how much poison he would need for a lethal dose and found that he had more than enough bufotoxin to kill six people, let alone two.

  Reading the description of the symptoms was very informative: hallucinations, vomiting, seizures, paralysis, and then ventricular fibrillation. As one book put it:

  Often the hallucinations involve the sensation of bugs crawling across the victim’s skin or out of the bodily orifices. Frequently, those experiencing these symptoms will scratch furiously at their skin or attempt to scrub, slice or burn the bugs away.

  So, it looked like the next two victims would die just as dramatically as Simona and Pasquino did in Emilia’s story, the seventh tale told on day four.

  Given the delivery method he’d chosen, Giovanni couldn’t be certain if his victims would fatally poison themselves tonight or in the morning, but he was relatively certain that both of them would be dead before noon tomorrow.

  Based on their habits, they would be away from home this afternoon. He could place the poison then. And if they changed their pattern, he would alter his plan. Maybe slip over later tonight while they were asleep. Either way, the story would play out just as it was supposed to.

  The tragic squeaking and scratching of the last dying rat caught his attention. He watched it until it stopped quivering, just like he’d watched his grandmother stop twitching so many years before.

  Finally, the rat stared wide-eyed and unblinking at the world, just like Grandma Nadin
e had done.

  Just like all the people over the years in the different tales he’d told.

  The snake opened its jaws and began to swallow its meal.

  Giovanni laid the two syringes full of bufotoxin in a narrow metal case, snapped it shut, and slipped it into his duffel bag.

  Then he left the storage facility and, since he had a few arrangements to make before the last four stories began, drove to his place of employment where no one knew, no one had any idea, who he really was.

  And where, in the greatest irony of all, he was trusted implicitly with people’s lives every day.

  70

  Tessa was showered, dressed, and sitting at my parents’ kitchen table waiting for me when I arrived at their house with the diary.

  She was sipping a glass of chilled orange juice and had a half-eaten grapefruit in front of her, and although I expected her to ask me where I’d been or complain that I’d dragged her out of bed and made her change in the car, all she said was, “So, um… do you have it?”

  I couldn’t think of anything touching or profound to say, so I simply handed Christie’s diary to her and watched her reaction.

  She accepted it quietly, stared at it. Turned it over in her hands.

  Christie had used her diary partly as a scrapbook, pasting snippets of letters, notes, and postcards inside, all of which made the book fat and lumpy and left the binding straining at the lock. But it gave the diary character, and by the look on Tessa’s face, it seemed to appeal to her inquisitive nature.

  After a few moments when she didn’t say anything, I asked her, “Where’s Martha?”

  “At church.” Tessa still hadn’t looked up from the diary.

  “She left you alone?”

  “She asked if I wanted her to stay home, but I told her I’d be safe with those two undercover cops in the car across the street watching the house.”

  “How did you-?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Puh-lease.”

  OK, so I would need to have a little talk with those two officers.

  “So, you fly out today again?” Tessa was looking at the diary, but speaking to me.

  “I need to leave for the airport at about 2:30. I’m hoping to be back tomorrow evening.”

  “And then we leave for DC pretty much after that.” She didn’t state it as a question.

  It was possible that my testimony in Chicago would affect the timing of our trip to DC, but I decided I could deal with all that later. “We’re scheduled to leave on Wednesday. Yes.” She didn’t reply. I tapped her shoulder gently. “All right, well, fill me in when you’re done reading it, OK?”

  “I will.”

  Then, leaving the glass of OJ and the remains of the grapefruit behind, she took the diary upstairs to the bedroom my parents let her use when I’m out of town.

  Despite her overwhelming curiosity, Tessa stared at the diary for a long time before opening it.

  When Patrick had first told her about it, she’d been angry, angry, so angry that he’d kept it from her, but then when he told her that her mom hadn’t wanted him to give it to her until her eighteenth birthday, she stopped being angry and became something else.

  Curious, yes.

  Maybe a little afraid.

  But why? What was she afraid of?

  She stared at it, ran her fingers across the weathered cover.

  She kept this from you. Your mom kept it from you.

  She didn’t want you to know about it until you were eighteen.

  But why not?

  Tessa slipped the key into the lock. Her heart began to run like a rabbit through her chest as she turned the key, clicked open the clasp. Flipped to the first entry.

  November 2

  Dear Diary,

  I’m not really sure why I’m doing this, writing to you, I mean, starting a diary. I guess I’m hoping you’ll be a place for me to just be myself, the real me, the person no one ever really seems to notice. I guess it’s good to have a place like that. I don’t know. It’s hard to be honest with people sometimes, maybe I can at least be honest with you.

  A place to be real.

  Nice.

  Based on the date, Tessa realized that her mother had started the journal when she was seventeen-the same age that she was now.

  You were conceived two years later.

  She was tempted to jump around, skim over the entries, kind of like scrolling through someone’s blog to see if you really wanted to read the whole thing or not, but she already knew that she wanted to read every page, and, just like reading any book, you cheat yourself if you skip to the end. You miss all the surprises.

  “Hey, Tessa.” It was Patrick, calling from the first floor. “I left my laptop at home. I have a few things to check on and then I have a meeting at 1:00. You’ll be all right?”

  “Uh-huh,” she hollered through the door of her room.

  “I’ll see you this afternoon before I fly out. I’ve still got your cell, OK?”

  “Yeah. Just tell those two cops not to be quite so obtrusive.”

  A pause. “I will. Call me if you need me.”

  “OK.”

  Then Tessa turned to the diary’s second entry and began to read.

  71

  I had a quick and rather blunt word with the two officers who were supposed to be watching my parents’ house undercover, and then I drove home to pick up my laptop.

  Using Tessa’s cell I dialed in to my account and checked my voicemail, but my mailbox was empty. When I checked hers, I found a dozen text messages from her friends at school. I wanted her to be able to access them, so I programmed the phone to automatically forward all her messages to her email account.

  Then I called the warden from the Waupun Correctional Institution, the maximum security penitentiary in Wisconsin where Basque had spent most of the thirteen years of his incarceration.

  I caught Warden Schuler at home grilling steaks for his family, and he made sure he let me know how happy he was that I was disturbing him on a Sunday morning, but I told him it would only take a minute, and then asked if I could get a look at the letters Basque had received while he was in prison.

  “Sure, if we had ’em.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Basque ripped ’em up and flushed ’em.”

  “Well, you made copies, right?”

  “Privacy rights. We can open the mail, inspect it, but we can’t copy anything. ACLU would have a field day with that. Sorry.”

  “What about outgoing mail?”

  “Same deal.”

  For the second time that day, I cussed.

  “My sentiments exactly.”

  “All right, thanks. Have a good lunch.”

  “I wish I could be of more help.” As Warden Schuler said the words, his voice slipped from the annoyance I’d heard at the beginning of the call into a tense kind of uneasiness. “In sixteen years of doing this, Agent Bowers, he’s the worst I’ve seen. Put him away. At the trial, I mean. Don’t let him-”

  “I won’t,” I said and ended the call.

  With Basque’s letters destroyed, there was no way to verify that John had ever written to him, but still, Basque had known who I was talking about right away when I mentioned Renaissance literature so I figured that somehow, they’d been in touch.

  John.

  Giovanni.

  Since the murders were in Denver, and Kurt had told me that the only college in the region that offered medieval literature courses on The Decameron was DU, it seemed probable to me that John-or Giovanni, or whatever his name was-would have taken one of those classes.

  When I arrived home I went directly to my desk, tapped the spacebar, and woke up my laptop.

  According to our information, Dr. Bryant, the professor who taught the classes on Boccaccio, was in Phoenix yesterday. It’s tough living in the twenty-first century without leaving electronic footprints everywhere you go, so I accessed the Federal Digital Database, and surfed to the FAA’s flight manifest record
s. Then I checked the passenger lists from all the airlines that fly into or out of the Denver International Airport and the Colorado Springs Airport for yesterday and today, but I didn’t find the name Adrian Bryant on any of them.

  I expanded my search to include any arrivals or departures over the last twenty days.

  Still nothing.

  So unless Professor Bryant drove to Phoenix or flew under analias, it looked like our local Boccaccio expert never went to his conference.

  Interesting.

  It took me less than three minutes to do an online search and find out that Dr. Bryant wasn’t married, lived alone, and didn’t own a landline, so it was a good thing for me the National Security Agency keeps searchable records of all the cell numbers and subscriber names from the mobile phone companies operating in North America.

  The Bureau’s cybercrime division works closely with NSA, so I called them, and a few moments later, I had Bryant’s cell number and verification that the GPS location for both his phone and his 2009 BMW 328i sedan were currently at his home address. I told them to monitor the GPS locations and call me if either moved in the next thirty minutes.

  To confirm that Bryant was at home with his cell, I tapped in his number, and after he picked up I asked if he wanted to purchase a free vacation package He hung up without even pointing out that I’d offered him a chance to buy something that was free.

  So, he was at the house. Good.

  Sometimes I wonder how crimes were ever solved before we had computers.

  A quick look at the clock-11:14 a.m. I needed to be at police headquarters by 1:00, so considering where Bryant lived in Littleton, it might be cutting it close, but I figured I’d have just enough time to drive over, meet with the professor, and make it back in time for Jake’s sure-to-be-scintillating briefing.

  I made one final call from behind the wheel of my car, and after Cheyenne answered I invited her to join me, and she agreed-as long as I could swing by and get her. “All right,” I said. “This time I’ll pick you up.” And then, realizing how I’d phrased that, I added, “In my car. For the case. To catch the bad guy.”