The Knight pbf-3

by Steven James

  “I know.”

  My flight left in less than an hour.

  I put a call through to United Airlines but found out that all the flights for the rest of the day were already overbooked. Even with my FBI clearance they weren’t able to get me a seat.

  My mother watched me hang up the phone. “Tessa needs me here,” I said. “I’m not going to leave her.”

  “I’ll take care of her. It might be better, considering… I just mean that since I’m a woman, she might feel more comfortable.. .”

  “I understand, but-”

  “It’s OK.” It was Tessa’s voice, at the bottom of the stairs. “You can go, Patrick. I’m fine.”

  I looked over and saw her standing with one foot on the bottom step and one on the floor.

  “Tessa, are you all right?”

  She nodded.

  “Giving you the diary. I thought it would help.”

  “It’s not that. It’s not you. It’s Mom.”

  Even though I understood where she was coming from, it hurt to hear her say those words. “I’m sorry all this has happened.”

  “It’s not your fault.” She toed at the carpet for a moment, then looked at me again. “This killer, this guy on trial, you told me that he did terrible things to people, right? To women?”

  I remembered the conversation I’d had with her on Friday morning. “Yes.”

  “And that he made you question the amount of evil we’re capable of doing to each other? And that it frightened you?” I wondered if the graphic descriptions of abortions she’d given me twenty minutes earlier were affecting the emotional intensity I heard in every one of her words.

  “Yes.”

  “Then don’t let him hurt any more women,” she said. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be OK here with Martha and the two cops outside who so cleverly switched cars to disguise themselves.”

  Great.

  “Are you sure? Because-”

  “Get going already, before you miss your flight.”

  She’d convinced me. I kissed her on the forehead and told her that I’d be back as soon as I could, by six tomorrow-unless things didn’t go as planned-and that I loved her.

  “You too,” she said softly.

  Then I thanked my mother for letting Tessa stay with her, and she told me of course and not to worry, and then I grabbed my suitcase and computer bag, climbed into my car, and drove through the gray Colorado day to the airport.

  Just as the first snowflakes began to fall.

  3:48 p.m.

  225,341 hits.

  That’s how many Amy Lynn had gotten since posting the article three hours earlier.

  She was almost giddy.

  The whole idea of a murderer basing his ten crimes on an ancient book gave her the perfect angle for a series of online articles-and for the true crime book she’d already started outlining. And coming up with the moniker “The Day Four Killer” was nothing short of brilliant.

  The cable news networks had picked up on it and the entire Denver metroplex was bracing for what one cable anchorman called “The next troubling saga of unimaginable evil.”

  And Amy Lynn loved every minute of it.

  Ever since Ari called her, she’d been doing what she did best, poking around and digging up facts that she wasn’t supposed to find out about.

  And if she could just track down a little more background about some of the victims, she could have the second article ready to post by tomorrow morning.

  She was online, fact-checking the times of the murders, when her phone vibrated. Reggie.

  “Hey, dear,” she said, playing the role of the loving wife.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” His voice was dark and accusatory. “You posted that article? Tell me the truth.”

  “What article?”

  “The one on the Internet. The one everyone is talking about. About the homicides.”

  “Of course not, no. Rhodes told me not to write about the killings.” And she found that it wasn’t difficult to say the words. Eventually, after she found a publisher, she could straighten things out with Reggie. Smooth things over, but for now, she needed some space. “Besides, I’ve been busy on this baseball piece.” She’d turned that in yesterday, but it seemed like a reasonable thing to say.

  Silence.

  “I swear, Reggie.”

  Still no reply.

  “I wouldn’t lie to you. You know that.”

  Finally, he sighed softly. “OK, you’re right. It’s just, I don’t want you involved with any of this.”

  “I know.”

  “You know how much I love you. How much I want to protect you.”

  Good grief.

  “I know.”

  “It’s just, I keep thinking I should be the one to protect you and Jayson, instead of some feds.” He didn’t bother hiding his contempt for the FBI. And then, he set about once again trying to convince her that she didn’t need to stay in protective custody. “I could take a few days off. I can take care of you-”

  “I know you can.”

  “How about this: I’ll take off work tomorrow. We’ll all go home. We’ll spend the day together as a family.”

  She mulled over his proposal and was surprised to find herself actually considering it.

  Yes, she’d enjoyed the privacy of being able to work in solitude at the safe house today, but tomorrow she would probably need to get out, follow some leads, do some interviews…

  “Reggie, I think it’d be great to be with you, but I don’t want us to be bothered with all these cops and agents following us around-”

  “I can take care of that.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “I’ll leave as long as it’s only you.”

  “Great, that’s great. I get off at six tonight. I can pick you up then.”

  “No. My car is here, remember? I’ll meet you at home.”

  A slight pause. “Yes. OK. It’s going to be better this way. You’ll see.”

  They said good-bye and ended the call.

  So, this might be just what she needed.

  Even if the feds did send some agents to follow her home, once Reggie got there he could get rid of them. She’d make sure that he did. And then, tomorrow when it was only Reggie with her, she would find a way to slip away. He and Jayson could have a Daddy Day.

  Oh yes. This was going to work out very well.

  She ignored Jayson’s whining in the other room and began to edit her next article.

  88

  Tessa’s arm hurt.

  She hadn’t been cutting as much recently, and she’d pressed the blade a little too hard. The blood totally weirded her out, and it seemed like there was more than there should have been, and in the end, she’d had to bandage the cut.

  But at least Patrick and Martha didn’t know. They would have probably been mad, or worse, disappointed.

  And the bummer thing was, it hadn’t really helped.

  Not really.

  Half an hour ago, after Patrick left for the airport, she’d driven to her house with Martha to pick up her schoolbooks and clothes. The undercover cops followed them the whole way, ever so stealthily.

  How nice.

  From past experience, she knew that when Patrick testified at a trial he was sometimes called back to the stand several days in a row, so she wasn’t exactly convinced he was going to make it home by Monday afternoon. She threw a couple extra changes of clothes into an overnight bag just in case. Then she grabbed her jewelry box and the Rubik’s Cube.

  On the drive back to Martha’s, she was glad her step-grandmother didn’t give her any trite advice on how to deal with everything, because it wouldn’t have helped. Instead, Martha just drove quietly beside her, and it seemed to Tessa that maybe that was exactly what she needed.

  But maybe it wasn’t, because all the junk was still there inside her.

  The twisted, angry feelings weren’t going away. Not at all.

  B
y the time they made it to Martha’s house, Tessa had realized she definitely needed a way to keep herself from thinking about her arm and her mom and her dad and the pot of basil and everything that had happened in the last couple days.

  Writing didn’t seem to do it. Cutting hadn’t really helped.

  She needed something else to think about.

  Yesterday, she’d promised Dora that she would read the story of Pandora’s Box this week.

  That should do it.

  She surfed to an online version and pulled it up.

  It didn’t take her long at all to read four different versions of the story of Prometheus and Pandora, and in the end she found that Dora had been right-the story did have a surprise ending. She’d expected that the last thing out of the box might have been disease or famine or death, but it wasn’t.

  No, actually it was the opposite “Is there anything you need, Tessa?” Martha called up the stairs.

  “No, I’m good.”

  As she slid her laptop aside, she noticed her stack of textbooks staring at her, and she remembered her exams coming up in the morning. Normally, she could pretty much ace her tests without studying, but maybe that was just what she needed to do to get her mind off everything.

  So Tessa pulled out her trig book and tried to disappear into the numbers and equations, but her thoughts kept drifting back to Paul, the man who’d written to her mother and begged to be a part of her life. And as she thought of him, she realized that her arm was no longer the part of her that hurt the most.

  5:02 p.m.

  It was starting to look like I wouldn’t be leaving Denver tonight.

  Already our flight had been delayed for nearly an hour because of the late-season snowstorm rolling down the Rockies, and the gate agent kept reassuring us that we would still be taking off, but with the amount of snow falling on the tarmac I had my doubts.

  At first as I’d waited, I called to check on Tessa. My mother assured me that she’d spoken with her only a few minutes earlier and that she was fine and reading in her bedroom.

  Then, since it looked like I’d be using Tessa’s phone at least until tomorrow evening, if not longer, I logged in to my federal account and synched her cell with my address book so I would have access to all of my contacts.

  When I hung up, I saw I’d missed a call from Cheyenne, so I gave her a shout, and she informed me that she’d just left Jake’s second briefing and that it had been “just as informative and productive as the first.”

  “Too bad I missed it. Any word on Bryant?”

  “Here’s the thing: when he left the Denver News building, Benjamin Rhodes was with him.”

  “Rhodes? Amy Lynn’s boss?”

  “Yes. They stopped for a late lunch at a Mexican place near DU and then went to Bryant’s house. I just spoke with one of the officers assigned to watch them. He told me that both men are still there.”

  Interesting.

  Then Cheyenne told me that she would call me as soon as she knew more, and after we ended the call, I decided to follow up on Dr. Bryant. I typed in the IP address I’d gotten from his computer when we were at his house and remotely logged on to his system.

  He wasn’t online at the moment, but I was able to access his browser’s Internet history.

  And that’s where I found the porn sites.

  More than a hundred of them-all hardcore S amp; M sites that exclusively featured men.

  I thought about my conversation with Bryant, the pot of cof- fee he’d brewed, his dinner meeting with Rhodes, his interest in homosexual porn…

  So, Rhodes and Bryant…?

  All loose threads. Nothing solid. But enough to pique my interest.

  I was sorting through the possible implications when the gate agent announced that the flight was now boarding, and that because of the delay, they were expediting the boarding process and welcoming passengers in all seats, all rows, to board.

  So we boarded. And I let my thoughts flip through the facts of the case.

  And less than twenty minutes later we were in the air and I was on my way back to Basque’s trial in Chicago.

  Giovanni had placed the poison earlier in the afternoon and then driven to Bearcroft Mine.

  Now, he turned on his headlamp and entered the tunnel on the west side of the mountain.

  This entrance didn’t appear on any of the maps still in circulation. And, while it was possible someone had heard about it, Giovanni believed it was far more likely that, now that Thomas Bennett, the mine’s former owner, was dead, he was the only person alive who knew it was there.

  It took him nearly half an hour to maneuver through the network of tunnels and arrive at the mine’s second-lowest passageway.

  He lit a lantern and hung it from a hook on one of the wooden beams buttressing the ceiling.

  The tunnel ended just a few feet to his right, and beside him was the six-foot-by-six-foot platform that the miners in the 1800s had used to lower the ore carts into the tunnel thirty feet further down. The platform hung from a rope looped through a double pulley attached to the beam above Giovanni’s head. He’d replaced the aging hemp rope with a new static nylon one last month. The pulleys reduced the force needed to raise and lower the platform so that a single person could manage it by himself.

  A single miner.

  A single murderer.

  A single storyteller.

  He stepped onto the platform, held one end of the rope, and then released the lever on the beam above him. A crude cam device next to the pulleys pressed against the rope, controlling the rate of the platform’s descent.

  Slowly, he began to lower himself down the shaft.

  The tunnel he was heading toward had never been completed when the mine was abandoned in the early 1900s. It spanned only forty feet, and was less than six feet high, which meant that once Patrick Bowers was sealed inside, he wouldn’t be able to stand up for the rest of his life.

  As he descended, Giovanni inspected the line of plastic explosives he’d threaded down the walls of the shaft. Even though he had no formal explosive ordnance training, with his professional contacts it hadn’t been difficult to acquire the C-4 and learn enough rudimentary skills to rig the shaft to blow. He’d practiced in other abandoned mines over the last few months and had become relatively proficient at sealing shut mine shafts.

  When he reached the bottom, he tied off the rope, synched his handheld detonator with the four wireless receivers attached to the C-4, and then looked around.

  Months ago when he’d first begun investigating this mine, apart from a few pieces of rusting mining equipment, this tunnel had been completely empty, but now it was stocked with enough food and bottled water to keep one person alive for ten to twelve weeks.

  After all, it wouldn’t have been nearly as satisfying of a climax if Agent Bowers died too quickly after being buried alive.

  If the access shaft had been located in the middle of the tunnel, Giovanni might have been concerned about the entire tunnel collapsing when the shaft blew, but since it was on the end and he’d reinforced the tunnel’s ceiling braces, he was confident that the tunnel would withstand the explosion.

  One more thing to check.

  He pulled out the Matheson Analyzer.

  When air moves through space it acts like a fluid, so using the Matheson, he tested the computational fluid dynamics of the oxygen level coming from the air flow of a two-inch wide rift in the wall, taking into account that the access shaft would be sealed. It took the mechanism only a few moments to make the calculations.

  Yes, the oxygen would be adequate. Bowers would survive until he either starved to death or eventually went insane.

  Early in his planning, Giovanni had decided that it would be more frightening for Bowers to see his tomb for himself, to search the walls, the ceiling, the ground for some possible way out, but to find none. And then, to have his light slowly fade. Slowly die as his small, enclosed world was swallowed in darkness forever. So, when the time came, Gio
vanni would let his captive have a flashlight.

  It would make for a much better ending.

  Giovanni clicked off his light and let the thick, living darkness sweep over him. He opened and closed his eyes. No visible difference.

  This is what it would be like for Bowers in the end.

  He listened to his heartbeat, to the steady, even sound of his breathing.

  At last, light back on, he checked his watch.

  He still had a forty-five-minute drive to Denver.

  Tomorrow, before taking care of Bowers, he would be placing two people in his storage unit, and he needed to make sure all the preparations were in place for their stay. So he took one last look around the tunnel that Bowers would die in at the climax of his tale, then Giovanni left Bearcroft Mine and drove through the softly falling snow to Denver.

  89

  Although I could think of a thousand things I’d rather have been doing, I spent the flight to Chicago typing up my report about the courthouse incident on Friday for FBI Assistant Executive Director Margaret Wellington, detailing the circumstances involving Grant Sikora’s death.

  When we arrived at O’Hare, I took a moment to email it to her before leaving the airport.

  With my email program open, I noticed there weren’t any messages from Calvin. But there was one from Angela Knight, my friend in the FBI’s cybercrime division:

  Pat,

  About those 911 calls.

  We couldn’t backtrace either of them. Nothing on the call to your landline either. Whoever made them knew how to cover his tracks.

  Not much on the voice spectrograph of the 911 tapes either, but I can tell you it was the same person on each call.

  The background noise on the first call is internal feedback from the dispatch office. The sound on the second tape is rain falling on the windshield of a car. And no, I can’t tell you the make and year-although I am working on it.

  That’s it. More later. Be well.

  – AK

  So, Cowler had been right about the background sounds on the first tape, and while the rain on the second audio didn’t prove that John was in Chicago when the call was made, since a storm had been blowing through the city that morning, it did corroborate the hypothesis that he was.