The Queen pbf-5

by Steven James

  “Oh. Right.” Yeah, this is Tessa, remember? “Anyway, I suggested Nielson remind him that doing this would give Iran credibility on the world stage, a seat at the table, so to speak. And they could save face in the Muslim world by portraying the US as a rogue nation with nuclear weapons that it couldn’t control-”

  “But that they could,” Tessa said, completing my thought.

  “Precisely.”

  “And they come out looking more powerful than America.” She nodded. “Nice, so you appealed to Iran’s self-interest and pride.”

  “In a sense, I suppose.”

  “So, motives.”

  “Motives?”

  “Right. You had to accurately assess their motives, then-”

  “No, it was just logic.”

  She put both of her hands on my shoulders, looked me squarely in the eye. “Patrick, you helped stave off war in the Middle East only because you thought like a profiler. Lien-hua is gonna be so proud of you when I tell-wait.” Tessa dropped her hands. “Is she okay? Where is she?”

  “She’s fine. She’s still at the top secret underground military base helping round up the eco-terrorists.”

  Tessa blinked. “Oh.”

  I thought again of Valkyrie, who it might be-Cassandra? Becker? Manoji? Rusk? We could sort that through soon enough.

  In the hallway beyond Tessa, I noticed the elevator doors glide open. “You should know that I told Lien-hua tonight I was going to marry her.”

  “You what?”

  “I told her I was going to marry her.”

  “No, I mean you didn’t ask her if she’d marry you?” Tessa said incredulously. “You told her you were gonna marry her?”

  “Um…”

  Jake Vanderveld left the elevator and came striding toward us.

  “Oh.” Tessa shook her head. “You screwed that one up big time.”

  “How’s Amber?” Jake asked, eyeing the door behind us.

  “Recovering.” I was surprised to see him here. “Did you go to the base?”

  “Without a snowmobile there wasn’t any good way to get out there; I couldn’t reach you by phone, and when I spoke with Lien-hua, she said I’d find you here. I decided to come and check on everyone.”

  His marked concern surprised me and made me wonder if maybe I’d misjudged him all these years.

  “Tessa,” I said, “can you give us a couple seconds?”

  “Sure.”

  She knocked on the door to Amber’s room, and Sean invited her in. As soon as she was gone I asked Jake, “What do we know about the base?”

  “Torres and his men disarmed the explosives, and it looks like they caught all the Eco-Tech militants, but Chekov is missing.”

  “What!”

  “Somehow he overpowered the MA who was guarding him. The guy’ll survive, but by the time SWAT got to the control room, Chekov was already gone. Listen, we’ll get him, though, right? Lien-hua told me you put a GPS ankle bracelet on him, so as soon as he surfaces we should be able to nail him.”

  Don’t bet on it.

  He saw the skepticism in my eyes. “Those things are a bear to get off, Pat.”

  “Yes, they are.”

  “You think he’s still in the base?”

  I shook my head. “He has a gunshot wound in his shoulder that needs to be treated. Also, he’d anticipate that the longer he waited, the more backup would arrive.”

  I doubted Chekov would use the Schoenberg tunnel to escape, since, after leaving a kidnapped victim at the Inn, he would know there’d be a heightened law enforcement presence there.

  He could possibly be hiding in one of the other tunnels, but since they lacked rail tracks, there was no indication that they surfaced anywhere. Also, after his disappearance he would know law enforcement would search them eventually and he’d be trapped.

  That left the tunnel to the sawmill, and what better place to cut off a tamper-proof, steel mesh GPS ankle bracelet than a sawmill?

  “Jake, are you up for a drive?”

  “To where?”

  “Let’s go catch us an assassin.”

  100

  I drove.

  Jake sat beside me, his iPad 2 on his lap, a tracking application for the GPS ankle bracelet open on the screen.

  Before we left the hospital, Amber had assured me that she was fine, that I didn’t need to worry about her; and Sean had been glad to let me borrow the pickup: “As long as it doesn’t end up like my sled.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Now, Jake and I were about ten minutes from the sawmill, but so far, nothing had come up on the iPad’s tracking program. Nothing at all.

  So maybe this was a fool’s errand. Another dead end.

  Maybe.

  Maybe not.

  I’d spent the first part of the drive giving Jake my account of what happened at the base. In the end, he suggested that Rusk was probably Valkyrie. “He’s a hacker,” Jake said. “He’s got a Carnegie Mellon computer science degree.”

  “But it doesn’t fit. He’s a hacktivist, that’s all. There’s nothing else in his background that matches Lien-hua’s preliminary profile for Valkyrie.”

  “And what profile is that?”

  “She believed Valkyrie would have law enforcement or covert operative training, be highly intelligent, well-traveled, midforties, linguistically skilled. Male.”

  “That’s not much, Pat, hardly anything. Maybe Valkyrie is just a code name Manoji was using, or it could’ve been Cassandra after all.”

  “That doesn’t explain how Valkyrie showed up in Russia last May. Terry was in a coma and Cassandra was in prison at the time.”

  Jake quietly monitored the iPad, and I had the sense he didn’t want to discuss Valkyrie’s identity anymore just then.

  Wait.

  The mind has to deal with guilt somehow. When it’s overwhelming, escaping reality is sometimes the only choice.

  Alexei might still be in the tunnel and offline. Or, he might not be.

  Yes. Bait.

  “Send me an email,” I said, “asking me to confirm that I know Valkyrie’s identity. Make it seem like I’m about to reveal to the Bureau who Valkyrie is.”

  “Send you an email?”

  “To my Bureau account. Go ahead. Let’s see how often Alexei checks my messages.”

  I found my thoughts flitting through the events of the night, and I remembered that earlier I’d made a mental note to follow up on any videos that might’ve been found of people in the Midwest being killed while Basque was in prison.

  “When you’re done with the email, pull up the Federal Digital Database. There are a few things I’d like you to check.”

  A couple moments later he finger-scrolled to a browser. “What do you need?”

  I gave him the search terms I had in mind-the dates, the locations, the types of weapons, the victimology.

  “What are we looking for, exactly?”

  “Reiser’s killer.”

  We tried a variety of searches but in the end didn’t find anything helpful. If there were more victims, more videos, they hadn’t been found.

  Dead end.

  “Think this through with me, Jake. Fourteen years ago we discover two sets of DNA at the scene of Basque’s murders but aren’t able to identify the second set until the homicide last June when you matched it to Reiser. Lien-hua and I were wondering if the records could have been falsified.”

  “But how?”

  “Once Basque got out of prison, if he reconnected with his old partner and that person had access to the records, they could’ve set up Reiser by faking or switching the DNA analysis.”

  Jake considered that. “We could pull up a list of people who’ve accessed the case files or DNA records. See if there are any red flags.”

  With all of the lawyers, officers, and agents involved, I knew the list would be extensive, but it was worth a look. “Do it.”

  We could cross-reference the names against work schedules, the timing of the crimes, their l
ocations, travel times from the crime scenes to people’s residences…

  Jake finished typing but said nothing. There was a stalled moment of silence.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “One person’s name keeps coming up.”

  “Who?”

  “Torres.”

  “What? Anton?”

  “Yeah. He’s been in there half a dozen times. Including earlier this week. On Tuesday.”

  “That makes sense,” I said, defending Torres. “He was doing prelim work for the mission on the trailer park.”

  “And it looks like he accessed the files two days before I identified the DNA sample last summer.”

  Torres was left alone in the kitchen when you and he entered the trailer. He could’ve planted No, it couldn’t be Torres.

  Three miles to go. Six, maybe seven minutes.

  Torres is the one who told you there was DNA on one of the knives from a murder in DC, he sent you the videos, he lives in DC “Wait a minute,” I said. “The clippings. The news footage. Yesterday you said Reiser was a scrapbooker.”

  “Yeah, and the ERT found-”

  “Yes, yes, but which news shows? Which papers? It wasn’t just cable news. It was local.”

  “Sure, WKOW in Madison, WTMJ in Milwaukee. We went through all this already today, Pat.”

  I remembered Lien-hua’s words about someone who seems innocent for the whole story but then turns out to be the killer.

  “But if they were local papers, the killer would’ve most likely chosen ones that were delivered to the places he lived…” I was thinking aloud. “Recorded news shows he could watch from home.”

  “Okay…?” Jake said expectantly. “And?”

  “Torres never lived in Wisconsin or Illinois.” Caught by my thoughts I said, “Oh. Yes. Basque’s partner left his footprints.”

  “Where?”

  “Here.” I tapped the map on the screen of his iPad. “Everywhere.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He’s been leaving them all over the place-Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, DC–I just haven’t been studying them carefully enough.”

  “You’re not making any sense, Pat.”

  “Okay, overlay the people on that list with the locations of-”

  The GPS program sounded its alert.

  The ankle bracelet was above the surface.

  Jake swept his finger across the iPad screen. “Chekov’s at the sawmill,” he announced. “And he’s on the move.”

  101

  I brought the pickup sliding to a stop on the edge of the lumberyard, and Jake and I leapt out.

  “Which way?” I said.

  A few utility lights pinioned high on telephone poles tried to illuminate different sections of the lumberyard, but through the wild, blowing snow, everything looked wispy and half real, more like a painting than reality.

  Pyramids of logs. Lonely buildings. Shadows lurking everywhere.

  Jake glanced at his iPad, then pointed toward the sawmill building, the one with the conveyor belts, sorting stations, high-powered blades, and mammoth grinder that chewed logs into pulp.

  I took the lead, and we crossed the yard quickly but cautiously, weapons out. We’d called Tait on the way to get backup over here, but now Jake phoned him again to confirm they were on the way.

  The lumberyard was vacant. No movement in the night.

  Though I tried to direct all of my thoughts here, now, on finding Alexei, I couldn’t help but think about the Reiser case.

  Torres accessed the files?

  Torres No. That was too obvious. Someone skilled enough to be able to overlay digitized DNA records would be careful enough to use someone else’s ID number. So, a hacker? An FBI agent? Someone who could We reached the sawmill.

  Jake confirmed that the ankle bracelet was inside the building, then slipped his iPad under his jacket. Leaning against the door with my shoulder, I pressed it open and was once again overwhelmed by the smell of sweet pine and sawdust, just like I’d been when I first visited the mill. All the lights were off.

  “Alexei?” I called.

  Silence. No sound except the wind repositioning itself outside, whistling through cracks in the ceiling.

  The killer taped local news shows.

  Clipped local papers.

  Local.

  Reiser lived in La Crosse, Oshkosh, Superior, but the papers and news programs were from Rockford, Milwaukee, Madison Jake found a light switch, and the sawmill flicked into view, illuminated by a series of yellowish bulbs high overhead.

  The ankle bracelet lay less than three meters away on the ground. A handsaw had been discarded nearby.

  “He’s close,” I whispered to Jake, then I called into the cold air of the sawmill, “Alexei!” I scrutinized the area. “Come on out. Don’t make me shoot you.”

  Jake edged left toward one of the workstations.

  Lien-hua noted that the killer would be less dominant, more easily manipulated than Basque… He accessed the digitized files, early last summer, right after Dr. Renee Lebreau’s murder, lived in Oh.

  Fire coursed through my thoughts, bringing everything-the facts, the hypotheses, the duty to the truth, bringing it all into focus.

  Sex and violence. The killer’s psychological history will include a close association between sex and violence.

  Be always open to the unlikely.

  I wished I was wrong, hoped I was.

  But Who asked to work the Reiser case? Who first reviewed the digitized case files, matched Reiser’s DNA? Who lived in Rockford and Madison before moving to DC? And in Cincinnati fourteen years ago “Jake,” I said softly. “Where is the Business Courier from? It’s from Cincinnati, isn’t it?” I looked behind me, but he wasn’t there.

  “Jake?” I heard shuffled movement to my right and turned.

  Just in time to see Jake Vanderveld, Basque’s accomplice, bring the shovel down toward my head.

  102

  I woke up on the conveyor belt to the wood grinder. My head was pounding and it took me a moment to regain my senses. When I tried to move, I realized my injured ankle was restrained, plastic-cuffed to the reticulated chain running along the side of the belt.

  Awkwardly, I managed to roll onto my stomach.

  Jake stood beside the control panel ten meters away adjusting the instruments. I felt my pockets; he’d taken my phone, keys, gun. All I had left was my flashlight.

  “Where’s Alexei, Jake?” I touched my head where the shovel had hit me. Couldn’t help but wince.

  Jake looked my way. “Oh, Pat. Welcome back. Haven’t seen Chekov. I’m sure he’s long gone by now.” Both of our guns sat on the workbench in front of Jake. “So, the Business Courier? From when I lived in Cincinnati? That’s what did it, huh?”

  “You should have been more careful with your scrapbooking. You saved the newspaper clippings and recorded local news coverage from the places you lived, not the ones where Reiser did. That’s not a very good way to set someone up.”

  “You couldn’t just leave well enough alone, could you, Pat? The DNA should have been enough. It would have been for most people, but not for you-”

  “Or Lien-hua. She knows too, or she will. She noticed it first.”

  “Lien-hua,” he said slowly. “I see.”

  I suddenly regretted mentioning her name.

  I tugged at my leg. I wasn’t going anywhere. “Counseling rape victims? You got a thrill out of that, didn’t you? Sex and violence. You just like watching women suffer. That’s why you taped Basque killing them. How many other women died while Basque was in prison?”

  “A few.” Then he corrected himself. “More than a few.”

  I felt my anger rising. “Other partners? Accomplices?”

  “None that are still alive.”

  How did he pull this off for so long!

  I remembered my conversation with my brother at lunch yesterday, when I’d considered the fact that every killer, every rapist is friends wi
th someone, is trusted by someone, loved by someone.

  And my conclusion: You can never really know someone, not really; at times every one of us acts in ways that are inconceivable to others, that are unthinkable even to ourselves.

  How true Jake was watching me curiously.

  “So what’s the story you’re going to use?” I didn’t have enough play with my ankle to stand, but I was able to push myself to my knees. “Alexei killed me? You chased him, but he got away? Is that it?”

  “Something along those lines. Maybe that I was searching the sawmill office when Chekov attacked you down here. By the time I heard the motor running and managed to arrive, it was too late to stop your tragic, and rather grisly, death.” He contemplated that for a moment. “I should be able to make that fly. I’m pretty good with this sort of thing.”

  “Why not just shoot me?”

  “Come on, Pat, that really would be hard to explain, besides, by now you should know I like a little spectacle.”

  I thought of the videos, the soft chuckles of the person filming them. “Sooner or later,” I said, “you knew we would’ve caught on that Reiser wasn’t Richard’s partner. That’s why you killed him, so we’d stop looking, right? By killing him, you-”

  “Yes, yes. Case closed. But it didn’t quite work out like that, did it?” Sirens in the distance, still a few minutes out. “Okay, let’s get things rolling.”

  “And Albuquerque and St. Louis-you know which cases I’m talking about-you stalled out those investigations, didn’t you? To give the killers more time.”

  “Really, Pat. You should have been a profiler.” He took a long look at me. “And so, first, though, the matter of Lien-hua. If, as you said, she knows, I’ll have to hand her over to Basque, let him do what he does best. It should make for some really good footage. I always like those Asian girls. The way they writhe.”

  Anger.

  Cutting loose inside me.

  “Mmm. And what about Tessa? What shall we do with her? Oh, she’ll be devastated by the death of her stepfather and his girlfriend. Maybe I could send her the video of Lien-hua’s last few hours?” He paused, seemed to savor the thought. “No, as tantalizing as that is, I think watching that sweet little stepdaughter of yours squirm under Richard’s blade is just too enticing. I think we’ll do her too.”