The Monarch

by Jack Soren

  “I’m sorry. I get excited sometimes. Could I get a glass of water if it’s not too much trouble?”

  “Help yourself,” Emily said. She scanned the maps again while he went to the sink, but her focus waned when she realized Dan was standing beside her oven.

  The metal case of cash had been waiting for her on the kitchen table when she got home. Once she got over the idea of someone being inside her apartment while she’d been gone, she looked inside. The cash from the limo was there, along with a folder with a single word on it: “WAGNER.” Then the kid’s knocking had startled her, and she’d dropped everything on the floor. After quickly scooping the contents back into the case, she’d panicked and jammed the case into her oven before answering her door.

  “Um, you still haven’t told me how you got past the car out front.” Wagner had sent a car to watch her, but the masked man had warned her that might happen. Even so, it had been disturbing to her, so she wondered how this Chihuahua of a person had handled it with such composure.

  Dan turned around, holding his glass with a self-­assured grin on his face. “I paid a homeless guy twenty bucks to pee on their car,” he said with pride before putting the glass of water to his lips. Emily shook her head. Maybe she’d underestimated this guy.

  “Brazen,” Emily said. “Most seasoned reporters wouldn’t have figured out how to get past a ­couple of FBI agents.”

  Water shot across the room. Dan almost dropped the glass as he coughed another few ounces out of his lungs. Emily jumped up and went to him, taking the glass from him and patting him on the back.

  “F . . . FBI?” Dan managed when he could breathe again.

  “Yes. Who did you think they were?”

  “Jeez, I just thought it was a ­couple of reporters. I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “Not here!” Emily said, grabbing him and pushing him toward the bathroom. They almost made it.

  Half an hour later, she’d finished cleaning up the mess. Dan lay on her sofa, his suit jacket hung on the back of a chair, and a cool compress rested on his forehead. She sat beside him and with a motherly touch, checked his temperature by pressing her hand to his cheek.

  “Feeling better?”

  “How am I going to be a reporter if I go to prison?”

  Emily looked at his slight build and thought if he went to prison, a career choice would be the least of his problems. “You’re not going to prison,” she said, thinking if anyone in that room was headed that way, it was she.

  “I am. I know I am. Cripes, they’re probably listening to us right now,” Dan said. She saw him getting worked up again and tried to think of a way to distract him.

  “Tell me about this again,” Emily said, walking over to the table. “What do you think you found?”

  “It’s probably nothing,” Dan said, carefully sitting up. But she could tell by his voice he didn’t believe that. By his voice and the fact that he was in her apartment. He’d apparently tried to get his coworkers to help him, but they wouldn’t listen to him. She was his last-­ditch attempt for vindication.

  “Humor me,” she said. “The dots all along the streets. What are they?”

  “Traffic cameras,” Dan said, carefully standing and coming over to the table. They sat down. Talking about it seemed to relax him. And the sooner he recovered, the sooner she could get him out of here.

  “What about them?” Emily asked, egging him on.

  “During each murder, the traffic cameras in the area went dark for a short period of time. Just a few minutes. Just long enough to . . . well . . . do it and get away without being seen.”

  “Do they know how he did it?” Emily asked, interested in the answer.

  “No. Or not that I know of, anyways. But here’s the thing, it’s a pretty unique trick. So I started thinking, if I was smart enough to know turning off the traffic cameras would let me kill without being seen, what about my getaway?” This was where he’d gotten all excited last time and Emily had lost him. She wasn’t sure if she finally got her mind off the money in her oven or something, but this time it was making sense.

  “If you can’t see him kill, you just look at the cameras outside of the dark zone and you can piece it together.”

  “Right,” Dan said. “My uncle works for the traffic department, so I asked him for a listing of any other dark areas around the same time as the murders.”

  “Good thinking,” Emily said, honestly impressed.

  “Thanks. Well, the first two murders were dead ends. No other cameras went dark. I figure he probably got on a bus or went down into the subway or something. But here . . .” Dan flipped through the maps and pulled the one he was looking for on top. Emily could see it was a map of the area of town where the third murder took place.

  “You got something?”

  “Just after the time the third murder took place, a bunch of other traffic cameras went out in sequence. They started close to The Cloisters museum,” Dan said, pointing to the dots he’d marked. Then he drew along the streets with his finger, showing Emily where the line went. “And ended here, near Brooklyn.”

  “What’s the big red X mean?” Emily asked.

  “This is where it gets really Twilight Zone-­y. Just before the last traffic camera came back on, there was a traffic accident right there. A truck hit a car, killing the driver. Then boom, just when the accident is over, the camera comes back on.” He stopped talking and smiled, leaving Emily feeling let down.

  “It’s interesting, but probably just a coincidence. There were likely a lot of accidents during that window.”

  “That’s what I thought at first. Then I saw the police report,” Dan said, digging through the papers. She grabbed his hand.

  “Just tell me, Mr. Cooper.”

  “Oh. Uh, okay,” he said. “The report said that while they found the remains of the driver of the car, there was no body in the truck. Kind of weird but not unheard of. I mean, maybe the driver fell asleep, woke up after the crash, and took off.”

  “So?”

  “Well, there was this big fire that burned up the truck and car—­and the body—­so none of it could be identified. But when the camera came back on, they were still burning. I played around with the images in Photoshop and got these,” he said, handing her two pictures.

  One was of the truck’s license plate and the other was a little more blurry but apparently was the car’s license plate.

  “Okay, the truck I’ll give you, but how’d you get the car’s license plate? The back end is hidden by the truck and facing the wrong way,” Emily said, pointing to the original unretouched photo.

  “You can thank the fire for that. Look here,” he said, pointing at the window of the coffee shop the truck had smashed the car into. She could just barely see a reflection of the car’s license plate, illuminated by the flames on the truck.

  “Brilliant,” she breathed. She had totally underestimated this kid. She got a sense that it happened to him a lot.

  “It was fuzzy and backward, so it just took longer to render. Anyways, I checked them and the truck was stolen the day before.”

  “What?”

  “That’s not the best part. The car was licensed to a recent ex-­con who was paroled early. I’m still looking into that,” Dan said, digging through the papers again. “To this guy.” Dan beamed with pride, but Emily didn’t recognize the man in the picture.

  “Who is he?”

  “Are you kidding? It’s David Jordan!”

  Emily stared at him, her expression unchanged.

  “No?”

  “Sorry,” Emily said, feeling let down again.

  “Maybe it happened before you came to New York. The final murder victim, Bob Cummings, you know he was a news anchorman.”

  “That I know,” Emily said.

  “Well, Cummings used to be a cop. In f
act, there was a huge racketeering case brought against him a few years back. It turned out he was clean, but the assistant DA had gone after him too hard, so he sued. Made a bundle of cash and was exonerated in the public’s eye. He became a weird kind of martyr for blind justice. Besides the money, he got famous. Which made it easy for him to get a job in front of the cameras.”

  “I still don’t see—­”

  “Cummings was exonerated, but his partner was guilty. Went to prison for it.”

  “And just got out,” Emily said, feeling a chill.

  “Now you’re getting it. The guy killed in the car just before the traffic cameras came back on was David Jordan, Bob Cummings’s ex-­partner.”

  “Jesus,” Emily said tracing her own finger along the map lines backward from the accident to The Cloisters. “Follow the yellow brick road.”

  “So what do you think?” Dan asked.

  He’s not the killer, Emily thought. At least, not the one who had killed leaving his symbol in his victim’s dead flesh. There was no way to know if he had been driving the truck or not, but Emily’s loyal mind reasoned that even if it was him behind the wheel, he hadn’t killed but protected—­protected his symbol, his reputation, and anyone else from being killed in his name.

  “I think you’re bloody brilliant!” Emily said, hugging him.

  “DON’T LOOK AT me like that, Church,” Emily said when she felt her hulking tomcat’s green eyes burning into her. She was standing by the door paging through the pictures she’d taken on her digital camera. Dan had made the mistake of going to the bathroom and leaving his maps and photos lying out on the table. Was that her fault?

  Before he’d left he’d told Emily what he wanted from her. A phone call, that was all. A simple phone call to his editors. Somehow he thought her endorsement would make them take him seriously. She knew a call from a struggling true crime author would make no difference whatsoever, but she didn’t tell him that. She just wanted to get him out of her apartment. Of course, she had no intention of making the call. Her guilt was easily overridden by her excited conviction that The Monarch was innocent.

  Churchill lay on the window ledge staring at her, his tail doing a slow, rhythmic snap every now and then that, to Emily, screamed disappointment.

  “I didn’t ask him to come here,” Emily said, though if he hadn’t she wouldn’t have had the pressure in her chest relieved.

  Despite what she’d told Wagner and her publisher, sometime in her final year at Oxford, during a conversation with her father, Emily had first learned about The Monarch. She’d almost immediately fallen in love with the faceless, debonair outlaw. It hadn’t made any sense, but she couldn’t help it.

  When the masked man had mentioned her “error in judgment,” he’d been talking about how she’d taken her school grants and loans and had used them to chase every rumor of The Monarch across Europe instead of finishing her degree. Her goal in life had become to find the object of her affection. Just as, apparently, it had become the masked man’s goal. Now that he could use the killings as a way to—­

  The frightening thoughts from the bus stop rose up in her mind again. What if these killings weren’t just a convenient tool the masked man could use? What if he was responsible for them? He had power and pull. He also seemed to have a flair for the dramatic. And since almost every murder scene screamed, Ta-­da!, that didn’t bode well for him just being an opportunist.

  “There’s something bigger going on here than some kid’s dream of being Clark Kent, Church,” Emily said, flopping down on her couch.

  Churchill rolled off the ledge and thudded to the floor. Emily wondered how he could do that. He just pushed himself into the unknown and somehow always rolled enough to land on his feet. He padded over and hopped up on the sofa, nuzzling his way onto Emily’s lap.

  “What does this guy want, Church?” Emily asked as she scratched behind his ears. He purred an I don’t know.

  Emily had her suspicions—­some of them horrifying—­but with thousands of dollars roasting in her oven, it was almost impossible for her to take the righ­teous stance.

  “Maybe he is just a fan? Maybe he just wants more of the book?” Emily tried to lie to herself. Churchill twitched like he was trying to shake something off. “Yeah, I’m not even buying that one.”

  Emily thought for a while longer and finally realized she didn’t have enough information—­about either the murders or the masked man—­to make a decision either way. Her eyes fell on the oven across the room as she thought.

  She pushed Churchill aside and took the case out of the oven, placing it on the table. Emily put the file on the table and took the cash out, making a mental note to find a place for it before going to sleep.

  If she was lucky, there’d be something here she could trace back to the owner. A serial number, a make and model—­something. With the contents out, it just seemed like a run-­of-­the-­mill metal briefcase. The outside was silver aluminum with two latches, each with a keyhole. The inside was lined with black felt and the lid had a ­couple pockets for files and such. Emily looked in the pockets but couldn’t see anything. Just to be sure, she reached in and ran her fingers along the bottoms of the pockets. The first one was nothing but more felt. But in the corner of the second pocket, the one that used the lid as its backing, her finger caught on something.

  Emily rooted through a kitchen drawer until she found a flashlight, hoping the batteries weren’t dead. The light was dim, but still alive. Before it died, she shone it into the briefcase’s pocket. There, in the bottom corner, sticking out through a tiny tear in the felt, was a loop of wire.

  Something electronic was hidden in the briefcase.

  She dropped the flashlight and backed away.

  How could I be so stupid?

  This wasn’t her first time around the block and it certainly wasn’t the first time a source had tried something like this. She tried to run the night through her mind—­where they’d been in the room and what they’d said. It had been such an emotional roller coaster that she just couldn’t remember it all.

  Emily decided against ripping the case apart to get a better look at whatever was secreted inside. The less whoever put it there knew, the better. She was pretty sure she hadn’t said anything she didn’t want the masked man to know in its vicinity, and it had spent most of the night in the oven. But if the device was sensitive enough, it might have picked up her conversations with Dan at the kitchen table. Assuming it was a listening device and not a bomb. Stranger things had happened; which was why the case went back in the oven.

  With paranoia firmly set in, Emily went out into the hall taking only her own cell phone. She made a quick call and returned to her apartment, being careful not to slam the door. If it was a listening device, she didn’t want them knowing she’d left. If it was a bomb, loud noises were generally a bad idea, though the more she thought about it, the more she doubted the bomb idea. Still, once her writer brain got rolling it was hard to stop it.

  Emily changed her clothes and got into bed with Wagner’s file. She propped herself up on some pillows and flipped the file open. For over an hour she read through pages and pages of commendations, reprimands, promotions, and demotions. Wagner’s career read like a bouncing ball. Reading between the lines, Emily discerned that he was a man who did what he thought was right, regardless of protocol or the chain of command. Not quite a maverick, but definitely not someone who worried about politics. Normally, he’d be the type of man Emily respected. At the moment—­sizing up her opponent—­it worried her.

  11

  FCI Yazoo City

  Yazoo, Mississippi

  2:00 A.M. Local Time

  LEW FELT MORE than heard the driver’s door slam. He’d actually fallen asleep after lying in the plain wooden coffin with the taped-­up Colero as a pillow. By the time he’d shaken the sleep grog from his brain, he felt the tr
uck pull out and head down the short drive to the prison gate. His training in Iraq, thanks to all the kidnappings of Americans, had included how to determine direction and orientation of a vehicle with a bag on his head. He was pretty sure this wasn’t what the instructors had had in mind for his training, but he was grateful for it, nonetheless.

  Colero mumbled something under his tape gag.

  “Here we go,” Lew said quietly, holding the gun at the ready. He’d given up on his fingerprint idea when it just got too hard to hold the darn thing with only two fingers.

  Less than a minute later, the van’s brakes squeaked to a stop. The door slammed after the driver got out and Lew heard muffled voices for a while. This was the hard part. The waiting. The next sound they heard would either be the driver’s door slamming after he got back in, or the dreaded click of the van’s back door as a guard opened it to check inside. It could go either way. Lew figured if Quinn was on the level he would have called ahead to the guard. But with the near riot still fresh in the guard’s mind, he might decide to check inside the van anyway.

  All Lew could hear was the pounding of his own heartbeat in his ears. It reminded him of a time before he’d met Jonathan, before his life had taken a downward spin. His unit was clearing a village in Kuwait when mortar fire hit them. Almost his entire squad was killed except for him and this kid named Olsen, though Olsen had lost most of his left shoulder in the attack. When the shelling stopped, Iraqi troops had come in on foot to check for survivors. Lew pulled Olsen into a ditch and then pulled several dead bodies on top of them. The kid couldn’t stop moaning from the pain, so Lew had choked him out to save his life. That’s when the boots came out the back door, less than three feet from where they were laying.

  Lew had thought he was going to lose his mind from the anxiety. Especially when, to make sure, one of the bastards had strafed the pile of dead bodies with his AK–47. Two of the slugs went straight through Olsen’s head, and one of them pierced Lew’s leg. Even so, he’d kept perfectly still and quiet. The enemy wandered around the village for two more hours before they left. It was another hour before Lew could get up the courage to climb out of his hole. He put a tourniquet on his leg and walked almost four miles back to base, every one of his buddies’ dog tags in his bloody pocket.