Founders' Keeper (A David and Martin Yerxa Thriller - Book 1)

by Ed Markham

  Martin chuckled. “That doesn’t surprise me. I watch his show sometimes, and he’s a small government zealot all the way. The things I’ve heard this week about stamp-fingerprint databases and computer tracking, I don’t blame him.”

  “I showed him the photograph of Vereen from the gas station,” Lauren went on, “and he was pretty pissed we hadn’t released that to the public.”

  “Something else we agree on,” Martin said.

  “What else?” David asked her.

  She thought for a moment. “He softened up big time when he realized he might be a target. He’ll be relieved to know you took care of his problem. I spent a few hours waking up his staff and collecting records on his audience members, his fan mail, and the emails sent to his personal account and the address listed on his website. Omar and his people have already started working on the data.”

  “How’d you leave things with him?”

  “I told him we’d be in touch, but that he’s free to go about his business. His assistant told us he’ll be in D.C. until his big event tomorrow. He has a house in Kalorama.”

  Martin whistled. “High roller.”

  “Big event?” David asked.

  “His Founders’ Rally, or whatever he calls it. He’s appearing live in front of the Washington Monument. D.C. Police expect more than a hundred thousand people will turn out.”

  “You’re kidding me?” Martin said.

  Lauren shook her head. “Nope. The rally’s all about celebrating the Constitution. And with all the interest these murders have stirred up, attendance estimates have skyrocketed.”

  Attendance estimates have skyrocketed, David repeated to himself. He started to speak, but was interrupted by one of the Bureau’s forensic technicians.

  “Agent Yerxa. We found something you should take a look at.” The man handed David a gallon-sized Ziploc bag containing a blood-smeared, typewritten letter.

  David read it quietly.

  “What is it?” Martin asked him.

  David handed him the letter and turned to Lauren. “She had a partner in this, and they may have something more planned.”

  Her expression darkened. “The Goodman rally—” she started to say, but was cut off when David’s cell phone began to ring.

  He listened quietly for a moment, and then said to her, “It’s SWAT. They found something in Edith Vereen’s house.”

  Chapter 21

  EVEN AT 6:30 in the morning it was hot as balls out, thought A.J. Taggart. Wearing sixty pounds of Kevlar didn’t help.

  Taggart unwrapped two pieces of Winterfresh gum and smashed both onto his tongue. He secured the butt of the Benelli M4 shotgun against his shoulder, barrel pointed at the dirt, and signaled to four of his men who were positioned across the yard. They reciprocated with head nods and arm gestures and headed for the rear of the house.

  All of the men carried M4s, along with .45-caliber Glock Model 21 pistols and tactical grenade belts strung with flash bangs and stingers, all of which Taggart doubted they’d need. He knew what they were doing here—whose house this was—and he knew Vereen had already 86’d herself up in Philly. Still, there was no way to know what they might find in the crazy bitch’s clown house. Better to be safe than sorry.

  The SWAT-team members in back and at the sides of the property were just for containment. Taggart’s unit would go in through the front door and secure the house—a boxy ranch squatting on a dusty rectangle of crab grass ten miles from Charlottesville, Virginia. The back of the house was pressed up against the sprawling forest that bound the local properties like wads of grout between floor tiles.

  Taggart turned to look at the five sweaty, calm faces of his team members. Each man had his back pressed up against the police van. Taggart nodded once at them, crouched low, and spat into the grass before shuffling toward the house.

  The six-man team moved in a tight cluster, fast and near to the ground like a line of black ants. They reached the front of the house in seconds and spread flat against it. Taggart stood with his back against the house and pounded a three-beat staccato on the front door.

  “ALBEMARLE COUNTY POLICE. OPEN UP.”

  He repeated the knock and the entreaty once more, then turned, took a step back, and pistoned his right foot into the door just to the side of the knob.

  The cheap casing and jamb splintered, and the door flew inward. By the time it had slammed against the inside wall, Taggart had slipped back against the exterior of the house and two of his men were inside. A second later, all six had entered, and one had already thrown up.

  As he shuffled through the doorway, the smell hit Taggart in the face, hot and instantaneous like the flame of a newly ignited grill.

  “Ughh, fuck me,” one of his men cried, dropping to a knee.

  Taggart’s eyes were watering, but he could see vomit pouring out from under the man’s helmet brim.

  Every molecule in Taggart’s body was repelled and screaming at him to flee. He had smelled dead bodies before, but nothing like this. It was as if they’d stepped inside the cavity of a decomposing corpse. He dropped his head but willed himself not to run. Against every instinct, he took deep breaths in through his nose, knowing it was the only way the smell would dissipate. He felt a watery glaze of mucous coat the top of his mouth and throat and he spat it out on the moss-colored carpet. After a few seconds he was able to lift his head and look around the room.

  He saw a faded, floral-print couch and mismatched chairs. A coffee table and wood cabinets containing a few figurines. No television. No books. No art tacked to the faux-wood paneled walls.

  No life, Taggart thought.

  He’d instinctively raised the barrel of his M4, but now he pointed it at the floor and flipped the safety forward. He told his team to do likewise. He knew there wouldn’t be anyone alive to shoot.

  He stepped through the room and into a windowless central hallway. On his immediate right, he passed a small yellow-tiled bathroom. A quick glance told him the shower and tub were empty, but he motioned over his shoulder for one of his team members to check it out. A few more steps brought him to a closed door on the opposite side of the narrow hallway. He raised a fist to indicate he was stopping, and then he crouched low and pushed the door open.

  He saw movement, and stepped back against the wall of the hallway. He raised his weapon to eye level and switched off the safety. Then he realized he was looking at himself. A white vanity squatted against the far wall of the room. Its oval mirror stared back at him like a giant silver eye. He saw there were several other mirrors in the bedroom, propped up on easels and surrounding a bed draped in white linens. The room was otherwise empty.

  Christ, he thought. Fucking creepy.

  He stepped back from the bedroom and moved toward the rear of the house. At the end of the hallway he could see a small window that looked out on the back of the property. Flecks of dust were suspended in the sunrays that poured in through the window’s dirty rectangular panes. To the right of this window, Taggart could see a doorway that opened onto what had to be the kitchen. That’s where he knew he’d find the body.

  He moved quickly, wanting to get it over with, but paused just before turning the corner. Behind him, Taggart could hear two of his team members breathing heavily from the heat and the stink and the adrenaline. He held his breath, but what he saw when he stepped into the sun-filled kitchen forced the air out of his lungs.

  “Guh,” he said, a glob of spit slipping from his mouth and running down his chin.

  The shape on the table was identifiable as human only in vague terms. The naked limbs and torso were bloated and covered with flies so that the body looked like a pile of rotting excrement that something had expelled onto the tabletop. The body’s head faced away from the kitchen doorway, and Taggart could see only dark, blood-soaked hair and a red-stained scalp. He could also see that someone had removed the corpse’s skin from the shoulder blades to the thighs. Maggots had burrowed into the putrid flesh, and they squirmed
now as they ate and reproduced. Blood was everywhere—on the floors, walls, and ceiling. Where it had pooled beneath the table, the blood looked syrupy and viscous.

  Taggart had stopped chewing his Winterfresh and he could feel the wad resting hard and dry on his molars. There was no sound save the buzzing of flies.

  He told himself to turn and leave—that this was a job for the medical examiners and forensics, not SWAT. But instead he stepped forward and to the side of the kitchen table, which someone had dragged into the middle of the room. He wanted to see the corpse’s face. He had to see it.

  Below the decaying ridges that once comprised the man’s brow—and Taggart could see now that it was a man—he saw eyes that were half open and green with putrescence. A glistening, grayish fluid leaked from their sockets and from the man’s black nostrils as though his brains had liquefied and were running out of his skull.

  The man’s mouth gaped unnaturally wide. Stuffed between his torn and rotting lips was the head of a snake. Its gold scales glinted in the morning light, and its eyes seemed clear and alive.

  Taggart’s gum fell out of his mouth and dropped onto the floor of the kitchen. Though he wasn’t a religious man, he began to pray.

  Chapter 22

  DAVID SLOWED AS he passed the white marble columns of the Alderman Library, nestled near the center of the University of Virginia’s campus. Floppy-haired students were everywhere, dressed in bright-colored shorts and tank tops and Ray-Ban sunglasses, walking to and from class or passing Frisbees among one another on the lawn a few hundred yards away from the library.

  “It’s like a preppy Shangri-La,” Martin said as David pulled into a parking spot. “Glad nothing’s changed.”

  When David was a boy, his family had driven out from D.C. to Charlottesville every fall to see the color change and to visit Monticello, which was among Martin’s sacred places. David could tell the site held magic for his father, not only because of the great man who’d lived there but because of the contrast between the bucolic, pastoral grandness of rural Virginia and the dense, scarred city of Martin’s upbringing. And those annual fall trips had nearly always included a swing by the University of Virginia’s campus.

  They’d left Judge Perry’s house together after reading the letter from Edith Vereen’s partner, which was signed “Levi.” While Omar and his team looked into Philip Goodman’s audience and email records for references to Edith or someone named Levi, Lauren was still working at the judge’s home. They’d all agreed to reconvene back at Quantico after David and Martin had learned a little more about Edith Vereen.

  Their first stop had been her home, where they’d spent some time examining the mess SWAT had discovered in her kitchen. The deceased turned out to be Vereen’s father. Scrawled on one wall of the kitchen was the phrase, “ ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.’ ”

  “Thomas Jefferson,” Martin had said. “Who else?”

  Apart from the corpse in the kitchen, Edith Vereen’s home was meticulously neat and almost totally devoid of personal possessions.

  “OCD maybe,” one of the on-site investigators had said to David. “We also found a fire pit out back that looks like it got plenty of use. She may have burned a lot of her things.”

  The juxtaposition between Edith Vereen’s ramshackle neighborhood and the campus of the University of Virginia, located just ten miles east, was startling to David. He could smell freshly cut grass and azaleas in the humid air as he and Martin walked from their car to the Alderman Library.

  They entered the main hall, where a dozen glowing chandeliers hung from a high ceiling, illuminating clusters of chairs and couches where students sat reading and tapping away on their laptops.

  “I called ahead and asked to meet with someone who worked with Vereen,” David said. “He should be waiting for us.”

  He spoke to the building’s receptionist, who pointed them toward a doorway at the far end of the hall. They walked through it into a smaller, bookshelf-lined room filled with armchairs, lamps, coffee tables, and warm-toned rugs. Students filled most of the room’s chairs, and several of them looked up when David and his father entered.

  A young man with a full head of blonde hair and like-colored mustache approached them tentatively wearing khaki slacks and a plaid shirt. “Agent Yerxa?” he said, cocking his head at David’s appearance.

  David nodded, and the young man introduced himself as Teddy Dean, a graduate student and research assistant at the library.

  “Nice place to study,” Martin said, looking around the room.

  “Oh, yeah,” Dean agreed. “But we’re not staying here. Follow me this way, guys.”

  He led them into a smaller adjoining room that contained a single banquet-sized table positioned between the room’s bookshelves and on top of an oriental rug. Large windows looked out on the university grounds. Half a dozen notebooks and many more documents were spread out on the table, and the air smelled of old books and furniture polish.

  Dean invited them to have a seat—an offer neither accepted.

  “They told me you wanted to talk about Edith?” the student said as he shuffled nervously from one foot to the other, his expression apprehensive.

  Morning news broadcasts announcing Edith Vereen’s death and identifying her as the Colony Killer had broken nationwide two hours earlier, and David could see Dean was wound up.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Did you know her well?”

  Dean shrugged. “I wouldn’t go that far. I did work with her for three years, but Edith wasn’t someone you got to know well.”

  “What does that mean?” Martin asked. He’d taken out his notebook, and had his pen poised over a fresh page.

  Dean ran the side of his index finger across his moustache self-consciously. He glanced at his finger, as though caught off guard by the whiskers he’d felt brush against it. “She’s a strange girl,” he said, blinking at David. “I mean, she was a strange girl.”

  “How was she strange?”

  “Quiet, for one thing.” Dean paused and seemed to be considering how to answer. “I tried to joke with her sometimes, to get her to open up a little bit. But she wasn’t like that. She looked at me like I was trying to mess with her or something, so eventually I just gave up. We said hello and goodbye to each other, but that was it.”

  “Did anyone else here work with her more closely than you did?”

  “No way. When we started we were both grad assistants, so we worked side by side. Then she finished up her master’s and became the collections admin, and I didn’t see her as often. We worked together a few days a week, but she also worked weekends so Dr. Williams—he runs the collection—wouldn’t have to come in on Sundays. We’re closed to students that day, but sometimes outside researchers come in to check out our materials.”

  As Dean spoke, Martin jotted notes in his pad.

  “When was the last time you saw her?” David asked.

  “A few weeks ago. She quit sometime in mid-August. Never said a word to me about it, not that she would have. I came in one Monday and they told me she’d handed in her notice. That was it. I didn’t give her much thought until this morning when the news broke.”

  “Were you surprised?”

  “Was I surprised that Edith was the Colony Killer?” Dean said, laughing a little at the absurdity of the question.

  “Don’t just answer,” David said. “Give it some thought.”

  The student’s eyebrows sank and his eyes narrowed as he considered this. “Sure I was surprised. I mean, this is pretty incredible—pretty awful. I can’t believe it.” He paused, and rubbed again at his moustache. “But there was something about her that you could tell was off. Just wrong, you know? I never expected anything like this, but she seemed like the type to have some pretty weird hobbies.”

  “Weird hobbies?” Martin said.

  “Yeah. Dressing up like Star Trek characters, or being into Wicca—stuff like
that. Just weirdo stuff.”

  David glanced at his father, who was looking at the college student with a perplexed expression on his face. David turned his attention to the materials spread out on the table. “What’s all this?”

  “These are her journal logs,” Dean said, pointing at the stack of notebooks. “Edith was always writing—taking notes on her research and on the visitors’ projects. She was pretty obsessive about it, which made sense. Historians totally get the value of leaving a written record, you know? She left these behind when she quit, and Dr. Williams told me to box them up. They’ve been sitting in our storage closet since she left.” Dean gestured toward the other documents and said, “Like you asked, I also pulled the Madison papers where she’d focused most of her recent research.”

  “Thanks for putting this together on short notice,” David said. He looked at Dean, and the student got the hint.

  “Right, no problem,” Dean said. “My desk is in the office right next door. If you need anything, just come find me.” He started to leave, but turned back, eyeing the pen and notepad in Martin’s hands. “Sorry, we don’t allow pens while you’re looking at these materials. Can’t risk getting the ink on anything, you know? If you need to take notes, there are pencils and paper there on the bookshelf.”

  Martin slipped his pen into the pocket of his navy windbreaker and nodded to Dean. He and David sat down and each grabbed a different notebook.

  Chapter 23

  WHEN HE OPENED Edith Vereen’s notebook, David felt momentarily disoriented.

  The page was lined and included margins, but Vereen had ignored these guides. Her handwriting—the most perfect, compact cursive David had ever seen—began in the first centimeter of the page’s top-left corner and continued on in an unbroken stream until the very bottom of the page.

  He leaned down toward the notebook and examined the way each letter slanted at the exact same angle to the right. He compared one “e” or “g” to another, and found that they were identical. Despite the tightness of her writing, each word was separated by an unusually wide gap of space—always the same, about a quarter of an inch. David couldn’t find a single smudge or sloppy word, let alone a cross-out.