Checkmate_The Bowers Files

by Steven James

  “Skype.”

  I tapped at the screen to contact Lien-hua. Still not completely convinced that this wasn’t some kind of trap, I had Basque back up from me a few meters and I kept one eye on him as I waited for her to respond.

  Momentarily, she accepted the invite and her face came up. “Pat, I’ve been trying to reach you. Where are you?”

  “Hang on. Are you somewhere private?”

  “Yeah, I’m good. Hey, I have to—”

  “Lien-hua, listen to me. I need you to do some digging for me, but do it discreetly.” I detailed what I needed to know about Davenport. “I don’t want any red flags coming up about this search, nothing related to Mason.”

  She looked at me curiously. “What’s going on? Does this have anything to do with your meeting with Basque? Is that—are you in some kind of danger?”

  “No. I’m fine. Just find out what you can as quickly as you can. We’re on a tight time frame here.”

  “We?”

  I paused slightly. “All of us.”

  She read my equivocation. “Did you meet him? Did you find Basque?”

  I was tempted to cover up what was going on, but she would have been able to tell I wasn’t being straight with her. Besides, I’d promised not to lie to her, even if I thought it would protect her. “Yes, but I can’t get into all that right now.”

  “Pat, I’m—”

  “I can’t get into that, Lien-hua.”

  She took her time assessing things, but finally replied, “Okay, I’ll see what I can find out about Davenport, but you need to know something about Brin: It’s why I was trying to call you earlier. The doctor is with her now. The baby isn’t tolerating labor very well.”

  “What? What happened?”

  “She’s in distress. Her heartbeat keeps going down when Brin has a contraction.”

  “So what do they do about it?”

  “They’re trying to decide right now whether or not to do a C-section.”

  I didn’t really like talking about this in front of Richard. “Tell Brin she’s in my thoughts.”

  “I will. And I’ll let you know about Davenport.”

  “Good.”

  We ended the conversation and I quietly prayed that my friend and her baby would be alright.

  Richard knew Ralph and Brineesha from our previous encounters, and now he said, “I’m sorry to hear that there’s something wrong with the delivery.”

  He might have been mocking the situation. I couldn’t tell. He sounded genuine enough, but I reminded myself not to be blinded, not to lose sight of who he was, of the dozens of people he’d slaughtered, of the fact that he had tried to kill the two people I cared about most.

  I didn’t address his comment, but just said, “We need to wait to hear from Lien-hua.”

  He checked his watch. “I hope she’s quick.”

  + + +

  The wind changed.

  It wasn’t perfect for what Kurt had in mind, but it was close enough and it would definitely do the trick.

  He was at the house monitoring the Knoxville Southeast Railway dispatch office through his laptop. According to the data he was able to pull up, the train engineer and conductor for M343 had checked in at the rail yard ten minutes ago.

  * * *

  Spartanburg, South Carolina

  Glenn Ashland watched his conductor, Louis Faulkner, flip through the shipping papers for M343.

  A conductor and his engineer have a somewhat strange relationship. The conductor handles all the paperwork. He’s also officially in charge of the train, but the engineer is the only one who can run the train.

  A person needs to be Federal Railroad Administration certified to move a train. You go to school to become a conductor, but then you have another six months of training to be an engineer.

  However, since the conductor is considered the boss, he can order the engineer what to do. When trains stop and pick up or set off cars and engines, the conductor is the one who pulls the pins, gets on the radio, and tells the engineer when to throttle forward.

  Glenn had been working as a conductor and then an engineer for twenty years, more than a decade longer than Louis had been a conductor.

  Sometimes the relationship created tension, sometimes things were fine. Glenn had always gotten along with Louis well enough.

  “We good to go?” Glenn asked him.

  “We’re still on target to leave at two thirty-five, Old Head.”

  In the industry the nickname Old Head was an acknowledgment of seniority and also a compliment.

  “Good, because I want to get this run over and get back home in time to catch the Braves game tonight.”

  + + +

  “How many has it been?” I asked Richard while we waited to hear from my wife.

  “How many?”

  “How many more victims. How many people have you killed since April, since I—”

  “Since you killed me?”

  “Since I brought you back.”

  “I haven’t killed anyone. I’ve been seeing how long I can go in between.”

  “Why?”

  “To test my self-control.”

  Maybe he was telling me the truth, maybe not. At the moment, though, I couldn’t think of anything Richard could gain by lying to me. He would be going back to prison forever when I brought him in, whether there’d been any additional victims or not.

  “Do you know why Mason would do this?” I asked him. “Why he would target Corrine after you helped him escape from prison?” I’d almost said, “murder Corrine,” but somehow it felt like being that blunt would have dishonored her memory.

  “I’ve been asking myself the same question. The only thing I can come up with: He knew it would hurt me and he’s wondering how I’ll react.” He stared past me toward the skyline. “And he’s about to find out.”

  The breeze brushed past us.

  “Richard, why did you start out by killing women who resembled your sister?”

  “I’ve read your books, Patrick. I know how you feel about trying to identify and delineate motives. Are you really asking me to give you the motive that lies behind so much of my past? You, of all people?”

  For more than a decade I’ve been teaching other investigators that motives can’t be easily defined, that it’s futile to try to summarize complex psychological behavior in a single word or phrase. Hate. Anger. Jealousy. Greed.

  Where does one end and another begin?

  But still, now, I caught myself wanting to do that, wanting some answers. Some closure.

  “Call me curious.”

  “That lovely wife of yours must be wearing off on you.”

  “Bring her up again, Richard, and I will make you sorry that you did.”

  “Ah—that’s what I was looking for there: that fierce, protective side of love. You want to know why I killed those women, well, it’s because I loved Corrine and I didn’t know what to do with that feeling.”

  “You loved her so you murdered innocent people? You ate them? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “She had to be the only one.”

  “The only one?”

  “No imitations. No copies. Do you understand?”

  I tried to, I really did, but I wasn’t able to wrap my mind around what he was saying, to see things from his perspective. Maybe that was a good thing.

  There was one more question I’d been wondering about. I couldn’t think of a better time than right now to bring it up. “Why did you help Mason escape from prison?”

  “I wasn’t feeling very magnanimous toward you after our last encounter. As you recall, you shot me. I thought perhaps Mason would go after you, but it looks like he chose someone else.”

  Yes, he had.

  Corrine.

  Basque was quiet. “Pat,
as long as we’re having this little sit-down, tell me why you gave me CPR by the marsh after I’d drowned. Why didn’t you just leave me dead?”

  Justice.

  The darkness.

  Demons calling to me in the night.

  “Because I was afraid of becoming like you,” I told him bluntly.

  “You are like me.”

  He’d claimed that once before and I’d countered it, told him that I wasn’t, that I fought the darkness and that’s what made us different. Now I didn’t reply. As I’d been thinking earlier today: We are, all of us, like him to a certain degree.

  But maybe I was more like him than I cared to admit.

  But you did bring him back, Pat.

  You did—

  A notification came up on the iPad that I had an incoming Skype call.

  I tapped the screen and Lien-hua’s face came up

  “Pat, I found what you need.”

  “First, how’s Brin?”

  “They’re doing a C-section now. Ralph’s in the OR with her. Tessa’s in the waiting room. The doctor seems confident the baby will be okay. In the meantime, I have what you wanted on Davenport. It was a little hard to track down, but he rented a place over in Fourth Ward.” She gave me the address. “Should I call it in to get a car over there?”

  “No. I’ll let you know more as soon as I can.”

  After we’d ended the call, I headed for the car’s passenger’s door, pulled up a map application on the iPad, and said to Basque, “Alright. Let’s go. It doesn’t look like it’s very far.”

  + + +

  Kurt tuned to a live feed of Fan Celebration Day on television.

  A news chopper flying overhead provided footage of the thousands of people who were outside the stadium at booths that’d been set up. Even though kickoff was still more than an hour away, hundreds of folks had already entered the stadium so they could get good seats for the upcoming game.

  72

  We parked.

  The historic home that Davenport had rented lay across the street—that was, if Davenport was even an alias that Mason was using. This could all be some sort of elaborate ploy.

  The neighborhood was quiet.

  Still.

  I considered leaving Richard in the car, but then realized I could keep a better eye on him if I brought him with me.

  “If you let me come in”—he seemed to be reading my thoughts—“I’ll help you find him. If you leave me here alone, I’ll take off. Then you’ll have to split your resources between finding me and finding Mason, and you don’t have time for that.”

  And maybe this is where you leave the two of them alone in the same room—if Mason’s really here.

  “Try anything and I will put you down,” I said.

  “Understood.”

  I confirmed that the sensor for tracking him was working; then I left the iPad on the seat, and together we crossed the street toward the house that Kurt Mason was purportedly using.

  + + +

  Kurt heard a knock at the door.

  For a moment he tried to figure out if it was just his imagination playing tricks on him, but then he heard it again.

  He flicked out the straight razor and, staying toward the back of the room, he peered out the front window.

  And saw Patrick Bowers and Richard Basque standing on the front porch of the house.

  + + +

  I knocked again but no one answered. However, through a window, in the recessed shadows of the home, I caught sight of movement at the other end of the living room, so I could tell that someone was here.

  “Hello? Mr. Davenport? Kurt?”

  Whoever was inside stepped back and vanished into the darkness. Given what I knew, there was no time for second-guessing things.

  I unholstered the Glock, then tried the door. Found it locked.

  Okay, this might not fly too well with my superiors—but then again, neither would working with Richard Basque.

  I stepped back to kick in the door.

  Wait, there might be a trip wire like there was at the apartment. Don’t—

  But that’s when I heard a door at the back of the house slam shut.

  “Get back in the car,” I ordered Richard.

  I flew around the side of the house and just barely caught sight of Mason hoisting himself over a fence encircling one of the neighboring backyards. I identified myself, shouted for him to stop, but that only spurred him on to move faster, and then he was out of sight.

  Sprinting toward the fence, I made short work of it and then scrutinized the area. Someone appeared to be walking to the south of me, near the street, but he disappeared behind a house before I could identify if it was Mason or not.

  It was the only person I could see, so I bolted in that direction, but by the time I got there I found it wasn’t him. Just a man out walking his dog.

  Cursing, I returned to where I’d lost Mason.

  Man, I wished I had a radio or a phone to call for backup.

  I gauged the layout of neighboring streets, trying to anticipate what direction he might have fled in, but he knew how I thought and he might very well have gone the opposite of what I would anticipate.

  Or, guessing you’d think that, he might not have.

  Enough.

  I couldn’t read minds.

  Get this neighborhood cordoned off.

  I hurried back to the car to call it in using the iPad.

  But found that the sedan was gone.

  And so was Richard.

  When I glanced toward the house Mason had rented, I saw that the front door had been kicked in.

  Basque must have entered before taking off!

  I saw no landlines leading to Mason’s house, but they did go to one of the homes across the street. I ran to the front door, knocked. No one answered.

  Well, I wasn’t about to waste time going door-to-door to call for some officers.

  One kick did it. The lock shattered and the door flew open.

  Once inside, I located a phone, punched in 911, and told dispatch to get some cars over here immediately.

  While they were confirming the address, I pulled out the sensor to track the nanobots and saw that Basque was already several blocks away and was traveling west.

  I couldn’t tell for sure if he was still in the vehicle, but he was moving rapidly, so it appeared he wasn’t on foot.

  I told the dispatcher the last place I’d seen Mason, as well as Basque’s exact location and the make, model, and license plate of his car.

  Clear Mason’s house. Make sure he wasn’t working with anyone.

  I finished the call, angled across the street, and, gun in hand, I entered the residence to confirm that no one was there lying in wait.

  73

  2:30 p.m.

  1 hour until kickoff

  All clear.

  No one in the house.

  Eleven minutes average response time, I kept telling myself, but we were close enough to police headquarters that I figured we could cut that at least in half and, based on the sirens I heard coming this direction, it seemed like that was the case.

  Still, Mason had slipped away and Basque was on the move. Richard wanted revenge and I couldn’t see him stopping until he’d seen things through to the end. He’d told me that he had more information about Mason’s plan. He’d also mentioned three thirty, which gave us just shy of one hour to work with.

  And Mason was planning to make a statement.

  Basque had mentioned that too.

  All part of his story.

  Why did Richard enter the house? Why didn’t he chase Mason with you?

  I wasn’t sure, but I did know one thing: Until we could find Mason, Basque was our best bet for stopping whatever he had planned.

  An
d we could track Basque’s precise location with the help of those nanobots.

  I checked the sensor again to see where he was, then I mentally overlaid a map of the area with what I remembered from driving around the city with Guido yesterday morning.

  From what I could tell, Basque’s movement stopped at the Charlotte Regional Medical Center, the place I’d gotten my stitches yesterday.

  A hospital? Why would he go there?

  A blood transfusion to get rid of the nanobots?

  No, I’d asked O’Brien about that and he’d told me it wouldn’t work. Besides, it would take way too long, even if Basque somehow had a doctor waiting for him.

  For drugs to try to mask the nanobots’ signal?

  That was possible. If so, I wondered how Basque would even be able to guess which ones to use.

  I would’ve called the hospital but I had no phone. Officers were en route. I’d update them in a minute.

  A few minutes ago, when I was searching Mason’s house, I’d discovered a laptop in the first-floor bedroom. The computer had been smashed in with a decorative stone bookend. Our lab would probably be able to recover data, but that would take time that we did not have.

  Did Basque destroy it or did Mason do it before he fled?

  Earlier, when I first got here and was standing on the front porch, I hadn’t heard any sounds from inside the house, but that wasn’t definitive. Mason could have still been the one to destroy it.

  Sirens outside.

  Okay, deal with the computer in a minute.

  I hurried to the street so I could meet up with the officers as they arrived, and a moment later I saw the flashing lights as one of the cruisers rounded the corner and raced my way.

  After identifying myself, I told them where Basque was, then I informed them about the house Davenport had been using and the laptop, and explained that we needed to get the Field Office’s Cyber experts and ERT here right away. “Check any cars leaving this neighborhood for Mason.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m going to need your cell phone.”

  He handed it to me.

  This was getting to be a habit.

  “And one more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Your car.”