The Knight

by Steven James

  “. . . the body of her lover.”

  Beneath my finger I felt something soft and cool and fleshy.

  Cheyenne was staring at the place in the pot where I’d been digging. “Pat, you’re not saying . . .”

  I pushed more dirt aside, and the scent of basil was no longer the most overpowering odor in the room.

  Just enough of the pot’s contents were visible.

  Tessa had been right.

  “Oh . . .” Cheyenne’s voice trailed off.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s Travis Nash.”

  36

  43 minutes later

  The pot and soil lay on the far end of the steel examination table.

  Travis Nash’s head lay in front of us.

  After delivering the pot to headquarters, Cheyenne had swung me home so I could pick up my car and check on Tessa, but she and Dora hadn’t arrived yet. So, we’d returned to police headquarters in our respective cars, parked in HQ’s underground parking garage, and then hurried to join the team in the lab.

  Now, two forensics specialists were studying the head, carefully using toothbrushes to clear dots of soil from the open, staring eyes.

  Jake was speaking quietly with a third lab worker in the corner of the room. The door opened, and Kurt entered.

  “Reggie here yet?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Did CSU find anything at the morgue?” Cheyenne asked.

  Kurt strode toward us. He stared grimly at the examination table. “He used the sink, we know that. Didn’t leave any prints on the door handles and managed to get into and out of the building without showing up on any of the hospital’s security cameras. I assigned an officer to compare the suspect list with the roster of hospital employees to see if it gives us any leads.”

  “Good,” I replied, although I wasn’t sure the suspect list was going to be much help.

  As investigations like this progress and people call in with tips, names are added to the list of potential suspects generated by the evidentiary aspects of each crime scene. The list usually grows exponentially with time. When I’d read the case files on the drive to Taylor’s earlier in the day, there were already 180 names on the list. I’ve worked cases with tens, even hundreds of thousands of names on the list, and I had a feeling the number of suspects for this case was going to grow quite a bit before it began to shrink. Sometimes the lists are beneficial, but many times the killer’s name never even appears, or if it does, it’s often buried so deeply in the stack that it gets overlooked.

  Reggie arrived, and Kurt began to have words with him on the far side of the room.

  As I watched the forensic technicians work, I began to feel useless standing around here, and anxious to move forward on this case—and now at least there were some specific leads to research.

  That message: Must needs we tell of others’ tears?

  The pot of basil.

  The Keats and Alexander connection.

  I heard the exchange between Kurt and Reggie growing louder, but I was only able to catch bits and fragments of their conversation. Something about Reggie’s wife, Amy Lynn.

  Then Reggie raised his voice. “I know, but I can stay with her.”

  “That’s not enough.” Kurt’s tone was sinewy and strong. “We’re going to do whatever we need to do to protect her.”

  “I’m aware of that. But Amy Lynn—”

  Before he could finish, Kurt led him into the hall to continue their conversation out of earshot. Obviously, the two of them were not in agreement on how to best protect Reggie’s wife now that the killer had sent her the basil, marking her as a potential victim.

  We needed to move on this case before the killer had a chance to make that happen.

  “All right,” I said to Jake and Cheyenne. “It’s time for me to go.”

  “And do what?” Jake asked.

  “I think we should start with the Keats poem and the paintings of John Alexander. The victims so far have been posed, their murders so unusual that I’m wondering if maybe the killer is reenacting other violent poems or portraying other paintings.”

  “Hmm,” Jake said. “To create some kind of gallery of portraits of the dead.”

  “Maybe.”

  Cheyenne looked around the room. “Well, for the moment there’s nothing more for us to do here. We can use the conference room on the sixth floor. The computers up there are actually less than a decade old.”

  “I’ll come too,” Jake said. “Give me a few minutes, though.” He was staring at the head. “Then I’ll be right up.”

  Cheyenne and I left and found Kurt just outside the door, alone. Reggie was already halfway down the hall. I watched him for a moment and let my gaze become a question for Kurt.

  “He wants to let Amy Lynn keep working,” he said. “We’ve assigned an officer to her, but I think we should move her into protective custody. The note, the pot—they connect her to the case. I don’t like it.” He paused. “I want her safe.”

  “You need to ask Amy Lynn,” Cheyenne said. “Not her husband. It’s not your call or Reggie’s. It’s hers.”

  She was right, of course, but from my brief meeting with Amy Lynn I didn’t get the sense that she was the cautious type. I couldn’t see her choosing protective custody.

  Kurt let out a thin sigh. “Point taken.”

  Cheyenne told Kurt where we were going, and he said he’d join us as soon as he’d spoken with Amy Lynn.

  Then, as we left, I glanced back into the forensics lab and saw Jake Vanderveld leaning over, staring intently into Travis Nash’s lifeless eyes. It looked like he was whispering to himself.

  But maybe he was whispering to the ears of the dead.

  And I couldn’t help but wonder what he might possibly be saying.

  Amy Lynn Greer didn’t like the fact that no one would tell her why the police and FBI were in such a hurry to remove the flowers after the teenage girl told them it was a pot of basil, or why they’d stationed an officer right outside her door, and she let Benjamin Rhodes know it.

  “You can’t get involved with this,” he said. “Not with your husband’s position.”

  “I’m already involved. The flowers were sent to me.” Rhodes looked like he was about to respond, but before he could, she added, “Look, I spent all morning following up on this. I know more about it than anyone else. And you’re telling me being knowledgeable disqualifies me from writing about it? What kind of—”

  “Amy Lynn, settle down. Let’s just see what the police find out first.” Rhodes rounded his desk and stood beside the window, hands folded behind his back. “The executive board feels that if we move on this too fast there might be legal ramifications. They want us to sit on it until we have something a little more solid.”

  “But don’t you see?” she said. “That’s all the more reason to investigate it now, so we can be prepared to run a story when the time comes.”

  If the pot of basil was related to the week’s previous murders, she could already envision this story shaping up as a true crime book. This was her chance for a big story, a breakout story, and she wasn’t about to let it slip through her fingers just because the board wanted to play it safe.

  “No,” Rhodes said. “I’m sorry.”

  Amy Lynn was about to let him know what she thought about him and the executive board but held her tongue and simply said, “All right.”

  “Finish the steroids piece, get your weekly column on my desk. I’ll give you till four this afternoon—then we’ll see.”

  “Yes. All right. Thanks.” She left his office, brushed past the police officer waiting for her in the hallway and headed for her desk.

  No, she wasn’t going to spend the rest of her day writing about a baseball player.

  She was going to find John.

  37

  We split up the research.

  Cheyenne took the Alexander paintings, I scoured the Internet for Keats poems that might bear some semblance to the m
urders, and Jake looked for other literary references to pots of basil or to the message about telling of others’ tears.

  Even though Cheyenne had suggested we use the sixth floor conference room because of the computers, it didn’t take me long to realize that they were dinosaurs compared to the laptops the Bureau provided. I switched to my computer, and five minutes later, I noticed Jake had done the same.

  Each of us sat in a separate corner of the room and disappeared into our research, and as if by a unanimous, unspoken agreement, we worked quietly for nearly twenty-five minutes typing and surfing and scribbling notes before Jake broke the silence. “Well, let’s see what we have.”

  I looked up and saw him gaze from me to Cheyenne.

  “Sure, I’ll go first,” Cheyenne offered, but she sounded frustrated. “I looked all over Alexander’s online portfolio and, apart from two pictures that vaguely resemble the view of the mountains near the mine where we found Heather’s body, I’m not seeing any paintings that have a connection to the other murders. Nothing solid at all.”

  I tilted my laptop’s screen so I could read it more easily. “Well, I don’t have much either. Just one thing, though. A section of the poem by Keats.”

  And then I read aloud,

  O Melancholy, turn thine eyes away!

  O Music, Music, breathe despondingly!

  O Echo, Echo, on some other day,

  From Isles Lethean, sigh to us—O sigh!

  Spirits of grief, sing not your “Well-a-way!”

  For Isabel, sweet Isabel, will die;

  Will die a death too lone and incomplete,

  Now they have ta’en away her Basil sweet.

  I summarized, “The theme of despair runs through almost every line: melancholy, despondence, spirits of grief, the lack of singing, and then a lonely death—just like the killer wanted Kelsey to experience in the morgue.”

  “But she’s safe now,” Jake said.

  I thought for a moment. “I don’t see this killer giving up that easily.” I turned to Cheyenne. “There’s an officer with her now, at the hospital?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s keep him assigned to her until we catch this guy.”

  “All right.” She wrote something on her notepad. “I’ll talk with Kurt.”

  “One more thing. Keats mentions ‘Isles Lethean.’ I looked it up: the river Lethe was one of the rivers in Hades. If you drank from it, you would forget your life on earth. You would forget everything.”

  “Isles Lethean.” Jake gazed at the wall thoughtfully. “Maybe the UNSUB is perpetrating these crimes to forget something from his past, to cross the river, so to speak.”

  Great. UNSUB: Unknown Subject of an investigation. It may very well be the stupidest acronym ever created in FBI history. And that’s saying something.

  Jake, of course, loved the term.

  He went on, “Maybe he’s trying to find freedom from his own despondence, his own grief.”

  There was no way to either prove or disprove his hypothesis, and either way it offered us no specific investigative strategies. After all, who hasn’t dealt with grief? Who doesn’t want to forget painful memories? Most of the Denver metroplex’s 2.8 million people would probably fit that profile.

  Still, I let his words pass without comment. “I only managed to get through about thirty of Keats’s poems, but I didn’t find anything helpful in the ones I read.” Then, though I didn’t want to, I admitted the inevitable, “It’s possible we’re on the wrong track entirely, here.”

  Jake glanced at his computer screen. “I’m not so sure.” He motioned to the wide screen television monitor mounted on the conference room wall. “Is there a way we can . . . ?”

  Cheyenne deciphered his question and stood. “I’ll get it.” She powered on the wall-mounted monitor and then fished a USB cord out of a drawer on a nearby console.

  Jake took a moment to connect his computer to the USB port on the table, and just as the image from his laptop appeared on the screen, Kurt eased into the room and took a seat.

  “Amy Lynn wanted to be in protective custody,” he said, then looked at me. “A couple of your boys at the field office moved her to a safe house. And Reggie is not happy.”

  “So she’s safe,” Cheyenne said. “That’s good. One less thing to worry about.”

  Something didn’t seem quite right, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Jake opened a website, and it appeared on the wall monitor.

  “One more thing,” Kurt added. “The victimology info you wanted, Pat. Everything we have so far has been uploaded to the online case file archives.”

  “Good.” I filled him in on what Cheyenne, Jake, and I had been discussing and then motioned for Jake to resume.

  “Here’s what I have.” Jake pointed the cursor to the middle of the webpage. “Nothing on the phrase about tears, but I did find something more about the pot of basil. Keats’s poem was actually based on a story from the fourteenth century about a woman named Isabel who digs up her lover’s body, severs the head, and puts it into a pot, then plants basil over it.” Jake paused, then added, “The story appears in a book that was condemned by the church. It’s called The Decameron.”

  I leaned forward.

  “A condemned book?” Cheyenne said.

  “Yeah. It’s by an Italian author named Giovanni Boccaccio.” He scrolled down the article. “And by the way, Giovanni is the Italian form of—”

  “John,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Unbelievable,” Kurt muttered.

  John Alexander.

  John Keats.

  John Boccaccio.

  All three of these men had told the story of a disinterred head in a pot of basil: the first through a painting, the second through poetry, the third through prose.

  And now here in Denver, we had a killer who called himself John and had reenacted the story in a fourth way: real life.

  By signing the note “John” and sending the pot of basil to a reporter, the killer must have known we would eventually make the connection to either Keats, Alexander, or Boccaccio. I wasn’t sure if I should be impressed by this thoroughness, or insulted by it.

  All one elaborate, twisted game.

  Jake went on, “Apparently, The Decameron became a source of literary material for other authors, including . . .” He looked at his notes. “Faulkner, Tennyson, Longfellow, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and of course, Keats—just to name a few. In fact, a quarter of the stories in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as well as its literary structure are based on stories from The Decameron.”

  I could hardly believe it. “Chaucer, Longfellow, Shakespeare, they all based stories on Boccaccio’s book? I’ve never heard of him before.”

  Jake shook his head. “Neither had I.”

  “Wait,” Cheyenne said, somewhat impatiently. “You said the book was condemned by the church?”

  Jake scrolled down the webpage. “In 1370 a monk named Pi-etro Petroni wrote to Boccaccio warning him that he would be eternally damned unless he renounced the book. Boccaccio later revised the book, but he never recanted. Soon after that, the pope, let’s see . . .”

  He slid the cursor across the screen until he found his place. “Yeah, Pope Paul IV officially condemned the book, and it was banned from being distributed and read. But that only seemed to make it more popular.”

  “No surprise there,” Kurt said. “The best way to sell a book is to get someone to ban it.”

  “It’s still on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum to this day,” Jake concluded.

  “The Index of Forbidden Books,” Cheyenne said softly. She caught me looking at her questioningly. “Catholic school.”

  “All right,” I said to Jake. “Then it must contain something heretical, or maybe satanic. What did the website say about the book’s content?”

  He glanced at the notes he’d scribbled on a legal pad beside his keyboard. “The book is about ten people—seven women and three men who are trying to escape the Black De
ath in the 1300s. In the story, the Plague had infected Florence, and the ten travelers were trying to get to the hills of Fiesole where they could be safe.”

  I was amazed at how much he’d been able to uncover in only twenty-five minutes.

  After a quick breath, he went on. “During the ten-day trip they agree that every day they’ll each tell one story. And that’s where the title Decameron comes from: two Greek words, deka and haemeron, which mean ‘ten’ and ‘days,’ respectively.”

  Ten travelers. Ten stories. Ten days.

  Ten candles surrounding Heather Fain’s body.

  My heartbeat quickened.

  Cheyenne tapped the table impatiently. “Jake, get back to Pat’s question for a minute. If the church condemned the book, what kind of stories did these people tell?”

  By her tone, I sensed that investigating a book condemned by the church she’d grown up in was bothering her more than just a little.

  “Well, one of these indices lists . . .” Jake glanced at his computer, and I saw a new webpage appear on the wall monitor. “Yes. Here. It looks like the stories are pretty much about everyday topics: relationships, politics, religion, corruption, grief, and love . . .”

  “So, daily life,” Kurt said.

  “Pretty much.”

  I still didn’t understand why the church would have condemned the book, but for now at least, the church’s specific reasons for banning it didn’t matter as much as the connection it might have to the case.

  “We need to find out as much as we can about the stories in The Decameron,” I said.

  Jake shook his head. “These stories aren’t short, and there are a hundred of them. It’ll take us, I don’t know, at least a couple days to wade through all—”

  “No,” I said. “Remember the anonymous tips about the bodies: ‘Day Four ends on Wednesday.’ We can skip the rest of the days for now and just focus on the stories told on the fourth day. And we need to hurry. Dusk is coming.”

  38

  The four of us downloaded the text to The Decameron from the Internet, then Jake offered to investigate the first three stories that were told on the fourth day, Cheyenne took stories four through six, Kurt, seven and eight, and I agreed to study the last two.