The Knight

by Steven James

  Then he carefully gave him the second injection, rebuttoned the shirt, slid behind the steering wheel, and left for the ranch.

  43

  Ever since my conversation with Margaret nearly forty-five minutes ago, I’d been doing what I used to think I did best.

  I wasn’t so sure anymore.

  No matter how I reworked the geoprofile, I wasn’t coming up with anything solid, and I was running out of ideas.

  Though I hated to admit it, I was starting to believe that John might have skewed the results by randomly selecting his victims and crime scene locations.

  I rubbed my eyes.

  I pushed back from my desk and stood. Stretched my back.

  My eighteenth-story office window stared down at the city of Denver, and I leaned my hand against the glass and let my eyes wander through the maze of mirrored high-rise hotels and banks that make up Denver’s downtown.

  John lived down there somewhere.

  Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was peripatetic, just traveling through.

  The muscles in my arm, my shoulder, my neck stiffened in frustration and anger.

  You have to find him, Pat. You have to bring him in.

  I caught sight of the original Denver courthouse just across the street from my office. It had been built in 1910 as a premier example of turn-of-the-century architecture and as a testament to justice in the West. Even though it was only four stories tall, it was imposing, monumental, and took up an entire city block.

  From my window I could read the frieze inscribed in tall letters, spanning the building just below the roof—Nulli Negabimus, Nulli Differemus, Jutitiam.

  Tessa had studied Latin in middle school, so a few months ago I’d brought her downtown to give her a chance to show off her foreign language expertise. As we’d passed the building I’d looked up and said, “Hey. Isn’t that Latin?”

  But she’d already noticed the words and was working on the translation. “Yeah, but it’s kind of hard to translate.” She sounded frustrated, and I was glad it was at least a little bit of a challenge to her. “I guess maybe it’d be ‘To no one we will deny, to no one we will defer justice.’ But differemus could be translated ‘discriminate.’ So, pretty much it’s saying they won’t deny justice to anyone or discriminate against them.” And then she mumbled, “Yeah. Maybe if you’re rich.”

  Her comment seemed to come out of nowhere, and I had the sense that I should disagree with her about it, but realized that she was at least partly right. So, instead of commenting, I led her around the building to the southwest side to show her the second Latin inscription, but before I could, she pointed angrily at the building. “Can you even believe that?”

  She wasn’t pointing at the Latin phrase.

  “What?” I asked.

  “There.”

  She pressed a light finger against my jaw and turned my head toward the marble lettering above an ornate stone doorway near the corner of the building. The sign had two words: Judges Entrance.

  “It’s been up there for like a hundred years,” she said.

  “So? It’s where the judges go in.”

  “You’re kidding me? It doesn’t bother you?”

  “Why should it?”

  “It’s missing an apostrophe.”

  OK.

  As I was trying to figure out how to respond to that, she scanned the phrase I’d led her to this side of the building to see: “OK. So 211 that one’s from Cicero. It’s a lot more common. We learned it in Latin class. It means, ‘The law does unfairness to no one, injustice to no one.’”

  Injustice to no one.

  So now, as I leaned my hand against the glass and thought of that day with Tessa, Calvin’s words from last night echoed in my mind: “Our justice system is concerned more with prosecutions and acquittals than it is with either truth or justice. You know it’s true. It’s just that we’re reticent to admit it.”

  Tessa might not have agreed with the first inscription, but I was starting to doubt the truth of the second.

  Because sometimes the law is unfair.

  Sometimes justice isn’t carried out.

  As I was considering that, I heard a knock at my office door.

  I turned. “Come.”

  But the door was already flying open.

  Cheyenne burst into the room and slapped a manila folder onto my desk. “We know who owns the mine.”

  44

  “His name is Thomas Bennett,” she said. “He lives here in Denver; works as a weekend auditor at the Wells Fargo bank. He left work about forty-five minutes ago. Either his cell is off or he’s not answering. It might be nothing, but we can’t get a GPS lock on his car either. His wife said he never turns off his phone and he should have been home by now.”

  I positioned myself in front of my keyboard. “Do you have his home address?”

  “Sure.”

  “Let’s plug it in here, see if he lives in the hot zone. ”

  She gave me the address and while I updated the geoprofile, she told me she hadn’t come up with anything on the therapist or marriage counselor angle. “What about you?” She studied the screen. “Anything?”

  “Not so much.”

  Using a different color for each victim’s travel routes, I overlaid the data onto a three-dimensional map of the Denver metroplex. The result looked like a plate of multicolored spaghetti.

  She pulled up a chair beside me, perhaps closer than she needed to, but I didn’t say anything. “So tell me,” she said. “What am I looking at?”

  I remembered that she was familiar with some of my research, but I also knew that geospatial investigation wasn’t her specialty, so I pointed to the tangle of overlapping colors and said, “I’m trying to find John’s home base, so I input Denver’s most traveled roads based on the typical daily vehicle congestion at the times of the crimes, then I compared that with the victim’s typical travel patterns—but so far, even with Bennett’s address it doesn’t look like the data is complete enough to give us what we need.”

  “OK.” She drummed her fingers on the desk. “Let’s think this through. Location and timing, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “We know when the anonymous tips were called in.”

  “That’s right. And in most of the crimes so far, we know the times and locations of the abductions or murders. I’ve already input those.”

  She stood. Paced to my bookcase. “And because of the videos from the entrance to the hospital, we know when Kelsey Nash arrived at the morgue . . .”

  “We know when Brigitte Marcello bought the Chinese food she took to Taylor’s.”

  “And,” she added, “we know that John flew to Chicago sometime after dumping Brigitte Marcello’s body, and that when he returned to Denver he drove from the airport to the morgue.”

  I was about to say something, then paused. “What?”

  “Well, I mean, not for certain, but at least it’s probable. Based on the audio message in the mine, we can assume that John traveled to Chicago after disposing of Brigitte Marcello’s body.”

  “I don’t like to assume.”

  “But you are assuming—you’re working from the premise that John didn’t fly to Chicago. Doesn’t it make sense to run your data at least once, assuming that he did?”

  I stared at her for a moment.

  It struck me that even though she wasn’t in the Bureau and we’d only worked half a dozen cases together over the last year, it was beginning to feel like she was my partner. And I liked how it felt.

  “You might have a point,” I said.

  “It pains you to have to say that, doesn’t it?”

  “You have no idea.”

  Thoughts of the cases I’d worked with Lien-hua tried to climb into my mind, but I slid them aside and pulled up the FAA’s archives of arrival and departure schedules for the last three days to figure out which airport John might have used.

  The ranch lay on the southern edge of Clear Creek County, fifty minutes from D
enver and three thousand feet higher in the Rockies than the Mile-High City.

  The property contained a few rolling fields dotted with pines and was hemmed in by thick spruce forests and steep rocky cliffs. National forest land bordered the ranch on three sides.

  Elwin Daniels had owned the land until three weeks ago when he bequeathed it by default to the man who was watching the blood spurt from his neck.

  Red sunlight streaking the air.

  And since the property lay at the end of a remote, unmarked dirt road and the good people of Clear Creek County tended to keep to themselves, Giovanni hadn’t had any trouble with neighbors stopping by to chat with the reclusive rancher he’d killed.

  He turned onto Piney Oaks Road.

  Less than five miles to the ranch.

  It only took a few minutes to analyze the flight schedules from Denver International Airport and Colorado Springs Airport. While I did, Cheyenne pulled out an oversized map of Denver County and unfolded it on the other end of my desk.

  By comparing arrival and departure schedules with the time of Friday’s anonymous tip about the location of Sebastian Taylor’s body, I realized that John would have needed to fly out of DIA instead of Colorado Springs.

  To cover all my bases, I ran the names from the suspect list against the passenger manifests and, considering how careful John had been so far, I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t find any matches.

  Based on the current theories of distance decay, I reorganized the data and calculated the most likely travel routes from Bearcroft Mine to Taylor’s house, from Cherry Creek Reservoir to the airport, and from the airport to Baptist Memorial Hospital at the times of day John would have been traveling.

  Hit “enter.”

  The hot zone shifted west of the city.

  I felt the familiar thrill of being in the middle of a case as things heat up. “Do you have the list of greyhound owners?”

  “Let me check with Kreger; he was heading that up.”

  She tapped at her phone while I pulled up the satellite imagery of the Denver metroplex. A moment later I heard her identify herself to someone on the other end of the line.

  “Ask about the greyhounds,” I said. “If anyone from Clear Creek County recently purchased one.”

  She relayed the question, nodded to me as she listened to the answer, then tipped the phone away from her mouth and told me, “A man named Elwin Daniels. Ten days ago. MasterCard purchase. He lives on a ranch in the southern part of the county.”

  The location lay less than two miles from the revised hot zone.

  I typed in his name. Pulled up his address. Zoomed in using FALCON.

  It’d been three minutes since the last satellite pass, but we had footage of a car halfway up the winding dirt road to the ranch. The Infiniti had tinted windows, so it was impossible to see the driver’s face. I focused on the rear bumper to try to read the plate number.

  Cheyenne spoke into the phone, then said to me, “According to Elwin’s DMV records, he’s seventy-two years old. So, probably not our killer.”

  You need to get to that ranch, Pat.

  “Cheyenne.” I froze the picture. Magnified the image. “Get us a helicopter.”

  Sharpened the resolution.

  Yes.

  Got it.

  I grabbed the car’s license plate, enlarged it, then tapped at my keyboard and ran the numbers.

  Beside me, Cheyenne was requesting a chopper. Dispatch must have suggested Cody Howard, the department’s chief helicopter pilot, but she told them rather brusquely, “We’ve been through this before: I don’t fly with Cody. Get us Colonel Freeman.” Her sharp tone surprised me, but then the name of the man who owned the vehicle flashed on my screen and I stopped worrying about why Cheyenne preferred to fly with the colonel.

  The Infiniti belonged to Thomas Bennett.

  The owner of Bearcroft Mine.

  I sent my chair toppling backward as I stood. “Let’s go.”

  As I sprinted for the hall I yanked out my cell and called dispatch to get some cars and an ambulance to Elwin Daniels’s house.

  45

  Colonel Cliff Freeman fired up the helicopter as Cheyenne and I slipped on our headphones and headset mics so we could communicate en route.

  As we took off, I used my cell to pull the DMV photos for Thomas Bennett and Elwin Daniels so that we could visually identify the two men if either of them were at the ranch.

  By the time I looked up, we were already soaring over the foothills toward the Rockies.

  Giovanni dragged Thomas Bennett’s unconscious body into the barn and laid him on the hay-strewn ground.

  He took a moment to close and latch the twelve-foot-tall sliding doors so that they could only be opened from the inside. The only other way into the barn was through the tack room.

  With the doors shut, the barn was lit only by the sparse lightbulbs dangling from the beams high overhead and the four tiny windows on the east side.

  The familiar odor of dried manure and dusty hay surrounded him, but now it was mixed with the stench of the stale urine on the floor of the greyhound’s cage.

  The cage hung in the middle of the barn, about twenty-five feet away, suspended three feet above the ground by four chains cinched around the beams high overhead.

  Giovanni had named the sleek, jet-black greyhound Nadine, after his grandmother whom he’d pushed the knife into when he was eleven. And now that he hadn’t fed the dog in four days, he knew she’d be motivated to eat whatever type of meat he offered her.

  Even if it were still moving.

  A wheelchair sat beside the cage, but the floor of the barn was too rutted and had too many loose boards to wheel Thomas around, so Giovanni picked up the man’s legs and pulled him across the hay.

  As he passed the horse stalls, the Appaloosa and the black mare—the only two horses currently in the barn—watched him from behind their gates. The Appaloosa neighed and stomped at the hay as he passed, but he ignored her.

  He arrived at Nadine’s custom-designed cage: four feet wide, eight feet long, and just tall enough for her to stand. Because of its weight, it barely swayed as she paced impatiently back and forth. He hoisted Bennett into the wheelchair.

  From inside her cage, Nadine let out a burst of vicious barks that betrayed the fact that she’d grown up domesticated.

  She stopped and locked her eyes on Giovanni. Snarled.

  He’d expected her to be in a nasty mood, but the low feral sound coming from her throat surprised him. The amphetamines he’d injected into her throughout the week must have been making her even more aggressive than he’d anticipated. “Easy, girl,” he said. “Supper’s on the way.”

  Bennett’s limp body slumped in the wheelchair, and Giovanni took a moment to prop him upright.

  Then he retrieved a roll of duct tape from a shelf near the tack room and returned to the wheelchair to begin the preparations.

  I spent the flight reviewing what I knew about the case, trying to discern whether Thomas Bennett was more likely the victim or the killer, but I didn’t have enough data to confirm or disprove either possibility.

  We made it to the ranch in less than nine minutes.

  “There!” Cheyenne pointed to the gray Infiniti FX50 parked beside the barn. A field stretched between the house and the barn, but had so many scattered pine trees and so much uneven terrain that I couldn’t see any good landing spots.

  I asked Cliff, “What do you think?”

  He shook his head. “Closest I can get is that field to the southeast.” He pointed to a meadow that lay about six or seven hundred meters from the ranch house.

  I wasn’t sure how fast Cheyenne could run, but she sure appeared fit. And although I hadn’t been jogging much since last winter when I’d been shot in the leg, I’d recovered pretty well and I figured I could make it to the ranch in less than three minutes.

  “Up for a run?” I asked her.

  A gleam in her eye. “Only if it’s a race.”
/>   I liked this woman. Liked her a lot. I patted Cliff’s shoulder. “

  Take us down.”

  He nodded and aimed the helicopter toward an opening in the trees.

  46

  Giovanni finished duct taping Thomas’s left wrist to the wheelchair. Tugged the tape tight. Ripped it off. Set down the roll.

  There. Both wrists and both ankles were secure. Thomas wouldn’t be leaving that chair.

  The spaces between the bars of Nadine’s cage were only wide enough for her muzzle, but that didn’t stop her from viciously attacking the air less than two feet from Giovanni’s arm as he stood nearby.

  He felt a spray of her hot saliva on his forearm.

  “Almost time,” he said, being careful not to get too close to her. “You’ve been more than patient. Just a few more minutes.”

  Confident that Thomas couldn’t wriggle free, he walked past the cage to retrieve the duffel bag and the bucket of rose petals from the shelves near the maze of round hay bales on the barn’s west side.

  He carried the duffel bag and the roses back to the wheelchair, set them down, and glanced at Nadine.

  The top of the cage could be unlatched and had an opening through which Giovanni had lowered the tranquilized dog a week and a half ago. The cage’s only other door lay on the end a few feet from Thomas Bennett’s unconscious body. When unlatched, this second opening wasn’t large enough for the dog’s body, but it was large enough for her head.

  That was the feeding door.

  Greyhounds are smart, so it hadn’t taken Giovanni long to condition Nadine to eat whatever he placed in front of the feeding door.

  He unzipped his duffel bag and pulled out a silk sheet, then smoothed it across the ground.

  He would be needing that for the body.

  Cheyenne beat me to the ranch house, but not by much.

  The barn lay a hundred meters past the house on the other side of the field.

  We drew our weapons. “You take the house.” I tried to hide how out of breath I was. “I’ll get the barn.”