Checkmate

by Steven James

  Tessa let out a long breath. “I’m seriously glad you’re not dead, Patrick.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “Three of us,” Lien-hua added.

  “And you too, Lien-hua,” Tessa said. “Maybe you should be thankful you were hit by that car and had physical therapy this morning.”

  “Maybe I should.”

  “Being in that accident might have saved your life. I mean, in a butterfly-effect sort of way.”

  “That’s a good way of looking at it.”

  Habib worked on the stitches and I might have winced if there weren’t three women in the room who were gauging my reaction to see how I was doing.

  Lien-hua, Tessa, and I didn’t chat much as he finished stitching up the last wound. It seemed like a mutual understanding that we would talk through things later, rather than here in front of the doctor and the nurse.

  After Habib was done, he confirmed that my tetanus shot was up to date, then reviewed instructions on how to avoid infection.

  “I think we’ve been through this before,” he said.

  “I think we have.”

  Because of the nature of the lacerations, he hadn’t used dissolvable sutures and he told me they would need to be removed in six or seven days. Then he gave me one prescription for antibiotics and another for pain medication. I’m not one for taking pain meds unless absolutely necessary, but I thanked him. I figured I’d go with the antibiotics, and I could always grab a couple of Advil if I needed to.

  I got a call from Ralph that the ERT had cleared the bodies to be removed from the NCAVC site and that they were being brought over here to the morgue at the medical center.

  Tessa must have overheard him because she bit her lip and rubbed two fingers together nervously.

  Thankfully, the paramedics wouldn’t be bringing those bodies in through the front doors, but rather through another hallway to the morgue on the lower level, so it wasn’t likely we were going to run into anyone rolling a corpse in.

  For Tessa’s sake I was thankful.

  Well, for my sake and Lien-hua’s as well.

  We were making our way through the waiting room toward the front doors when I saw Sherry Ritterman, the wife of the man who’d died in my arms, sitting in one of the chairs near the window.

  He would have been brought over earlier and I wasn’t sure why she was here in the waiting room—unless the doctors had somehow managed to revive him.

  Before losing consciousness he’d enjoined me to tell Sherry he was sorry about Iris.

  And, not having any idea who Iris was, I couldn’t even begin to guess what kind of reaction Sherry was going to have when I told her that.

  She noticed me, rose, and then approached us, calling for me to wait.

  9

  “Pat.” Sherry’s makeup was smeared and ran in tired, sad streaks from her bloodshot eyes. “I heard you were there with Stu when he died.”

  Yes, and I did all I could. I swear, I thought, but I didn’t tell her that.

  “Yes,” I said. “I was.”

  She waited. Either she couldn’t think of anything to say or she expected me to go on.

  “He was brave.” I hoped that would be enough.

  She sniffed back a tear, but said nothing.

  This did not feel like the right time or place to tell her what Stu had said about Iris.

  I said, “I’m so sorry for . . . all that’s happened.”

  It’s not your business why he was apologizing about Iris. Your business is just telling Sherry what he said. That’s all. You’re just a messenger.

  “He wanted me to tell you something, Sherry.”

  “What?” Her tone was touched with longing and profound sadness. “What did he say?”

  “He told me that he . . .”

  The look in her eyes was what did it.

  It was a look that yearned for some hope, some meaning, some comfort. Her husband had died this morning and—

  “Yes?” she said imploringly. “What was it?”

  “That he loves you.” The words just came out. “That he’s always loved you.”

  Pat, what are you doing? Tell her what he said about Iris. That’s what he wanted. That’s what—

  Her eyes moistened. “He said that?”

  “Yes,” I lied. “He wanted to make sure you knew how much he cared about you. That you never doubted that.”

  She wiped away a tear and said nothing.

  “He loved you,” I reiterated.

  “Okay.” The word was so soft it was hardly audible. “Thank you.”

  Before I could think of anything else to say, she returned to the window and leaned, weeping, into the arms of a woman I didn’t recognize—a friend maybe, a relative perhaps.

  Just being here made my heart break.

  “C’mon.” I led Lien-hua and Tessa outside.

  The rain had stopped, although the sky was still overcast. The sun was trying to find its way through the clouds but was failing.

  “Lien-hua and I need to swing by the NCAVC and check in with Ralph,” I told Tessa.

  “You’re not thinking about going back there to work,” she scoffed. “Patrick, I mean, come on, you gotta be kidding me.”

  Though I would have been glad to work at the scene, I knew that Director Wellington would never allow an agent who’d been to the emergency room to return to the field that soon—if nothing more than to avoid bad publicity and to placate the Bureau’s lawyers. However, Lien-hua might be able to help with the case there at the NCAVC building.

  “No, I expect I’ll be stuck doing paperwork at home for the rest of the day. But why don’t you follow us in your car, and then if Lien-hua needs to stay there I can catch a ride home with you.”

  She contemplated that and finally shrugged. “Sure. I guess. Whatever.”

  Tessa left for her VW bug and I walked with Lien-hua to her Infiniti Q60 Coupe. My wife knows her cars and she likes them fast and classy.

  “Why did you lie to Sherry?” she asked me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why did you lie about what her husband said?”

  I paused, stared at her disbelievingly. “How did you know?”

  “I know your baseline, Pat, where you look when you’re telling the truth, your posture, your mannerisms, when you typically pause. You’ve never been a very good liar.”

  There are times when being married to such an observant student of human nature does not play to my advantage.

  “To try to protect her,” I said.

  “Protect her?”

  “Yes.”

  “From what?”

  “The truth. From what her husband actually said.”

  A pause. “‘The truth is the one thing no one needs to be protected from.’ You told me that once, remember?”

  It was a saying my advisor for my Ph.D. program came up with, and I’d shared it with Lien-hua soon after we first met. “I remember.”

  “So?”

  “I can’t tell Sherry what Stu said, Lien-hua. If I did . . . I’m afraid it would bring up bad memories. And that’s the last thing she needs right now.”

  We climbed into the car.

  “But you will?” Lien-hua asked.

  “Tell her?”

  “Yes.”

  I hesitated. “Yes. I will. When the time is right.”

  She started the engine and pulled onto the road. “And Tessa as well. You were only telling her part of the truth.”

  “You mean about me doing paperwork and you staying at the NCAVC building if they needed you?”

  “Yes.”

  “That was true.”

  “But only partly.”

  “How’s that?”

  “That wasn’t the main reason you told her to f
ollow us, is it? You didn’t want her at home by herself. I mean, whoever attacked Jerome Cole left a copy of your book there.” She didn’t have to say any more.

  “It’s better if she’s not left alone this afternoon.”

  She was quiet.

  Habib had sent in the prescription for the antibiotics, but I contacted the pharmacy to verify that they’d be available for pickup on the way home. When I hung up Lien-hua said to me, “Pat, I need to ask you to do something for me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t ever lie to me.”

  “I wouldn’t lie to you.”

  “Listen to me: even if you think it would be for my good. Even if you think you would be protecting me by doing it. We don’t hide things from each other and we don’t deceive each other. Understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “Okay. And you promise?”

  This time I wasn’t so quick in replying. “I promise,” I told her at last. But I wondered if I would really be able to offer her only the truth if it came to the place where I could offer her hope instead.

  10

  The meeting with Ralph at the NCAVC building took less than five minutes.

  He asked about my stitches and after I’d assured him that I was alright, he moved right into the case. “Some state police found the semi at a gas station about five miles from here. The security cameras at the station didn’t catch anyone leaving the cab. The guy parked the truck so the driver’s door was next to the woods.”

  He knew the position of the cameras.

  “Sight lines,” I said.

  Ralph nodded. “Yeah. He knew what he was doing. He must have slipped out, gone through the forest. Volunteers from the base and a couple dozen agents are scouring the woods as we speak, but there’s a road nearby and it’s very possible he had someone pick him up or had a vehicle waiting there.”

  “Check for prints on the side-view mirror,” I said. “I saw him adjust it and he wasn’t wearing gloves.”

  “Good. I’ll get the ERT on it.”

  “What about Cole’s cell phone?”

  “Destroyed in the cab of the truck. Oh, and Angela and Lacey are all over those numbers you found in the book in Cole’s bedroom. You’d mentioned it might be a phone number?”

  “As a possibility, that’s all.”

  “I’m not sure what they’ve pulled up nationally from other area codes, but locally the guy with that number is a grocery bagger. Twenty-year-old kid. We brought him in for questioning, but he looks clean.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Lien-hua suggested that the numbers might refer to page numbers in the book that was left at the scene. I’ll check that out tonight.”

  “Great.”

  Lien-hua asked him, “What do we know about the semi’s route to or from the building?”

  “Our guy managed to avoid all the traffic cams in the area—and I know what you’re going to say, Pat.”

  “That I don’t believe in coincidences.”

  “Exactly.”

  “He scouted it out,” Lien-hua surmised.

  “And he chose a rainy day, when our satellites couldn’t pick up anything.”

  A weather report? Did he really think that far ahead? Would that have even entered his mind?

  “What about our exterior surveillance cameras at the back of the building?” I asked Ralph. “Surely we have footage of him when he left the semi to unload that lawnmower.”

  “Nothing helpful so far. I have a team reviewing the video, but the guy wore that cap for a reason.”

  “And he knew just where to look? Where to tip his head to avoid getting caught on camera?”

  “It appears so. Yes.”

  Did Jerome give him the locations of the surveillance cameras at the back of the NCAVC building—and, if so, why would Jerome have even noted where they were in the first place? If not, how would the offender have known where to turn his head to avoid being caught on the security videos?

  Too many questions, too few answers.

  And it was probably going to be that way for a while.

  The ERT was busy on the site and, as I suspected, Ralph told me to head home and write up my report, but then surprised me somewhat by telling me that he wanted me at a nine o’clock briefing with him in the morning at FBI Headquarters. “I saw you taking photos before you left in that ambulance.”

  “Yes. And video.”

  “Alright, pull everything you have together, upload it to the online case files. And look over what we have regarding the scene at Jerome Cole’s house, see if there’s anything you noticed there that you can add to what Natasha and her team come up with. I’ll see you in the morning at HQ.”

  He paused and took a deep breath as if he were preparing himself to do something he didn’t want to do. “Director Wellington will be there and, because of the possibility that this was a terrorist attack and more government agencies might be targeted, we’ll have AD Sheridan from the Counterterrorism Division, the director of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, probably some DOJ reps, maybe even someone to report back to the National Security Council.”

  “Ralph, I don’t belong in a crowd like that. Bureaucrats and politicians? I’m just an instructor at the Academy.”

  “You’re a lot more than that, Pat. In any case, with your book left there on Cole’s body, there’s a connection to you in all this. And you’re the only one who saw that guy in the semi. Director Wellington specifically requested that you attend.”

  I tried to hold back my enthusiasm.

  My friend laid one of his gorilla hands on my shoulder. “Go home, man. Fill in the gaps we have in the files. I have a press conference to prepare for. Get some sleep tonight. I want you rested and ready in the morning. We all know how much you like briefings.”

  “Yeah, about as much as I like needles.”

  “And about as much as I like the metric system.”

  “Or France.”

  “Or France.”

  “I’m staying,” Lien-hua informed him. “To help work up the profile.”

  He nodded brusquely. “Good.”

  * * *

  As I was walking to the car, Debra met up with me. “Pat. I heard about Jerome.” She appeared absolutely devastated. “How he was tortured.”

  Even though he delivered to the back of the building and didn’t come past the reception area much, she knew him. We all did.

  “Yeah.” Man, she really did not look good. “You should go home,” I suggested. “Spend some time with Allie.”

  Debra didn’t answer right away. “She’s at her dad’s this week.”

  “Right.” I wanted to reassure her but I wasn’t sure what else to say. “We’ll catch the guy who did this.”

  There I was, making promises to people again.

  “Yes,” she said. “I know.”

  Then I left with my daughter to swing by the pharmacy on our way home.

  * * *

  3:04 p.m.

  Charlotte, North Carolina

  The bard parked his van in the slot closest to the elevator in the northwest corner of the Schaeler Parking Garage near the intersection of 4th and Tryon.

  The Bureau still hadn’t released the names of those killed in the explosion, so he didn’t know whether Special Agent Patrick Bowers had survived.

  He hoped that he had.

  Stepping outside the parking garage, the southern summer air hit him full force.

  Upper nineties. Humid.

  He walked to Independence Square at the intersection of Trade Street and Tryon, the most famous intersection Uptown.

  Charlotte was a city in love with the future. Some people have called it the next Atlanta or the emerging capital of the South, but those descriptions missed the point. Charlotte wasn’t striving to be the biggest cit
y or even the most influential city in the South. Instead it was carving out its own unique space as a center for science and the arts, for thinkers and dreamers.

  It was a city that wasn’t ashamed of its conservative religious roots, but neither was it afraid to welcome the neoliberals flowing in from the Northeast. It was a city with a broad heart, open arms, and a spirit bent on being ahead of the curve.

  He was here to snap photos of the four statues on the four corners of the intersection, to get them in this light, at this time of day, before driving down to Columbia, South Carolina, to spend some time with Corrine.

  Each twenty-four-foot-tall, five-thousand-pound sculpture signified a chapter of Charlotte’s history. From the first time he’d visited this corner two months ago, he’d been interested in their symbolism and how they portrayed the history of this city and this region.

  He faced the first one.

  Commerce—the statue of a prospector panning for gold. Back in 1799 gold was discovered near Charlotte, and for fifty years North Carolina was the gold capital of the United States. The region was dotted with literally hundreds of gold mines, a few of whose abandoned shafts and tunnels still ran under sections of the city.

  In the statue, the man was emptying his pan of gold over a likeness of the former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan to celebrate the city’s banking and finance interests.

  That was, admittedly, odd, but Charlotte was the second-largest banking center in the U.S., trailing only New York City, and at the time the statues were dedicated in 1995, Greenspan ended up being the natural choice to represent that part of the city’s identity.

  The bard centered the statue on his phone’s screen, snapped the photo, and then turned to the next corner.

  Transportation—an African-American man holding a sledgehammer that resembled those used to build the railroads of the region. The eagle that most people miss seeing when they look at the statue represented air travel.

  He took the picture.

  Next: Industry—a female mill worker, to pay homage to the textile industry, which created the boom that resulted in the banks being established in the area. A child beside her knees stood for the children who also worked in the mills before child-labor laws were passed to protect them from abusive work conditions.