The Camelot Gambit

by A. J. Scudiere

  Though Eleri agreed with the linguistics, she had to explain. "There is a lot of overlap between the terms, sir, and—"

  He interrupted. "I don't care about the terms—”

  She interrupted back. "Yes, you do, because the terminology will help us determine how we go forward with this case. And the terminology you use will inform the public of how afraid they need to be."

  That, at least, seemed to calm him down, and she launched into a pedantic discussion of the various types of killers. She hoped that, as smart as he was, and as much as he had loved the high end of intelligence enough to build a whole town for it, that speaking to him in this way would at least soothe him.

  "Sir, there are mass killers—those who kill people all in one location, all at one time. The Vegas shooting spree was a mass killing. There are spree killers—these are people who walk down the street and kill many or all of the people they encounter. Some sprees are minutes, some are months, but they follow a path. Bonnie and Clyde are probably the prime example of spree killers. Both mass and spree killers generally have no connection to their victims. And then you have a serial killer—which is probably the closest term for what we have here, but it still isn't really psychologically the proper terminology."

  “Go on.” At least he was looking at her, listening carefully now, and she had his attention.

  "Most serial killers kill for the thrill of the kill, or the torture. In many cases, they have some ritual they have to go through. They select a victim for reasons that please the killer or the ritual. They perform all the steps, usually in the same order and, in some cases, the kill isn’t even part of the urge. They just have to kill the victim at the end because of the information the victim would have if set free, or because the damage from their ritual is too great. But serial killers, in general, kill because of an urge.

  “You have to remember, though, if you ask ten psychologists or psychiatrists the definition of these things, you will get ten different answers. Our killer is in a grey area. I do not believe our killer is killing for any kind of thrill, and that's the big difference. I believe our killer kills out of some need—either to gain information or to suppress it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Donovan hopped in then, and she was grateful. “Our killer doesn’t love killing. He may even hate it. He feels he has to kill to get what he wants.”

  “Then why the ritual?” Bennett pushed, though now he looked as heartbroken as Eleri felt rather than wearing the angry expression he had before.

  “Maybe to throw us off the track. Maybe it’s a way he knows that works …”

  Eleri watched as Donovan trailed off. She could almost see the idea forming in his mind. She started talking before Bennett saw it, too. “What this means is that profiling the victims by their location—or their looks, or ages, or professions—isn't going to help us here, not at all. If you announce to all of Curie that there's a serial killer in their midst, the people of this town are going to look up that definition and they're going to draw some conclusions. . . and some of them will be very erroneous conclusions. Then they're going to change their lives and their children's lives accordingly. And if they draw the wrong conclusions," she was practically leaning over from the front side of the desk now, almost nose-to-nose with Marshall, "they will not only fail to protect themselves, they may put themselves further in harm's way. So how you distribute this information to the town is of the utmost importance.”

  Eleri took a deep, badly needed breath before continuing. "For example, you called my partner and I in here this morning. You failed to give us an alternate route into the building. We found one anyway, so that people did not see two newcomers to town—strangers—heading into the office of the mayor and founder. That would have likely blown our cover. You're going to have to be as careful about this as we are, sir, and any help you can provide us would be greatly appreciated." She changed her tone at the end of that, hoping to enlist him as a helper rather than smack him down as a fool.

  Then she upped her tone even a little more, hoping to calm Bennett and put him squarely in their court. "My conclusion is that Marat Rychenkov had something—either an object or knowledge— that the killer wanted. We've concluded that the killer had access to the home information. We told you, remember? He used the door codes, and he used the door codes correctly, without fail, even after Johanna Schmitt changed them. That indicates a system hack. That person repeatedly came into the home and continued looking for something. So my partner and I think they killed Marat Rychenkov without the information or the object already in hand."

  “They must have believed it would be easier to find after he was dead.” Bennett was getting into the game now, and Eleri was glad to have him on their side rather than yelling at them across the desk. "So if we can figure out what that thing is, we may be able to figure out who the killer might go after next."

  "If anyone at all," Eleri said. "It's plausible the killer got what they needed out of Mrs. Schmitt. To be fair, she told us firmly that she had no idea what it was. If she was holding out on us, the killer might have gotten her to tell whatever information she had."

  Donovan entered the conversation again then. He'd been watching them go back and forth almost as though he were at a tennis game, but Eleri could tell his mind had been churning with something else the whole time. "Get the police and the medical examiner, when they run the tox screen, to check for Sodium Pentothal,” he said now. “It'll be a few days before we get that result back."

  Bennett frowned at him. "Truth serum?"

  Of course. Of course the mayor of the town knew it by its chemical name, Eleri thought.

  "Yes. If they wanted information out of Johanna Schmitt, that's the most likely way to have done it," Donovan told them.

  Bennett absorbed that information the way he absorbed everything: casually. But Eleri knew he would not forget. He seemed to have come to terms with his role in moving the investigation forward, even as he changed the topic. "The police reports are here.”

  “Did you email them?" Donovan asked and was relieved when Bennett shook his head and said, “Not yet.”

  "Give us hard copies, please."

  Eleri quickly explained how they had to keep the records out of any computer program that could be hacked, but they had to do so without alerting the killer they were on to the hack. Let Bennett chew on that one for the next day, Eleri thought. It might keep him out of their hair.

  After leaving, they snuck back out to Donovan’s car and finally made it to the Up N Atom. Eleri had copies of the police reports on her, and they weighed heavy in her bag.

  19

  Eleri and Donovan had been at the coffee shop for a good thirty minutes when they decided to call it a loss. At least they’d gotten coffee and pastries, she thought. The hit of sugar and caffeine had done her good.

  They’d purposefully taken seats at the long, group table right in the center of the place. As Eleri had nothing on her screen that she needed to shield from anyone this time, they were trying to be as visible as possible. She turned to Donovan to declare the morning a bust and was reaching for her foil pastry wrapper to toss it, when Kaya Mazur came in with her husband Nate and the two kids, all of them looking forlorn.

  "Kaya!" Eleri called out at the same time Kaya called her name back. The woman rushed over and grabbed Eleri's hands.

  "I heard you were the one who found her," Kaya said, her expression worried for her new friend. Eleri nodded in a tight movement, letting the tears well in her eyes at last, grateful she didn't have to cover her true feelings about the situation. She let the explanation fall out of her mouth—even though the words were slightly false—just the way someone would if they had been through a traumatic situation that they were not prepared for.

  Eleri and Donovan were overly prepared, but now she let the story roll off her tongue. "We were at the high school. We heard they did classes and I was thinking maybe I could teach some … While Donovan and I were walkin
g down the hall, one of the rooms had the light on, and we went in to check it out and. . .“ She took a breath and continued her purposeful babbling. "The office door was open, so we knocked and then. . .“

  She let the last words trail off. Everyone knew what had happened after that—or at least they believed they did. She hoped no one knew that Donovan and Eleri had done a cursory FBI investigation first.

  "I'm so sorry you had to deal with that." Kaya squeezed her hands while Nate looked over her shoulder. The two kids stood behind them, clearly watching their mother, though not fully engaged. Kaya turned with a start, realizing she’d missed a step in etiquette. "Oh, I’m so sorry. This is my husband, Nathan. Nate. I believe you've met Cage and Joule?"

  The two kids barely nodded, as did Eleri. She looked to them. FBI training urged agents to speak directly to kids whenever possible once the kids were above the age of three or four. She found that worked in everyday life, too.

  "You're not in school today?" she asked, though she didn't use a tone in that was derogatory or judgmental.

  It was Cage who shook his head. "No. I couldn't."

  Kaya filled in. "The kids were over there all the time. I mean, it was hard enough losing Marat, but now this."

  It was then Joule's eyes welled up. She'd been holding it back, but the tears spilled freely now, and Kaya turned and hugged her daughter, though Eleri had been about to jump up and do it herself. The poor kid.

  But Eleri was filing away the information that the children had been at the Rychenkov-Schmitt house repeatedly. They'd worked with Marat Rychenkov as his students and maybe his young friends. He'd taught the occasional high school class, but they also had been in the home.

  Shit, Eleri thought. How are they going to interview these kids without blowing cover or angering their parents? But it was definitely something that needed to be done.

  That was when Eleri noticed it. Though Joule was crying at her loss, Cage looked wary. He was glancing around the coffee shop as though he was trying to suss out which person was the killer. She hoped he knew that she had not lived here when Marat died, and that she could not be responsible. She needed him to understand that she was on his side.

  She'd already established herself as a human biologist. Re-establishing herself now as a forensic expert or doling out forensic advice of any kind would come across as weird, and she couldn't afford the slightest misstep of weird in this town. These people would figure it out.

  "Do you want to join us?" Eleri asked, motioning to the table where Donovan still sat. They’d picked the community table for exactly that purpose. She wanted to offer to buy the family their coffees and pastries, but felt it would be going a little too far. Technically, she was in no more shape to console the family than they were to console her. She was the one supposedly traumatized by finding the body and being up all night with the police.

  She had thought that had been the hardest thing—not blowing her cover to those who were professionals, law enforcement officers like herself. But now, as she looked at Cage and Joule, as she saw Joule catching on to Cage's demeanor and pulling her tears back to start looking around the Up N Atom with a suspicious eye. The girl seemed to be trying to glean information, and Eleri wondered if she had a future investigator on her hands. An event like this could make that happen, as Eleri well knew. The problem was, right now, they were part of her investigation, and she thought these two might be the toughest nuts to crack.

  "Oh," Kaya said. "I think we're just going to grab our own space and sit and be a family for the day.”

  "I am so sorry." Eleri put her hand on the woman's shoulder in a half hug before reaching and shaking Nate Mazur's hand. "It's really nice to meet you. Kaya talks about you all the time, and I'm sorry that I’m finally meeting you but it’s under these circumstances."

  "The same to you." His tone was flat, though it was hard to read the why of it from his expression. "I'm sure it must have been a shock."

  Though Eleri nodded, as if it had been, she saw in his eyes that he, too, was questioning everything. Whether that was because his friend was murdered, or because she and Donovan had slipped up in some way, she couldn't tell.

  This time, they'd actually succeeded in folding up the foil paper their pastries had come in and putting their cups into the dish rack.

  Donovan pointed to a spot in the trash center for foil and Eleri answered the question before he asked. “They recycle it. A local kid melts it down and forges them new foil out of it.”

  “Of course they do.” Luckily, he whispered the words.

  Eleri hid the smile that wanted to pull at her mouth. Now was not the time. They made it out the door without running into anyone else and headed back to the Frank Lloyd Wright house. The large stone sign for Pythagoras Point mocked her. With its curves, it seemed wrong. The only thing that has a curve in the whole neighborhood just has to be the welcoming sign bearing the name Pythagoras, Eleri thought.

  When they arrived at the house, Eleri plopped down in the recliner in the living area, glad to be out of the hard chair of the dining table where she seemed to have set up personal and emotional camp. She stared out the back window, at the bushes that bordered the tall wooden fence, each angle precisely cut. It was Pythagoras Point. She saw right triangles and hypotenuses everywhere she looked. Hypotenii? She didn't know, but surely even the kids at the high school did.

  With a bone-deep sigh, Donovan stretched out across the couch, though his head was up on the arm and his feet were hanging over the other end. His sound mimicked the feelings pushing at her ribs.

  "Donovan, we have to interview those kids. I think we have to interview the entire Mazur family."

  "Yeah," he said. "But who else? We blew our cover to Joanna Schmitt, and she's dead."

  "Well," Eleri said. "Ignoring all feelings of our fuck-up regarding her death, revealing ourselves to her was the right decision. Clearly, we picked the right person. We just didn’t protect her well enough.”

  It was Donovan this time to who tried to allay her anger at herself. “Eleri, we had no idea we needed to protect her. They were after Marat’s stuff. Not her. A point Johanna herself argued vehemently. We did offer her more protection. She didn’t take it.”

  Eleri tried to absorb his absolution while simultaneously ignoring it. “Who else do we need to go to now?"

  "Shit," he said, and then hauled himself off the couch and went back to his paperwork. He wasn’t ignoring her, though. She knew he was diving into the information to find an answer for her question.

  Though they had tablets and computers, though they'd been watching the footage, Eleri had become more and more concerned this morning. "Donovan," she said, "we need to move to paper tracking."

  "We can't move video to paper," he protested with a shrug.

  "I know, but pretty much everything else we can. I think we need to take our video and travel it on USBs rather than internet. Somebody hacked the Schmitt-Rychenkov home. They had the code. They had it as soon as she changed it, and we've been emailing videos. Maybe that's why they kept the hoodie on and their hands covered. Maybe they knew that we were watching—even inside the house. Or, at least, they suspected it. If there was something Marat Rychenkov had that was worth stealing and killing over, then it would be reasonable that he would have had some kind of surveillance on it, too.”

  Donovan picked up on what she was saying. “He would have had some kind of security, especially if he knew he had something that valuable.”

  “Did he? That’s a good question,” Eleri said, not leaving her position sitting sideways in the recliner. Her body almost couldn’t move because her brain was eating all her energy. “We should have asked Johanna Schmitt that question.”

  And now we can’t, she thought.

  Donovan either didn’t see her slip into self-blame or he ignored it. “—and the cursory look at this house says there's no security. Marat kept all the robotics in the garage, where a person could simply pry open the door and get to it.
Sure, he or Joanna would likely have heard that happening if they were home, and anyone on the street would have seen it. But the security level is very low. At least to the naked eye.”

  Eleri was forced to agree.

  "Let me find my notes." He rifled through his work, even though she still felt almost paralyzed by her thoughts. They would have to go back to the Rychenkov-Schmitt house. Who had Marat Rychenkov spoken to the most? Who had Joanna Schmitt spoken to the most? And had she been killed merely because of her relationship to Marat, or was there something more between her and the killer?

  Donovan, now standing at the table, listed names. “The people Marat spoke to most were Jivika Das, Greg Whitlow, and Kaya Mazur.”

  Finally finding her ability to move, Eleri stood up. “They just became our prime suspects.”

  20

  Twenty-four hours later, Donovan stood in Marshall Bennett’s office once more. This time he, Eleri, and the mayor were watching live video of the police interviewing their prime suspects.

  Yesterday, they had quickly realized the futility of their position. They needed to interview three chief suspects—Jivika Das, Greg Whitlow, and Kaya Mazur—but that was going to be an impossibility, giver their cover stories. The only real access they had was to Kaya, and she was as Eleri's new friend. They weren't even close enough friends for Eleri to ask any hard questions. So they were going to have to deal with being a full step out of the loop.

  The interviews would have to be left up to the police. Eleri and Donovan, as the acting FBI agents, created a list of questions they had Bennett forward to the Curie PD to use in the interrogations. Not that the PD probably appreciated that.

  As far as the PD knew, Bennett was the source of the questions. Donovan decided to wait and see how far that took them. If he and Eleri had done their jobs, the PD believed they were the only ones investigating what was now a pair of murders.