The Camelot Gambit

by A. J. Scudiere

  She cranked the wheel for another turn, and he didn't feel the acceleration quite as strongly.

  "So you mean like the other intruder did—go to the house on the street behind, hope they aren't home, sneak across and climb the fence?" he asked.

  "Something like that. We can't go in the front of Johanna’s house, because if they see us—God forbid—the Mazur kids are going to know we're exactly what Joule thinks we are. At least right now she's got her mother telling her she's being silly."

  "Did Kaya really tell her that? Or did Kaya maybe humor her?"

  "Shit," Eleri blurted out again, taking yet another turn, this one looping them around Copernicus Circle.

  They were close, at least, he thought. Maybe the intruder is still there. But he kept the conversation on the other point. "Kaya Mazur told you that she thinks Joule's idea—that we're FBI agents—is silly. But did she tell you that she told Joule that?"

  "Fuck," Eleri muttered, "I don't know. I guess I just assumed she did."

  "Because if she didn't," Donovan continued, "then it's very plausible that Joule and Cage are staking us out as often as they can."

  "So we have to go into the neighborhood from the other direction. We can’t even go by the front of the Schmitt home."

  "Right," Donovan said, "because that path will take us right in front of the Mazur home as well."

  They pulled up a little too quickly to the house that sat directly behind Johanna and Marat's. As Eleri pushed the gear into park, Donovan climbed out and looked around, shoving the last of the granola bars into his mouth. Still chewing, he walked up to the front door, and knocked. This time, he didn't hear anything, and he was grateful.

  They’d been trained to listen for footsteps from the back of the house, dogs barking, that kind of thing. Anything that would indicate somebody was eventually going to come to the door. His keen ears told him more, and he told Eleri, "No one's here. Let's just quickly go around to the back and hope no one sees us."

  They acted as though they were checking the place out, looking for the owner or such. Donovan even motioned as though he heard someone in the back, and they headed around. Once they were behind the house, though, they both bolted for the fence, and he was grateful he was wearing something he could run in. To be fair, his khaki pants and blue button-down shirt weren't the best for fence climbing.

  He’d popped himself up and over the fence before he even realized that he’d left Eleri in the dust. Climbing back up to reach over and help, he spotted her fingers loop the tops of the flush pickets. She was small, but she stayed in shape. She knew what the job was, and sometimes the job was this: scaling a fence in the middle of the afternoon, quickly.

  He watched as she forced herself up by brute strength, coming up onto her hands, and throwing one leg over the fence. Once she was there, she was over and down on the other side as quickly as he had been. Looking at each other, they didn't speak, but the conversation clearly passed between them. They were going to storm the house and catch the person in the act—even though neither of them had their guns on them. They had their badges, and he hoped it would work.

  It was the plan now, whatever happened. Donovan took off running for the back door and busted it in with a well-placed kick.

  36

  Eleri couldn't have been more stunned by the woman they found in the home. If Donovan was right, and she suspected he was, Jivika Das had not broken into this home before.

  Had she been one of their recent intruders, she would have known the codes. Besides, as Eleri thought back, those who had broken in before had seemed to know what they were doing. They'd come in strong, they'd snuck around, they'd looked—apparently—for something in particular, and they'd left. Which meant they possibly now had three different intruders into this house, with two of them likely working together.

  Jivika was doing nothing to indicate any organization at all. In fact, as soon as the back door slammed open and Eleri and Donovan came in, even Eleri could hear her running up the stairs. Their culprit seemed to startle, then she turned and ran down the steps right toward them. She seemed startled again when she saw Eleri and Donovan standing there.

  Jesus, Eleri thought. If they had known it was Jivika breaking in, they wouldn't have had to confront her. They would have only needed to follow the tracker on her car later to know what was going on. But that option didn’t matter anymore. They’d played this card and they had exposed at least part of the fact that they weren’t casual new entries to town. Now they would have to live with the consequences.

  Eleri looked to Donovan, and he glanced back at her quickly. His expression said he knew they'd blown their cover and they would have to swear Jivika Das to secrecy—or arrest her. If she couldn't stay quiet about what they were, or if either of them got any kind of feeling that they couldn't trust her, they would likely have to take her out of town just to get rid of her and keep her from spreading the news. Then again, if Jivika was their killer, then they had a whole different set of problems on her hands.

  Realizing there was only one thing she could reasonably do, Eleri reached into her back pocket, pulling the folded wallet out and flipping it open, showing it to Jivika. Where the woman had previously looked startled and confused, she now looked wholly surprised. Eleri had been prepared for Das to think she was reaching for a gun, and the way her shoulders had stiffened in surprise wasn’t a shock to Eleri. Das’s expression changed to defeat as she recognized the badge she was seeing, and her shoulders sagged.

  Donovan had pulled his badge, too, so it was clear that Jivika Das was facing a pair of agents. It was likely that she'd just now figured out that they'd been brought in to solve the murders of the people who had lived in the home she'd broken into.

  "You better start talking," Eleri said, "Fast. Tell us everything."

  No one moved, though Jivika's stance certainly changed. She looked to the left and then to the right, and then at last she looked them in the eye and said, "Good."

  This time it was Eleri who was startled. For a moment, she braced, waiting for Jivika to reach backward into the waistband of the skirt she was wearing to pull out her own gun.

  Eleri’s brain flashed quickly to her past dangerous encounters and she wondered, if she was scared enough, could she stop a bullet? She honestly didn't know the answer and worked to quell her heart rate as Jivika began speaking, not reaching for a gun, though Donovan interrupted the woman to say, "Keep your hands where we can see them."

  To her credit, the woman looked startled to be even told such a thing, but what she said was, "I'm glad somebody's investigating. Somebody murdered Marat, and they murdered Johanna, too."

  "What are you doing in this house?" Eleri asked, maintaining her stance even though she didn't have a gun to train on her newest witness.

  "I wanted to find Marat's things," Jivika said. "I wanted to see if they'd been stolen. See if I could figure out who took them."

  "What things?" Eleri prodded, grateful that Donovan let her lead the questioning, and knowing that he would jump in if she missed something or didn't see a connection that he did.

  Jivika shook her head. "I don't know."

  There, Eleri thought. The twitch of her eye. The fleeting moment at which her gaze darted down and to the left. She lied. Jivika Das did know what Marat Rychenkov had been killed for. Did that make her the killer?

  Thinking that through, Eleri realized she couldn't quite make that connection, given the video they had of previous intruders. Eleri shifted topics, wondering if she could possibly catch Jivika Das off-guard by using a non-linear questioning path.

  Most of the time, she would count on such a system, but here, in Curie, she didn't count on much of anything. "How did you know the code to the alarm system?"

  Jivika's shoulders straightened and she looked them in the eye. "Marat told it to me."

  Not a lie, Eleri thought. So we have a burglar full of half-truths and bold statements. "Then why didn't you know the door code?"

&n
bsp; The woman shrugged. "The door code didn't work." Jivika was still looking at them, shoulders still square. Also not a lie.

  "Why not?"

  "Johanna must have changed it, or someone did after Johanna died. It's not the code that Marat gave me."

  "When was the first time you came back to the house after Marat died?"

  "Three days later," Jivika replied, and Eleri squinted at her, wondering if she was, in fact, one of the intruders they’d seen and she’d used the old code for a smooth entry before Johanna changed it. This time, she was forced to break the glass. If that were the case, then they might have only two intruders. Eleri tucked that information away.

  "What did you do when you broke in that time?"

  "I—I didn’t break in! Not that time. I visited Johanna! I went to the market and bought her a roasted chicken and potato salad and a side of green beans, and I brought her food so she would have something to eat."

  "How did you enter the home?" Eleri asked, realizing she’d made a possibly erroneous leap from a poorly worded question.

  Jivika looked affronted by the simple question. "I knocked on the front door, and then Johanna answered and invited me in."

  "How many times have you broken in?" Eleri asked.

  Now Das looked irritated. "Just this once. Obviously, I did a crap job of it, too." Again, her eyes darted down, but Eleri couldn't tell whether this motion was just self-deprecating or whether it indicated another lie. If it did, this one was definitely of a different caliber.

  "Marat Rychenkov called you frequently," Eleri said, and watched as Jivika's eyes widened in surprise. Although, at this point, she figured Jivika's brain had to be churning, too, and she had to have realized she was facing two FBI agents. Surely, she would catch on quickly that they knew things she probably hadn't expected them to.

  She shook her head though, as if denying Eleri’s statement of fact. "I already told the police what Marat and I were working on together. That's why he called me frequently. He kept asking me questions. I'm a biomolecular mimicry specialist," she said, and again, Eleri watched her stance change to yet another new form. This one Eleri recognized: Academic, speaking in her field of expertise. Again, Eleri asked, "Why did you break in?"

  "I just wanted to find Marat's notes," Jivika said, and that part was straightforward. But her eyes darted again when she said, "I wanted to find out why someone murdered him and then Johanna, in hopes that maybe I could prevent it from going any further."

  No, Eleri thought, that was another lie.

  37

  At two in the morning, Donovan was lying on the couch staring at the ceiling. Fifteen minutes earlier, he'd been lying in his bed staring at the ceiling there, but after a while he’d decided this was a better ceiling to stare at.

  At least down here there was a vaulted roof line, thick beams overhead, and wide windows. He could see up into the trees and out in little snippets toward the sky, with the occasional star. Curie didn't produce quite enough light pollution to remove the twinkle from the sky and he wondered if that was one of Marshall Bennett’s considerations when buying up the land. Even though he could only see one here and there, for a moment he could pretend he was home in South Carolina, where the whole night sky was often visible.

  His body ached with the need to shift and go running, but it wasn't an option. Not only because he didn't know how to get out of town and go do it, but also because he was here as an acting agent. If he disappeared for a while into a form where no one could have access to him, he wasn't being a very good partner to Eleri.

  He'd smelled the wolf on Keyoor Vergheese as well. So far, Whitlow’s friend was the only one Donovan had scented, and he wondered several things about the anomaly. Did Whitlow know what his friend was? And why was Vergheese here? Just as the Lobomau had been attracted to New Orleans, did no one come to Nebraska? Certain places were hot spots, while others might be practically repellent.

  He wondered where Vergheese went when he ran and if it might be worth it to follow him and find out, since he and Eleri had no idea how long they would be here. Did the wolf drive out into the family-owned farms in between here and Beatrice, or go toward Lincoln? Did he walk out into the cornstalks, leave his clothes behind, then change and run?

  The stalks were sharper than people gave them credit for, Donovan knew—not quite the romanticized playgrounds that were always seen in movies. Though he looked out and saw the stars, and for a moment imagined himself underneath them with the cornstalks brushing his fur as he went by, he didn't make a move to get up or leave or actually act on any of it.

  The day had been far too complex and—though he hoped Eleri was asleep upstairs—it was still churning in his brain. In a strategic move, they'd let Jivika Das leave on her own from the Rychenkov-Schmitt home. They'd asked her how she'd come in and it turned out she'd parked around front, knocked on the front door, and gone around to the back, much as they had at the other house. They sent her back out the front door and told her, in straightforward FBI orders, that she was to go directly home. They would arrive shortly, and she was to let them in.

  Donovan made it clear to Jivika that she was not to flee, because they would find her. They were, after all, the FBI. He didn't mention the tracker on her car and hoped she hadn’t found it. Though higher tech options were available, these were radio sensitive, and a sweep of her car would reveal its exact location.

  He and Eleri hadn’t gone to the effort to requisition the FBI for better tracker models. Lord knew the residents of Curie could probably find them anyway. They’d told Das they would give her a little bit of a head start, but they didn't give her more than a one-minute lead time.

  The heat had been turned off in the Rychenkov-Schmitt house and Donovan could see that Eleri was starting to get cold. Probably she hadn't noticed it when they first walked in, because they were so high on the adrenaline of finding someone. But as they questioned Jivika, and as her answers both sounded and smelled ever-so-slightly like lies, the room had made them both colder and colder. His only consolation was that Jivika must have suffered from it as well.

  Before they’d all left, Eleri patted the woman down and found nothing on her. So, if Jivika had found something in the house, she'd swallowed it or. . . He didn't want to contemplate it. Once she was gone, he and Eleri considered patching up the back window, but instead opted to use their time going after Jivika.

  They’d told Das that she would have a head start, but they lied. They headed straight back over the fence, praying no one had come home to the other house, and jumped quickly into Eleri’s car.

  Eleri practically barreled out of the neighborhood, taking more sharp turns as she headed toward Kangaroo Court where, this time, they parked directly in front of Jivika's house. Heading up the front walk, they knocked on the door, and when Jivika answered, Eleri threw herself into the woman's arms as though they were old friends. Donovan could hear the words—though a normal person would not have—as Eleri whispered into the woman's ear, "Go with it. We are your best friends now. This is the only way you keep your job and stay in town."

  Jivika pasted on a wide, fake smile, probably visible to the people who lived across the street, whoever they might be. Donovan made a mental note to look up the names of all her neighbors. Once they'd gotten home later, he had, but none of the names popped. None matched from any of their lists of Rychenkov’s phone calls or from Marshall Bennett's unremembered applicants. Nothing stood out, nothing.

  Once inside the Das home, Donovan started off with a casual, "You live in Kangaroo Court, yet you only have a cat?"

  She'd blinked a little, likely wondering how they knew about her choice of pet, but Eleri had mentioned seeing the cat in the window and with several sniffs, Donovan was aware that the woman had no other animals.

  Jivika huffed a little. "I'm a biomolecular mimicry specialist. I choose to live here, in the middle of all the biology. You wouldn't believe the number of times that I've been working on something—some theor
etical problem—and somebody's out walking their llama down the street.” She waved her hand toward the sidewalk beyond the walls of her home. “And I see their hooves or their fur and it sparks something. Or the llama decides it’s time for a skirmish with the kangaroo and it's an interesting little battle. But while I watch, I solve something."

  "And the cat?" Donovan asked.

  "Never solves anything," Jivika said with a smirk. As he’d hoped, the humor put her a little bit at ease. Seeming to find some level of comfort with them, she offered them tea but both agents declined.

  He could tell Eleri was concerned about accepting food from the possible killer. For a moment, Donovan thought maybe he should have accepted and sniffed it to check. But GHB itself was odorless, even to him. If Das was cooking up an alternate version, he might smell that but—since he wouldn't know what he was sniffing for or which way the odor might go—Bananas? Chemicals?—he wouldn't know if it was there or not. In fact, it might even smell like tea.

  Eleri dove in with the harder-hitting questions, leaving Donovan to play good cop, albeit a slightly creepy version who knew too much about their suspect. As she talked, he took advantage, sniffing at things around the house, making observations, and asking disturbing questions as though they already knew more than they did.

  But before he even got to ask about her habits, Eleri asked, "How did you kill Marat Rychenkov?"

  Though Jivika had startled and seemed affronted, and though he'd smelled fear, Eleri had made a motion to him that the woman was telling the truth when she simply said, "I did not kill Marat. And, before you ask, I didn't kill Johanna either. I've never killed a person."

  Donovan frowned. "What have you killed?"