The Queen pbf-5

by Steven James

  “Amber, it’s Pat.”

  “Pat.”

  “How are you?”

  “I’m good.” Her tone was impossible to read. “This is a surprise.”

  “I’m sorry to call so late, but I found myself in the area and I wanted to see if you and Sean were going to be around tomorrow. So we can get together.”

  “You found yourself in the area?” No more dish sounds now. “Where are you?”

  “Woodborough.”

  “Woodborough,” she repeated slowly. Then, “Do you need a place to stay?”

  “No, I’ll get a motel room.”

  A pause. “You’re welcome to stay here, you know.”

  Even though I figured it wouldn’t matter to Jake or Natasha if I stayed with my family, I declined. “Thanks, but I’m actually here on business and should stay close to town. I need to go to Tomahawk Lake first thing in the morning.”

  “Oh.” Now, sadness in her voice. “The Pickrons.” Of course she would have heard about them. By now, word of the homicides would’ve been all over the news.

  “I’m assisting the sheriff’s department,” I said.

  “Pat, it’s so terrible what happened. I can hardly believe it. Things like that just don’t happen here.” I thought she might add, “Just in the big cities,” or something along those lines, but she left it at that.

  Since Amber was the only pharmacist in Elk Ridge, the next closest town over, I wouldn’t have been surprised if, in these small, close-knit communities, she’d known the Pickrons or at least been peripherally familiar with the family’s name.

  At last I said, “Is Sean there? I tried the bait shop.”

  “No one picked up?”

  “No.”

  “Figures. He’s out ice fishing. He doesn’t always get someone to cover the store. You know how he can be.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that. “Yes.”

  “Really, Pat.” I sensed a subtle shift in her tone. A softer quality. “You know you’re welcome here.”

  “I know.” Based on my history with Amber it wouldn’t be a good idea for me to head over there, especially if Sean was late in getting home. Additionally, because of my relationship with Lien-hua I didn’t want to give anyone the wrong impression. “I’ll be tied up all morning, but I should be able to get away for lunch. Do you think that would work? For the two of you?”

  “I’ll talk to Sean.” I heard the clink of glasses in the background. She’d gone back to doing the dishes. For the moment at least, she’d given up on convincing me to come to the house tonight. “It’s business,” she said, “so Tessa didn’t come along?”

  “I was hoping she could come over tomorrow, but with this storm, we’ll see. She’s in the Twin Cities this week.”

  “I hope she can make it.” More dishes. “We’ve never met, you know. Your stepdaughter and I.”

  Now that I thought about it, I realized she was right. Amber hadn’t made it to my wedding with Tessa’s mother and had been in the hospital with food poisoning the weekend of Christie’s funeral nearly two years ago. “I’ll try to make that happen. I’ll call you in the morning. We’ll set up a time to get together.” I was stumbling for a way to gently ease out of this conversation. “After you talk to Sean.”

  “It’ll be good to see you. It’s been too long.”

  I wondered if it’d been long enough.

  “Good night, Amber.”

  “Good night.”

  We ended the call, and I slowly lowered the phone.

  Hearing her say good night to me again brought back a rush of memories and emotions that I really didn’t need surrounding me at the moment.

  A few months back, when Lien-hua and I had started to get serious, she’d told me that she wanted us to look forward and not backward. In lieu of this, she’d proposed that we not talk about past loves, past mistakes, past regrets, and as it happens, Amber fell into all three categories. So, although I would’ve been glad to discuss things with Lien-hua, I’d never spoken to her about Amber. Never even brought her up.

  But now, I thought again of what had happened five years ago between me and Amber when she and Sean were engaged. Even though Lien-hua was the one who’d suggested not dredging up the past, in light of our potential future together, I felt a vague wash of guilt just thinking about Amber, and our relationship seemed like something Lien-hua should know about.

  This week Lien-hua was on-site in Cincinnati profiling a case of three missing women.

  I was about to tap at the phone to speed-dial her but then had second thoughts. It would probably be best to think through how to delicately broach the subject of Amber first, before getting on the line with Lien-hua.

  I held the phone for a moment, staring at it, thinking about why the shooter might have returned up the stairs a second time after the murders.

  The phone. Hmm.

  Yes, check on that first, then call Lien-hua.

  Using my laptop I logged into the Federal Digital Database, found that Donnie and Ardis Pickron had only one cell phone between them, registered in her name. I entered my federal ID number again and pulled up Ardis Pickron’s mobile phone records.

  13

  Elk Ridge, Wisconsin

  From his vantage point in the log cabin nine hundred meters from the Schoenberg Inn, Alexei Chekov monitored the entrance using the US military issue night vision binoculars he’d purchased last month on the black market in Afghanistan.

  He didn’t like surprises, and he wanted to have at least a cursory idea of how many people he would be dealing with at the meeting at 1:00 tomorrow afternoon. He’d been told three, but he anticipated a lot more had to be involved, at least at some level.

  Through his sources, he knew that the team would be arriving tonight.

  To monitor them, he’d taken the liberty of accessing this cabin. It’d been empty when he arrived, and he was hoping the owners wouldn’t return or he’d be forced to make sure they would not be a problem. That might get messy, and that was a situation he would prefer to avoid.

  So far he’d seen nine people arrive at the Schoenberg Inn, a sprawling, stylish hotel that looked out of place here in the northwoods.

  All of the people he’d seen had parked in locations that allowed the lights from the front of the Schoenberg to illuminate their faces from more than one direction as they entered-an indicator that told Alexei they were either innocent civilians or, if they were operatives, they were inexperienced.

  Using an infrared camera, he’d photographed all nine and was currently running their photos through the Federal Digital Database’s facial recognition to confirm their identities. So far he’d identified four people from Eco-Tech-three men and one woman.

  Because of their carelessness while entering the hotel, Alexei was surprised someone as meticulous and careful as Valkyrie was working with them.

  Already, $2,000,000 had been wired to their account: Valkyrie had informed him of this. Alexei was here to deliver $1,000,000 more as well as the access codes he’d gotten from Rear Admiral Colberg that morning. The final payment of $1,000,000 would be delivered upon completion, after the message had been sent to and received by the US government at 9:00 p.m. Saturday night. That was all he’d been told-a message sent to the government.

  He would pick up that money from a drop point tomorrow prior to the deadline.

  When his phone rang and he saw who it was, he quickly answered.

  Nikolai Demidenko, his contact at the GRU.

  “In reference to Valkyrie, all I have found, my brother,” Nikolai said, “are some suspect ties to an Islamic charity based in Pakistan. But that is all.”

  “Pakistan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Send me the details and keep looking. I will forward the usual amount to your account.”

  “Yes, yes, of course.”

  Islamic charities?

  Informative.

  Alexei had been on a few cases in Pakistan himself over the years. Perhap
s he and Valkyrie had associations with some of the same people. Something to keep in mind. Wait and see what else Nikolai could dig up.

  Alexei had grown used to getting very little sleep but decided he would watch the Inn for two more hours and then go to bed.

  Until then he would observe the premises, doing the job he had been hired to do.

  Simply.

  Professionally.

  To the best of his ability.

  The phone records confirmed my theory.

  At 1:54 p.m. an incoming call had reached Ardis Pickron’s cell phone.

  The conversation hadn’t ended until 1:58 p.m.

  Before the state troopers left, one of them had driven to Mrs. Frasier’s house and found out that the oven clock she’d looked at when she heard the last shot was six minutes slow, so the murders would actually have occurred at 1:54 rather than 1:48.

  Someone had called Ardis’s cell almost immediately after the murders.

  And yet, now, the phone was charging in the master bedroom.

  So the killer went back upstairs to answer the phone?

  Possible.

  The call had come from an unknown, unregistered number from someone in Egypt, one that had never called, or been called from, this phone before.

  Although the country of origin appeared on the phone company’s records, no actual number did, which meant someone knew what he was doing when he covered his tracks.

  I took a moment to go tell Natasha to dust for prints on Ardis’s phone, then I returned to the study for some privacy.

  If the killer didn’t talk for four minutes on the phone, who did?

  Was more than one offender present? After all, there were two sets of boot impressions in the snow outside the laundry room door.

  Truth often hides in the crevices of the evident. Be always open to the unlikely.

  Considering both the location of the phone in the master bedroom and the timing of this call, it seemed at least possible that it had rung shortly after the murders, and that the shooter had gone upstairs to answer it.

  If so, he or she would’ve had to have been expecting the call. Why else answer the phone at the home of a person you just killed? Why else have a four-minute conversation?

  Unless it was Donnie after all.

  When you’re working a case, you arrange the pieces like a jigsaw puzzle, and I had the feeling I was looking at a straight-edged piece that might help frame in part of the perimeter. But how it related to the other facts of the case was still a mystery.

  It’s getting late, Pat. Call Lien-hua, tell her about Amber.

  I hadn’t really taken the time to collect my thoughts like I’d hoped, and I still wasn’t sure exactly how to tackle this, but I knew I’d better call her now, tonight, get it off my mind.

  I speed-dialed her number.

  14

  When Lien-hua picked up, she promptly told me she was busy going over case files with one of the local detectives. At first I thought it seemed a little late in the day for a business meeting like that, but then remembered I was the one calling her from a crime scene.

  With the ambient noise in the background it sounded like she might be at a restaurant.

  “I’m sorry to cut this short,” she said, “but I really have to go, Pat. Ashton’s got some notes we need to go over.”

  “Ashton.”

  “Ashton Rivera. The detective I’m consulting with.”

  “Of course.”

  I was quiet, searching for what to say, for a way to gracefully bring up Amber. “I had to drive up here to Woodborough. Margaret handed me another case.”

  “I heard.”

  I gave Lien-hua the rundown, and when she spoke again her tone had softened. “I wanted to tell you that I’m sending a surprise up there for you. It should arrive tomorrow.”

  Lien-hua’s surprises were always intimate and always memorable. “Hmm. I suppose it won’t do any good to ask what it is?”

  “If I told you what it was, it wouldn’t be-”

  “Sure, I know-a surprise-but I won’t hold full disclosure against you this time. I promise.”

  “Nope. You’re going to have to wait. But I have a feeling you’re really going to like it.”

  Okay, now my curiosity was getting piqued.

  “Really, Pat”-urgency in her voice again-“I need to go. Ashton and I need to finish some things up. I’m glad you called, though.”

  “Yeah.” I wanted to mention Amber, tell Lien-hua the story of what had happened five years ago, explain that Amber wasn’t a threat, but all that came out was, “I’ll look forward to that surprise, then.”

  “Good. Call me tomorrow.”

  “I love you,” I said.

  “You too.”

  After we hung up I was still thinking of Amber, of the incidents from my past that I hadn’t shared with Lien-hua. The phone felt heavy and awkward in my hand, and I nearly missed slipping it into my pocket.

  “Pat?” Jake’s voice. He was standing in the doorway. I wondered how long he’d been there.

  “What?” Even to me, my tone sounded somewhat sharp, but I figured if he’d been listening in on my conversation he deserved it.

  “We should probably find a motel before it gets too late.”

  I heard Linnaman’s voice from the living room: “You staying in Woodborough, then?”

  “If possible,” Jake said.

  We joined Linnaman by the couch.

  “Only one there is the Moonbeam Motel. The Schoenberg’s in Elk Ridge, but the Moonbeam’s a lot closer.”

  “That’s it, then.” Jake looked at me expectantly.

  “All right.” I tossed him the keys. “I’ll be right out.”

  I did one final walk-through, trying to do what Margaret said I was good at-noticing what needs to be noticed-but didn’t feel very successful at all.

  At last I returned to the night and left with Jake for the Moonbeam Motel.

  In her dorm room at U of M, Tessa listened to Patrick’s voicemail from earlier in the day-holding the phone to her right ear because of the hearing loss she’d suffered in her left ear last summer, when it all happened.

  When the message ended, she set her phone on the dresser. The mirror above the sink caught her reflection, and she whisked away a strand of black hair from her eyes so she could see to wipe off her mascara.

  Over the past couple years she’d flirted with the Goth look, wearing black lipstick, fingernail polish, and mascara for most of her sophomore and junior years. However, this year she’d eased up on all that, moving into more of a neo-Bohemian thing. But the dark mascara had stayed. As her friend Cherise sometimes said, “Fashion trends may come and go, but black is always sick.”

  As she was washing up, she brushed her fingers across the line of thin, straight scars on her right forearm, emblems of her cutting stage in the wake of her mom’s death. They marked her search for release, narrow red lines that each brought a thread of pain while also letting a different kind of pain out.

  But these days, despite being totally into screamer bands like House of Blood, Trevor Asylum, and Death by Suzie-and being pretty much addicted to gothic horror stories-she wanted nothing to do with blood or dead bodies in real life.

  Nothing at all.

  She’d had enough of that.

  Instead, lately, she let her pain weep out onto the pages of her notebooks, filling one every week or so as she passed through the quotidian rhythm of life.

  But still, the notebook wasn’t quite enough.

  She took the bottle out of her overnight bag.

  Stared at it for a long time.

  Slipped two pills out.

  She caught herself glancing at the phone as she swallowed them and decided to return Patrick’s call in the morning rather than tonight. She shed her clothes, pulled on her pajama pants and one of the old T-shirts Patrick had given her, an XL Simon Fraser University tee from the days he’d done his postgrad work in Vancouver.

  Leaving the dorm r
oom’s bathroom light on, she swung the door only partly shut, then climbed into bed and grabbed the teddy bear she’d brought with her. Occasionally over the past year Patrick had given her a hard time about sleeping with Francesca, but she had the feeling that beneath it all he was glad she hadn’t grown up completely yet; that at least in a few small ways she was still a little girl.

  And he was probably relieved she was sharing her bed with a stuffed animal and not some guy.

  Even if the pills did help, Tessa didn’t expect to sleep much tonight, since she barely slept at all these days, and when she did, her dreams were harsh and scraped raw with images of her being chased by a man with a cold face and barren eyes and a wide unnerving grin that still gave her chills whenever she thought of it.

  She’d been a part of something last summer that she could not forget and would never forgive herself for, something she tried not to think about every night when she lay down to go to sleep.

  And every day when she awoke.

  But the memory of that gun beside her ear, of squeezing the trigger, of the sound of the man who was about to kill her dropping to the floor, of seeing-out of the corner of her eye-all that blood splattered across the wall…

  It had all happened so fast, so It was way too much.

  She slid the memory to the side. Buried it.

  Refused to let it crawl to the surface.

  A distraction.

  That’s what she needed.

  She flicked on the light beside her bed, pulled out one of her notebooks, propped herself up, and picked up a pen, “as carefully as if she were pulling out a scalpel to do surgery,” the words whispered through her mind, seemed to hover in the air before her, “against the black insidious tendrils of shame tentacling through her heart.”

  Okay, that was too much. Too melodramatic. Definitely in need of editing, but something else would come.

  She placed the tip of the pen against the virgin page, but hesitated. When she opened herself up like this on paper, she could be certain it would bring everything to the surface again, paradoxically making her feel worse and better at the same time.