The Chessman

by Jeffrey B. Burton

It was impossible to tell which agent made more haste to exit the conference room, leaving the two men alone to gawk at each other.

  “What’s the matter with you, Agent Cady?” The job title slid thickly off the assistant director’s tongue, as though addressing Cady like he was still with the bureau would make it true. “You used to be my prize bloodhound. Tough as nails.”

  “I was never tough as nails, sir.”

  “The hell you weren’t.”

  “Senator Farris came to see me that first night in the hospital…at George Washington.”

  “That so?” Jund replied. “The good senator was all over my ass that week, calling for my resignation. Had an ‘off the record’ with him to make it stop. Never knew he visited you in the hospital.”

  “Visit might not be the right word. I had my hand elevated, my jaw wired shut, a Grade 1 concussion, and a knee the size of Mount St. Helens, and even with the morphine drip, my head throbbed. I felt like I’d been hit by a Mack truck and I couldn’t sleep a wink.”

  “I’ve seen road kill look more chipper than you did that night.”

  “About four a.m. there’s a commotion outside in the hallway. A second later Arlen Farris storms in, glares at me for an eternity and says, ‘I wish to hell it were you down there in the morgue instead.’”

  “Senator Arlen Farris is a bully and a jackass.”

  “I’d gotten his son killed.”

  “No you didn’t, Drew.” The assistant director took a thicker file from his briefcase and placed it on top of the open folder in front of him. “The only reason you were at Patrick Farris’s home that night was because of their bullshit.”

  “However deceptive the senator and congressman were, I should have seen through the smokescreen.”

  “Clairvoyance is not part of the job description.”

  “Remember, sir, they came to us for help.”

  Jund looked at the file he had just set on the tabletop and then abruptly switched subjects. “How’s Laura? You two work through it?”

  “I guess,” Cady said. “She got remarried in June. Some guy who owns a car dealership in Akron.”

  “I hadn’t heard.” Jund’s face reddened. “I’m sorry.”

  “A mutual friend set them up on a blind date. I guess they clicked.”

  The assistant director looked at Cady’s left hand. “You’re still wearing the ring.”

  “Guess I’m living the lie.” Cady paused, searching for the right words, and then said, “Look, sir, I don’t want to waste anyone’s time. I appreciate your confidence in me, I truly do, but I’m not cut out for this. Not anymore. If anyone wants to pick my brain on what happened back then, I’m a phone call away.”

  “I’m beyond spent, Agent Cady. I’ve not slept in nearly thirty hours, so please forgive me if I give you the Cliff Notes version of the pep talk. You’re like a broken pop machine, son, with an ‘Out of Order’ sign hung on the front.”

  “Or perhaps all I want is to be left alone.”

  “The pointy heads in Behavioral would mumble something about you being in dire need of redemption. And closure.”

  Cady began shaking his head.

  “Hear me out,” Jund said, leaning back. “I was raised by a couple of atheists and I imagine my soul is flapping in the breeze like a busted box kite, so I can’t speak for redemption. However, Agent Cady, I can speak fully to the closure I suspect you crave. It’s private and personal—different flavors for everyone—but for me closure is when I sit behind the defendant in the courtroom and burn a hole in the back of their head with my eyes. After a while, they’ll sense it and turn around. They always do. And that’s when I give them my best Stan Laurel impersonation.”

  “From Laurel and Hardy?” Cady asked, confused.

  “I do a picture perfect Stan Laurel, Agent Cady. Picture perfect. It tells them that they got caught by someone with the IQ of a dead hamster. Remember the Dog Kennel Killer from ten years ago? At the trial he kept looking back at me, could not believe his eyes. I even let my mouth hang open for the complete village idiot look. When they brought him back to his cell that afternoon, he tried to chew through the veins in his wrist. I like to think that was on me. I realize that may sound certifiable to most, Agent Cady, but that’s how I get my closure. That’s how I sleep at night.”

  Cady digested what the assistant director had said, certain the man was joking, and shook his head again. “It’s not about closure, sir.”

  “It has everything to do with closure.” The AD leaned forward and slapped the new file folder for emphasis. “You told me more than once that you thought he’d slipped away, that the final act had been staged like some Off-Broadway production. That’s three years of second guesses and hesitations percolating beneath the surface—driving you round the bend. If it turns out not to be a copycat, then you can help us nail the bastard’s hide to my wall, Agent Cady, and that will give you all the closure that you will ever need to move on with your life.”

  “Sir—”

  “No, Agent Cady. Please let me finish. I’m not asking you to be the SAC. You will not be leading this investigation. That’s Preston, for now anyway. This is backseat only. You won’t be near the headlines.”

  “What would you have me do?”

  “Some light lifting. Liaison with Liz and review the Gottlieb file. It won’t take long, as it’s about the size of your fingernail. See if it screams copycat.”

  “Somehow I don’t think you flew me out here for that.”

  “I need you to cover home plate.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “If it’s not a copycat—if the Chessman is genuinely alive and hiding in the weeds after having fucked us over big time—nobody knows more about what happened three years ago than you do. So I need you to travel back in time and find me a loose thread. Then I want you to bring me that loose thread so we can both yank on that son of a bitch for all its worth, right on up to his lethal injection.”

  “You want me to cold case the original investigation?”

  “Everything came to an abrupt end after Patrick Farris. The Chessman was dead, so for all practical purposes the investigation ceased in its tracks. But if we were wrong…if we were wrong…” The AD let silence fill the void.

  “A cold case,” Cady said, chewing it over in his mind.

  Jund stood, picking up the FBI file. “Solve the case in the past and we can catch the murdering prick in the present.”

  Assistant Director Jund held out the Chessman folder.

  Cady took it from him.

  Jund didn’t get a chance to respond before there was a light knock and the door opened to reveal Miss Somber.

  “Sorry to disturb you, Director, but the Washington Post has connected Gottlieb’s death to the Chessman. One of their reporters is calling for a comment.”

  Chapter 2

  Cady sat at the chair in his Embassy Suites hotel room and continued to marvel at how Assistant Director Jund could play him like a cheap toy out of a kid’s meal box. Within seconds of tap dancing the Woodward wannabe off the line empty-handed, Jund had Cady signing a contractor agreement, multiple confidentiality forms, and then had pawned him off on a blonde Admin named Penny Decker, who made quick work of providing him with proper ID and computer access to the bureau’s network so he could send Jund his status reports.

  A cubicle the size of a postage stamp was made available for when Cady was in the office. Cady had sat in the cube and read through the Gottlieb file. The clear glass queen tied Gottlieb to the earlier deaths, and burglary appeared not to be a motive—also the case in the earlier deaths. But the AD had been correct; there wasn’t much to prove or disprove the existence of a copycat killer. Cady sent Agent Preston an e-mail stating as much and headed out for the day. When Cady checked into the hotel, the receptionist informed him that his week-long reservation had been made the night before.

  Cady thought about Roland Jund and shook his head. A kid’s meal toy.

  —


  The Chessman file waited on the coffee table in front of him. He remembered that first morning, the grim scene at the law offices of Sanfield & Fine. Cady had been there merely as an observer, ignorant of the chain of events about to unfold…and the toll on body and soul that they would exact.

  Cady closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, and tried to force himself back into the zone. On the count of three he opened both his eyes and the file folder.

  On top was the CE, the chronicle of events form that he’d personally typed up three years earlier. It was followed by a separate folder containing a copy of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department’s investigation into the slaying of K. Barrett “Barry” Sanfield. The detectives at MPD had done a meticulous job, but were quite content to share the hot potato with the Fibbies after the Zalentine twin killings connected the M.O. It was political dynamite and MPD was more than happy to ride shotgun, even if it only spun them an inch or two away from the harsh glare of the media magnifying glass.

  Cady could hardly blame them.

  The MPD’s homicide report on Sanfield began with pictures of the power attorney from better days, a couple of obvious professional shots that the litigator had taken for promotional purposes, such as those appearing on his firm’s web site, in articles or legal journals, or at conferences that he might keynote. The pictures of Sanfield that came after these would never appear in a legal journal or be distributed at a keynote speech. These pics were the ones snapped by a forensic photographer.

  K. Barrett Sanfield was the D.C. power attorney—the Magician, as he was known among the inner circles—that the politicians with the thickest billfolds rushed to in order to make certain situations disappear. Sanfield had been one of a handful advising President Clinton on the Lewinsky matter, before the blue dress came to light and made all else a moot point. Sanfield had been behind-the-scenes for Gore during the chaos in Florida. Those two situations hadn’t broken his way, unlike the vast majority of Sanfield’s cases—the ones you didn’t see on the evening news—which was exactly why his anxious clients didn’t blink an eye at his billing rate.

  Sanfield had been Arlen Farris’s campaign manager in 1976, the win that sent Farris to the United States Senate as the Junior Senator from Delaware. Farris had ridden in on Jimmy Carter’s coattails but stayed a few decades longer. Sanfield had followed Farris to D.C. after the election and set up shop—said shop being Sanfield & Fine, Attorneys at Law. Very blue chip. Business thrived and, in the early 1990s, Sanfield’s effectively connected law firm was able to command a corner wing on the twelfth floor of One Franklin Square, a posh high-rise commercial office building on K Street.

  Sanfield, long divorced with no children of his own, had not been found until the following morning. Stephen Fine, son of Gerald Fine—Sanfield’s partner and confidant—and a junior partner workaholic his own self, had arrived for work at his usual 5:30 in the a.m., seen Sanfield’s door was shut, was amazed that anyone, much less his godfather Barry, had beat him in that morning, and, after brewing a double bag of leaded, peeked his head into Sanfield’s office to say hi. And what the junior partner saw caused him to drop his cup of java, scamper out to the foyer as though the devil himself were in hot pursuit, smack the down button a couple dozen times, and call 911 on his cell phone in the elevator as he fled to the safety of the guard station on the first floor.

  Cady had been at the scene within hours of the discovery of Sanfield’s body. His presence there was twofold: ostensibly to lend a helping hand to the local gendarmes, as well as facilitate the use of the FBI Crime Lab in the collection and analysis of crime scene data. But the ulterior motive for Cady’s loitering was to keep Assistant Director Jund apprised, firsthand and in real time, of any new developments in the Sanfield slaying. Cady imagined that even at this early a stage in the investigation, a flock of politicos was already lining up to breathe down the assistant director’s neck.

  “I thought Barry’s killer was still in the office,” Stephen Fine said when Cady had initially interviewed him for the bureau. Looking at the forensic photographs of K. Barrett Sanfield, Cady wondered if Fine was still the early bird of the office.

  MPD determined, and Cady concurred, that the scene had played out this way. Sanfield had stood up, likely in an effort to defend himself from the attacker or attackers. It had been a short struggle, no defensive cuts on Sanfield’s hands, but the blade had entered upward underneath the solar plexus and breastbone, through the pericardium, puncturing the right atrium of Sanfield’s heart. Death was almost instantaneous. MPD’s initial line of thought was that Sanfield hadn’t sensed danger until the last possible instant, and that perhaps Sanfield knew his killer.

  The most they could glean from the entry wound was that the killer was likely right-handed. The knife was likely a type of OTF stiletto—a stabbing weapon—the kind outlawed in the late 1950s. Aside from the fact that the killer wasn’t considerate enough to leave the spring-release blade at the scene, the medical examiner noted from the entry wound and internal damage that the blade had been twisted, rotated back and forth repeatedly, in order to router a wider opening. Some might call that overkill, but not in the manner that domestic crimes of passion involving all manner of kitchen cutlery are overkill. Here the ME realized that, however bent, there was an iota of logic involved. After Sanfield had sunk back down in his chair, and a minute of bloodletting had passed, the killer pressed the chess piece—a glass queen—crown first into the gap he’d created beneath attorney’s solar plexus. Not something you saw every day.

  MPD’s crime scene investigators took fingerprints from every conceivable surface in Sanfield’s executive office, all door handles, his aged mahogany desk, his credenza and matching wall-length bookcase, his two-tone leather couch, his Herman Miller Aeron chair, his liquor cabinet, the Scotch bottles—you name it. MPD was able to quietly, and impressively, match all prints against clients, staff members, and janitors. Clients and colleagues in Sanfield’s orbit were okay with this effort at ruling out the known prints on the agreement that none of the prints would be sent to any database. Unfortunately in this case, once elimination printing was finished, MPD was left with no remaining unknown prints.

  In terms of building security, tenants could opt to go with the corporate security firm contracted by One Franklin Square, Cadence Security, or negotiate with another company of their own choosing. Sanfield & Fine chose to stick with Cadence Security and had them set up the access control system for S&F’s office facilities. Cadence’s single card solution for parking and office entry, as well as building and elevator access during afterhours, appeared to be a no-brainer. Each S&F employee was issued one proximity ID card—a prox card—that they wouldn’t even have to remove from their wallet, purse or badge holder as they waved it in front of the card reader and let the radio frequency identification technology, a transponder chip in the prox card, take care of the rest. If you were authorized to enter, the door would unlock. If not, well, good luck with all that.

  An initial break came when the electronic surveillance report provided by Cadence Security indicated that Debbie Varner, one of the newer paralegals, had entered the offices through the reception door at 8:42 that evening, a time that the ME was able to establish as the general time of death based on internal temperature readings of Sanfield’s body.

  Upon immediate face-to-face questioning, a hysterical Ms. Varner informed the detectives that she’d misplaced her security badge, which she normally kept in the armrest compartment of her Subaru, thought she’d accidentally left it at home, had piggybacked in that morning with Peg Maynard, another fresh-faced Sanfield & Fine paralegal, and fully planned on reporting it if her badge didn’t appear in another day or two. Her alibi for that night had checked out, as Ms. Varner and her roommate/partner had been at dog obedience training across town from 7:30 to 9:00 p.m., surrounded by many witnesses—and not just the four-legged variety.

  Cady remembered thinking at the time that no matter how the case turned
out, these two new paralegals weren’t long for Sanfield & Fine.

  Ms. Varner’s badge had also been used to activate the elevator at 8:58 p.m. From the front reception area, it took less than a minute to wind through the hallways to Sanfield’s corner office suite. Then a little extra time to return to the elevator foyer and summon a lift—assuming the killer didn’t sprint. That gave the killer about fourteen minutes to stab Sanfield, insert the glass queen, and get back to the elevator. But the real question for Cady was, why did it take so long? Every additional second on the scene could spell the perpetrator’s downfall. Did the killer know Sanfield? Was that why there weren’t defensive wounds about Sanfield’s hands? Or was he there for the hit, but also searching for something? Too many questions.

  A secondary break came when MPD’s Detective Bruce Pearl worked with the red-faced and major-league pissed off head of Cadence Security—Dick Heath, an ex-FBI man himself—to review the night’s digital surveillance recordings from the closed-circuit television surveillance cameras strategically placed at all the entrances and exits of the block-long high rise. Video from each security camera was transmitted to the monitors at the corresponding guard station covering that particular access point.

  Heath, Pearl, and a team of Cadence guards reviewed the digital recordings from the prior evening. The building was for the most part emptied out by that time of night, with only an occasional workaholic sneaking out into the darkening skies. Heath got a hit on the monitor he was glaring at, with a time log reading in the bottom right corner of the video of 9:01 p.m., a time that fit hand in glove with the digital timeline established per Ms. Varner’s prox card. A hunched figure with a baseball cap, carrying something indecipherable in his right hand, was shown leaving through the northeast exit. Suddenly, he materialized on Heath’s display monitor as if out of nowhere, as though he’d figured out a way to slide through One Franklin and only get detected on this single surveillance camera. His face was aimed downward, away from the camera, off in the shadows to the side. But one thing was starkly evident; the figure had a pronounced limp.