The Chessman

by Jeffrey B. Burton

  “Why did they stay out east after college?” Cady asked. “Why not come back home?”

  “That was my doing. I was hoping they might mature with time. So I trust-funded them with a generous monthly allowance in order to keep them fat and happy and the hell away from me. A couple of sports cars here, some half-baked investment over there—chump change.” Zalentine wiped his brow with his forearm. “You do know they never finished Princeton?”

  “I’d heard.”

  “Turned out they were paying a couple brainy nerds to take their classes and do their assignments. Some kid heard about it and ran to a professor. Three years of tuition and two hundred grand in legacy donations flushed down the shitter.”

  “Do you know of anyone who would want to harm your sons?”

  “You may want to check into where they bought their club drugs from, you know, designer pharmaceuticals—Vicodin, ecstasy, whatever’s the current craze.”

  “There was some high-grade cannabis found onboard their sailboat. We’re pressing that angle, but it seems unlikely for a dealer to go to this degree of trouble over recreational drugs.”

  “Isn’t that what these things always turn out to be? Bang-bang over the dope?”

  “That’s often the case, but your boys had access to no small amount of funds, Mr. Zalentine. Hard to imagine they’d stiff drug dealers to the point of a double homicide.”

  “To be frank, I can’t begin to imagine the predicaments those two might have burrowed themselves into.” Zalentine took another gulp from the water bottle. “Pains me to say this, but there could be some oddball sex angle. I’d heard some rumors about the weird stuff they’d get into with girlfriends. It didn’t sound pretty, and that was a few years back.”

  “You didn’t want your sons around here. Why is that?”

  “I sell diamond rings, Agent Cady. Lots of them. I know what makes people tick. For example, I can tell by your look that you’re silently judging me—as a father and a human being—and finding me wanting.”

  “Sir, I’m just here to ask—”

  “Fuck it, doesn’t matter,” Zalentine said, waving his hand. “I can size up a couple that walks inside any of my jewelry stores within thirty seconds, can tell you exactly what engagement set they’ll buy, whether they’ll still be married in five years, which one will be the first to cheat—you name it and I can tell you all of that within thirty seconds. So imagine how I could size up my sons. I know it’s not the most glowing endorsement of my own flesh and blood, Agent Cady, but do you remember those Menendez brothers—Lyle and Erik—remember them?”

  Cady nodded.

  “So the reason that I made damn sure they didn’t live here after the great hamster detonations, Agent Cady, the reason I sent them off to any boarding school in the country that would take them, and then off to a college on the East Coast, was quite simple. I didn’t want to wake suddenly one night to find Adrien and Alain at the foot of the king-size, naked, with scalpels, prepared to take their tricks to an entirely new level.”

  So it may not have come as an earth-shattering surprise to Vance Zalentine when he received the news that his boy, Alain, had been shot to death at a rest area off U.S. Highway 50, outside of Queenstown, Maryland. Alain Zalentine, out tooling around in his Porsche Carrera GT, had pulled into a rest stop and gone inside to use a bathroom stall. Unbeknownst to Alain, someone had followed him in, given him a minute or two to get settled, then kicked in the stall door and shot Alain dead center in the forehead.

  It was not a robbery. Alain’s eel-skin wallet, stuffed with six hundred dollars cash and six credit cards, and the keys to his Carrera remained in the pockets of his Dolce & Gabbanas, scrunched down about his ankles in the puddle of blood. Rather the opposite of robbery, and the reason the case immediately drew in the bureau, was that something had been left behind. In this case, a glass bishop had been inserted straight into the entry wound in the middle of Alain’s forehead.

  Another oddity left at the murder scene was on the men’s restroom door. An OUT OF ORDER sign had been duct-taped to the entrance. The cleaning crew from Queenstown had been confused about that sign as well as how it had gotten there. The sign, which looked like something you could pick up at a dollar store, was not one of theirs. Their records did not indicate that any facility at the rest area was not in working condition. The crew went inside, immediately noticing a set of legs extending beneath the stall. They might have thought something else was happening if not for the blood…and the smell. Evidently death was the ultimate laxative. Queenstown PD took the call, but when the chess piece went over the wire, a handful of FBI special agents, led back then by Cady, swarmed to the death site.

  The chess piece linked Alain Zalentine’s murder directly to the Sanfield case. The related murders had crossed state lines, or, more accurately, crossed from the District of Columbia into Maryland, as D. C. was not part of any U.S. state. As such, the crimes entered FBI jurisdiction and Cady found himself building a task force on the fly in order to work closely with state and local authorities because, contrary to popular belief and Hollywood depictions, the bureau did not swoop in and take over cases from the powers that be.

  Queenstown PD had already contacted Beverly Hills PD. A squad car with a grief counselor was en route to the Zalentine mansion to notify Alain’s parents. Queenstown had also networked with the Cambridge, Maryland Police Department. They had so far been unable to contact Brother Adrien via his home or cell phone, numbers which had immediately been provided by Verizon-Maryland. Cambridge was sending a squad over to the Dorchester Towers, where the Zalentine twins each owned a luxury condo, to see if they could rustle up the missing Zalentine sibling.

  Unlike the hustle and bustle of an identically named city in Massachusetts, Cambridge, Maryland was laid back, quiet and tranquil…or it had been. The Cambridge DA had been alerted. The victim, an heir to Zalentine Diamonds, would make this a high-profile case, and every move taken would have to be done per protocol—by the proverbial book—for it to be solid in court. Agent Cady immediately realized why they were taking these precautions. Brother Adrien was off the radar and the detectives were considering the potential of this being a Bubba Bump, as most murders are committed by someone the victim knew, very likely a family member. Adrien, for the time being, was a prime suspect—think Paris Hilton as a psycho killer. If that proved to be the case, a courtroom media circus would most certainly be on the horizon. A celebrity killing on the docket in the Queenstown courthouse. Cady could see the promo: Cain and Abel Slaying Rocks Sleepy Berg, news at eleven. Yes, the district attorneys in both Queenstown and Cambridge were going to be involved every step of the way.

  But first they had to find Brother Adrien.

  Referring to them as luxury condos was the understatement of the year. Alain and Adrien owned the top floor of the Dorchester Towers, off Washington Street, near the city center. Both had sizable three-bedroom condos, but the rest of the floor was dedicated to a gymnasium that would make high-end fitness clubs flip cartwheels in envy, a movie theater that could seat one hundred people, and a game room the size of Fort Knox, containing everything from classic pinball machines to Donkey Kong and Pac-Man to multiple Game-box, PlayStation, and Wii setups. Yet another section contained a fully-stocked bar in the model of Disney World meets Disco. Cady had walked the floor to get a sense of how Alain lived. All in all, it was a sixteen-year-old male’s wet dream.

  Alain, in better days, had been wiry—thin but muscular—six-even, with a model’s head of blond hair parted to the right. Ditto identical twin Adrien, Cady noted from pictures lining the hallway walls of Alain’s condo. Except Adrien’s hair was parted on the left, which made for an interesting face-on picture that Cady noticed in the Disney Bar. The boys were certainly in love with their own images.

  And speaking of Adrien, he and his blond locks were still nowhere to be found. Not in his condo, nor in his top floor play palace. Adrien continued to be inaccessible via his cell phone no matte
r how many urgent messages had been left for him. This was a major red flag. Cady began to believe that Alain might just turn out to be a Bubba Bump after all; some messed-up domestic that resulted in homicide. Perhaps Alain hadn’t given Adrien his fair share of turns on Nintendo or whatever in hell other games they had in that home arcade. Cady wondered about the chess pieces. How had Sanfield been dragged into this fray? Did Sanfield know the twins? Had he represented one of them in a dispute?

  With the help of the condo’s management, Cady was able to make a quick tally of the five sport cars the Zalentine twins owned. Minus Alain’s Porsche from his fatal stop at the Highway 50 rest area, there was a Jaguar XKR missing. Within six hours an APB went out listing Adrien Zalentine as a person of interest wanted for questioning and describing the missing Jag—an ebony convertible.

  Officers of the Cambridge PD began knocking on doors and interviewing neighbors on lower floors of the Dorchester Towers. Reports came back painting the twins as elusive, a bit elitist, snobbish; they wouldn’t speak, say “Hi,” or smile if you saw them in the elevator, just awkward silence until the doors slid open and you were gratefully able to depart. The Zalentine twins didn’t partake in any reindeer games or get-togethers the condominium association planned.

  One tenant, an attractive and single blond attorney on the eighth floor, reported that one of the twins, she could never tell them apart, always asked her to go sailing with him on his boat sometime whenever they bumped into each other. The woman told the officer, “He was good-looking, almost pretty, and I knew the Zalentines, obviously, were big-time loaded, but I always came up with an excuse, any excuse, to put off a sailing date, because my Creep-o-Meter alarm went off whenever he came around.”

  So the Zalentines owned a sailboat.

  A little more digging and Cady had discovered that the twins owned a Sydney 36CR, a thirty-six-footer, and had a boat slip at Bachelors Point Marina in Oxford, Maryland, no more than forty minutes from Cambridge. The Bachelors Point Marina had excellent access to Chesapeake Bay.

  Cady called the marina, got a pleasant enough manager on the horn, and asked the gentleman if he’d seen Adrien Zalentine that day.

  “Haven’t seen either of them,” the marina manager told Cady, “but those two boys come and go like ghosts. Let me send a guy out to check the dock.”

  Five minutes later the manager told Cady the Zalentine slip was empty. Forty-five minutes later Cady was talking to the now-nervous marina manager in person. On the way into the club house the agents had noticed Adrien’s black Jag in the corner of the marina’s parking lot, parked at a slanted angle to keep other cars away.

  There continued to be no answer on Adrien’s cell phone. The marina couldn’t raise The She-Killer—the name of the Zalentines’ sail boat—on the VHF marine band. At that point Cady brought the Fifth Coast Guard District into the mix. The Guard immediately sent out helicopters in search of The She-Killer, in hopes of locating the lost Zalentine.

  It appeared that the twins were about as introverted at Bachelors Point as they were at their condo building—no close sailing chums—but one of the yachtsmen had a strong opinion about the Brothers Zalentine. “Don’t think they ever sailed much if at all,” the man said. “Mostly saw them motoring about using that Yanmar diesel they had. A real shame because that Sydney was built for racing. Over a quarter-million dollars to use it as a speedboat, what a waste.”

  In fact, the consensus around Bachelors Point was that the Zalentines were not real sailing enthusiasts and just had the boat as a status symbol. Something to show off to the girls. Aside from Adrien’s Tuesday morning jaunts, several members remembered catching a glimpse of them taking various dates or girlfriends out for a nighttime cruise. One great wit said he’d taken to calling the Zalentines’ Sydney 36CR The Love Boat.

  The manager mentioned that the handful of times he saw Adrien on his Tuesday morning junkets, that Adrien was here and gone before noon. He thought it quite odd that Adrien would be out overnight.

  At this point, Cambridge PD had picked up a search warrant in order to enter Adrien’s condo, across the hall from Alain’s, so Cady headed back to the Dorchester Towers. At 5:00 p.m. that Wednesday, almost an entire day since the Queenstown cleaning crew found Alain in the restroom stall, the Coast Guard contacted Cady.

  Brother Adrien had been found.

  Chapter 5

  Cady lay on the still-made bed, rested his eyes, and spent ten minutes working the squeeze ball, something he did six times a day in hopes of increasing the muscle strength in his right hand. He never left home without the foam ball.

  When he’d completed the exercise, Cady returned to the hotel room table and dove back into the case file.

  A Coast Guard helicopter had spotted the sailboat, The She-Killer stenciled in bold lettering on the stern. When they flew over it they saw something troubling and radioed the patrol boat in for a closer check.

  Ten minutes later Cady got the call. Adrien Zalentine had indeed been found, alone, onboard his craft, a bullet through the center of his forehead, and a glass bishop shoved deep into the entry wound. The identical twins that came into the world together went out on the same day and in the same precise manner.

  Twins in life, as well as in death.

  Cady knew little about sailing, but the yachtsmen at Bachelors Point Marina had done enough oohing and aahing about the Sydney 36CR that Cady knew the craft was about as slick as could be. What remained of Adrien Zalentine was nothing for the weak of stomach, which came with the territory of having a baseball-sized chunk missing from the back of your head. His body lay diagonally across the stern, feet upright beneath the steering wheel. Adrien’s blood had settled, his face a ghastly sight, and two days in the scorching sun had been anything but kind.

  Chesapeake Bay was shallow for the most part, and the spot where the Zalentine twin had anchored was about twenty-five feet deep. Cady had it explained to him that Adrien had, evidently, diesel dropped the kedge from the bow, laid out the rode and reversed the engine until the kedge dug into the bottom. Zalentine did it windward so the boat wouldn’t swing in the breeze. The boat wasn’t close to shore so he hadn’t needed to anchor, could have just slowly drifted, but perhaps he fancied a swim or just wanted to enjoy this particular patch of blue. The past several days had been relatively calm, sunny, with a pleasant breeze for relaxed sailing. Cady thought about the shooter. Had the two known each other? Or had the UNSUB followed Zalentine out to this patch of blue, rafted up alongside the 36CR, all full of smiles and misdirection long enough to pull the gun and blow Adrien Zalentine’s brains out into the bay, and insert a certain chess piece into the killing wound?

  Cady left Adrien for the forensics crew and stepped below deck. It seemed as if he’d passed into an optical illusion, as it appeared far more spacious than what he’d seen at the surface as he watched the Coast Guard tow the sailboat back to their LeCompte Bay station. With over six feet of headroom, Cady could stand straight up and look about the cabin. He saw a large refrigerator below what one Coast Guard officer had called the nav station. Opposite the galley was a sink, as well as a propane stove and oven. Double quarter berths appeared on each side of the companionway steps. Port and aft of the V-berth was the head and shower.

  Cady walked over to the 12-volt refrigerator and used a handkerchief to open the door. Several things of interest. A variety of imported cheeses, with names like Fourme d’Ambert and Camembert, and a box of Mini Toasts and Water Crackers stared neatly back at him. There was a half bottle of black wine labeled Chateau Margaux that probably cost more than a ride on the space shuttle. The cork had been pressed back in place. Cady wondered if opened wine should be stored in a refrigerator. But behind the wine and cheese and boxes of crackers was something that really caught Cady’s eye: a sandwich bag of what appeared to be marijuana, later determined by the lab to be Ice Hash. And when the forensics crew combed through the cabin and itemized their findings, a couple of water pipes had been found i
n one of the Sydney’s side drawers.

  Evidently, Adrien Zalentine’s Tuesday morning excursions involved more than a deep love of the nautical life. Other items on the list of cabin belongings included a mountain-sized box of Oreo cookies, a twelve-pack of bottled water, a plastic container of instant Kool-Aid mix, and a half-eaten bag of Fritos. It looked like Adrien had the munchies issue fully addressed. But something had occurred then, before Adrien got out his water bong, something that put Zalentine’s Ice Hash days permanently behind him.

  Also found in various compartments were a twelve-pack of Trojan Magnum Twisters, several bottles of suntan lotion, a large tube of half empty K-Y Jelly, three-strand twisted marine rope, extra swimsuits—including a couple of female suits the size of dental floss—and almost two hundred pounds in barbell weights, the kind with a donut hole in the middle. Cady pictured the twins entertaining some female companions, slipping into the cabin to change into a bathing suit, and doing ten quick arm curls to pump up their biceps before returning to deck.

  Adrien’s condo confirmed that both of the Zalentine twins were tidy, exceedingly so in Cady’s opinion, as dirty laundry in hampers was folded neatly, no dirty dishes sat in their black granite sinks or remained in their brushed nickel dishwashers, and, despite the lack of a hired cleaning service, there was nary a dust bunny to be found.

  Previous girlfriends were questioned. From what Cady could tell, neither of the Zalentine twins practiced long-term relationships. Anything more than three weeks appeared a major commitment. Evidently, Vance Zalentine was correct. His boys could be quite captivating—of course, being absurdly well off didn’t hurt—but neither twin played nice in the sandbox. Stories trickled in of how Adrien or Alain would wine and dine a new girl, a virtual shock-and-awe of charm, until one brother got his date between the sheets, and then he’d trade his conquest off for the sexual pleasure of the other brother. That is, Adrien would begin posing as Alain—and vice versa—until both twins had gotten to know each of their girlfriends in the biblical sense. Then, after nonchalantly informing the unsuspecting female of their sexual betrayal, the twins would sit side by side on the leather couch in order to soak in the woman’s reaction and heartbreak, both brothers’ blue eyes wide as saucers as though witnessing the Aurora Borealis for the first time.