The Chessman

by Jeffrey B. Burton

  “Stabbed after death?” Farris asked.

  “Keeps the gas from ballooning, an added insurance policy against the women ever floating to the top of the bay. I didn’t envy the medical examiner working with the decomposing remains of these five young women, but he was able to enlighten us on one other point. All the victims had laceration marks around their waists, Congressman.” Cady turned to look at the house rep. “Rope burns.”

  Farris had remained by the terrace balcony, back to Cady, staring off in the general direction of the Robillards and the elusive nature of true love, but Cady saw the man’s shoulders quiver.

  “You see, after the victims had been repeatedly raped by Alain and Adrien, they’d been tossed overboard, a rope tied around their stomachs, kind of like a monkey on a string, Congressman. The women were made to drown for hours for the Zalentines’ amusement.”

  “Fucking psychopaths.” Farris put his empty glass down on the stone railing.

  “Any time a girl would give up and let herself go, the twins would pull her up, let her rest a moment or two, and begin the torture anew. I imagine this made their jollies last longer. What do you think—”

  “Stop it,” the congressman whispered.

  “What do you think triggered the Zalentines’ bloodlust, Farris?” Cady asked, probing deeper. “What really happened that night at the lake?”

  The silence between the two men could be stirred with a boat oar. Cady turned to the aquarium, looking for the eel in the pirate ship, when something else caught his eye. His blood froze. The top half of a single chess piece stuck out from the colored pebbles behind a piece of coral. A clear glass king. Cady bent for a closer examination. It looked identical in shape and size to the kings in the chess set the crime lab had tracked down, the chess set with clear glass pieces that matched the ones inserted into the killing wounds in both Sanfield and the Zalentine twins. The chess pieces came from a fourteen-inch glass chess set, one that went for under $20 and could be found at any game or toy shop at any mall or department store from coast to coast—making it impossible to track a purchase. Cady had juggled a similar glass king as he contemplated what statement the killer was trying to make.

  And now to find this piece hidden in Farris’s fish tank, like a prize inside a Cracker Jack box, broke reality.

  “Turns out I misled you.” Farris slurred his words to the night. “Misled myself, too, Agent Cady. Once upon a time, long ago, I knew exactly how it felt—Phil Robillard’s affection toward his wife. Cuts deep and endless. Alas…unrequited.”

  His mind spinning like a merry-go-round, Cady withdrew his Glock 22 from his shoulder holster. Farris was the Chessman? He’d known Marly Kelch? Loved her? Had discovered what the Zalentines had done to her that night, how Sanfield had helped them cover their tracks—and set about taking his vengeance? He’d hidden the glass king in the aquarium as some kind of sick keepsake?

  “Turn around very slowly, Congressman Farris.” Cady aimed at center mass, reminding himself what the Chessman had done to the Zalentines and Sanfield. “Place your hands in the air where I can see them.”

  Farris turned around, a questioning look on his brow.

  “Walk slowly into the room, Congressman. No sudden moves.” Cady cursed himself. He’d left a set of flex-cuffs in the car.

  “I guess this ends it, then.” Farris walked into the living room toward Cady, palms in the air. “Every last one of us. But,” Farris said, squinting at Cady, “who are you?”

  Cady squinted back, trying to digest Farris’s peculiar comment when thunder clapped and the top half of the congressman’s face blew apart, showering Cady in a mist of brain tissue, blood, and skull matter.

  Cady dropped to the floor in a blink, his side against the sectional. A blink later Cady put two rounds into the ceiling fixture, showering the room with glass and darkness. The only light came from the aquarium and the half moon shining from the open terrace. Cady crab-crawled backwards until he was up against the whiskey cart. He could make out the dark lump in the middle of the room that had seconds previously been Congressman Farris. The man was dead, no ifs, ands, or buts.

  The Robillards are home early flashed through the agent’s mind. They’ve got a timeshare in Venice. Cady suddenly knew it had not been Phil or Gretchen Robillard—the Antony and Cleopatra from across the way—who had flicked off the back light in the neighboring condo.

  Cady wrenched a faux antique phone from the whiskey cart, knocking over and shattering Farris’s near-empty bottle of Glenfiddich. He tossed the handset onto the hardwood floor and punched in 911. Cady crouched, worked his way silently against the terrace door and listened. Nothing. Then footsteps. He closed his eyes, remembered the cement patio beneath the terrace. Cady took off, covered the terrace in an all-out sprint. Left hand on the balcony, he hurtled over, landed fifteen feet below and went down hard into a gravel bed, and knew immediately that something was seriously wrong with his right knee.

  Cady pushed himself up and hobbled to the wooden privacy gate that led out to the alleyway. He made out the padlock in the moonlight, and then sent a side kick with all his might at handle level. The pain seared up and down his right side. He bit down hard, twisted about and repeated a side kick, this time with his left foot. The gate burst open and Cady pushed through, weight on his left side, Glock sweeping the path in front of him. He held his breath and listened for something to tell him which way to go. Nothing.

  Cady took a step down the alleyway, knew if the shooter made it to Connecticut Avenue, he’d be quickly lost amongst the restaurants and nightclubs near Woodley Park Metro. Cady hobbled toward Connecticut. Suddenly a shadow in his periphery—then a sledgehammer cracked into the side of his face. Cady dropped like a bag of cement, handgun skittering across the way. Dazed, on his stomach, he swam after his Glock when a jackhammer of darkness smashed down upon his right hand, shattering bones and tissue, his palm a washcloth of crimson.

  Cady screamed. He screamed to stay conscious. Something was wrong with his mouth as his scream came out a low guttural echo, hardly audible. He tasted blood and teeth and looked up. A figure flew across the shadows, nearing the end of the alleyway, long coat flowing behind him like a cape, a dark case in one hand, suddenly slowing, turning the corner…escaping.

  Cady heard the sirens as he pulled himself back to the entrance to Farris’s patio, vomited, and passed out.

  Chapter 12

  Two days later, on a lead provided between surgeries by a bedridden Agent Cady at George Washington University Hospital, FBI agents tried unsuccessfully to contact Dane Schaeffer at his cabin home outside Chester, New Jersey. The following day Agent Preston and her team returned with a warrant, but Schaeffer’s house was deserted. No car in the attached garage and black bananas sat on a lonely kitchen countertop. The only thing of interest was when Agent Preston nudged Schaeffer’s mouse on the pad in his office and the monitor blinked awake. Two short sentences in a Word document displayed on the screen in size twenty-six Times New Roman.

  Forgive me, Father. Please forgive me…

  A week later some hikers from Mason Neck State Park found a Lexus RX Hybrid on a dirt road down near the river—abandoned in a place where no vehicles should be. The hikers figured teenagers, a stolen car, and a joy ride, and called the police. The Lexus RX turned out to belong to Dane Schaeffer. Agents were present to discover a handful of glass chess pieces stuffed inside a brown envelope in Schaeffer’s glove compartment, as well as a smashed trombone case hidden in the car’s trunk. After popping out both the Kohlert TB524 and the high pile plush lining, the federal agents found something doubly interesting: a Remington 700 LTR 308, a light tactical rifle.

  A day after finding Schaeffer’s abandoned Lexus, Special Agent Dan Kurtz was able to match the round that killed Congressman Patrick Farris—a .308 Win—to the Remington 700. They were also able to determine that it had been vigorous strikes from the hardshell Kohlert trombone case that had shattered Agent Cady’s jaw, broken both his
nose and left cheekbone, and turned his right hand to mush.

  A week after this discovery they pulled a floater out of the Potomac River. Dane Schaeffer was not a pretty sight.

  Book Two

  Middlegame

  Chapter 13

  Present Day

  Elaine Kellervick’s husband was at the Chem-Eng conference in Denver until Friday evening, which translated fluently into her eating that last slice—allegedly Steve’s slice—of the two extra tiramisu cheesecake slices she’d brought home after her dinner with The Dames, as her gang of lady chums referred to themselves, at the Prudential Center the night before. She’d not mentioned the cheesecake to Steve on the phone this morning and, although both had made the same New Year’s resolution to shed those extra pounds around their centers and both had been kickboxing religiously at the gym all year, Elaine reckoned that Steve need be none the wiser. Besides, she had something potentially big to celebrate this evening, and to heck with what The Cheesecake Factory may or may not be doing to her middle-aged thighs.

  Elaine had been tasked by her walrus-stached, content-free pantload of a boss, Albert Banning, to reverse-engineer a competitor’s trading strategy and revenue stream so that their Boston investment firm, Koye & Plagans Financials, could replicate Mr. Schmooze’s money-making results. She had met and mingled with Mr. Schmooze at a variety of events in the financial industry over the past decade and had been surprised and touched to have received a handwritten letter from Mr. Schmooze himself in response to a résumé she’d sent his firm after a particularly trying Albert Banning week a half-year back. Although they had no openings for her skill set at that time, his note had read, he “remembered” Elaine “fondly” and wished her “all the best.” The note went on to say that she “would skip to the top of the list should anything arise” and that she should “definitely keep in touch.”

  Although it was something that didn’t make it into the corporate literature or promotional brochures, it wasn’t uncommon in the financial industry to data model the competition. When that boob Banning had given her this assignment, in a continuing effort to keep her name at the top of Mr. Schmooze’s list, she’d sent Mr. Schmooze a teasing e-mail about how she’d been charged with discovering the secrets of his success, with a smiley emoticon winking at the end of the final sentence.

  Every time she met with Banning or talked to the clown on the telephone or received one of his spell-check-free e-mails or even passed the nincompoop in the hallway, Elaine became completely and utterly flabbergasted. Utterly flabbergasted that Albert Banning was the Chief Investment Officer at K&P. Utterly flabbergasted that this Ted Baxter had Peter-Principled his way up to a position where he could inflict maximum damage to the firm on a day-in-day-out basis. Although, in retrospect, there’d been some foreshadowing miscommunications throughout the interview process, Elaine had been utterly flabbergasted since her second day on the job, two years previously, when it became abundantly clear that his pompous vacuousness did not conceal any redeemable brilliance. Utterly flabbergasted that Banning was able to locate his corner office each and every morning and didn’t wind up stumble-bumbling about in a neighboring high rise looking for his chair.

  Dear hubby Steve lived for her stories about Albert Banning, about how annual reviews were not unlike the old Bob Newhart comedic monologues; how if someone else were presenting in a meeting, you could wind your watch by how soon Banning would pick his nose and wipe any findings on the underside of the conference table; how he’d steal a second and even third bismark every time someone on staff—although never Banning himself—brought donuts in to share with the gang; how Banning’s eyes faithfully returned, like a magnet to metal, to even the slightest hint of exposed cleavage. But then again, Steve could afford to enjoy these stories because he didn’t have to report to the asshat on a weekly basis.

  Banning certainly looked the role: dark wool suits and white dress shirts all properly tailored and dry-cleaned, and somewhere along the line he’d miraculously mastered cufflinks. He carried around a calfskin briefcase—which she strongly suspected contained his stash of Gummi bears and malted milk balls rather than any work—as his constant companion. After Elaine’s first month as an investment strategist at K&P, Steve had to dissuade her from hiring a P.I. to determine if Banning’s Yale MBA was truly on the up-and-up. Steve told her that “forging a résumé would indicate a certain creative spark” that they both knew Banning thoroughly lacked, and that “frankly, Elaine, a third of the graduates pooped out of these Ivys couldn’t find their ass with a funnel, and Albert Banning wouldn’t have the foggiest how to even spell funnel.”

  But Elaine knew her days at K&P Financials were numbered a couple of months back when Banning had e-mailed her and a few of the firm’s other market analysts some generic economic questions requesting their answers, input, or comments. The queries had actually piqued Elaine’s interest, and she’d jotted down a few paragraphs of thought on the current state of stock volatility and the P/E ratio to which she received no acknowledgement or note of thanks or any type of reply at all from the buffoon. So imagine Elaine’s surprise when she noticed her insight quoted word-for-word in the Fidelity Investor newsletter in a short interview with you-know-who. So angry that she could have blasted straight into orbit, Elaine had marched into Banning’s office waving a copy of the newsletter, only to see that he’d already had an issue framed and hung on the wall behind his black executive desk, situated between his MBA and an eight-by-ten of him standing next to an obviously put-upon Alan Greenspan at some long-forgotten conference.

  “I told the editor that those conclusions came from our brilliant team here at K&P,” a startled and placating Banning had mumbled. “I even sent them your names, but I guess they didn’t have room in such a short piece.”

  Elaine stormed out of the swine’s office in order to refrain from shattering his newly framed article with a pitch of the weighted tape dispenser sitting atop the corner of his desk. The all-star ignoramus had been hang-dog around her for a week—all Please let me get the door and How are we doing today? faux sweetness. But as if to rub salt in her wound, her quote, attributed to the bumblefuck, had been picked up and reprinted in the Business section of the Boston Globe. As far as Elaine was concerned, there was no God.

  After two days of mathematical modeling of Mr. Schmooze, Elaine realized she’d bungled something up herself, that her data model was incorrect—tainted by Banning’s involvement, no doubt—so she made a phone call to Mr. Schmooze’s firm under the guise of a courtesy call, was fended off by a frosty and likely menopausal executive assistant. She tore through her desk drawer of clutter and found Mr. Schmooze’s business card. Off went an e-mail request for additional information. Then Elaine scrapped her fouled-up model and began again in the interest of being overly meticulous—or, as Steve would attest, anal retentive. By the end of the next business day, with that blunderhead Banning asking her about her analysis every time they passed in the hallway, she’d wound up with the exact same results.

  She scanned the summary spreadsheet, peeked at some numbers in the body of her market analysis, and then peeked again at her assumptions. A ghost of a pattern danced in the back of her mind, but then again, Elaine could ferret out a numerical pattern in some dice tosses. The data model was off, it had to be. Elaine set all of her files neatly—neatly, Steve, not anal retentively—on the table in front of her and began sorting through the materials. Although markets would yo-yo up and down, Mr. Schmooze—he whose client list stepped off the pages of People Magazine, starred in major movies, and won Oscars, Emmys, and Grammys by the boatload—had a performance line that for all practical purposes only scaled upward. Her figures had to be incorrect, as this was a statistical impossibility; only seven percent of Mr. Schmooze’s months were down, with nearly uninterrupted investment gains averaging ten percent a year.

  Elaine shook her head to vanquish any stray thoughts. She’d been working for the goofball way too long; his idiocy
must be contagious. If she showed Banning her work, he’d laugh in her face and hold it over her every time she caught him making a doddering old fool of himself. She must be botching up Mr. Schmooze’s split-strike conversion strategy, as that investment methodology was exceptionally complex to begin with, but would be where the magic, if there was any, lay.

  Her phone rang. She recognized the New York area code and picked up the receiver. Serendipity—it was Mr. Schmooze himself. He mentioned that he didn’t have much time, but wanted to get back to her before heading out to some “insufferable” dinner party with the Lieutenant Governor. They chatted about the sorry state of the industry and very, very gingerly Elaine brought up her data modeling.

  “I suspected that’s what your call was about,” Mr. Schmooze said. “I wish it were seven, but we both know what that would mean…plus, I’m not Merlin the Magician. No, Elaine, the percent is closer to thirty, and even at that I’ve got clients heating up the tar and plucking the feathers.”

  “That’s what I suspected,” Elaine had said. “Garbage in-garbage out.”

  “If you can pop in to New York early next week and let me buy you lunch, we can discuss—very generically, of course—the firm’s internals. In fact, Elaine,” the Schmooze had said, “my true purpose for calling is that Paulette Glimski, my favorite data modeler, just gave birth to triplets—an in-vitro procedure that you hear so much about these days. Anyway, Paulette broke my heart earlier this week, although we saw it coming. She handed in her notice, said she’s giving up Excel spreadsheets for diapers and pacifiers, so we’re a little short-handed—in case you’re still looking for an opportunity.”

  Thoughts of kicking Banning to the curb, leaving the breathing gaffe machine shorthanded, made her hot and she wished that Steve wasn’t in Colorado, in more ways than one. She couldn’t wait for their nightly call. In her mind, although playing hard to get of course, she’d already accepted the position. Mr. Schmooze had made it clear that there’d be no need to move, that the bulk of the work could be done remotely, telecommuting except for the odd meet-and-greet here or presentation there, and much of that could be done via web conferencing or net meetings. Yes, Elaine thought to herself, she’d be bringing a résumé on her day trip to New York next week.