Founders' Keeper (A David and Martin Yerxa Thriller - Book 1)

by Ed Markham

  “Is this typed?” Martin joked as he examined another of her notebooks. He whistled and shook his head.

  “It’s the same handwriting from the messages,” David said.

  Martin started to flip through the volume in his hands, and immediately said, “Turn the page.”

  David did, and was surprised to see the next page was completely blank apart from the pen impressions from the first. He turned to the following page, and found it too was blank. On the notebook’s fourth page the writing resumed, just as before.

  “Why?” Martin asked.

  “Look at the pen marks on the blank pages, and the darkness of the ink,” David said. “She was pressing extremely hard. Maybe she didn’t like writing over her own pen marks.” He flipped through the notebook and saw this habit of skipping two pages was repeated throughout.

  “This is nutso,” Martin said.

  David had seen similar writing samples from extreme obsessive compulsives and some trauma sufferers—people who tried to exert unusual control over their habits and environments because they felt like the rest of the world was out of their control and unpredictable. But nothing he’d encountered possessed this degree of exactitude.

  They read quietly for a few minutes.

  Martin was the one to break the silence. “Most of what I’m reading here is mundane. It’s a catalogue of her daily activities—when she showed up, what materials she worked with. Impersonal comments regarding the content of those materials. She notes what time she took her lunch and what she had to eat, as well as the time she returned to work—to the minute.”

  David nodded. “She also abbreviates nothing, and writes out numbers longhand. And she refers to herself in the third person.” He looked up at his father. “Have you seen references to a Levi? She notes visitors and researchers in mine, but I haven’t seen that name.”

  Martin shook his head.

  David scanned each page of the notebook for the name Levi, as well as for breaks in the monotony of the writing. He found none, and set it aside. He reached for another notebook. When he opened it, he encountered more of the same.

  As he made his way through the second notebook, Martin tossed his down and moved on to the Madison documents.

  Both read in silence until Martin said, “There are flagged passages here—dated markers that highlight specific sections. Listen to this: ‘I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together.’ ”

  “Separation of Church and State,” David said.

  Martin nodded and turned to another flagged section. “ ‘Americans have the right and advantage of being armed,’ ” he read, “ ‘unlike the citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.’ ” He paused, and then said, “And one more: ‘Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected.’ ”

  He looked up at his son. “There are at least two dozen flagged sections here, and they’re all similar to the founders’ quotes left at the murder sites.”

  “What are the dates?” David asked.

  Martin glanced at a few of the documents. “All August of last year.”

  David flipped through the notebook in his hands and then grabbed for another. When he reached the pages that corresponded with those dates, he stopped. “There are errors here.” He paused, staring at the open notebook. “Not errors. Imperfections.”

  While all the previous pages David had seen resembled immaculate computer printouts, he now saw abnormalities—an elongated down stroke on a “y” or “g”, or inconsistent spaces between words. The irregularities, though slight, were glaring compared to the faultlessness of the preceding pages.

  He leaned forward, reading. After a few moments he started tapping on one of the notebook’s pages. He looked up at his father and said, “Levi Harney.”

  With Martin watching him, he read out loud: “Mister Levi Harney arrives for his second visit to library at nine-thirty ante meridiem on Sunday, August eight. Examines James Madison’s Speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, dated June sixteenth, seventeen hundred eighty-eight. Spends approximately forty-two minutes with said document, remarking at one point: This is quite interesting, Edith. Reads out loud following excerpt of said document: There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. Mister Harney asks Miss Vereen her impressions of spoken excerpt. Miss Vereen voices her impressions. Mister Harney voices his agreement with Miss Vereen, and repeats the abbreviated excerpt: Gradual and silent encroachments. Mister Harney remarks, The prescience on the part of Madison is staggering.”

  David stopped reading and looked at his father. “There are at least two writing miscues in that small section alone.”

  “Sounds like Miss Vereen had a thing for Mister Harney,” Martin said.

  “Does that name sound familiar to you?”

  Martin looked puzzled. “Harney? No.”

  David returned his attention to the notebook. “She doesn’t deviate much from her usual style here, but she writes a lot about Harney’s reactions and comments. She hasn’t done that with any of the other visiting researchers, at least none that I’ve seen.” He paused, turning ahead a few pages. “Her writing errors also get worse. Still minute, but more frequent.”

  “Should I call Omar to get him started on this Harney lead?” Martin asked.

  David nodded, but never took his eyes from the notebook. “Here she notes Harney’s final visit to the library. Quote: Mister Harney concludes his research at two fifty-eight post meridiem August twenty-nine. Mister Harney voices his appreciation to Miss Vereen for her assistance, and for her company.” He paused. “That’s it. The rest of this page is blank.” He flipped ahead, and saw the usual two-page gap before the writing resumed. He flipped through to the back of the book. “The rest of the notes here return to her usual, steady style.”

  As Martin waited for the Quantico operator to connect him to their CITU offices, David turned back to the last page of the Harney entries. As he did, he noticed a hitch in the way the pages fell over themselves in his fingers. He looked carefully at the notebook’s binding and said, “Someone’s ripped out a few pages.”

  He opened the notebook wide and held the blank page up toward the window light, regarding it on an angle. He set the notebook down on the table and walked quickly to the nearest bookshelf, where he retrieved a pencil and a piece of blank paper. Returning to the notebook, he lay the blank sheet on top of the open page and began to rub the side of the pencil lead on top of it, trying to make a tracing of the impressions below. He stopped a quarter of the way down the page and looked at the tracing. Then he continued, more quickly.

  “Hold on a minute, Omar,” Martin said into his phone. He looked at his son. “What is it?”

  David didn’t speak until he’d finished. He also didn’t take his eyes off the page. “Take a look,” he said.

  Martin walked to his son’s side, and they both regarded the pencil tracing silently.

  There were no sentences; only single words. They were scrawled across the page at random, the letters large and irregular, twisting and tailing off at odd points. Many of the same words were repeated, and they were all partially obscured by an erratic spiral, as though Edith Vereen had at one point started scratching over them in wide, arcing slashes.

  The words were: ALONE WEAK UGLY WORTHLESS SHAME

  Chapter 24

  THE MAN HUNCHED forward and slipped the tip of the needle into the nylon. He worked slowly and carefully, mindful of every movement. When he’d sewn shut the opening, he reached for the small blade, made a slit in the next compartment, and removed the heavy palette inside. He carefully lifted a like-sized rectangle of orange-red material and tucked it into the vacant fold. He started to sew it closed, but stopped suddenly and set down his n
eedle.

  Hearing her name, he found it difficult to concentrate.

  The man sat back from the table and listened as the voices of the National Public Radio newscasters filled the dank subterranean space.

  “. . . Federal authorities have yet to release an image, but it has been confirmed that the serial murderer known as the Colony Killer is a twenty-six-year-old woman named Edith Vereen. We’ve also learned that Vereen took her own life very early this morning in a private residence near downtown Philadelphia after federal agents thwarted her attempts to commit a tenth murder. We’re joined now by Dr. Carey Miller, a professor of psychology and criminology at the University of Cincinnati who specializes in violent crimes perpetrated by women. Dr. Miller, can you tell us . . . ”

  Edith, the man thought. And then he said the name out loud. “Edith.”

  He’d known it might end this way—with her trapped somewhere in Judge Perry’s house, alone and almost certainly crushed by her failure. In fact, it was miraculous that something like this hadn’t happened sooner.

  “You were wonderful,” he said, hoping that somehow, somewhere, she was listening. He believed she was.

  It’s silly to mourn her, he told himself. Had Edith succeeded at the last, she still would have been dead by late morning.

  The plan had been for her to drive with the judge and his wife to Washington Square in downtown Philadelphia. Once there, Edith would have shown the judge the dummy explosives in her truck’s glove box, telling him to follow her instructions or lose his wife. She would have led him to the verdant park behind Independence Hall, where she would have bound him to a tree and cut away his clothing. Then she would have whipped him for his sins. A public whipping for his crimes against his country. And when the police attempted to stop her, Edith would have drawn her pistol, shot Judge Perry, and then turned the gun on herself.

  Despite her final failure, she’d achieved more than either of them could have imagined at the start of their endeavor. Still, now that she was gone, the man felt a great sense of guilt at having deceived her.

  Her deception was necessary, he assured himself. As sick as Edith had been, the man knew she had a moral compass—however weak and miscalibrated it might have been. He’d been able to see that almost from the start. It wasn’t enough that her victims’ deaths would bring about a constructive outcome; he understood that Edith needed to believe the people she killed were themselves evil and deserving of her wrath. And so he’d provided her those justifications.

  But then, there was the greater deception—the lie that he had loved her. He couldn’t equivocate that deception away, but at least he could take comfort in the knowledge that his false love had been real and comforting to Edith.

  My poor, sick girl, he thought.

  As he listened to the NPR newscasters discuss and debate the murders and the apparent motive behind the Colony Killer’s acts, his sorrow slowly lifted.

  The radio hosts had welcomed a “Constitutional Law scholar” who had authored a book about America’s ever-evolving relationship to its founding document. The female anchor asked her guest, “Considering the charged, bipartisan nature of contemporary American politics and the heightened public debate we’ve observed in recent years over gun laws and personal privacy rights and many other issues related to the Constitution . . . in light of all that, do you think it was only a matter of time before someone took things a step too far—or in this case, many, many steps too far?”

  “Oh I don’t think there’s any doubt,” the guest scholar said. “And this certainly isn’t the first instance of this sort of obsessive, homicidal behavior. We all remember Timothy McVeigh and his fixation on the Second Amendment . . .”

  The man felt energized by the dialogue. He’d known the public wouldn’t be able to resist the intrigue of the murders. And now that they’d learned the Colony Killer was a woman, the story would explode upon the national consciousness.

  Death is the necessary component, he thought.

  Taken alive, a murderer was just a sick, troubled human being. But death worked a strange and wonderful kind of alchemy. For years, people would regard Edith’s acts with awe and horror. They would study her life and try to pick apart her motivations, as well as the ramifications of her actions. But without her alive to corroborate their suspicions, they would never know for certain, and so they would not be able to forget her.

  Just as they won’t forget what happens tomorrow, the man said to himself. He exhaled a deep breath.

  He recalled the revised attendance estimates he’d read in the morning’s newspaper. D.C. Police expected at least 120,000 would attend the rally on the National Mall.

  Death, he thought again. Death, and fear. To incite change, those were the only reliable catalysts.

  The man returned to his work.

  Chapter 25

  NINETY MINUTES AFTER leaving the Alderman Library at UVA, David and Martin rejoined Lauren, Omar, and several of their team’s analysts back at the Quantico conference room where they’d spent much of the previous week.

  After his forced absence, the return felt like a homecoming to David. Martin’s hand-drawn map of the East Coast lingered on one of the room’s dry-erase boards, though its lines were smudged and someone had drawn X’s in many of the previously empty circles marking the original thirteen colony states.

  Missed Virginia, David thought as he looked at the empty circle and recalled the sight of Edith’s slain father. He also saw that the circles in Georgia and Rhode Island were still vacant.

  After finishing their examination of Edith Vereen’s notebooks, David and Martin had met with Dr. Everett Williams, Edith’s former boss and the head of the James Madison Collection at UVA. Williams told them he couldn’t provide much information on Levi Harney.

  “I feel so foolish,” the older man had said apologetically, his grey head and like-colored spectacles bobbing in unison. “I know we ought to keep much better visitor records, and I’ve thought for years about instituting new policies. But then, we’ve never had an issue with the old system. And you know what they say about inertia . . . ” He’d offered David and Martin a pleading, stricken smile.

  “So you can’t tell us anything about Levi Harney,” David had said, “even though he visited the collection four times last August?”

  “I’m very sorry, but I cannot. We don’t receive many visitors, so we tend not to scrutinize access requests unless we have reason to suspect foul play. Also, I’m out of town on vacation most of August, which is our slowest month.”

  “And Harney never emailed you to ask permission to visit the materials?”

  “Not that I can find in my records.” Williams had pressed his fingers into his temples as though he could knead out the memory of his interaction with Levi Harney. “I seem to remember a phone call asking for permission to visit the collection. If he had informed me he would come on a weekend, I know I would have told him Edith would assist with his research, and I would have notified her of a visitor.”

  “What about campus security videos?” Martin had asked.

  Williams had brightened at that. “Oh, of course. Absolutely. But you’ll have to talk with the university about that.”

  Now, back at Quantico, David heard his father ask Omar, “You’re working on getting those security videos from UVA?”

  “Working on it, but still waiting,” Omar said.

  Martin grunted. “What else have you been able to find on Edith Vereen?”

  Omar connected his laptop to the room’s projection system, and he gestured toward the hanging screen. After pulling up the associated file, he said, “She was born in—are you ready?—Dooms, Virginia. It’s a little patch of nothing about thirty miles due west of Charlottesville. Two brothers, both several years older. Father, Garrett Vereen, was a rye farmer.”

  A farmer, David thought, recalling the knot the cop had pointed out to him on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. It seemed like years had passed since then.

  “Yo
u saw what was left of Garrett this morning,” Omar continued. “Vereen’s mother passed away when her daughter was only two years old. Vereen attended Dooms elementary, middle, and high schools, which were all housed in the same small building. Records from the school are sparse—they don’t have everything digitized yet, so they trash everything older than a decade—but the documents we received from the state show Vereen was an exceptional student and scored off the charts on the mandatory aptitude tests.”

  Omar paused. “She was also a psychologically troubled young woman, and probably experienced some serious domestic abuse. She was admitted to a hospital in Waynesboro at age eleven for severe vaginal bleeding and trauma. Stated cause was horseback riding.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Lauren said, scowling. “And no one from child services followed up on that?”

  Omar shook his head. “Her high school’s shrink held onto his old files, and he sent us a few psych profiles and interview notes. They say Vereen was extremely shy and showed some signs of sociopathology and potentially violent inclinations. Once, when an older boy was picking on her, she picked up a piece of broken glass, slit her own tongue, and spat blood at him.”

  Martin groaned and shook his head.

  “What else?” David asked.

  Omar scrolled down on his computer file. “That’s basically all we have on her until she applied and was accepted to the University of Virginia. Partial academic scholarship, which she supplemented with jobs at the university—first in the dorm cafeterias, and later at the library. She spent six years there. Earned a bachelor’s and master’s in American history. Lived alone in the dorms the whole time. Academic transcripts you’ll see are impressive, but no extra-curriculars or clubs. Not too sure what she did with herself, but we’re making calls to those students who lived in the rooms around hers, as well as her former professors and advisors.”