Steven James - The Rook

I grabbed the chain. Yanked it.

The room wasn’t locked.

The eyewitness to Melice’s trial in DC was killed… Lien-hua knows DC. She used to be a detective there… What had Osbourne said? The government was worried about the Chinese… She’s Chinese. She’s planning a trip to Beijing.

Defeating him in his own castle.

Every thought was a betrayal to my feelings, to my world, to all I’d come to believe about the woman who told me she needed me.

Semantic aphasia… using the words that your listeners want to hear. It’s a way of manipulating people.

Lien-hua was the one who led us to the warehouse, and both times Shade had called me, Lien-hua wasn’t beside me, wasn’t in view. Reality began to splinter apart.

No, it couldn’t be.

Yes, it could.

Nothing was as it seemed.

I bolted for the door with one thought ripping through my mind: Lien-hua was Shade and I’d just left her alone with the device. Creighton Melice set the garment bag on the edge of the reception desk at the Surfside Inn. “Excuse me,” he said to the man working behind the counter. After he had his attention, Creighton flashed the FBI badge Shade had given him at the Blue Lizard Lounge in November. “I’m looking for two people who checked in here earlier today. They’re suspects in the terrorist bombing yesterday at the naval base. I assume you’ve heard about it?”

The man’s nervous nod said it all.

“All right, then. You’d recognize them. A very attractive Asian woman and a man who-”

“Yeah. I know ‘em. They’re in room 524. The guy nearly wrenched my arm out of its socket.”

“That would be him. Room 524, got it. We’ll bring in one of our men to watch the front desk while I go up there. I need you to wait in the back room and lock the door. Give us at least thirty minutes. Am I clear?”

More nods, then the man backed away from the desk and, rubbing his wrist, disappeared into the back room while Creighton picked up the garment bag, entered the elevator, and pressed 5.

Lien-hua pulled the curtains shut and took the device to the far room of the suite.

She let her mind walk slowly through all that had happened over the last couple days. Every moment became another flower, and in her heart she placed them in a vase and began to arrange them in a way that caught all the light she’d ever known.

She untied the laundry bag.

This is what she’d wanted, wasn’t it?

A new beginning? A chance to fall in love again?

She slid the device out. Just to see it. Just to look at it.

In Pat’s arms she felt stronger and weaker than she had in years. Was that a good thing or a bad one? Who could tell? Feelings do that, twist and change our motives, our dreams. She heard the door to the hotel room creak open.

A flicker of excitement and apprehension caught hold of her. She reached for her gun just in case it wasn’t who she expected.

“Hello?” she called. “Is that you?”

I skidded around a corner, then punched the accelerator again.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t Lien-hua.

I had to be wrong. Yes. I had to be.

A good investigator doesn’t look for evidence to prove his theories, but to disprove them.

And I’d never wanted to disprove myself more than I did right then.

I needed to trust the evidence.

Evidence. Yes. Not conjecture. I was doubting Lien-hua only because of circumstances, events that could be read different ways.

Trust the evidence wherever it takes you.

My thoughts spun backward, funneling hours and hours of our investigation into a few brief seconds.

I had to be wrong. I had to be.

The chains. The cameras. The angles. The videos.

Blind spots.

The evidence room.

Wait. The person who checked on the device in the evidence room was a man. Not a woman.

Not a woman. Not Margaret. Not Lien-hua.

But I needed more than that. I needed more.

You missed something, Dr. Bowers.

Yes, I did.

The handwriting on the envelope, on the wall. I’d seen Lien-hua’s handwriting a hundred times, and even though handwriting analysis has never been my specialty, I could tell it wasn’t hers. And the analysts already determined it wasn’t Melice’s, so unless there was another abductor we didn’t know about…

Not just the handwriting, the video.

And then, everything about the case unraveled again. All the facts began to mount in a new order. My head was finally starting to clear.

The AFIS records were altered.

The thermal satellite imagery showed Hunter slip the device into the car. That’s how Shade knew the police had the device.

Terry mentioned Sebastian Taylor had been sighted.

Crease after crease, my preconceptions unfolded.

Mental origami.

Dupin. Think like Dupin.

The video of Cassandra in the tank was exactly one minute and fifty-two seconds long.

Yesterday Calvin told me to stop looking at the facts and to start looking at the spaces between them. “One cannot adequately understand the movement of the planets,” he’d said, “until one has identified what they all orbit around.”

So what did everything orbit around?

The video.

Yes. That was the key to everything. The one minute and fifty-two second long video of Cassandra in the tank.

And in one crystallizing moment, the final shape of the case became clear. No, Lien-hua wasn’t Shade after all. I’d been wrong, I’d been wrong. Thank God I’d been wrong.

No, she wasn’t Shade.

An old friend of mine was.

No reply from the other room.

Lien-hua called again, “Pat? Is that you?”

No reply. She steadied her gun, crouched. Listened for movement.

“Pat?”

No reply, except for the click of a closing door.

To get to the suite’s main room she needed to walk through one more bedroom. She glided in, made sure the room was clear.

Quickly checked the closet.

Empty.

Bathroom. Shower.

Nothing.

Under the bed.

Clear.

Now to the main room of the suite.

She eased around the corner and saw Creighton Melice standing placidly beside the desk.

“Down,” she shouted. “On your knees!”

He was holding her vase of dying flowers. Both of his hands wrapped in bloody, shredded gauze, the untended wounds smearing blood against the glass. “Nice flowers.” He set down the vase beside her notepad.

“I said get-”

But before Lien-hua could finish her sentence, the dart entered the back of her neck.

Someone else. There’s someone else in the room. Shade.

Lien-hua’s hand involuntarily flew up to her neck, and she tugged out the dart as she whirled around to see if she could identify the other assailant, but the ripple of the curtains told her the person had disappeared onto the veranda. By the time Lien-hua had turned back to Creighton Melice, he was on her with a vengeance, chopping his hand at the gun, sending it spinning to the ground. Then, he came at her with a stylized uppercut and back fist.

He’d studied martial arts.

But she knew the form: Choy Li Fut.

And knowing it, she could counter it. She leaned into this punch and used the force of his momentum against him, driving him backward, then twisted his wrist behind his back. He yanked free, but not until after she’d hammered his side with two brutal alternating straight punches that would’ve brought most men to their knees.

He didn’t even flinch, just pivoted backward and brought an elbow into her face. She tumbled against her vase and sent it smashing into the wall.

He feels no pain. You have to knock him out.

Moss began to grow across her field of vision.

The dart. She’d been drugged.

The whole world tipped sideways, sounds and colors came to life, time began to stretch thin and then wrap around her, and she couldn’t be sure what was real anymore.