Steven James - The Knight

“Why didn’t you save me, Patrick?” She only mouthed the words, but in the dream I heard them as if she spoke them aloud.

Cold lips.

Whispering.

“Why, Patrick?”

And then, footsteps behind me. I whipped around, and my light shone on the faces of more walking dead, all approaching me.

“Why, Patrick?”

Crowding around me, reaching for me.

“Why?”

I pushed them aside, felt my hands smear against their warm, moist wounds, began to run through the dark, my light swinging wildly, shadows splintering, then re-forming, then splintering around me again.

And then I was sprinting through a field and through time and I was in the tunnel of the gold mine again and I was leaning over Heather’s body and she opened her eyes and then grinned a dead smile and held the terrible heart out to me.

Her lips, cold lips.

“For you.”

But then it wasn’t Heather’s face anymore, but Lien-hua’s, and she was offering me the heart. “Here is my heart, Patrick. For you.”

The heart reeked of death.

“No,” I yelled in my dream.

I stumbled backward.

She stood up, joined the corpses.

“No!”

And they all called to me, their words beating like a dark heartbeat over and over in my head. “Why, Patrick? Why?”

And then I awoke to a pale shroud of sunlight soaking through the curtains of my room.

I tried to relax, to let the dream fade away, but it refused to let go of me. I looked at the clock, and even though it was just after five, I didn’t want to go back to sleep and chance tipping into the dream again, so I climbed out of bed.

The images kept playing like a movie in my head. I slipped into some workout clothes and my rock-climbing shoes and went to the bouldering cave I’d built in our garage-a mini climbing gym with holds bolted to the walls and across the ceiling.

Since Tessa was sleeping over at her friend Dora Bender’s house, I didn’t have to worry about waking her, so I pulled out my twenty-yearold boombox, popped in some U2, turned it up loud enough to help me forget the dream, moved my car to the driveway, and laid some bouldering mats across the concrete so I wouldn’t hurt myself any more than necessary when I fell.

After traversing the walls for ten minutes to warm up, I began to cross the ceiling, hanging upside down, fingers gripping the climbing holds, toes wedged into small cracks or against the holds I’d passed.

Across the ceiling and back.

Arms pumped. Abs screaming. My side throbbed from meeting the axe handle yesterday, but it wasn’t as sore as I thought it’d be, so I guessed that no ribs were broken. However, it still ached, especially each time I lost my grip and fell from the ceiling onto my back.

The bouldering pads helped a little, but I could definitely feel the impact.

I worked the routes for forty-five minutes, but as much as I cranked on the moves, I couldn’t clear my head. So finally, I gave up and went back upstairs to get ready to meet Cheyenne.

Some people think that an investigator will be immediately reassigned to a different case if a killer mentions his name while corresponding with the authorities or does something to threaten him or his family.

And while the scenario might make for a good plot for a crime novel or cop buddy movie, it’s not the way things work in real life. Once you start on a case, especially a high-profile case with a serial killer, you stay on it, regardless of how many threatening phone calls, photographs, or recorded messages the killer might send you.

It has to be this way, otherwise as soon as an investigator started closing in, a killer could simply leave a threatening message or make a taunting phone call and-voila!-the one person who has the best chance of catching him would be reassigned. That’s just not the way it is.

It’d be too easy for the bad guys.

However, it is true that if they mention your name, it gets personal.

It’d been personal with Taylor and with Basque, and now I felt the same itch, the same intimate anger with this new killer who’d left the recorded message for me in Heather Fain’s mouth.

As I stepped out of the shower, changed clothes, and grabbed some breakfast, the message kept replaying in my head, making the case more and more personal each time it repeated.

“I’ll see you in Chicago, Agent Bowers.”

Maybe coffee would help. Give me a caffeine buzz. Help me think in a new direction.

I decided on Honduran estate-grown French Roast. After all, if Detective Warren was going to shuttle me around for the morning, the least I could do was offer her sixteen ounces of some world-class coffee. I ground enough for thirty-two ounces, brewed the coffee to perfection, filled two travel mugs-adding a little cream and honey to mine-and had just finished downing a bowl of oatmeal when she arrived at the curb.

Toting my computer bag and hugging the two travel mugs against my chest, I maneuvered out the door. I’d never ridden with her before, and now I saw that she drove a scrappy 2002 Saturn sedan. Maroon. Scratched up, mud-splattered. Homey.

Even though it was still early, the sky was already stark and blue, with just a single streak of cirrus clouds layered high in the west. A light, cool breeze wandered through the neighborhood, but other than that, the day had a still, solid feel to it.

Cheyenne rolled down her window. “Good morning, Pat.”

“Morning.” I set the cups on the roof and patted her car. “I have to say I figured you for a pickup truck kind of girl.”

“I’m hard to pigeonhole. Just throw your bag anywhere in the back.”

I opened the door and realized that following her instructions wouldn’t be as easy as it sounded. The seats and floors were piled with papers, the skeletal remains of at least four trips to KFC, three crumpled shooting range targets, a pair of rusted jumper cables, a mountain bike wheel, a very old pair of men’s cowboy boots that I thought it best not to ask about, and a helicopter flight manual. I motioned toward it. “I didn’t know you flew.”

“Not quite done with my lessons. Just have to pass my solo.”

In order to make room for my computer bag I slid the targets aside. They contained some of the tightest center-mass groupings I’d ever seen, so as I positioned my computer bag on the seat I asked her, “How often do you shoot?”

“Mondays and Tuesdays. I try not to miss a week.”

After closing the door, I grabbed the travel mugs from the roof and joined her in the front seat. “Looks like you try not to miss the bull’s-eye either.”

“Part of growing up on a ranch. You need to be able to pick off coyotes from a full gallop.”

“Don’t tell my stepdaughter about that. She doesn’t believe in hunting: ‘Nothing with a face should ever be murdered.’” I offered her one of the travel mugs. “Coffee?”

“Naw. I don’t touch the stuff.”

“Ah, but this is good coffee.”

“That’s an oxymoron,” she said.

OK, now that was just uncalled for. “And here I thought you were a woman of discriminating taste.”

She gave me a furtive glance. “I am. When it comes to some things.”

OK. This woman was not subtle.

Before I could give her any sort of witty reply, she slid a manila folder across the dashboard toward me. “Some reading material for the drive.”

“Thanks.”

As I picked it up I noticed a St. Francis of Assisi pendant hanging from her rearview mirror. I would never have pegged her for the religious type.

She really was hard to pigeonhole.

Cheyenne wove through traffic, hopped onto I-70. “By the way,” she said, “Heather Fain was poisoned. Same poison that Ahmed Mohammed Shokr died of on Wednesday.”

Ahmed was one of the victims in the double homicide on Wednesday. His girlfriend, Tatum Maroukas, had been stabbed with a sword.