Steven James - The Knight

Assistant Director Margaret Wellington.

Great.

I picked up.

“Margaret, I don’t have a lot of time right now-”

“It’s a sign of respect to address someone by her title.”

My fingers tightened around the phone. “I’m a little busy right now, Assistant Executive Director Margaret Wellington.” I could picture her sitting behind her desk at FBI headquarters: power suit, thin lips, piercing eyes, mousy hair.

“I’m expecting a full report summarizing yesterday’s shooting at the courthouse to be on my desk by eight o’clock Monday morning.”

“That seems reasonable. Now-”

“I’ll also be ordering a full investigation of the incident.”

A waste of time. The Chicago Police Department already had statements from dozens of eyewitnesses. The only investigation that needed to be done was on how Sikora, or his accomplice, had managed to load the gun before it was delivered to the courtroom.

“Thanks for letting me know.”

“Has Jake arrived yet?” she asked curtly.

“Jake arrived this morning.” How to put this. “And he’s already been an invaluable asset to the investigation.” I realized that the words valuable and invaluable are synonyms, just like flammable and inflammable, but it felt better to describe Jake’s contributions as invaluable.

She paused, no doubt trying to read any subtext of my words.

“Do not patronize me, Dr. Bowers. I can make your life miserable.”

Who am I to argue with that?

“Margaret, I have to go.”

“I’m looking forward to you teaching at the Academy this summer.” Derision underscored each of her words. “Just think, we’ll be able to see each other every day for three months.”

“I can hardly imagine what that’ll be like.”

Before she could reply I ended the call and put Margaret and her infatuation with paperwork out of my mind.

I decided to switch strategies on the geoprofile. Maybe if I couldn’t find John’s home base, I could at least narrow down the routes he took to locate and then transport his victims.

To do that, I reorganized the data and began to study the most likely locations where the victims’ travel patterns might have intersected with the killer’s.

And the minutes ticked by.

Thomas Bennett stepped out of the elevator, and Giovanni lowered himself into the thick shadows of the Infiniti’s backseat to make certain he wouldn’t be seen.

He pulled on his ski mask, unfolded the straight razor, and heard the car beep as Bennett remotely unlocked the doors.

The man climbed into the driver’s seat.

Closed the door.

Slowly, Giovanni sat up and stared at Thomas’s face in the rearview mirror. He was a narrow-jawed man with nervous eyes, and he was so busy fumbling with his keys that he still hadn’t noticed that there was a person watching him in the mirror. Giovanni waited. He wanted Thomas to see that he was not alone in the car.

Finally, as Thomas slid the key into the ignition, his eyes instinctively found the rearview mirror. “What the-”

But before he could finish his sentence, Giovanni had already reached around the headrest and pressed the straight razor’s blade against the front of Bennett’s neck. “Hello, Thomas.”

The man’s lips began to quiver. “Who-”

“This blade really is sharp, so I’m going to have to ask you to sit still and not fidget. If you move too much, it’ll get messy. Trust me. If you understand, nod slowly.”

Giovanni eased the blade slightly away from Thomas’s neck while the man nodded stiffly.

“All right. I’m going to give you a little something to help you relax.”

His eyes were large with fear. “You can have my wallet, I-”

“I’m not interested in your money.” Giovanni held the razor blade firmly against Bennett’s neck again to encourage him to remain stationary. “Now, please, just sit still for a moment.”

Then, watching him carefully in the mirror and holding the blade steady, Giovanni picked up the first needle with his free hand, placed its tip against the left side of Thomas Bennett’s neck “No,” Bennett begged. “Please.”

“Shh.”

Depressed the plunger.

And a few seconds later, after Thomas was unconscious, Giovanni climbed out, shifted him to the backseat, and unbuttoned the man’s shirt to reveal his chest.

Then he carefully gave him the second injection, rebuttoned the shirt, slid behind the steering wheel, and left for the ranch.

Ever since my conversation with Margaret nearly forty-five minutes ago, I’d been doing what I used to think I did best.

I wasn’t so sure anymore.

No matter how I reworked the geoprofile, I wasn’t coming up with anything solid, and I was running out of ideas.

Though I hated to admit it, I was starting to believe that John might have skewed the results by randomly selecting his victims and crime scene locations.

I rubbed my eyes.

I pushed back from my desk and stood. Stretched my back.

My eighteenth-story office window stared down at the city of Denver, and I leaned my hand against the glass and let my eyes wander through the maze of mirrored high-rise hotels and banks that make up Denver’s downtown.

John lived down there somewhere.

Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was peripatetic, just traveling through.

The muscles in my arm, my shoulder, my neck stiffened in frustration and anger.

You have to find him, Pat. You have to bring him in.

I caught sight of the original Denver courthouse just across the street from my office. It had been built in 1910 as a premier example of turn-of-the-century architecture and as a testament to justice in the West. Even though it was only four stories tall, it was imposing, monumental, and took up an entire city block.

From my window I could read the frieze inscribed in tall letters, spanning the building just below the roof-Nulli Negabimus, Nulli Differemus, Jutitiam.

Tessa had studied Latin in middle school, so a few months ago I’d brought her downtown to give her a chance to show off her foreign language expertise. As we’d passed the building I’d looked up and said, “Hey. Isn’t that Latin?”

But she’d already noticed the words and was working on the translation. “Yeah, but it’s kind of hard to translate.” She sounded frustrated, and I was glad it was at least a little bit of a challenge to her. “I guess maybe it’d be ‘To no one we will deny, to no one we will defer justice.’ But differemus could be translated ‘discriminate.’ So, pretty much it’s saying they won’t deny justice to anyone or discriminate against them.” And then she mumbled, “Yeah. Maybe if you’re rich.”

Her comment seemed to come out of nowhere, and I had the sense that I should disagree with her about it, but realized that she was at least partly right. So, instead of commenting, I led her around the building to the southwest side to show her the second Latin inscription, but before I could, she pointed angrily at the building. “Can you even believe that?”

She wasn’t pointing at the Latin phrase.

“What?” I asked.

“There.”

She pressed a light finger against my jaw and turned my head toward the marble lettering above an ornate stone doorway near the corner of the building. The sign had two words: Judges Entrance.

“It’s been up there for like a hundred years,” she said.

“So? It’s where the judges go in.”

“You’re kidding me? It doesn’t bother you?”

“Why should it?”

“It’s missing an apostrophe.”

OK.

As I was trying to figure out how to respond to that, she scanned the phrase I’d led her to this side of the building to see: “OK. So 211 that one’s from Cicero. It’s a lot more common. We learned it in Latin class. It means, ‘The law does unfairness to no one, injustice to no one.’”