Steven James - The Knight

Injustice to no one.

So now, as I leaned my hand against the glass and thought of that day with Tessa, Calvin’s words from last night echoed in my mind: “Our justice system is concerned more with prosecutions and acquittals than it is with either truth or justice. You know it’s true. It’s just that we’re reticent to admit it.”

Tessa might not have agreed with the first inscription, but I was starting to doubt the truth of the second.

Because sometimes the law is unfair.

Sometimes justice isn’t carried out.

As I was considering that, I heard a knock at my office door.

I turned. “Come.”

But the door was already flying open.

Cheyenne burst into the room and slapped a manila folder onto my desk. “We know who owns the mine.”

“His name is Thomas Bennett,” she said. “He lives here in Denver; works as a weekend auditor at the Wells Fargo bank. He left work about forty-five minutes ago. Either his cell is off or he’s not answering. It might be nothing, but we can’t get a GPS lock on his car either. His wife said he never turns off his phone and he should have been home by now.”

I positioned myself in front of my keyboard. “Do you have his home address?”

“Sure.”

“Let’s plug it in here, see if he lives in the hot zone. ”

She gave me the address and while I updated the geoprofile, she told me she hadn’t come up with anything on the therapist or marriage counselor angle. “What about you?” She studied the screen. “Anything?”

“Not so much.”

Using a different color for each victim’s travel routes, I overlaid the data onto a three-dimensional map of the Denver metroplex. The result looked like a plate of multicolored spaghetti.

She pulled up a chair beside me, perhaps closer than she needed to, but I didn’t say anything. “So tell me,” she said. “What am I looking at?”

I remembered that she was familiar with some of my research, but I also knew that geospatial investigation wasn’t her specialty, so I pointed to the tangle of overlapping colors and said, “I’m trying to find John’s home base, so I input Denver’s most traveled roads based on the typical daily vehicle congestion at the times of the crimes, then I compared that with the victim’s typical travel patterns-but so far, even with Bennett’s address it doesn’t look like the data is complete enough to give us what we need.”

“OK.” She drummed her fingers on the desk. “Let’s think this through. Location and timing, right?”

“Yes.”

“We know when the anonymous tips were called in.”

“That’s right. And in most of the crimes so far, we know the times and locations of the abductions or murders. I’ve already input those.”

She stood. Paced to my bookcase. “And because of the videos from the entrance to the hospital, we know when Kelsey Nash arrived at the morgue…”

“We know when Brigitte Marcello bought the Chinese food she took to Taylor’s.”

“And,” she added, “we know that John flew to Chicago sometime after dumping Brigitte Marcello’s body, and that when he returned to Denver he drove from the airport to the morgue.”

I was about to say something, then paused. “What?”

“Well, I mean, not for certain, but at least it’s probable. Based on the audio message in the mine, we can assume that John traveled to Chicago after disposing of Brigitte Marcello’s body.”

“I don’t like to assume.”

“But you are assuming-you’re working from the premise that John didn’t fly to Chicago. Doesn’t it make sense to run your data at least once, assuming that he did?”

I stared at her for a moment.

It struck me that even though she wasn’t in the Bureau and we’d only worked half a dozen cases together over the last year, it was beginning to feel like she was my partner. And I liked how it felt.

“You might have a point,” I said.

“It pains you to have to say that, doesn’t it?”

“You have no idea.”

Thoughts of the cases I’d worked with Lien-hua tried to climb into my mind, but I slid them aside and pulled up the FAA’s archives of arrival and departure schedules for the last three days to figure out which airport John might have used.

The ranch lay on the southern edge of Clear Creek County, fifty minutes from Denver and three thousand feet higher in the Rockies than the Mile-High City.

The property contained a few rolling fields dotted with pines and was hemmed in by thick spruce forests and steep rocky cliffs. National forest land bordered the ranch on three sides.

Elwin Daniels had owned the land until three weeks ago when he bequeathed it by default to the man who was watching the blood spurt from his neck.

Red sunlight streaking the air.

And since the property lay at the end of a remote, unmarked dirt road and the good people of Clear Creek County tended to keep to themselves, Giovanni hadn’t had any trouble with neighbors stopping by to chat with the reclusive rancher he’d killed.

He turned onto Piney Oaks Road.

Less than five miles to the ranch.

It only took a few minutes to analyze the flight schedules from Denver International Airport and Colorado Springs Airport. While I did, Cheyenne pulled out an oversized map of Denver County and unfolded it on the other end of my desk.

By comparing arrival and departure schedules with the time of Friday’s anonymous tip about the location of Sebastian Taylor’s body, I realized that John would have needed to fly out of DIA instead of Colorado Springs.

To cover all my bases, I ran the names from the suspect list against the passenger manifests and, considering how careful John had been so far, I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t find any matches.

Based on the current theories of distance decay, I reorganized the data and calculated the most likely travel routes from Bearcroft Mine to Taylor’s house, from Cherry Creek Reservoir to the airport, and from the airport to Baptist Memorial Hospital at the times of day John would have been traveling.

Hit “enter.”

The hot zone shifted west of the city.

I felt the familiar thrill of being in the middle of a case as things heat up. “Do you have the list of greyhound owners?”

“Let me check with Kreger; he was heading that up.”

She tapped at her phone while I pulled up the satellite imagery of the Denver metroplex. A moment later I heard her identify herself to someone on the other end of the line.

“Ask about the greyhounds,” I said. “If anyone from Clear Creek County recently purchased one.”

She relayed the question, nodded to me as she listened to the answer, then tipped the phone away from her mouth and told me, “A man named Elwin Daniels. Ten days ago. MasterCard purchase. He lives on a ranch in the southern part of the county.”

The location lay less than two miles from the revised hot zone.

I typed in his name. Pulled up his address. Zoomed in using FALCON.

It’d been three minutes since the last satellite pass, but we had footage of a car halfway up the winding dirt road to the ranch. The Infiniti had tinted windows, so it was impossible to see the driver’s face. I focused on the rear bumper to try to read the plate number.

Cheyenne spoke into the phone, then said to me, “According to Elwin’s DMV records, he’s seventy-two years old. So, probably not our killer.”

You need to get to that ranch, Pat.

“Cheyenne.” I froze the picture. Magnified the image. “Get us a helicopter.”

Sharpened the resolution.

Yes.

Got it.

I grabbed the car’s license plate, enlarged it, then tapped at my keyboard and ran the numbers.

Beside me, Cheyenne was requesting a chopper. Dispatch must have suggested Cody Howard, the department’s chief helicopter pilot, but she told them rather brusquely, “We’ve been through this before: I don’t fly with Cody. Get us Colonel Freeman.” Her sharp tone surprised me, but then the name of the man who owned the vehicle flashed on my screen and I stopped worrying about why Cheyenne preferred to fly with the colonel.