Steven James - The Knight

But maybe not.

Then a thought.

Maybe I wouldn’t have to wait for them.

I wrote a few more notes on my pad, then rolled the pen through my fingers. “All right,” I said to Professor Bryant. “You’re proposing that, to Boccaccio, the relationship between the reader and the text, between the person and the story, was an illicit affair?”

“Yes.”

I surveyed the bookshelves again, laid the notepad and pen on his desk. “And Boccaccio was the one bringing them together, playing the role of the knight, Galeotto.” I still hadn’t seen any 853 commentaries, but the professor had thousands of books.

“That is correct.”

Yesterday, Jake had suggested that all of the killer’s stories were about the tragic consequences of love: “Cruel, fatal tales of love and loss.”

Is John acting as a matchmaker between lovers and death? Is that his game?

Professor Bryant looked impatiently at Cheyenne and me. “Now, if that’s all, I really need to-”

My phone rang. “Excuse me.” I stepped into the hallway. Through the door I could hear Cheyenne asking the professor about the specific literary significance of the stories told on day four.

As I answered the phone I walked softly to the kitchen to check on something. “Yes?”

“It’s me,” Ralph said. “I had an agent watching Calvin. She said he was at home, but he wasn’t returning my calls so I swung over to invite him to lunch. He’s not there.”

“What?” I was silently looking over Dr. Bryant’s countertops, then I quickly searched his cabinets.

“Somehow he slipped past us.”

“He’s nearly eighty years old.” Quickly, quietly, I checked the contents of the professor’s dishwasher.

“I know. I’m looking into it.”

“We need to find-”

“I said I know.” He turned his words into hammer blows. “I’m looking into it.”

“OK,” I said. “Thanks.”

He ended the call abruptly. I didn’t find what I was looking for in Dr. Bryant’s kitchen, and, discouraged on both counts, I returned to the study.

As I entered the room, I heard Professor Bryant wrapping up his explanation to Cheyenne: “You see, while the ten pilgrims were trying to escape the Black Plague, death was only one step behind them, but of course it would eventually catch up with them, just as it catches up with us all. So, in all of the stories told on this fourth day of the journey, we find the underlying, unstated theme that love itself is a plague, a sickness, that tracks us down and ends unhappily, that love inevitably leads to misery.”

Based on what we knew about the killer and his crimes up until that point, Bryant’s analysis seemed right on target.

I caught Cheyenne looking at me. I guessed that she was just checking to see if I had any follow-up questions. I shook my head.

She handed Dr. Bryant her card. “Well, thank you for your time. You’ve been very helpful. Please call us if you think of any students who’ve shown particular interest in The Decameron.”

“I will.” But by the look on his face I suspected he’d throw the card away as soon as we were out the door.

“And if we have any more questions,” Cheyenne said, “we’ll be in touch.”

“Yes.” He led us to the front door. “All right.”

“Oh, wait.” I patted my pockets. “I forgot my notepad and pen in your office. I’ll be right back.”

A few seconds later I was in Professor Bryant’s office again, this time, alone. I went around the desk to his keyboard and tapped the spacebar to still the fish swimming across the screen and wake up his iMac.

Sometimes you have to poke around for evidence to find out if there’s enough reason to even bother getting a search warrant.

At the end of the hall I heard Cheyenne say, “So, when does the semester finish up?”

The desktop screen appeared. I quickly clicked on the apple on the upper left-hand corner, scrolled to System Preferences “Two weeks,” Bryant told Cheyenne.

I clicked the “Sharing” icon. Turned on “Remote Login” and “File Sharing.”

Dr. Bryant’s voice drifted down the hall. “If you would excuse me.”

I memorized his IP address so I could remotely log into his computer. Heard footsteps. Grabbed my notepad and pen.

Closed his System Preferences.

Turned.

He was standing in the doorway. “All set?” he asked.

I held up the notepad and pen I’d purposely left on his desk a few minutes earlier. “Mission accomplished.”

After Cheyenne and I were in the car, I promptly started the engine and pulled into the street.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“He was lying.”

“How do you know?”

“The coffee.”

“The coffee?”

“It smelled like Geisha beans from Hacienda la Esmeralda’s farms in Panama, one of the world’s rarest and most expensive coffees.” “You identified the coffee by its smell?”

“Well, that and the fact that I saw the bag while I was on the phone looking around the kitchen, but that’s not the point. The point is: he doesn’t own a thermos.”

She blinked. “He doesn’t own a thermos?”

“Nope. Or a travel mug-or if he does, he’s hiding them really well. And he made twelve cups. OK, now this is just my gut reaction, but I doubt that someone who buys one hundred dollar per pound coffee would brew that many cups at once unless he was expecting someone. A coffee connoisseur brews small pots to keep his cups fresh. And it was percolating when I walked in, so I don’t think he was about to go mountain biking.”

“Did you just say your gut reaction? And here I was, thinking you were the guy who doesn’t trust his instincts.”

“I don’t,” I said. “That’s why we’re circling around the block.”

“So he lied about going mountain biking,” she said. “Do you think that matters?”

“Everything matters.”

Cheyenne cleared her throat, ever so slightly, but I noticed. “You know, this is the seventh case I’ve worked with you, and you’ve said that at some point in every one of those investigations.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Must be a quirk.” I parked behind a minivan near the intersecting street closest to Dr. Adrian Bryant’s house. “Let’s see who he’s meeting.”

A few moments later, Bryant left the house, looked up and down the street, then slipped into his BMW and backed out of the driveway. He didn’t take his mountain bike with him. “Hmm,” I said. “A slight change of plans for the professor. No visitors, and I guess the biking trip can wait.”

“What do you think?” Cheyenne asked. “Follow him or let him go?”

I looked at my watch: 12:32.

In twenty-eight minutes Jake Vanderveld would begin sharing his psychological profile of the killer. “Follow him. That way we’ll have an excuse for missing Jake’s briefing.”

She took a moment to evaluate my comment. “You’re kidding.”

“Yes. Maybe.”

“Well, you’re the one in the driver’s seat this time. You can take me wherever you like.”

Man, this woman loved her double entendres.

And I didn’t mind them so much either.

Maybe if we were lucky, Bryant would do something illegal so we could arrest him and Cheyenne and I would have a good excuse for missing the briefing.

Bryant entered the tangled web of subdivision streets that surrounded his house, and I followed him, staying far enough back so that he wouldn’t see me.

And I memorized the route he took as we drove.

Steven James

The Knight

Tessa heard Patrick’s mother return from church and start setting plates on the table for lunch.

The diary didn’t include entries every day, and sometimes Tessa’s mom would skip a week or even a month just like most bloggers do. And often, instead of writing, she would paste in a letter or a photograph, but still, Tessa walked with her mother like a friend, like a sister, through her first year of college and into the beginning of the summer that followed.