Steven James - The Knight

The cable news networks had picked up on it and the entire Denver metroplex was bracing for what one cable anchorman called “The next troubling saga of unimaginable evil.”

And Amy Lynn loved every minute of it.

Ever since Ari called her, she’d been doing what she did best, poking around and digging up facts that she wasn’t supposed to find out about.

And if she could just track down a little more background about some of the victims, she could have the second article ready to post by tomorrow morning.

She was online, fact-checking the times of the murders, when her phone vibrated. Reggie.

“Hey, dear,” she said, playing the role of the loving wife.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” His voice was dark and accusatory. “You posted that article? Tell me the truth.”

“What article?”

“The one on the Internet. The one everyone is talking about. About the homicides.”

“Of course not, no. Rhodes told me not to write about the killings.” And she found that it wasn’t difficult to say the words. Eventually, after she found a publisher, she could straighten things out with Reggie. Smooth things over, but for now, she needed some space. “Besides, I’ve been busy on this baseball piece.” She’d turned that in yesterday, but it seemed like a reasonable thing to say.

Silence.

“I swear, Reggie.”

Still no reply.

“I wouldn’t lie to you. You know that.”

Finally, he sighed softly. “OK, you’re right. It’s just, I don’t want you involved with any of this.”

“I know.”

“You know how much I love you. How much I want to protect you.”

Good grief.

“I know.”

“It’s just, I keep thinking I should be the one to protect you and Jayson, instead of some feds.” He didn’t bother hiding his contempt for the FBI. And then, he set about once again trying to convince her that she didn’t need to stay in protective custody. “I could take a few days off. I can take care of you-”

“I know you can.”

“How about this: I’ll take off work tomorrow. We’ll all go home. We’ll spend the day together as a family.”

She mulled over his proposal and was surprised to find herself actually considering it.

Yes, she’d enjoyed the privacy of being able to work in solitude at the safe house today, but tomorrow she would probably need to get out, follow some leads, do some interviews…

“Reggie, I think it’d be great to be with you, but I don’t want us to be bothered with all these cops and agents following us around-”

“I can take care of that.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“I’ll leave as long as it’s only you.”

“Great, that’s great. I get off at six tonight. I can pick you up then.”

“No. My car is here, remember? I’ll meet you at home.”

A slight pause. “Yes. OK. It’s going to be better this way. You’ll see.”

They said good-bye and ended the call.

So, this might be just what she needed.

Even if the feds did send some agents to follow her home, once Reggie got there he could get rid of them. She’d make sure that he did. And then, tomorrow when it was only Reggie with her, she would find a way to slip away. He and Jayson could have a Daddy Day.

Oh yes. This was going to work out very well.

She ignored Jayson’s whining in the other room and began to edit her next article.

Tessa’s arm hurt.

She hadn’t been cutting as much recently, and she’d pressed the blade a little too hard. The blood totally weirded her out, and it seemed like there was more than there should have been, and in the end, she’d had to bandage the cut.

But at least Patrick and Martha didn’t know. They would have probably been mad, or worse, disappointed.

And the bummer thing was, it hadn’t really helped.

Not really.

Half an hour ago, after Patrick left for the airport, she’d driven to her house with Martha to pick up her schoolbooks and clothes. The undercover cops followed them the whole way, ever so stealthily.

How nice.

From past experience, she knew that when Patrick testified at a trial he was sometimes called back to the stand several days in a row, so she wasn’t exactly convinced he was going to make it home by Monday afternoon. She threw a couple extra changes of clothes into an overnight bag just in case. Then she grabbed her jewelry box and the Rubik’s Cube.

On the drive back to Martha’s, she was glad her step-grandmother didn’t give her any trite advice on how to deal with everything, because it wouldn’t have helped. Instead, Martha just drove quietly beside her, and it seemed to Tessa that maybe that was exactly what she needed.

But maybe it wasn’t, because all the junk was still there inside her.

The twisted, angry feelings weren’t going away. Not at all.

By the time they made it to Martha’s house, Tessa had realized she definitely needed a way to keep herself from thinking about her arm and her mom and her dad and the pot of basil and everything that had happened in the last couple days.

Writing didn’t seem to do it. Cutting hadn’t really helped.

She needed something else to think about.

Yesterday, she’d promised Dora that she would read the story of Pandora’s Box this week.

That should do it.

She surfed to an online version and pulled it up.

It didn’t take her long at all to read four different versions of the story of Prometheus and Pandora, and in the end she found that Dora had been right-the story did have a surprise ending. She’d expected that the last thing out of the box might have been disease or famine or death, but it wasn’t.

No, actually it was the opposite “Is there anything you need, Tessa?” Martha called up the stairs.

“No, I’m good.”

As she slid her laptop aside, she noticed her stack of textbooks staring at her, and she remembered her exams coming up in the morning. Normally, she could pretty much ace her tests without studying, but maybe that was just what she needed to do to get her mind off everything.

So Tessa pulled out her trig book and tried to disappear into the numbers and equations, but her thoughts kept drifting back to Paul, the man who’d written to her mother and begged to be a part of her life. And as she thought of him, she realized that her arm was no longer the part of her that hurt the most.

5:02 p.m.

It was starting to look like I wouldn’t be leaving Denver tonight.

Already our flight had been delayed for nearly an hour because of the late-season snowstorm rolling down the Rockies, and the gate agent kept reassuring us that we would still be taking off, but with the amount of snow falling on the tarmac I had my doubts.

At first as I’d waited, I called to check on Tessa. My mother assured me that she’d spoken with her only a few minutes earlier and that she was fine and reading in her bedroom.

Then, since it looked like I’d be using Tessa’s phone at least until tomorrow evening, if not longer, I logged in to my federal account and synched her cell with my address book so I would have access to all of my contacts.

When I hung up, I saw I’d missed a call from Cheyenne, so I gave her a shout, and she informed me that she’d just left Jake’s second briefing and that it had been “just as informative and productive as the first.”

“Too bad I missed it. Any word on Bryant?”

“Here’s the thing: when he left the Denver News building, Benjamin Rhodes was with him.”

“Rhodes? Amy Lynn’s boss?”

“Yes. They stopped for a late lunch at a Mexican place near DU and then went to Bryant’s house. I just spoke with one of the officers assigned to watch them. He told me that both men are still there.”