Steven James - The Knight

Interesting.

Then Cheyenne told me that she would call me as soon as she knew more, and after we ended the call, I decided to follow up on Dr. Bryant. I typed in the IP address I’d gotten from his computer when we were at his house and remotely logged on to his system.

He wasn’t online at the moment, but I was able to access his browser’s Internet history.

And that’s where I found the porn sites.

More than a hundred of them-all hardcore S amp; M sites that exclusively featured men.

I thought about my conversation with Bryant, the pot of cof- fee he’d brewed, his dinner meeting with Rhodes, his interest in homosexual porn…

So, Rhodes and Bryant…?

All loose threads. Nothing solid. But enough to pique my interest.

I was sorting through the possible implications when the gate agent announced that the flight was now boarding, and that because of the delay, they were expediting the boarding process and welcoming passengers in all seats, all rows, to board.

So we boarded. And I let my thoughts flip through the facts of the case.

And less than twenty minutes later we were in the air and I was on my way back to Basque’s trial in Chicago.

Giovanni had placed the poison earlier in the afternoon and then driven to Bearcroft Mine.

Now, he turned on his headlamp and entered the tunnel on the west side of the mountain.

This entrance didn’t appear on any of the maps still in circulation. And, while it was possible someone had heard about it, Giovanni believed it was far more likely that, now that Thomas Bennett, the mine’s former owner, was dead, he was the only person alive who knew it was there.

It took him nearly half an hour to maneuver through the network of tunnels and arrive at the mine’s second-lowest passageway.

He lit a lantern and hung it from a hook on one of the wooden beams buttressing the ceiling.

The tunnel ended just a few feet to his right, and beside him was the six-foot-by-six-foot platform that the miners in the 1800s had used to lower the ore carts into the tunnel thirty feet further down. The platform hung from a rope looped through a double pulley attached to the beam above Giovanni’s head. He’d replaced the aging hemp rope with a new static nylon one last month. The pulleys reduced the force needed to raise and lower the platform so that a single person could manage it by himself.

A single miner.

A single murderer.

A single storyteller.

He stepped onto the platform, held one end of the rope, and then released the lever on the beam above him. A crude cam device next to the pulleys pressed against the rope, controlling the rate of the platform’s descent.

Slowly, he began to lower himself down the shaft.

The tunnel he was heading toward had never been completed when the mine was abandoned in the early 1900s. It spanned only forty feet, and was less than six feet high, which meant that once Patrick Bowers was sealed inside, he wouldn’t be able to stand up for the rest of his life.

As he descended, Giovanni inspected the line of plastic explosives he’d threaded down the walls of the shaft. Even though he had no formal explosive ordnance training, with his professional contacts it hadn’t been difficult to acquire the C-4 and learn enough rudimentary skills to rig the shaft to blow. He’d practiced in other abandoned mines over the last few months and had become relatively proficient at sealing shut mine shafts.

When he reached the bottom, he tied off the rope, synched his handheld detonator with the four wireless receivers attached to the C-4, and then looked around.

Months ago when he’d first begun investigating this mine, apart from a few pieces of rusting mining equipment, this tunnel had been completely empty, but now it was stocked with enough food and bottled water to keep one person alive for ten to twelve weeks.

After all, it wouldn’t have been nearly as satisfying of a climax if Agent Bowers died too quickly after being buried alive.

If the access shaft had been located in the middle of the tunnel, Giovanni might have been concerned about the entire tunnel collapsing when the shaft blew, but since it was on the end and he’d reinforced the tunnel’s ceiling braces, he was confident that the tunnel would withstand the explosion.

One more thing to check.

He pulled out the Matheson Analyzer.

When air moves through space it acts like a fluid, so using the Matheson, he tested the computational fluid dynamics of the oxygen level coming from the air flow of a two-inch wide rift in the wall, taking into account that the access shaft would be sealed. It took the mechanism only a few moments to make the calculations.

Yes, the oxygen would be adequate. Bowers would survive until he either starved to death or eventually went insane.

Early in his planning, Giovanni had decided that it would be more frightening for Bowers to see his tomb for himself, to search the walls, the ceiling, the ground for some possible way out, but to find none. And then, to have his light slowly fade. Slowly die as his small, enclosed world was swallowed in darkness forever. So, when the time came, Giovanni would let his captive have a flashlight.

It would make for a much better ending.

Giovanni clicked off his light and let the thick, living darkness sweep over him. He opened and closed his eyes. No visible difference.

This is what it would be like for Bowers in the end.

He listened to his heartbeat, to the steady, even sound of his breathing.

At last, light back on, he checked his watch.

He still had a forty-five-minute drive to Denver.

Tomorrow, before taking care of Bowers, he would be placing two people in his storage unit, and he needed to make sure all the preparations were in place for their stay. So he took one last look around the tunnel that Bowers would die in at the climax of his tale, then Giovanni left Bearcroft Mine and drove through the softly falling snow to Denver.

Although I could think of a thousand things I’d rather have been doing, I spent the flight to Chicago typing up my report about the courthouse incident on Friday for FBI Assistant Executive Director Margaret Wellington, detailing the circumstances involving Grant Sikora’s death.

When we arrived at O’Hare, I took a moment to email it to her before leaving the airport.

With my email program open, I noticed there weren’t any messages from Calvin. But there was one from Angela Knight, my friend in the FBI’s cybercrime division:

Pat,

About those 911 calls.

We couldn’t backtrace either of them. Nothing on the call to your landline either. Whoever made them knew how to cover his tracks.

Not much on the voice spectrograph of the 911 tapes either, but I can tell you it was the same person on each call.

The background noise on the first call is internal feedback from the dispatch office. The sound on the second tape is rain falling on the windshield of a car. And no, I can’t tell you the make and year-although I am working on it.

That’s it. More later. Be well.

– AK

So, Cowler had been right about the background sounds on the first tape, and while the rain on the second audio didn’t prove that John was in Chicago when the call was made, since a storm had been blowing through the city that morning, it did corroborate the hypothesis that he was.

I checked my voicemail.

Nothing.

Then I grabbed my bags, flagged a cab, and rode to my hotel.

Reggie was several hours late getting home from work, but when he finally arrived, Amy Lynn met him with a kiss, told him how good it was to see him, and then pointed out the window to the pair of agents sitting in a car beside the curb. “Let those guys go. I’ll be safe with you. You can protect me.”