Steven James - The Knight

She was trying to convince herself that the man who’d hit her and then tied her up was not the Day Four Killer. He was the last person on earth she would have ever suspected.

But it was him, there was no denying She heard the doorbell ring and she tried to scream, to yell for help, but was barely able to make a sound.

The sound of the dispatch radio stopped.

The doorbell rang again.

Then, heavy footsteps pounded through the house. She strained to get free.

The front door opened. She heard a cry. A short scuffle.

A thud.

And then the voice of her attacker, “Well, this isn’t quite what I had in mind, but you’ll do.”

I whipped through the fifty-one names, but I didn’t remember seeing any of the men at Rachel’s and I didn’t have enough information to figure out which of them might be John.

Then a thought: John sent the pot of basil and the handwritten note to Amy Lynn. She was the only other person besides myself whom he’d personally contacted.

He chose her, Pat. Just like he chose you.

Janie’s newspaper lay on the counter. I flipped to Amy Lynn’s political column and pointed at her headshot just beneath the title. “Janie, does this woman ever come in here?”

She nodded. “Sure. I’ve seen her.”

“Did you ever see any guys checking her out? Watching her? Maybe following her?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“What about guys meeting her here?” Cheyenne said. “Flirting with her? Coming on to her?”

“Usually, she’s with this one blond guy. But he wasn’t in any of those pictures you showed me.”

“Reggie has brown hair, Pat,” Cheyenne said. “It’s someone else.”

I’d only shown Janie pictures of the known victims, not the fifty-one men.

I suspected that many of the government personnel files would be incomplete and lack a photo, so I copied the names, surfed to the Department of Motor Vehicles records and quickly downloaded the driver’s license photos for all of the men. I handed the phone to Janie again. “OK, one more time. The guy she came in with; see if he’s one of these men.”

“I’m not sure I’m really being very helpful-”

“Please,” Cheyenne said. “You’re doing great.”

Finally, with Cheyenne’s encouragement, Janie accepted the cell. And I closed my eyes and rotated the cube in my mind.

Desperately, desperately, Amy Lynn tried to think of a way to get free. But the only things in the closet were shoes, hangers, dresses, blouses.

Something. There had to be something!

Dim light seeped beneath the door.

She peered around the closet.

No. Nothing.

She twisted. Repositioned herself.

Her leg bumped into one of her dresses and she heard the hanger rattling on the bar above her.

And she realized how she could get away.

A puzzle with so many pieces.

Who could have found Sebastian Taylor? Who could have worked with Grant Sikora to plan Basque’s assassination? Who could have known the response times and the fact that I was on the task force? Who had access to my unlisted phone number and to I opened my eyes. “That’s it.”

Cheyenne furrowed her brows. “What’s it?”

If I was right, the killer had been right under my nose the whole time. And he had the perfect alibi-but I couldn’t be sure yet. There was one more thing I needed to check.

I calculated the time difference between Denver and DC and realized that Angela Knight would still be at her desk at cybercrime.

“Pat, talk to me,” Cheyenne said. I could tell she was getting frustrated.

“Let me check with cybercrime first, but I think I might know who John is.”

I used Cheyenne’s phone, dialed Angela’s number.

Janie was still scrolling through the fifty-one DMV photos.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Angela picked up. “Hello. This is Special Agent-”

“Angela. It’s Pat.”

“Oh, I just sent you the address.”

“What address?”

“For Paul Lansing.”

I blinked. “Angela, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Six minutes ago you sent me an email request for a locate on Paul Lansing, formerly of Minneapolis, Minnesota.”

A rising uneasiness. “I didn’t send you a request.”

“It came from your computer.”

A request for Paul Lansing? From my computer?

You left your computer at your parents’ house, Pat!

Paul… from Minneapolis…

Tessa must have found an old address for her dad.

A mixture of anger and a strange kind of loneliness shot through me. “Angela, you said you already replied?”

“Yes.” Her confusion had shifted to concern. “What’s going on?” This can wait. Find John.

“I’ll explain later, just don’t send me any more emails until I call you back. For now, pull up those audio files I sent you earlier. I’m wondering about the caller’s location.”

“I told you before, I wasn’t able to get a lock on-”

“I know, I know, but can you isolate the background sound on the first call? Separate the audio tracks from the two sides of the conversation, analyze them individually? Can you do that?”

“Sure.” But she sounded a little reluctant. “Just a sec.”

Amy Lynn struggled against the ropes binding her hands behind her back, trying, trying to reach another dress. If she could just get hold of a wire hanger, she could use the hooked end to work at the knots.

But even though she’d managed to pull down five dresses so far, no hangers had dropped to the floor.

She heard her captor dragging a body into the bedroom.

Hurry! You need to hurry!

She leaned as far to the right as she could and grabbed one more dress.

Tugged. Rolled.

It slumped to the floor.

And this time the hanger fell with it, bouncing off her shoulder and landing on the carpet beside her face.

After only a few seconds, I heard Angela mumble, “That’s odd,” and when she said those two words I knew what she’d found.

“The ambient noise,” I said. “It’s from both sides of the conversation, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But that would mean that the first anonymous tip-”

“Was placed from inside the dispatch office.”

“But that’s…”

“Yes.”

“Here!” Janie tapped the phone. “This is the guy.” She turned the phone so Cheyenne and I could see the photo. “I saw him come in with that reporter a bunch of times.”

Even before I looked at the picture I already knew who she was pointing at-Ari Ryman, the ex-Marine who’d played the audio tapes for us in the dispatch office.

The Day Four Killer.

I handed Cheyenne her phone. “Quick. Call HQ, see if Ari Ryman is there.”

A flood of emotions crossed her face as she looked at Ari’s photo.

“The guy from dispatch? You think he’s John?”

“Yes, I do. Please, I’ll explain in a minute.”

As Cheyenne made the call, I turned to Janie. “You’re sure? The reporter, she used to come in with that man?”

“Yeah,” she lowered her voice. “I think they might have been having an affair. You work here long enough, you watch people, you can usually tell when two people are… you know.”

I let my thoughts fly through the facts that had led me to suspect Ari: as an EMS dispatcher he would have had access to my unlisted phone number, known the task force members’ names and our response time, and been able to pull up information about the hospital and the morgue; he was an ex-Marine.

He would have learned hand-to-hand combat.

The call came from inside the dispatch office.

And he hung out with Amy Lynn Greer at Rachel’s Cafe, the place where the killer apparently hunted for his victims.