Checkmate_The Bowers Files

  “Good. Thanks.”

  When we hung up Ralph said, “Anything?”

  “Not yet.” I turned to Tessa. “You were saying?”

  “It might be lyrics from a song or a refrain from a poem. Could even be something contemporary.”

  “Wouldn’t they show up online?”

  “Maybe,” she acknowledged. “But it could be that someone translated the phrase from English into Latin and that would mean they might have used a slightly different word order or syntax. So, the lyrics might not have come up if you searched for them with those specific words.”

  “It would be some pretty dark lyrics, don’t you think?” Ralph said.

  She shrugged. “Not really.”

  “Any idea on bands?” I asked her.

  “I mean, House of Blood or maybe Death by Suzie might have some lyrics like that, but I know most all of their songs, so . . . probably not. Maybe Boomerang Puppy—they actually have a whole song in Latin. The phrase isn’t in it, but who knows? It could be there’s a song out there that I don’t know about. I’ll do some checking.”

  She already had her phone out. “And we need to send out an inquiry into the Latin underground.”

  She’d gone through this with me before. Over the last decade there’d been a resurgence of Latin on the Web: discussions, videos, podcasts, all in Latin. An essentially dead language was being revived and revitalized by Latin geeks online.

  “Tessa, let’s say someone didn’t know Latin as well as you do and was translating from the English into Latin, or vice versa. Can you come up with some other phrases—”

  “That could have been translated that way.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking, yes.”

  “So, you’re officially asking me to help you with a case?”

  “It’s not exactly a case, it’s just—”

  She patted her hand against the air to stop me. “Sure. Let’s just pretend it’s important.”

  Some time ago I’d given her the nickname Raven, partly because of her interest in Poe and partly because, with her black hair and untamed imagination, she made me think of a free-spirited bird. And now the nickname slipped out. “That’s not what I mean, Raven, I . . .”

  “No, it’s cool. I get it, Agent Powers.”

  “Agent Powers, huh?”

  She shared a look with Ralph.

  I let them have their fun.

  Tessa retreated upstairs to look into the Latin underground, and I called Angela back to have her team do image searches on skulls, album and CD covers, different translations of the Latin—and to contact the Vatican just in case my daughter was right about their catechisms or archives.

  “Whoever sent that text to you knew how to cover his tracks,” Angela told me. “I wasn’t able to find out exactly where it came from. It was routed through a carrier in North Carolina, but the GPS seems to have come from the DC area.”

  “So North Carolina or DC?”

  “There are digital signatures that point to both. That’s what I’m saying. That’s why it stuck out to me.”

  “Interesting.”

  “And that’s not all. Lacey has been busy. Remember the list of words that the numbers in the column of the book might spell out mnemonically?”

  “Yes.”

  “And one of them was Meck Dec?” She sounded like I should know what that was referring to.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s our link.”

  “What’s our link? Meck Dec? What does that mean?”

  “The Mecklenburg Declaration.”

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “I hadn’t either, but Lacey dug it up. Before the actual Declaration of Independence was written, a year earlier, back in 1775, the people in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina—where Charlotte is located—well, they wrote up their own declaration of independence and had a local tavern owner deliver it to DC. The stories are a little conflicted from there on out, but apparently he completed his trip but the declaration was rejected. He returned to Charlotte and became something of a folk hero. Captain Jack. You know, like in Pirates of the Caribbean. But he was a tavern owner, not a quirky, fey yet gorgeous pirate.”

  “Gotcha.” I’d almost forgotten how much Angela, who is single, is in love with Johnny Depp. “So what happened to this declaration?”

  “It was destroyed in a fire, although there was an alleged copy of it printed in 1819 in the Raleigh Register.”

  “Alleged?”

  “Some of the phrases are so close to what’s found in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence that some people think he plagiarized it, others think the version printed was a fake. In any case, in Charlotte they take it all pretty seriously. They even celebrate May twentieth, the day it was signed, as Meck Dec Day.”

  So.

  That gave us three investigative threads that led to North Carolina: the stolen Colonial weaponry; the numbers scribbled in the book, if they really were referring to the Mecklenburg Declaration; and the origin of the text message.

  She said, “I’m going to forward you the list of words that can be made from the phone number you sent me. I think one of them will catch your eye.”

  “Which one is that?”

  “Trust me. You’ll know it when you see it.”

  She ended the call and a few seconds later her list of words arrived.

  Of the ones that actually contained some meaningful combination of letters, I found gam-back, ham-cab-5, I-coca-a-5, and more, but it only took a second or two for my eyes to land on the one that made the most sense.

  4-26-2225

  I-am-back

  I showed it to Ralph.

  “What are you thinking?

  “I’m thinking it’s time to call Margaret. We may need to take a road trip to North Carolina.”

  25

  “Are you sure you’re up for this?” Margaret asked me when I phoned her. “I mean, with that injury of yours?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Just a moment.” She stopped talking and then, when she came back on the line she said, “There’s a flight for Charlotte that leaves at four.”

  “What? Today?”

  “Yes. Can you be ready?”

  “Um, sure.”

  “I was hoping you would say that, because if Joint Terrorism Task Force Director René Gonzalez concurs, I would like both you and Ralph down there.”

  “And you want us to leave now, today?”

  “If that’s where everything is pointing, why not?”

  Good point.

  However, I wanted to make one thing clear before I went anywhere. “Since Jerome’s killer left a clue that connects me to this case, and now this text message was sent to me, I need to make sure Tessa is safe when Lien-hua is at work. We have a couple of agents who’ve been rotating watching the house. I want them to be put on detail until I get back.”

  “I’m sure that can be arranged.” She told me that she would contact the unit chief in charge of the scheduling at the Academy to assign another instructor to cover my classes until further notice; then she asked to speak to Ralph.

  I handed him the phone. “Margaret has something to ask you.”

  He spoke to her briefly, then told her he would call her back.

  I told Lien-hua what was going on, making sure it was okay with her if I went down to Charlotte. I sensed a little hesitation in her reply. “Sure.”

  “If you don’t want me to, I can just tell Margaret that—”

  “No, no. I do. Tessa and I will be fine. But I think you need to be the one to tell her.”

  “Sure. Of course.”

  When I shared my plans with my daughter she said, “So, does this mean those agents have to keep watching the house?”

  “When Lien-hua isn’t around, yes.
Are you going to be able to live with that?”

  “You’re gonna owe me big-time for this.”

  “I’ll make it up to you.”

  While I waited in the living room, I could hear Brin and Ralph discussing things in the kitchen. Though I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, they weren’t quieting their voices and the conversation was easy enough to make out.

  “You need to go down there.” It was Brin.

  “I need to be here for you.”

  “They were your people. The ones who were killed.”

  “And you’re my wife. And this is my daughter we’re talking about. I want to be here when our little girl comes into the world.”

  “Honey, I don’t want to be a distraction from you catching whoever—”

  “You’re not a distraction, Brin. It’s . . .” He let his voice trail off. “You’re more important to me than my work.”

  “I know that, but that’s not what’s at stake here.”

  Despite how Ralph called the shots everywhere else in his life, Brineesha was known to call one or two of them at home. Ralph was, to put it mildly, strong-willed, but when Brin put her foot down even he didn’t try to slide it aside, so I really wasn’t sure how this was going to play out.

  “When you were a Ranger you were sent on missions and you couldn’t have just opted out of one to be home for the birth of your baby. You were gone for six months one time. This’ll probably be just a couple days.”

  “And that’s one of the reasons I left the military, remember?”

  “Okay,” she said. “A compromise. Go down there. See what you can find out. You’ll only be, what? A forty-five-minute, maybe an hour-long flight away? I was in labor with Tony for nearly ten hours. If I start having contractions, I’ll call you and you can get back up here in plenty of time to see your daughter be born.”

  He was quiet, and when I heard him speaking again I could tell he was on the phone. “Yeah, Margaret, it’s Ralph. I go to Charlotte under one condition . . . Uh-huh . . . I fly back whenever I need to, day or night—if Brineesha goes into labor—so I can be here for the birth of my baby girl . . . Yes . . . Right. The Bureau picks up the bill. That’ll work. That’s it, then. Alright.”

  A moment later he emerged from the kitchen and announced to me, “Pack your things, bro. We’re going to Charlotte.”

  PART III

  Broken Blades

  26

  They played together as children, Corrine and her brother did.

  The two of them lived with their parents on the edge of town near a field that spread out wide and wild into the Maine countryside. In the summertime they would go there, lay in the meadowed grass, and watch the clouds build and billow and form high overhead. And they would talk about what they wanted to be when they grew up.

  She dreamed of being a movie star and living a life of glamour and wonder and beauty and fame.

  He wanted to be a forest ranger—not a baseball player or a fireman or anything like that. No, he liked the woods, camping, time by himself.

  And so they dreamed their summers away, there in the meadow with the skittery sound of grasshoppers hidden around them in the waving grass.

  In retrospect she wondered if she should have noticed something.

  How could you not wonder? Now, looking back—

  How could anyone not wonder?

  When you find out the evil someone is capable of, when you see what he is capable of becoming, how can you not wonder if you should have noticed a sign of it beforehand?

  Surely there was something that would have given away what was going to happen? Something small, perhaps: the way he spoke to other children or the way he treated their puppy or the look in his eyes when he got into trouble.

  But no, there were no clues to make anyone suspicious.

  He was a normal boy.

  Just a normal boy.

  She remembered when she was twenty-four and first heard the news that he’d been arrested, that he’d been found at a crime scene where several women had been murdered.

  And not just murdered. Cannibalized.

  Yes, she remembered that day.

  And for some reason her first reaction had not been shock.

  It should have been.

  That’s the thing.

  For someone in her situation, for a young woman to find out that her older brother was accused of such things, it should have shocked her.

  But it had not.

  And ever since then, she had wondered why that was.

  If accusations like that about someone so close to you didn’t shake you to the core, then surely you should have seen it coming.

  Signs.

  She should have seen signs.

  But she had not.

  No one had.

  When the crimes became known, when the verdict was read, the media had pressed her with questions about her upbringing, about her parents, trying to pin down a reason for her brother’s actions—abuse, neglect, a brain injury of some type; anything so they wouldn’t have to admit that he was a successful, popular, well-adjusted guy who just started abducting, murdering, and eating people.

  Psychiatric problems? Had he taken medication? Been depressed when he was growing up?

  No.

  He’d been a good boy. A good son. A good brother, playing quietly with his sister under the still summer skies, daydreaming about what they would do someday when they were grown and all their dreams would come true.

  No, he hadn’t been a troubled child. And that’s what frightened people the most, because if that happened to him, then the same thing could perhaps happen to anyone.

  And yes.

  That was it.

  That’s what made everyone so uncomfortable.

  The people who knew him had trusted him.

  Everyone in the family had loved him.

  She had loved him.

  Did love him.

  He was her brother.

  Their parents were gone now, both dead. Natural causes. All their other relatives had disappeared into anonymity after the trial. Corrine was the only one left.

  She knew that he loved her. She had never doubted that.

  She’d been married briefly when she was in her late twenties, and after the divorce she’d decided to hang on to her married name. It didn’t keep all the reporters and bloggers away, but it did help her establish a small sense of anonymity.

  Corrine Monique Davis.

  Formerly, Corrine Monique Basque.

  The sister of Richard Devin Basque, the killer, the cannibal, who had started off his criminal career by torturing and slaughtering and cannibalizing women who reminded him of her.

  The sister he loved.

  * * *

  And now.

  Here she was.

  In a long, narrow tomb, trapped in this tunnel that dropped off into nothingness two hundred steps from the water. She had almost fallen off the edge, almost lost her balance when she found no ground for her foot as she mapped out in her mind the length of the tunnel.

  Then when she raised her hand above her, she found one final beam where the ceiling ended. It must have been how the man had gotten her into this tunnel.

  The walls ended too.

  A shaft.

  To the surface? A shaft that leads to the surface?

  She’d felt an immediate surge of hope, but it was short-lived because when she tried leaning out and looking up, all she saw was stark blackness. No light. Not even a tiny dot of daylight in the distance.

  Maybe it’s night? Maybe there’ll be light coming down if you wait here long enough?

  She reached out in search of a rope, in search of anything, but there was nothing there. Just blank, eternal darkness.

  She screamed until she lost her voice, begged
the silent, unfeeling emptiness to help her.

  And she prayed.

  How long had passed now since she’d prayed last?

  It didn’t matter.

  There was no reply.

  No help came.

  A stone tossed into the shaft told her it was a long way to the bottom.

  A very long way.

  The tears came in waves—she would be fine for minutes, for hours, for what seemed like days, and then she would find herself wracked with tears again.

  But they didn’t offer her any comfort.

  She’d started to shiver more, and though she was walking back and forth to keep moving and to stay warm, she was getting tired and she was afraid to sit down and sleep.

  Afraid that she might stop shivering.

  She was thirsty but, still leery of drinking the water at the tunnel’s other end, she opted to let drops from the ceiling partway down the tunnel land on her tongue. But it didn’t quell her growing thirst.

  The only option she had right now was to persevere, to hold on, to keep moving, and to trust forces bigger than herself to bring her help before it was too late.

  She wasn’t sure if she should wait here by the shaft. It seemed like the best option for being found.

  But what if that man comes back?

  Maybe you should go back by the water.

  No. What if someone else comes looking and misses you because you’re too far away?

  She tried evaluating things, but her thoughts seemed muddy and thick. One moment it was clear that the obvious choice was to stay here, then the obvious choice seemed to be to wait by the water.

  But why? Why by the water?

  You could swim. You’re a good swimmer. You could swim to safety, find where the water goes—

  What are you even thinking, Corrine? That’s crazy.

  Finally, she decided on the sensible thing, the logical thing: to wait by the shaft where she could see if someone was coming down to save her.

  Her thoughts returned to her brother.

  To summers with him as a child.