The Chessman Read online

  One recent ex summed it up quite succinctly: “They had voids where their hearts should be—a couple of turds in search of a punchbowl.”

  Alibis of these girlfriends withstood double scrutiny.

  Special Agent Dan Kurtz, the bureau’s Yoda of firearm examiners, felt fairly certain that the flattened bullet—determined to be a .45 ACP cartridge, which had passed through the center of Alain Zalentine’s forehead and out the back of his skull, then smashed through the wall tile and lodged into the sheetrock behind—most likely came from a Sig Sauer P220. Hell, Cady thought, some FBI agents still carried their Sigs for old times’ sake. Enough juice to make a noticeable entry wound and a god-awful exit. The P220 was likely the same gun the UNSUB used to kill Adrien Zalentine on the sailboat.

  Kurtz, genius that he was, even passed a digital image of the bullet through the IBIS database—the Integrated Ballistics Identification System—to see if he could link the Sig Sauer P220 that fired the bullet that killed Alain Zalentine to other crimes used by the same gun. Unfortunately, no matches came back. Cady figured the odds of his ever finding the actual Sig Sauer for Kurtz to positively match striations was right up there with his collaring sasquatch or stumbling across the Holy Grail. The shooter would have been a fool not to toss the Sig Sauer into Chesapeake Bay on the return trip from his tête-à-tête with Adrien Zalentine.

  Cady closed the Zalentine file. He looked at his uneaten Reuben and then at the digital clock by the hotel room’s double bed. Almost two o’clock in the morning. Cady was exhausted, mentally and physically, but he wondered how well he’d sleep with thoughts of the Zalentine twins dancing in his head. Cady walked into the bathroom, splashed water on his face, and asked himself repeatedly why he’d agreed to cold-case this for Jund.

  Then he returned to the Zalentine files.

  Cambridge PD traced the Ice Hash back to some small-time yuppie dealer named Courtenay LaMotte, a man who expanded his client list by fluttering about the upper-crust watering holes in Cambridge and neighboring communities. Turned out Courtenay LaMotte’s real name was Jim Webber. Webber was able to minimize his overhead on account of living out of his mother’s basement. He was twenty-six but looked all of fourteen, a tall twig of a boy who hadn’t yet begun to shave.

  A black Cambridge detective named Allan Sears picked Webber up, brought him back to the station, tossed him in an empty interrogation room for three hours—no chairs, no table, no potty breaks—then came back in, Mirandized him, and informed Webber he was going down hard for the two Zalentine killings. Webber, sobbing like a baby, walked Sears through every dime bag he’d ever sold since junior high. The Zalentines were his best customers, always paid upfront in cash, even tipped him and placed future orders. He had absolutely no motive to kill Alain or Adrien. Unfortunately, burger and gas station receipts corroborated Webber’s alibi that he’d been in Virginia, buying ecstasy tablets from his source, when Alain and Adrien had been murdered.

  Detective Sears came to Adrien’s condo to let Agent Cady know the results of the Ice Hash connection, walked in, saw Cady standing in the kitchen, looked at the island, then turned and left. A minute later Sears came back in and said, “Have you checked his hidey-hole?”

  “What do you mean?” Cady asked.

  “In Alain’s kitchen space, the island is Better Homes & Gardens. Open cupboards below the tabletop to stack the fancy pots and pans they never used. But Adrien has his island space walled off, looks okay with the wooden doors on one side, but that’s how it looks in, say, my house. Certainly not Better Homes & Gardens.”

  Cady squatted down. “You’re right. Both condos mirror each other, except for this. Why would the designer go pedestrian in one condo and high class in the other?”

  “More likely Adrien did some remodeling,” Sears said. “When I worked in Baltimore, we had this child pornographer dead to rights, a real sick piece of work. He wasn’t downloading, he was distributing. We warranted his house, found his cameras and picture rooms, but no pictures, not even digitals in the various cameras. So we sledge-hammered the island and hit the mother lode. Eight cameras full of the most disturbing shit you can imagine, and about twenty pounds of hard copies. He’s doing life in Hagerstown—that is, if the other inmates let him.”

  Cady began knocking on the wooden panel of the island. “So we should bust this open?”

  “Well,” Sears said, stooping over and joining Cady, “we found out after the sledgehammer that there was a trick latch.”

  Sears got under the countertop, ran his hands across the wood, felt a seam, and then checked up and down the side panel. An idea occurred to him and he backed up six inches. He began running his fingers underneath the countertop.

  “Yup,” Detective Sears said. He pressed some latch under the lip and a section of siding popped open an inch. “Tree house cool.”

  Cady looked at Sears. “I’m getting you a job application.”

  Sears had a baritone laugh. “No thanks. I came here from Baltimore to lower my blood pressure.”

  Cady swung back the partition. A Gardall wall safe with some kind of push button electronic lock faced him and Sears. “I’ll be damned.”

  “What do you think is in there?” Sears asked.

  “Remember, these are Zalentines, so my guess would be upper-end diamond jewelry—rings, watches—the type that costs more than we make in a year. Maybe some rec drugs. Maybe a wad of cash.”

  “Your team come across any combo numbers?”

  “No,” Cady said. “We’ll call the parents; see if they know anything about it. Otherwise we’ll get a driller.”

  Cady’s guess at the wall safe’s contents proved incorrect. And the next morning—when the Gardall was drilled open—everything changed.

  Chapter 6

  “Shakespeare got it almost right: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’ But he left out the most important part—how we should first hang ‘em upside down from trees and pour boiling olive oil down their assholes.”

  Stouder nodded quick agreement to the Goliath-sized rummy sitting next to him at the bar and wished the bartender, who at first glance appeared to be the only other person in the Brass Rail at 10:00 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, hadn’t immediately deserted him after pouring Stouder a glass of the House wine. Well, calling it the House wine might be a bit of hyperbole, as Stouder’s glass of Merlot tasted like something a skunk might utilize to defend itself. Of course the taste might have something to do with the predicament Stouder found himself in.

  It hadn’t helped when Stouder turned about on the bar stool to unexpectedly discover this barfly on the seat to his left, invading Stouder’s personal proximity, the drunkard’s face all but ten inches from his. The stranger looked like Mr. Clean, white t-shirt, all bald with white eyebrows, but sans the earring. And what kept Stouder nodding like a bobble-head was not the man’s bread-loaf-sized biceps or the way his knuckles looked like tree roots, the kind you’d spend half a day chopping at in your garden, or the Canadian Club Mr. Clean kept pouring into a shot glass and from there straight down his gullet, one shot glass after another—but rather the manner in which Mr. Clean vocalized his passionate disdain for the legal profession.

  “At least when a plumber gouges you, you get a working shitter out of the deal. But these fucking lawyers have no sense of proportional value. No sense whatsoever. You pay ‘em to review that boilerplate bullshit whenever you buy a house, right? You know that small print they pretend to read at their desk in front of you?”

  Stouder nodded again, repeatedly.

  “Then the fuckers turn around and bill as though they’d just litigated the Scopes-Monkey trial. Un-fucking-real.”

  Stouder had gotten another correspondence from Richaard Gere the previous night. It had merely stated The Brass Rail, 29th and Lex, 10:00 a.m. Tuesday. Stouder had been up all night wondering if he should bring the authorities into the situation, especially since he was part of the authorities. These hooligans could find the
mselves on the receiving side of some serious time for attempting to blackmail a New York State Deputy Attorney General. But there was, after all, the matter regarding his little secret for him to consider. What did these people know and what could they show? He’d rescheduled his morning with a hasty excuse about illness and a fabricated doctor’s appointment and scampered out before he’d have to deepen the fib.

  “The cocksucker that handled my divorce, for instance, charged me $800 every time he walked across the room to pick up a paperclip. In fact, the only guy who ever got his money’s worth out of any attorney was O.J. Simpson.”

  Mr. Clean certainly had some heartfelt convictions.

  And so, against his better judgment, Stouder sat still and periodically nodded his complete agreement with Mr. Clean and wondered how much longer he should give it before he scampered the hell out of The Brass Rail.

  “Truth be told, I’d done some things—things that in the light of day I ain’t proud of—that killed the marriage. I’m big enough to own that. Now my ex ain’t necessarily over it, but we get along. Hell, I stopped by her apartment last month for some drinks and got the balls licked. But that’s not my point. My point is the bills this fucker kept serving at me were unconscionable. Talk about kicking a fellow when he’s down.”

  Stouder nodded, deeply wishing to the core of his existence that he were anyplace but here.

  “And that really irked me,” the drunk continued. “That’s a word you don’t hear much anymore, but it irked the living shit out of me. Every time I cut him a new check, it was like twisting corkscrews into my eyeballs. But I kept a stiff upper lip, patted him on the back when the papers finally came through. I even bought him a drink—he even ordered some of that red piss you’re drinking—when I cut him his final check at a tavern not unlike this one. All amiable and ain’t you just done me the biggest fucking favor in the world and all that kind of shit because you’ve got to do things right and let a little time go by. You know what I mean?”

  Stouder nodded by rote.

  “I even passed along some business referrals. You know, to dicks I could care less about. I even sent the shyster a Happy Holidays card that first Christmas after the divorce. All happy times are here again and bullshit. But, you see, I didn’t forget his gouging. I just couldn’t move on, I guess. So after a proper amount of time had passed, I came to visit him late one night, and woke his ass out of bed with an invoice of my own, know what I mean?”

  Stouder started to nod, but paused and stared at Mr. Clean.

  “A little something that needed to be paid in full, an account that needed settling. You should’ve seen that fucker’s pale face. Sonofabitch—that’s right!” Mr. Clean got excited, dug something out of his pocket and slapped it on the top of the bar, right next to Stouder’s glass of Merlot. “That’s how I came about this little coin purse.”

  Stouder looked at the poor excuse for a coin purse sitting on the counter in front of him. Oddly shaped, the slit down the middle warped open, and looking more like one of those rawhide pig ears his mother bought for Tanzy, the poodle, than any coin purse Stouder had ever seen before.

  “That’s one hundred percent yam sac, that is,” Mr. Clean said. “One hundred percent.”

  Stouder felt the bile rise in the back of his throat and struggled to keep it down.

  “You’re going to want to head into the back parlor, beyond the pool tables.” Mr. Clean now sounded sober. “They’re ready for you.”

  Stouder stood still in the parlor’s entryway, trying to recoup from an overly invasive frisk by Mr. Clean. Not a big room, certainly nothing to host any type of event Stouder could think of outside a biker gangbang. A single circular table sat in the middle of the room. It was covered with a lime-green tablecloth that may have been new during the Kennedy Administration. A speakerphone sat atop the table. Next to it an inch-thick manila folder labeled with Stouder’s name. One wooden chair sat in front of the table. It appeared fairly obvious where he was meant to be seated.

  “Do come in, Deputy Attorney General Stouder. Please, sir, make yourself at home.” A voice emanated from the conference phone. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you in the flesh.”

  Stouder took three steps into the room when the door to the back parlor slammed shut. He almost hit the ceiling, and twisted about to see if there was anyone in the room with him. Completely empty.

  “Sorry about that, sir, but we need to have a little pow-wow and it just wouldn’t do for anyone to listen in, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Stouder remained standing. He bit his lower lip, tried not to tremble, and recited the lines he’d rehearsed on the drive over. “If you think you can intimidate a New York State Executive Deputy Attorney General with these juvenile antics, you are sadly mistaken. If I don’t call my secretary in fifteen minutes, she’s to turn over an envelope to my team of prosecutors containing our correspondences, my thoughts on the issue, as well as the address of this…” Stouder looked around the room disdainfully and continued, “…establishment.”

  “By all means, Deputy Attorney General, by all means you’ll be able to call your secretary. I’m afraid we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot.” The voice sounded impossibly mellow, like a midnight deejay on a jazz station telling the audience about the mild night temp before putting on another track of Miles Davis. “And we probably shouldn’t have used St. Nick as a greeter.”

  St. Nick must be Mr. Clean, Stouder thought. “Your man is a drunkard!”

  “Now, now, Deputy Attorney General Stouder, before we go casting aspersions at St. Nick—who truly does play Santa Claus for the kiddies in December—did you know that Ulysses S. Grant ordered a barrel of whiskey to always be on hand for his beck and call? The good general would dip his cup into it to quench his thirst. Shall we discuss how Winston Churchill drank a bottle of wine with breakfast?”

  Stouder stared at his fingernails. “And your point is?”

  “St. Nick has special talents, sir. Let’s just say he gets the sausage made and leave it at that. Give me a handful of functional alcoholics like St. Nick and I can rule the world.” The voice on the speakerphone sounded more and more like one of those neutered hosts on NPR, no longer a late-night jazz deejay. “Deputy Attorney General, you’ve heard of the carrot and stick approach? You know, for rewarding good behavior and punishing bad?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s good, sir, because, and I hate to brag, but the file in front of you is one hell of a big stick. By all means page through it if you don’t believe me.”

  “If you’ve done your homework, you will know that nothing concerns me more than the health and welfare of children. I have been a child advocate for years, well before I was appointed to my current position. I’ve donated thousands to child shelters across the United States.”

  “Of course you have, Deputy Attorney General,” the NPR jazz deejay voice said slowly, as though signing off for the night. “Of course you have.”

  “Then let’s dispense with this ridiculous masquerade. I’ve been researching how sexual predators utilize the Internet to prey on unsuspecting children. I will shortly be announcing the formation of a task force to tackle this very issue. I have respected colleagues by the dozens who know about my advocacy in this area.” Stouder had hit upon most of his rehearsal points. “Nothing in that folder will mean a thing to anyone.”

  “Humor me, Deputy Attorney General Stouder. You really don’t want St. Nick to walk through these pages with you, do you, sir? I have a queasy stomach.”

  At the mention of St. Nick/Mr. Clean, Stouder opened the folder and paged quickly through the first section, which contained transcripts of his chat room talks with Ricky and the others.

  “Meaningless.” Stouder threw up a hand. “And very likely doctored.”

  “Page on, Deputy Attorney General Stouder,” the NPR speaker voice pushed.

  The next section contained side-by-side pictures of him, both in and out of his costume. Stouder turned white.
But that wasn’t what sent him into shock. What nearly sent Executive Deputy Attorney General P. Campton Stouder into a state of anaphylactic seizure was that the pictures had been taken of him in his master bathroom. The bastards had been in his house.

  “Amazing what those Nanny Cams can pick up, isn’t it, sir?”

  Stouder felt his hands begin to quake, but he did his best to stay in character. “You’ve just tacked on several more felony counts to your blackmail scheme.”

  “Once you see a pattern, Deputy Attorney General Stouder, everything else is a cakewalk.” The NPR voice no longer sounded casually ironic.

  Stouder ceased speaking as he paged through the remainder of the folder. Pictures of him on the prowl, outside Ricky’s house, at a theatre restroom, next to a boy at a urinal.

  “If you see any you’d want for holiday cards, I can get you a discount at Proex,” the NPR voice remarked.

  Stouder continued to page through the photos, one after another after another. The last were a series of pictures of the boy who had been next to him at the urinal. The last document was taken from that morning’s paper, which had a picture of this same boy, who had been missing since Tuesday, since he’d gone out to play with the local kids and never returned. Nor had any of the neighborhood kids seen him that day.