Checkmate (16 page)

Friday, August 2
6:47 a.m.

The exercise room at the hotel consisted of a single, dated treadmill and a stained, yellow yoga mat discarded haphazardly beneath the window.

I opted for a jog outside.

With my wounded side, I had to be careful not to swing my right arm too much, which made running a little awkward, but I managed.

A wooded park nearby, enshrouded in early-morning mist, gave me a quiet place to run.

After half an hour I turned around, and on the way back to the hotel I explored a side street where I found a park with a children's playground. One bar looked about the right height and I would have loved to pump out a few sets of pull-ups, something I try to do as often as possible to stay in shape for rock climbing, but there was no way the stitches were going to stay intact if I tried something like that.

A discarded toy helicopter lay beside a rusted metal swing. The chopper was splattered with mud from a recent rain and was half-covered with dirt. I'm not sure why, but I picked it up and found that its blades were broken.

It would never fly again.

And it took me back.

Memories.

A boy.

Taken.

I was working as a detective in Milwaukee. One day a woman lost track of her five-year-old son on the Summerfest Grounds. She was nearly hysterical by the time I arrived. “He's okay,” she was saying over and over. “He has to be okay.”

But the boy wasn't okay. I was the one who found him two days later. He was still alive. The man who took him, a high school English teacher, had kept him locked in his guest bedroom and videotaped the things he'd done to him.

That boy would never be okay again.

And I was the one who had to tell his mother.

I wish I didn't know so much about crimes.

For some reason it didn't feel right to leave the helicopter there, so I took it with me.

Back in the hotel room I found Ralph doing push-ups. I had no idea how long he'd been at it. I've seen him lay out a set of seventy-five in a row before, so when I realized he was finishing a set of twenty and was sounding winded, I imagined he'd been working out for a while.

“What's with the helicopter?” He took a break, lifted his right arm, stretched his triceps.

A reminder of a time I was too late.

“A souvenir from my run.” I set it on the bedside stand.

After we'd both cleaned up and changed clothes, we left for the Field Office.

+ + + +

The bard drove to work.

A month ago he'd taken a position that allowed him access to the local museums as well as other businesses throughout the city that he'd used while he was looking
into the location of the mines. It'd made it easier to get the artifacts that he'd needed for his night with Jerome Cole.

Really, the job was perfect—only a couple of days a week, flexible hours, and it got him into places he never would have been able to enter otherwise.

He kept a low profile.

Didn't cause any trouble.

He was a good, quiet, faithful employee.

No one at work had any idea about his extracurricular activities.

+ + + +

We took Exit 3 to get to 7915 Microsoft Way, where the Charlotte Field Office was located.

“By the way,” Ralph said, “did you think it was a little cold last night in the hotel room? I was freezing.”

“Hmm . . . We'll have to take a look at that tonight.”

“Yeah. I don't want to miss out on any of my beauty sleep.”

“Now, see, you just lobbed one over the net for me and I'm not even going to spike it back at you. No snide comment coming your way.”

“You're a smart man.”

“I'm a beacon of self-control in a factious world.”

“It sounds like you've been spending too much time with Tessa.”

“That just may be true.”

As we drove toward the five-story building, the sunlight glared off its dark windows situated in the reinforced concrete sides. An imposing, spear-tipped steel fence ran around the property.

The FBI has its own police force and now, even though the officers here were expecting us, the two men in the guardhouse took their time verifying our creds and, in light of the bombing at the NCAVC on Monday, even checked under the car for explosives.

After parking, we met up with Special Agent in Charge David Voss in a conference room. He was a tall, spindly man who made me think of a human spider. Glassy eyes behind retro glasses, late thirties. I figured he must either have been an incredibly bright guy or someone who was shrewd at politics to snag his position at his age. Maybe he was both.

After introductions, he said to Ralph, “I got word from Director Wellington that you were coming.” It seemed like a needless thing to say.

“Yes,” Ralph replied.

“I'm here to do whatever I can to help you.”

“Glad to hear that.”

Voss gathered up the leaders of three of his units—Cyber, Evidence Response, and Counterterrorism.

Fortunately, the agents had prepared for our arrival and were already relatively familiar with the case. Together Ralph and I filled in the blanks for them.

When we'd finished, Ralph said, “So, where are you guys at? What do we know?”

“Well,” Voss replied, “we have a team looking into historical markers and locations that deal with the Mecklenburg Declaration. So far, nothing. We're consulting with the Charlotte Historical Society to see if we can find out about a connection between the Catawba tribe and the Mecklenburg Declaration.”

Ralph nodded. “Good. And the museum footage?”

“Still reviewing it.”

I flipped open my laptop and connected to the room's
projection-screen system for a video conference with Joint Terrorism Task Force Director René Gonzalez, the man Margaret had put in charge of the investigation.

Once he was on-screen he said, “Angela hasn't been able to find anything pertinent regarding that Latin phrase or the English translation relating to sculptures or CD covers. The Vatican has assured us that they're going to do whatever they can to help, but so far they haven't come up with anything either.”

Maybe the sentence isn't from anywhere. Maybe the text was written up specifically for you.

“What do we know about the Semtex?” I asked him.

“Two hundred pounds were taken.”

“What?” I gasped. “I thought it was only twenty.”

“Yeah, well, so did we. An extra zero got dropped out of the initial reports. And from what we can tell only a few pounds would have been needed at the NCAVC to cause that extent of damage. We could be looking at a much bigger attack on the horizon.”

“A shipment that size of Semtex was lost and we didn't hear about it on the news?” Voss said skeptically.

“It's not exactly something the Army was excited to publicize, but, believe me, I'm looking into it.”

“With that much Semtex”—it was Voss again—“how much damage could you do to . . . say, a skyscraper?”

Ralph answered this time, drawing from his background as an Army Ranger. “If you knew what you were doing and where to place it, and, of course, depending on the size of the building and its structural integrity, you could probably bring one down.”

After we'd all had a chance to take that in, I asked Gonzalez what else we knew.

“The Semtex was shipped last Monday. It was supposed to go to Fort Bragg, but it never arrived.”

“What does that mean, ‘it never arrived'?” I said. “It didn't just disappear en route. What are we talking about here?”

“Yeah”—Gonzalez scratched with irritation at his scar—“that's pretty much what I said. I'll let you know more as soon as I find anything else out.”

After the video conference, Voss adjourned the meeting and Ralph and I went with him to his office. Once the three of us were alone, Ralph said, “Talk to me about your joint task force work with the CMPD.”

Charlotte is a little different than many major cities in that its police department covers the whole county rather than just the city proper. They ended up with the somewhat cumbersome name of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, or CMPD for short.

Voss was slow in responding to Ralph's question. “You know how these things can be.”

“Tell me how these things can be.”

He glanced at the clock on the wall, then back at Ralph. “I'll put it this way: They're not the most cooperative department I've ever worked with.”

“And how many is that?”

“Three. Before I came here.”

The FBI works with hundreds of state and local law enforcement agencies across the country, as well as dozens of other government agencies. There are more than seventeen thousand different law-enforcement entities in the U.S., many with overlapping jurisdictions. And, despite how things are portrayed in the movies, in real life the Bureau usually has a positive working relationship with local law enforcement.

It didn't sound like that was the case in Charlotte, though.

“What can we do here to help you?” Voss asked us.

“Let's start by taking a look at your city,” I replied.

My phone is a beta version of one in development for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a branch of the Defense Department. Because of my involvement with geospatial applications in law enforcement, they were letting me use it so I could give them feedback on the user interface.

The phone was able to project a three-dimensional hologram based on aggregate geospatial data from our defense satellites, a program known as FALCON, or the Federal Aerospace Locator and Covert Operation Network.

It was a bit like virtually flying through a city on Google Earth, but you could manipulate the images with your hands—throw them into a digital trash bin, enlarge and shrink the objects floating in front of you, zoom in, zoom out. It was pretty slick, and from what I'd heard, it wasn't going to be that long before this technology would be commercially available for the general public.

I pulled up the 3-D map of Charlotte's Uptown, then tapped the button to project the hologram of the city. It hovered half a meter above the table. I adjusted it until it was about a meter wide, then zoomed in on Uptown.

“I've never seen anything like that,” Voss muttered.

“Yeah, it's one of his favorite toys,” Ralph told him. “I'm asking for one for Christmas.”

“Better be good. Santa's watching.”

I wasn't sure if Voss was trying to be funny or not. The guy was hard to read.

“Right,” Ralph said uncertainly, as if he were trying to discern Voss's intent as well.

Zooming out, I rotated the hologram, turning the city
before me, and it took only a moment to notice that the center of Charlotte was laid out in a grid but the residential areas had winding, meandering streets.

With Voss's help we identified the Mint Museum's two locations—one Uptown, and one on Randolph Road, where the theft had taken place. We also looked at possible travel routes to and from the museum and noted which streets might have traffic cameras.

After I'd closed up the phone, Voss said to me, “So, they say you don't believe in motive.”

“Who says that?”

“I heard it around.”

Well, news travels fast.

“That's not quite the case, but here's where I'm coming from.”

And then I told him the truth about motives.

“All of us are motivated to do things,” I said, “but trying to accurately guess what someone else might've been thinking prior to committing a crime is fruitless. Many times we don't even understand what motivates the actions we take ourselves. How can we claim to know someone else's motivation when we can't even pinpoint our own?”

“I'm not sure I follow.”

“Take hate crimes, for instance. A man can scribble racist graffiti on a wall and be charged with felony criminal mischief and maybe face a sentence of one or even up to seven years. But if a judge or a jury decides that it was a hate crime the offender might get ten to thirty years in prison, depending on local and state statutes. But how do you know hate motivated it? That's speculation and it could send someone away for decades. That's not justice.”

“You have to trust the system, Pat,” said Ralph.

Needless to say, we did not see eye to eye on this issue.

This wasn't really the time to debate the merits of punishment in the pursuit of justice, but I didn't need to worry about it since Voss took us in another direction.

“But isn't establishing motive the first step in figuring out a crime?”

“If it's a step at all,” I said, “it should be the last one. We should be in the business of collecting and analyzing evidence, not involved in trying to guess what someone was thinking before he might have or might not have
taken a specific action. You can never confirm a motive, you can only speculate as to one. Whatever the motive for the crime, offenders ask themselves four questions, even if they're not aware that they're doing so.”

“What are those?”

“How much do I want this thing? How much am I willing to risk to get it? How much will I benefit if I get it? How will I get away with this action without getting caught?”

He mulled that over for a moment. “So evaluating risk and rewards.”

“Exactly.”

“But all this stuff about geography . . .” He gestured toward the phone. “How is that going to help us here?”

“I want a couple of agents working up a full comparative case analysis to see if there are more crimes linked to this case besides the robbery of the Catawba weaponry here in Charlotte, the homicide of Jerome Cole, and the attack on the NCAVC.”

“And don't forget the shooting at the DEA headquarters last week.”

“So far there's no evidence that's related,” Ralph corrected him. “But the Semtex is.”

“That's right,” I said. “We track its movement—its travel route, the exact timing and location of the robbery as well as why it wasn't made public earlier. We find those things and we might find the link we need.”

“But those are all very different crimes,” Voss noted. “What are you suggesting we look for?”

“Based on what our guy did to Cole, we know he's violent and he's forensically aware, and this is not likely his first offense. He might have been arrested before and learned from his mistakes.”

“So, physical or sexual assaults? Torture?”

“Yes, and even petty crimes, misdemeanors, moving-vehicle violations on the day of the robbery, traffic-camera footage—anything. We need to see if he left any other footprints in time and space for us to find, mistakes that might lead us to where he is now.”

I'd taught a lot about comparative case analysis at the Academy and a good example of failure in the realm of police investigation actually had to do with an investigation here in Charlotte. “It happened here with Wallace.” I sometimes talk to myself and think aloud and now I didn't realize I'd spoken the words until Voss said, “What do you mean?”

“I'm sorry?”

“You said it happened here with Wallace.”

“Henry Louis Wallace back in the nineties.”

“Oh.” Voss nodded. Apparently he recognized the name after all. “The Charlotte Strangler.”

“Yes.”

“Nine women,” Voss said, “all African-Americans murdered within a two-year span.”

Wallace had also confessed to killing a prostitute here in Charlotte, as well as another ten women while he was stationed at military bases around the world, but I didn't bother to correct Voss.

“Raped too,” he added.

“Most of them were, yes. But law enforcement failed to link the cases. Two of the women lived in the same apartment building, two had worked at the same Bojangles' restaurant, two at the same Taco Bell, five had
known connections to that restaurant manager's friends and relatives.”

“And that was Wallace?”

“It was. He killed the last three women within a three-day span. If the police had taken a closer look at the travel routes, awareness space, and links between the previous victims, they could have pinpointed Wallace as a suspect earlier.”

“And saved those three women.”

“It's possible,” I acknowledged.

“So, focus on finding links between locations and victims?”

“Exactly. Who knows your city the best? Here among your agents?”

He looked at me curiously. “I'm not sure I understand.”

“This guy who killed Jerome Cole, he's been leaving clues that relate to Charlotte's history. You can only learn so much from staring at maps and holograms. I want to drive around the city. I need someone to guide me.”

He considered that. “Well, I mean, we've been consulting with this one guy over the last couple days. He does tours of the city—you know, history tours, that sort of thing. We found him through the Chamber of Commerce. He's not an agent, but he seems pretty well-informed about Charlotte and, like I say, we've been talking with him, so he's familiar with working with the Bureau.”

“That'll work.”

“Name's Guido Lombardi.”

Ralph blinked. “Your local expert on Charlotte, North Carolina, is a guy named Guido Lombardi?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Just . . . No reason.”

We made the arrangements to meet Guido at the Chamber of Commerce office Uptown and then, after Voss assured us one more time that he would do all he could to help us, Ralph and I took off to meet the man who was going to escort us around the
city.