The Chessman (23 page)

“If he staged it, how in hell would Westlow have gotten ashore? An accomplice?”

“We’ll certainly be looking into whether Westlow had an accomplice, but an inflatable dinghy, the kind you could pop a motor on, would serve quite nicely. Westlow could have set a waypoint on a GPS and followed that in. Easy as pie. He’s long gone by the time the Jayhawk shows up.”

Cady appreciated how Agent Preston didn’t state the obvious to the assistant director, how she let him piece together that this same inflatable boat could also have been used in the killing of Adrien Zalentine in Chesapeake Bay.

“How would he sneak all that gear onboard?”

“Westlow’s alleged suicide was on the night of his fourth rental day, so he had four days to get that stuff aboard and stowed in the cabin. He could have used a large box for the inflatable or he could have segmented it into several smaller boxes and whistled while carrying each aboard.”

Cady thought of the boat motors Terri rented to guests at Sundown Point Resort. “No one at a marina is going to look twice at some guy carrying a five or six horsepower out to his boat, even if he doesn’t have it boxed up. Remember, everything pointed to Westlow committing suicide, so the investigation never went down this path.”

“This is all interesting conjecture,” Jund said, tossing a hand in the air. “Have you got anything solid for me?”

“Let’s talk about his financial trail,” Preston said. “Beth, if you please.”

Special Agent Schommer had done her homework and leapt at the opportunity to shine. “Jake Westlow siphoned off four credit cards before his so-called suicide. Two Visa Golds, an American Express, and a Discover Card. One of the Gold cards and the Discover he’d only recently received, and had applied for them immediately after his mother’s funeral.”

“So what?” Jund replied. “I find out I have terminal cancer, I’m off on a European tour compliments of AX.”

“Westlow did not travel to Europe or anyplace else. His apartment wasn’t stuffed full of ninety-inch HDTVs, gold-plated golf clubs, jewelry, none of that. The lieutenant commander tapped some sizeable cash advances on all four of those credit cards. All of these funds remain unaccounted for.”

“Now we’re talking my language. How much money is missing?”

“It’s $110,000 in credit card advances. Another $42,000 left over from the sale of his mother’s house. Add in another twenty-five grand from the sale of his nearly new Chevy Traverse so he could begin driving his mother’s twenty-year-old Ford Tempo. That’s $177,000 dollars.”

“Somehow I don’t picture the lieutenant commander going chitty-chitty bang-bang around his naval base,” Jund said. “That’s a pretty good nest egg for a start-over.”

“And that’s only the money we know about, sir,” Schommer said. “Westlow did leave two grand in a savings account and about eight hundred in a checking account. I figure he did that for appearances’ sake. In a cobbled-together last will and testament found in his motel room, he wanted that money and anything remaining in his estate to be given to his favorite charity—the Make-A-Wish Foundation.”

“Misdirection for any superficial investigation into his death.”

It was at that point that Cady knew they had Jund, that they’d convinced the assistant director. The AD’s mood had lifted, his humor returning; he was seeing results. And the team of federal agents had left some of the best for last.

“They also found an envelope on the boat,” Agent Preston said, resuming the narrative. “It contained a key to some sleaze-ball motel in Alvord Lake—near Golden Gate Park—where the junkies hang. Westlow had prepaid the room for a week and instructed the t-shirt manning the front desk that he wanted to be left alone—no house cleaning—not that this dive did much of that to begin with. A Do Not Disturb sign had hung on his room door all week. Investigators found both a handwritten suicide note and the handwritten will that Beth mentioned on the unmade bed. There was an empty bottle of Ambien by the toilet, a picture of him and his mother from better days atop the TV, and not much else.”

“This note is Exhibit E, right?” asked Jund.

“Correct,” Preston replied, and gave the room a second to flip to that page. “Please forgive me in advance for butchering Shakespeare, but Westlow’s short note reads as follows: O, here, Will I set up my everlasting rest, And Shake the yoke of inauspicious stars, from this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last!”

“
Romeo and Juliet
. Act five, scene three,” Special Agent Fennell Evans informed the room.

“You have that in your notes?” Jund asked, staring at Evans. “The act and scene number?”

Agent Evans shook his head.

“You’ve memorized Shakespeare’s plays?”

“Just the more popular plays and sonnets, sir.”

Jund continued staring at Agent Evans. “My wife is always showing up with tickets to theater—Shakespeare, Chekov, Ibsen—that sort of stuff. Any chance you’d like to attend some of these performances that I either can’t or
won’t
make?”

“Love to.”

“All this time I’ve thought of you as that creepy blood-splatter guy who ate paint chips as a child. It turns out that you’re a sensitive, poetic blood-splatter guy.” Jund blinked and got back on task. “Romeo commits suicide. Westlow commits suicide. Any significance?”

“If he associates himself with Romeo, I don’t think those lines refer to his mother,” Evans responded.

“It’s an interesting twist,” Cady pointed out, “but remember how Juliet’s initial death is faked. She’s not really dead. The Chessman has cornered the market on
faked
deaths—Ingram’s and Schaeffer’s—so it’s no great stretch that he would have faked his own demise to throw us off track.”

“It worked.”

“He built in layers. His first tier was to pin everything on Schaeffer. But if that blew up in his face, a
living
Jake Westlow would be the frontrunner on our short list of suspects.” Cady looked at the agents sitting around the table and knew it was time to unleash the clincher. “Tell them about Rochester, Liz.”

“The day after he visits Dorsey Kelch and gets the
Newsweek
with the Farris article, Westlow catches an early morning flight to Rochester—as in Rochester, Minnesota. An hour after deboarding the plane, Jake has a half-hour meeting with one of the Mayo Clinic’s top oncologists to review Lorraine Westlow’s medical record in order to provide a second opinion, to see if anything was overlooked. Doctor Heidi Steicken, the cancer specialist, mentioned that Westlow wanted to be certain that his mother’s providers had covered all possible bases. Doctor Steicken said she thought it was ‘very late in the game for a second opinion,’ but she knows how family members grasp at straws, often until the end. Steicken reviewed Ms. Westlow’s file and informed Jake Westlow that it was exactly how she would have treated her for kidney cancer had Lorraine been her patient. Westlow thanked her profusely and left.”

“And?” the AD asked.

“And he didn’t fly back until the next afternoon,” Agent Preston said. “Westlow rented a Hertz in Rochester. And even though he checked in to stay overnight at the Doubletree, he put on six hundred and fifty miles in a little over a day. Cohasset, Minnesota, is under a five-hour drive from Rochester. The night we’ve placed Jake Westlow in Minnesota is the night Bret Ingram died in the barn fire.”

“Let me guess, the car mileage would more than cover it.”

“It gets deeper,” Cady continued. “Upon his return to Reading, Westlow gets a prescription for Ambien from his mother’s physician due to ‘having trouble sleeping.’ Then he visits a grief counselor and scores some Valium to help him through his mother’s final days, as well as the funeral week. He makes another appointment with this same grief counselor, but doesn’t keep it. And once back in San Diego Westlow makes an appointment with a psychiatrist who specializes in grief counseling, but, again, stands that counselor up.”

“Nice touch. The sly fucker mocked up a paper trail for suicide.”

Agent Preston steered the investigators to the final page in their packets. “Exhibit F is an eight-by-ten copy of Westlow’s picture taken from his military ID card—his CAC—which, of course, is now nearly four years old.”

The room went quiet.

Cady had already spent no small amount of time examining Exhibit F, staring into the face of the man who had crippled him in the alleyway behind Farris’s row house in Woodley Park. Not exactly the image Cady had conjured up of the man responsible for at least six deaths and possibly others. Westlow’s blue eyes stared back at Cady, his hair a sandy blond, service cut above the ears; he was cleanly shaven, with a broad smile that reminded Cady of an old photograph Dorsey Kelch had shared with him of a long-ago birthday party and a little boy by the swing set caught smiling at Marly.

“One last item,” Cady said, closing his packet. “Remember the time lag at the Sanfield slaying? The amount of time the killer was in the office with Sanfield?”

“Something like fifteen minutes.”

“It doesn’t take fifteen minutes to stab a person to death. As I previously mentioned, I suspect Westlow got all that Ingram knew about Snow Goose Lake, basically fingering the Zalentine twins and Barrett Sanfield, but I believe Westlow got
the rest of the story
from Sanfield during that fifteen-minute gap. I could never figure out why Sanfield would put his ass on the line for a couple of freaks like the Zalentines, no matter what kind of money they could toss his way, but Barrett Sanfield would walk through fire for either Arlen Farris or his son Patrick. I’m sure that Sanfield provided Westlow the
unabridged
version of the events at Snow Goose while pleading for his life.”

The table sat in silence for several seconds.

“I’ll be goddamned. You pulled it off, Agent Cady. Motive. Means. Opportunity. The Chessman created this highly structured mirage, but damned if you didn’t find him.” Jund broke into a grin and slapped the tabletop. “I’d already acclimated myself to the fact I’d be greeting customers at Home Depot this time next month. Same-sex is legal in D.C., Drew—what say we tie the knot?”

“I say we’ve got a name and a face, sir. The hard part will be catching him.”

“We’ll plaster his name and face all over the news. It’s a gamechanger. By tomorrow night everyone will know this guy’s mug. If Westlow tries to mail a postcard in Guam, he’ll find an eight-by-ten glossy of himself on the post office wall. We’ll leak some of the juicier tidbits to the press to turn up the heat on this joker. I want all of Jake Westlow’s friends and fellow officers interviewed—haul them in here and make them know it’s not funsie time. Drew, I need you to head up the manhunt.”

“I’m sorry, sir.” Cady held his palms out in front of him. “I’ve fulfilled my commitment—you got your
loose thread
to pull on, remember?”

“You know that was all bullshit to get you in the door,” Jund protested. “You’re not seriously going to bolt right now, as we’re picking up a head full of steam?”

“Just as far and as fast as I can, sir. I’ve made some other plans.”

“You have got to be shitting me.”

“Believe it or not,” Cady said, “I’m going fishing.”

Chapter 29

D
ennis Swann was in the process of committing suicide.

And it was turning out to be more time-consuming than he’d originally intended. It must be his work ethic right up to the very end that kept him from pulling the trigger. He sat at his laptop and retested the code, smiled, encrypted the compiled files, zipped it, pecked out a page full of paragraphs to his IT contact at St. Mary’s Hospital in Richmond, Virginia, and clicked Send. Swann then forwarded the e-mail on to the project manager and her team of Oracle programmers, as well as the two physicians whose extraordinary vision had brought the project into existence in the first place. He was taking no chances, as any future bug testing would be completed sans Dennis Swann.

Swann’s deliverable had been placed into Production late Saturday evening. His piece of the pie, the EDI code, worked swimmingly in the Test environment—in fact, the four databases interfaced seamlessly. But Swann didn’t want to leave the gang high and dry at this juncture. The proof’s in the Production environment, and he’d spent half the morning chasing a handful of minor bugs the end users had reported.

He could now resume killing himself.

Swann had already been compensated, and compensated quite highly at that, for his consulting services. This final tidying up was strictly pro bono, more or less a matter of personal integrity on his part. So he told himself, anyway. His IT contact and the project manager wanted Swann to roll over to the next phase. They actually wanted him in a salaried rather than consulting role. Swann explained that he’d give that a great deal of serious thought, but first he needed to take two weeks in order to help move his sister’s family from Austin, Texas, to Seattle, Washington. St. Mary’s requested that Swann contact them as soon as he was back in town. That, of course, wouldn’t be happening. For one thing, Swann had no sister, he wasn’t from Austin, Texas, and he would never be contacting anyone from St. Mary’s staff ever again.

Dying wouldn’t be terribly hard on Dennis Swann. Second time’s a charm, they say, and Dennis Jackson Swann had originally died thirty-odd years back of early childhood meningitis. A tombstone in a forgotten cemetery outside of Austin attested to that fact.

Swann took off his small round glasses and slowly bent the frames in half at the nose piece as he worked his way through his mental check list. His apartment was for all practical purposes empty. He’d sold off the few pieces of furniture he’d owned, as well as the television, and then Goodwilled most everything else. His work responsibilities had, of course, just been concluded. Swann had spent much of the previous day juggling the financial accounts. He looked at the warped glasses in his hands and then tossed them into the small garbage bag he’d be taking with him. The devil was in the details, but Swann was fairly certain he’d covered everything.

Dennis Swann snapped his laptop shut and tossed it inside its carrying case. He stuffed the plastic sack of throwaways inside his traveling bag, grabbed the bag and the laptop case and stood for a second by his door. As he left Dennis Swann to die, Lieutenant Commander Jake Westlow exited the little-utilized side entrance of his efficiency apartment and stepped out into the night.