The Chessman (18 page)

“Stings at first,” A voice across the room whispered.

This must be a nightmare
, Banning told himself. As if his problems weren’t already unpleasant enough, they now invaded his sleep.

“It’s not a dream.” The voice, low as a distant train rumbling on the edge of Banning’s consciousness, seemed to read his mind.

Banning forced his eyes open. The piercing light from above like razors across his retinas. He blinked several times, struggling with the glare. Blurry, like staring through warm, oily water, the light slivering into his brain. Bright fluorescent lamps hung along the center of a long, gray room that had seen more pleasant days. He appeared to be on the floor of a cavernous old garage or abandoned warehouse that smelled more like a moldy cellar. Banning slumped lethargically on the bitter concrete, unable to move, feeling as though his hands were somehow glued to the ground.

“You’ll feel better in a minute.” Again, a quiet susurrus from the other side of the room.

Banning squinted toward the voice, but only made out a smear of white at the far end of the room, a tall figure in an open doorway, backlit by more piercing light. Banning tilted his head sideways for better viewing through the kaleidoscope of light and pain. He did his best to filter, to focus on the unknown voice.

Grandpa?

But Banning’s grandfather was long dead, had in fact passed away half a century ago, back when Banning was a five-year-old boy. In fact, the only memory Banning had of his grandfather was from the old coot’s funeral—Grandpa lying there in the black pine coffin, waxy, slightly bloated, and white. It had left an indelible impression on him at so young an age. Somehow that image, five decades buried, sprang to the forefront of Banning’s thoughts as he strained to make out the figure from across the room.

“Where?” Banning’s throat was sandpaper. He cleared it and tried again. “Where am I?”

“In a place of no secrets, Albert Banning,” the voice replied slowly, heavily. “A place of no secrets.”

He knows my name
, Banning thought, fighting his way through the grogginess to piece together the last-known events. Banning remembered leaving work, of course. He remembered the commute home to Newton Friday evening, pulling into his driveway, thankful for a weekend reprieve from the living hell of the past week. Banning remembered a noise. Remembered the door to his 750i Sedan being torn open, remembered a frosty breeze across his face, a steel grip, an aborted scream…then darkness, then here.

An intense fatigue kept his mind grinding away in slow motion. Must be burning off whatever drug—Chloroform? Ether?—this old bastard had given him.

“You’re next on the docket, Albert Banning. In a place of no secrets, you’re next on the docket.” With that the figure vanished, leaving an empty doorway of piercing white light.

Banning’s lips were dry; an unquenchable thirst was forced to the backburner when Banning realized that he lay naked on the cold floor. Banning fought through the silent panic and gradually came to an epiphany. Banning’s epiphany was a resounding
OH SHIT!

Banning attempted to stand up, to make himself less vulnerable, but something caught and he got yanked back down to the concrete. He squinted back at his right ankle and saw what snared him. A handcuff tethered him to some kind of radiator pipe, round as a silver dollar, that jutted out from the floor and on up thirty feet, all the way to the high ceiling above. Banning wrenched at the handcuff for all he was worth. Firmly locked. He then pulled on the pipe. Immovable.

Albert Banning, Chief Investment Officer of Koye & Plagans Financials, had fancied himself a virtual Rock of Gibraltar in the face of the financial turbulence of recent years, but this situation tore at his sanity and the all-encompassing fear choked out rational thought. Banning looked around his newfound prison. The only thing within reach was a twenty-ounce bottle of Fixx, some type of highly caffeinated energy drink he’d never heard of before. It reminded him of his great thirst. Banning stretched forward and seized the blue plastic bottle. He paused a second, examined the plastic bottle top. The cap remained sealed to the collar, didn’t appear to have been tampered with. Banning twisted the bottle top, broke the seal, and chugged down nearly the entire bottle before coming up for air. It was sickeningly sweet, and Banning almost gagged, but it tackled his dehydration in this
place of no secrets
. He took a second long swig, wiped a forefinger across his lips, licked at that, and then finished the remainder of the bottle. Having addressed his thirst, Banning returned to studying the room.

He saw his Joseph A. Bank’s Signature three-button wool and silk blue tie, his Avanti white dress shirt, Madras silk boxer shorts, designer socks, and Gucci dress loafers in a heap about twenty steps away. Next to the pile of clothes, his Venezia calfskin briefcase had been flung wide open. His laptop sat open on the floor next to the briefcase, facing him. His Starfield screensaver stared back, mocking him, his RSA security token atop the keyboard.
Jesus Christ
, Banning grimaced and bit his lower lip.
I should be home asleep
—not in the middle of one of those horrid
Saw
movies he’d watched with his stepson last summer before the boy returned to UCLA.

That was precisely when Banning began hearing the noises from a neighboring room. Muffled voices. Banning leaned forward and closed his eyes. The dead-grandpa voice was asking some sort of question. Another voice in response—it was a short female sob in the negative. The dead-grandpa voice asked the question again, but this time Banning recognized one word. The single word that Banning recognized was
Kellervick
. As in Elaine Kellervick, his most thorough investment strategist, who had been murdered earlier that week, a victim of a random burglary that had rocked K&P to its very foundation. Good God. Banning’s heart thundered faster. The man who’d killed Elaine had come for him. And he was…
next on the docket in a place of no secrets
. The panic sent him back to yanking on his tether, wiggling the cuff, doing everything he could to get loose from his hard steel snare.

Another question in the dead-grandpa voice, slowly asking something about Elaine Kellervick again. No responding sobs this time. Then a short phrase from the dead-grandpa voice. “Or neck?”

Banning was certain he’d heard the last part of what was asked, some sort of warped question—but it didn’t make any sense. What would
“Or neck?”
have to do with anything? Before he could ponder its hidden significance, there followed pleas to stop, growing appeals for mercy. A pregnant silence stretched for eternity, and then another female howl rattled forth from the neighboring room. The hair on the back of Banning’s neck stood straight. A pause, then another scream. Banning unconsciously pushed his back against the radiator pipe, and then tried impossibly to squeeze himself into the four-inch gap between the pipe and the wall as the scream turned into a bloodcurdler of pain and terror. Through a pounding drum of fright, Banning recognized a noise, something familiar from the men who’d come to remove a storm-downed tree from his backyard last summer—a chainsaw.

Banning pressed down on the cuff, pushing with all his might, trying to smear it off his foot, not caring how many layers of skin it cost him—but to no avail. The scream gurgled on for another second, and then abruptly cut short. Banning saw a spray of blackness across the piercing light of the open door. The chainsaw continued its hideous adventure for several more seconds.

Banning forgot how to breathe. He didn’t notice the steady stream of urine running down his leg. The chainsaw stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Banning shrank to the floor, a deflating balloon.
You’re next on the docket
echoed through his mind.

The dead-grandpa creature again filled the doorway, staring back at Banning, a twenty-seven-inch chainsaw hanging from its left hand, dripping gore onto the dusty concrete. The dead-grandpa creature walked ten feet into the room, toward Banning, then knelt as though in prayer, chainsaw held upright, palm atop the handle—like some deranged priest out of the Spanish Inquisition.

The creature wore black work boots, a gray mechanic’s jumpsuit now lathered in splotches of wet darkness. And the creature’s face—Banning knew it had to be a rubber mask, the kind kids wore on Halloween, but he’d never swear to it. Banning knew now why he’d thought of his long-dead grandfather. The creature’s face was that of an elderly man, ancient beyond years and the color of death, scraggly white hair at the side, waxen and bloated…definitely not smiling.

“What do you want from me?”

The figure stayed frozen in a dark sculpture of worship. “I’m here to wash away all sins, Albert Banning.”

“Sins?”

“The flock has been diminished, Albert Banning.” The dead-grandpa creature spoke low but with the ferocity of a Moses at Mount Sinai. “And in this place of no secrets, Albert Banning, I’m here to bear witness.”

“Please,” Banning’s voice faltered.

“Quartered or beheaded, Albert Banning?”

“I don’t want to die.”

“Lady Tilden chose her neck, Albert Banning.”

Dear God. Banning’s eyes opened wider, his mind a throbbing block of ice. It was Mira Tilden this maniac had just decapitated. Mira was one of the front desk receptionists, the younger, unmarried one who always had a pleasant smile for him.

After Banning had passed through the initial astonishment over Elaine’s death, and how Elaine had died, there rushed in an elevated sensation of anxiety—a heightened apprehension—over how all of Kellervick’s projects and loose ends would spill over onto him, but after plotting how to clear his desk via clever delegation to his various subordinates, Banning found himself left with one emotion that he would never verbalize to another living soul: an overwhelming sense of relief.

Lately, the Kellervick woman had lived in Banning’s face over one piddly work item after another, always acting so superior, and he often caught the woman glaring at him in meetings. It had gotten unbearably worse since his interview with
Fidelity Investor
. The damned Elaine Kellervick woman didn’t have it in herself to be happy for him, for Banning bringing some much-needed positive attention toward K&P Financials. She’d gotten extremely snappish over some of his comments in the newsletter, felt that he didn’t give her sufficient credit, making him feel guilty, when all he did was answer a few of that
FI
editor’s questions. Sure, he’d solicited Kellervick’s input, but those issues she’d brought up were issues that he’d already contemplated. Banning thought he’d switched up her wording a bit, but the editor had been under some kind of harsh deadline and had prodded Banning to rush his answers along.

He didn’t know how the Kellervick woman’s husband—Stewart, wasn’t it?—would want to stay married to the frigid bitch-cake. Banning liked Stewie Kellervick. The two of them spent time together whenever the firm had a social event where family members were invited. He and Stewie would yuk it up at those events. Good old Stew Kellervick would pat Banning on the back and wave at his wife across the room as she stood there glowering back at them both.

Banning knew it was appallingly wrong to even contemplate certain thoughts about the Kellervick woman, and he’d been certain to
tsk-tsk-tsk
it when talking to the police and other investigators, and he did feel great sympathy for his good pal Stew, but, truth be told, Banning felt this overwhelming sense of relief that the frigid bitch-cake was dead.

But now,
in a place of no secrets
, this maniac thought he’d been involved with Kellervick’s death…and Banning had to convince him otherwise.

“I loved Elaine. And Stew and I were best friends.”

“Who is this Stew?” the creature growled at him.

Oh Christ
, Banning thought as his bladder surrendered a final squirt to the stark terror of the situation—he’d messed up the Kellervick man’s name. It wasn’t Stew after all. It was Steve or Scott or some other damned thing that began with an S.

“Her husband.” Banning shook his head and cried. “Everyone loved Elaine. She was by far my best analyst, incredibly meticulous. I could trust her with any project; her market evaluations were full of insight.”

The avalanche of Banning’s random verbiage continued, for as long as he spoke to the creature kneeling in the middle of this dungeon, he remained alive.

“None of us know what happened, sir. It was a burglary gone terribly, terribly bad. This city—Jesus, it gets worse every year—Elaine probably interrupted some kids from Dorchester stealing her TV or something.”

The creature stood slowly, towering like the grim reaper, and repeated his question. “Quartered or beheaded, Albert Banning?”

“I had nothing to do with Elaine’s death. I’ve talked to the police. I talked to the FBI. I told them everything I know—which is nothing. The last time I saw Elaine, I wished her a good night. I swear I did. I said, ‘Have a good night, Elaine.’ That’s exactly what I told her. You’ve got to believe me.” Banning was weeping. Snot and tears saturated his white mustache. “Why would I want Elaine dead? It makes no sense. I’ve had to take over her projects, all of her work files.”

“Files?” The dead-grandpa creature jolted forward. In three strides he was at Banning’s pile of clothing and office materials. With a sturdy nudge of his work boot, the creature slid the laptop carrying Banning’s RSA security token across the concrete toward him. “Show me, Albert Banning.”

“But this is proprietary information—spreadsheets, strategies, e-mail records,” Banning stuttered. “Client confidentiality.”

The chainsaw still dripped crimson as the dead-grandpa figure reached for the starter rope. One swift pull and the saw clamored to life.

“No! God, no!” Albert Banning’s fingers flew to work. He prayed this gray dungeon had access to a wireless network so he could log in to the VPN—the virtual private network. Banning tapped in his user login and password like a master pianist hammering on the ivory. He snatched his RSA token from where it had slid off the keyboard, and then hurriedly entered the numbers before they rotated. He sobbed with something akin to joy when the laptop made the connection and his personal and confidential desktop opened. Albert Banning slowly looked up.