Sidney Sheldon’s Chasing Tomorrow (Tracy Whitney)

TRACY WAS AT HOME, reading, when the telephone rang.

“How are you with riddles?”

Jean Rizzo’s voice shattered her peace of mind in an instant, like a bullet through a windowpane.

“Terrible. I hate riddles.”

“You might want to improve your skills. Real quickly.”

“Yeah? Well, you might want to get lost. I’ve told you, Jean. Leave me alone.”

Tracy hung up.

Twenty seconds later the phone rang again. Tracy would have left it, but Nick was downstairs in the kitchen and might pick up if she didn’t.

“What?” she barked into the receiver.

“I need your help.”

“No. No more. You had my help and it didn’t help, remember? Please, Jean.”

“Daniel Cooper’s got Jeff Stevens.”

The silence on the other end of the line was deafening.

“Tracy? Are you still there?”

“What do you mean he’s ‘got’ Jeff?”

“Kidnapped. Abducted. Maybe worse, I don’t know. Cooper left a letter. It’s addressed to you.”

“It can’t be!” Tracy suppressed a sob. “Why?”

“I don’t know why. But I opened it and it’s a riddle, and I’m pretty sure that if you can’t help me solve it, Jeff Stevens is a dead man.”

More silence.

“I’m sorry, Tracy.”

After what felt like an age, Tracy’s voice crackled back onto the line.

“Read it to me.”

Jean exhaled. “Okay. This is it. ‘My dearest Tracy . . .’ ”

“He wrote ‘my dearest’?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Go on.”

“ ‘My dearest Tracy. I have taken Mr. Stevens hostage. I hope, for Mr. Stevens’s sake and for your own, that you will act on the instructions contained in this note. What I write below will make sense to you and you alone. Do what I ask and neither you nor Stevens will be hurt. And come alone. Yours ever, D.C.’

“Has he sent you messages like this before?” Jean asked.

“No. No messages. Never. I’d have told you if he had. What else did he write?”

“Nothing. Just the riddle. You ready?”

Tracy closed her eyes. “Go ahead.”

“Okay, so it’s sort of like a poem. It’s in four stanzas.”

Four stanzas? Jesus. “Okay.”

Jean cleared his throat and began to read Cooper’s words aloud in his soft, Canadian accent:

“ ‘Twenty Knights at three times three

Waiting for the Queen will be.

Her lover, husband, destiny

Beneath the stars, where God can see.’

“That’s the first stanza. Mean anything to you?”

Tracy sighed. “No. Nothing. Knights and queens, maybe something to do with a card game?” She realized she was clutching at straws. “Go ahead and read to the end. Maybe it’ll make more sense as a whole.”

“Okay.” Rizzo went on: “So then he writes:

“ ‘Thirteen lambs at altar slain,

Fourteen suffers daily pain,

Soon to end, his sins erased,

The shroud of old will be replaced.’

“Then:

“ ‘Dance the dance in black and white,

Where masters meet, the time is right.

Six hills, one was lost,

Here shall sinners learn the cost.’

“And the last verse:

“ ‘Twenty Knights at three times three,

Upon the stage of history,

At last, my love will come to me,

And what the Lord demands will be.’

“That’s it.”

“That’s it?” Tracy sounded bereft. “Nothing else?”

“Nothing else.”

Silence descended again. Jean broke it first.

“Do you know what it means?”

“No,” said Tracy.

“Not any of it? You have no ideas at all?”

“I need time, Jean! You can’t just call me up out of the blue and read me some crazy poem and expect me to solve your case for you like that.” She snapped her fingers angrily. “Daniel Cooper’s insane. How am I supposed to know how his warped mind works?”

“Fair enough. I’m sorry. It’s just that we don’t have much—­”

“Time. I know.”

Tracy could hear the disappointment in Jean Rizzo’s voice. The truth was, she did have an idea. But it was half formed and not yet clear and not a solution as such. She wasn’t ready to share it with Rizzo.

Jean said, “I’ll e-­mail the poem to you now so you have it in writing. I have to leave Seville and fly back to France in the morning, but you know how to reach me. You will let me know if anything comes to you? Any idea or clue or thought, however unlikely.”

“Of course I will.”

“You’re the key to this, Tracy. I knew it before but now Cooper’s confirmed it directly. He’s trying to tell you something. This is personal.”

“Are you sure he has Jeff?” Tracy asked. “How do you know he’s not bluffing about that? Using Jeff as a ploy to lure me in?”

“I don’t,” Jean Rizzo said truthfully. “But do you really want to call that bluff, Tracy? If you’re wrong . . .”

He didn’t need to finish the sentence.

I know. If I’m wrong, Jeff dies.

Tracy sat back in her chair and rubbed her eyes. Her palms were sweating and her mouth felt dry, as if she were chewing a ball of cotton.

She thought, I’m afraid. I’m afraid for Jeff and I’m afraid for myself.

Jeff had saved Tracy’s life once. Now it was her turn to return the favor. Except that what she’d said to Jean Rizzo before was true. She hated riddles. She was terrible at puzzles of any kind, always had been. And this one had been concocted by a madman.

“Give me twenty-­four hours,” she told Jean. “I need to think.”

“We don’t have twenty-­four . . .” Jean began.

But the line was already dead.

TRACY DROPPED NICHOLAS OFF at school the next day. Instead of heading home, she turned onto Route 40 and headed toward the tiny town of Granby.

The Granby chess club met four days a week, in a small room above the general store. Its members were mostly retired men, some local, some from as far afield as Boulder or even Denver. For a tiny local club, Granby had a big reputation.

“I need to know about chess moves.”

Tracy sat at a Formica table, opposite a man in his late sixties named Bob. Bob had a wrinked face like a pickled walnut. He was short and bald, and had tiny, wide-­set brown eyes that glinted with intelligence and interest as he listened to Tracy talk.

“That’s a big subject. Can you be a bit more specific?”

Tracy handed Bob a piece of paper with Cooper’s poem written on it.

“It’s a riddle,” she explained. “The answer should be a place, a very specific geographic location. It may also specify a time. At first I thought the writer was alluding to a card game, with the knights and the queens. But then I looked at that third stanza, and the phrases ‘dance the dance in black and white’ and ‘where masters meet.’ And I realized it wasn’t cards. It was chess.”

The old man nodded. “I can see the dance might be an allusion to chess. But there are no references to moves here.”

“Twenty knights at three times three, waiting for the queen?” Tracy asked hopefully.

Bob smiled. “A chessboard has four knights, my dear, as I’m sure you are aware. Two white, two black. There are no moves with twenty knights. Unless, of course, you had five boards. Five games, playing simultaneously.”

Tracy wrote Five games? on the pad in front of her.

“Let’s forget the numbers,” she told Bob. “Can you tell me about moves where a player uses knights to trap his opponent’s queen?”

The old man’s face lit up. Now Tracy was talking his language.

“I can do better than that, my dear. I can show you.”

TWO HOURS LATER, DRIVING back to Steamboat Springs, Tracy knew a lot more about chess moves. But she still had no idea what Daniel Cooper was trying to tell her.

She tried to think sequentially.

Chess.

Jeff and I did a scam together on the QE2 where we hoodwinked two grand masters, Pietr Negulesco and Boris Melnikov. Does Cooper know about that? Is the QE2 “where masters meet”?

Presumably I’m the queen in this “dance of black and white.”

But who are the “twenty knights” waiting for me?

Five boards. Twenty knights . . . Shadows of answers danced before her eyes, but there was nothing she could grasp, nothing that was real.

THE STEAMBOAT LIBRARY WAS practically empty. A few young mothers sat in a circle in the children’s section, listening to “story time” with their toddlers, but that was it. Tracy remembered coming here with Nick when he was little and felt a momentary pang of nostalgia.

“Can I help you?” The librarian smiled at Tracy. “Mrs. Schmidt, isn’t it?”

“Do you have a history section?” Tracy asked.

“Of course. I’ll show you.”

“Thank you. Also, do I need a code to log on to the computers here?”

The librarian nodded. “I can give you a temporary library card so you can log on.”

THAT NIGHT, AFTER NICHOLAS was asleep, Tracy read through the notes she’d made until her eyes began to cross. Numbers swam in her head like pieces of an elaborate jigsaw puzzle

Twenty knights. Five chessboards. Thirteen lambs. Six hills. One lost.

At the library earlier, she had searched both the books and online for references to “six hills” and “places with six hills.”

The results were not encouraging. There were six hills in Alpharetta, Georgia. The Russian city of Tomsk was integrating its universities into a “six hills” campus. Then there were the tepeta, six syenite hills in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. A famous string of Roman long barrows—ancient burial grounds—in Hertfordshire, England, was known as the six hills. Jerusalem famously had seven hills—­seven was six, after “one lost”?

It was hopeless. Jeff could be anywhere from Jerusalem to Georgia. She tried not to think about what might be happening to him, what torture a man like Daniel Cooper might have devised. But panic crept into her body with each passing minute and hour. Jeff needed her! She was his only hope. If Cooper was playing chess with Tracy, he was winning. Hands down.

She read the poem again. The only verse that made no sense at all to her was the third, the one about the shroud and the lambs. Fourteen suffers daily pain. What significance did the number fourteen have? None. All that Tracy could think of was “unlucky thirteen,” and that wasn’t going to get them very far. She’d been sure that chess was the key to this, but her trip to Granby had made her more confused, not less.

Someone would be waiting for the queen—­was she the queen?—­beneath the stars. Did that mean Cooper’s meeting place was outside, in the open air?

A thought suddenly occurred to her. The line in the last verse: upon the stage of history. A stage could be outside in the open air. Something of historical importance.

Racing into the study, she switched on her computer. Her first idea was London and the Globe Theatre. The meticulously restored stage where Shakespeare’s plays had first been performed was in the open air, beneath the stars. But how did it link to six hills? Or chess?

What about other outdoor theaters? Greek or Roman amphitheaters?

Cooper knew about Jeff’s interest in archaeology. Was that a clue? What about the six hills in England, the Roman long barrows? Was there an amphitheater nearby?

Tracy could feel herself getting closer. But as the hours ticked by—­eleven, twelve, one in the morning—­the answer still eluded her. She went to bed and had terrible nightmares of torture and death, of Jeff Stevens being ripped from her arms out into a cold, black, endless sea.

TRACY AWOKE WITH A start. The clock beside her bed read 5:06 A.M.

Five chessboards.

Six hills.

And suddenly it was there. Not the answer. But the question.

I know the question Cooper wants me to ask.

I know where I’m going to find Jeff.

JEAN RIZZO PACED HIS Lyon apartment, depressed. He’d picked up his children from school today and taken them to a pizza place for lunch. They’d all talked politely. Jean felt like a stranger.

Sylvie told him, “There are no shortcuts. You need to see them more.”

Jean had snapped at her out of guilt, because he knew she was right. Then he’d gone home feeling even worse. Checking his phone and e-­mails, he found no message from Tracy, but two from his boss summoning him to a meeting in his office first thing tomorrow morning.

That could only mean one thing. Henri Marceau was assigning him to another case.

Jean couldn’t blame his boss. Henri had already cut him far more slack than he would have with any other detective, out of respect for their friendship. But Henri had bosses too, and budget cuts to deliver. The Bible Killer case was as cold as ever. Jean’s investigation had been an expensive failure.

Pouring himself a large glass of whiskey, Jean dialed Tracy’s number.

“Any progress?”

“Not really.” Tracy told him about her conversation with the chess player and her research into “six hills” and Roman ruins. Jean couldn’t put his finger on it, but something in her tone made him suspicious. Perhaps it was the fact that she sounded so relaxed. Jeff Stevens, a man she had married and clearly still loved, was in all likelihood being held captive by a known killer. And yet Tracy was talking to Jean about dead ends and false leads as if this were nothing but a game they were playing.

He asked her bluntly, “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Nothing! Why are you so suspicious?”

“I’m a detective. And you’re a con artist.”

“Retired,” Tracy reminded him.

“Semiretired,” Jean reminded her back. “You know where they are, don’t you?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Why aren’t you telling me? Do you want to go alone, is that it? Because he asked you to? I hope you know that’s out of the question.”

“I don’t know where they are, okay? I don’t know and that’s the truth.”

“But you suspect?”

Her split-­second hesitation confirmed it.

Jean’s voice became urgent, anxious. “For Christ’s sake, Tracy. Do not go to find them alone. It’s madness. If you know something, anything, you must tell me. Cooper will kill you, whatever he wrote in that note. He will kill you both without blinking.”

Tracy said, “I don’t think he’ll kill me.” Jean could hear Nick’s voice in the background. “I have to go.”

“Tracy!”

“If I find out anything concrete, I’ll tell you, I promise.”

“Tracy! Listen to me!”

For the second time in a week, Tracy hung up on him.

“Goddamn it!” Jean said aloud. Tracy Whitney was without a doubt the most infuriating woman he had ever met.

If anything happened to her, he would never forgive himself.