Now they have ta’en away her Basil sweet.
I summarized, “The theme of despair runs through almost every line: melancholy, despondence, spirits of grief, the lack of singing, and then a lonely death-just like the killer wanted Kelsey to experience in the morgue.”
“But she’s safe now,” Jake said.
I thought for a moment. “I don’t see this killer giving up that easily.” I turned to Cheyenne. “There’s an officer with her now, at the hospital?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s keep him assigned to her until we catch this guy.”
“All right.” She wrote something on her notepad. “I’ll talk with Kurt.”
“One more thing. Keats mentions ‘Isles Lethean.’ I looked it up: the river Lethe was one of the rivers in Hades. If you drank from it, you would forget your life on earth. You would forget everything.”
“Isles Lethean.” Jake gazed at the wall thoughtfully. “Maybe the UNSUB is perpetrating these crimes to forget something from his past, to cross the river, so to speak.”
Great. UNSUB: Unknown Subject of an investigation. It may very well be the stupidest acronym ever created in FBI history. And that’s saying something.
Jake, of course, loved the term.
He went on, “Maybe he’s trying to find freedom from his own despondence, his own grief.”
There was no way to either prove or disprove his hypothesis, and either way it offered us no specific investigative strategies. After all, who hasn’t dealt with grief? Who doesn’t want to forget painful memories? Most of the Denver metroplex’s 2.8 million people would probably fit that profile.
Still, I let his words pass without comment. “I only managed to get through about thirty of Keats’s poems, but I didn’t find anything helpful in the ones I read.” Then, though I didn’t want to, I admitted the inevitable, “It’s possible we’re on the wrong track entirely, here.”
Jake glanced at his computer screen. “I’m not so sure.” He motioned to the wide screen television monitor mounted on the conference room wall. “Is there a way we can…?”
Cheyenne deciphered his question and stood. “I’ll get it.” She powered on the wall-mounted monitor and then fished a USB cord out of a drawer on a nearby console.
Jake took a moment to connect his computer to the USB port on the table, and just as the image from his laptop appeared on the screen, Kurt eased into the room and took a seat.
“Amy Lynn wanted to be in protective custody,” he said, then looked at me. “A couple of your boys at the field office moved her to a safe house. And Reggie is not happy.”
“So she’s safe,” Cheyenne said. “That’s good. One less thing to worry about.”
Something didn’t seem quite right, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Jake opened a website, and it appeared on the wall monitor.
“One more thing,” Kurt added. “The victimology info you wanted, Pat. Everything we have so far has been uploaded to the online case file archives.”
“Good.” I filled him in on what Cheyenne, Jake, and I had been discussing and then motioned for Jake to resume.
“Here’s what I have.” Jake pointed the cursor to the middle of the webpage. “Nothing on the phrase about tears, but I did find something more about the pot of basil. Keats’s poem was actually based on a story from the fourteenth century about a woman named Isabel who digs up her lover’s body, severs the head, and puts it into a pot, then plants basil over it.” Jake paused, then added, “The story appears in a book that was condemned by the church. It’s called The Decameron.”
I leaned forward.
“A condemned book?” Cheyenne said.
“Yeah. It’s by an Italian author named Giovanni Boccaccio.” He scrolled down the article. “And by the way, Giovanni is the Italian form of-”
“John,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Unbelievable,” Kurt muttered.
John Alexander.
John Keats.
John Boccaccio.
All three of these men had told the story of a disinterred head in a pot of basiclass="underline" the first through a painting, the second through poetry, the third through prose.
And now here in Denver, we had a killer who called himself John and had reenacted the story in a fourth way: real life.
By signing the note “John” and sending the pot of basil to a reporter, the killer must have known we would eventually make the connection to either Keats, Alexander, or Boccaccio. I wasn’t sure if I should be impressed by this thoroughness, or insulted by it.
All one elaborate, twisted game.
Jake went on, “Apparently, The Decameron became a source of literary material for other authors, including…” He looked at his notes. “Faulkner, Tennyson, Longfellow, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and of course, Keats-just to name a few. In fact, a quarter of the stories in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as well as its literary structure are based on stories from The Decameron.”
I could hardly believe it. “Chaucer, Longfellow, Shakespeare, they all based stories on Boccaccio’s book? I’ve never heard of him before.”
Jake shook his head. “Neither had I.”
“Wait,” Cheyenne said, somewhat impatiently. “You said the book was condemned by the church?”
Jake scrolled down the webpage. “In 1370 a monk named Pi-etro Petroni wrote to Boccaccio warning him that he would be eternally damned unless he renounced the book. Boccaccio later revised the book, but he never recanted. Soon after that, the pope, let’s see…”
He slid the cursor across the screen until he found his place. “Yeah, Pope Paul IV officially condemned the book, and it was banned from being distributed and read. But that only seemed to make it more popular.”
“No surprise there,” Kurt said. “The best way to sell a book is to get someone to ban it.”
“It’s still on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum to this day,” Jake concluded.
“The Index of Forbidden Books,” Cheyenne said softly. She caught me looking at her questioningly. “Catholic school.”
“All right,” I said to Jake. “Then it must contain something heretical, or maybe satanic. What did the website say about the book’s content?”
He glanced at the notes he’d scribbled on a legal pad beside his keyboard. “The book is about ten people-seven women and three men who are trying to escape the Black Death in the 1300s. In the story, the Plague had infected Florence, and the ten travelers were trying to get to the hills of Fiesole where they could be safe.”
I was amazed at how much he’d been able to uncover in only twenty-five minutes.
After a quick breath, he went on. “During the ten-day trip they agree that every day they’ll each tell one story. And that’s where the title Decameron comes from: two Greek words, deka and haemeron, which mean ‘ten’ and ‘days,’ respectively.”
Ten travelers. Ten stories. Ten days.
Ten candles surrounding Heather Fain’s body.
My heartbeat quickened.
Cheyenne tapped the table impatiently. “Jake, get back to Pat’s question for a minute. If the church condemned the book, what kind of stories did these people tell?”
By her tone, I sensed that investigating a book condemned by the church she’d grown up in was bothering her more than just a little.
“Well, one of these indices lists…” Jake glanced at his computer, and I saw a new webpage appear on the wall monitor. “Yes. Here. It looks like the stories are pretty much about everyday topics: relationships, politics, religion, corruption, grief, and love…”
“So, daily life,” Kurt said.
“Pretty much.”
I still didn’t understand why the church would have condemned the book, but for now at least, the church’s specific reasons for banning it didn’t matter as much as the connection it might have to the case.
“We need to find out as much as we can about the stories in The Decameron,” I said.
Jake shook his head. “These stories aren’t short, and there are a hundred of them. It’ll take us, I don’t know, at least a couple days to wade through all-”
“No,” I said. “Remember the anonymous tips about the bodies: ‘Day Four ends on Wednesday.’ We can skip the rest of the days for now and just focus on the stories told on the fourth day. And we need to hurry. Dusk is coming.”