The Pawn

by Steven James

  “Has she been moved?” I asked Ralph.

  “No,” he said.

  So, this was how the killer had positioned her.

  I gently tipped the body to the side. Touching her like this, moving her, felt like some kind of violation. I heard a voice in my head asking her to forgive me, to accept my touch as long as it would help me find the person who’d done this to her.

  There was no dirt or debris on her back like there would have been if she’d been raped out here or dragged along the trail. I looked around. If he didn’t drag her, did he carry her? All the way up here? Was this the primary crime scene after all? Did he meet her here, maybe?

  Somewhere behind me the chopper roared to life, but its sound was quickly drowned out by the howling wind of the coming storm.

  Daylight was dying around us. I pulled my Mini Maglite flashlight out of the sheath on my belt, flipped it on, and studied the girl’s face. Her ocean-blue eyes were open, staring forward. Forever staring forward. No longer bright and alive, now cloudy and opaque. I leaned over and looked deeply into her sightless eyes. The eyes that had seen the man who killed her. Had watched him. There was an old wives’ tale that the eyes of the dying record, like a photograph, the face of the killer. But there was no face captured on her eyes.

  “She has contacts,” I said, still staring at her.

  I heard Sheriff Wallace shuffle in close behind me. “Huh?”

  “Contacts. This girl wears contact lenses.”

  “So?”

  “The information Ralph sent me didn’t mention contact lenses.”

  Agent Hawkins glared at the crime scene technicians. “I guess we didn’t notice.”

  “Does it matter?” asked Wallace.

  “Everything matters,” I said. The wind flipped a wisp of the young woman’s hair across her face. I pushed it back. “I worked one case where the killer put contacts into a girl’s eyes after he killed her. He left fingerprints on the lenses. Everything matters.”

  I carefully removed her contact lenses and put them into an evidence bag. Then I examined her neck and cheeks and sighed softly. “He tortured her.” I didn’t realize I’d said the words aloud until Agent Jiang leaned over beside me. I caught the scent of her shampoo. Vanilla.

  “How can you tell?”

  I pointed. “See those tiny dots? Around her eyes there?”

  “Those purplish reddish ones?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Some kind of hemorrhaging?”

  “Petechial hemorrhaging—caused from asphyxiation. Usually, even in strangulation, the dots are small—sometimes only the size of a speck of dust, and only appear around the eyes or eyelids. She has them all across her face, even down here around her neck and shoulders. See?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means,” said someone behind me, “he didn’t just strangle her, he choked her into unconsciousness and then revived her again. Over and over. It must have gone on for a while.”

  I glanced over my shoulder.

  A strikingly handsome man in his late twenties knelt beside me. “Special Agent Brent Tucker,” he said. “Forensics.” Dark hair, neat, trim. He looked serious about his work and moved with the confidence of someone who’s used to getting things right the first time.

  “Yeah,” I said to Agent Jiang. “That’s what it means.”

  “You’re Dr. Bowers, aren’t you?” Agent Tucker asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s an honor to meet you.”

  “You too.”

  A chess piece lay in the palm of the girl’s right hand. A black pawn.

  “What do you estimate for her time of death?” I asked Tucker.

  He glanced at his notepad. “Hmm . . . They took her temp sixty minutes ago . . . she’s clothed”—he was thinking aloud—“it’s cool and windy on this mountain, and she wasn’t in direct sunlight . . . I’d say sometime this morning. Maybe between eight and ten.”

  I nodded.

  Sheriff Dante Wallace shook his head. “I can’t believe our guy carried her to the top of this mountain. How do you know he didn’t do her up here?”

  Ralph deferred to me, and I pointed to the girl. “There’s no sign of a struggle,” I said. “The ground isn’t disturbed. And look at her hair. It’s clean and neatly combed. No leaves. No dirt. She was probably killed indoors.” Probably, I thought. But this guy might be toying with us. I’m not sure about anything yet.

  I turned to Ralph. “You said some hikers found her?”

  “A couple locals, yeah,” he said, “just before I called you. We took them in for questioning. So far they look pretty clean.”

  “Do we know her name yet?”

  Ralph shook his head. “No ID. But there was a girl from Black Mountain reported missing yesterday named Mindy Travelca. We think it might be her. We’re checking.”

  “He wanted her found,” I said.

  “Then why did he bring her all the way out here?” Agent Tucker asked.

  That’s what I’m here to find out, I thought. But I didn’t say it. I didn’t say anything. I just knelt there and stared at the unblinking eyes of a girl who should have been making out with her boyfriend or studying for her college exams or eating a pizza with her roommate or chatting with her friends online instead of lying dead on top of this mountain.

  Someone’s daughter. Someone lost his daughter today.

  Just like me, I thought, even though Tessa was alive and well and wasn’t exactly my daughter at all. Someone just like me.

  I reached down and gently closed the eyes of the girl who might have been named Mindy just as the first raindrops began to fall, like tears from the eyes of God, splattering on the tarp above me.

  4

  The Illusionist watched as they carefully wrapped and removed the body, as the rain began, as the storm arrived. Everything was going according to plan. Everything!

  It would take them at least half an hour to carry the body down the trail to the ambulance. He wished he could stay to watch the show, he really did, but with the storm rolling in and so much work to do, he would have to be going. He glanced at his watch. Oh, yes, he needed to be on his way. There was so much to do yet tonight.

  5

  After we left the mountain, I rode with Sheriff Dante Wallace to a hotel about eight miles outside of Asheville. Dark sheets of angry rain slanted against the windshield. I was lost in thought, staring at the water running off the windshield wiper blades when he asked, “So how do you do it?”

  I turned and looked at him in the dim light. “Do what?”

  “Chase these monsters all the time.”

  I considered my words for a moment. “Well, I try to tell myself they’re just as human as I am. It helps some. Makes it more personal.”

  Tension hardened the lines around his jaw. His voice took on an edge. “How is someone who rapes little babies or dissects his wife and eats her for supper just as human as I am?”

  Actually, it was a good question, although I’d never heard it put quite like that. It’s hard not to think of these killers as monsters or aliens or subhumans; I struggle with it myself sometimes. “I try to think in terms of the similarities not the differences, Sheriff Wallace. Criminals interact with the world just like everyone does. They have patterns, follow routines, try to save time and money. They eat, drink, sleep, work, get into arguments, avoid the things they don’t like, and cover up the things they do wrong so they won’t get caught. Just like all of us. I know it sounds cold and unfeeling to say all that, but it helps me catch them. Understanding how people act helps me understand how killers act, and it helps me track them down.”

  He drove in silence for a few moments letting my words sink in. At last he turned off the highway and let out a coarse cough. “Well,” he said tersely, “you’re the expert.”

  A few minutes later he slowed to a stop in front of a Comfort Inn. “It ain’t the Hyatt,” he said. “But it should do ya for tonight.”

 
“Thanks for the ride, Sheriff.”

  “You’re welcome . . .” He paused. I could tell he was trying to think of how to address me—Detective Bowers, Agent Bowers, Dr. Bowers . . .

  “Pat,” I said. “My friends call me Pat.”

  “All right. See you tomorrow, Pat.”

  “OK,” I said.

  Then, I walked inside and tried not to think about what the killer had done to that girl on the mountain.

  I dragged myself into my hotel room and closed the door. I could still see her face, her unblinking eyes. Over the years I’ve tried to forget the faces, but I can’t. So many young, promising faces. It seems like it’s always the most attractive ones who get killed. Beauty brings out the worst in us. You’d think it would be the other way around—that the twisted, the deformed, the misshapen would ignite rage and terror. But they only seem to arouse sympathy. No, it’s beauty that brings out the beast. For whatever reason, elegance and grace always seem to ignite the deepest rage and darkest lusts of the human animal.

  I’ve been to hundreds of crime scenes over the last fifteen years. Probably thousands. I stopped counting a few years ago when I reached nine hundred. At first all the remembering bothered me. It always bothers people at first. Every cop and FBI agent I’ve ever met can remember their first crime scene.

  There’s something about seeing your first dead body. It’s not like the movies or TV. And it’s not like at a funeral where everything has been cleaned up and sanitized. It’s dirty and sad and messy and you see the chest that doesn’t rise and the lips that don’t move and the eyes that don’t blink. Corpses are discolored, misshapen, bloated, and reek with the smell of death. There is nothing beautiful or glamorous about a corpse.

  Everybody remembers seeing their first dead body.

  But after a while the images kind of run together. You remember bits and pieces—a patch of blood here. A bullet hole there. A knife lying discarded on the grass. A torn piece of fabric clinging to a patch of mottled skin. And if you really work at it, you can start to make the connections. Oh yeah, that was the nine-year-old girl who was kidnapped from her home and found buried outside her dad’s fishing cabin in Montana . . . That bullet wound reminds me of the boy down in Arkansas who was showing his friend the shotgun in his dad’s office after school . . . Those pliers look like the ones that couple in Maine used to torture their victims . . .

  The details blur together, but the faces remain etched in your mind. You don’t forget the faces.

  I kicked off my shoes and took a quick shower. Then I flipped on the TV. Images I didn’t care about flickered past me. Plastic people flashing fake smiles at a pretend world. I channel surfed past a few home shopping shows, the day’s sports highlights, a rerun of 24, a series of mindless commercials trying to sell me stuff I didn’t need, and of course, the political smear ads for the upcoming presidential election.

  The last channel I came to was a local news station doing a story on the disappearance of Mindy Travelca. They had footage of her dad standing in his front lawn. Based on the position of the sun in the sky, I guessed they’d filmed the interview sometime late in the morning. If it was Mindy we’d found, she was probably already dead at the time of the interview. “We’re just hoping and praying she’ll be OK,” the dad was telling the camera as bravely as he could, but his eyes betrayed him; they glistened with tears. A girl of about eight or nine ran up and jumped into his arms.

  That must be Mindy’s little sister.

  “We know she’s going to be OK,” the man continued. “Don’t we, sweetie?” The little girl nodded. “We love you, Mindy,” he said. “We’re here for you—”

  I shut it off. I couldn’t take it.

  They probably would have shown Mindy’s picture in a minute or two and I could have known for sure if she was the one we’d found. But I just couldn’t watch. Maybe I didn’t want to know.

  I lay there on my back, listening to the cars rush by on the highway less than a hundred meters away, watching the curtains rustle softly as the heater beneath the window struggled to spit mildly warm air into my room.

  Someone lost a daughter today.

  I grabbed my cell phone and dialed my parents’ number. I heard it ring, and then a frail, familiar voice answered, “Hello?”

  “Mom, it’s Pat. Is Tessa there?”

  “Oh, Patrick. Yes. I’ll go and get her. Just a moment, dear.” In the background I could hear her calling Tessa’s name, and then I heard my stepdaughter yell back that she was busy!

  I pictured her standing there yelling at my mother. A study in contrasts. Tessa with her shoulder-length, shadow-black hair. My mother with her arctic white curls. Most of the time Tessa liked to wear black long-sleeve T-shirts emblazoned with the skull-shaped logos of bands I’d never heard of. Torn jeans with retro tennis shoes usually rounded out her outfit. My mother always wore a dress. Always.

  I waited helplessly as they argued until finally Tessa’s voice came on. “What do you want?” she said.

  “Don’t talk to your grandmother like that, Tessa Bernice Ellis.”

  “I’ll talk like I want to whoever I want. Besides, she’s not my grandmother. My grandparents are dead, remember?”

  Ouch.

  “I know and I’m sorry, but Martha is my mother, and I’m asking you to treat her with a little more respect.”

  A pause with ice in it. “So what is it you want, Patrick?”

  I didn’t really expect her to call me Dad, but I could do without the venom in her voice.

  “I wanted to wish you a happy birthday.”

  “My birthday was yesterday.”

  Of course I knew that. Of course I did. And I should have called. There was no excuse. “I know, but I couldn’t call, I was at a conference and then—”

  “That is so lame.” She was right, and we both knew it.

  “Look, I’m sorry. Really, listen—”

  “It doesn’t matter. I gotta go. I’ve got stuff to do. I gotta study. I have two tests tomorrow.” And then, before I could reply, “You’d know that if you were ever here.”

  “Listen, Tessa—”

  Click.

  I stared at the phone. Oh, that went well.

  Sighed.

  Someone lost a daughter today.

  Someone just like me.

  6

  N3161 Virginia Street

  West Asheville, North Carolina

  10:01 p.m.

  He thought of himself as a magician. A great illusionist. Ever since he’d been a kid he’d liked magic. Now you see it, now you don’t! It all had to do with disguise and trickery and misdirection.

  The first magic show he remembered was back in fourth grade when some guy had come to his school to perform tricks for the students.

  “Watch as I make a red bandana appear out of nowhere,” the guy had called into his portable PA system. And the children had watched, just as they were told, until the cheap sound system squealed loudly and all the kids screeched along with it.

  A moment later he pulled out a green bandana and the kids laughed and pointed.

  “Oops,” he said. “Aha. There!” He pulled out a purple one this time. The kids laughed again. Then it was pink. More laughter.

  “Now, watch and be amazed,” he said. “As the Magnificent Marty attempts his next trick.” He showed them his empty hands and then walked out into the audience, right up to the Illusionist. He looked down at the boy, smiled, and then reached down and pulled a bandana out from behind his ear. This time it was orange.

  The kids laughed as the Magnificent Marty walked back onstage, looking very disappointed. He folded the bandana and stuffed it into his right hand. Then with a flourish he pulled out a blue bandana, and the orange one was gone. The children all gasped and clapped and whispered to each other, “How did he do that? It’s magic!”

  Then he pulled a dove out of a balloon, he escaped from a set of handcuffs, and finally, at the end of the show, as he was bowing, he pulled the red bandana
out of his nose, and the kids erupted in applause.

  And that was when the Illusionist realized that the entire show, from start to finish with all its feigned mistakes and slick banter, had been perfectly planned, carefully rehearsed. The show itself was one big illusion. And the magician had been in control the whole time. He’d crafted each moment to misdirect the children. He was always one step ahead of the audience. One step ahead of the world.

  The secret was all in misdirection. While you’re looking over here at this hand, I’m hiding the coin in my back pocket with this one. Watch and be amazed!

  The light in the living room flicked off, and the game began. He edged closer to the window and waited. He was a master at waiting for just the right moment. He could wait an hour or a year. And that’s what made him who he was. The Illusionist. Always one step ahead of the world.

  Time ticked by, and he waited. More lights in the neighborhood blinked out. The dogs stopped barking. Crickets began chirping from everywhere and nowhere. He stood motionless, entombed in the shadows. Always in the shadows. Just like those crickets. A man at home in the dark.

  At last the bedroom light went out. Minutes passed. Then hours. He listened to his own soft breathing until the night stopped moving and sleep spread her wings over the neighborhood. Finally, it was time.

  The Illusionist pulled on his ski mask and slipped on the latex gloves. Then he glided his leather gloves over the latex ones. He knew that latex gloves can snag or rip. Fingerprints and DNA from the sweat on your fingertips can be lifted from some types of latex. He knew that too. That’s why he wore both pair.

  He stepped across the footpath to the garden and leaned up against the scratchy brick wall of N3161 Virginia Street. It was an anonymous middle-class house in an anonymous middle-class neighborhood in an anonymous middle-class town.

  But it wouldn’t be anonymous for long.

  He already knew about the alarm system. And he knew how to disarm it. The Illusionist knew where the motion sensors were, where Alice McMichaelson kept the spare key for the neighbors when she left town. He knew it all.