The Pawn

by Steven James

  She studied it for a few brief seconds. “Six, nine, eight, four, one, three,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The bottom row. Fill those in, you should be able to take it from there.” After registering his surprise she added, “Though I wouldn’t bet on it.”

  He looked down at the sheet then back at her. “How do you know that?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe it’s just easy to figure out when you’re a kid.”

  Then he made a small sound with his mouth half open, asked her to repeat the numbers, looked down at his puzzle, and started scribbling. While he filled in the squares in his lame little puzzle, Tessa turned back to the wall of the airplane and stared out the window, searching the sky for something. Anything.

  But all she could see were miles and miles of clouds.

  42

  Alice McMichaelson sighed and slumped into her recliner.

  After taking Jacob to his last soccer game for the year (they won four to three thanks to Jacob’s two goals) and maneuvering through traffic and then stopping by the library to drop off Brenda’s overdue books and check out another stack that she’d probably finish by the end of the weekend and swinging through McDonald’s to get some lunch and then crawling past that nightmare construction zone on highway 240 West, she’d finally made it home.

  Whew.

  She kicked off her shoes. Stress. That was the problem. Starting a new job, arriving late for work, not getting enough sleep last night, running around all day with the kids.

  She took a deep breath and let her thoughts wander back to work. She really liked this job. The bank was going through a merger—Second National had been bought out by Montrose Intl. Investments last month, and transferring files and accounts had been a nightmare because the two banking companies just happened to use different computer programs—surprise, surprise. But that was one of the reasons they’d brought her on board. They needed extra staff to help with the transition and she needed the money. Garrett had never sent any child support and it was tough enough just making house payments. She had to keep this job. She had to.

  She sighed again, then reached down and rubbed her left foot. Ah, that felt good. Tonight, once the kids were in bed, she could do some studying, get ready for her exam on Monday. But for now it just felt good to relax.

  Jacob had deposited his soccer clothes in the middle of the hall and disappeared into his room to play video games, and the truth was, she didn’t even care. A few minutes ago Brenda had emerged from her room just long enough to find a bag of Cheetos. Alice watched her daughter return down the hallway and then let her eyes wander around the living room. Could use some cleaning. Vacuuming mostly. But then again, it wasn’t so bad, really. Being a single mom with two kids, what did you expect? She’d managed OK. And maybe she wouldn’t be single forever. She was still young enough to start over again and hadn’t lost all of her looks—at least not yet. And there were a few guys who’d shown interest in her, after all.

  She brushed at a stray wisp of hair. Never did find that brush, though, and it bugged her. Usually she prided herself on knowing where everything was around the house.

  Well, not a big deal. She’d buy another dumb brush. And at least she didn’t have to get up for work tomorrow, just take the kids to mass at ten, and after that she had all day to relax. She could make it through until then. Yes. She could manage.

  In a few minutes she would get up and straighten the living room. She closed her eyes and whispered a small prayer and rubbed her foot while the weekend drizzled past her outside.

  The angels were winning.

  At least for now.

  43

  Ralph suggested we take a breather and then reconvene in half an hour to debrief. It gave us all a chance to collect our bearings, refocus, grab some coffee, whatever. While everyone else went their separate ways, I had one of the paramedics take a look at my shoulder.

  He pulled out the blade-like slat of wood that the explosion had buried six inches into my back, cleaned the wound, and smeared the area with antibiotic. “You really should have this stitched up,” he said. “There’s a lot of muscle damage.”

  “I’ll be all right,” I told him. “Just butterfly it shut with some bandages.”

  “Are you a doctor?”

  “Not that kind of doctor. I used to lead wilderness trips, though. Learned first aid for that.”

  “Might leave a scar.”

  “It wouldn’t be my first.”

  He gently bandaged the wound and then patted my good shoulder. “You be careful out there.”

  I thanked him and headed inside for the meeting. On the way past the senator’s office I noticed Ralph and Lien-hua standing by the water cooler. Water, good idea. Rinse the bile out of my mouth. I grabbed a cup.

  “That shoulder all right?” asked Ralph.

  “Yeah. It’ll be fine. Little sore though.” Actually, it was killing me. “You two OK?”

  They nodded.

  “Listen,” I said, “did you see any evidence at the house before the explosion?”

  Ralph took a deep sigh. “A leather jacket in his closet. Looked like the one our guy was wearing last night. I didn’t grab it though because we didn’t have the search warrant yet, and then there wasn’t time to go back for it after you yelled ‘bomb.’”

  “Lien-hua?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “No. Nothing.”

  Just then Margaret and Tucker walked in. They nodded a silent greeting to us and headed to the conference room. Ralph joined them, but Lien-hua stayed by the water cooler a moment longer.

  “So honestly, is your shoulder OK?” she asked.

  “Honestly, it hurts like the dickens.”

  “The dickens?”

  “My mom used to say it.”

  “Oh. Well, anyway. I wanted to say . . . thanks.”

  “For . . . ?”

  “At the house. You covered me with your body. You protected me. You didn’t have to do that.”

  Ah. She noticed.

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “But . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t ever do it again.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “I don’t need protecting, Agent Bowers. I can take care of myself. I’m a big girl. Understand?”

  “Um, I—”

  “Do you understand?”

  “Yeah,” I said. No, I thought. “Wait a minute. Are you saying you don’t want me to protect you, but that you’re thankful to me when I do?”

  “I would give that analysis an A,” she said with the flicker of a grin, and walked away, leaving me standing there by myself with an empty paper cup in my hand.

  I will never, ever understand women.

  I rinsed out my mouth, threw the cup into the trash, and followed Lien-hua to the meeting.

  Margaret looked worse than the rest of us. Streaks of mascara scarred her face, and she was staring at the wall, emotionless. A zombie was in charge of our team. Ralph glanced my way and conferred the leadership of the meeting to me with a nod.

  “First of all, everyone’s OK,” I said. “Right?”

  Nods.

  “I know right now everything seems to point to Grolin, but let’s back up for a minute and try to stay objective. Margaret, the CSIU is finishing up outside?”

  “Yes,” she mumbled. “Then we have to send them to Grolin’s house and your cave up on that mountain.”

  Those guys would be earning their pay today.

  “Agent Tucker?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you find any more links between the crimes—like the contacts or the engagement ring?”

  He shook his head. “We’ll need more time to be sure, but there doesn’t seem to be anything else. It looks like he started leaving clues with Reinita.”

  “But what about Bethanie?” asked Lien-hua. “She came between Reinita and Mindy. Why would he skip over her?”

  Tucker shrugged. “I don’t know.�
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  “We’re missing something,” I said.

  Just then one of the crime scene technicians burst into the room. We all turned and stared in his direction. I think it intimidated him because he shrank back a little and mumbled, “Special Agent Wellington, you told us to let you know if we found anything . . .”

  “Yes,” she snapped. “What is it?”

  He shrank back even more. “Her purse. It was in the car with her, shoved back into the corner of the trunk.”

  “Let’s see it,” said Ralph.

  I pushed aside the piles of papers, pens, and empty coffee cups to clear off the table, and the tech guy carefully dumped out the contents of Jolene’s purse. Her cell phone tumbled onto the table along with a set of keys, a makeup case, a compact, some crumpled receipts, a billfold stuffed with pictures and credit cards, a few pens, a brush, two tampons, and a checkbook.

  All four of us studied the items intensely.

  “OK,” said Lien-hua. “What do you see?”

  Ralph shook his head. “Any of these things could be hers or someone else’s. There’s no way to know.”

  We all donned gloves before touching anything. I pulled out her credit cards and shuffled through them, glancing at the names on the cards. “Nope. These are all hers.” I uncrumpled the receipts, compared them to the credit cards. “These are all hers too.”

  “The billfold, maybe?” said Tucker. “Could it be someone else’s? He wants us to know. He wouldn’t leave something we couldn’t link.”

  Lien-hua flipped the billfold over and shook her head. “It’s embroidered with her initials . . . Wait a minute.” She pointed to the hairbrush. “Jolene has blonde hair.”

  “Yeah, so?” I said.

  Lien-hua picked up the brush and held it up to the light. “This brush has red hair in it.”

  “That’s it!” said Ralph. He turned to Tucker. “Process that now. I want fingerprints, DNA—” The crime scene technician reached for the brush, but Ralph stopped him. “No offense, buddy.” He pointed to Tucker. “You do the fingerprinting. You’re the best we have.”

  “I’m on it,” said Tucker.

  He hurried off with the brush as the timid crime scene guy scooped up the rest of the purse’s contents and followed him to the lab.

  “OK, good,” said Ralph. “Let’s see where that leads us.”

  “It’s possible it might be something else in the purse instead,” I said. “Let’s not get too excited yet. Either way, he hasn’t linked all the bodies for us—”

  “I still want to know why he skipped Bethanie,” said Lien-hua impatiently. “She was killed between Reinita and Mindy. Did he get started with her maybe, and she resisted, and that’s why he didn’t leave a clue? Or was he interrupted before he could leave it?”

  “Maybe something went wrong,” said Margaret, “and he panicked?”

  “He didn’t panic,” said Lien-hua. “The one thing this guy doesn’t do is panic.”

  “Besides,” I said, “he would have had the contact lenses with him already; he would have come prepared to leave them no matter what. After all, he left the pawn and the yellow ribbon. Besides, the ring points to Mindy, not Bethanie. It’s like he skipped right over Bethanie, like she’s not part of the series.”

  “Yeah,” said Ralph. “And if Tucker’s right, then he didn’t start leaving these clues until Reinita.”

  “Order matters,” I said. “There’s something about the order we’re missing.” Why did he start with Reinita? What happened? I stared off into space, processing everything.

  I looked up at the faces on the wall. The beautiful pictures of the dead women.

  Someone had already added Jolene’s picture to the mix.

  Patty. Jamie. Alexis. Reinita. Bethanie. Mindy. Jolene.

  Alexis and Bethanie were found the farthest away from Asheville.

  Maybe he didn’t skip Bethanie.

  I thought back to the basement at Grolin’s house. The workbench. The bookcase. The cat.

  Maybe he didn’t kill her.

  The cat.

  Suddenly I remembered something I’d heard years ago. “Only the most foolish of mice would hide in a cat’s ear,” I muttered. “But only the wisest of cats would look there.”

  “What?” said Ralph.

  I walked around the table to look at the pictures on the bulletin board. “A saying I heard once. It means the best place to hide something is often the most obvious place because it’s the last place anyone would look.”

  Margaret looked at me quizzically.

  “We’ve been looking for what all the victims have in common, right?” I glanced around at the team. “But what if only some of them had something in common?” I pointed to the wall. “Alexis and Bethanie.”

  Margaret shook her head. “What are you saying?”

  “What if you wanted to kill someone but also avoid suspicion?” “I’d make sure I had an airtight alibi,” she answered. “I don’t see what this has to do with—”

  By then Ralph had caught on. He stood up. “Or you could make sure you wouldn’t need one at all.”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s right.”

  Margaret shook her head. She still didn’t understand.

  “OK,” I said. “Let’s say I wanted to kill off Lien-hua here.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Just for discussion purposes. If we were friends and then suddenly she showed up dead, I’d be a suspect, right?”

  “Well, maybe,” said Margaret, glancing at me derisively. “If you had motive, means, and opportunity.”

  So, she was getting a little of her old spunk back. That was good.

  “OK,” I continued. “What if I had all those things, but she’d obviously been killed by someone else, say a serial killer. Same MO. Same signature. What then?”

  Suddenly it all began to sink in. “A copycat?” she whispered.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Two killers instead of one. That would explain why the geo profile was off. It would also explain why he started linking the crimes with Reinita—”

  “Because someone else killed Alexis, and he wanted to separate his work from the copycat’s!” said Lien-hua.

  Ralph grabbed the manila folder containing the medical examiner’s reports. “Hmm. The wound pattern was the same in each case, but it looks like the cuts weren’t as deep on Bethanie and Alexis.” He flipped to another page. “And the pawns—the ones found at Alexis and Bethanie’s sites—were cut with the same lathe.” He studied the photos carefully. “But the graining of the wood might be slightly different. Could be a different set. I’ll check it out.”

  “Why didn’t we notice that before?” asked Margaret.

  “Because we weren’t looking for it,” I said. “We were assuming rather than examining.”

  “Wait,” said Lien-hua, “toxicology, remember? Different drugs for Alexis and Bethanie.” She hit the table with her hand. “He can’t stand that someone else would share the spotlight.”

  “He’s telling us which ones are his,” mumbled Margaret.

  Wait a minute. Never assume. Theorize, test, revise.

  “OK,” I said. “I’m hypothesizing here, but let’s see what we’ve got. If someone else killed Alexis—found out about the ribbons and the chess pieces, I don’t know how, but let’s say he did—then the Illusionist—”

  “Grolin,” said Margaret.

  “Whoever he is, he’s following the case on the news, right, Lien-hua?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “He hears about this other body, knows he didn’t kill her, and doesn’t want to—what did you say?”

  “Share the spotlight.”

  “Right. So he decides to link his crimes for us in another way—a way nobody could possibly copy, leaving clues to his future victims. This way he keeps playing the game even though someone else has reached across the board and started taking some of the pieces.”

  Everyone seemed to be tracking, following my train of thought.
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  “OK,” I said. “Let’s use this as a working theory, but before we jump to any conclusions, let’s see if this hairbrush leads us anywhere.”

  Ralph began to point to each of us like a drill sergeant clicking off jobs on a duty chart. “Lien-hua, revamp the psych profile based on five victims rather than seven—leave out Alexis and Bethanie. Pat, rework the numbers on that geo-whatever computer program of yours. Let’s see where that takes us. I’ll get the interrogation room set up.”

  Margaret just stood motionless by the table, stunned. “Two killers,” I heard her whisper as I hurried past her to my desk. “And one of them knows where I live.”

  44

  Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid had only met one true psychopath in his life.

  As a teenager, Aaron had spent four months in a state-run group home for adolescents in southern Mississippi. The state didn’t call them orphanages anymore. Of course not. Much too negative-sounding. Instead, it was a “group home.” As if calling a place like that a “home” would turn it into one. As if anything could do that.

  Of course, the idea was still the same—children who’d lost their parents and were no longer cute and cuddly little babies whom couples might actually want to adopt get to live together until “they’re old enough to move out and become a burden on society.” At least that’s how the staff at the group home used to put it when they thought the children were out of earshot.

  It was their idea of a joke.

  So that’s where Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid met the psychopath—during his stay at the Oak Island Group Home in La Cruxis, Mississippi.

  Sevren was a gray, cold pool with deep currents. On his first day there, he ran into Lucas, an ape-like high school senior nearly six years older than him, in the hallway. Lucas bullied all the other kids and they all hated him, but none of them dared cross him.

  The two students stood staring at each other, neither moving. Neither flinching.

  “Out of my way,” said Lucas, glaring at the newcomer.

  Sevren just eyed him. Expressionless. Impassive. Unmoving.