The Pawn

by Steven James

  “Oh, wait,” I said. “I see. Now I get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “Someone from Governor Taylor’s office called you, didn’t they?”

  “Dr. Bowers.” She was speaking very slowly, very distinctly. “I hope you are not accusing me of acting unethically?”

  “Why not? That’s exactly what I’m doing—”

  “Bowers, your techniques are not working. We still have no idea who the killer is—”

  “Vanessa might know a name.”

  “Oh, haven’t you heard?” Her voice had become chilly. Distant.

  My heart sank. “Heard what?”

  “She died this afternoon, Dr. Bowers.”

  No.

  “How did she die? Who was assigned to guard her room? What was the time of death?”

  “She died from being shot in the neck, Dr. Bowers, when you led your team into an ambush. Now I’d like you to stop all this nonsense about Jonestown and killer cults and focus on finding the man who shot her or I’m pulling you off the case. One more screw-up, and you’re going back to Denv—”

  “I think I’m losing you, Margaret,” I said.

  “Don’t hang up on me, Dr.—”

  I hung up and then shut off Ralph’s phone. I was tempted to drop it against the garage door at about eighty miles per hour, but caught myself just in time.

  65

  Sheriff Wallace met me at the door. “Hey.”

  “Hey.” I avoided mentioning my conversation with Margaret. I just wasn’t up for it. I peered past him and looked inside the house. Blood spatter on the wall and doorframe told me where the shooter and the victim were standing at the time of the murder. Abrams’s workout bag lay by the door, a racquetball racket leaning next to it. He might’ve been on his way out when he was attacked.

  We followed the dried blood trail through the house to Abrams’s bedroom. He’d been dragged into the closet.

  “And Jolene’s body? Where was that found?” I asked.

  “Over yonder. On the treadmill.”

  “Treadmill?”

  “Yeah.”

  Treadmill?

  “By the way, I don’t know if this matters now that Grolin’s dead,” he said. “But I finished going through his credit card statements.” “And?”

  “That leather jacket he likes to wear? He bought it from the Gap over there in Hanes Mall last spring. Guess who was working at the Gap that day?”

  “Jolene.”

  “Yup.”

  I thought for a minute. It was all too perfect. Someone had been framing Grolin and planning it for close to a year. “Any other leather jackets purchased that day?”

  “Other jackets?”

  “From the Gap. Were any other leather jackets purchased that day, or maybe later that week?”

  He looked perplexed. “I don’t know.”

  “Find out.”

  Lien-hua entered the bedroom. Ralph was right behind her.

  “Ralph,” I said. “What’s going on? Why didn’t you tell me about this crime scene when you were at the safe house?”

  “I thought you’d appreciate a little time away from the case.”

  “Why?”

  He glared at me. “I flew Tessa in so you could straighten things out with her, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So do it.”

  I felt my fingers tense. Anger began to curl through me. At Margaret for being Margaret. At Tucker for rushing in last night. At the Illusionist for winning. At Ralph for being right. “But you should have known I’d come out here after talking to Lien-hua on the phone—”

  “Yeah,” he said icily. “You’re right. I should have known.”

  “Listen, it’s important for me to be here at this crime scene.” I said it loud enough for everyone to hear, but I knew I was saying it for myself. Silence in the room. There are some things more important than crime scenes, I heard a voice inside of me say. At first I thought it sounded like the voice of my dead wife. But then I realized it sounded more like the voice of her only daughter.

  I tried to shake the thoughts from my head, get focused again. No one responded to my comments. I continued, “So, he was shot yesterday morning, right?”

  “Yeah,” said Ralph. I could tell by his tone that he was still upset.

  I turned around and scanned the room, expecting to see a pawn somewhere. When my eyes came to rest on the treadmill, I wasn’t disappointed. A white one. “But why Abrams?” I asked, exasperated. “How does he fit into this whole thing? What do we know about him?”

  “He made a name for himself back in 1991,” explained Lien-hua. “That’s when North Carolina signed on to become part of the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.”

  “VICAP,” I said.

  “Yes. He was the one who signed North Carolina in.”

  It seemed like the case was spinning off sideways, getting skewed. I was starting to doubt I’d ever be able to catch this guy. “Did we get anything on that brush yet?” I was asking everybody. “Get any prints off it? DNA? Anything?”

  “Hmm.” Ralph scratched at his chin. He seemed to be lightening up. “Far as I know, Brent was taking care of that. We should have had those back by now. Maybe with him being on mandatory leave right now, something slipped through the cracks. I’ll check on that.”

  “I’ll do it,” said Sheriff Wallace. He stepped away to make the call.

  I walked over to the closet. Abrams’s body had already been removed. A patch of dried blood stained the carpet.

  “Dragged him into the closet,” I said. “Why a closet?”

  “I think it’s part of his narrative, his fantasy life,” said Lien-hua. “The first pawn was found in a closet, he strangled Mindy in that cave . . .”

  “Maybe he feels at home in tight places,” said Ralph.

  “Or maybe he likes the dark,” added Lien-hua.

  I had to let that sink in.

  The phone in Ralph’s pocket rang. He looked at the number. “It’s the police in New Mexico,” he said. He headed into another room to take the call in private.

  I turned to Lien-hua. “So what’s he telling us here?” My approach didn’t seem to be working all that well. Maybe hers would.

  “He’s escalating quickly,” she said. “He’s shifted from being a serial killer to a spree killer, not taking time to cool down anymore. He left Jolene’s body with key FBI leadership from both the past and the present. Maybe he’s saying you couldn’t catch me then and you can’t catch me now.”

  “You think he’s been active since 1991?” I asked.

  Lien-hua leaned down, pointed to the bloodstain in the closet. “Maybe. The execution-style murder tells me it wasn’t anything personal for him. This was to make a statement, nothing more. Just like Vanessa and the guy in the parking garage, it’s all part of the game to him. Anyone and everyone is expendable.”

  I looked at the treadmill. “So why did he leave her legs on the treadmill?” I asked.

  A voice came at us from the doorway: “Legs on a treadmill—hello!—running but not going anywhere.”

  We both turned. Tessa.

  “What are you doing here?” I snapped. “I told you to wait in the car.”

  “I got bored.”

  “Tessa?” said Lien-hua.

  “Yeah. And you must be the woman on the phone.”

  Lien-hua glanced at me and then back to Tessa. “Yes. I must be. And I think you might be right.”

  “About what?” I said.

  “Running but not going anywhere,” she said. “He’s summing up our investigation. That’s what we’ve been doing—running but not going anywhere.”

  I sighed. “C’mon, Tessa. Back to the car.” Well, at least she didn’t contaminate the scene. At least they’ve finished processing it. “What if there’d been a dead body in there?” I said to her. “What then?”

  “Ew. That would’ve been gross. I would’ve thrown up.”

  “That’s right. You would have
. Now, c’mon.”

  As we left the room, I had a thought. “By the way, how did you get past those two agents on the porch?”

  “I can be pretty convincing when I put my mind to it.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  “Did you hear that lady?” Tessa was staring at the bloodstained carpet as we walked back to the living room. “She said I was right. About the treadmill. Did you hear that?”

  “Oh. Well, she’s a profiler,” I started to say. “She can’t help it—” Stop, rewind.

  Reach out with your hand open . . .

  “Um . . . it was a good observation, Tessa. You might have nailed it.”

  She grunted. “Wow, I’m writing this one down. On Sunday, October 26, 2008, Patrick Bowers actually offers his stepdaughter a compliment.”

  “Tessa,” I said, a slight edge climbing into my voice, “do you know what the word acerbic means?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you have an acerbic wit.”

  She stopped, folded her arms, and cocked her head. “That is so not right.”

  “What?”

  “Telling me I’m sour, bitter, and vitriolic.”

  I stared at her. “I thought you didn’t know what acerbic meant?”

  “I lied.”

  This cannot be what all teenagers are like. It just can’t be.

  “Comes from the Latin,” she said. “Acerbus. Means bitter, gloomy, and dark.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s just great.”

  “I took two years of Latin instead of Spanish in middle school. Latin is a dead language. I thought it’d be cool to study a language that was dead.”

  Man. Did I really want to take on parenting this girl?

  Wait. Stupid question.

  Yes.

  More than anything else in the world.

  Before we made it to the front door, I heard Ralph cussing in the other room. And this was one of those times I didn’t think it was a good sign.

  “Bodies,” he said loud enough for my stepdaughter to hear. “They found fifteen bodies.”

  66

  The color drained from Tessa’s face. “What did he say?”

  “Tessa, this is why I didn’t want you to come along.”

  “Don’t do that,” she said. “I hate when people say I told you so!”

  “OK. Listen, I’m sorry. Please. I want to make things right between us. It’s just that, can you wait outside? Please. For a couple minutes.”

  “Don’t call me names then.”

  “I won’t. I promise.”

  She plopped onto the front porch swing, and I went back inside to tell Ralph what I thought of him cussing within earshot of my stepdaughter.

  From his vantage point, the Illusionist watched the girl swing back and forth, back and forth on the porch. He recognized her right away from his research. Tessa Bernice Ellis, Dr. Bowers’s stepdaughter. So, he’d flown her in, brought her to North Carolina to protect her.

  How nice.

  The Illusionist closed his eyes and let his mind wander, his senses dream, his desires explore the possibilities. Yes, this could mean an even more fitting conclusion to the game.

  He scanned the front of the house with the binoculars, studied Bowers’s rental car for a moment, made a note to himself that the good doctor had his backpack with him. Probably his climbing gear. Hmm.

  He allowed himself one more lingering glance at the girl and then headed back to his house to get his supplies.

  Before I could lay into Ralph, I saw the look on his face. “Thirteen of ’em were children,” he said.

  My mouth went dry. “Thirteen kids?”

  He nodded. “No smoke in their lungs.”

  “They were dead before the fire began.”

  “Yeah.”

  “They killed their kids?” said Lien-hua.

  “Just like at Jonestown,” I said.

  “The building next to the house had two adult bodies,” said Ralph. “One male, one female. And Kincaid’s private plane is gone from the regional airport. Filed a flight plan to Seattle.”

  “Seattle?” I said. “What’s in Seattle?”

  “They’re checking.”

  Suddenly the door flew open, and Wallace came ambling into the room, waving his new phone.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “The prints,” he exclaimed.

  “Who?” asked Ralph. “Who is it?”

  Wallace shook his head. “If the killer touched the brush he didn’t leave any prints. But I think we might have found his next victim. Every bank employee in the country is fingerprinted, so if there’s a robbery it’s easy to see if it was an inside job—there’s a national database of their fingerprints, and we—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” barked Ralph. The stress of the case was getting to him, to all of us, wearing our patience razor-thin. “Who is she? What’s her name?”

  “Alice McMichaelson. She works at Second National Bank. Lives in West Asheville.”

  “She’s next,” I said.

  “Do we have an address on her?” said Ralph.

  Sheriff Wallace told it to us.

  “Get some cops there now,” I said to him. “But make them plainclothes in case he’s watching the house. This just might be our chance to finally move out in front of him.”

  67

  Alice McMichaelson was sitting in her living room balancing her checkbook when the doorbell rang. Before she could even get up it rang again. Probably some kind of salesman. Don’t they ever give it a rest? I mean, give me a break, this is a Sunday.

  Maybe if she ignored him he’d go away.

  Ring. Ring. Ring.

  Oh, all right already.

  She crossed the carpet and peered out the window. A man wearing khaki pants, a golf shirt, and a maroon windbreaker stood on her porch. When she pulled the curtain to the side, he nodded at her.

  Alice opened the door, kept the chain clasped in place. “Yes? May I help you?”

  He held up his wallet to show her his badge. “Ma’am. I’m Officer Lewis with the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Department. May I come in?”

  “Is there some kind of problem?”

  “It might be better if I explained it to you inside the house, ma’am.”

  She looked past him to the car in the driveway. A sedan. Maybe he was off-duty or undercover.

  “Please,” he said. “There’s a very dangerous man on the loose. We think he might be after you. He’s unpredictable. He could show up at any time. We need to get you out of here as quickly as possible.”

  “Who is he? What does he want with me?”

  The man glanced over his shoulder and then back toward her. “Think of the worst thing you can. That’s him getting started.”

  She made no move to open the door any wider. Why was this officer by himself? Why didn’t he have a partner with him? He must have noticed that she was hesitant. “Look,” he said, “we believe you and your children might be in some danger. But I can’t force you to do anything. I’ll wait here on the porch for you to decide.” He handed her a card. “Here. Call this number and they’ll confirm I am who I say I am.”

  68

  After I drove Tessa back to the safe house, Sheriff Wallace called to inform me that his men had contacted Alice, but she refused to leave her home. “We can send a squad to surveil her house, but other than that our hands are tied.”

  I thought back to the hairbrush and the fingerprints and made a couple calls. When I found out Alice had only been working at the bank for less than a week, it gave me an idea. I called Lien-hua and put things into play.

  Then I got a text message from Ralph telling me Governor Taylor was scheduled to speak in Seattle to a consortium of tech companies next Monday.

  Aha. So that’s where Kincaid is planning to strike.

  At least we had a week to find him.

  Governor Taylor stood in front of the mirror and tried to concentrate on his speech for Monday. Tried, tried, tried, but t
he words just wouldn’t come.

  “We are on the brink of a new chapter in our nation’s history,” he said to the well-groomed man in the mirror. “A chapter defined not by the throes of terrorism, but by the footnotes of freedom.”

  No, that wasn’t it. The “footnotes of freedom”? Horrible. He’d have to fire his speechwriter tomorrow. He pulled out a pencil. Um, the banner of freedom? Clarion call of freedom? The resounding shout of freedom? Yes. That was good. He liked that.

  He scribbled some notes across the page. He liked to use pencil instead of pen since he often wrote, erased, and rewrote phrases dozens of times. He was a precise, careful man. When Sebastian Taylor did something, he did it well. He did it right. It was one of the reasons he was such a good leader.

  The presidential election was less than two weeks away, and he was actually glad the Democrats were polling so well; if the Republicans lost this election it would give him a better chance in 2012. Two years to plan, two years to run.

  Actually, four years to run. Starting now. With the video bloggers and nearly everything you do showing up on the Internet these days, every speech, every word mattered.

  So why did the distant past and his previous career have to come up and haunt him now, right when everything else was coming together?

  Kincaid peered out the plane window at the countryside far below. “David,” he said without turning to the man beside him.

  “Yes, Father?”

  “I never told you what happened on November 19th after I woke up by the river. It’s time you know.” Kincaid rubbed his finger over the scar, caressing the moments, remembering them all. “As you know, a Peoples Temple guard shot me in the shoulder. When I awoke I was in shock, too weak to find my way through the jungle. The only thing I could do was head back to the compound to look for help. I figured there would be others like me who’d fled in the night, who would be returning then, in the daylight. I thought maybe they could help me.”

  Governor Taylor snapped the pencil in half.

  It had been nearly three decades since the assignment. Yes, of course, he’d been in charge of the wet work on the congressman, but he was only doing his job. When Dwyer blew his cover and then Jones spun out of control, he’d needed to make some split-second decisions to diminish the fallout, to make sure all the evidence pointed where it was supposed to point.