The Pawn pbf-1

by Steven James

  A man.

  A dead man.

  Special Agent Brent Tucker.

  83

  “Don’t worry, Pat,” said Margaret. “She’s OK. The paramedics are looking after her.” But her words were barely audible, floating somewhere beside me. They meant nothing. Because I was holding Tessa’s necklace in my hand, and nothing else mattered.

  He leaves an item from the next victim.

  My daughter is next.

  “Phone!” I yelled, pocketing the necklace. “Give me a phone!” Lien-hua handed me hers. I dialed Tessa’s cell phone number. Please answer. Please, please. The room was twirling; I was about to collapse, dizzy from the drugs.

  It rang.

  Someone answered. “Hello, Patrick.” I knew that voice: it was the paramedic who’d treated my shoulder. The paramedic who’d waited patiently for us to finish examining Mindy’s body, the one who helped the injured officer to the ambulance outside of Alice’s house last night. But no one noticed him because he was supposed to be there. Because paramedics are always supposed to be there. Even in Charlotte, in another city, he could blend in and disappear in the chaos following the shooting in the parking garage by just wearing his uniform. It was the perfect disguise because it wasn’t a disguise at all. He became invisible by the cleverest misdirection of all-by fitting in.

  By hiding in my ear.

  “Checkmate,” he said.

  Dizzy… dizzy… swaying… I handed the phone to Lien-hua and mumbled, “GPS…” The world was closing in. “Track her cell location with GPS… It’s the param-” I started to say, but before I could tell them who the Illusionist was, everything went black.

  84

  Tessa opened her eyes.

  She had no idea how long she’d been unconscious.

  Something was stuffed in her mouth. Some kind of gag. It made her want to retch, but she was afraid that if she threw up she’d choke on the vomit and die like that kid from school did last year at that party when he got so drunk he passed out and never woke up.

  Never woke up.

  Calm down, Tessa. Calm down.

  Never woke up.

  Calm down.

  She was on her side. Her hands stretched behind her back, tied together. It felt like duct tape. When she tried to move her legs, she couldn’t. Her ankles were tightly bound too. At least she still had her clothes on-thank God.

  Her mind felt fuzzy, unclear. She looked around.

  Where was she?

  An ambulance. She was in the back of an ambulance, and they were driving up a curving road, into the mountains.

  Drifting. Drifting. She blinked, tried to focus.

  Slipped into unconsciousness again.

  I woke up, looked around. A huddle of faces surrounded me.

  “The guy tossed the phone,” someone was saying.

  “The paramedic,” I managed to say.

  “He’s back!” Ralph’s face loomed into view. “You OK?”

  I nodded feebly. “It’s the paramedic.” I tried to speak, hardly made a sound. “The Illusionist. It’s him.”

  “Put out an APB on the ambulance!” Ralph shouted. I saw Margaret calling it in.

  “If it’s a paramedic, where’s his partner?” asked Lien-hua.

  I knew the answer from my days as a wilderness guide, and I wanted to tell her that in isolated mountainous regions, EMTs and paramedics drive their ambulances home, so that when a call comes in they don’t have to drive back to town first, but can respond faster. And they don’t always arrive on the scene with their partner. I wanted to explain it all, tried to, but voices and visions whispered to me, blurred my thoughts, curved reality around me.

  What kind of drug was that?

  “Where’s that doctor!” yelled Ralph. Then he looked at me. “That was a good idea to track her phone, but he discarded it.”

  “Where?” I managed to say. “Where did he toss it?”

  “240 West.”

  Location and timing…

  “How long ago?”

  Location and timing…

  “’Bout two minutes.”

  What was that paramedic’s name? I tried to think, tried to remember.

  He never told me his name. Just told me it might leave a scar. “Find out who responded to the 911 call at the safe house,” I said.

  “I’m on it,” said Ralph.

  “He’ll probably switch vehicles, Ralph.” I felt so weak. “We can’t chase him… gotta get out ahead of him…” I felt weak and nauseous. I must have looked it too.

  “We need to get you to the hospital,” said Lien-hua.

  I slapped myself in the face to wake up. Some of my thoughts were positioning themselves in a straight line again, but not all of them. “Not before I find my daughter,” I said. “Get my computer. It’s still in the security room.”

  “Pat-” she said.

  “Please,” I begged. “Please. Hurry.”

  She left for it.

  “His name’s Sevren Adkins,” Ralph announced. He asked them where Sevren lived and then scribbled down an address. “We can’t track the vehicle, though. It’s an older model. No GPS.” Then he said something into the phone and turned back to me. “I’ve got Asheville EMS on the phone, Pat. Anything else you need to know?”

  “Is he on their high angle rescue unit?”

  He asked them.

  “Yes!” he yelled.

  That explains the cave connection.

  “Find out if he used to work in Spartanburg, if he was the one who responded to the domestic abuse call from Grolin’s girlfriend. I want to know how long he’s been playing this game.”

  A minute later Lien-hua returned with my computer. I fired up F.A.L.C.O.N. “Showtime,” I said. I typed in the address Ralph had given me. The image focused, zoomed.

  Onto clouds.

  Useless.

  We haven’t found a way yet to see through the clouds.

  Tessa was dreaming, dreaming, dreaming. The world was a blur. A blood-drenched dream. She remembered arguing with Patrick… the necklace… her knapsack… seeing that cop get shot… Agent Tucker trying to help her… the paramedic.

  And then everything was swallowed by the clouds.

  She shook her head to clear her thoughts. Her mind was filled with visions of puffy clouds floating overhead, forming into fairies and unicorns and dragons with wispy, bristling teeth, and she could hear her mother’s laughter from somewhere nearby and then she was coming home from her mother’s funeral and she could see her reflection in the bathroom mirror where she was pressing a razor blade against her arm and the blood was dripping, falling, spreading out across her arm and then down the hall and onto a treadmill and across the carpet, and then it was flowing from Agent Tucker’s neck, forming into shapes on the floor, clouds on the carpet, coloring the world red with crimson tears.

  Bloody rain.

  Calm down, Tessa. Calm down.

  A terror still and deep settled over her, descended into her. She was tied up. She was with a killer. She was going to die.

  She was afraid to make a sound, afraid of what he might do if he found out she was awake, but despite herself, she let out a muffled gasp.

  The man driving the ambulance turned around and smiled. “Tessa,” he said. “So glad you could join me.”

  Ah, so she was awake. Good.

  It was more fun when they woke up early and had more time to contemplate what was about to happen to them.

  He heard a cell phone ring.

  What? He’d tossed the kid’s phone earlier. Whose phone was that?

  Another ring.

  He hadn’t checked both of her pockets, just the one.

  She was carrying a second phone.

  “Sevren lived in Spartanburg,” announced Ralph, hanging up his phone.

  I tried to pull together everything: Grolin had been set up from the start. He was Sevren’s perfect little pawn, writing about locations in MountainQuest magazine that Sevren could later drop bodies into to
make all the evidence point away from himself. And as a paramedic, Sevren would have known Vanessa from working at the hospital, could have convinced her to come to the golf course.

  He’s showing us the board.

  I thought of Tucker’s longitude and latitude theory and pulled up the geo profile and the computer’s chess game, grabbed the image of the chessboard, overlaid it onto the geo profile, resized it to fit. Locations, abduction sites, crime scenes. I added the golf course. The safe house.

  Patterns… patterns… patterns…

  I had to find him. I had to predict where he was going to go.

  You don’t predict the future, Pat. You can’t.

  But I had to.

  Sevren stopped the ambulance by the side of the road. They hadn’t quite made it to his destination yet, just a little farther before he could switch vehicles, but he needed to get rid of that phone. He climbed into the back with the girl.

  He fished the phone out of her pocket, stepped outside the ambulance, and hurled it into the gorge through the swirl of damp snow that had started descending on the mountains. Then he returned to her side.

  Yes.

  Maybe he could have a little fun with Tessa now that she was awake. Why not? He’d earned it. He watched her squirm for a few moments and then removed her gag.

  85

  “We got him,” announced Ralph.

  “What?” I said.

  “Sheriff Wallace just called in. State troopers are at his house. He probably switched vehicles like you said; his van is parked out front. They’re going in.”

  “No!” I hollered. “Tell them to stand down. Remember the bomb in Grolin’s place? If they breach the door, that house might blow. He might have Tessa inside. It would be the perfect ending to his game. Stand down!”

  As soon as the paramedic took off her gag Tessa spit in his face.

  For a moment he looked like he might slap her, but then he just grinned and wiped off the saliva. “Tessa, do you know who Boethius is?”

  Calm, down. Tessa, calm down.

  Outthink him. That’s what she needed to do. Stall. Until she could get free.

  She nodded. “Of course.” Tried to tug her hands free, failed, but felt something in the back pocket of her jeans. What was that?

  Her razor blade.

  His eyes narrowed. “Tell me.”

  Boethius… Boethius… the name was Latin… masculine.

  “A Roman,” she said. “He was that famous Roman guy.” He had to be famous, after all, or else the killer wouldn’t have even bothered to ask.

  “Yes,” he said suspiciously. “And what did he write about?”

  She slid out the blade and began working it against the tape binding her wrists as she tried to figure out who in the world Boethius could be.

  Ralph called off the raid. “What do you want us to do then?”

  “Hang on a second.” I was still groggy.

  The capsule. You swallowed half of that capsule.

  I had no idea what kind of drug was in there. Something powerful. I glanced at the bodies of the dead cult members scattered around me.

  “Give me a shot of adrenaline,” I said to the doctor who had finally responded to Ralph’s call for help.

  “We need to get you to the hospital,” she said.

  “Not yet,” I splashed a handful of water from the fountain into my face. “I gotta find my daughter.”

  Ralph walked over. “Do as he says, doc,” he thundered. “Do it now.”

  Reluctantly, the doctor gave me the shot.

  I stared at my computer screen. “Tell them to wait for me,” I told Ralph under my breath. “Tell them I’m on my way but not to make a move until I get there.”

  “But no one is supposed to leave the hotel-”

  I pulled out the necklace and spoke in an urgent whisper. “Ralph, he’s got Tessa.”

  “You’ve been exposed.”

  “Marcie will help us, you said so yourself.”

  “Pat-”

  “Ralph, he’s going to torture her, and then he’s going to kill her. I have to stop him. You know I do. I’m going.”

  His face wrinkled up, then turned to steel. “Yeah,” he said at last. “OK. Go. I’ll tell them to wait for you.”

  I pocketed the necklace and slipped into the hotel kitchen, figuring there’d be a delivery entrance I could use that wouldn’t be heavily guarded. After all, most of the guards were busy controlling the panicking guests. Thankfully I only met one security guard on my way. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “you’ve been infected. I can’t let you out-” My fist found his jaw. He fell to the ground.

  “Nothing personal,” I said, stepping past him. “But this concerns my daughter.”

  I pushed the door open and ran through the driving snow to my car.

  Tessa thought and thought hard.

  The guy said Boethius was a writer. OK, so what did he write about?… What would a Roman guy write about? The wars? Was he a historian? A philosopher? Playwright? Had to be one of the four, really there weren’t that many other choices, not from some stupid Roman author.

  Then she noticed a bracelet dangling from the guy’s wrist. It had a word inscribed on it: “Sophia.”

  Sophia means wisdom… A philosopher, maybe?… Was Boethius a Roman philosopher?

  Her hands were almost free. Almost.

  “Wisdom,” she said. “He wrote about wisdom.”

  The man gently stroked the back of her head. “I’m impressed.”

  Then his fingers intertwined in her hair. She cried out. He pulled her head back by her hair, exposing her throat. His voice seeped into her ears. “And what is the secret to true wisdom, Tessa?”

  Oh no. Now he had her. The secret to true wisdom? Tessa had no idea.

  The secret to true wisdom…

  She tried to speak, couldn’t. He loosened his grip slightly.

  Say something. Guess!

  “Love,” she whispered. “The secret is love.”

  “Close,” he said. “The answer is pain.”

  Sevren curled his lips into a dark smile and told the girl, “Of course we’ll get more into that lesson when we get to the house.” Then he climbed into the cab of the ambulance and pulled onto the road to take her to his workshop.

  There. Her hands were free.

  Now for her legs.

  Almost as soon as I’d peeled out of the parking lot I realized Sevren wouldn’t head home. Of course not; it would be too predictable, too obvious. He always tried to stay one step ahead.

  So he would have another place to take the women. But where?

  I thought through the geo profile, the chessboard.

  I was still missing something…

  The tempo and timeline of the crimes… the crime distribution pattern… road infrastructure… the time-benefit ratios… optimal travel routes. Asheville is shaped like a football, outlined by interstates 26 and 40… bodies in three states…

  The pieces were scattered all over the board… There was no pattern! None… The sites were scattered all over…

  Except for one place.

  Nothing happened in that one place.

  Exactly.

  The answer wasn’t where the pieces were placed-it was where they weren’t. All the locations, all the chess pieces, were clustered around one location where nothing happened. No murders. No abductions. No dump sites. Everything else orbited around this void, this abyss on the map. He’d tried to hide his tracks but left the biggest one of all. By trying so hard to stay away from his anchor point, he’d shown me right where it was.

  Warrior’s Peak.

  I whipped the car around and aimed it up into the mountains.

  By the time Tessa had freed her legs, she’d made a decision. There was no way she was going to let him get her back to his house. She could only imagine what he would do to her there. She crawled to the back doors and tried opening them, but they’d been locked from the outside. She threw her weight against them. Nothing.r />
  No, she had to get out. She had to. Even if she died in a car accident, she couldn’t let him get her to his home.

  Tessa looked around the back of the ambulance. Her eyes fell on one of the huge first-aid kits. She flipped it open, pulled out a pair of razor-sharp scissors, and headed for the cab of the ambulance.

  Icy snow bit into the windshield as I cruised up the serpentine road toward Warrior’s Peak. All the state troopers were looking in the wrong place, but there was no way for me to get word to them. No phone with me, no radio in my car. Maybe they could follow the homing beacon on the mic patch I was still wearing. I wasn’t sure how far it would broadcast. I could only hope.

  As much as I wanted to race up the mountain, I had to be careful. The visibility was low, and the road was spotted with patches of black ice. Twice my tires lost their grip on the pavement, and I almost went skidding off into the gorge.

  Then I saw the ambulance about a quarter mile ahead of me, but it was swerving back and forth like the driver had lost control.

  What’s going on?

  I accelerated.

  The adrenaline was wearing off. I was feeling nauseous again, sleepy. My vision grew blurry. I couldn’t trust my senses. I needed to get to her fast.

  I was only about a hundred meters behind them when it happened.

  The ambulance spun sideways, glided along the icy road, smashed through the guardrail, and then disappeared off the edge of the cliff.

  No, that couldn’t have happened. It couldn’t be real. I was seeing things. Hallucinating.

  I crushed the accelerator to the floor, slicing through the snow, through a dream, through a new reality I was trying to construct around myself, and by the time I reached the spot where they’d gone over I’d almost convinced myself it hadn’t happened, that I was only seeing things.

  Almost.

  But when I jumped out of the car and staggered to the edge of the precipice, I saw that it was real after all.

  Headlights stared up at me from three meters below. My daughter and the killer were caught on a ledge. “Tessa!” I couldn’t keep the terror out of my voice. “Are you OK?”

  Sevren’s voice came back to me, like poison blackening the day. “Patrick, is that you? I should have known you’d find-” But before he could finish his sentence the ambulance tipped back over the outcropping and dropped into the heart of the gorge, encased in the screams of my daughter.