The Pawn

by Steven James

  “What do you mean, ‘see her’?” he said.

  I took a slow breath. “I need to see Tessa, Ralph. In person. The truth is, we’ve both been having a hard time. We’ve never really talked about Christie’s death. And now these dead girls, this case . . . it’s getting to me. I need to make things right with her. You have a kid, Ralph, you know what I’m talking about. My parents can stay out there, but not Tessa. Either I fly back to Denver for a couple days or the Bureau needs to bring her out here.”

  “Pat, you know I can’t—”

  “Get her a safe place close by, Ralph.” I eyed the luggage. “Either that or I’m heading back to Colorado right now.”

  I heard a knock on the hotel room door and peered through the eyehole. Even though it was still dark outside, I could see two very annoyed-looking officers standing outside my door. Neither one looked old enough to shave. One of them held up a set of car keys, dangling them in front of the peephole as if he were trying to hypnotize it. Ah, good. My rental car had arrived. I unlocked the door.

  “Well, Ralph? I’m waiting.”

  He cussed. Sometimes that was a good sign, sometimes a bad one. I figured the timing on this one was in my favor. “OK,” he said. “I can’t believe I’m saying this—I’ll make it happen. But once you two have ironed things out, she goes back to Denver so you can focus on this case. She’s here two days max.”

  “Four.”

  “Three.”

  “Deal.”

  I opened the door and pointed to my bags. The officer who looked older by about three minutes nodded to his partner, who groaned but finally sauntered over to pick up my backpack. I grabbed the suitcase as I told Ralph the flight number I wanted Tessa on. It left Denver at 11:20 a.m. mountain time but because of the time change wouldn’t arrive in Charlotte until 6:16 tonight.

  Boy Cop grunted, “What ’chu got in this thing? Bricks?”

  “Climbing gear,” I said to him under my breath.

  Then I told Ralph the ticket price.

  I had to pull the phone away from my ear again.

  The officer shook his head and followed me out the door. I turned my attention back to the conversation with Ralph. “You’ll need to have an agent from Denver accompany her. I don’t want her left alone for a minute. Not with this guy on the loose.”

  “Great. Another ticket.”

  “Ralph.”

  “OK.” A sigh. “Anything else? Trip to Bermuda, maybe?”

  “Hey, that’d be nice. Maybe later this winter.”

  “In your prayers.”

  Once I was convinced I’d be seeing Tessa in the evening, I ventured into the case. “So, any progress? Any word on Jolene?”

  “Not yet,” he grumbled. “I was hoping we’d get video of our guy at the mall, but the cameras only cover the public access entrances, not the employee break areas where her keys were stolen from. We’ve got some people going over the footage, though, just in case.”

  “Parking garage?”

  “Nope. No cameras.”

  “Figures.”

  I unlocked the trunk of the car, and we hoisted my bags inside.

  “Ballistics is looking at the bullet, but prelims don’t seem to match it with the guns registered to any of the security guards. Local PD is checking out all the guards. So far, two of them look interesting. One guy lives on the same street as Jolene. I thought I’d talk to him before coming back to Asheville.”

  I nodded my thanks to the officers and slid behind the wheel of the rental car. They walked off mumbling to each other, obviously not happy to be playing Bellhop and Errand Boy this morning. “Hmm. Well, check it out, but I don’t think it’ll be him. There may even be evidence that points to the guy, but he’ll be cleared.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I flipped on my headlights and pulled into the slowly dawning day. “I don’t think our guy is stupid enough to go after a girl from down the block or get himself caught on video at the mall. He would have thought of all that. Besides, think big picture. This is just a piece of a complex puzzle. Just one in the series. Remember, predatory killers typically expand their hunting grounds on each subsequent crime; they don’t shrink it back toward their neighborhoods. But who knows. Talk to the guard. See what you can find out. By the way, how’s the guy who was shot?”

  Ralph grunted. “He’ll survive. Might not ever speak again, though. If that bullet had gone any further to the right—”

  I looked in the rearview mirror and noticed a pair of headlights.

  “I know, I know.” The taunting words of the Illusionist echoed in my head: You and I both know I didn’t intend to kill him. “I don’t think he meant to kill the guy, Ralph. He might be a sharpshooter. Let’s have Sheriff Wallace follow up on that.”

  I pictured Ralph nodding on the other side of the phone. “We tried talking to the girl who was with him,” he said, “but we couldn’t get much. She was really shook up.”

  “Yeah. No kidding.” I merged onto the highway and shifted the phone to the other hand.

  “She has no idea how the chess piece got in their car—we were able to get that much from her. Anderson’s wife was very forthcoming, though—Anderson’s the guy who was shot—turns out he’s an English professor at UNC. The girl is one of his students.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “He told his wife he was playing poker every Friday night. Apparently, it’s a regular thing.”

  A pattern. Yes.

  He knew that. The Illusionist knew they’d be there.

  “The girl did mention that they’d start in the car and then move to the hotel down the block. She said it was what turned him on.”

  “That’s a little too much information for me, Ralph,” I said. “But I appreciate your thoroughness.” After that the conversation lulled. We’d both said most of what we had on our minds. Ahead of me, even though the sun wasn’t up yet, the edge of the horizon was beginning to glow amber and red.

  “That it?” he said at last.

  The headlights followed me. Stayed four cars back.

  There was one more thing.

  I merged into the flow of traffic on the Blue Ridge Parkway. “The whole thing with the contact lenses, Ralph . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “It troubles me. He’s linking the crimes for us.”

  “Don’t the ribbons and chess pieces do that?”

  “This is deeper. It’s something else.”

  “Showing off?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. He stole the contacts from Jolene and then planted them on Mindy. He was cross-contaminating the crime scenes with evidence from a future victim. I’ve never seen that before.”

  I accelerated, passed a few cars. Kept an eye on the rearview mirror.

  Ralph was quiet for a moment; I figured he was chewing on everything. “But if it’s supposed to be a clue to his next victim, it’s not nearly enough to go on. I mean, stolen contacts?”

  “That’s the thing. I don’t think he wants us to stop the killings,” I said. “I think he wants us to know we can’t stop them.”

  The car I was watching passed a few other cars. Stayed the same distance behind me.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m heading to the federal building to pick up my laptop—I left it there when we rushed out last night—and then I’m heading back to look at Mindy’s crime scene again. The medical examiner placed the time of death somewhere between 8:00 and 11:00 a.m.”

  “I never understood why it’s so important for you to see the crime scenes at the same time as the murder—”

  “You notice things. Lighting, maybe. Usage patterns. You see what he saw. It helps me understand the context of the crime. Listen, Ralph, I think I’m being followed.”

  “What?”

  “A car. It’s been with me since I left the hotel. He’s not being obvious, though. Whoever it is, he’s experienced.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “There’s a tunnel up ahead. I’ve got an id
ea.”

  25

  About a quarter mile ahead of me the road disappeared into a tunnel that bore through the side of a mountain. I raced the engine and sped toward it. Whoever was tailing me was stuck behind traffic and couldn’t pass because the highway narrowed as we approached the tunnel.

  I noted how many cars he was back—four—then entered the tunnel and flicked off my lights so the cars behind me wouldn’t be able to judge how far ahead of them I’d traveled. I floored the gas pedal and watched the headlights shrink behind me. A few seconds later I emerged from the other side of the mountain, whipped over to the shoulder, and backed up, spraying up a cloud of gravel in the process.

  Now I could see the cars leave the tunnel, but they couldn’t see me.

  I waited. He’d be out any time, and the tables would be turned. I would be following him.

  Out came the first car.

  I waited . . .

  Car number two.

  I gripped the steering wheel. My heart began racing. Is this the killer? Did he wait for me outside my hotel room after calling me last night?

  Number three.

  I got ready to follow. I wished I’d been able to get the make and model of the car.

  Well, I’d have those in a second.

  Waited . . .

  The seconds passed. The car didn’t come.

  I waited a few more moments and then spun my car around and headed back through the tunnel to the other side of the mountain, but he was gone. The road was empty.

  He must have realized what you were planning when you sped up. He never entered the tunnel.

  I wasn’t sure if I should feel disappointed or relieved. It was just another puzzle piece that didn’t make sense.

  At last I drove back through the tunnel toward Asheville. I dialed Ralph and told him what had happened.

  “I’ll have Sheriff Wallace check with those two officers . . .”—his voice was getting spotty—“. . . see if either of them noticed a car in the parking lot, or someone following you.” He was right about his phone. It did need a charge. In a bad way.

  Static began to swallow his words.

  “I’m losing you,” I said.

  “I’m sending . . .” Ralph kept talking, but his voice blinked out in the middle of the sentence.

  The phone was dead.

  Dead.

  Well, that was appropriate.

  I glanced at the dark mountains looming around me. Above them, the bloated early morning clouds were drinking in the scarlet sunlight that seeped up and over the peaks. For a moment they made me think of giant gray bodies smeared with blood hanging from the sky.

  Man.

  I need to get a different job.

  I turned on the radio and scanned the dial to try and find some music to get my mind off the case. Off death. A few snatches of whiny country music flickered on and then became garbled by static. Mostly all I could get were stations of radio preachers.

  I spun the dial, turned them off.

  But it was too late. The Bible verses they were quoting brought it all back . . . sitting on the stiff orange chair in the corner of the hospital room . . . seeing Christie on the bed . . . having to listen to the Reverend Donovan Richman go on about the goodness of God when all I could see was evidence of his cruelty lying right there in front of me . . .

  She’d asked him to come, Christie had. She’d been going to a small storefront church, and he was their new pastor, and so when she was admitted, she asked him to come.

  Reverend Donovan Richman. What a name.

  Another man from the church came too, a retired African-American gentleman, Benjamin Grayson. He was one of the deacons, and I gathered from their conversations that he was the one in charge of the “visitation ministry” that served shut-ins and hospitalized church members.

  Mostly I sat in the corner in the orange chair while they talked—well, while Richman talked. The rest of us pretty much just listened.

  Richman was rife with clichés about why God allows suffering and nodded his head agreeably whenever Christie would whisper something about Jesus or heaven. Benjamin just sat quietly and held Christie’s hand and sometimes cried strong, round tears.

  I don’t know that he meant it this way, but to me Reverend Richman made Christie’s pain seem trite, like some kind of cosmic object lesson sent by God to teach her something important about life. I have a hard time believing that God would torture people into loving him. I don’t know that much about God or about love, but I do know that torture isn’t what brings them together.

  The Illusionist jiggled the mouse, and his computer monitor sprang to life. The first rays of sunlight were sliding through the window, sending streaks of light dancing across his fingers. A beautiful morning. Beautiful!

  He cruised to some of his bookmarked websites and skimmed the latest online news concerning the abduction of Jolene Brittany Parker. He even downloaded a couple of articles about her. Mostly boilerplate stuff, but a few were actually interesting. It was always entertaining to see what people were saying about his work.

  “Look at this, Jolene,” he called over his shoulder. “Your parents are waiting for a ransom note.”

  No response.

  Ah, well, that was to be expected.

  He almost giggled. A ransom note! Who did they think he was? As if he were interested in money.

  He took a sip of ice-cold orange juice and surfed over to a chat room for true crime enthusiasts, where some of the resident “experts” were taking their stab at profiling the Yellow Ribbon Strangler. How clever was that? Taking their stab at profiling him. Ha. And he thought of that right there, on the spot. He was that good!

  He scrolled down the list, scanning the inane responses.

  Someone named catchem16 had written that the killer was, “Obviously a unorganized introvert with latented homosexual tendencies since he didn’t have sex with none of the women.”

  Idiot.

  Someone named deadhunter1zero thought, “The main UNSUB has past military experience and probably has a dishonorable discharge for violent outbursts. He’s living out of a mobile home or travel trailer. He works a menial job and has a German shepherd.”

  In a way it was funny. “He’s a white male between the ages of 25 and 40,” they would write, “antisocial, divorced, low IQ . . .” Blah, blah, blah, blah. Cookie-cutter profiling. Morons. Imbeciles. They had no idea who they were dealing with.

  He wondered what Agent Jiang thought of him. He knew what he thought of her. Oh yes. He knew exactly what he thought of her. What fun they could have together in the moonlight with the ropes and the ribbon and his favorite silver blade.

  He could picture it now. Her face. Her body. The workings of her throat as she gasped for breath.

  Mmm.

  But really, it was better not to fantasize too much about that right now. Her time would come.

  And then, of course, there was Dr. Bowers. Despite all his talk about space and time and the geography of crime—see he was a poet too!—Patrick did understand the mind of a killer. Yes, somehow he knew what it was like. Maybe that’s why he made such a show of not listening to profilers. Because he was afraid of his own motives, of the dark channels in his own heart. There was something there. Yes. Something to consider.

  He read one more asinine paragraph describing how the Yellow Ribbon Strangler probably started fires, wet his bed, and tortured small animals as a child.

  Well, one out of three wasn’t bad.

  Christie died on a rain-soaked Monday afternoon eight months ago today. End of February. Spring was trying to unfold; winter trying to die. She passed away in between the seasons, in the middle of the empty spaces of the year.

  The day before she died, Reverend Richman asked how I was doing. When I told him I was okay, he asked politely if I was ready to face death. I said that I was ready for mine but that I wasn’t ready for Christie’s and never would be. Not ever.

  He didn’t seem satisfied with my answer. I tr
ied to thank him for coming and told him that right now probably wasn’t the best time to talk about all that but that both Christie and I really appreciated his—The anger had started feeling its way to the surface, and even now I could feel my hands tightening around the steering wheel.

  Because he wouldn’t let it drop.

  He just wouldn’t let it drop.

  He interrupted me in the middle of my sentence. “Don’t take eternity lightly, Dr. Bowers. You never know when your time will come.” His concern appeared to be genuine, but his timing was terrible.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  As we walked toward the door he said, “You seem like a well-read man; have you ever heard of Pascal’s Wager?”

  Of course I’d heard of Pascal and his wager. Blaise Pascal was one of the greatest mathematicians to ever live and one of my favorite authors. Without his pioneering work, computers—and geographic profiling—might never have been invented. He’s the one who wrote, “The only thing that consoles us from our miseries is diversion. And yet it is the greatest of our miseries.” I read that quote years ago and never forgot it. It seemed to tell the story of my life.

  “Yes, I know Pascal,” I said. “But I’ve never been a big fan of his wager. I don’t like the idea of betting on God.”

  “But why wouldn’t you want to bet on God?”

  I took a deep breath. On the one hand I did believe in God, but on the other I wasn’t really so sure. I had my doubts, especially in that hospital room with Christie. “Because I know someone who did.” I spoke in a low enough whisper so that my dying wife couldn’t hear me. “And he let her down.”

  The sentence tasted like poison on my tongue. I knew they were harsh and hurtful words, but I didn’t care. Richman was the one who’d brought it up. He’d pushed the issue. “Now excuse me,” I said. I started ushering both him and Benjamin to the door.

  “Give God a shot,” Richman persisted. “You don’t have anything to lose.”