The Pawn

by Steven James

  “That’s it.”

  “Just those three?”

  “Yup. Think about it. Take them one at a time. Desire: people want fame or sex or money or power. Even revenge is a form of desire. Think of how many crimes result from lust, greed, envy, jealousy, or ambition. All just different names for desire.”

  “Hmm,” she said thoughtfully. “OK. And anger I’ll agree with.”

  “Yeah. And of course there’s guilt, which speaks for itself. We all have to find a way to deal with our regrets and our shame, or we implode.”

  She pushed a branch out of the way. “It may surprise you to hear this, but I agree with those three. However, I think you missed the two most important ones.”

  “Oh. Well, I find that very . . .” I waited until the branch had snapped back into place before following her. “Interesting. And they are?”

  She stopped walking, let her eyes crawl along the trail for a few seconds. At last, she raised them to peer at me, and I could see that they were filled with deep channels of pain. “The first is fear, Dr. Bowers. Sometimes people do terrible things because they’ve been pushed into a corner. Fear can turn us into different people.”

  I didn’t say anything, but the questions rose in my mind, What are you afraid of, Lien-hua? What happened? Did you do something terrible too? “OK,” I said at last. “Fear. I’ll give you that one. What’s the second one?”

  She turned and continued down the trail. “Let’s see if you can guess the most important motive on your own.”

  Before I could even venture a guess, we came to an overlook just north of the crime scene. The trail skirted along the edge of a steep escarpment, the mountain ending abruptly at our feet and dropping hundreds of feet straight down to the river. I hadn’t noticed this overlook on our hike out to the trailhead on Thursday because of the thick fog that had ushered in the storm.

  “Survival?” I asked.

  She shook her head, her attention riveted on the view. “That falls under desire—the desire to live. Now, shh . . . don’t spoil this. It’s beautiful.”

  I followed her gaze. The valley swept out before us and then rose majestically to become autumn-tinged mountains, endless and alive. The valleys wandered through the mountain range, each with their own unique patchwork of shadows cast by the community of clouds gathering high overhead. A blaze of sunlight ignited each cloud, making them glow even more brightly against the steel blue sky.

  I remembered, years earlier, another wilderness guide telling me that “Appalachian” comes from a Native American word that means “endless mountains”; and staring out across these mountains I couldn’t help but get the impression that they really did fold back endlessly into space and time. The planet’s ancient origami left over from the days when the continents folded together.

  The breeze was constant here, rising from the valley, washing up and over us; the gentle morning breath of the hills. I wondered what it would feel like to stand here when the wind was still. What kind of solitude that must be to have the day decide its shape all around you, sky and shadow and peak and valley all draped in deep and primal silence.

  “Maybe that’s why he chose it,” I whispered after a few moments.

  “What?” She turned to me.

  “Beauty.”

  “You think he chose this place because of the beauty?”

  “Because of the paradox.” I looked at her. The wind blowing up and over the peak was whispering through her hair, letting it escape from gravity for just a moment, feathering it around her head in slow motion, easy and free. “Humans can’t seem to enjoy beauty without destroying it.” I was transfixed by the sight of her. “This trail, for example, cutting through the forest. It’s the only way to experience the solitude of this peak. But the trail also mars the very thing it allows us to enjoy—the scenery. I think beauty frightens us into destroying the things we admire most.” Our eyes met for a fraction of a second too long, that one tiny piece of time that says more than words can say. “That’s the paradox.”

  She looked away. “The medical examiner placed the time of death right about now.” Her voice had become efficient and professional. She stepped back from the edge of the mountain, and her hair returned to normal. Life returned to normal.

  “Yeah,” I said softly. “Let’s go.” And then I followed Lien-hua to the place Mindy died, while thoughts of death and beauty, of Christie’s memory and Lien-hua’s presence, wrestled in my mind.

  32

  We entered the clearing where Mindy Travelca had been found dead beneath a tree two days ago, and I set down my backpack.

  Lien-hua paced to the middle of the field. “The crime-scene investigation unit was all over this place already. And besides, the storms up here would have destroyed any physical evidence. So, what exactly are we looking for?”

  I turned in a circle, taking in the view, the mountains, the perspective, the trail. “Not forensic evidence as much as geographic understanding. Why here, Lien-hua? What significance does this place hold for him? A crime scene is everything related to the crime. The air. The wind. The ground. But a crime occurs in four dimensions, not just three.”

  Oops, I’d slipped into lecture mode without even realizing it.

  “The fourth dimension,” she said thoughtfully. “You mean time.”

  “Yes. Time.” I lay down against the tree so that I was in the same position Mindy had been when we found her. I stared out across the mountains. Why did he leave you here, Mindy? Why did he kill you then? “A crime occurs in both space and time. And how those two factors relate to each other is what I’m interested in most.”

  Contact lenses. He left them in her eyes.

  Time of death: between 8:00 and 11:00 a.m.

  She disappeared Wednesday afternoon.

  Died on Thursday morning.

  He didn’t carry her up the mountain.

  She made a cell phone call to her mother at 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday, said she’d be home on Friday.

  What did he leave you looking at? What did he want you to see?

  Sightlines were important to him.

  “There.” I pointed to a peak directly in front of us. “That mountain there. Which one is that?”

  Lien-hua pulled out the map and spent a few moments orienting herself to our surroundings. “Warrior’s Peak. And . . . wait . . . there’s a local legend about it . . . hang on.” She flipped the map over. “The daughter of a Cherokee chief who lived there was abducted by some members of the Catawba tribe and brought here, to this mountain we’re on right now.” Lien-hua glanced over the story printed on the map and then summarized. “Her lover snuck through the night to rescue her, but it was some kind of trap. He was killed, slaughtered, and the girl—rather than let herself be married to anyone from the Catawba tribe—threw herself off this mountain, over there where the cliffs are, where we were standing before. According to the legend her tears falling to the ground became the valleys surrounding these peaks. And listen to this”—she paused to find her place, then continued reading—“some people say you can still hear her crying up on this mountain, when the wind is right.”

  A chill settled over me as I sat where Mindy’s body had rested, as I stared out across the valley toward Warrior’s Peak. “He knew the story.”

  Lien-hua was quiet, reflective. “He put contacts in her eyes, Pat. He wanted us to think about her tears.”

  He wasn’t just one move ahead of us, more like two or three.

  Lien-hua must have been thinking the same thing. “This guy is good.”

  “He posed her,” I said. “Just like Jamie by the ‘No Loitering’ sign and Reinita on the trail to Tombstone Caverns.”

  “Taunting us. Sending us a message. It all plays into his fantasy.” Lien-hua looked around. “Well, right about now is when Mindy died. If they came here in the morning, would that have given him enough time to torture her?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Not enough hours of sunlight before her time of death. Not with t
he extensive petechial hemorrhaging she had.”

  “So he spent the night out here with her,” she said.

  I looked around. “That’s right. But not here. Not in this clearing; it’s too exposed.”

  “So where?”

  I pointed to a trail nearby that led to a series of exposed cliffs and outcroppings. “There.”

  33

  Grabbing my pack I followed Lien-hua along the trail. It brought us to the beginning of a series of cliffs that rose twenty to thirty meters above us and stretched back along the ridgeline. Another trail nearby led along the boulder-strewn base of the crags.

  “What are you looking for?” asked Lien-hua.

  “A cave.”

  “What? A cave? Why a cave?”

  “Mindy had soil caught in the grooves of her toe ring. Yesterday afternoon I compared the soil samples on her toe ring to the samples Ralph collected in the meadow. The soil in her toe ring has a higher clay content than the topsoil does. That and the fact that the killer needed a place out here to be alone with her led me to think he killed her in a cave.”

  “Soil? Differences in clay content?” she said skeptically.

  “What?”

  “I thought you weren’t interested in physical evidence, Dr. Bowers, just geographical understanding?”

  Picky, picky.

  “Caves are geographic,” I said. “C’mere and look at this.”

  I pointed to a small footpath leading off to the left. A deep heel depression was visible in the mud. “The kid at the mall said he was a big guy. If he was carrying her to the meadow, he might have left that.”

  “Why didn’t the tech team find that?”

  “They weren’t looking for a cave.”

  It didn’t take us long to find the mouth of the cave, only forty or fifty meters away. The temperature in a cave remains relatively constant; generally at this latitude it would be cooler than the surrounding area in the summer and warmer in the winter—about 58°F. And today the air leaving the mouth of the cave was condensing in the cool morning. Almost as if the earth were exhaling.

  The cave entrance was about two meters wide. I took off my backpack, pulled out my flashlight, and peered down.

  She gestured toward my flashlight. “Do you carry that thing with you all the time?”

  “A flashlight is a detective’s best friend. Especially this one. Precision-machined high-strength aluminum alloy case, waterproof, ergonomically designed grip—”

  She shook her head. “Boys and their toys.”

  The cave dropped vertically into the mountain. I couldn’t tell how far. “Well, what do you think?” I asked.

  “It’s isolated. It would give him the privacy he needed—”

  “No, I mean do you want to go in or should I?” I opened my pack and pulled out my climbing rope, a harness, a few carabiners, and some nylon webbing.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  “I sure hope so.” I pointed overhead. A stout tree stretched above the entrance to the cave, forking in two near the trunk. “See those branches? See how the bark is worn there?”

  “Yeah.”

  I tied a loop of webbing around each arm of the branch and clipped them together with two carabiners. “That’s where he anchored the rope.”

  “So you’re really going in?”

  “How else am I going to see what’s down there?”

  I threaded the middle of the rope through the biners and tossed the ends into the cave, pulled on my harness, and clipped the rope through my belay device.

  Lien-hua watched me. “What’s that thing for?”

  “It’s called a Figure-8,” I said. “The rope passes through it to create friction, and that friction is what slows my descent. I use my right hand, here, as my brake hand to control my speed.”

  She stared at the rope. “But how are you going to get back up?”

  I held up a couple of ascenders. “That’s what these are for. They slide up the rope and lock off. Of course, I could also use prussiks.” I pointed to a couple two-meter-long loops of smaller diameter rope. “By wrapping those around the climbing rope with a special knot, I can create loops that I can step into. Then, whichever loop you’re not standing on, you slide it up the rope. You take turns stepping and sliding. Kind of like walking vertically.”

  “Well . . .” She peered at the dark mouth of the cave. “You can go this time. I’ll supervise from here.”

  I double-checked my harness buckles and anchor system, held the flashlight in my teeth, and tipped backward into the cave.

  The floor of the cavern lay about ten meters below me. I didn’t even need to go all the way to the bottom before I began to picture what the killer had done.

  I took the light out of my mouth. “Mindy had pale outlines around her hips, didn’t she?” I called up to Lien-hua. “And encircling her upper thighs?”

  “Yes.” Her voice floated down to me. “The ME couldn’t figure out how she got them.”

  Lividity, the pooling of blood near the skin, begins when the heart stops circulating blood through the body and gravity tugs the blood downward. It might start as early as thirty minutes after the time of death. If she were hanging in a rock-climbing harness when she died, her body weight pressing against the webbing would constrict the blood vessels, keeping the stagnant blood from pooling, creating the outline of the webbing around her upper thighs.

  You left her hanging on the rope, didn’t you? You lowered her, left her hanging there in a harness, maybe tied her hands off loosely. Then you could have clipped them into the rope, so she wouldn’t struggle too much. You took off her boots so there wouldn’t be soil samples, even washed her feet when you were done—but you’re not as good as you think. You didn’t scrub her toe ring clean.

  The floor of the cave had been brushed to eliminate footprints, but the brushing told me a story too—someone was trying to cover something up. A few dark spots stained the clay beside a nearby rock. We would need to test it, but I suspected those stains were Mindy’s blood.

  He could have wrapped some webbing around her legs, maybe her calves. Outside of her jeans it wouldn’t have left ligature marks on her skin. Yeah, just tight enough to control her. She wouldn’t have been able to kick or fight back at all. She would be powerless. She would be his. All night long.

  “You OK down there?” Lien-hua called.

  “I’m good. Hang on.” I thought I saw something in the corner of the cave. I scanned the area with my flashlight.

  A curl of yellow ribbon.

  “He brought her here, Lien-hua. There’s water down here too. A pool. I’ll bet that’s where he washed off the body.”

  Using the ascenders I worked my way back up the rope to the lip of the cave.

  A couple minutes later I had the harness off and was packing up my gear. “We need to get back to the car, get some people up here to work this scene—wait a minute.”

  “What?”

  “Check your maps. See if this cave appears on any of them.”

  She pulled out the maps, looked them over. “Nope. Nothing.” “It’s only known to the locals then. That narrows it down even more. So he knew this cave well enough to know he wouldn’t be disturbed here—that he could have all night to do whatever he wanted to her,” I said.

  “And he knows how to rappel,” she said.

  “Oh man.”

  “What?”

  I closed the top flap of my backpack and cinched it tight. “The climbing gym on Wall Street. Her car was found half a block away. They lead trips up into these mountains. Climbing and caving.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I paid them a visit yesterday afternoon. Worked out for a while.” I hoisted the pack onto my shoulders. “C’mon. Let’s go.” I turned around, but Lien-hua had already started sprinting down the trail toward the car.

  34

  It wasn’t easy running with the backpack on, but thankfully I didn’t have to do it very long, plus it was all
downhill. In less than fifteen minutes we’d made it to the trailhead.

  I heaved off my pack and shoved it in the backseat of the car. I was still huffing from the run. “Yesterday afternoon . . . I had a few minutes . . . to walk around downtown . . . check out the places from the geo profile.” I pulled out the menus and business cards I’d stuffed into the car yesterday along with the brochure from the climbing gym. “I grabbed these.”

  “You think our guy might work there?” she asked.

  I handed her the brochure, pointed to the phone number. “See if you can reach them. See if . . . anyone was missing from work . . . the last couple days.”

  I threw open the door and pulled out my computer while she tried her cell phone.

  “No reception.”

  By then I’d managed to catch my breath. “Well, let’s see if any of their climbing guides were at Mindy’s crime scene. Hold that brochure up here, to the computer.”

  Using my laptop’s built-in video chatting camera, I snapped a picture of each of the twelve staff members, then pasted the photos into the face recognition program I’d had installed for my work with the National Law Enforcement & Corrections Technology Center in Denver.

  I pulled up the photos and video footage from Mindy’s crime scene, and the computer began sorting through the footage, zeroing in on one face after another, calculating, evaluating. A moment later the computer beeped and highlighted a man’s face showing a 91 percent probability of a positive match.

  “There he is,” whispered Lien-hua, pointing to the screen. “The guy in the baseball cap.”

  “I don’t believe it. He wore that cap at the mall too.”

  “Joseph Grolin,” she said.

  “Thinks he’s a real tough guy.” In his climbing guide photo he had a cocky smile and a stubbly beard a few shades darker than his shoulder-length blond hair. Late twenties, early thirties. He wore sunglasses. According to the bio beneath his picture, he worked as a rock-climbing instructor part-time and wrote for MountainQuest magazine for his day job. He’d been their outdoor editor for the last four years. Special interests: scuba diving, Native American lore, downhill skiing.