by Steven James
Native American lore.
Lien-hua pointed to the bottom of the brochure. It read: “All our guides are highly trained and certified as Wilderness First Responders.”
“The stab wounds,” I said. “A First Responder would know just how deep to make them. And how to suture them up.”
She pulled out her cell phone again. “C’mon, work. Work!”
“Try this one.” I threw Dante’s phone to her as I rounded the car and hopped into the driver’s side.
“Nothing,” I heard her say. “I can’t believe he was there in the meadow the whole time. Watching us study the body.”
“Yeah,” I said. “He likes to watch. C’mon.” I fired up the engine. “It’s possible Jolene Parker is still alive.”
35
We flew down the mountain, nearly careening off the road twice as I took a couple curves too fast.
“Careful,” said Lien-hua. “You kill us, and we’ll never catch him.”
She tried the phone again. Still no coverage.
Asheville lay ten miles ahead of us.
I screeched the tires as I rounded another tight mountain curve.
“Easy, Pat. I want to get this guy as much as you do. But let’s do it in one piece.”
“Yeah.” I eased off the gas a little. “OK, sorry.”
She shook her head. “I’ve never seen anything like this guy. Indian legends, kidnappings, cross-contamination, he’s got it all thought out.” She tried her cell phone again. Still nothing.
“Betrayal,” I said.
“What?”
“The missing motive,” I said. “It’s betrayal, isn’t it?”
“Nope. You betray someone because of desire, and you respond to betrayal with anger. Try again.” She set her phone down. No use dialing until we got into flatter territory.
“Curiosity?”
“That’s a form of desire—you desire to know what that crime feels like or how it will affect you.”
I paused. I was running out of ideas. I thought about saying honor or vanity, but they were forms of desire too. Even duty and integrity are desires—the desire to please, the desire to be virtuous. “Hmm. Remorse?” I said.
“Just another name for guilt.”
I shook my head. This was harder than I thought. Maybe if I tried thinking like a profiler, I could do it.
On second thought . . . we all have our limits.
Lien-hua punched the number into the phone I’d borrowed from Sheriff Wallace. “Finally,” she muttered and then immediately launched into an explanation of everything we knew so far about Grolin. I could tell she was talking to Margaret.
But the more Lien-hua spoke, the more the expression on her face flattened out, became hard. She tried explaining the situation again, more emphatically this time, but once again she was cut off in mid-sentence.
“What?” I asked. “What is it?”
Lien-hua leaned toward me and whispered through clenched teeth, “Margaret says it’s not enough for a warrant.”
“What? Give me that phone.”
Lien-hua handed it to me.
“Margaret, Jolene might still be alive!”
“Don’t raise your voice at me, Dr. Bowers.” Each word was a carefully crafted stone.
“Listen—”
“Indian legends?” she snapped. “Contact lenses? Just listen to yourself. There’s nothing tying Grolin to these crimes. I’m not calling up a judge to get a search warrant—”
“He was at Mindy’s crime scene, Margaret.”
“So were fifty other people,” she said. “It’s not enough.”
“He leads trips to this cave.”
“You don’t even know he was in that cave. All you have is some mud on the girl’s foot.”
“We have to move on this now!”
“Listen to me carefully, Agent Bowers.” Her voice had turned to ice. “I’ll consider calling it in on Monday when Judge Stephenson gets back from vacation, if you get me some actual evidence instead of just conjecture. Until then—”
“What?” I said. “I’m losing you.”
“Just wait for—” she droned on. I slammed the cell phone shut and threw it to the floor. The battery flew out. Along with a few other things.
“Oops,” I mumbled. “I hate when I do that.”
Lien-hua picked up the various items that used to be Dante Wallace’s cell phone. “Nice negotiation skills.”
“Um, I’ll buy him another one.”
“So what did she say?”
“She told me not to waste any time. She said to bring him in.” I cruised around a corner and accelerated into a straightaway as the road leveled out. “She said saving a girl’s life is more important than jumping over bureaucratic hurdles.”
Lien-hua stared at me. Blinked. “No she didn’t.”
“No,” I said after a pause. “She didn’t.”
I wasn’t sure how Lien-hua would respond. I had to do something. I had to. Jolene had a dad somewhere too, just like Mindy did. Crying. Worrying. Hoping. I couldn’t just sit by and wait while the Illusionist tortured and killed another girl when we might still be able to save her. I hoped Lien-hua was with me on this, I really did. If she wasn’t on board, I didn’t know what I was going to do.
Finally, out of the corner of my eye I saw her nod. “Too bad we lost reception right when she was telling us what she wanted us to do.”
“Yeah,” I said, gunning the motor and flying around another curve. “Too bad.”
Lien-hua picked up her phone. It took three calls to find Grolin’s address. She pulled out a map and called out the directions.
I merged onto Highway 70 and headed toward Billings Road, breaking every traffic law I could think of on the way.
36
Lien-hua made two more calls. “Unbelievable,” she muttered.
“What? Do we have something on Grolin?”
“Two priors. Assault in 2004; he did six months probation and three hundred hours of community service. Domestic violence last winter. Beat up his girlfriend really bad. They were living in Spartanburg at the time.”
“The site of the first murder.”
“Yeah. And the timing matches. Two days after the paramedics were called in to treat Grolin’s girlfriend, Patty Henderson was killed. The girl never pressed charges, just took off. Psychologically, it makes perfect sense—a girlfriend leaving would be a textbook precipitating stressor.”
“Enough to set him off.”
“Yeah, pushed him over the edge.”
“What about the profile, though? You didn’t think he’d served time.”
“True,” she said, “although the history of violence does fit.”
I felt myself gritting my teeth. “Why didn’t they catch this stuff when they ran the names of everyone at the scene of Mindy’s murder?”
“He’s a journalist. It makes sense for him to have been at the crime scene.”
“So what did Ralph say?” I’d heard snatches of her second conversation but not enough to catch the big picture. “Did he learn anything from interviewing that guard?”
She shook her head. “Waste of time. He’s on his way back, though. I caught him just before he made it to the federal building. Margaret doesn’t know he’s back in town yet. He’s going to meet us at Grolin’s place. He said to wait for him.”
Suddenly I realized I still had Ralph’s dead cell phone in my pocket. “Wait a minute, whose phone is Ralph using?”
“He told me he’d picked up his wife’s on the way through town.”
I nodded.
“Good. So we go in with Ralph.” If Lien-hua and I went after Grolin and saved Jolene, everything would be fine. Margaret wouldn’t be able to say a word. But if Grolin wasn’t our guy and we moved on this without a search warrant, someone’s head was going to roll—namely mine. Ralph was better at fending off reprimands than I was, especially from Margaret. In any case, I felt better about approaching a suspected serial killer with Ralph by my
side. Anyone would.
Billings Road lay on the edge of town and wound seven miles up into the hills.
“Isolated,” said Lien-hua. “It’s perfect. Except . . .”
She didn’t have to finish her sentence. I knew what she was thinking. This house lay on the other side of Asheville, nearly ten miles from of the hot spot I’d deduced our offender would live in.
“He could have another base he operates out of—a girlfriend’s place, maybe,” I said. “A friend’s house. Let’s have Tucker check on any other residences this guy might’ve had in the last couple years.”
She agreed and placed the call.
As she was finishing it up, we arrived at the dirt road leading to Grolin’s house. I drove up the quarter-mile driveway and pulled to a stop next to Ralph’s beat-up Jeep about fifty meters from Grolin’s house. I could see slivers of Grolin’s two-story home ahead of us through the nearby trees.
Ralph stepped out and eased his car door silently shut. “Margaret know you’re here?”
“Nope,” I said.
“Good. Let’s go.”
We started toward the house.
“When this is over,” said Ralph, “I’ll have to remind Margaret that you don’t need a search warrant in the case of an emergency, and if saving a girl’s life isn’t an emergency, I don’t know what is.” It was typical Ralph. And it was good to see.
“Who drove you back from Charlotte?” I asked.
“Couple state troopers.”
“Were they both named Bubba?”
“Probably,” he mumbled.
Lien-hua smiled.
“So Ralph,” I said, “how do you want to do this?” Lien-hua and I were following him along a trail that threaded through the forest toward the house.
“We go in fast and clean.”
I’d seen Ralph’s idea of fast and clean before. Fast was a word I would use. Clean was not.
I had to hurry to keep up with him. Despite his massive size, he moved like a spider through the trees, the result of a four-year stint as an Army Ranger.
The morning was quiet and still. A few birds chattered in the trees. But I felt anything but peaceful. My heart began to hammer. If Grolin was in there, this could end today, or it could spin off in a very bad way. “He’s a good shot,” I said. “Scary good. Let’s be careful.”
Ralph led Lien-hua and me up the steps and onto the porch. The place had been painted white years ago, but by now most of the paint was peeling off, curling out into the morning. Wisps of the past, flaking down at my feet.
Ralph approached the door, unholstered his weapon, and peered through the front window. “Anything else I should know?” Someone else might have been scared. He was just gathering information.
“He’ll deny everything,” said Lien-hua, the profiler. “He’s arrogant. He’ll probably invite us in, even if he’s got her in there. He’s sure he won’t get caught. He might have her hidden somewhere else.” She looked around the yard, then at the driveway where a VW bug was parked. “There’s a car here, but not the Subaru station wagon. He might not even be home.”
“We’ll find out soon enough.” Ralph walked up to the door and knocked.
Nothing.
“Hello?” he called. No response. He tried the doorknob. “Oh, look at that. It’s locked.” He turned toward me with a grin.
“Oh no, you don’t,” I said. I’d seen that look before.
Lien-hua stared at him. “Oh no you don’t what?”
Ralph took a step backward.
She turned to me. “Oh no he doesn’t what?”
“You might want to get out of the way.”
Ralph judged the distance to the door and then rushed toward it shoulder first. At impact, the door ruptured in half. Instantly, Ralph leveled his weapon and rushed forward.
We heard a creak above us from somewhere on the second floor. “Oh, I love my job,” he muttered, swiveling his gun toward the steps and heading up the stairs. “You two sweep this level. I’m going up.”
I pulled out my gun and stepped into the Illusionist’s home.
37
The Illusionist received the automatic page and slipped into one of the vacant janitor’s closets at work. He pulled out his palmtop computer and watched the agents burst into the house on the video feed from the camera positioned in the forest nearby. Oh, it was all so very dramatic with that large agent bursting through the door, everyone drawing their weapons. So very gung ho of them.
He almost giggled. Almost. It was even better than he’d planned it, though they arrived faster than he’d thought they would. He hadn’t expected them to connect the dots quite so quickly. Ah well, good for them. A pleasant surprise. All it did was move up the timeframe a bit.
But it was too bad, in a way, that all three of them went in.
Shame to have all of them in there at once.
He sent the email to the woman whose car he had visited earlier in the morning and then sat back and waited. It wouldn’t be long now.
The timer on his computer had started the five-minute countdown as soon as the door was breached.
Just four minutes and twenty-two seconds remained before the three federal agents would find even more than they bargained for.
Lien-hua headed toward the kitchen, and I moved slowly, methodically, down the hallway, found two doors at the far end, called out, no response, identified myself as a federal agent, pressed open the first door and leaped back out of the range of fire, then burst in, leveling my gun with both hands, sweeping the room. Grolin’s bedroom. The bed wasn’t made. Rock-climbing gear, harnesses, ropes, and carabiners cluttered the floor. It looked like he was either packing for a trip or had just returned from one.
“Clear!” I heard from upstairs. The sound we’d heard must have just been the house settling after Ralph demolished the front door.
I checked the other room. A small office. Computer. Printer. Bookshelves. Desk. Posters of rock climbers and mountaineers on the walls. A Native American dreamcatcher dangled in the window.
“Clear!” I called.
“Clear!” Lien-hua called from the kitchen.
After the initial sweep, we each started to go over the house again, more thoroughly. I’d seen a small inset window as we approached the house, and started looking for the staircase to the basement. It would be the perfect place to take Jolene.
There.
Halfway down the hall past the kitchen I came to a door. I grabbed the doorknob and twisted it. Locked.
I leaned against it. Listened.
“Jolene?”
3 minutes 14 seconds.
For a moment I thought of trying to smash the door open like Ralph had done but decided it was better to keep the damage to the house, and to my body, to a minimum. Besides, that door-smashing stuff is a lot harder than it looks. I glanced around the house. A pile of bank statements held together with a paperclip lay on the kitchen table.
I grabbed the paper clip, straightened it out, hurried back to the door, and slid the paper clip into the lock. I’d learned to pick locks on an undercover assignment back in 2001. Very handy.
The lock clicked, and the door swung open faster than I expected. Since I was leaning against it, I nearly stumbled down the steps. Awkwardly, I ducked back to the side as best I could, in case Grolin was down there with a gun. When nothing happened, I leaned over and called into the dark pit yawning before me, “Jolene?” I slid one hand along the wall, searching for a light switch. I kept my gun trained on the darkness just in case Grolin was here.
Above me I could hear Ralph’s footsteps as he scoured the house, systematically searching it room by room.
My fingers found the switch, and I flipped it up. A single bulb flickered on, illuminating the staircase with a jaundiced light. The air curling up toward me was thick with the smell of mold and decay. At the base of the stairs the dirt floor seemed to swallow the wooden staircase abruptly in mid-step.
“Jolene?” I called again, thi
s time softer, my heart hammering in my chest. This is where he brings them. This is where he does it.
I stepped forward onto the staircase. Behind me, the door swung creakily shut on its own.
I took the steps slowly, watching for trip wires or booby traps. If Grolin was as good as I thought he was, he wasn’t just going to let us walk in here and find her.
“Jolene?”
Step. Step.
No reply. But I did sense a rustle of movement in the darkness somewhere below me. My heart raced.
“Jolene, are you here?”
No reply.
Step.
I reached the bottom of the stairs.
38
2 minutes 25 seconds.
The dark cellar drank up the light of the single bulb, leaving most of the basement wrapped in thick shadows. I turned on my flashlight.
The air down here was noticeably cooler than the air in the rest of the house.
It reminded me of a cave.
The heavy support beams buried in the dirt floor had long ago started to sway under the weight of the house, giving the illusion that the entire house might collapse at any moment. The middle of the cellar contained a tumble of cardboard boxes and dead furniture. An old mountain bike, a pair of skis, and a torn backpack leaned against the stack. A workbench sat in the right-hand corner of the cellar under a pegboard covered with screwdrivers, hammers, wrenches, ragged handsaws, and chisels. He might be a carpenter. Or the tools might be for something else. Have those checked for blood. Hair. Prints.
I turned. On my left, a metal bookshelf leaned against the far wall of the cellar. Even in the dim light I could tell it held textbooks on journalism and English composition, long ago relegated to the basement. He’s a journalist, a writer. A lover of words. He can’t part with his old books even if he knows he’ll never read them again.
Above the bookshelf near the ceiling was the small recessed window I’d seen earlier. It was covered with grime. I doubted it had ever been opened.
