The Pawn

by Steven James

  “I said, step aside,” growled Lucas, moving closer.

  He pushed Sevren against the wall and smacked him hard in the gut. As Sevren gasped for breath, Lucas leaned close. “I heard about your mama, little boy. What she did for a living. She deserved to get cut.”

  And then, something happened. Something snapped in the wiry little boy who had just arrived. As quick as an asp he grabbed the older boy’s throat and squeezed. Lucas beat on Sevren with his massive fists, but it had no effect. It took five other kids to pull Sevren off, and Lucas spent the next four months in the hospital trying to learn how to swallow again.

  Of course, the other kids were glad Lucas was out of the picture. So when the administration asked about the fight, they just told them Sevren was acting in self-defense, which was mostly true. And instead of being sent to juvenile prison he was allowed to stay at the home.

  Sevren became a coiled serpent, always watching, always evaluating, always calculating. But what impressed Aaron the most wasn’t his roommate’s physical strength but his ability to manipulate people, to control them. In fact, he was almost as good at it as Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid was.

  Almost as good, in fact, as Father.

  But of course, that’s not what makes a person a psychopath, just having the ability to manipulate others. If it were, someone might actually consider Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid a psychopath. But no, persuasion, admirable though it is, isn’t enough. To be a psychopath you need to lack empathy. You need to have a complete disregard for what other people are feeling or experiencing.

  Even now, Kincaid remembered watching CNN when Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer, was captured back in 2001 after a nineteen-year killing spree in the northwest. After he was finally convicted of killing forty-eight women (and claimed to have killed forty-one more), the investigators asked him what made him different from other people, and he summed it all up in three simple words: “That caring thing.”

  Psychopaths lack that caring thing. They act on impulse, don’t feel guilt, don’t respond emotionally the way the rest of the world does, and have an insatiable need for power and control. Some don’t feel fear. Some can’t find sexual fulfillment unless their partner is in pain, or dying, or dead. Usually it’s the agony of others that brings psychopaths the most pleasure.

  So that was Sevren. No conscience. No guilt. No fears. No regrets.

  They say psychopaths begin exhibiting signs of their pathology at age fifteen.

  Sevren was an early bloomer.

  One day after school, Aaron had snuck behind the group home’s south wing to grab a smoke out of sight of the host family’s window. It was April in Mississippi. Hot and steamy. Humidity you could taste.

  Just after lighting up, he heard sounds in the nearby woods. Screeches. High-pitched, primal, something other than human.

  The noises were coming from a clearing up ahead. Aaron knew the place. The teens would meet there sometimes late at night to drink or smoke pot around a bonfire.

  He heard the sound again. What was that?

  And then, laughter. Quiet and calm. And a cold voice oozing through the trees. “You like that, don’t you?”

  Aaron saw a flicker of movement in the meadow and stepped quietly onto the path.

  Another cry, this time sharper. Definitely not human. Some kind of animal.

  What was going on?

  He had to see.

  But then the screech was cut off abruptly, swallowed by a burst of strange, moist, gurgling sounds. “There, now. That’s better,” said the voice.

  Aaron edged forward and peered through the underbrush. He was close enough now to see a figure kneeling, working at something with his hands, humming. Whatever he had on the ground in front of him lay hidden from view.

  Aaron took another step closer. Who was that? Only his back was visible.

  Maybe it was the movement, visible out of the corner of his eye, or the soft sound of footsteps on the forest floor, but the figure stopped what he was doing. Froze. So did Aaron.

  Time crashed to a halt. To Aaron the moment smelled like spring rain and flowers and earth and blood, and then the person in the meadow turned his head slowly and rose in one smooth, serpentine motion. Aaron recognized him right away.

  “Hello, Aaron.” Sevren was holding a pocketknife smeared with dark blood. More blood dripped from his hands and forearms down onto the leafy forest floor.

  Aaron let his eyes follow the descent of the drops of blood. And that’s when he saw what his roommate had done to the cat. Somehow the poor creature was still alive. It flopped what was left of its head back and forth feebly, finally facing Aaron. Tried to look at him. Had no eyes left to do it.

  “What are you doing, Sevren?”

  “A little experiment.” Sevren cocked his head slightly and shook out his fingers, splattering warm blood onto the young leaves. “You won’t tell, will you?”

  For a moment, just a moment, Aaron thought of running. Somewhere deep beneath the gurgles of the dying cat he could hear the sounds of the jungle and the screams and pleading prayers of the dying children. And the babies crying in the dark.

  Somewhere beneath the sounds.

  The dream called to him. He thought of running from Sevren, from this meadow, from everything, escaping like he had when he was ten, running and running and running forever, but this time he stood still. Something kept him there, drew his eyes toward the gruesome scene.

  Sevren’s voice turned dark. “If you tell, Aaron, I might have to explain what happened to Jessica. What really happened.”

  The words slammed into him like a fist in his stomach, taking all the air out of his reply.

  “What?” Aaron searched Sevren’s eyes. He couldn’t possibly know.

  “Jes-si-ca.” Sevren said the word slowly, deliberately, savoring every letter. “What really happened to her.” Sevren grinned and drew the pocketknife across his wrist, not to cut the skin, only to demonstrate that he knew what Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid was certain no one could possibly know.

  Sevren continued. “I saw your scar, there on your wrist, last week when you were changing clothes, and I remembered what happened to Jessica Rembrandt last month. It wasn’t too hard to piece together. At first I thought maybe you’d planned to die with her, and then at the last minute you chickened out and couldn’t go through with it. But . . . that’s not what happened, is it?” He paused, but not for long. It wasn’t really a question. “You talked her into it, didn’t you?” During the last few words, his voice, his posture, his tone had shifted from cool judgment to warm admiration. “You convinced her to do it.”

  When Aaron didn’t reply, Sevren nodded. Shook some blood off his fingertips. “Yes. I thought so.”

  Aaron couldn’t think of anything to say. He didn’t know if it was rage or fear or disgust that swarmed over his soul. “I loved her,” he said at last.

  Sevren nodded. “Yes,” he said simply. “I know.” A pause. Then, he continued. “So I won’t tell if you won’t tell. We’ll have two little secrets between us: the girl and the cat.” He placed a bloody finger to his lips to signify their pact of silence. “Shh.”

  Aaron scratched absently at the fresh scar on his wrist. He nodded. “I won’t tell.”

  Sevren looked down at the writhing cat whose paws he’d tied down to four stakes. Then, he looked back at Aaron. “Cross your heart and hope to die?”

  Aaron nodded.

  Sevren pulled a yellow ribbon out of his pocket and turned back to the cat. Then he glanced back at Aaron. “You can stay if you want. It’s just now getting to the good part.”

  And Aaron had stayed. Until it was over. And then a little longer even.

  Long enough to listen to Sevren tell him about his mother.

  45

  The two boys were sitting together by the campfire pit. They’d built a small blaze and were smoking, swapping stories. Aaron told Sevren about his parents, about the jungle and the babies and his destiny.

  And then, as Sevren s
lid a long stick into the fire, he told Aaron about what he saw when he finally got out of the closet.

  July 15, 1981

  Memphis, Tennessee

  7:17 p.m.

  The nine-year-old boy watched his mother lean down toward him and felt her smear a wet kiss on his forehead. She smelled sweet with perfume. “Now you be quiet and be a good boy and don’t be interruptin’ your mama’s work. You understand?”

  The young boy had nodded.

  “You know what’ll happen if you interrupt your mama?”

  He nodded again.

  The air conditioner coughed and sputtered in the windowsill of the double-wide trailer they called home.

  She grinned, her mouth big and gaping. She was missing five teeth. “I knew you’d listen to your mama. I knew you’d be a good boy.”

  Once again Sevren nodded. He didn’t want to be a bad boy. He didn’t like what happened to him when he was a bad boy. He didn’t like having to stay in the closet overnight. He wanted to please her, of course he did, just like any good boy would want to do.

  “I’ll get you out as soon as I can,” she said. And then the change came over her, the strange change that turned her into someone he didn’t recognize. Sometimes it meant she hadn’t been taking her pills. Sometimes it meant she’d taken too many. Her face turned terrible and red, her voice became angry and hard. “You don’t make a sound, boy! Don’t you dare let me hear you. Your mama has to work, you understand?”

  Another nod. His eyes wide, his heart hammering.

  And so, Sevren went willingly into the bedroom closet and sat on the floor. It wouldn’t be long if he did as he was told. Then his mama shut the closet door and locked it. Now he couldn’t get out. Now she was in control.

  He stared at the narrow band of light slicing through the space between the bottom of the door and the floor. It would go black soon, when his mother shut off the bedroom light.

  Sevren heard the outside door open and the gruff voice of a man and the girlish giggles of his mama pretending to be interested in him. It was her job. The boy knew that. Then, he heard the bedroom door open and close. A few minutes later the light in the bathroom went out, and his mother began doing her job.

  And then came the noises that he didn’t really understand. Somehow frightening and beautiful and soft and comforting all at the same time. But he didn’t like hearing them, so he sat in the closet doing what he always did: playing games in his mind. At first, when he was younger, it was tic-tac-toe. He would play both sides, first the X side and then the O side, rotating the board in his mind so he could see the game from the perspective of his opponent, which was really just him. But eventually, he figured out that in tic-tac-toe if you know what you’re doing, you’ll never lose. And since he was playing both sides, he could also never win. That got old pretty quickly.

  Then he learned checkers. At first it was much more difficult to keep all the pieces straight in his mind, to remember where he’d moved and which checkers he’d taken. It took him a long time to be able to train his mind to remember the progress of all the red and dark circles as they moved across the board, but in time, he was able to do that too. He had plenty of time in the closet to practice when he didn’t do his homework or when he didn’t please his mama.

  But in time he discovered that the strategies for winning checkers were limited too. So eventually he’d landed on chess. In chess the possibilities were almost limitless. And it didn’t matter so much who had the opening move. Yes, white had a slight advantage because it went first, but either side could win. Either could lose. He could actually beat himself.

  But on this night, the night with the Angry Man, something was different. Normally Sevren was pretty good at blocking out the sounds, making them seem not so real, but this night, the sounds broke through and found their way into the closet with him. There was a different kind of urgency to these sounds. They turned into gasps and threats, and he heard sounds that he shouldn’t have heard. Smacking sounds. Ripping sounds and wet sounds. And then, a slicing, tearing sound that he hoped he would never hear again. He tried humming to block them out, but it didn’t work.

  And he didn’t move. He dared not move until his mama came for him.

  He waited, even after he heard the bedroom door open and close, then the outside door slam shut. Even after the soft gasping sounds in the room beyond the closet door went away and everything descended into silence. Still he waited. Playing chess. Winning. Losing. It was all the same in the end. He waited and played and waited and played. He waited until he couldn’t wait any longer. “Mama?” he whispered at last. His voice was hoarse, and it didn’t even sound like it was coming from his throat. “Are you there?”

  No answer. No sound. Maybe she was sleeping? He wouldn’t want to wake her. He was afraid of what she might say.

  But it was strange for her to fall asleep right then. Usually she came and unlocked the closet as soon as she could, sometimes even before she was done counting her money.

  “Mama?”

  He heard his voice echo in the closet, but no reply came from his mother, no sound came from the bedroom except the air conditioner sputtering and, with a harsh, grating gasp, dying its final death in the windowsill.

  As the hours slipped by, his calls became shouts and then screams and then wails, and then everything just deteriorated into sobbing. He yelled and begged for his mother to come, but she didn’t. He banged on the door until his hands were raw, but she didn’t answer. Why didn’t she come? Didn’t she love him?

  After a while the tears stopped.

  He tried to play chess again, tried to picture the board and the pieces, but in his mind the board had been tipped over. All the pieces were scattered across the floor of his imagination. He couldn’t seem to get them set upright again. No matter how hard he tried, they kept tipping over, spilling onto the floor. Scattered. The game was over.

  “Mama!”

  He flung himself against the closet door, over and over again, screaming with his tired, ragged voice. But his mama didn’t reply, and she didn’t come to let him out. He tried turning the locked doorknob again and again even though he knew it wouldn’t move.

  By morning he was no longer screaming. He was no longer pounding. He was just sitting in the corner, smelling the strange and slightly ripe odor coming from beyond the closet door.

  He spent that entire day in the closet.

  Oh how he wished the air conditioner was working.

  It was late that afternoon when he began to notice the flies.

  A few crawled beneath the door and joined him in the hot closet. He tried to shoo them away, but they buzzed around him like an angry, dark cloud.

  There were a lot of flies.

  On the third day, only after he took the umbrella that he found in the corner of the closet and stabbed its tip into the wood and splintered a hole that he was able to kick larger and larger until he could slide his hand through to unlock himself, only then did he emerge into the room.

  Only then.

  Dim twilight gave everything an odd reddish glow.

  “Mama?”

  Only then did he see the bed.

  “Are you there, Mama?”

  Only then.

  A form lay beneath the covers, but the sheets were tangled and draped over the still bulge in a twisted, awkward way. Dark pools and splotches stained the sheets and the wall and the headboard of the bed. Flies crawled on his mother’s forehead, and he couldn’t figure out why she didn’t brush them away.

  “What’s that smell, Mama?”

  Beside her bed lay the yellow scarf. Her favorite one. The one she liked to wear on special occasions.

  “Let me tuck you in, Mama.”

  And he did. He even took the yellow scarf from the bedside and tied it gently in her stiff, matted red hair.

  Only then.

  “There, Mama. That’s better. Now everything will be OK.” And he lay down beside her and he held her as the flies crawled across his
arms.

  Only then did he stop playing chess in his mind forever.

  The pieces had fallen so far out of reach that no one would ever find them again.

  Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid remembered hearing this story, remembered meeting Sevren at the group home, remembered seeing what he had done to the cat using only a pocketknife.

  He remembered these things when he was in North Carolina last summer researching Q875, because that’s when he heard about the chess pieces and the stab wounds and the dead girls with the yellow ribbons tied in their hair.

  And when he heard, he knew.

  It had to be Sevren. It had to be.

  The timing had been perfect, really.

  Because when the young women in the southeast began showing up dead, he realized almost at once how to solve the problem that had come up concerning two of the family members.

  The solution seemed quite clear. It would allow him to take care of Bethanie and Alexis without drawing undue attention to his family or the plans they’d so carefully laid.

  He didn’t have to worry that the police would never find out that someone else had murdered two of the girls. He just needed to buy a little time. Until October 27th, and after that it wouldn’t matter anymore.

  Because in the next three weeks there would be so many other bodies to sort through that the world wouldn’t even remember those two dead women.

  Some scars are meant to be caressed forever.

  Oh yes, Father would be very proud.

  46

  We couldn’t find Joseph Grolin.

  Sheriff Wallace’s team checked the MountainQuest offices. He grunted as he recounted the visit to Ralph and me: Yes, Grolin had shown up for work that morning, but no, they didn’t know where he’d gone. Yes, they knew what he was writing: an article about North Carolina raft guides who spend their winters working on the slopes of Vail, Colorado, as ski instructors, but no, they didn’t have any idea where he might be. Yes, they would call if they heard anything about his whereabouts. Yes, yes, yes, and now could you please leave the office since you’re disrupting the production schedule?