The Pawn (7 page)

“Wait. This might be helpful.” She pulled up the crime-scene photos and started scrolling through them. “He abducts them, tortures them, then kills them and dumps their bodies where we can find them, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Where we can find them.”

“That’s right.”

“Most killers either leave a body indoors, at the primary crime scene, or if they move the body at all it’s to obstruct the investigation. To hide evidence.”

Hmm. And this from a profiler. “That’s right. Good point. So why does he want them found?”

“Right. That’s what I’m wondering. And one more thing I noticed. He started with blunt force to subdue Patty. Then he progressed to drugging his victims.”

“Not as messy,” I said, “and more reliable. Sometimes hitting someone on the head has the unfortunate result of killing them right away. Doesn’t give you the chance to torture them to death.”

“Well, there was some contamination in the original toxicology tests, so we didn’t get the correct results in until yesterday. This wasn’t in the information Ralph sent you. Look, the drugs used for Alexis and Bethanie are different from the ones used on Jamie and Reinita.”

She slid the toxicology reports my way, and I picked them up. “It is a little odd that he’d alternate like that,” I said. “Seems more likely he’d progress from one to the other, not switch back and forth.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“Let’s see what the autopsy brings back on Mindy. If she was drugged too . . .”

She scrolled to Mindy’s picture. I glanced back and forth from the bulletin board to the computer screen. In the one picture Mindy looked so alive, so timeless. So enduring. And in the other, so violated, so helpless, so dead; so utterly, unchangeably dead. Life is so terribly fragile. So fleeting. So brief. It’s a puzzle I can’t begin to understand even after all these years. One minute you’re dreaming of writing a novel, or retiring early, or vacationing in Bermuda, and the next you’re a slab of cooling meat with a blocked artery or a brain aneurysm. Or a chest full of cancer.

“You OK?” It was Agent Lien-hua’s voice. She was staring at me. I had no idea how long I’d been lost in thought.

“Huh?”

She pointed at my hands. I looked down. I’d curled my hands into fists and was squeezing so tightly my knuckles were turning white. I quickly relaxed my hands, flexed my fingers, shook them loose. “Yeah, yeah. Of course. I’m fine. Sorry. What were you saying?” My heart was hammering.
Stay in control. Don’t get distracted
here. Focus. Stay focused.

Lien-hua was quiet for a moment and then lowered her eyes, “I know what happened, Pat. Ralph told me. I’m very sorry.” It sounded like she genuinely meant it.

“About?” I hoped she didn’t know.

“Christie.”

Hearing her say Christie’s name sent a tremor through me. I could feel the anger rising like a tide. Anger against the doctors or God or fate or destiny or whatever other cosmic forces work together to so effectively screw up our lives and rip apart our dreams. In the first few months after she died, it was just loneliness that gnawed away at me, but lately anger had been giving it a run for its money. I wasn’t sure which one was better, anger or loneliness, but the anger didn’t make me feel so numb. So maybe that’s the one I preferred. I don’t know.

“I’m so sorry,” she repeated.

I couldn’t believe how sensitive I still was, eight months after the fact. “Yeah,” I said at last. I should’ve figured Ralph would have mentioned something to Lien-hua about Christie, but for some reason it still bugged me that he’d told her. “So am I.”

“You OK to do this?”

“Of course I am. Yeah. This is what I do.” I tried to stretch out my fingers, to shake out the filaments of rage. “So, um . . . let’s see what the medical examiner says about Mindy, then we’ll see if the killer keeps alternating the drugs. OK?”

“OK.”

I fumbled for what else to say. “All right. I’ll see you later.”

“See ya.”

I was still working at uncoiling my fingers when I walked away.

The first victim, Patty Henderson, lived in Spartanburg, South Carolina. She and her husband had twin four-year-old boys. At first the husband had been a suspect. Spouses, lovers, boyfriends are guilty in over half of domestic homicides. They’re always suspects. One of the first objectives when investigating a murder is to clear the spouse or boyfriend, then the person who found the body.

Everything seemed to point to him. He and Patty had been having marital problems and were seeing a counselor, and then one day she was found strangled and mutilated in their bedroom. Go figure. But he’d been cleared. At least a dozen people saw him at the time of the murder at a sports bar downtown, and there was no way he could have gotten back in time to kill her. Their sons were at Patty’s mom’s place for the night so she’d been home alone. Her husband might have hired someone, but I doubted it. The killer had taken the time to pull the sheets up to her neck, as if he were tucking her in bed. Covering a body typically means the killer has some kind of remorse, or that he knows the victim; is close to her. A contract killer wouldn’t typically do that, and he definitely wouldn’t tie a yellow ribbon in her hair. But if it wasn’t the husband, then who?

And then there was the white pawn on the floor of the bedroom closet. At first no one really paid attention to it. In a house crawling with kids nothing is ever put away, you get puzzle pieces, games, and toys scattered across the floor all the time. But then the husband finally noticed it. “That’s weird,” he’d said. “One of the kids must have brought it home from a friend’s house. We don’t have any chess games here.”

Then a month later an elderly couple found Jamie McNaab in a parking lot just over the state line in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. Nothing pointed to a pattern until one of the responding officers noticed she was holding a chess piece in her left hand. That was also the first murder to draw attention to the Asheville area.

You’d think the yellow ribbon would have been enough to tie the crimes together, but that info had slipped through the cracks. VICAP’s reporting procedures are a little overwhelming and time-consuming for a lot of cops, and with different people filling out the forms they’re never as complete or as uniform as they should be. A lot of investigations suffer because of it.

In the case of Jamie, I couldn’t help but wonder if the killer had put the pawn in her hand on purpose because the first chess piece had almost been overlooked. That was a chilling thought, because it might mean that this guy, whoever he was, saw the whole thing as a game. And he was making sure that the police knew every move he made.

Or even more chilling, he might have obtained inside information about the investigation.

Alexis had been found at Grayson Highlands State Park just over the border in Virginia. And Reinita Lawson, in the Nantahala National Forest in the far west corner of North Carolina.

All morning I worked furiously at sorting and sifting the geographic information, comparing it with population distribution data from western North Carolina, downloading cell phone records, inputting data into my computer, gathering all the information that would help me see the overall movement patterns of the offender and the victims.

I skipped lunch, and before I knew it Margaret was standing beside me, tapping her fingers on my desk. “I’m so anxious to hear your take on this case,” she said. She wasn’t a very good liar. “Are you ready to brief the team?”

“Yeah, I’ve been looking forward to it.”

I’m not a very good liar either.

I gathered my notes and stepped past her toward the briefing room. All the way there I could heard the staccato click of her heels tracking right behind me.

11

Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid did not think of himself as a violent man.

And, truthfully, if you asked the people who knew him best, they wouldn’t have described him as violent in any way.
Thoughtful
, perhaps,
quiet
, maybe,
reflective
,
caring
, maybe even
loving
.

Yes, they might have even used the word
loving
to describe Aaron, but not
violent
.

Because really, it was love that had given him the courage to seal his two friends inside the room fifteen hours ago. His love for his family. His Father. His destiny.

In truth, he was a focused man. A passionate man. Those were good words to describe him. Focused and passionate. And loving.

Less than thirty-six hours.

That’s how much time Rebekah and Caleb had left.

Even now as he went to check on them, Rebekah held her hand up to the window, and Aaron placed his hand across the glass from hers, as if they were touching. She didn’t look angry. More at peace than anything. He nodded to her.

“Our love will unite us forever,” she mouthed to him. And he mouthed the words back to her as if she were his daughter and they were whispering bedtime prayers together.

She and Caleb had been even easier to persuade than Jessie Rembrandt had been back in 1985.

It had taken him years of searching and waiting and dreaming. Now at last the time had come.

Last year, finally, he’d found the person he’d been searching for all this time, and the plan had been set in motion.

True, it would have been ideal to have everything happen next month, on the 18th, rather than now, in October. That would have been perfect. But only terrorists and madmen assign more significance to dates than to deeds. And Aaron was neither of those. He was simply a focused, dedicated man in love with his family, fulfilling his ultimate destiny.

In a way it was a shame that Rebekah and Caleb would miss the events on Monday. But really, there was no other way about it. What had to be done had to be done.

He took his hand away from the glass and walked outside. The autumn wind felt cool but also fresh and inviting, promising a change in the seasons.

It made him think of all the wonderful things to come.

12

This is why I hate briefings. Usually I’m supposed to summarize all my years of research in environmental criminology and my experience as a detective and FBI agent in twenty minutes. And of course, I’m usually the only person in the room who believes my investigative approach will actually work.

That’s the kicker.

Ralph was standing in the corner tapping away at something when I entered the tiny, cramped conference room. “What are you doing?” I asked him. He tried to shove the thing in his pocket, but I saw what it was. “A PlayStation Portable?”

He looked slightly embarrassed and shy, which is not easy for someone who can bench-press a truck. “Don’t tell anyone. I’m trying to get good enough to beat my son.”

“Tony is ten, right?”

Ralph nodded. “I can still beat him at football, hoops, wrestling—”

I stared at Ralph’s size. “You wrestle Tony?”

“Yeah, of course,” he said. “Why?”

Well,
I thought,
you weigh almost three hundred pounds.

Ralph gave a proud papa smile. “He’s a stout boy.”

“Oh.” I wondered just how much Tony had grown in the last few months.

“Anyway, he’s really good at these things, so I’m practicing. Trying to get good enough to beat him at Sorcerer’s Realm IV. Don’t tell anyone.”

“I promise.”

He leaned toward me. “I mean it.” I could tell he did.

“Gotcha.”

It took me a few minutes to connect my computer to the room’s overhead projection system, and when I finally looked up, I noticed nearly every seat had been taken. In addition to Agents Hawkins, Jiang, Tucker, and Wellington, I saw Sheriff Wallace and half a dozen other agents and police officers I hadn’t met yet.

All at once Margaret stood up, straightened the front of her skirt, and cleared her throat. “I know we all have plenty to do, so let’s get started.” I glanced at the clock on the wall. Yup, 1:59 exactly.

The chatter and small talk quieted down. Dante Wallace and Ralph took their seats. Brent Tucker sat beside Margaret, and I slid into the chair next to Lien-hua even though I knew I’d be standing up again in just a moment.

Margaret was speaking overly politely. “Dr. Patrick Bowers has been kind enough to join us and offer his . . . unique perspective on this case. I thought it might be prudent if he would outline some of the principles behind his . . . unorthodox investigative approach.” Then she stretched her lips into a tight, patronizing smile and motioned toward me. “Dr. Bowers?”

Wow. What an introduction.

I stood and nodded. “Yes, thank you, Margaret.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Lien-hua doodling in her notebook, smiling.

“First of all,” I said, “from what I’ve seen so far, your work on this case has been thorough, professional, and incisive. So, good work.” Stoic nods all around. They knew as well as I did that without a conviction or even a primary suspect, all the praise and backslapping in the world was meaningless.

I tapped my computer’s credit-card-sized remote control, and a three-dimensional map appeared on the projection screen.

“My specialty, as Agent Wellington alluded to, is a bit unique. I’ve worked both in local law enforcement as a detective in Milwaukee, and for the last nine years for the FBI. Mostly I’m interested in where and when the crime occurred and the significance that the crime’s timing and location have in the life of the offender, or in our case, the killer.”

“Environmental Criminology,” Agent Tucker announced. “Which merges the fields of environmental psychology with geospatial investigation.”

“Right . . .” I said. “So rather than focus simply on the forensic evidence or the specific pathology of the offender, I’m looking at the relationship the offender has to his victim and his environment. It may seem self-evident, but every crime occurs at a specific time in a specific place.”

Sometimes when I’m explaining this stuff I get strange looks, and already the same thing was happening. A few snickers and sideways glances—mostly from the local police officers. I glanced at Margaret. She was staring at me with granite eyes. Agent Tucker nodded and scribbled some notes on a legal pad.