The Pawn

  Even in the days when I used to live in the area and work as a wilderness guide, Asheville reminded me a little of Boulder, Colorado—only on a smaller scale and flavored with the music and culture of Appalachia. Just like Boulder, there’s an artsy downtown district complete with exotic import shops, dance studios and arts centers, roaming bohemian hippies, indoor rock-climbing gyms, quaint coffee shops selling organic blends, and vegetarian restaurants staffed by women who don’t believe in shaving any part of their bodies. And out along the streets you’ll find scores of weathered Jeeps and Land Rovers topped off with kayaks, skis, or mountain bikes depending on the season.

  But here in Asheville you also find bearded musicians playing mountain dulcimers, banjos, and fiddles on the street corners at twilight, a large population of retirees, and high-steepled brick churches perched on nearly every street corner. Over the last twenty years the town has become a cultural melting pot where both ends of the spectrum—the religious fundamentalists and the social progressives—meet. Makes for an interesting mix at times.

  “Asheville has more art galleries per capita than any other city in North America,” Lien-hua told me as we passed through the security checkpoint of the Veach-Baley Federal Complex. “And one of the top independent bookstores in the world.”

  Apparently, it had been a very informative trolley tour.

  Ralph had taken over a conference room just down the hall from the senator’s office on the first floor. Lien-hua and I walked in, and I looked around.

  I saw that Ralph had brought in half a dozen computers, communication stations, bulletin boards, and dry erase boards. I felt right at home.

  The pictures of the previous five victims were posted neatly on the wall. These weren’t the crime scene photos, these were the smiling, posed pictures where each victim looks airbrushed and radiant and full of life. Yearbook photos, family vacations, things like that. These are the pictures we use with the media. And thankfully these are the pictures people end up remembering. Rather than the ones etched in my mind. The ones I can’t seem to forget.

  I placed my computer bag on an empty desk and stared at the photos of the dead girls.

  Victim number one, Patty Henderson, twenty-three, smiled slyly out of the corner of her mouth. She was blonde, blue-eyed, had perfect teeth, and looked like she was still in her teens.

  Victim number two, Jamie McNaab, eighteen, was sitting on a paint-splattered wooden stool and holding a paintbrush. Jamie had a playful, girlish face and coy smile. A can of paint lay on the floor next to her. You could tell she was in a studio. The photographer had probably taken pictures of hundreds of smiling teenage girls posing beside those cans of paint.

  Make sure we check on this photographer. There might be some kind of link through the studio. Maybe someone who works there or the place that processed the film or something.

  Alexis Crawford, twenty, was next. She had stringy brown hair and was pretty in a dainty sort of way, but had a broken, lonely-looking smile as if life had not been easy on her. Which, in the end, it hadn’t been.

  While I was looking at the pictures, Agent Brent Tucker walked over, pinned up a photo of Mindy Travelca, and then returned to his desk without saying a word.

  In her picture, Mindy was smiling just like the others.

  Ralph appeared and greeted me with a nod.

  “When was Reinita’s picture taken?” I asked, looking back at the photos. Reinita Lawson, nineteen, was the fourth victim and the only African-American in the group. She had fine, light chocolate-colored skin and eyes brimming with dreams.

  Ralph flipped open a manila file folder. “The day before she was abducted. She’d just posted it on her MySpace page. Why?”

  In her picture she was flirting with the camera, her left hand leaning up against her cheek, delicately, invitingly. Her smile held a hint of seduction. She was strikingly beautiful, but something wasn’t right. I stared at the picture. I traced her smile, her eyes, her hand. Leaned close. “The day before? Are you sure?” I asked.

  Ralph glanced at the file again. “Yeah. What are you thinking?”

  “She doesn’t have an engagement ring on,” I said.

  “What?”

  “In the crime scene photos you sent me she’s wearing an engagement ring.”

  He flipped through a stack of papers in a manila folder. “Hmm,” he said. “She might not have been wearing it that day.”

  “You get engaged, you show off the ring to everyone.” I spoke my thoughts aloud. “Of course, it’s possible she got engaged between having the picture taken and getting abducted. But that’s unlikely if she took it the day before.”

  He set down the folder. “So what are you saying? You think the killer might have left it as some kind of symbol? Is he trying to tell us he’s engaged to them? Marrying them in some sick, twisted sense?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.” I stared at the photo for a long moment. “Check it out for me, though, would you? Find out if she’s really engaged to anyone. If so, I wanna meet the guy.”

  “You got it.”

  Suddenly I realized I was giving orders. “Um, please,” I said. Officially, I’d been brought in as a consultant, but Ralph and I had worked so many times together at the Bureau that I just seemed to pick up right where we left off.

  He slapped me on the shoulder. Almost knocked me over. “Don’t worry, you’re cool. Let’s just catch this sicko.”

  Ralph went to make a few phone calls and I looked at the last picture. Bethanie Dixon, twenty-two, was the only other victim besides Patty to be found indoors. She was also the one found the farthest away, in Athens, Georgia. The pawn and the yellow ribbon linked her to our killer, even though the distance didn’t seem quite right.

  I was jarred from my thoughts by someone calling my name. “Dr. Bowers.”

  Something about that voice.

  No, it couldn’t be her.

  I turned.

  It was.

  Special Agent Margaret Wellington.

  And my day had been going so well too.

  10

  “Margaret,” I said. I knew she would correct me.

  “I’d prefer you call me Special Agent in Charge Wellington.”

  I extended my hand. “Sorry. I guess I forgot.”

  She flipped back a snatch of her impossibly straight rodent-colored hair and glared at me. I’d forgotten how narrow her lips were, how straight her teeth. Instead of shaking my hand she slid her hands to her hips. “No, Dr. Bowers. You didn’t forget.”

  Well, OK. That was true. I did remember how much she hated being called Margaret, but I’d forgotten that she was stationed here in North Carolina. Slipped my mind entirely. Obviously it had, or I wouldn’t have accepted Ralph’s invitation to consult on the case. I retrieved my hand. She wasn’t going to shake it anyway.

  Margaret Wellington had a habit of breathing in sharply through her nose, which made it seem like she was constantly disgusted with you. Which, maybe, she was. “It’s been, what, Dr. Bowers? Four years?”

  “Has it been that long?” I said. “Hardly seems like it.”

  She blinked. “Yes. Four years.” She cocked her head slightly. “So. How have you been?”

  “Busy.” It was true enough.

  “I heard your wife died,” she said. I could feel my anger rising. She continued, her voice even and emotionless. “Very tragic. And then they transferred you to Denver and stuck you behind a desk. Must have been hard.”

  “I volunteered for the position in Colorado,” I said coolly. The National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center in Denver housed the most advanced crime-mapping program in the world. I’d been helping integrate the research from the National Institute for Justice with that of the FBI. “It’s important work and this way Tessa could be closer to my parents.”

  “Yes of course.” Finally she backed up a little and even let the hint of a smile dance across her lips. “Well, it looks like I’ll be moving back to Quantico again a
s soon as this case is wrapped up. They’d like me to teach at the Academy again.”

  “Congratulations. I know how important that is to you.”

  “Yes.” Her voice had turned to chalk. “You do.”

  I held my tongue. Better to let it be at that.

  “See you in the briefing room,” she said at last and stalked off to her glass-enclosed office in the corner of the room.

  The air around me seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. I saw Lien-hua glance up from her desk, a question mark on her face. “What was that all about?”

  “It’s complicated,” I said. “Ralph, why didn’t you tell me she was here?”

  He grinned. “Must have slipped my mind.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re going to owe me big-time for this.”

  “What do you mean complicated?” asked Lien-hua.

  I sighed. “We were both working at the Bureau. I was teaching environmental criminology, and she was assigned to counterter-rorism—”

  “Wait a minute,” Lien-hua said. “I thought that before you moved to Denver you lived in New York City?”

  “I did. I’d fly in to teach a couple weeks every month. Anyway, she’d been eyeing the assistant director’s position for quite a while and was on the fast track toward getting it when—”

  “Some evidence was lost,” Ralph said. “There were a lot of accusations, and Pat here noticed some things that internal affairs was very interested in.”

  I sat down at the desk beside Lien-hua. “Like I said, it gets complicated. Anyway, there was a disciplinary hearing. I had to testify, and she ended up getting transferred here, to the satellite office, to push papers around.”

  “She’s blamed Pat ever since,” Ralph added. “And brown-nosed everyone she can to get reinstated at Quantico. Needless to say, she wasn’t too happy to have any of us come in on this case, but on the other hand, she wants it all wrapped up as soon as possible because it doesn’t look good to have a serial killer running around loose in your neck of the woods when you’re trying to impress the director.”

  I turned back to Ralph. “Wait a minute, what did she mean by that ‘see you in the briefing room’ comment?”

  “Oh yeah. Margaret wants you to brief the team on your investigative techniques.”

  “When?”

  He looked at his watch. “Half an hour.”

  “What? No way. I haven’t visited the crime scenes yet. She knows that. It’s too early for any kind of preliminary report—”

  “Just walk us through the process, Pat. You know, all that geographical time and space mumbo jumbo.”

  “I can’t, Ralph. I haven’t even—by the way, you make my work sound so intriguing and scientific—”

  “Thank you.”

  “I need two days at least.”

  “We can give you till noon—”

  “There’s no way I could be ready by—”

  “Two o’clock, then?”

  “Two o’clock!”

  “Two o’clock it is,” said Ralph triumphantly. “Good man. I’ll go tell Margaret.”

  “What? Wait a minute.” I turned to Lien-hua. “What just happened there?”

  “I think you’re going to give a briefing at two.”

  “I didn’t agree to that, did I?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “But I can already tell I’m going to enjoy watching you two work together.”

  I grabbed a handful of files off the desk and stood up. I couldn’t believe it. I came in here today planning to visit the crime scenes, and now I was going to be stuck giving a briefing instead. I hate giving briefings almost as much as I hate bad coffee.

  She motioned to the screen mounted on the wall. “Before you get started, c’mere for a second. There’s something I wanted to show you.”

  “Listen, Lien-hua. I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  “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.