Authors: Steven James
“Yeah,” came the sleepy reply from across the hall.
“You don’t sound like it.”
The creak of his bed.
“I’m up.”
Clinking of a spoon and a cereal bowl from the kitchen. “Are we gonna be late for school, Mom?” Brenda had her mouth full.
“I’ll write you a note.”
“Oh,” said Brenda. “OK. I don’t want to miss library time.”
Alice pulled on some stockings. “Are you getting dressed, Jacob?”
“Yeah, Mom! I’m up, OK?”
“OK, OK.”
Alice flew to the closet, grabbed a dress, slipped it on.
Shoes.
Which shoes? It doesn’t matter. Just hurry. Anything. Black. No.
Brown pumps. OK.
She stepped into the bathroom, held a washcloth under the faucet, rubbed it across her face, smeared on some lipstick. “Get your backpacks, kids. We need to go.”
Then back to the dresser.
Hair is a mess. A mess! OK, where is
it?
She scanned the dresser.
Where is that brush?
“Brenda, did you take my hairbrush?”
“No, Mom.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
Alice shoved her jewelry box aside, opened up the top drawer to see if she’d tossed it in there, scanned the floor. Nothing.
8:39.
Err. “We need to get going, Jacob,” she called, but really she was yelling at herself. She glanced into the hallway. Brenda had wandered down the hall and was standing at attention with her pink backpack on. She’d probably been up since six. Jacob, on the other hand, would sleep until noon if he could get away with it.
Alice stomped into the bathroom. She had to brush her hair. Counter. Shelves. No brush. “Are you ready, Jake?”
“I didn’t get any breakfast.”
“Grab a granola bar or something. We need to get going. Does everybody have their homework?”
“What about our lunches?” asked Brenda.
Lunches!
“I’ll, um—” Alice grabbed her purse, pulled out a few bills. Passed them around. “Here. Buy a hot lunch today.”
Jake eyed the money. “Can I get pizza?”
“Whatever.” Alice scooted into Brenda’s room and used her daughter’s brush to calm down her hair. It still didn’t look good, but it would have to do. She’d find her brush later, no big deal.
She shooed the kids toward the door, grabbed the car keys, and herded everyone into the car, hoping she could make it to her desk before anyone noticed she was late.
The main FBI field office for North Carolina is located in Charlotte. Normally that’s where Ralph would have set up his base of operations, but in this case, because of the proximity of the crimes, he’d set up shop here at the satellite office in Asheville.
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.
“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 as 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.”