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.
