talking to Margaret.
But the more Lien-hua spoke, the more the expression on her face flattened out, became hard. She tried explaining the situation again, more emphatically this time, but once again she was cut off in mid-sentence.
“What?” I asked. “What is it?”
Lien-hua leaned toward me and whispered through clenched teeth, “Margaret says it’s not enough for a warrant.”
“What? Give me that phone.”
Lien-hua handed it to me.
“Margaret, Jolene might still be alive!”
“Don’t raise your voice at me, Dr. Bowers.” Each word was a carefully crafted stone.
“Listen-”
“Indian legends?” she snapped. “Contact lenses? Just listen to yourself. There’s nothing tying Grolin to these crimes. I’m not calling up a judge to get a search warrant-”
“He was at Mindy’s crime scene, Margaret.”
“So were fifty other people,” she said. “It’s not enough.”
“He leads trips to this cave.”
“You don’t even know he was in that cave. All you have is some mud on the girl’s foot.”
“We have to move on this now!”
“Listen to me carefully, Agent Bowers.” Her voice had turned to ice. “I’ll consider calling it in on Monday when Judge Stephenson gets back from vacation, if you get me some actual evidence instead of just conjecture. Until then-”
“What?” I said. “I’m losing you.”
“Just wait for-” she droned on. I slammed the cell phone shut and threw it to the floor. The battery flew out. Along with a few other things.
“Oops,” I mumbled. “I hate when I do that.”
Lien-hua picked up the various items that used to be Dante Wallace’s cell phone. “Nice negotiation skills.”
“Um, I’ll buy him another one.”
“So what did she say?”
“She told me not to waste any time. She said to bring him in.” I cruised around a corner and accelerated into a straightaway as the road leveled out. “She said saving a girl’s life is more important than jumping over bureaucratic hurdles.”
Lien-hua stared at me. Blinked. “No she didn’t.”
“No,” I said after a pause. “She didn’t.”
I wasn’t sure how Lien-hua would respond. I had to do something. I had to. Jolene had a dad somewhere too, just like Mindy did. Crying. Worrying. Hoping. I couldn’t just sit by and wait while the Illusionist tortured and killed another girl when we might still be able to save her. I hoped Lien-hua was with me on this, I really did. If she wasn’t on board, I didn’t know what I was going to do.
Finally, out of the corner of my eye I saw her nod. “Too bad we lost reception right when she was telling us what she wanted us to do.”
“Yeah,” I said, gunning the motor and flying around another curve. “Too bad.”
Lien-hua picked up her phone. It took three calls to find Grolin’s address. She pulled out a map and called out the directions.
I merged onto Highway 70 and headed toward Billings Road, breaking every traffic law I could think of on the way.
36
Lien-hua made two more calls. “Unbelievable,” she muttered.
“What? Do we have something on Grolin?”
“Two priors. Assault in 2004; he did six months probation and three hundred hours of community service. Domestic violence last winter. Beat up his girlfriend really bad. They were living in Spartanburg at the time.”
“The site of the first murder.”
“Yeah. And the timing matches. Two days after the paramedics were called in to treat Grolin’s girlfriend, Patty Henderson was killed. The girl never pressed charges, just took off. Psychologically, it makes perfect sense-a girlfriend leaving would be a textbook precipitating stressor.”
“Enough to set him off.”
“Yeah, pushed him over the edge.”
“What about the profile, though? You didn’t think he’d served time.”
“True,” she said, “although the history of violence does fit.”
I felt myself gritting my teeth. “Why didn’t they catch this stuff when they ran the names of everyone at the scene of Mindy’s murder?”
“He’s a journalist. It makes sense for him to have been at the crime scene.”
“So what did Ralph say?” I’d heard snatches of her second conversation but not enough to catch the big picture. “Did he learn anything from interviewing that guard?”
She shook her head. “Waste of time. He’s on his way back, though. I caught him just before he made it to the federal building. Margaret doesn’t know he’s back in town yet. He’s going to meet us at Grolin’s place. He said to wait for him.”
Suddenly I realized I still had Ralph’s dead cell phone in my pocket. “Wait a minute, whose phone is Ralph using?”
“He told me he’d picked up his wife’s on the way through town.”
I nodded.
“Good. So we go in with Ralph.” If Lien-hua and I went after Grolin and saved Jolene, everything would be fine. Margaret wouldn’t be able to say a word. But if Grolin wasn’t our guy and we moved on this without a search warrant, someone’s head was going to roll-namely mine. Ralph was better at fending off reprimands than I was, especially from Margaret. In any case, I felt better about approaching a suspected serial killer with Ralph by my side. Anyone would.
Billings Road lay on the edge of town and wound seven miles up into the hills.
“Isolated,” said Lien-hua. “It’s perfect. Except…”
She didn’t have to finish her sentence. I knew what she was thinking. This house lay on the other side of Asheville, nearly ten miles from of the hot spot I’d deduced our offender would live in.
“He could have another base he operates out of-a girlfriend’s place, maybe,” I said. “A friend’s house. Let’s have Tucker check on any other residences this guy might’ve had in the last couple years.”
She agreed and placed the call.
As she was finishing it up, we arrived at the dirt road leading to Grolin’s house. I drove up the quarter-mile driveway and pulled to a stop next to Ralph’s beat-up Jeep about fifty meters from Grolin’s house. I could see slivers of Grolin’s two-story home ahead of us through the nearby trees.
Ralph stepped out and eased his car door silently shut. “Margaret know you’re here?”
“Nope,” I said.
“Good. Let’s go.”
We started toward the house.
“When this is over,” said Ralph, “I’ll have to remind Margaret that you don’t need a search warrant in the case of an emergency, and if saving a girl’s life isn’t an emergency, I don’t know what is.” It was typical Ralph. And it was good to see.
“Who drove you back from Charlotte?” I asked.
“Couple state troopers.”
“Were they both named Bubba?”
