“We know she’s going to be OK. We love you, Mindy,” her father had said on TV. He didn’t know she was already dead. “We’re here for you-”
But how could I catch this guy? He was smarter than I was, always one step ahead.
The only way to catch him is to stop playing by his rules. You need to make a move.
I thought of Jolene, what it would be like to lose a daughter like that, to have her mutilated, abused, slaughtered. I couldn’t even imagine it.
Right now, the Illusionist was somewhere laughing at us, probably watching us, mocking the pain he was causing. I couldn’t let him get away with it. I couldn’t.
With those thoughts, rage, white hot and unchained, began to rip through my soul. Howling anger sharpening its claws. Filling me. Boiling inside of me. Chasing away the nausea, chasing away everything and replacing it with a storm of fury. The rage both frightened and reassured me. Over the last eight months, wrath had started to feel right at home in me.
You gotta move out in front of him, Pat. Do what you do best.
I looked back at the people examining Margaret’s car.
Everyone was talking in whispers. A tumble of barely audible words skittered across the parking lot toward me. I heard someone mutter something about the media and warrants, and then someone started calling Grolin the names I’d been thinking of but just hadn’t gotten around to saying yet.
I had to stop him. And I would. For Christie.
I wiped my mouth on the sleeve of my windbreaker, stuffed the receipt into my pocket, and headed back to the crime scene.
I arrived just in time to hear Lien-hua gasp. “He sawed her in half?” Her voice broke in the middle of the sentence, and I wanted to save her from seeing the body and from the images she would never be able to erase from her mind, to protect her from doing her job, from becoming more like me. But I couldn’t protect her. I wasn’t here for that.
A few minutes later, Lien-hua, Ralph, and I drifted back together on the edge of the parking lot. Margaret strode up to us, jittery and tense. No one said a word. Then Agent Tucker and Sheriff Wallace found their way over to us, and I spoke softly, but to all of them. “When he talked to me last night, he called himself the Illusionist. He told me, ‘You can’t have her. I saw her first.’”
Ralph’s teeth were clenched. “The sawing the woman in half trick.”
“That’s sick,” said Sheriff Wallace.
Margaret turned to Lien-hua. “Where did you say Grolin works?”
“ MountainQuest magazine. He writes the outdoor column.”
Wallace nodded. “I know the place. It’s out on highway 25 on the way to Hendersonville.”
“Find him. Bring him in.”
Dante turned to me. “Dr. Bowers?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I have my phone back?”
“Oh yeah. Sure.” I reached into my pocket, pulled out the handful of parts that used to be his phone, and handed it to him.
“What on earth happened to it?”
Ralph answered for me. “He dropped it.”
“Something like that,” I mumbled. “I’m really sorry. I’ll buy you a new one.”
He shook his head, stuffed the pieces into his pocket, and then motioned to a couple of uniformed officers who followed him to a patrol car.
I felt bad, but then Margaret turned to me and I prepared to feel worse. I was sure she was going to rip into me about disregarding her orders and heading over to Grolin’s place. “Get that shoulder looked at,” she said. “Have the EMTs check it out.”
Now that was a surprise. Considering the circumstances, her concern was somewhat moving.
“I’ll be all right.”
“Dr. Bowers, there is a piece of wood sticking out of your back.”
No wonder it hurt.
“Get that taken out. You get an infection, it costs us more money. I don’t want the Bureau to have to spend any more money on you than it has to.”
Oh. Well. In that case.
“Ralph?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“I want you to do the questioning.” Her voice was iron. Flat and cold.
He nodded.
She tried to stay calm, but her voice began to quaver. “No kid gloves, Ralph. He put that girl in my car.”
He nodded again. “I understand.”
Joseph Grolin, here we come.
41
Tessa stared out the window of the 737 at the towering castles of clouds surrounding the plane. Glowing corridors of vapor and light split open to encircle the plane, to welcome it into their fairytale landscape. At one time she might have been impressed, even astonished by this journey through gossamer light, but today all she saw was a bunch of stupid clouds.
When she was younger she used to lie on her back in the summer grass and look up at the clouds with her mother, pointing and giggling and finding mystical creatures in the sky; mermaids and dragons and fairies. Just like all children do at one time or another.
“See that one,” she would cry. “It’s a unicorn!”
“Yes,” her mother would say. “I see it. I see it.”
Whatever the clouds really looked like, Tessa could always find a unicorn.
But not anymore. No, today there were only clouds in the sky. Shapeless and blank. No unicorns. Just misty haze surrounding her. In fact, she hadn’t seen a unicorn in a long, long time. She couldn’t even remember when.
She glanced over at the profile of the man escorting her. He’d told her his name: Special Agent Eric Stanton. He didn’t really look like an FBI agent, more like an accountant. Hair parted on the side, baby face, clean shave. But he wasn’t wearing a ring, and he wasn’t really that old-maybe twenty-two or so-and he might have actually looked cute if he could lose the tie and the old-man-looking glasses, grow a little soul patch… ruffle up his hair a little…
“Yes?” He was looking directly at her now. “Did you need something?” He had soft brown eyes.
“Um, no.” She looked away, out the window again. She hoped she wasn’t blushing.
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
He leaned close. She could smell his aftershave.
Gak. Why did he have to use aftershave?
“You OK, kid?”
Kid!
“I’m fine.”
“Well, that’s wonderful,” he said sarcastically. “As your chaperone I’m very glad to hear that.”
She looked at him again. What in the world was wrong with her! The guy was probably over thirty! Old enough to be her dad. She folded her arms and glared at him. She glanced momentarily at the Sudoku puzzle he was working on. He’d been struggling with it for the last hour or so. It was rated “expert.” Huh. Yeah, right. He should have probably been doing one rated “toddler.”
She studied it for a few brief seconds. “Six, nine, eight, four, one, three,” she said.
