Ralph suggested we take a breather and then reconvene in half an hour to debrief. It gave us all a chance to collect our bearings, refocus, grab some coffee, whatever. While everyone else went their separate ways, I had one of the paramedics take a look at my shoulder.
He pulled out the blade-like slat of wood that the explosion had buried six inches into my back, cleaned the wound, and smeared the area with antibiotic. “You really should have this stitched up,” he said. “There’s a lot of muscle damage.”
“I’ll be all right,” I told him. “Just butterfly it shut with some bandages.”
“Are you a doctor?”
“Not that kind of doctor. I used to lead wilderness trips, though. Learned first aid for that.”
“Might leave a scar.”
“It wouldn’t be my first.”
He gently bandaged the wound and then patted my good shoulder. “You be careful out there.”
I thanked him and headed inside for the meeting. On the way past the senator’s office I noticed Ralph and Lien-hua standing by the water cooler. Water, good idea. Rinse the bile out of my mouth. I grabbed a cup.
“That shoulder all right?” asked Ralph.
“Yeah. It’ll be fine. Little sore though.” Actually, it was killing me. “You two OK?”
They nodded.
“Listen,” I said, “did you see any evidence at the house before the explosion?”
Ralph took a deep sigh. “A leather jacket in his closet. Looked like the one our guy was wearing last night. I didn’t grab it though because we didn’t have the search warrant yet, and then there wasn’t time to go back for it after you yelled ‘bomb.’”
“Lien-hua?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No. Nothing.”
Just then Margaret and Tucker walked in. They nodded a silent greeting to us and headed to the conference room. Ralph joined them, but Lien-hua stayed by the water cooler a moment longer.
“So honestly, is your shoulder OK?” she asked.
“Honestly, it hurts like the dickens.”
“The dickens?”
“My mom used to say it.”
“Oh. Well, anyway. I wanted to say… thanks.”
“For…?”
“At the house. You covered me with your body. You protected me. You didn’t have to do that.”
Ah. She noticed.
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“But…”
“Yes?”
“Don’t ever do it again.”
I blinked. “What?”
“I don’t need protecting, Agent Bowers. I can take care of myself. I’m a big girl. Understand?”
“Um, I-”
“Do you understand?”
“Yeah,” I said. No, I thought. “Wait a minute. Are you saying you don’t want me to protect you, but that you’re thankful to me when I do?”
“I would give that analysis an A,” she said with the flicker of a grin, and walked away, leaving me standing there by myself with an empty paper cup in my hand.
I will never, ever understand women.
I rinsed out my mouth, threw the cup into the trash, and followed Lien-hua to the meeting.
Margaret looked worse than the rest of us. Streaks of mascara scarred her face, and she was staring at the wall, emotionless. A zombie was in charge of our team. Ralph glanced my way and conferred the leadership of the meeting to me with a nod.
“First of all, everyone’s OK,” I said. “Right?”
Nods.
“I know right now everything seems to point to Grolin, but let’s back up for a minute and try to stay objective. Margaret, the CSIU is finishing up outside?”
“Yes,” she mumbled. “Then we have to send them to Grolin’s house and your cave up on that mountain.”
Those guys would be earning their pay today.
“Agent Tucker?”
“Yeah?”
“Did you find any more links between the crimes-like the contacts or the engagement ring?”
He shook his head. “We’ll need more time to be sure, but there doesn’t seem to be anything else. It looks like he started leaving clues with Reinita.”
“But what about Bethanie?” asked Lien-hua. “She came between Reinita and Mindy. Why would he skip over her?”
Tucker shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“We’re missing something,” I said.
Just then one of the crime scene technicians burst into the room. We all turned and stared in his direction. I think it intimidated him because he shrank back a little and mumbled, “Special Agent Wellington, you told us to let you know if we found anything…”
“Yes,” she snapped. “What is it?”
He shrank back even more. “Her purse. It was in the car with her, shoved back into the corner of the trunk.”
“Let’s see it,” said Ralph.
I pushed aside the piles of papers, pens, and empty coffee cups to clear off the table, and the tech guy carefully dumped out the contents of Jolene’s purse. Her cell phone tumbled onto the table along with a set of keys, a makeup case, a compact, some crumpled receipts, a billfold stuffed with pictures and credit cards, a few pens, a brush, two tampons, and a checkbook.
All four of us studied the items intensely.
“OK,” said Lien-hua. “What do you see?”
Ralph shook his head. “Any of these things could be hers or someone else’s. There’s no way to know.”
We all donned gloves before touching anything. I pulled out her credit cards and shuffled through them, glancing at the names on the cards. “Nope. These are all hers.” I uncrumpled the receipts, compared them to the credit cards. “These are all hers too.”
“The billfold, maybe?” said Tucker. “Could it be someone else’s? He wants us to know. He wouldn’t leave something we couldn’t link.”
Lien-hua flipped the billfold over and shook her head. “It’s embroidered with her initials… Wait a minute.” She pointed to the hairbrush. “Jolene has blonde hair.”
“Yeah, so?” I said.
Lien-hua picked up the brush and held it up to the light. “This brush has red hair in it.”
“That’s it!” said Ralph. He turned to Tucker. “Process that now. I want fingerprints, DNA-” The crime scene technician reached for the brush, but Ralph stopped him. “No offense, buddy.” He pointed to Tucker. “You do the fingerprinting. You’re the best we have.”
“I’m on it,” said Tucker.
He hurried off with the brush as the timid crime scene guy scooped up the rest of the purse’s contents and followed him to the lab.
“OK, good,” said Ralph. “Let’s see where that leads us.”
“It’s possible it might be something else in the purse instead,” I said. “Let’s not get too excited yet. Either way, he hasn’t linked all the bodies for us-”
“I still want to know why he skipped Bethanie,” said Lien-hua impatiently. “She was killed between Reinita and Mindy. Did he get started with her maybe, and she resisted, and that’s why he didn’t leave a clue? Or was he interrupted before he could leave it?”
“Maybe something went wrong,” said Margaret, “and he panicked?”
“He didn’t panic,” said Lien-hua. “The one thing this guy doesn’t do is panic.”
“Besides,” I said, “he would have had the contact lenses with him already; he would have come prepared to leave them no matter what. After all, he left the pawn and the yellow ribbon. Besides, the ring points to Mindy, not Bethanie. It’s like he skipped right over Bethanie, like she’s not part of the series.”
“Yeah,” said Ralph. “And if Tucker’s right, then he didn’t start leaving these clues until Reinita.”
“Order matters,” I said. “There’s something about the order we’re missing.” Why did he start with Reinita? What happened? I stared off into space, processing everything.
I looked up at the faces on the wall. The beautiful pictures of the dead women.
Someone had already added Jolene’s picture to the mix.
Patty. Jamie. Alexis. Reinita. Bethanie. Mindy. Jolene.
Alexis and Bethanie were found the farthest away from Asheville.
Maybe he didn’t skip Bethanie.
I thought back to the basement at Grolin’s house. The workbench. The bookcase. The cat.
Maybe he didn’t kill her.
The cat.
Suddenly I remembered something I’d heard years ago. “Only the most foolish of mice would hide in a cat’s ear,” I muttered. “But only the wisest of cats would look there.”
“What?” said Ralph.
I walked around the table to look at the pictures on the bulletin board. “A saying I heard once. It means the best place to hide something is often the most obvious place because it’s the last place anyone would look.”
Margaret looked at me quizzically.
“We’ve been looking for what all the victims have in common, right?” I glanced around at the team. “But what if only some of them had something in common?” I pointed to the wall. “Alexis and Bethanie.”
Margaret shook her head. “What are you saying?”
“What if you wanted to kill someone but also avoid suspicion?” “I’d make sure I had an airtight alibi,” she answered. “I don’t see what this has to do with-”
By then Ralph had caught on. He stood up. “Or you could make sure you wouldn’t need one at all.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s right.”
Margaret shook her head. She still didn’t understand.
“OK,” I said. “Let’s say I wanted to kill off Lien-hua here.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Just for discussion purposes. If we were friends and then suddenly she showed up dead, I’d be a suspect, right?”
“Well, maybe,” said Margaret, glancing at me derisively. “If you had motive, means, and opportunity.”
So, she was getting a little of her old spunk back. That was good.
“OK,” I continued. “What if I had all those things, but she’d obviously been killed by someone else, say a serial killer. Same MO. Same signature. What then?”
Suddenly it all began to sink in. “A copycat?” she whispered.
“Yeah,” I said. “Two killers instead of one. That would explain why the geo profile was off. It would also explain why he started linking the crimes with Reinita-”
“Because someone else killed Alexis, and he wanted to separate his work from the copycat’s!” said Lien-hua.
Ralph grabbed the manila folder containing the medical examiner’s reports. “Hmm. The wound pattern was the same in each case, but it looks like the cuts weren’t as deep on Bethanie and Alexis.” He flipped to another page. “And the pawns-the ones found at Alexis and Bethanie’s sites-were cut with the same lathe.” He studied the photos carefully. “But the graining of the wood might be slightly different. Could be a different set. I’ll check it out.”
“Why didn’t we notice that before?” asked Margaret.
“Because we weren’t looking for it,” I said. “We were assuming rather than examining.”
“Wait,” said Lien-hua, “toxicology, remember? Different drugs for Alexis and Bethanie.” She hit the table with her hand. “He can’t stand that someone else would share the spotlight.”
“He’s telling us which ones are his,” mumbled Margaret.
Wait a minute. Never assume. Theorize, test, revise.
“OK,” I said. “I’m hypothesizing here, but let’s see what we’ve got. If someone else killed Alexis-found out about the ribbons and the chess pieces, I don’t know how, but let’s say he did-then the Illusionist-”
“Grolin,” said Margaret.
“Whoever he is, he’s following the case on the news, right, Lien-hua?”
“Absolutely.”
“He hears about this other body, knows he didn’t kill her, and doesn’t want to-what did you say?”
“Share the spotlight.”
“Right. So he decides to link his crimes for us in another way-a way nobody could possibly copy, leaving clues to his future victims. This way he keeps playing the game even though someone else has reached across the board and started taking some of the pieces.”
Everyone seemed to be tracking, following my train of thought.
“OK,” I said. “Let’s use this as a working theory, but before we jump to any conclusions, let’s see if this hairbrush leads us anywhere.”
Ralph began to point to each of us like a drill sergeant clicking off jobs on a duty chart. “Lien-hua, revamp the psych profile based on five victims rather than seven-leave out Alexis and Bethanie. Pat, rework the numbers on that geo-whatever computer program of yours. Let’s see where that takes us. I’ll get the interrogation room set up.”
Margaret just stood motionless by the table, stunned. “Two killers,” I heard her whisper as I hurried past her to my desk. “And one of them knows where I live.”