Sheriff Wallace met me at the door. “Hey.”
“Hey.” I avoided mentioning my conversation with Margaret. I just wasn’t up for it. I peered past him and looked inside the house. Blood spatter on the wall and doorframe told me where the shooter and the victim were standing at the time of the murder. Abrams’s workout bag lay by the door, a racquetball racket leaning next to it. He might’ve been on his way out when he was attacked.
We followed the dried blood trail through the house to Abrams’s bedroom. He’d been dragged into the closet.
“And Jolene’s body? Where was that found?” I asked.
“Over yonder. On the treadmill.”
“Treadmill?”
“Yeah.”
Treadmill?
“By the way, I don’t know if this matters now that Grolin’s dead,” he said. “But I finished going through his credit card statements.” “And?”
“That leather jacket he likes to wear? He bought it from the Gap over there in Hanes Mall last spring. Guess who was working at the Gap that day?”
“Jolene.”
“Yup.”
I thought for a minute. It was all too perfect. Someone had been framing Grolin and planning it for close to a year. “Any other leather jackets purchased that day?”
“Other jackets?”
“From the Gap. Were any other leather jackets purchased that day, or maybe later that week?”
He looked perplexed. “I don’t know.”
“Find out.”
Lien-hua entered the bedroom. Ralph was right behind her.
“Ralph,” I said. “What’s going on? Why didn’t you tell me about this crime scene when you were at the safe house?”
“I thought you’d appreciate a little time away from the case.”
“Why?”
He glared at me. “I flew Tessa in so you could straighten things out with her, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So do it.”
I felt my fingers tense. Anger began to curl through me. At Margaret for being Margaret. At Tucker for rushing in last night. At the Illusionist for winning. At Ralph for being right. “But you should have known I’d come out here after talking to Lien-hua on the phone-”
“Yeah,” he said icily. “You’re right. I should have known.”
“Listen, it’s important for me to be here at this crime scene.” I said it loud enough for everyone to hear, but I knew I was saying it for myself. Silence in the room. There are some things more important than crime scenes, I heard a voice inside of me say. At first I thought it sounded like the voice of my dead wife. But then I realized it sounded more like the voice of her only daughter.
I tried to shake the thoughts from my head, get focused again. No one responded to my comments. I continued, “So, he was shot yesterday morning, right?”
“Yeah,” said Ralph. I could tell by his tone that he was still upset.
I turned around and scanned the room, expecting to see a pawn somewhere. When my eyes came to rest on the treadmill, I wasn’t disappointed. A white one. “But why Abrams?” I asked, exasperated. “How does he fit into this whole thing? What do we know about him?”
“He made a name for himself back in 1991,” explained Lien-hua. “That’s when North Carolina signed on to become part of the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.”
“VICAP,” I said.
“Yes. He was the one who signed North Carolina in.”
It seemed like the case was spinning off sideways, getting skewed. I was starting to doubt I’d ever be able to catch this guy. “Did we get anything on that brush yet?” I was asking everybody. “Get any prints off it? DNA? Anything?”
“Hmm.” Ralph scratched at his chin. He seemed to be lightening up. “Far as I know, Brent was taking care of that. We should have had those back by now. Maybe with him being on mandatory leave right now, something slipped through the cracks. I’ll check on that.”
“I’ll do it,” said Sheriff Wallace. He stepped away to make the call.
I walked over to the closet. Abrams’s body had already been removed. A patch of dried blood stained the carpet.
“Dragged him into the closet,” I said. “Why a closet?”
“I think it’s part of his narrative, his fantasy life,” said Lien-hua. “The first pawn was found in a closet, he strangled Mindy in that cave…”
“Maybe he feels at home in tight places,” said Ralph.
“Or maybe he likes the dark,” added Lien-hua.
I had to let that sink in.
The phone in Ralph’s pocket rang. He looked at the number. “It’s the police in New Mexico,” he said. He headed into another room to take the call in private.
I turned to Lien-hua. “So what’s he telling us here?” My approach didn’t seem to be working all that well. Maybe hers would.
“He’s escalating quickly,” she said. “He’s shifted from being a serial killer to a spree killer, not taking time to cool down anymore. He left Jolene’s body with key FBI leadership from both the past and the present. Maybe he’s saying you couldn’t catch me then and you can’t catch me now.”
“You think he’s been active since 1991?” I asked.
Lien-hua leaned down, pointed to the bloodstain in the closet. “Maybe. The execution-style murder tells me it wasn’t anything personal for him. This was to make a statement, nothing more. Just like Vanessa and the guy in the parking garage, it’s all part of the game to him. Anyone and everyone is expendable.”
I looked at the treadmill. “So why did he leave her legs on the treadmill?” I asked.
A voice came at us from the doorway: “Legs on a treadmill- hello! -running but not going anywhere.”
We both turned. Tessa.
“What are you doing here?” I snapped. “I told you to wait in the car.”
“I got bored.”
“Tessa?” said Lien-hua.
“Yeah. And you must be the woman on the phone.”
Lien-hua glanced at me and then back to Tessa. “Yes. I must be. And I think you might be right.”
“About what?” I said.
“Running but not going anywhere,” she said. “He’s summing up our investigation. That’s what we’ve been doing-running but not going anywhere.”
I sighed. “C’mon, Tessa. Back to the car.” Well, at least she didn’t contaminate the scene. At least they’ve finished processing it. “What if there’d been a dead body in there?” I said to her. “What then?”
“Ew. That would’ve been gross. I would’ve thrown up.”
“That’s right. You would have. Now, c’mon.”
As we left the room, I had a thought. “By the way, how did you get past those two agents on the porch?”
“I can be pretty convincing when I put my mind to it.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
“Did you hear that lady?” Tessa was staring at the bloodstained carpet as we walked back to the living room. “She said I was right. About the treadmill. Did you hear that?”
“Oh. Well, she’s a profiler,” I started to say. “She can’t help it-” Stop, rewind.
Reach out with your hand open…
“Um… it was a good observation, Tessa. You might have nailed it.”
She grunted. “Wow, I’m writing this one down. On Sunday, October 26, 2008, Patrick Bowers actually offers his stepdaughter a compliment.”
“Tessa,” I said, a slight edge climbing into my voice, “do you know what the word acerbic means?”
“No.”
“Well, you have an acerbic wit.”
She stopped, folded her arms, and cocked her head. “That is so not right.”
“What?”
“Telling me I’m sour, bitter, and vitriolic.”
I stared at her. “I thought you didn’t know what acerbic meant?”
“I lied.”
This cannot be what all teenagers are like. It just can’t be.
“Comes from the Latin,” she said. “ Acerbus. Means bitter, gloomy, and dark.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s just great.”
“I took two years of Latin instead of Spanish in middle school. Latin is a dead language. I thought it’d be cool to study a language that was dead.”
Man. Did I really want to take on parenting this girl?
Wait. Stupid question.
Yes.
More than anything else in the world.
Before we made it to the front door, I heard Ralph cussing in the other room. And this was one of those times I didn’t think it was a good sign.
“Bodies,” he said loud enough for my stepdaughter to hear. “They found fifteen bodies.”