I glanced at the suitcase and the backpack that had been waiting for me when I arrived at the hotel last night. True to his word, Ralph had sent for them. The suitcase was for work, the backpack was for play. I’d been planning for months to spend a couple days climbing in Linville Gorge after that law enforcement conference. Didn’t look like I’d get a chance now, though.
“Yeah. I think I’ll stick around for a few more days. Nothing pressing on my calendar. And this guy has already made two mistakes-waiting for us at the mall and calling me at the hotel. He’s overconfident. We might still be able to save Jolene.”
“If she’s still alive.” His voice sounded grim.
I wasn’t sure if I should tell him the killer had mentioned my daughter, wasn’t sure if he’d want me off the case. I decided to risk it; after all, this was Ralph. “He knows I have a daughter, Ralph. He mentioned her by name. He might know where she is. I need to make sure Tessa and my parents are safe.”
“We’ll get them to a safe house out in Denver.”
That was Ralph for you. A good man.
“Thing is, Ralph, I need to see her.” I’d had a lot of time to think things through last night after talking with the Illusionist. My adrenaline had been pumping so hard I’d needed to do twenty minutes of pull-ups on the door frame of the hotel room just to calm down. It’s great exercise. Of course, you can only use your fingertips though. Back when I started working out it took me two years before I was able to do just one fingertip pull-up; another year before I could do ten. That was a decade ago. I’ve gotten a little better since then.
“What do you mean, ‘see her’?” he said.
I took a slow breath. “I need to see Tessa, Ralph. In person. The truth is, we’ve both been having a hard time. We’ve never really talked about Christie’s death. And now these dead girls, this case.. it’s getting to me. I need to make things right with her. You have a kid, Ralph, you know what I’m talking about. My parents can stay out there, but not Tessa. Either I fly back to Denver for a couple days or the Bureau needs to bring her out here.”
“Pat, you know I can’t-”
“Get her a safe place close by, Ralph.” I eyed the luggage. “Either that or I’m heading back to Colorado right now.”
I heard a knock on the hotel room door and peered through the eyehole. Even though it was still dark outside, I could see two very annoyed-looking officers standing outside my door. Neither one looked old enough to shave. One of them held up a set of car keys, dangling them in front of the peephole as if he were trying to hypnotize it. Ah, good. My rental car had arrived. I unlocked the door.
“Well, Ralph? I’m waiting.”
He cussed. Sometimes that was a good sign, sometimes a bad one. I figured the timing on this one was in my favor. “OK,” he said. “I can’t believe I’m saying this-I’ll make it happen. But once you two have ironed things out, she goes back to Denver so you can focus on this case. She’s here two days max.”
“Four.”
“Three.”
“Deal.”
I opened the door and pointed to my bags. The officer who looked older by about three minutes nodded to his partner, who groaned but finally sauntered over to pick up my backpack. I grabbed the suitcase as I told Ralph the flight number I wanted Tessa on. It left Denver at 11:20 a.m. mountain time but because of the time change wouldn’t arrive in Charlotte until 6:16 tonight.
Boy Cop grunted, “What ’chu got in this thing? Bricks?”
“Climbing gear,” I said to him under my breath.
Then I told Ralph the ticket price.
I had to pull the phone away from my ear again.
The officer shook his head and followed me out the door. I turned my attention back to the conversation with Ralph. “You’ll need to have an agent from Denver accompany her. I don’t want her left alone for a minute. Not with this guy on the loose.”
“Great. Another ticket.”
“Ralph.”
“OK.” A sigh. “Anything else? Trip to Bermuda, maybe?”
“Hey, that’d be nice. Maybe later this winter.”
“In your prayers.”
Once I was convinced I’d be seeing Tessa in the evening, I ventured into the case. “So, any progress? Any word on Jolene?”
“Not yet,” he grumbled. “I was hoping we’d get video of our guy at the mall, but the cameras only cover the public access entrances, not the employee break areas where her keys were stolen from. We’ve got some people going over the footage, though, just in case.”
“Parking garage?”
“Nope. No cameras.”
“Figures.”
I unlocked the trunk of the car, and we hoisted my bags inside.
“Ballistics is looking at the bullet, but prelims don’t seem to match it with the guns registered to any of the security guards. Local PD is checking out all the guards. So far, two of them look interesting. One guy lives on the same street as Jolene. I thought I’d talk to him before coming back to Asheville.”
I nodded my thanks to the officers and slid behind the wheel of the rental car. They walked off mumbling to each other, obviously not happy to be playing Bellhop and Errand Boy this morning. “Hmm. Well, check it out, but I don’t think it’ll be him. There may even be evidence that points to the guy, but he’ll be cleared.”
“What do you mean?”
I flipped on my headlights and pulled into the slowly dawning day. “I don’t think our guy is stupid enough to go after a girl from down the block or get himself caught on video at the mall. He would have thought of all that. Besides, think big picture. This is just a piece of a complex puzzle. Just one in the series. Remember, predatory killers typically expand their hunting grounds on each subsequent crime; they don’t shrink it back toward their neighborhoods. But who knows. Talk to the guard. See what you can find out. By the way, how’s the guy who was shot?”
Ralph grunted. “He’ll survive. Might not ever speak again, though. If that bullet had gone any further to the right-”
I looked in the rearview mirror and noticed a pair of headlights.
“I know, I know.” The taunting words of the Illusionist echoed in my head: You and I both know I didn’t intend to kill him. “I don’t think he meant to kill the guy, Ralph. He might be a sharpshooter. Let’s have Sheriff Wallace follow up on that.”
I pictured Ralph nodding on the other side of the phone. “We tried talking to the girl who was with him,” he said, “but we couldn’t get much. She was really shook up.”
“Yeah. No kidding.” I merged onto the highway and shifted the phone to the other hand.
“She has no idea how the chess piece got in their car-we were able to get that much from her. Anderson’s wife was very forthcoming, though-Anderson’s the guy who was shot-turns out he’s an English professor at UNC. The girl is one of his students.”
“Wonderful.”
“He told his wife he was playing poker every Friday night. Apparently, it’s a regular thing.”
A pattern. Yes.
He knew that. The Illusionist knew they’d be there.
“The girl did mention that they’d start in the car and then move to the hotel down the block. She said it was what turned him on.”
“That’s a little too much information for me, Ralph,” I said. “But I appreciate your thoroughness.” After that the conversation lulled. We’d both said most of what we had on our minds. Ahead of me, even though the sun wasn’t up yet, the edge of the horizon was beginning to glow amber and red.
“That it?” he said at last.
The headlights followed me. Stayed four cars back.
There was one more thing.
I merged into the flow of traffic on the Blue Ridge Parkway. “The whole thing with the contact lenses, Ralph…”
“Yeah?”
“It troubles me. He’s linking the crimes for us.”
“Don’t the ribbons and chess pieces do that?”
“This is deeper. It’s something else.”