“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.”
44
Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid had only met one true psychopath in his life.
As a teenager, Aaron had spent four months in a state-run group home for adolescents in southern Mississippi. The state didn’t call them orphanages anymore. Of course not. Much too negative-sounding. Instead, it was a “group home.” As if calling a place like that a “home” would turn it into one. As if anything could do that.
Of course, the idea was still the same-children who’d lost their parents and were no longer cute and cuddly little babies whom couples might actually want to adopt get to live together until “they’re old enough to move out and become a burden on society.” At least that’s how the staff at the group home used to put it when they thought the children were out of earshot.
It was their idea of a joke.
So that’s where Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid met the psychopath-during his stay at the Oak Island Group Home in La Cruxis, Mississippi.
Sevren was a gray, cold pool with deep currents. On his first day there, he ran into Lucas, an ape-like high school senior nearly six years older than him, in the hallway. Lucas bullied all the other kids and they all hated him, but none of them dared cross him.
The two students stood staring at each other, neither moving. Neither flinching.
“Out of my way,” said Lucas, glaring at the newcomer.
Sevren just eyed him. Expressionless. Impassive. Unmoving.
“I said, step aside,” growled Lucas, moving closer.
He pushed Sevren against the wall and smacked him hard in the gut. As Sevren gasped for breath, Lucas leaned close. “I heard about your mama, little boy. What she did for a living. She deserved to get cut.”
And then, something happened. Something snapped in the wiry little boy who had just arrived. As quick as an asp he grabbed the older boy’s throat and squeezed. Lucas beat on Sevren with his massive fists, but it had no effect. It took five other kids to pull Sevren off, and Lucas spent the next four months in the hospital trying to learn how to swallow again.
Of course, the other kids were glad Lucas was out of the picture. So when the administration asked about the fight, they just told them Sevren was acting in self-defense, which was mostly true. And instead of being sent to juvenile prison he was allowed to stay at the home.
Sevren became a coiled serpent, always watching, always evaluating, always calculating. But what impressed Aaron the most wasn’t his roommate’s physical strength but his ability to manipulate people, to control them. In fact, he was almost as good at it as Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid was.
Almost as good, in fact, as Father.
But of course, that’s not what makes a person a psychopath, just having the ability to manipulate others. If it were, someone might actually consider Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid a psychopath. But no, persuasion, admirable though it is, isn’t enough. To be a psychopath you need to lack empathy. You need to have a complete disregard for what other people are feeling or experiencing.