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.”
66
The color drained from Tessa’s face. “What did he say?”
“Tessa, this is why I didn’t want you to come along.”
“Don’t do that,” she said. “I hate when people say I told you so!”
“OK. Listen, I’m sorry. Please. I want to make things right between us. It’s just that, can you wait outside? Please. For a couple minutes.”
“Don’t call me names then.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
She plopped onto the front porch swing, and I went back inside to tell Ralph what I thought of him cussing within earshot of my stepdaughter.
From his vantage point, the Illusionist watched the girl swing back and forth, back and forth on the porch. He recognized her right away from his research. Tessa Bernice Ellis, Dr. Bowers’s stepdaughter. So, he’d flown her in, brought her to North Carolina to protect her.
How nice.
The Illusionist closed his eyes and let his mind wander, his senses dream, his desires explore the possibilities. Yes, this could mean an even more fitting conclusion to the game.
He scanned the front of the house with the binoculars, studied Bowers’s rental car for a moment, made a note to himself that the good doctor had his backpack with him. Probably his climbing gear. Hmm.
He allowed himself one more lingering glance at the girl and then headed back to his house to get his supplies.
Before I could lay into Ralph, I saw the look on his face. “Thirteen of ’em were children,” he said.
My mouth went dry. “Thirteen kids?”
He nodded. “No smoke in their lungs.”
“They were dead before the fire began.”
“Yeah.”
“They killed their kids?” said Lien-hua.
“Just like at Jonestown,” I said.
“The building next to the house had two adult bodies,” said Ralph. “One male, one female. And Kincaid’s private plane is gone from the regional airport. Filed a flight plan to Seattle.”
“Seattle?” I said. “What’s in Seattle?”
“They’re checking.”
Suddenly the door flew open, and Wallace came ambling into the room, waving his new phone.
“What is it?” I asked.
“The prints,” he exclaimed.
“Who?” asked Ralph. “Who is it?”
Wallace shook his head. “If the killer touched the brush he didn’t leave any prints. But I think we might have found his next victim. Every bank employee in the country is fingerprinted, so if there’s a robbery it’s easy to see if it was an inside job-there’s a national database of their fingerprints, and we-”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” barked Ralph. The stress of the case was getting to him, to all of us, wearing our patience razor-thin. “Who is she? What’s her name?”
“Alice McMichaelson. She works at Second National Bank. Lives in West Asheville.”
“She’s next,” I said.
“Do we have an address on her?” said Ralph.
Sheriff Wallace told it to us.
“Get some cops there now,” I said to him. “But make them plainclothes in case he’s watching the house. This just might be our chance to finally move out in front of him.”
67
Alice McMichaelson was sitting in her living room balancing her checkbook when the doorbell rang. Before she could even get up it rang again. Probably some kind of salesman. Don’t they ever give it a rest? I mean, give me a break, this is a Sunday.
Maybe if she ignored him he’d go away.
Ring. Ring. Ring.
Oh, all right already.
She crossed the carpet and peered out the window. A man wearing khaki pants, a golf shirt, and a maroon windbreaker stood on her porch. When she pulled the curtain to the side, he nodded at her.
Alice opened the door, kept the chain clasped in place. “Yes? May I help you?”
He held up his wallet to show her his badge. “Ma’am. I’m Officer Lewis with the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Department. May I come in?”
“Is there some kind of problem?”
“It might be better if I explained it to you inside the house, ma’am.”
She looked past him to the car in the driveway. A sedan. Maybe he was off-duty or undercover.
“Please,” he said. “There’s a very dangerous man on the loose. We think he might be after you. He’s unpredictable. He could show up at any time. We need to get you out of here as quickly as possible.”
“Who is he? What does he want with me?”
The man glanced over his shoulder and then back toward her. “Think of the worst thing you can. That’s him getting started.”
She made no move to open the door any wider. Why was this officer by himself? Why didn’t he have a partner with him? He must have noticed that she was hesitant. “Look,” he said, “we believe you and your children might be in some danger. But I can’t force you to do anything. I’ll wait here on the porch for you to decide.” He handed her a card. “Here. Call this number and they’ll confirm I am who I say I am.”
68
After I drove Tessa back to the safe house, Sheriff Wallace called to inform me that his men had contacted Alice, but she refused to leave her home. “We can send a squad to surveil her house, but other than that our hands are tied.”
I thought back to the hairbrush and the fingerprints and made a couple calls. When I found out Alice had only been working at the bank for less than a week, it gave me an idea. I called Lien-hua and put things into play.
Then I got a text message from Ralph telling me Governor Taylor was scheduled to speak in Seattle to a consortium of tech companies next Monday.
Aha. So that’s where Kincaid is planning to strike.
At least we had a week to find him.
Governor Taylor stood in front of the mirror and tried to concentrate on his speech for Monday. Tried, tried, tried, but the words just wouldn’t come.
“We are on the brink of a new chapter in our nation’s history,” he said to the well-groomed man in the mirror. “A chapter defined not by the throes of terrorism, but by the footnotes of freedom.”
No, that wasn’t it. The “footnotes of freedom”? Horrible. He’d have to fire his speechwriter tomorrow. He pulled out a pencil. Um, the banner of freedom? Clarion call of freedom? The resounding shout of freedom? Yes. That was good. He liked that.
He scribbled some notes across the page. He liked to use pencil instead of pen since he often wrote, erased, and rewrote phrases dozens of times. He was a precise, careful man. When Sebastian Taylor did something, he did it well. He did it right. It was one of the reasons he was such a good leader.
The presidential election was less than two weeks away, and he was actually glad the Democrats were polling so well; if the Republicans lost this election it would give him a better chance in 2012. Two years to plan, two years to run.
Actually, four years to run. Starting now. With the video bloggers and nearly everything you do showing up on the Internet these days, every speech, every word mattered.
So why did the distant past and his previous career have to come up and haunt him now, right when everything else was coming together?
Kincaid peered out the plane window at the countryside far below. “David,” he said without turning to the man beside him.
“Yes, Father?”
“I never told you what happened on November 19th after I woke up by the river. It’s time you know.” Kincaid rubbed his finger over the scar, caressing the moments, remembering them all. “As you know, a Peoples Temple guard shot me in the shoulder. When I awoke I was in shock, too weak to find my way through the jungle. The only thing I could do was head back to the compound to look for help. I figured there would be others like me who’d fled in the night, who would be returning then, in the daylight. I thought maybe they could help me.”