The Pawn Read Free Page B

area.
    Ralph leaned close. “We’re doing everything we can to work with these local guys, but just between you and me, they’d do better to fire half their butts and just let us do our job. Plus, somehow, the press found out.” He gestured to a pack of reporters herded into a corner of the meadow. He looked at the deepening clouds for a moment. “At least we don’t have their choppers flying all over the place.”
    The storm was rolling in fast. We needed to hurry.
    I picked up my pace and tried to think of how I might save some time. “Okay, fill me in. What do we know?” I’d read the notes on the flight over but I wanted to hear it all again. Let it sink in. So I could look for patterns.
    “Well, whoever our guy is, he knows how to leave a clean crime scene. We haven’t found much of anything so far. He even washes the bodies, sutures the wounds. Our victim has six stab wounds, but she died from being strangled, just like the others. Um, I mean, at least that’s the preliminary finding. We’re still waiting for the medical examiner to confirm it.”
    I nodded. The killer had stabbed each of the women ritualistically in the chest and abdomen, but the mechanism of death in all of the murders so far had been cerebral hypoxia—which is just a fancy way of saying the brain didn’t get enough oxygen. You squeeze the throat long enough, you choke the brain.
    “Wasn’t the first one done with the cord of a hair dryer?” asked Sheriff Wallace, who was puffing along beside us.
    “Yeah,” said Ralph. “The last three with clothesline rope.”
    “Why would he change his MO?” asked the sheriff.
    “He came prepared the next time,” Agent Jiang said softly. “He wasn’t taking any chances. He brought his own rope.”
    “I assume you’re tracing it?” said Wallace. “To see if it gives you any leads on a manufacturer?”
    Ralph cleared his throat. “Already on that.”
    Sheriff Wallace waddled in closer, struggling to keep up. Special Agent Jiang strode beside us in silence, watching the sky.
    “The rope’s embedded a quarter of an inch into her neck,” said Ralph. “He might have even used something mechanical to tighten it.”
    I felt my fists clench. After all these years, I should be used to hearing details like this, but it still disturbs me. It used to turn my stomach, now it fuels my anger. I guess in a way that’s good. It helps me focus on catching these guys.
    “That and we found another chess piece.”
    I thought back to the case files I’d read. At the first crime scene, the pawn had seemed like a great clue—the piece came from a hand-carved wooden set that the lab guys were able to trace to a wood-worker in Oregon who made them out of redwood and shipped them all over the world. The analysts were even able to nail down the dates when the set was made, since the carpenter switched the kind of lathe he was using two years and two months ago. It leaves a different kind of cut on the chess pieces, so the chess set our killer was using was at least two years old. There was no way to know yet which of the eight or nine sets in question our killer had gotten a hold of, but the woodworking guy was being helpful. Right now, some agents were going through his records, checking up on everyone who’d bought one of his sets in the last five years.
    “What piece was left this time?” I asked.
    “Another pawn. Black. What do you make of that?”
    “I’m not sure. Maybe nothing.”
    “What do you mean?” asked Sheriff Wallace. “It’s huge. He’s trying to tell us something.”
    I shook my head. “Maybe, maybe not. These days, lots of killers leave intentional clues at crime scenes to throw off the investigators—someone else’s blood, hair, semen. Too many CSI episodes and serial killer movies. The smarter we get, the smarter they get. It might be there to throw us off. Or who knows, he might just like chess.”
    Killers often leave taunting clues or notes at crime scenes. The most