14 BOOK 2 (4 page)

Over there. Italy.
Italia.
They had scheduled three weeks for a romantic honeymoon, and Taylor had been bound and determined to teach herself the language before they left. He loved to watch her learn, to see the phrases tumble from her lips.

“Distracted. Why would you think that?” She turned back to the window and stared at the winter wonderland that comprised their new front yard, the cul-de-sac and the other houses in the neighborhood. The problem was, there were no defining characteristics between them all. Everything was white. Fifteen inches of white. And a killer was out there, plotting his next murder. Damn. He watched her mood shift, playful to alert and serious.

“Four new murders, Baldwin. Sam’s call all but confirms it. Snow White is really back. Or is this a copycat? If he is, he’s a damn good mimic. And we look like a bunch of monkeys fucking a football.”

Baldwin slipped behind Taylor, putting his arms around her waist. He started whispering in her ear. “
Siete il mio
amore. Non posso attendere per spendere il resto della mia
vita con voi. Avete la faccia di un angelo.
Need me to translate?”

She spun in his arms, her breath hot on his cheek. Obviously she caught the gist of what he’d said. He gave her a wink. It never failed.

“You’re an easy woman, Taylor. Mutter a few words in a foreign language and here you are, rubbing up against me like a cat.” He brushed a kiss against her generous mouth, smiling as she bit his lip.

“I may be easy, Dr. Baldwin, but at least I’m not cheap.”

She pulled away and punched him playfully on the shoulder. “Do you think they’ll have the street plowed by morning?”

Baldwin looked out the window. “We can hope.”

Taylor cracked her neck. Snow. Murder. The look in her gray eyes was blatant—if the roads weren’t clear by tomorrow, she would murder someone herself. Baldwin slipped an arm around her waist, drawing her back to him. “We could…”

“No, we couldn’t. That was the deal. I want our wedding night to be special. You can hold out a little longer. All I asked is that we try to abstain for a week. A week wasn’t that much to ask.”

He smiled and pulled her close. “But we already…” He kissed her softly, tasting chocolate, but she fought to leave the circle of his arms. Breath ragged, she pushed him away, gave him a weak smile.

“Stop. Four more days. Okay? Let’s just make it through this week, and we’ll be horizontal before you know it. I just can’t think about anything but that poor girl right now.”

Baldwin adjusted his fly and gave her his most wicked smile. “Let me help you forget.”

Taylor lay in the bed, realizing she was sleeping with her eyes wide shut. It was an old trick she used, keeping her eyes closed as if asleep, but seeing everything behind the lids. Usually, it worked to allow her mind to process whatever kept her awake, yet she felt rested when she finally succumbed and got out of the bed. It wasn’t working.

She opened her eyes, taking in the dim light of the room. Baldwin was asleep on his left side, back to her, and she knew he was out by the soft whispery snores emanating from his pillow. Lucky bastard. Since they’d moved to the new house, he’d been sleeping like a baby. It might have been the bed—a king-size sleigh that afforded them much more room than they actually needed. They could each stretch out and not worry about banging into the other. She missed the old bed, but only briefly. Who was she kidding? She loved to luxuriate in the crisp sheets, to stretch her extremely long legs all the way to the end of the bed and still have several inches to spare. She did just that, easing the tension in her shoulders with a bit of stretching, tensing and releasing. Maybe a game would take her mind off the case. No sense lying here staring at the ceiling.

The pool table was housed in the bonus room over their three-car garage. Taylor walked out of the master, slipping the door closed with a gentle click. A night-light showed her the path. She walked down the long, wide hallway past empty rooms. Rooms that should hold promise but mocked her with their very emptiness. Marriage. Babies. Yawning mouths of black-haired, redlipped girls, all in a row. Fuck it all. She jogged the last few steps down the hall until she reached the open space that housed the vast majority of her old life.

She flicked the lamp and the room filled with soft yellow light. Closing the door carefully behind her, she went to the pool table, whipped the cover off and bunched it into a ball. Tossing it on the couch, she went back to the table, racked the balls and took a moment to stretch again, two vertebrae in her neck unkinking with a pop. Better. Loosened up, she took the break, cracking ball after ball into their respective pockets.

She ignored the faces hanging on the wall. She’d turned the poolroom into a makeshift office, someplace she could spend her nights thinking about the murders while she tried to relax. Elizabeth Shaw, Candace Brooks and Glenna Wells all smiled down on her. At least they’d been identified quickly. This new victim was nameless. 

Smack—Snow White.

Smack—Janesicle.

Smack, smack, smack—wedding, copycat, four dead girls.

The tension drained and she found her rhythm. She’d find this guy. She always did.

She was four games of nine ball in when the door opened.

Baldwin stood in the frame, hair mussed, sleep marks creasing his left cheek. He whistled a low tune and she melted. He looked so damn unbearably cute that Taylor couldn’t help herself. All the bad thoughts left her. The worries, the frustrations, disappeared. She put the cue stick back in its holder, went to him. Took him by the hand and wordlessly led him back to the bedroom. 

Nashville, Tennessee

Tuesday, December 16

6:40 a.m.

Taylor rose early, gritty-eyed from the lack of sleep. She left Baldwin in the bed, tucked a pillow in his arms, and felt her heart break when he smiled and murmured into it. Seeing him like that, remembering what he’d done to finally get her to sleep, made all her worries about the wedding seem silly.

Long legs ensconced in a pair of jeans, she slipped into her favorite old Uggs and pulled on a creamy cable sweater. She stopped in the kitchen briefly, grabbed a banana and a granola bar, then got in the 4Runner. She backed into a drift of snow in the driveway, but the powerful truck slid through it easily.

The neighborhood was beautiful, sheer and pure, a white only produced by snow fallen from a crisp wintry sky. She felt like she was in the mountains; the deciduous trees masquerading as heavy evergreens with black trunks and feathery limbs coated in ice, the sky cerulean, a shade rarely seen during a Southern winter. The beauty cheered her, and she left the quiet subdivision in a good mood. Moved by the weather. Sheesh. She was getting soft.

Out in the suburbs, the side roads were unplowed and impassable to all but four-wheel drives, but the main roads were relatively cleared and not yet icy. She was careful, made her way to the Starbucks drive-through, got her now standard nonfat, sugar-free vanilla latte and headed toward work.

The autopsy of Janesicle was scheduled for seven, and Taylor intended to witness. Maybe Sam would have the results back from the LCMS tests. If this was definitely victim number four, it would be a hard secret to keep. She flipped on the XM, used the remote to scroll through the stations until she found some music she liked. No talk radio for her this morning, and she’d given up on the holiday channels after the third murder. It just didn’t feel right to be listening to such joyful exuberance when girls’ bodies were stacking up like cordwood in the morgue. She needed mindless noise, distraction. She settled on a U2 tune and mouthed the words as she made her way down the highway. The roads were virtually empty and she felt freer than she had in months. Little by little, as she closed the distance to Forensic Medical, her heart grew heavier. When she entered Gass Street, she turned off the radio.

Sam’s offices were housed in a corporate-looking building up the road from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. Taylor had been here so often that Sam had issued her a badge that allowed her access after hours. Or before hours, when necessary. They’d have a skeleton staff on a day like today, but Taylor knew Sam would be there. And she was, already prepped. Taylor could see her, distorted through the crisscross wire embedded in the glass of the industrial door. The air was cool and clean in the compartmented vestibule where she slipped out of her clothes and boots, sliding blue plastic clogs and doctor’s scrubs on. She put her street clothes in a locker. No sense making her clothes reek for the rest of the day. With the new gear in place, she went through the door into the autopsy suite. The chemical scent of death greeted her like an old friend. She hardly noticed it anymore. Sam nodded as she entered the room, already dictating into a hands-free mike clipped to her headgear. The body of Janesicle Doe lay on the cream-colored plastic slab that encased the stainless-steel table underneath. She was so white; cold, clammy flesh, with that big, black grin across her throat. Taylor felt the gorge rise in the back of her own throat and swallowed hard. Inappropriate reaction. She hoped Sam hadn’t noticed. Taylor was as detached as the rest of them, but something about this girl was breaking all her protocols. The individual murders hadn’t bothered her in the beginning. Well, not that much. Not like this.

“Taylor, did you notice? She’s got that same stuff on her temples.”

Taylor stepped closer, bent over the body. On either side of the girl’s face, two smears of a whitish substance glistened under Sam’s light. They looked like streaks of moonlight.

“Appears to be identical material. Any chance the labs are back on it?”

“We should have an answer by the time I finish her up. We didn’t get anything usable from the earlier samples, they were too degraded.” Sam started working her way systematically through the Jane Doe’s hair.

“You said it wasn’t biological.”

“Right. No DNA to obtain. There was plenty of it on this body, though, nice and fresh. I put it into the LCMS.”

“That’s your special little machine that spits out the chemical compositions, right?”

“Special little machine? How about liquid chromatography mass spectrometer? I’d like to spend more time, do some sophisticated testing to see its composition, but I need a comparison sample with the actual material that’s leaving the marks to be sure. In the meantime, we have enough to at least get an idea of what we’re working with.”

Sam continued her examination, and Taylor stood beside the body, lost in thought.

Two months ago, Taylor had been called on the murder of Elizabeth Shaw, a senior at Belmont University. Elizabeth had disappeared walking home to her apartment from class. The city buzzed, searches were initiated, but it was all too late. Her body was found in the tall grass in a gulch off of Interstate 24. Thrown out of a car door like litter, she’d lain in the gulch for at least two days. The postmortem damage to her body had been animal related. The biological evidence was copious; her arms and legs were hog-tied. They hadn’t determined where she was actually killed.

Elizabeth Shaw’s murder scene didn’t look precisely like the original work of Snow White, but during her autopsy, flakes of red Chanel lipstick were recovered from her mouth. They reexamined the knots on the ropes, found them to be much more complex than they originally appeared. And in a touch that alarmed even the most seasoned law enforcement officials, a two-decades-old newspaper clipping about the first murder in the original Snow White case had been pulled from her vagina. All thoughts of this being a simple murder flew out the window, and the homicide team found themselves quietly reopening a twenty-year-old case.

In quick succession, two more girls were taken and murdered. Candace Brooks was killed three weeks later, left by the side of Interstate 65 this time. The press started attributing the killings to “The Highwayman”—the interstates being the one common denominator between the two crimes. Candace’s autopsy was eerily similar to Elizabeth Shaw’s, right down to the newspaper clipping—though this one detailed the twenty-year-old report about the Snow White’s second murder.

When victim number three, Glenna Wells, showed up on a boat ramp on Percy Priest Lake, the media beat the medical examiner to the scene. A sharp-eyed young reporter had managed a glimpse of the body, saw the glowing crimson lips, the presentation of the body, and ran back to her producer with video footage. The producer was an old-timer, recognized the tableau from his early days on the crime beat. The Highwayman was relabeled the “Reemergence of the Snow White Killer.” Taylor and the rest of Metro were lambasted for not warning the area that a serial killer long dormant was back in their midst, and the media frenzy began. Glenna’s body gave them a third newspaper clipping and no more clues. And now there was a fourth.

The girls were linked in death by gaping neck wounds, the newspaper clippings, the knots and that damnable Chanel lipstick. Blood tests indicated they were over the legal limit for intoxication, with BAL’s in the 1.5-2.0 range. Rohypnol showed on the tox screens. It was obvious they’d all been killed by the same man. Whether it was the original Snow White or a copycat was still up for debate. A marked difference in the new murders versus the 1980’s slayings was the slick, creamy residue on the girls’ faces. Hindered by the fact that they couldn’t do their own DNA testing, Sam was still waiting on DNA results. The DNA would tell the truth—a copycat or the original killer. Taylor leaned toward the former. The differences were subtle, but there.

“Yo, earth to Taylor? Can I get some help here?”

“Oh, gosh, Sam, sorry. I was thinking about something else.”

Sam gave her a sharp glance, then pointed at the girl’s lower body.

“Can you pull up her right leg for me? I should put her in stirrups, but since you’re here…”

“Sure, of course. Yeah, no problem.”

Taylor reached for the dead girl’s leg, ignoring the bizarre sensation of dead flesh against her thin latex gloves. It felt a bit like the skin on a store-bought chicken breast, rubbery, loose. Her hand almost slipped, and she chided herself. Jeez, girl, get a frickin’ grip already. She took a better hold and pulled the leg back, exposing the girl’s genitals. Sam was already at work, swabbing, following the necessary indignities. Taylor tried to watch the back of her friend’s head, but saw something glint, a reflection of the light. She looked closer.