Don’t Talk to Strangers: A Novel (19 page)

“Jesus,” I muttered. I thought again about that thin young man sitting across from
me in a chilled interview room.
I’m here to assist in the investigation of your sister’s murder
. I looked at the sheriff.

“Model prisoner,” Meltzer said. “Had a lot of freedom. I talked to Tina Brolin. Mrs.
Davidson specifically requested we allow her to notify Jeff that his sister’s remains
had been identified.”

“Well, she never made it,” I said. “And I didn’t know.” I heard an unexpected rush
of emotion shake my voice. “I didn’t prepare him at all. Shit.”

“This isn’t your fault, Keye. He had eleven years to prepare. It’s absurd to think
he hadn’t considered the probability.”

“Maybe it was about hope. The last flicker of a flame getting snuffed out. His sister
must have been his only connection in life. The person he knew loved him.”

Meltzer nodded. We were silent for a couple of minutes. “This man who took Tracy and
Melinda, he killed Jeff Davidson,” Meltzer said. “Maybe he didn’t hold the knife but
he killed him just the same. I see it with Melinda’s parents. Molly and Bryant were
happy once. He destroyed them.”

I thought again about the text from Molly I hadn’t had time to read. “Were they happy?
Their marriage, I mean. Before Melinda disappeared?”

“I think they had some stressors,” the sheriff replied. “Money. Took a while to get
the bowling alley profitable, I think. But they wouldn’t have talked to me about that.
We’re not that kind of friends. And people around here are quiet about their private
lives. Why the interest?”

“I’m just looking for something else those girls had in common
besides age, gender, and blond hair. He accessed their lives somehow. He spotted them
somewhere. We know Tracy’s parents had problems. Just wondering if that was true for
Melinda.”

“Even if it was, how would that give the killer access to their lives?”

“It may not be relevant, Sheriff. I’m searching just like you are. But my experience
tells me that selection is rarely truly random in series crimes even with strangers.
Maybe it’s a physical type, a way these girls carry themselves, speak. Maybe it’s
something else, something deeper, a circumstance in their life. He saw them somewhere
and he decided he wanted them. We need to entertain every possibility.”

“I’m going to ask someone from patrol to get you back to your car. I’ve got to deal
with this. I need to handle the notification myself this time. Don’t imagine this
will be easy for Mrs. Davidson. Maybe she knew Jeff would react this way. Maybe that’s
why she didn’t tell him.”

I thought about Josey Davidson sitting in her carport twisting her wires, blowing
glass around her bugs, two dead children and a thug for a husband. Some lives are
hard to look back on and find a reason to stay sober. “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe she’s
just a shitty mother.”

I felt a blast of heat coming up off the baking asphalt as I pushed through doors
and stepped outside. A police car eased out of a parking space and came to a stop
in front of me. The window came down. “Climb in, Dr. Street. We’ll get you over to
Whisper. Silver Spoon, right?”

“Right. Thanks.” I got in. The officer and I exchanged small talk. He was polite.
I asked if he minded if I made a call. He didn’t.

I pressed in Neil’s number. “How’s everything at the office?” I asked. “Any kitchen
fires? Lost clients? Injuries?”

“It’s all good. Pretty quiet, actually.” Neil sounded cheerful. He’d probably used
mood-altering substances outside on the docks. This is his idea of not smoking pot
at the office. On those rare occasions we have a client come to our business, the
one I spent a bazillion dollars
redecorating, I’d like for it not to smell like a frat party. “We moved all the
DETOUR
signs on the street,” Neil told me. I heard Latisha laugh in the background. “There
were eight of them.”

“Moved them? Where?”

“In a three-block circle,” he said as if it were a perfectly reasonable answer.

“But why?” I asked.

“Why? Because it was fun, Kiwi.” He said it as if I had some deficiency that inhibited
my ability to grasp the concept of entertainment. “All that annoying construction
traffic is going in circles now. Can you not see the fun in that?”

I glanced at the officer. He was staring ahead through the windshield, politely ignoring
my conversation. “I’m speechless,” I said into the phone.

“Did you call to say you’re coming home? Because people are calling.”

“Who’s calling?”

“Tyrone’s Quikbail has a couple failures to appear. Larry Quinn has a job and about
half a dozen attorneys need papers served.”

“Put them off,” I said. “Don’t take anything that has to be done in the next week.”

“A week?” Neil repeated. “You were talking a couple of days.”

“I may need more time,” I told him, and glanced at the cop driving. I wanted to be
careful about what I said. I didn’t want any rumors seeping out into the general population
regarding the investigation. “I don’t know how much yet. You can handle it.”

“Don’t get sucked in down there, Keye,” Neil said, and irritation shot through me
like a bottle rocket. “You know how you get. And we have an employee now. You bring
in the big jobs.”

“I can’t talk about this right now, Neil. I need you to find some photographs real
quick and email them to me.”

“Sure. People or locations? You got names?” Neil asked.

I glanced at the officer again. “I’ll shoot you a text with the info.”

We pulled into the diner a few minutes later and parked behind my Impala. I hadn’t
told the cop I was driving the old Impala but Whisper was tiny and Meltzer’s patrols
probably knew every vehicle in
town. And my license plate did say
FULTON COUNTY
. I thanked him for the ride, went to my car, pushed my key into the door. They didn’t
have key fobs in 1969. No Bluetooth. No GPS. No satellite radios. You had to love
a ’69 Impala for the sheer beauty of the machine.

I lowered the top and pulled across my body the new seatbelt my dad had put in to
replace the original old lap belts. That’s when I saw it on my windshield. A piece
of white paper folded in half, then folded again so it hung like a parking ticket
around the wiper blade. I got back out, plucked it off my windshield, and opened it.

I held the note by the top corner and called Sheriff Meltzer. I read it to him as
I opened my back door, found the aluminum case I use as a scene kit, and pulled out
an evidence sleeve. My eyes swept the lot. Four cars. It was a slow midday at the
Silver Spoon. I slid the note into the bag and sealed it.

“Is it handwritten?”

“Printed,” I answered.

“Sounds like the kind of crap Logan Peele would pull. This morning he was gloating
over knowing who you were. But we have his devices. So he’d have to go somewhere else
to do it.”

“This letter needs to go to your lab. I bagged it. You have a patrol in the area I
can hand it off to?”

“Raymond’s at the Whisper office. I’ll send him over to pick it up.”

“He used my first name in this note, Sheriff. I think he feels some kind of connection.”

“You need protection,” Meltzer said.

“He doesn’t want
me
. He wants to
challenge
me. And himself.” I looked at the diner window. I saw the backs of a couple of customers
at the counter. A woman in a booth was watching me through the window as she ate like
she was staring at a television. “The more he communicates, the more we learn about
him. This kind of offender wants to insert himself into an investigation, attempt
to direct it one way or another, influence investigators. He gets off on the cat-and-mouse.
Colin Ireland made calls to Scotland Yard. Zodiac was a letter writer and so was Wishbone.
This guy may be special but he’s not unique, and judging from the letter he’s not
terribly sophisticated either.”

“You’re telling me we have a full-blown serial.”

“Unfortunately, I don’t think he’s full-blown yet. His first victim’s injuries were
consistent with captivity, struggle, attempts at escape.” I had to be careful. The
sheriff knew Melinda Cochran. I didn’t want it to feel so personal that he couldn’t
focus. “But the finger breaks in the second victim, her other injuries, that was him
dipping his toe in the water. As I said over breakfast, he’s evolving, realizing and
fulfilling different needs. And now he’s engaged us with this letter, issued a challenge.
Figure me out. Catch me if you can. Listen to me
. He just upped the ante. He’s not done, Sheriff.”

“Then it’s time to go public with that information,” he snapped. “I’m sworn to protect
the people here. They have to be made to understand the threat. I have to release
the profile.”

“Okay,” I said. “But, Ken—” I hadn’t used his first name before, and it stopped me
for a second or two. “If my name is attached to the profile, Whisper is going to have
a media problem and fast.”

Silence—Meltzer weighing his options. “Understood.”

17

I made a quick sweep of the parking lot and the wide street in front of the diner.
I could see the sign for my hotel two blocks down, and the shops on Main Street a
block over, Whisper Park, the woods skirting it on one side, the middle school and
shops and neighborhoods on the others. So many places to hide. Was he watching now?
Had he waited to see me read the note, make the call he knew I would to Sheriff Meltzer?
I checked the time: 2:12 p.m. How long had the note been sitting on my windshield?
My car had been parked at the diner since very early this morning. I hadn’t known
when I left the hotel to meet the sheriff that I would end up spending half the day
in his vehicle tossing sex offenders.

I walked inside the diner. Two guys at the counter turned on stools and stared at
me. They had coffee cups. No plates. The woman in the booth who’d been watching me
through the window had her eyes on me now, eyes without warmth or welcome. I didn’t
recognize any of the employees, a server, a cook, a woman behind the cash register
clicking the keys on a yellowing old tape calculator. The place was stone-cold quiet
except for the sound of her tallying receipts.

“Help you with something?” She stopped adding up tickets long enough to look at me.
Normally, when someone walks into a diner, one assumes they’d like a seat, food, coffee.
I wasn’t getting any offers.

My raised voice, my official voice, the one I’d learned at the FBI, traveled through
the nearly empty restaurant. “Did anyone see who left the note on the white Impala
in the parking lot?” The counter guys swiveled back around to the counter and said
nothing. No one else moved.

I looked at the woman in the booth. “How about you?”

“Nope.” That was all she said. It hung in the air, sour as bad milk.

I looked at the cashier. “You?”

She’d gone back to adding up receipts—keys clicking followed by the windup sound old
tape calculators make when the tape advances. “Nope.” She drew it out so it sounded
like
new-ope
.

One of the counter guys glanced back. It reminded me of kids on a playground sneaking
a look at whoever’s being bullied. We always want to see what that face looks like,
don’t we? I wondered what mine looked like now as a spark of anger shot through me.

“Have a nice day,” I said pleasantly, and walked out.

Raymond was opening the door of his Crown Vic when I stepped into the steamy air.
He was probably part of the reason I was receiving this icy reception. Who knew what
he’d said, what he and his girlfriend Brolin had told people about me? I thought about
the old server last night pulling away when he discovered who I was and warning me
not to get on Raymond’s bad side. I felt the heat in my cheeks. I was flushed. I didn’t
even have to look in the mirror to know that. Okay, so maybe I don’t always light
up a room when I walk in, but I’m not accustomed to the pariah treatment. Sometimes
it can get weird in small, lily-white towns where I look so different from the general
population. The Chinese heritage I know nothing about is all over my face, and the
way I move, talk, dress, laugh—all of it—says I’m not from around here. Whisper felt
like it was getting a lot smaller.

“Sheriff said you’ve got something for the lab.” Raymond didn’t sound happy about
being an errand boy. He’d gotten a haircut, and his receding hairline made it look
like his dark hair started on top of his head. He had thick brows and a beefy face,
J. Edgar Hoover–style. He was not an easy guy to like.

I handed him the sleeve with the letter I’d found on my windshield. “Probably from
the suspect,” I told him. “I handled it before I realized
what it was. My prints are in the system. They can exclude me quickly.”