Don’t Talk to Strangers: A Novel (28 page)

It was a silent ride to the hotel, curling through Whisper’s back streets. I’d left
the sheriff conferring with his deputies. Another scene tech had arrived to help process
that square of road and the ditch. They’d asked us politely to leave. No one had to
twist my arm. I wasn’t doing anyone any good standing there.

I climbed the outside steps up to my hotel room. My key card was in my hand when I
reached to push it in the door and realized I was staring into a blank space, a darkened
room, a door already cracked open.

I stepped back, heard the growing
thump, thump, thump
in my ears. Fight or flight. There it was. What was it going to be? My gun was inside.
I had no flashlight. No anything.

I spun around and hit the door with the side of my foot, kept moving. The door swung
open hard and slammed into the wall.
Adrenaline and cortisol
. I could taste it in the back of my throat. I waited. No sound. No movement inside.
I reached one arm inside and found the light switch.

Empty room. Dresser drawers pulled out. The contents of my suitcase dumped on the
bed. I went quickly to the closet and checked the safe. The readout said it was locked.
I keyed in the four-digit code, popped open the safe, grabbed my Glock and shoved
in a clip. The bathroom door was closed. And I wasn’t the one who’d closed it.

I turned the knob with my left hand, gave it a little push, then swung in with my
Glock. Nothing. I snatched open the shower curtain and saw an empty square.

I let myself breathe. I’m an emergency person. I have an inexplicably cool head for
the unexpected. It’s the aftershocks that wreck me. I felt them now in my knees.

I inspected the door. Whoever had broken into my room had used some kind of pry bar
and torn the heck out of it. It was bent and scarred. Definitely not a professional
job. The lock wouldn’t slide into place. I attached the chain to hold it closed while
I cleaned up the room and assessed the damage. My clothes were there. The shaving
kit I use as a makeup bag sat on the bathroom counter. My toothbrush was where I’d
left it in a plastic hotel cup. Good bet I’d never use that toothbrush again. I went
back to the safe. My Mac, my digital camera, my notes—everything was still there.
There were no marks on the safe to indicate someone had tried to open it without the
code. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to take nothing. Was this another message?
Or was it something else entirely? According to Bryant Cochran, there were a whole
lot of folks who didn’t like having me around. I thought about Logan Peele, then glanced
back at the door. I’d ruffled some feathers in the thirty-six hours I’d been in town.
One sex offender was sitting in jail, another had had his devices confiscated. Tina
Brolin hadn’t even tried to disguise her venom. And when she had misdirected it at
the family of a missing girl tonight, Meltzer had ordered her away. Where had she
gone? But why would Brolin do this? Why would Peele? Why not take something? Or leave
something? Could this be random, some teenage prank or a thug looking for credit cards
and cash? Why was the safe untouched?

I repacked my suitcase. The weight of the day made my shoulders and head ache. I slipped
the lip of my duty holster in the back of the navy slacks I’d been in all day and
walked outside with my computer bag hanging off my left shoulder and my suitcase in
my left hand. I wanted my right hand free. I wasn’t feeling the love in Whisper at
the moment.

A dozing clerk, roused by the bell on the door, blinked when I walked into the lobby,
wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. I
put my key card on the counter in front of him. “Checking out?” He got out of the
desk chair he’d been sleeping in behind the counter.

“Someone broke into my room.” I gave him the room number. “So yeah. I’m checking out.
Door was jimmied and it won’t lock now. You see anyone?”

“Did they take anything?” He seemed to brighten up. He’d probably hoped for a good
robbery. “We never have break-ins here.”

“Right,” I said. “So did you see anything?”

“No!” He came around from behind the counter and peered out the doors into the parking
lot as if he could see something helpful now. “Want me to call the cops?”

“Sure,” I said. “Tell them what you just told me. Be a lot of help.”

I lugged my things out and loaded my car. Yellow streetlamps softly lit the shops
and the narrow lanes of Main Street as I drove out of Whisper. It was a postcard town.
Everything about Whisper and the surrounding area—the thick forests, the rolling farmland,
the vast, icy-blue water, the manicured resorts—all of it beckoned, invited. It was
one big fucking
WELCOME
sign. But to me it whispered locked basements and eyes in windows, and secrets. And
murder.

I drove toward the resort area I’d jogged through a couple of miles out of town. I
found a Fairfield Inn with a room. It wasn’t exactly the Ritz, but when does a PI
get the Ritz? The room was clean. The door hadn’t been pried open, and it wasn’t in
downtown Whisper. I performed the bedbug check, turned corners back on all the bedding,
checked the seams and crevasses in the mattress. There are few things that can fill
my heart with dread like a bedbug. They’re sneaky. And they bite. I shivered at the
thought.

I took a shower and toweled my hair, brushed my teeth with a hard toothbrush I’d bought
in the lobby, fell into bed with my stomach rumbling. The sheriff’s spinach quesadilla
had worn off hours ago. I considered the hotel vending machine again. I would have
paid ten bucks for a package of Hostess Ding Dongs—chocolate cupcakes stuffed with
cream. Well, they call it cream. Lord knows what it is. My mother would have slapped
it out of my hand.

I used the key I’d found taped under Skylar’s desk drawer and opened the tiny pink
padlock hanging off her diary. Notes of varying
size torn from lined school paper tumbled out on the bed. Skylar must have opened
it carefully, kept it flat, knowing special memories were stuffed inside the cover.
I thought about Skylar handling this diary, sitting down to record secrets and dreams.
I thought about Raymond not wanting me to have it.

I unfolded one of the notes, a torn-off scrap bent in half with ragged edges.
My brother says Robbie says he likes you
. I opened another one.
They totally made out
. And another.
OMG! Did you see her shoes?
I read on through each bitchy, hormonal, funny, childish, innocent note; some of
them had clearly been passed around and contained two or three styles of handwriting.

A photo among the notes got my attention, Skylar and a girlfriend hamming it up in
an old-fashioned photo booth. Did they still make them? Four frames. Girls smiling
self-consciously, giggling as they grinned. Earrings dangling. The department would
access her photo stream online. I’d make sure of that. No one used paper anymore,
at least not a teenager. Everyone’s lives, mine included, passed through our smartphones
into a storage cloud somewhere. Raymond might have thought about online storage already
and gotten the ball rolling. The detective had some thug in him, but he wasn’t stupid.
I’d watched him at the scene tonight and with Skylar’s parents. His reconstruction
of the abduction based on drag marks and blood spatter was careful and thoughtful.

I flipped through the diary, went to the last entry, dated yesterday. One line.
I HATE my parents!!!!!

She wrote about her fears that her arguments with her parents contributed to the tension
between them. She regretted the fights later but held stubbornly to her belief in
the utter injustices perpetrated against her by Hayley and Brooks Barbour. Based solely
on Skylar’s complaints in her journal, they appeared to be protective parents, not
abusive ones. Skylar was interested in music but bored with band practice and scathingly
critical of the “lame” music teacher. I learned that her primary interest since the
new school year began was in a boy named Robbie.
Saw Robbie. He’s so gorgeous. Saw Robbie. He’s so smart
. The entries ran from a line one day to a crowded page another, from the flippant
and shallow and self-absorbed to the
dark and shallow and self-absorbed, which was exactly where she was supposed to be
emotionally at thirteen. That thought—the protected unworldliness with which she approached
life, the pure innocence of inexperience—wedged in my throat like a cotton ball.

I read back a couple of months before my eyes burned and I was no longer absorbing
anything. I switched out the light and lay there in the dark. I thought about that
smiling girl with caramel-colored eyes. Where was she tonight? Chained to a pipe in
some barn or shed, shivering with cold and fear? Was she hungry? We knew from the
lab reports that Tracy and Melinda had been fed just enough to be kept alive until
they’d served their purpose. Offenders don’t take prisoners and cook them balanced
meals. These people can get up from a steak dinner upstairs, clean their plates off
in the trash, and walk down basement steps with a two-month-old package of cookies
from the vending machine at work and toss it at their captives without a thought.
Look at Ariel Castro and the hellhole he’d created for three women and a child in
Cleveland. Look at Brian David Mitchell, who took fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Smart
and chained her to a tree, starved and raped her, and held her for nine months. I’d
seen predators’ lairs, their filthy dungeons littered with Frito bags and plastic
water bottles, excrement and shackles and ropes and knives and dildos and pornography.
The victims’ only value is in what needs they satisfy in the offenders. Age, innocence,
suffering, starving, the terrible sin of breaking a child—none of it matters.

I flipped over on my side, stared at a parking lot light through a separation in the
heavy curtains. I took a shaky breath. God, I wanted to find that kid. I wanted to
find her and watch Luke slobber her face with kisses. I wanted to find the sonofabitch
who was holding her and put a bullet in him before those light brown eyes of hers
grew dark and vacant.

I reached for my phone to call Rauser, to say good night, to tell him I loved him,
to hear the voice that had steadied me for years, as both friend and lover, the man
I’d nearly betrayed. Or had I already betrayed him by letting the sheriff get so near?
I’d enjoyed it, after all—the fantasies, the flirting. And if that weren’t enough,
here I was parsing the definitions of sex and betrayal like Bill Clinton at a deposition.
How would Rauser define cheating? I reviewed every moment I’d spent with Ken Meltzer.
The almost-kiss would have hurt Rauser far less than the walk on the dark road tonight
with Meltzer next to me, sharing the tension and heartache and fear and exhilaration
of an investigation like this. That connection, that intimacy, those moments, I knew
exactly what that would feel like to Rauser. I dropped the phone back on the bed table.

At six a.m. I stood in front of the mirror looking at the tiny creases at the corners
of my eyes, the ones that hadn’t been there a couple of years ago. Some foundation,
blush, a little pencil under the corners of my bottom lashes and I was beginning to
look human. I searched for my mascara. And then I searched again. I poured everything
out of the makeup bag. What the hell? It was Lancôme Ôscillation Intensity. Power
mascara. Thirty-six bucks a tube and it had probably ended up on the floor of that
hotel bathroom after my room was tossed.
Shit
. So far central Georgia was about as much fun as Gordon Ramsay at a redneck picnic.

I headed downstairs. The smell of bacon hit me as soon as the elevator doors parted.
I followed it to a room off the lobby with tables and chairs and a television. Sunken
trays, steaming at the seams, were filled with scrambled eggs and grits, bacon and
sausage. There were bagels and waffles and syrup and jelly. And tall dispensers that
squirted OJ or thin brown coffee into cups. I ate breakfast alone at a small table
and watched the hotel guests move in and out, some piling up plates and heading back
to their rooms with puffy eyes and bed head. Some stayed, slurping the hot, tasteless
coffee and pouring watery syrup on toaster waffles. A guy came in wearing a Krispy
Kreme uniform and carrying a crate full of green-and-white boxes. I watched him slide
the boxes into a rack on the counter. I waited for my chance to move in. Here’s the
thing about Krispy Kreme’s original glazed doughnuts: They are flat-out awful cold
and hard. But if you pop them in the microwave for a few seconds, the glaze melts
and they get soft and pliable and they are almost as good as when they come off the
conveyor in Midtown. I grabbed a fresh plate and two doughnuts, then nuked them for
ten seconds. The day was looking up. I took
Skylar’s diary from my bag and read while I washed Krispy Kremes down with weak coffee.
I missed Neil and his espresso maker.

She wrote about the last school year and summer days, about friends who had gossiped
behind her back, and her ongoing efforts to dump the school band. She’d been in the
band for a couple of years, which meant Skylar and Melinda were in the band at the
same time. Skylar’s parents and her music teacher pressed for her to stay in the band
for the year. She wasn’t pleased. It wasn’t the kind of music she wanted to play.
She’d had band practice twice this year and she’d ditched it once to watch Robbie
and his garage band rehearse. She obsessed about Robbie, drew hearts around his name.
He’d walked her back to school in time to meet her mom the day she’d skipped practice.
They held hands. A kiss. The summer had been all about her BFF, rides to the mall
down I-20, Coke floats, going to movies when they could catch a ride. Whisper was
too small for a theater, and Skylar cut into town on that path on summer nights and
walked the neighborhoods, sometimes with her friend after their parents were asleep.
Sometimes she was alone, full of bored, pubescent restlessness and desire. Too young
to drive, she felt marooned in the ranch house over the summer while her parents worked
and her best friend was away on a family vacation. She chronicled walks around town
with her dog. She walked past the church and stopped to talk to the pastor and his
wife gardening at the rectory next door. She wrote about pulling weeds and taking
tomatoes home to her mother, having lunch with the minister’s family and baking cookies
with Mrs. Hutchins and their daughter, Robin. There were other mentions of Robin.
Things like
played with Robin
or
she still likes dolls
. Robin was younger and a fill-in friend, I decided, but Skylar liked her. She went
to the drugstore and the coffee shop and the diner. She bought Cokes from the machine
and lay on her back in the park with her head on Luke like a pillow. It was the diary
of a sweet, wandering, lonely kid. Those long hours alone had put her at risk. The
Barbours, it appeared, did their very best when they were home—movies and books and
pizza night, board games. But their daughter had begun to withdraw: She dreaded the
dinners and wrote
sigh
and
boring
and
ugh
when she recorded them.