Don’t Talk to Strangers: A Novel (29 page)

I looked again at the photo booth picture, then tucked it back into the diary, locked
it so nothing would tumble out, and put it in my bag. On the television in the bland
breakfast room, there was a lot of talk about how much the royal baby would be worth
if everyone else in the family died, and Miley Cyrus had made everyone’s list of celebs
most likely to freak the fuck out this year. If Skylar Barbour was still alive, she
was learning just how cruel life could be. But the world, it just kept on turning.

I was on my way out when they broke for local news and I heard:
The bodies of two young women found murdered in the woods near Lake Oconee have been
linked to the disappearance of a third girl. Is there a serial killer in Hitchiti
County? The full report from Brenda Roberts at six
.

25

The Hitchiti County Judicial Center jutted up out of the landscape, big and modern.
Every one of those beds taken by the state was revenue. Sheriff Ken Meltzer seemed
to be good at the business of being sheriff. He’d grown his department. He’d lowered
the crime rate, which was miraculous considering what I’d seen of his investigators,
and he’d taken care of his own, made deals over a fishing pole, and gotten himself
reelected. But this hulking charcoal-stone and glass center surrounded by barricades
and asphalt seemed an abomination so near lakeshore architecture and ancient oaks
and scented, climbing jasmine. And was it at odds, too, with the guy who liked to
hike and watched
Castle
with his mom? I thought about being in his home last night, standing in the kitchen
with him at my elbow, those cabin stairs I’d fantasized about climbing.

“How’d you sleep?” a voice behind me asked as I passed through the first set of metal
detectors at the complex entrance.

“Shitty,” I grumped. I didn’t mention I’d changed hotels in the middle of the night.

“Me too,” Meltzer said. His hair was damp and I saw the light shadow of a beard. “The
Barbours’ polygraphs are scheduled for seven. They should be upstairs now. Brolin
and Raymond will interview them. You can watch from the observation room if you’d
like.”

“I’d like to, yes,” I told him. “I’ve been thinking about them. I hope they didn’t
see the news. It’s not the way you want to be told.”

Meltzer’s face told me he had no idea what I was talking about. He’d probably grabbed
a few hours of sleep, then come straight to the complex. He tunes out in the morning,
he’d already informed me. He doesn’t check messages or emails before business hours
and if someone wants him they can call. I guess no one had called.

“They reported that forensics had linked Skylar’s disappearance to Melinda and Tracy,”
I told him. “I hope that’s true. MO and signature certainly have. But ideally your
investigators and the family get that news before the public.”

“Lot of deputies on the scene last night.” He was frowning. “It could have gotten
out. Guess that reporter kept digging until she found a crack.” He nodded at the elevator.
“Come upstairs with me. We might have something from Freeman’s van.” We stepped into
an elevator. Meltzer pressed the button for the fourth floor. “That flash drive Raymond
found in Freeman’s vehicle was loaded with child porn. Enough to keep him locked up
awhile.”

“How about Peele’s devices?” I asked.

“Clean, according to the digital specialist. There’s a chance he could have scrubbed
them without the expert detecting it, but it’s a slim chance. He’d need to have access
to the kind of programs the Feds use. He’s coming to pick them up.”

“You plan on talking to him while he’s here?”

“You bet. Don’t you want to know what he did yesterday? Remember that gap in coverage
I mentioned? An hour between the time the scene techs left and the patrol arrived
on the street. Peele’s truck wasn’t there. He didn’t show up until almost nine last
night.”

The elevator opened. “By the way, they found a nail file and a makeup compact near
the ditch last night. It hadn’t been there long.”

“No purse?” I asked.

“Nope. That’s it. The crushed phone, the phone case, a nail file, a compact, and the
blood evidence.”

“He dumped everything out of the purse she might use as a weapon.” I thought about
that as we stood outside a glass wall looking
into an oblong room lined with a desk-high counter, three workstations, three rolling
chairs, computers, and more equipment.

“Firearms and tool marks are down the hall,” Meltzer told me, and I detected a hint
of pride in his voice. Cabinets with glass fronts lined the top section of the room.
They were neatly stacked with white envelope-size boxes labeled with handwritten information.
Microscopes sat on a wide stainless-steel table in the center, a latent print development
chamber, alternate light sources, fume extractors, machines for evidence drying, centrifuges,
and a whole lot of new technology I didn’t recognize. It had been more than four years
since I’d had reason to visit forensic laboratories. Science had zoomed past me.

“I’m impressed.”

“We take work from other agencies to support the center. And it helps relieve the
logjam. One day, when the money and expertise is available, we’ll add mitochondrial
DNA typing. I hope that will happen early next year.”

“More impressed,” I said, and smiled.

“So what kept you up?” Meltzer asked.

I looked over at him, then back at the window. “I read Skylar’s diary. Sad, sweet
kid. Just a regular kid.”

“Tough to read, huh? No revelations?”

“She was lonely, happy when school started. She did mention your friend the pastor
and his wife. And their daughter. Thought maybe I’d talk to them. Skylar liked being
with them. I think she missed having happy parents. She had a crush on a boy. I’m
going to see what I can find out about him. And she was trying to quit the band, but
her parents and her instructor wanted her to stay.”

“Daniel Tray,” Meltzer said. “The one we missed. We ran him. Looks clean. Not even
a speeding ticket. He grew up in Whisper, went to college, taught for a year in Boston,
then came back here. He’s forty-five. He’s been back here for twenty years.”

“Anything interesting happen while he was in Boston?”

Meltzer shook his head. “No missing or murdered students, if that’s what you mean.”
He pushed open the door. There were two
techs in the lab. I recognized both. Sam leaned away from a microscope and looked
at us.

“I don’t think you’ve had a proper introduction,” Sheriff Meltzer said. “Keye, this
is Samantha Petri. Sam, this is Keye Street.”

“We met last night,” she told the sheriff, and peeled off a glove to shake my hand.

“Sam has aspirations,” Meltzer remarked drily. “She has the FBI in her sights. We’d
like to keep her around here for a while. But the grass is always greener.” He winked
at her.

“It’s not greener,” I warned her. “And the money isn’t that great either.”

“Ah, but they get all the new toys,” she said.

“Tell us about the Freeman van,” Meltzer said. “Then I want to talk about what we
got off Cottonwood Road.”

“Mori did the van,” Sam answered, and nodded in the direction of the other technician.

He touched a screen and a fingerprint came up. He expanded the detail. “One of three
in the van,” he told us, gesturing to the screen. “They don’t match samples from Freeman’s
children or wife. Two of them aren’t in the system at all.” He stared at his screen.
“Lifted them on gel. With any luck we’ll be able to isolate chemical composition.
We’ve also sent samples to the GBI from the van along with the toothbrush from the
Barbour house.” If Skylar’s body turned up somewhere someday too damaged for identification,
her DNA profile would be in a database. “I’m Mori Payne, by the way,” the tech told
me. He was thirty, clean-shaven, round-faced.

“Nice to meet you,” I said. “You mentioned a third set of prints in Freeman’s van.
You have a match on them?” We knew Freeman wasn’t responsible for Skylar’s disappearance.
He had been sitting next door in a holding cell at the jail by the time Skylar left
school. And he wasn’t right for the murders. But he was a danger to children, probably
even to his own children. And the guy was utterly disgusting. I’d support incarceration
based solely on smell.

“We lifted the third set from several areas in the back of the van,” Mori said.

“Where there’s no door handles,” I told Meltzer.

“Fingerprints belong to Damian Howard,” Mori told us. “He’s fifteen. Got his thumb
printed for a temporary learner’s permit a couple of months ago, which is the only
reason he’s in the system.”

“I’ll have somebody talk to him,” Meltzer said. “Quietly. Boys don’t report these
things. Poor kid.”

Girls don’t report either
, I wanted to say. The shame of molestation and rape is genderless.

“You have something from the scene last night?” I asked Sam instead.

“First of all, I was able to type the blood on the road. B-positive,” she told us.

“Skylar’s blood type,” Meltzer said.

“Right,” she confirmed. “The nail file and the compact were wiped clean. There will
be skin cells in the file. Probably the victim’s since it was her file, but there’s
a chance we’ve picked up some from the offender. I’ve sent the sample in for DNA typing.”
She looked at me. “Remember that little smudge on the phone case?”

I nodded.

“It’s motor oil. Got it out with a solvent extractor. Very common ten-w-thirty. I
went back into evidence and checked the phone from the Cochran scene. I found minuscule
amounts. Nothing visible to the naked eye, but I was able to establish the viscosity.
We’re looking at the same oil.”

“How about the nail file and the compact?” I asked. “Oil on those too?”

She shook her head. “But he used the same cloth, because I found fibers on the phone
case that matched fibers in the file. Check this out.” She walked us to a microscope
she’d been peering through when we arrived. I looked at the screen and saw three fibers
on a clear surface. They looked more like thick wires at this magnification. “They’re
tinted,” I said. “Pinkish red.”

“I’d say they came from an industrial maintenance cloth,” she told us.

“Like a shop rag?” I asked.

“Exactly. Manufactured for maximum absorbency and minimum shedding. A red one. Not
a lot of pilling in a material like this, but if
you rub it on something that can grab trace like that rubber phone case or a nail
file, it’s going to leave fiber evidence.”

“He used it to wipe his prints off everything,” I said.

Sam nodded. “Looks that way.”

“Anything else about the fibers? Anything to pinpoint the store that sold the cloth?”
the sheriff wanted to know.

“Doubtful,” Sam said. “They come in packages at just about any auto parts and hardware
store in the country. Interesting, though. There was a heavy concentration of oil
on the phone case. And dirt. So the place on the rag he used to wipe down the phone
had a lot of dirt and oil on it. And it was deep in the rubber pores. Like he pressed
hard.”

“What about the dirt in the sample?” I asked. “Different from what you’d get on Cottonwood
Road?”

“Engine dirt, metal filings, grease,” Sam answered. “Probably unscrewed caps with
it, something like that. We also have trace amounts of other fluids, like coolant
and brake fluid. What you’d typically get from working on an automobile engine.”

We were silent. Meltzer said, “He’s a mechanic?”

I turned to him. “He’s faking a breakdown.” A door had flown open and I was dashing
toward the light. “He has his hood up and he’s pretending to work on his engine. That’s
why the drag marks curved around in a half-moon on the road. They started at the hood,
where he disabled the victim. He pulled her back to the car door in a semicircle.”

“And he uses her phone to make a fake call for help.” Meltzer was staring at me.

“There’s the con,” I said.

“And that’s why the last call on Skylar’s phone was to the stationary line inside
her own house,” he added.

I nodded. “Because he knows the number. And he knows no one is home. And he has to
pretend he’s making a call. He wants her phone. He wants her convinced and relaxed
and in just the right position so he can blitz her.”

“Maybe he’s called that number before. Maybe he knew voice mail would answer and exactly
how long he had.” Ken Meltzer had the
same expression I must have had—excitement, that back-and-forth that can give flight
to an investigation, the complete rush of hope that comes with understanding a scene.

“I think he pushed the rag into his engine and pressed it into that phone because
he wants us to know how he does it,” I told them. “That was the message of the note.
Listen hard … More soon
. He’s leaving bread crumbs. He wants us to know how smart he is.”

26