Don’t Talk to Strangers: A Novel (38 page)

“He’s jogging? This time of day? In a hooded sweatshirt? I don’t think so,” I said.
“He knows he’s under surveillance. He knows he was missing for an undetermined amount
of time. He understands the implications of that. And he understands that you will
have to
respond to this. He’s playing with you, Ken. Why else would he make sure they saw
him?”

“Because he’s arrogant enough to believe we can’t catch him.” He lifted the phone
and gave Brolin orders. “Let’s see who we can pull off patrol and get them out there.
We’re going to have to cover every inch within a mile of that place. Look at everything,
talk to everyone. Rob checked one of Skylar’s shirts into evidence. Have him give
it to the K-nine unit and let’s get them moving. And the unit that lost Peele—I want
them back in uniform within the hour sitting in their squad on the highway. In the
sun. For a week.”

He clicked off, said
damn
under his breath. The muscles flexed in his jaw. “I gotta get a new job.” He threw
the Interceptor in gear, then hit his brakes hard enough that I almost lost my frozen
latte. The florist, Nora Pace, appeared at my window. She was holding one of those
white vases I’d seen in the cooler. It held a single pink carnation. A note card was
stabbed into a fork-shaped plastic stem.

She thrust the vase at me. “I recognized your name and realized this was for you.
We were supposed to deliver it to your hotel, but since you’re here …”

I didn’t take the vase. “Where’d this come from?” I asked her.

“There was a note under the door when I got back from lunch with some cash and the
card that’s on here, with instructions to deliver it to you at Whispering Pines Inn,”
she said. “I threw in the carnation and the vase since we’re a florist, not a courier
service.”

“A secret admirer,” Meltzer said, and almost as the words were coming out of his mouth
he seemed to realize what Nora Pace might be holding. He reached in the back and opened
the latches on his scene kit, handed me gloves and an evidence pouch.

“He doesn’t know I’ve changed hotels,” I said, as I stretched on the gloves.

“Interesting Mr. Fu Manchu was conveniently AWOL when this arrived,” he remarked.

“Yes, it is.” I lifted the card off the plastic pitchfork and slid it into a paper
evidence pouch. Plastic looks good on TV but condensation
can corrupt evidence. I turned to Nora. “You got back at one o’clock?” I remembered
the
CLOSED FOR LUNCH
sign on the door.

She was starting to look nervous. She glanced back at her shop, then at the cameraman
easing across the street. “A few minutes before.”

“You still have those instructions? And the cash?”

“In the trash,” she said, standing there in the sun with her little white vase. “The
note, I mean. The cash is in the register. It was a twenty. It would be on top.”

“I’ll take the florist. You take the cameraman,” Meltzer said. He was out of the vehicle
with his scene kit held by its handle like a businessman with a briefcase. “I’m calling
Ferrell to pick up that card and whatever else we have inside.”

I pushed open the door, and Nora Pace stepped out of the way. She looked scared. “You
can keep the flower,” I told her. “And not a word of this to anyone. Please.” She
nodded. She didn’t have to be reminded we were keeping some secrets for her too.

The sheriff disappeared inside the shop. Daniel Tray’s married lover followed him,
holding the vase out in front of her like it had been contaminated. I headed for the
cameraman. “How long have you been here?”

I saw his finger hit a switch on the camera. He lowered it to his side. “I got here
when you got here,” he answered. Which probably meant he’d been tailing us from a
distance and definitely meant he hadn’t gotten the offender on tape. “They’re preparing
the park for a candlelight vigil tonight. I’m supposed to get some video.”

“The park is back there,” I told him, and watched him walk away. He pulled out his
phone and glanced over his shoulder.

I looked at Main Street, quaint and tidy, cars parked in angled slots in front of
the storefronts. Was he out there, looking out of one of those windows, watching us
trying to figure out what we had and how to keep a lid on it? Behind Main Street,
Whisper Park prepared for the prayer service. Was he playing the concerned neighbor,
helping out? Or had Logan Peele delivered that card while he was out on his jog?

I heard the bell jingle on the florist’s door. The sheriff crossed the
street and handed me his case. We got back in the truck. I checked to make sure the
camera guy wasn’t hovering, then released the metal latches on the hard-sided case.
I lifted the manila envelope lying flat on the top and opened it, peered down inside
to see a lined piece of paper, hole-punched, with ragged edges.

Please deliver this card to Keye Street at the Whispering Pines Inn.

I stared at it, felt it plucking at nerves already stretched as tight as guitar strings,
felt its silky fingers slipping around my neck. “Ken,” I said, “it’s Skylar’s handwriting.”

36

Nothing is more accustomed to the ordinary, more tuned to the predictable footfalls
of its regulars, than a main street in small-town America. We notice the extraordinary—orange
running shoes, blue hair, tats, a stranger hovering, dark sunglasses, a car creeping
behind a bicycle. Main Street was on alert today. Whisper was full of posters and
dark speculation, and still I hadn’t found one person who’d noticed someone slipping
a card under the florist’s door.

The hard, jagged truth that someone was targeting children in this honeysuckle town
had engulfed the population like the hot fangs of a fire. Reality was setting in for
everyone.

I’d glimpsed the sheriff coming out of one store across the street and going into
another. A shake of his head told me he hadn’t scored yet either. How long had it
taken—two, three seconds—to slip an envelope under a door? Bernadette Hutchins had
been on the street half an hour before we arrived, and the florist had been open when
she papered its door with Skylar’s photo. The shops that faced the florist—the hardware
store, the coffee shop, the drugstore—all had a view that was partially obstructed
by the cars parked in front. And Whisper wasn’t the kind of town that needed traffic
cameras and sidewalk monitors on every block like downtown
Atlanta, which was as wired and closely watched as a high-stakes poker game.

I had begun at the top of the street and worked my way back down to Smith’s Hardware,
near Meltzer’s vehicle. I checked the time. Another half an hour had been chewed up,
thirty more minutes ticking away like a detonator.

I saw the sheriff on the other end of the street. He was about to go into the Italian
restaurant. I looked over the shops. I could see a slice of the park from here and
beyond that the middle school. I could hear voices, young voices, in the park.

Mr. Smith came out of his store and stood beside me, a big, barrel-chested guy in
his seventies with liver spots on white fleshy hands. He pulled a pipe from his pocket
and tapped it. Ash and burned-black tobacco drifted down to the sidewalk. From the
other pocket came a pouch of new tobacco. The cherry scent roused a memory of my dad
in his shop tinkering and smoking the pipe my mother wouldn’t let him have in the
house.

“It’s a damn shame something so bad could happen in a town like this.” Smith lit his
pipe with short puffs, stared out at the street.

“It’s a shame anywhere,” I said.

“What happened here today?” he wanted to know. “Why all the questions?”

“We have reason to believe the man responsible for the murders and abductions was
here,” I answered. I wasn’t going to share the evidence with him.

“I didn’t see anything. Me and my only employee have been in the back most of the
day.”

“You know your customers, Mr. Smith? You know what projects they’re working on, they
consult you for advice?”

“Some of them.” He nodded. “Although we’re getting new folks from the city around
here now that would rather use the building supply place up the road. But it’s mostly
lumber. People gotta come here for some things. You looking for anything specific?”

“Soundproofing materials, someone reinforcing or adding on small spaces. Let’s say
for a music studio or a game room. You remember someone buying things like that? Heavy
lengths of chain?”

Smith rocked on his heels like a wave had slammed into him. He looked at me, removed
the pipe from his mouth. It scraped his teeth like a fork. “These girls are being
chained up?”

“We know he’s using metal cuffs. Stands to reason he’s welded on chains.” I thought
for a moment. “How does he do it? How does he hold them? That’s what I need you to
think about—your community, their habits, their property, their personalities, and
what they’re buying. You, the grocer, the barista, the drugstore owner, all of you.
That young girl.” I pointed to the poster on the pole next to us—pretty, blond Skylar
with the world in front of her. “She needs her neighbors to think that way right now
and help us find her. The killer, he’s close. He knows the neighborhood. He fits in.
He could be your next-door neighbor.”

Bushy gray eyebrows wrinkled. “What makes a pretty young lady want to do this kind
of work?”

I wasn’t quite half his age, which made me young to him. I smiled. “It’s a living,”
I said, and saw Meltzer coming out of the restaurant up the street. “Thank you for
your time, Mr. Smith.”

I met the sheriff at his truck. “Any luck?” he asked as we got in. He started the
engine and cranked up the fan.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Me either.” Meltzer backed out of the parking space and pointed the SUV in the right
direction up Main Street, then tapped his brakes and rolled his window down. I saw
him smile. “Hey, Robbie,” he called out his window. “What’s up, kiddo? Aren’t you
supposed to be in school?” He glanced over at me. “Rob’s boy,” he explained.

Robbie Raymond was coming out of the smoothie shop with a sweaty plastic cup in his
hand. He grinned and came over to the truck. “Hey, Sheriff.” He was tall and very
lanky, a blue-eyed blond boy with thick hair, a happy wide smile, and faded acne scars
near his jawline. “They let us out half an hour early to help in the park. You know,
for Skylar.” I saw his father’s cheekbones and tall frame, but apart from that he
had none of Detective Raymond’s blunt, ham-handed features. “My dad came by a little
while ago. He says y’all don’t know who did it yet. It’s gettin’ pretty weird around
here right
now. Nothing feels the same. Bunch of us guys, we want to go looking for her.”

“My deputies have been organizing search teams. We could use you and your friends.
Get a sign-up sheet,” Meltzer told him.

“Cool,” Robbie said, and peered into the cab at me. He had to lean down to do it.
“You must be Ms. Street.” He switched the smoothie to his left hand and jabbed the
right one in front of the sheriff. I leaned across the cab. We laughed awkwardly as
we shook hands.

“Listen, Robbie, I know you knew Skylar,” the sheriff said gently. “Anything you can
tell us that might help?”

“I didn’t even know her until this school year. So, like, a couple, three weeks.”

“She confide anything at all to you?”

“Nah, not really.” Robbie frowned, thinking about it. “I mean, she wouldn’t ride the
bus home because everyone on the bus is lame and she wanted to talk to her friends
and mess around after school and stuff. I guess that was a secret.”

“Anything else?” I asked.

His attention was drawn to a couple of boys about his age and height coming out of
the smoothie shop. “I’ll meet you over there,” he yelled to them, then leaned in the
cab a little, lowered his voice. “Skylar came to watch us practice a couple times.
Girls do that. It’s no big deal. But the guys gave me a hard time, you know? ’Cause
she was crushing on me and she’s in the eighth grade. I walked her back to the school
once. But she was all about the dance this weekend and wanting to be with me and stuff.
Like a date.”

“When was the last time you saw her?” I asked.

“Wednesday, I think,” he said, and I remembered her last diary entry.
I HATE my parents!!!
She was pushing them to let her go to the dance unchaperoned. “She walked over to
the high school and watched baseball practice. I acted like I didn’t see her.” His
mouth pulled tight. He looked around self-consciously, used the back of his hand to
wipe the corner of his eye. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. If I’d been nice maybe she
woulda been watching us practice or something instead of—”

Meltzer squeezed his arm at the biceps. “Not your fault, buddy. None of this is anyone’s
fault.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” the teenager said uncertainly. “Look, I gotta go, okay?”

“Take off. I’ll see you tonight,” Meltzer said.

“Nice to meet you, Ms. Street,” Robbie called with a wave back at us as he ran across
the street.

“You two seem close,” I remarked.