Don’t Talk to Strangers: A Novel (8 page)

“There’s a campground half a mile from the site. My patrols can’t see it from the
road. A lantern out here on the lake at night is going to be seen. And you need a
lantern. Water’s as black as oil at night. But the woods are thick. Nobody would see
a flashlight. Plus, the climb isn’t as steep. If it was me and I was dealing with
a dead body, that’s how I’d come in.”

“Is the creek accessible by smaller craft?” I asked. I felt perspiration gathering
around my hairline. Even the shady cover of the woods couldn’t take the humidity out
of the tropical system hanging over us, so heavy a butter knife would have hung in
the air. I took a band out of my pocket and pulled my hair back off my neck as we
walked.

“Catawba is wide but it’s shallow in places,” the sheriff answered. “Good for trout
and inner tubes. Around here, mostly what you get is fishermen and hunters. Season
for firearms doesn’t start up again until the end of September. I’ve been out here
several times since we found the girls and so have my two investigators. None of us
has run into a human once.”

“You run into anything else?”

Meltzer stopped, looked at me, the light growing in his brown eyes. “Animals, you
mean?” He laughed. It was a good laugh, easy and uninhibited. “Not really the outdoorsy
type, huh?”

I’d dressed for a hike through the woods. I’d prepared. I was wearing combat boots
and cargo pants, for Christ’s sake. I looked like a member of a SWAT team. What did
this guy want from me? Okay, so I don’t like being on water and I think about things
like bears. It’s not like I’d shown up in Christian Louboutins. I ignored him and
kept walking. “What do you know about the parents of the victims?”

“I haven’t met Tracy Davidson’s parents. But Melinda’s parents are good people. They’re
friends of mine.” We stepped over a fallen tree trunk and pushed our way through brush.
“Not a lot of education but hardworking,” the sheriff added. “She’s a waitress at
the Silver Spoon and he runs the bowling alley in Whisper. Melinda was a nice kid.”
His voice wobbled. “Damn.” He kicked at rock and dry leaves. “Hard to see people hurt
the way they did when Melinda didn’t come home.”

“Do you mind if I have a look at the interviews you did with the parents after each
victim disappeared?”

Meltzer shot me a look I wasn’t sure about. Annoyance, perhaps. “They weren’t interviews
exactly. Not with Melinda’s parents anyway. More like informing them we suspected
foul play in the disappearance of their daughter and watching their hearts break.
I’ll never forget it. Or what it was like when we had to tell them we found her body.”

He’d known one of the victims. He was emotionally involved and prickly about questions.
I understood it. But I wasn’t going to do my job on eggshells. “I need to learn as
much as I can about Melinda and Tracy, Sheriff. It’s where I usually start—with the
victims. If you have interviews already, we won’t need to go back to the families
and reopen that wound. Have you spoken to the Davidson family yet? And do you have
the initial reports from her disappearance?”

“Major Brolin, my head of Criminal Investigations, notified Mrs. Davidson yesterday
after the lab reports came in with a positive ID. And I’ve asked her to assemble everything
we have on both cases for you.” The sheriff pointed to a thin trail weaving through
thickets of privet and woody vines. “We’re going up this way so you can see the dump
site. Then we can walk around toward the campground.”

“I think I’d like to drive over to it later, if you don’t mind, then walk from there.”

The sheriff uncapped his water bottle and took a long drink. I did the same. “You
want to see what he saw if he came in from the road, is that it?”

I nodded. “Any insight into his thinking helps.”

“I don’t like looking through a predator’s eyes.” The sheriff said it flatly.

“You must have had to before in your career.”

“Started as a beat cop in Boulder, Colorado, made detective two years before I came
here. Narcotics. Different kind of predator. I never wanted to be in homicide. I don’t
like spending all my time thinking about killers.”

“I’ve always been drawn to it,” I said.

Meltzer stood above me on the hill with his open water bottle. He studied me for a
few seconds. “Well, you seem perfectly normal.”

“Do I?” I smiled. “That’s reassuring. What brought you to Georgia, Sheriff?”

He screwed the top back on his half-empty bottle and started walking again. “My dad
passed away. Mom was a southerner. She wanted to come back here.”

“Your mother passed too?”

Ken Meltzer turned back and looked at me. “Why do you ask?”

“You said
was
. She
was
a southerner.”

“God. That’s so telling, isn’t it? My mother developed Alzheimer’s symptoms nine years
ago. I guess sometimes it feels like she’s already gone.”

“I’m sorry. Is that why you came here?”

“She had relationships here. I thought moving her would add to her confusion. And
I was young enough to start over. It made sense.”

“That had to be tough,” I said.

“Thanks. It was.”

Neil’s ringtone, Main Source’s “Fakin’ the Funk,” throbbed through the woods and hushed
the birds. I’d forgotten to silence my phone.

The sheriff looked at me. “My business partner,” I told him. “You mind if I take it?”

“No problem,” he said.

“What’s up?” I answered.

“Jimmy’s here,” Neil told me. I watched the sheriff walk ahead. “He made zucchini
bread for the office. Too bad you’re not getting any. So what are the cops like? All
gun racks and shit?”

I glanced at Ken Meltzer moving easily through the woods. “I
haven’t met the others but the sheriff is a little bit of a Boy Scout,” I whispered.
“He’s also totally hot.”

“Bradley Cooper hot or Channing Tatum hot?” my brother piped in.

“Keith Urban hot,” I said.

“Ah,” Jimmy cooed. “A rebel. A little too wild and uncombed for the city. But sensitive.
Probably exfoliates.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Listen, I’m in the woods on the way to the scene. Can this wait?”

“I found eight registered offenders that meet your criteria,” Neil said. “I figured
you’d want to know. They’re in the area we mapped out. The timeframe works and they
have sheds, garages, barns, carports, or basements. I’m emailing you the particulars.”

“Great. Everything okay at the office?”

“You’ve been gone three hours, Kiwi. I think we’re okay.” Neil used the nickname he’d
hung around my neck a few weeks ago when he discovered my middle name was Lei and
rhymed with my first name, Keye. Together they sounded to him like, well, Kiwi. “Be
careful down there. Lot of history. Weird stuff.”

“Like what?”

“For starters, and this should give you an idea of the vibe, the Koasati tribe had
a word for that area.
At-pasha-shilha
. Know what it is?”

“How would I know that? I didn’t even know there was a Koasati tribe.” I trudged through
leaves up the hill and tried to keep my footing. The path was clear now that we were
deep into the woods. No thickets to maneuver through, just tall trees and leaves piled
on a pine straw bed.

“How can you grow up Chinese and be so totally clueless about other cultures?” Neil
huffed.

“I didn’t grow up Chinese. I grew up southern.”

“It means ‘mean people,’ Keye. You’re in the mean people county. Spooky, huh?”

“Yeah. It is. Look, I gotta run.” I disconnected, and jogged to catch up with the
sheriff. He heard me and waited.

“We found the bodies just up there,” he said when I got closer.

We topped the hill. I could hear the creek. “How do you remember the spot?” I asked.

“When you come straight up from the old dock and top this hill, you’re looking right
at those two old oaks growing together. It’s thirty yards north from there. When you
come in from the road, there’s a big poplar wrapped in dead vines about the size of
my arm where the path veers down to the lake. You go east and climb up the hill from
there. I spent a lot of time hiking in Colorado. You learn to remember natural landmarks.”

And so do killers
, I thought, and snapped some pictures as we walked, including the double oak tree
the sheriff used as a guidepost. We approached the edge of a slope. The dry dead leaves
crinkled under our boots. I gazed down at a twenty-foot drop, a natural indentation
in the earth that looked something like a sinkhole. I thought about the photographs—Melinda
on her side stopped by a rock, Tracy’s remains below her at the bottom. “Can you come
in from any other direction?” I asked Meltzer.

“It wouldn’t be easy. Farmhouses and dogs, private property. The distance would be
greater. Nowhere to leave your transportation. And he’d have to cross the creek. I
don’t see that happening.”

I looked back down at the drop-off and thought again about the scene photos. He’d
removed their clothes. Was it MO, something to defeat efforts at evidence collection?
Or was it signature, something that fulfilled a psychological need, something unnecessary
to the commission of the crime? Perhaps it reinforced his dominance over the victims.
Had he kept their clothes? “Those girls were alive when they got here,” I told the
sheriff. “He walked them out here, made them strip and turn their backs to him. He’s
carrying something he can use to dispose of their clothing, something that wouldn’t
look suspicious if he ran into someone in the woods. A backpack, maybe. He dropped
Melinda’s blouse accidentally on his way out.” I backed up a few feet from the edge,
turned, and pointed toward the creek. “He was close to the creek when he lost it or
else it would have either washed down the slope to the lake or ended up in the depression
where he disposed of the bodies. And he’d want them back far enough so he could hit
them hard without knocking them off. He’d want to
check their vitals. He’s careful. He has to make sure they’re not breathing.” I backed
up a couple more feet. “So he stands about here and swings his weapon.” I glanced
up at the sheriff. His wide brown eyes were fixed on me. “This isn’t just a disposal
site, Sheriff; it’s your primary crime scene.” I walked around, took some more pictures.
Flashes of sunlight broke through the branches and danced off the creek. There was
an enormous granite slab sticking out of the ground like a ledge—not unusual in Georgia,
the home of Stone Mountain. The stuff is everywhere. “You collected soil and leaf
samples from this area?”

Meltzer nodded. “A few. Lab hasn’t found anything so far that isn’t natural to the
area. Lost a lot of evidence to the elements, I imagine. My investigators bagged a
lot of debris around the bodies.”

“ME’s office get them out of the hole?”

“We did. On cots with pulleys and ropes. It was a mess. Hitchiti County doesn’t have
a medical examiner. We’re on the coroner system. It’s ridiculous. He’s a goddamn real
estate agent.” The sheriff shook his head and chuckled, but there was real irritation
in his voice.

“Any deals on waterfront property?”

“That’s about all he’s good for,” Meltzer answered.

I went back to the edge and looked down at the piece of granite protruding from a
sidewall, the one that had stopped Melinda Cochran’s fall. “The first victim was positioned
more toward the center.” I pointed down in the hole. “She would have had to be thrown.
But the second victim was rolled off. That’s why she hit the rock. And that’s not
the only difference in the behaviors here from victim one to victim two. He used the
sharp side of the axe on the second victim. And he left behind evidence. The victim’s
blouse.”

“Maybe he’s getting lazy,” the sheriff suggested.

“Maybe.” I took a deep breath, just let myself take in the scene—the drop-off where
a killer had dumped his prey, the woods humming with katydids and birds and every
kind of insect, the creek shimmering through the trees, the brown leaves covering
the ground, seasons and seasons’ worth, deep and decaying, the rich scents of earth
and pine sap. I took more photos. Sometimes the camera sees what I can’t. The Georgia
woods have a lot to hide. I knew this too well. Not long
ago I’d wandered upon a madman’s mass graves in the wooded hills of North Georgia.

“When Melinda disappeared, was she sexually active?” I asked.

The midday sun was cutting streaks through heavy branches. He rubbed his eyes. I saw
tiny creases, white like scar tissue, cut into tanned skin at the corners. “Not according
to her friends.”

“Both parents worked?”

He nodded. “Melinda spent afternoons with her mom at the diner when she worked second
shift every other week. I’ve seen her doing her homework at the counter a hundred
times, I guess. They didn’t like her going home alone. Molly was home the day Melinda
disappeared. But she vanished between school and home. They blame themselves for letting
her walk. But it’s that kind of town. It’s safe. At least it was.” He checked his
watch. “I have an appointment this afternoon. Major Brolin is at your disposal if
you need something. We have an empty desk at the office if you want to work there.
Doris will tell you where to find your hotel. One thing we have plenty of is hotel
rooms. I have to tell you, though: The nicer ones are up the road where all the golf
courses and resorts are located. But I thought you’d want to stay in Whisper.”

“Sounds good,” I lied. Room service and a docking station would have sounded good.
But I was on the sheriff’s dime. And I knew I needed to stay. You can’t drive in and
out of a town and end up with any sense of it. You have to feel it as you’re drifting
off, wake to it, hear its voices, smell its smells. I pushed myself off the granite
slab. “Mind if we walk along the creek awhile on the way back down?”

“I’ve never been opposed to walking along a creek, Dr. Street.”

“It’s okay to call me Keye.”

“You don’t like the title, do you?” Meltzer said, surprising me. “Why not? Most people
would be proud of it.”