Cold Truth (11 page)

E
leven

Mitch Peyton sat across the table from Regan Landry and tried his best not to stare. How had Cisco described her face? Interesting?

If the face across from him was
interesting,
he had to wonder what Cisco thought was
beautiful.

Oh, the face was interesting enough, all right. Deep-set green eyes and a mass of tumbled curly blond hair that was pulled up in a tangled knot at the back of her head. A trim well-proportioned body under a pale pink cotton shirt, the sleeves rolled up, and black yoga pants. Bare feet.

He’d been startled when she’d opened the door and looked up at him when he arrived at her farm earlier in the day. He’d been expecting . . . well, he wasn’t quite sure just what he’d been expecting, but it wasn’t
her.

It wasn’t just her appearance that appealed. There was an energy to her, a vibrancy, that sent his senses into alert mode.

“Agent Peyton?” she’d asked, then glanced at the ID he held out to her. She studied it with serious eyes, then smiled at him. “Come in. Please. I’ve been waiting for you.”

The smile had really gotten to him.

He’d barely heard a word she spoke, just followed her down the hall to the study, where she said she’d been working, and he’d probably want to see what she’d found straight off, so they might as well just start right in.

“I’m glad you came to look over these notes in person,” she said. “John and I did discuss the possibility of me faxing them to the FBI, but then, there are all these other files, and God knows what’s in them . . .”

She had waved her hand around at the stacks of boxes that covered most of the carpeted area.

“. . . and I know there’s more to this story than what we have here. I told you on the phone how scattered my father was in his record keeping?”

Mitch had nodded.

“Well, we’re paying the price for that now.” She’d stepped behind the desk and seated herself in the leather chair, which seemed to swallow her, and motioned for him to have a seat.

He’d pulled a chair up to the desk and sat.

“What makes you certain that there is more than those few files?” he’d asked.

“It’s an intriguing story, and my father was a sucker for intrigue.”

“If he was so taken by what he had, why didn’t he pursue it at the time? And do you know for certain that he didn’t, and maybe abandoned it, came up dry?”

“One possibility is that he may have been engrossed in something else, maybe he was wrapping up a book or just starting one. He’d develop a bit of tunnel vision when he was working. Which only exacerbated his careless filing habits. He might have an idea that appealed to him, but if he was already into a project, he’d have put the idea aside for the time being. Then again, I don’t know that he didn’t pursue it beyond what I’ve found thus far. I suspect that there’s more, but I haven’t found it yet. And of course, there is the possibility that he did write it off as not being worth pursuing. I did explain all this to John Mancini. He thought you should take a look, given what’s going on in those little beach towns.”

She’d opened a file and turned it to him, then eased herself half out of her seat to reach across the desk.

“These are the letters I found. See the numbers in the corners?”

He’d glanced at the letters.

Hey, Landry, remember me?
A seven inside a circle in the upper right-hand corner.

Hey, Landry, did you miss me?
Numbered eleven.

“When my dad started to gather his notes to start putting a project—a potential project—together, he numbered the pages in the corner, just like this, to show the order in which he was going to present them in his first draft.”

“Maybe there were other things . . . photos, reports, something . . . that he would have put between these two.”

She’d shaken her head. “He would have kept the letters together, chronologically, and reports separate, though also in chronological order, numbered separately as well. If he hadn’t received any other letters, this one, the one with the seven in the corner, would have been numbered one. And the one numbered eleven would have a two in the corner. There were other letters. I’m certain of it. I just don’t know what he did with them.”

“Why wouldn’t he have kept them together?”

“Why can’t pigs fly?”

He’d stared at her.

“I just mean, that’s a question that has no answer. My best guess is that the other letters arrived when he was engrossed in something else and he stuck them in a file so they wouldn’t get lost before he could get back to them.”

“Then forgot where he put the files.”

She nodded. “That’s my daddy.”

“So how do you know where to start?”

“I’m going box by box.”

“That shouldn’t take too long.” He’d started counting boxes.

“There are more in the basement.”

“Oh.”

“And in the attic.”

“I see.”

“He also used one of the small outbuildings for storage.”

“I’m beginning to get the picture.”

She’d smiled again. “Good.”

She’d sorted through several other files, then handed him two sheets of paper. “These are the lists that got my attention. The first one is pretty much self-explanatory.”

“Victims attributed to the Bayside Strangler, June 1979–August 1979,”
he’d read aloud, then scanned the list of names.

“Have you confirmed that these were, in fact, the 1979 victims of the Bayside Strangler?” he’d asked, looking up.

“I’ve confirmed the first four. That’s as far as I got.”

He’d reached for his briefcase, opened it, and taken out his laptop.

“We have several computers here,” she’d told him as he set his up on the corner of the desk. “You didn’t need to bring your own.”

“I can probably go places on this one that you can’t go on any of yours.” He’d smiled as he turned it on. “Let’s see what we can see.”

“Wireless?” she’d asked, and he’d nodded.

Then he’d lost himself in cyberspace for a little while.

He’d tuned back in about a half hour later, to look across the desk and find her chair empty.

He’d taken a small portable printer from the square case that sat at his feet and plugged it into a nearby wall outlet. As the page printed, he’d sensed her in the doorway.

“I made lunch,” she’d told him. “Nothing elaborate, but it’s almost two-thirty, and if you ate breakfast as early as I did today, you have to be at least as hungry as I am.”

“Thanks.” He’d glanced at his watch. “I had no idea how late it was.”

He’d gathered the two sheets of paper he’d printed and followed her to the kitchen, which was filled with afternoon sunlight. That had been almost an hour ago, and they were still seated at the table, their now-empty plates and soup bowls pushed to the side.

And he was still having trouble keeping his eyes from her face.

“All these names were in the FBI files?” she was asking.

“In files we have access to.”

“Of course.” A half smile teased one side of her mouth. She lowered her voice to an ominous tone. “We have our ways . . .”

Mitch laughed.

“So we know this is for real.” She placed that list aside and slid the second list to the center of the table. “What do you think about this one? What do you suppose it means?”

“Since it was with the Bayside Strangler list, I have to think the lists are related. Otherwise, as haphazard as your father was in his record keeping, wouldn’t they be in separate files if there was no connection?” He tapped on the first notation on the second sheet of paper. “Something happened in Pittsburgh in May of 1983 that caught your dad’s attention. And in February of 1986, in Charlotte. So we have to figure out what caught his eye on those dates.”

Regan frowned and stared at the list.

“He did keep some files—and again, I use that term very loosely—of newspaper clippings. Wide brown folders, you know what I mean?”

“The kind that have accordion sides, to expand?”

“Yes. Maybe if we look through those, one of these dates will jump out at us.”

“It’s worth a look, sure. Where are the files?”

“There are some in the office, in one of the filing cabinets. Let’s take our coffee with us. I’m curious now to see if there’s anything there.”

“Lead on.” He pushed the chair back from the kitchen table and stood. “Maybe we’ll find the key in one of them.”

They sat on the floor around a large round coffee table and went through first one file, then another. They were into their second hour of searching, when Mitch said, “Wasn’t there a Corona on that list?”

“Yes,” she said, and moved some papers aside to check the original list. “Here it is. August ’86. Corona.” She looked up at him. “I’m not sure I know where Corona is.”

“This clipping is from August 15, 1986. Dateline Corona, Alabama.” He skimmed the small clipping, then read aloud.
“Police have confirmed that the body of the woman found in East Park on Saturday morning was that of thirty-one-year-old Andrea Long of Corona. Identification was made by James Long, the husband of the victim, who’d reported his wife missing Thursday night . . .”

“Does it say how she died?”

“She’d been strangled.”

“Raped?”

He read a little further.

“Yes.”

“There’s a coincidence,” she said with some sarcasm.

“I’ll bet your dad thought so.”

He took his cell phone from his pants pocket and dialed information for the number for the sheriff’s department in Corona, Alabama, but wasn’t at all surprised to find that no one on the weekend shift seemed to know anything about a 1986 murder. He left a message for someone to call him back, then snapped the phone shut.

A few taps on his keyboard, and he dialed another number.

The answering machine picked up, and he began to leave a message. “Hi, Jessica, it’s Mitch Peyton, FBI. I worked with you on a case in Montgomery a few years ago, don’t know if you remember me or not. I’m looking into an old case—murder victim named Andrea Long, August ’86—and was wondering if you might be able to shed a little light on— Oh, hey, Jessica. How are you?”

He chatted for a few moments, then cut to the chase.

“I was hoping you could . . . no, I don’t have any other information, just the name of the victim, an approximate date of death, and the fact that she was strangled and sexually assaulted . . . Well, for starters, I was wondering if the case was ever solved. If not, if there was a list of suspects . . . Sure, that would be great.”

He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Regan, do you have a fax machine?”

She nodded and pointed to it where it sat atop a two-drawer file cabinet next to the desk.

He made a scribble sort of motion with one hand and she wrote the number of the fax machine on a piece of paper and handed it to him.

“Listen, anything you have, fax it to me at this number. I’ll give you my cell number and email address as well . . .”

He recited the information slowly, and after a few minutes of chatter, he ended the call.

“She’s going to look through the files and she’ll let me know if she finds anything. But it probably won’t be until Monday. She’s on her way out.”

“Is she with the FBI?” Regan asked.

“Alabama Bureau of Investigation.”

“So that’s one of the ten on the unidentified list. Encouraging, wouldn’t you say?”

“Well, it certainly gives direction to our search.”

“Pass that news clipping over here, and we’ll start a file on this one.” She searched the stack for an empty file, wrote
Andrea Long, Corona, Alabama, 1986
on the side, then set it on the cushion of a nearby chair to keep it separate. “Now, let’s see what else we can find in this folder . . .”

Over the course of the evening, they matched up one other clipping. Gloria Silver, Memphis, Tennessee, had been found raped and strangled on March 17, 1987.

Mitch reached for his cell phone.

“Let me guess,” Regan said. “You’re calling the Tennessee State Police.”

He shook his head. “Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.”

“Do you really think you’ll get someone at eight forty-five on a Saturday night?”

“Is it that late?” He glanced at his watch.

“ ’Fraid so.”

“Guess it’s true what they say about time flying when you’re having fun. Let’s wrap this up for tonight, then start fresh on Monday. By then, I should have been able to track down a few more names, and maybe we’ll have a response or two.”

“Fine with me.” Regan rubbed her eyes. “I guess I need to put this aside for a while anyway. My eyes are all but falling out of my head.”

“What time Monday is good for you?” Mitch gathered up his laptop and put it into its case, then slid it into the larger case, along with the small printer.

“Whatever time you get here. I’m an early riser.” She stood and stretched. “And maybe by then I’ll have found clippings that match up with the others.”

“You’ll be working tomorrow, then?”

“Sure. Writers don’t always get weekends, you just sort of work when you have something to work on, so I’m used to it.”

“Sort of like working for the Bureau,” he said. “You work the case until it’s done.”

“Exactly.”

Mitch followed her down the hall to the front door.

“You’re not driving back to . . . where did you drive from today?”

“I drove up from Maryland. But I’m staying at a motel on Route One.”

“Well, I’ll see you on Monday.”

She opened the door and he started through it.

“But you have my card, right, in case something comes up . . .” he paused to ask.

“I do. And you have my number . . .”

He nodded and walked to the car.

She stood in the doorway while he loaded the black case into the trunk, then got into the driver’s side and turned on the engine. The headlights shone far into the back field, and in their light, several deer startled. The light swung out around the field and made a yellow path as he turned the car around, and he waved to her when he drove past.

Regan stepped out onto the porch and leaned over the rail to watch the taillights grow smaller as they traveled the long lane, then disappear after he made the turn onto the main road. She sat on the top step for a while and stared up at the sky, where the clouds were beginning to fade and the stars were starting to appear. Her eyes followed the lights from a plane as it moved across the night sky. She thought about the dates and the places on the lists and about the fact that it was beginning to look like each date and place represented another woman whose life had been snatched.