Don’t Talk to Strangers: A Novel (13 page)

“Starving,” he said. He was wearing a short-sleeved uniform shirt with the department’s
logo like the one he wore yesterday, this one newly pressed. “Been a while since I
ran with anyone. It’s fun. It makes me push a little.”

“But not quite enough,” I said. “You are the one buying breakfast.”

He looked at me. “And here I thought cops were the competitive ones.”

“Point taken,” I said.

“Doris told me my investigators could have been a little more welcoming yesterday.
Guess I should have warned you.”

Ya think?
I tasted the coffee. Not a lot better than it was last night, but at least it was
fresh. “What’s up with them?” I asked.

“They’re easily threatened.” The smile again, dazzling against his tanned skin. “Anything
you can’t handle?”

“Not so far,” I said. “But it would be easier if they were on board.”

He nodded. “I’ll remind them. They aren’t bad cops. They just don’t readily warm up
to outsiders. They don’t like me much either.” That much I knew, given Detective Raymond’s
remarks in the woods. I wanted to ask why he didn’t just clean house, rid his department
of feet-draggers and the drama that erodes morale. I decided to mind my own business.
“So, tell me where you are. I’m interested in knowing your thoughts so far.”

“I created a profile based on the current evidence. I want to remind you this is an
equivocal analysis. New evidence can always emerge and alter an offender profile.
But based on the type of crime, the condition of the victims’ bodies, the crime scene,
I’m confident it can help with investigative strategy.”

The sheriff pulled a digital voice recorder about half the size of a pack of cigarettes
from his pocket, put it on the table between us. “You mind?” He switched it on before
I could answer.

“I don’t,” I said. “But I emailed you everything in writing this morning.”

“I’m encouraged to see you’ve been busy earning your exorbitant consulting fee.” It
wasn’t a full smile this time. Just an amused light in his eyes. He left the recorder
running. “I don’t look at my email until business hours. It tends to ruin my day.
Somebody needs me, they can call.”

“Noted.” I took the file folder Detective Raymond had delivered to me last night out
of my case and handed it to the sheriff. The gold wire rims came out of his shirt
pocket and he hooked them around his ears, opened the folder. “Neither Melinda nor
Tracy had bone breaks
prior to their disappearance,” I said. “The chips and fractures around the Davidson
girl’s wrists and feet are consistent with metal restraints. Both victims had bone
injuries, but there are some interesting differences. Could be a multitude of reasons
for them. His living space, which probably dictates how and where he holds victims,
may have changed. He could have moved since Tracy was abducted. This type of offender
will attempt to establish control right away, with metal restraints, threats, torture,
especially in the early days. If you can break their spirit they’re easier to handle.
The differences in the level of violence used with the first and second victim tell
me he needs a heightened level of victim suffering now to fuel his fantasy life.”

“What happened to Melinda?” he asked quietly.

“You didn’t read any of the injury reports?”

“We needed cause of death and we needed to confirm homicide and what kind of weapon
we’re looking for. The rest of it didn’t matter.”

“It matters to me, Sheriff. It’s a way to chart his interaction with the victims.
It’s a road map into his brain.”

“I get that now.” He avoided my eyes.

“Melinda had ankle injuries much like Tracy’s. A broken wrist, some superficial knife
strikes or curiosity marks to her inner arms and face, four broken fingers on her
right hand, two on her left.”

“What could have done that to her fingers?”

The sheriff wasn’t getting it. Not really. It wasn’t sinking in. “They weren’t broken
at the same time, Sheriff,” I answered flatly. “He did that. One of the fingers hadn’t
fully healed at the time of Melinda’s death.”

Meltzer blew out air like I’d slugged him in the chest. He looked away, found something
in the parking lot to stare at. They were his friends, I reminded myself. He might
have loved this kid. I decided not to describe the experimental cuts on Melinda’s
body. It was all in the profile, though—the terrible, bloody curiosity of a killer
finding and fulfilling new needs with the point of a knife and a terrified little
girl.

“The location of the disposal site indicates familiarity with the area, and according
to the interviews no one noticed a stranger in the days leading up to the girls’ disappearance,”
I said. “But he didn’t
just appear. He watched. He knew when they’d be alone. He’s local and it’s possible
he lived or worked in the Silas area when Tracy disappeared. He might have moved to
Whisper later. Or he may work in one town and live in the other. I’d look at real
estate, DMV, and voter registration records for anyone moving between the two towns
in the last decade. He may also have close friends or family he visits regularly in
that area. There’s a reason he started in a town twenty miles from here. He’s white,
middle income, married or divorced, probably has at least one child, a regular guy.
And he was able to approach these girls without anyone noticing. He was able to attract
them and get them close enough to overpower them. They trusted him. Why? Either because
they knew him personally or because they recognized him. They believed they were safe
with him. You need to look at everyone in these girls’ lives—teachers, coaches, the
guy who runs the ice-cream shop, any authority figure. And consider this. He’s kept
his captives quiet and alive for months. He has to have a property that will accommodate
them—a basement, a shed, a garage, a barn, someplace he can lock up, someplace that’s
just his. Some sacred space even his family wouldn’t think of intruding on. It could
be a second property.”

“I know guys who won’t let anyone in their workshops,” Meltzer said. “And we have
plenty of farmland with abandoned barns and shacks in this county.”

I nodded. “Your suspect has had to get at least two victims in and out without detection.”

“Understood,” Meltzer said tersely.

“Both abductions took place in the middle of the day, which means he could have flexible
hours or work at night. He’s stable, balanced, shows up for work, and doesn’t set
off any alarms.”

“How about age?”

“Age is tough. Theories have to be evidence-based, and there’s just not any evidence
to support opinions regarding age. It’s risky to speculate.”

“You speculated he’s white and married or divorced,” Sheriff Meltzer argued.

“I deduced based on experience with offenders who are able to
evade law enforcement for this long,” I answered, and heard the edge in my voice,
corrected it. “They generally hunt within their own race. They usually fit in to the
community—wife, kids, upstanding citizen, good neighbor, all that.”

“Okay. Sure. I get it. Off the record.”

“The first abduction took place eleven years ago,” I said. “He has to have a vehicle
to acquire a victim, a space to hold a prisoner, and enough control over his environment
to ensure that his space remains private. You could presume whatever you want from
that. But it would be pure speculation.”

“This is good work, Keye,” Meltzer told me.

“It’s better organized in the files I sent you, but it’s always good to talk it out.”

“First new ideas we’ve had in a while. I knew a fresh pair of eyes would pay off.”
The sheriff’s words trailed off. The server had arrived with breakfast. “Thanks,”
he said and looked up at her with soft eyes. “You doing all right today?”

“We’re hanging in there,” she said sweetly. I saw something familiar in the set of
her mouth, the cute snub nose, and realized she was Molly Cochran, the mother of thirteen-year-old
Melinda Cochran who’d turned up dead in the woods and who sometimes came to the diner
after school when her mother worked the second shift.

“Aren’t you supposed to be on afternoons this week, Molly?” Meltzer asked.

“They called me in early today.” She spoke with the kind of deep-woods southern accent
that told you she’d grown up in the country. “But that just means I get to go home
early.” The sheriff introduced us. Molly knew who I was. “I heard you were coming,
Dr. Street. I hope you can help find out who done this to my little girl.”

“I hope so too,” I said. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

“From the time she was a little biddy thing I always told her: Melinda, don’t talk
to strangers. But she loved everyone. She was a real good girl.” Molly topped off
my coffee and forced another smile. She’d decided a stranger had walked into the community
and violated it, sliced into her world, taken her child away from her. Too much faith
had been shattered already for Molly Cochran to allow for the possibility
that it wasn’t a stranger at all who’d abducted and murdered her child. “If you have
any questions or anything. I mean if there’s anything I can do to help. Me or Bryant.
You just call.”

I looked into eyes too old and weary for such a young, pretty woman. “I will,” I promised.
“Thank you.”

She patted the top of my hand, then returned to her customers, chatting, filling coffee
cups, working for tips while she must have felt like her heart was breaking. The sheriff
cut through a thick stack of blueberry pancakes with his fork and didn’t look up.
I sat there, trying to swallow the lump in my throat, then sprinkled black pepper
over my scrambled eggs and pushed them into creamy white cheddar grits. We ate in
silence.

“She’s young to have a daughter about to start high school,” I observed, after a while.
I felt eyes on me. It was like having breakfast in the bug lady’s aquarium.

“Molly got pregnant when she was sixteen. She and Bryant were high school sweethearts.
Happens a lot around here. Pregnancy, I mean. There’s not that much to do.” Meltzer
speared the last piece of ham on his plate and glanced around. He nodded and smiled
at a few people. “Seems like you’re creating a little bit of a stir, Dr. Street.”

“Not my intention, I assure you.”

“I’m having a little trouble not staring myself,” he said. His eyes landed on me,
browner and warmer than I remembered them. My first thought was:
I must have something in my teeth
. And then it hit me. He was flirting. I was completely unprepared for him to swing
that door open. I decided ignoring it would be the best strategy. I picked up my phone
and found the photograph I wanted to show him, handed it to the sheriff. He stared
at it for a while. His long lashes made his eyes seem closed when he looked down.
He lifted his head. “Looks like a tree.”

“It’s the poplar tree you told me to use as a landmark when I walked from the campground
to the crime scene,” I told him. “Now go to the next couple of shots.”

He advanced the screen with his piano player’s fingers, graceful and lean but strong
and tan like his arms. I liked the square jaw and the leanness in his face, the long,
sharp dents in both cheeks, the tuft
of hair like a triangle under his bottom lip. He must have felt me admiring him because
he looked up at me with knowing eyes, the smile I’d seen a lot this morning beginning
to form. The heat hit my brain first, then bungee-jumped through my system. So unwelcome.
So
inappropriate. That’s the thing about chemicals. They don’t care about proper. They
don’t care about timing. They don’t give a damn if you’re talking about how a killer
marks his path to dispose of a young body. I reached for the untouched glass of water
Molly Cochran had put on the table and took a long, cold drink.

The sheriff went back to the photographs, finally saw what I wanted him to see. It
wasn’t easy to spot. It was knee-high on the trunk of the tree—slices made in the
woody four-inch-thick vines that had severed them perfectly. A section had been removed.
“That’s a clean cut. That’s not natural. A vine will die all the way up when you cut
them like that.”

I knew this all too well thanks to the volume of information available on the topic.
I’d spent some time last night in my hotel room following one link after another on
the subject. “Something that thick can live off the tree for months even when it’s
severed. But eventually it starts to die. And when it does it’s the perfect landmark.”

“You think the suspect did this,” Meltzer said.

I nodded. “I started to wonder why a healthy tree had a dead vine that size. It didn’t
make sense. See how dry the vine is. It looks like old driftwood. It’s been dead for
years.”

Meltzer was advancing the screen again, looking at all the photos I’d taken in the
woods. It occurred to me he might go beyond them and find personal pictures, photos
of Rauser, of White Trash and Hank, of Neil, my office, snapshots of my life. “A hunter
could have done it.”

“It’s possible,” I conceded. I had no physical evidence to the contrary. “But wouldn’t
a hunter flag the path, or make a mark on the tree, do something overt? This wasn’t
that, Sheriff. This was camouflaged.” I leaned forward over the table and so did he.
“I think he planned Tracy’s murder well in advance and scouted out a place to dispose
of the body. He knew the embankment was a perfect place to hide her in order to keep
the body from turning up in the creek or the
lake. So he cut those vines as a landmark. He didn’t want it to look like someone
had marked it. It was just for him. I bet by the time he walked out there with Tracy,
those vines were browning out. He never wanted those bodies discovered. He’s a planner,
this guy. He’s confident, and he’s detached. He’d have to be.”

The sheriff’s eyes moved from the photos to me. He put my phone down. “But there’s
something else, isn’t there?”

I reached across and retrieved my phone. “Both girls had serious enamel defects, according
to the forensic odontologist’s report.” Meltzer turned the ring on his right hand
a half revolution, then another, then another. “It’s one indicator of poor nutrition.
It’s not uncommon in cases where the victim has been held for months or years. Could
be about control. It’s a way to keep them weak and dependent. There may be practical
considerations that contributed to their bad health. For example, wherever he’s keeping
them only allows access at certain times or on certain days without being seen. By
the way, my office was able to gain access to Melinda’s social media contacts. That
would be one of the emails you didn’t want messing up your day.”