ALL THE PRETTY GIRLS BOOK 1 (35 page)

Stepping out into the hallway, Lincoln met her, a mug of coffee in his hand. She winked at him, then stepped back into the room.

She handed him the coffee, then sat in the chair opposite him, next to Baldwin but distancing herself by sliding the chair a few feet to the side, so the table wasn’t between her and Buckley. “Here you are, Mr. Buckley. I sure am sorry we had to put you out like this. I’d understand if you didn’t want to talk to me, but I’d love to hear your side of the story, how that lip got cut. Was it one of the patrol officers?”

Buckley snarled at her. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re about there, little lady. You’re trying to get me to confess to something I don’t know anything about. All I know is I got pulled over, dragged from my car, assaulted by one of Metro’s finest and brought here. What the hell do you people think you’re doing? I swear I’m going to make sure every single one of you is fired.”

He glowered at her, hostile and demanding. Taylor could see this man as a killer, and the thought made her blood run cold. She almost dropped the act, nearly spit out what she was actually thinking about the bastard, but she held her tongue and simply nodded and crossed her legs.

“I understand completely, Mr. Buckley. I can’t apologize enough, for the whole department. We are truly sorry we inconvenienced you. I’m sure you understand, we have just one little problem to clear up and then we’ll do our best to get you out of here. Get you home to Mrs. Buckley. Quinn, isn’t it? I’m sure she’s worried sick about you right now, sir, what with you being on the news and everything tonight. She’s probably sitting at home right now, crying her eyes out because she doesn’t know what’s happening. Would you like to call her?”

“I’m on the news? Why the hell is that?”

Taylor chose to stall him. “Tell me, Mr. Buckley. Your wife mentioned that you like poetry.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Oh, I think you know. Love poems. She mentioned you used to send them to her, way back when. Are you still in that habit now, Mr. Buckley?”

“What difference does that make? So I send my wife love notes. Doesn’t make me any different than the next guy.”

“And when you send them to your wife’s sister?

Does that make you any different?”

“Send poems to Whitney? What exactly are you accusing me of, Detective?”

“It’s Lieutenant. And I’m asking if you were having an affair with your wife’s sister. Identical-twin sister, at that, who happens to be very, very dead.”

Jake Buckley opened and closed his mouth, took a breath and spoke, menace in his voice. “I don’t know anything about Whitney’s death. I’ll have your badge for this, Lieutenant. I may not be a lawyer, but I know slander when I see it. Is that what you’ve been telling my wife? That I cheated on her with her own sister?

What do you think I am, some kind of monster?”

“Perhaps you are.”

“And perhaps I’d like to know what you meant by me being on the news.”

It was time to get to it. Taylor raised her hands, palms up, entreating him for calm. “Well, Mr. Buckley. Sir, I’m sure you understand that we’ve been looking for you for a couple of days now. And there’s that little technicality we’ve been dealing with. Sir, how do you explain the girl in the trunk of your car?”

Buckley’s eyes widened and his bullying veneer dropped for an instant. “What girl? What the hell are you talking about?”

“How about the bag with the knives, rope and tape…your tool kit, full of bloody evidence?”

Buckley shifted in his chair. “I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

Taylor stood now, ready to hit her stride. She paced the room. “Let me guess, no one mentioned that you had a dead girl in the trunk of your BMW, Mr. Buckley? A girl named Ivy Tanner Clark?You met her in Louisville?

It’s okay, Mr. Buckley. I understand how these things work.” She sidled up to him. “You meet a girl, maybe get a little friendly with her. Maybe things get a little rough, and suddenly,
BAM!
She’s dead, and you don’t know what to do. So you stash her in the trunk of your car and drive toward home, figuring you’d find a good place to dump her along the way. Is that how it happened, Mr. Buckley? Isn’t that what you’ve been doing here for the past couple of months? Meeting a girl here or there, sweet-talking her to go somewhere with you? Getting a little frisky, okay, maybe a lot frisky, and she somehow accidentally ends up dead?” Taylor stopped pacing and planted herself two feet from Buckley. He reared back in his chair as if he’d been hit.

“No. No, no, no, that’s impossible, that’s not right. I never killed any girls. I have no idea—”

Taylor interrupted him, all the sweetness and light gone from her voice. “Oh yes, yes, yes, Mr. Buckley, that’s just what you’ve been up to. Your happy little road trip throughout the Southeast? Picking up girls, murdering them, transporting their bodies. Or has that little tidbit slipped your mind? What about their hands, Mr. Buckley?” Taylor was two inches from Buckley’s face now, each word biting and cutting as well as a knife. He looked terrified.

“What do you do with their hands, Jake? Do you mind if I call you Jake? Do you tell them your name before you kill them, Jake? Were you just trying to get yourself a little bit of ass and it went awry? You found out how much you liked it, didn’t you? You liked forcing them, liked choking the life out of them. And then you administered the coup de grâce, didn’t you, Jake? You cut off their hands, took one with you to throw down at the next dead body, the next mutilated girl. Isn’t that how it went, Jake?”

Her voice was sharp, loud, and Buckley flinched away from her, shaking his head, a low keening sound escaping his throat. “No, no, no, no,
NO!
No, I didn’t do any of those things. I didn’t, I swear it! I may be a jerk, but I’m not a killer. I didn’t kill anyone. Christ, you have to listen to me. Lawyer. I want my lawyer. Right now!” he roared, eyes white with panic. Taylor turned tail and walked out of the room. Baldwin followed suit. They left Jake Buckley blubbering like a baby in the interrogation room and joined the rest of the homicide team.

They met her in the hall, all four men grinning. “Nice performance, Lieutenant.” Price congratulated her.

“You scared him so shitless he forgot to ask for a lawyer until the very end. Well done, girl.”

“Thank you, thank you. But we have to get him to say something other than ‘No, I didn’t do it.’ Baldwin?”

Baldwin was staring at the floor, lost in thought.

“Baldwin?”

He met her eyes. “Something’s not right about him.”

“Well, we know that. Your average guy doesn’t like to kill his dates at the end of the evening,” she said.

“No, it’s something more. He was really cocky with you when you let him think he was in control. But the second you turned on him, he cowered like a beaten dog. This killer wouldn’t do that. The notes he’s sending, the sensational nature of the crime—I think he’d be bragging about it. I don’t think he’d let you get under his skin like that.”

“C’mon, Mr. Fed, give the girl some credit. She can waltz back in there and he’ll tell her anything she wants to hear.” Fitz wasn’t quite growling at Baldwin, but he definitely was pushing things.

“He just might. But I don’t know if it’s him. We need to get some of the forensics together, get his DNA. We can compel a DNA sample from him now, right?”

Taylor nodded.

“Then let’s do that. We can try to match it against the semen taken from Christina Dale’s crime scene. I just can’t get my head around him as the killer. Not the way he backed off when Taylor got in his face. An accomplice, maybe. Hell, I don’t know. Let’s get some proof.”

Fitz stared at Baldwin as if he were an alien.

“Baldwin, the man had Ivy Clark all laid out in the trunk of his car. He was speeding back to Nashville to get rid of the body. He had the bag of tools right there in the car with him, his own damn initials stamped on it. What the hell more do you need?” He raised a beefy paw. “Naw, don’t answer that. I’ll go get the sample, have it run over to be tested.” He disappeared into the hallway.

Baldwin turned to Taylor, whose smile had faded. It had felt right. “Let Buckley stew for a little bit. I want to go over the file on Whitney and Quinn.”

Baldwin set up shop in the conference room across the hall from Jake Buckley’s interrogation room. The files from Quinn and Whitney’s kidnapping were spread before him. He buzzed through them, absorbing all the information. The story was all too familiar. Whitney and Quinn were bright, bubbly twelve-yearolds when they went missing. They’d been playing that day, innocent and pure, two sisters enjoying an afternoon of free time after school, no responsibilities other than make-believe and fun. They were both towheaded, blue-eyed and happy. All this Baldwin gleaned from the photos of the girls that accompanied the files. Photos from before the kidnapping.

The after shots, pictures taken when the girls were recovered and taken to police headquarters while their parents were notified, told a different story. Their eyes were troubled, no smiles, just blank stares. Both girls had been beaten, eyes blackened, and Quinn had a split lip. The only way he could tell them apart was the small white label affixed to the bottom of each photo designating each girl. There was a shot of Whitney staring into the camera as if she hadn’t realized her picture was being taken. There was no innocence in the gaze, she had the eyes of a woman twice her age that had seen a lifetime of abuse. What three days could do to a child was overwhelming.

They’d been riding their bikes that day. They’d ridden down a garden path they’d discovered that led from the back edge of their parents’ estate. The path traversed a wooded area and opened onto a grassy clearing, which bordered the west edge of Belle Meade Boulevard. It was hidden from the road by a long line of crepe myrtle trees. Whitney’s bicycle had gotten a flat. Instead of making their way back through the woods, they’d decided to go the long way, to push their bikes along the boulevard, back to their house.

He flipped the page and stared at the photo of their kidnapper. The file identified him as Nathan Chase, a thirty-seven-year-old construction worker, more often out of a job than in one. He had approached the girls, offering them some ice cream, a treat to cool them down on a hot summer day, and a ride back to their house so they didn’t have to push their bikes.

In the time of innocence, before Amber Alerts and children being schooled day in and day out about the horrors lurking behind every stranger’s shadow, the girls had accepted. They were on the Boulevard after all. They wheeled their bikes to his truck. After Quinn’s bike was safely in the back and she was climbing into the cab, he’d grabbed Whitney, shoved her in behind Quinn and taken off, leaving Whitney’s flat-wheeled bicycle behind. And then they were gone. Disappeared. Vanished. But their story had a happy ending. Three days later, the girls appeared on Charlotte Avenue, disheveled, dirty, bloody, but alive. A Good Samaritan had seen them stumbling toward home and called the police. It was Whitney who had explained how Chase had gotten drunk, had passed out, that the girls had seen an opportunity and had made a successful break for freedom. It was Whitney who had identified Chase and his truck. She gave detailed descriptions of his home, a tiny, dirty two-bedroom bungalow off of Charlotte Avenue. The girls had only been five miles from home for the duration of their captivity. Quinn never volunteered any information, had only nodded in confirmation as Whitney told their story. PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, was Quinn’s biggest problem. She’d suffered such a shock that she’d been mute for weeks after the kidnapping, the file said. Whitney, having told the story, given all the information she could remember, had sat quietly waiting for her parents to take her home. The stronger of the twins.

The police had followed the directions Whitney gave them and found Nathan Chase alone in his living room, sucking on a Budweiser, watching a movie on television. He’d just smiled as they’d cuffed him, refused to confirm or deny the charges against him. He’d been tried and convicted on the strength of Whitney’s testimony, Quinn refused to come to court, wouldn’t take the stand, but the jury decided in only two hours that Nathan Chase was guilty as hell. He’d been sentenced to thirty years, a decent amount of time and punishment for a kidnapper in the early 1980s, and was serving out the remainder of his time at Riverbend, a maximum-security prison that had opened in 1989. He spent his days watching television, reading, working in the library and being a model prisoner. Baldwin sat back in his chair, rubbing his eyes. Nathan Chase. What kind of man kidnaps two little girls, beats them, but lets them get away? Then sits in his house, drinking a beer and waiting for the cops to come a-calling?

Baldwin leafed through the pages again. There was no sign of the sheets that mentioned the sexual assault. The girls’ reports were of multiple beatings and sleepless nights. They said he’d talked to them, told them stories, tried to entertain them. The odds that they weren’t assaulted were so slim that Baldwin finally sought Taylor out. She was in her office, sipping a Diet Coke and reading a case file.

“Whatcha up to?” Baldwin lounged in her doorway, drinking in her beauty. She should look frazzled and tired, it was the middle of the night, they’d been working for so many hours Baldwin had lost count. But she sat serenely at her desk, eyes wide and clear, looking like she’d just gotten up from a refreshing twelve hours in the bed. Except for the black eye. It gave her a rakish air. He briefly imagined her in his bed and smiled. She caught the look and laughed, closing the file in front of her.

“Lincoln just brought me up to speed on our Rainman suspect. Norville Turner. He works at the precinct filling station, doing mechanical work on the squad cars. Apparently, there’s no great psychosis behind his pattern. He’s a cop buff, couldn’t get on the force. He failed his entrance exams at the Academy four times, so he’s spent all this time trying to get back at us. Thought that setting up his crimes in a bizarre pattern would make him look mysterious. He’s just an everyday rapist. The good news is, he admitted to the rapes, which is an excellent first step. Now we have to do all the fun stuff, matching the DNA and all, but it looks like we got our man.”