Don’t Talk to Strangers: A Novel (10 page)

I reached under the seat for my Glock. I didn’t feel it. I reached farther. No weapon.
I got out and knelt down, peered under the seat. There it was. Another thing out of
place. First my computer, then my keys, and now my gun. They’d searched my bag
and
my car while I was out with the sheriff.
Sonofabitch
, I muttered. I inspected the Glock, checked the magazine, grabbed an extra clip,
pushed the flap on a duty holster down inside the back of my pants. I’m not the superstitious
type, but there was something dark-hearted down here in Whisper. It was seeping out
of those woods like sap.
Mean people
.

I headed into the woods, walked until the trail that was beaten down by tourists who
stopped at the campground to hook up their campers and get out their fishing poles
split to the right toward the lake’s edge. Catawba Creek meandered out of sight to
my left, but I knew where it was going. It would circle the incline that led to the
crime scene. I stayed straight and looked for the tree Meltzer had described, the
one with dead vines as big as his arms.

The forest was hushed but for chirping birds and insects. Squirrels scurried up trees,
and chipmunks rustled the dead leaves at my approach. No breeze. It was late afternoon
and the sun was low enough to light up the treetops above me. I slapped the mosquito
on my arm and cursed at the smashed gray spot with its splat of my blood. It itched
already. There’s no escaping the relentless barrage of hungry mosquitoes in Georgia’s
swampy heat unless you’re slathered in chemicals. I could still smell deet on my skin
from the spray the sheriff
had given me earlier, gamy and oily. I guess smelling is all it’s good for after a
few hours because the mosquitoes were not deterred.

I took my time, paid attention to the trees, the shrubs, looked for landmarks, markers,
something carved in bark, anything he might have used to mark his path. I snapped
a few pictures. How had he remembered the spot where he’d first marched a girl ten
years earlier and swung his weapon? Had he memorized these thin paths and dark trees?
They all looked alike to me.

I could feel my quads starting to work. The incline was beginning—a leaf-covered mountain
of earth in the middle of the hilly forest, climbing up toward the disposal site.
I spotted the big poplar tree Meltzer used as his landmark, wrapped in thick, woody
brown vines. I studied it for a minute, walked around it, photographed it from different
angles. Was this the killer’s landmark too?

I followed the sheriff’s directions, moving to the left and climbing east up toward
the crime scene. The leaves didn’t make for great footing, and the brush and foliage
nearer the lake had all but disappeared. There was nothing to grab on to if you slipped.
I thought again about a killer pushing a teenage girl through these woods, knowing
all along how it would end, where he would take her, how he would murder her.

I reached the top and heard water in the distance, trickling lightly over rock. I
saw the twin oaks Sheriff Meltzer used as his guidepost when he came in by boat. I
could barely detect a hint of kicked-up earth from our earlier visit. I thought about
the soil samples they’d taken weeks after Melinda’s murder. The evidence, if there
was ever evidence, had spent as much as sixty days in the elements—and the slightest
puff of air can dislodge traces. But the samples could be matched to a suspect’s shoes
or automobile in order to place him at the scene. Killers don’t always leave evidence
that investigators can detect, but they almost always carry something of the scene
home with them.

I walked until I found the place where the earth sucked in like a crater. I peered
down at the granite boulder that had stopped Melinda Cochran’s fall, closed my eyes,
and remembered the scene photos.
Had Tracy Davidson and Melinda Cochran been his only victims? If so, why? Why them?
Why a decade apart?

The sound of shoes crushing leaves on the forest bed got my attention, heavy and undisguised.
I reached for my Glock.

“Put away your weapon, Dr. Street.”

I didn’t put it away. I liked it just fine where it was at my side. “Detective Raymond,
what brings you out here?” I asked cheerfully. “Rethinking that cup of coffee?”

“Saw your car.” He was winded from the climb. His face was sweaty and his cheeks spattered
with color. He came up on my left side and stood beside me. He was a bull of a man,
the kind of guy who had played college ball and let his body get flabby. He couldn’t
have spotted my car from the highway. He would have had to drive down into the campground.
Had he followed me? I turned my attention back to the hollow.

Raymond stepped forward and looked down into the hole too. “Didn’t you come up here
with Meltzer already?”

I nodded. “I wanted to come in from the campground, get a feel for the walk.”

“Personally, I think the suspect came in from somewhere along the lake.” I could smell
beer on his breath, and I wondered why he’d gone for a beer instead of investigating
a robbery at some golf cottage with Major Brolin. Maybe she’d sent him.

“The sheriff thinks he would have been spotted if he came in that way,” I said. “Plus
it’s a steep climb.”

“It’s not that bad,” Raymond said. “And all he’d need is a little rowboat. He could
have pulled the boat up on shore and hid it between marine patrols. No sweat.”

“The suspect has to be someone familiar with the area.”

“No shit.” The muscle in his jaw and the dismissive tone told me he was aching for
a fight. “That why they call you doctor?”

“You have something on your mind, Detective?”

“Nobody wants you here.”

I glanced over at him. “I’m starting to get that.”

“We saw all those stories about you being some kind of big serial hunter,” he said.

“I’m flattered you went to the trouble,” I said.

“The sheriff may believe that shit but the way it looks to the major and me is that
you just found a way to repackage yourself when the FBI kicked you out.”

“Gotta make a living, Detective,” I said. “And for the record, I was fired because
I was a drunk. Not because I’m a shitty analyst.” Though his view was simplistic,
he was right. I had repackaged myself. And here I stood, unofficial to the world.
No badge. No security pass. Hell, I didn’t even have a wedding ring anymore. My past
would always trail me—those failures, those lapses, the consequences of some spectacularly
bad decisions.

Raymond took a pack of Marlboros from his pocket, lit one with thick, steady hands,
pulled smoke deep into his lungs. He looked completely comfortable standing there—justified,
confident, accustomed to confrontation the way cops are. “Major Brolin and me, we
both started out in uniform,” he told me. It was almost conversational. He might have
been discussing the drought. He blew out a plume of smoke that hung like a cloud in
the heavy air. “We worked hard. She’s one step away from chief deputy and she might
be the next sheriff if things go right these next couple of years. Wouldn’t want anything
interfering with that.”

“You’re saying I’m interfering?”

“The major’s track record will be important at election time. You prance in here and
get the glory for closing cases the whole county knows about—hell, the whole state
for that matter.”

“That’s what this is about? Glory?”

“Don’t be stupid. It’s all politics. You think Meltzer is in a second term because
he’s a good lawman? It’s because he’s a charming sonofabitch who knows what asses
to kiss. And we got a county full of little old rich, retired ladies who like their
asses kissed.”

“Well, in that case, the major is going to have to sharpen her people skills.” I looked
back down into the bowl-shaped depression that had been a killer’s landfill. “There’s
a predator out there who forced two innocent girls to live through a nightmare, Detective.
That’s what I’m thinking about right now. That’s all I’m thinking about. Politics
don’t interest me. And neither do your ambitions. Or the major’s.”

He cleared his throat and spat on the ground, dropped his cigarette, crushed it under
the sole of a cheap brown dress shoe. He stepped close enough so that his arm was
brushing mine and I was looking up at tiny red veins that had burst under his cheeks
over the years. Hard years, I guessed. With a lot of drinking. “Watch yourself,” he
whispered. His eyes were flat. “These woods can be dangerous.”

I returned the Glock at my side to the holster as Raymond stalked away, let out a
breath. You could have bounced a quarter off the muscles in my neck. I watched him
start down the hill. He slid in his slick-soled shoes and almost went down. I smiled.
I hoped he fell on his fat ass.

I walked toward the creek, thought about the blouse found with Melinda Cochran’s skin
cells around the collar. The killer would have had to come this way. Otherwise the
blouse would have ended up hidden in debris at the bottom of the embankment. A fisherman
would have never seen it, reported it. But why was the killer near the creek at all?
If he’d walked from the campground, he’d have no reason to come this far. Maybe Raymond
was right. Maybe he’d come up from the lake and followed the creek, dropped the shirt
on his way back to his boat. It mattered to me, not because it was a trail that would
necessarily lead to the killer—the area was too wide, with acres and acres of lake,
accessible by thousands of tourists and part-time residents. But it would say something
about the way he thought and lived, his level of fitness, his precautionary actions,
and whether he was comfortable with boats and perhaps owned one. I stood there on
the bank watching shallow water trickle over the rocks. Was it some kind of ritual?
Perhaps he’d tossed her shirt in the water—a good-bye, closure—believing water would
wash away evidence as it usually does. But the blouse had snagged on a branch on the
way downstream, and the folds and creases had protected the DNA inside the collar.
Everything else had been lost to the elements: the trace evidence that might have
told us where she’d been held, the fibers that would have revealed something about
his home and automobile, if he had cats or dogs.

I thought about how they’d died. He’d stood behind them. He’d swung his weapon hard.
Melinda had been hit with a heavy sharp
weapon consistent with an axe. I pictured him double-clutching that handle like a
baseball bat, swinging, the weapon slicing into her neck.

Spatter
. That was it. He’d come to the creek to rinse off Melinda Cochran’s blood. He didn’t
want to walk out of the woods and drive away with blood on his face and hands. And
that’s when he’d dropped the blouse. Had he come in the night and worked his way up
tangled paths with a flashlight and a weeping girl? Or was he comfortable enough to
come in daylight? How bold was this killer? Did he know the area and the routines
so well that he could walk out here just like I had? He’d made mistakes last time.
He’d dropped the blouse and as a result a crime scene I didn’t think he ever wanted
exposed was uncovered. Maybe we’d discover he’d made other mistakes too. But he wasn’t
stupid. That much I knew.

I knelt down, cupped my hands in the clear, cool water, splashed it on my face, raked
my hair back with wet fingers. I imagined his hands rinsing off Melinda’s blood in
this creek, him splashing his own heated face, the evidence tinting the water and
trickling downstream. I closed my eyes and breathed in the mossy banks, let myself
feel it, feel the serenity of this place falling down around me like rain, feel him
kneeling here as I was now, his knees pressing into the soft soil at water’s edge.
My ticking pulse, the blast of adrenaline that shoots through me when I’m learning
a killer, was as welcome and familiar to me as this place must be to him. It felt
good. I don’t know how else to explain that moment when you know you’ve understood
something about a scene, something intimate about the dark, veiled movements of a
psychopath. All those tiny moments, all those little actions—they add up, one stacked
on top of another, building a tower that would sooner or later come tumbling down.

I’d been here at least an hour. I pushed away from the creek and brushed sandy soil
off my knees, walked back to the crime scene and took another look. Raymond’s crushed
cigarette butt near the edge of the embankment irritated me, reminded me of his visit,
the not-so-veiled warning he’d left me with.
Fucker
.

I started back down in the direction of the campground where my car was parked, sliding
down slick leaves until I got to the poplar tree with the dead vines, Meltzer’s landmark.
The trail began to even out
there and thicken with privet and vines. I knew I was getting close. And then I smelled
it. Smoke.
Crap. Raymond
.

Just so you know, a nonsmoker can smell smoke a long ways away. Down here where the
air is full of moisture, it doesn’t dissipate. It holds together, creeps like a slow-moving
escalator, and sets fire to your sinuses. And it’s just stupid. If you want to stalk
someone, wait until you’re finished to indulge your addictions. It was a lesson I’d
learned the hard way when I was still indulging mine.

I made a sweep of the area, moving a little slower, keeping a little lower. I wasn’t
sure how far Raymond would go with his intimidation tactics. Out here in these woods
with no witnesses, with Detective Robert Raymond telling whatever story he wanted,
I wasn’t feeling particularly secure.

I got to the tree line and stopped when I saw a figure standing at the mouth of the
path. Raymond looked at me, raised his cigarette to his lips. I stepped out of the
woods. “Thought I’d hang around and make sure you got out safely,” he said as I got
closer. I saw his .38 in the holster. The strap was closed and snapped. A good sign.
But nothing in his eyes put me at ease.

“You’re just a one-man welcome wagon,” I said, walking past him toward my car.