Don’t Talk to Strangers: A Novel (17 page)

“You know what I do for a living, Ken. I design websites.” Peele got up, took a sponge
from under the sink, dampened it, wiped up the sugar. “It’s okay if I call you Ken,
right? I mean it seems like we’re on a first-name basis now.” He rinsed the sponge
and placed it in the microwave. He set the timer for one minute and sat back down.
“How’s your coffee, Dr. Street?” We hadn’t been introduced. He’d surprised me by using
my name and he knew it. He showed small, straight teeth when he smiled. “Oh come on,
Doc. Whisper’s Twitter feed is all about it. Amazing how much you can learn on social
media. For example, the Internet says you’re a runner.” He drank from his cup. Intelligent
blue eyes regarded me over the rim. “Only interesting thing in this shit town is social
media. I don’t even buy my groceries here anymore. Not many friends. For some reason
the citizenry just isn’t all that friendly anymore.”

“Because you sexually abused and raped your daughter for most of her life?” I asked
in my most clinical and neutral voice. “Or because you stalked and brutalized her
best friend? An eighth grader at the time, wasn’t she? About thirteen?”

“Touché,” Peele said. His eyes moved from mine to the sheriff’s. “I assume you’re
here to ask me again if I killed Tracy Davidson and Melinda Cochran because it’s common
knowledge that’s why you’ve hired a criminal analyst. For the record, I did not kill
them. I did not know them. And now I have work to do. So if you wouldn’t mind finishing
your coffee and leaving …”

He was getting tired of us now, impatient, and I could hear it in his voice. He pushed
away from the counter. Meltzer’s hand caught his
wrist. “Can’t let you use the computer,” the sheriff said easily. “The computer, that
iPhone over there, and whatever else we deem interesting is going with us.”

That threw Peele off his smug game for the first time. He blinked. I wasn’t sure if
he was reacting to the possibility of incriminating evidence on his devices or the
prospect of being left without them, which probably felt to a tech guy like standing
at the bottom of a staircase in a thigh-high plaster cast.

We heard a thud from somewhere in the house, a book perhaps, something falling but
not breaking, then another. Peele’s head jerked around. Order had been disturbed in
his home and it was undoing him. “Sheriff, will you tell your goons to be careful?
I like things neat.” Another layer of cool flaked away.

The sheriff and I exchanged a glance. Meltzer seemed amused. “We’ll be out of your
hair soon. But first, let’s talk about where you were on January seventeenth. About
two-thirty in the afternoon. That’s the last time anyone saw Melinda Cochran alive.”

“I was working, Ken. I’ve gone over this with your people. I was working on a project
with a client. My online status was active.” Peele’s tone had thinned. “My company
keeps records. We know who’s online, who’s not, and who’s idle and who’s active.”

“What we know is that you work remotely and that you were logged in,” Sheriff Meltzer
said. “That’s all we can really be sure of, isn’t it?”

Peele laughed. “You think I went out for a little dessert between keystrokes? Maybe
snatch some hot little thing and fuck her while—”

Logan Peele didn’t get to finish that thought. I hadn’t seen the sheriff’s body tense.
I had not heard a breath come out of him. But Meltzer struck like a rattlesnake and
Logan Peele had been jerked off of his stool and thrown against his refrigerator before
he could end his sentence. Meltzer’s fist dug into Peele’s solar plexus. He followed
with a quick elbow strike to the side of the face. I heard Peele’s teeth clamp together.
Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. Meltzer spun him around, grabbed the
back of his neck, and shoved him facedown into the stainless-steel sink. He turned
the water on. Peele was coughing, spitting out blood and saliva, blinking away water,
trying
not to breathe it in. I tensed. A deputy appeared at the kitchen door. Meltzer gave
Peele a last shove and walked away from the sink. Peele rose up, angrily jerked a
paper towel off a steel holder, filled it with ice. The deputy held up a piece of
cut drywall by handles that had been screwed in, the kind you might use on drawers
or cabinets. Her eyes moved nervously from the sheriff to Peele to me.

“Is this the kind of thing you were talking about?” she asked.

I got up and examined the square. “Looks like it was cut to slip in and out of a window.
The handles make it easy to set up and tear down. It blocks a lot of sound if you
cover all the windows.”

“There’s four of them.” The deputy’s concerned eyes were still moving from the sheriff
to Logan Peele’s swelling face.

“Where’d you find them?” Meltzer asked.

“Basement,” the deputy answered. “But the windows are too small down there. They don’t
fit.”

“Four windows on the garage,” I said.

“Want to tell us what the panels are for, Logan?” Meltzer asked.

Peele took the ice away from his mouth, looked at the bloody paper towel. “You’ll
find my Stratocaster and an amp in the upstairs guestroom. My wife didn’t like the
noise.” He dabbed the corner of his lips. “Back when I had a wife. Back before I had
to submit to this bullshit.”

“See if they fit upstairs,” Meltzer ordered the deputy.

“They don’t fit anywhere,” Peele said. He smiled and I saw blood in the grooves of
his bottom teeth. “Not anymore. I renovated. Remember? And when the house was done,
I even rebuilt that little garage. I lived out there while they were working on my
house. Little refrigerator, a nice soft mattress. You could survive out there for
a long time.” Another bloody smile. He was playing with us.

15

Ken Meltzer was still seething when we left Peele’s house. Rage was coming off him
like steam. Deputies had worked their way through the house as far as the kitchen.
Detective Robert Raymond and Major Tina Brolin had arrived and informed us the first
offender we’d visited was now sitting in a jail cell. I wondered if that box of porn
Lewis Freeman had hidden was worth it to him.

“Can’t arrest him for having sound panels,” Meltzer grumbled. We snapped seatbelts
into place. “But you better believe if there’s anything we can lift off them or anything
else, we’ll get it.”

The sheriff had ordered a scene technician with an alternate light source to go over
Peele’s house, garage, and basement. Some things can’t be washed and polished away,
things that can’t be seen with the naked eye. If blood or other fluids had spattered
there since the renovation, they would fluoresce. What happened in that house before
the walls and floorboards were ripped out would probably remain Logan Peele’s secret.
He wasn’t the kind of man who confesses, who needs absolution. Peele’s computers,
a tablet, and an iPhone were in an evidence box in the back of the sheriff’s vehicle.

“I should have held his head underwater a few more seconds,” Meltzer fumed. His phone
chimed. He looked at the display, dropped the phone into a compartment on the console.

“A few more seconds and I would have stopped you,” I told him seriously.

He glanced over at me as he backed out. “I lost it. I’m sorry.”

“Quick moves,” I observed. “Martial arts?”

“Tae kwon do. I teach a kids’ class on Saturdays. If you’re still here you have to
see these kids. Six to ten years old and so cute it will make your teeth hurt.” He
seemed to relax a little. “I really am sorry about what happened back there. Reacting
to guys who like to push buttons is just playing into their hands. I know that. I
was stupid.”

“I had a nearly overwhelming urge to slug him and I didn’t even know Melinda,” I said.
“I know you must have thought of her when he started talking like that. He’s a sadist.
He wanted to hurt you.”

“Ever seen anyone tear down a house to hide evidence?” He said it with a light smile
and a shake of his head, but he was only half kidding.

“I’ve seen fires,” I said. “Torch the clothing, torch the house, blow up the car.
This is my first renovation.”

“I think he’s our guy,” Meltzer insisted. “He has the time and opportunity. He has
the history. He has the personality. And his alibi is soft.” He looked across the
cab. “Here’s what I think. Something happened that shook him up. He got paranoid.
Maybe he saw somebody out there in the woods too close to his dump site. He knows
he’s going to be on the suspect list once it’s discovered. So he goes forward with
this major renovation while Melinda is still in that garage. He said he lived out
there, so the contractors expect to see him going in and out, bringing in food and
water. The neighbors see it, no big deal. He has the perfect explanation. He keeps
it locked when he’s not there. Again, it’s easily explained. He has electronics. He’s
a techie. Even the panels in the windows wouldn’t seem odd. He works from home. He
needs quiet. When the house is ready, he kills Melinda, disposes of her body, moves
back in, and renovates the garage. We looked at his financials when Brolin questioned
him a few weeks ago. He spent sixty thousand dollars on all this.”

“I thought it was interesting he wanted to talk about the garage,” I said. “He definitely
understood the significance of that. Question is, why did he take us down that path?”

“Ego maybe. You don’t have to spend a lot of time with him to see
that he thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room. He believes he successfully disposed
of evidence and outsmarted us.”

“Or he’s simply read about the cases, knows the details, and wants to intentionally
ignite suspicions, waste time.”

“You have doubts he’s our guy.”

“I think he’s capable of killing,” I answered. “Especially to protect himself. Look
at the guy. Control freak, obsessive. Jail would not be his happy place.” I looked
out the window as we passed the old courthouse and drove through Whisper. It was late
morning. The sky was pale blue with long white clouds that looked like jet streamers.
The temperature reading on the sheriff’s vehicle said it was ninety degrees outside.
Georgia was reminding us it was late in August. Our windows were up now, and the air
conditioner was blowing cold air into the cab. The sheriff’s vehicle drew attention
as we drove through town, waves from sidewalks and from other drivers. “He microwaves
his sponge,” I said. “The guy has some twists.”

“I thought his eyes were going to pop out of his head when I spilled the sugar.” Meltzer
laughed that good, rich laugh.

We stopped on red at one of two traffic signals on Main Street in tiny downtown Whisper,
Georgia. I saw Pastor Hutchins talking with someone outside the drugstore. He waved.
We waved back—the rituals of a small town. Losing one of their own, someone nearly
everyone knew, everyone except Logan Peele and Lewis Freeman, conveniently, must have
saddened and frightened them all, reminded everyone how fragile we are, how vulnerable,
how unable to protect those we love.

I glanced at shop windows, the square in the center of town with its lush green park,
the elementary and middle schools behind it, the same middle school Melinda Cochran
had attended. It would have been her last year before moving on to high school. It
was a pretty town. Giant oaks leaned over the street to form a canopy and block out
some of the sun’s stinging rush to midday as we left Whisper for the county seat.

The Hitchiti County Judicial Center sat back off the highway—two circular buildings
side by side with a bridge connecting them, tinted glass, and gray stone the color
of a thundercloud. The area surrounding the center was pedestrian-only. Stone barricades
protected it from car bombs. Lines on parking slots were bright white, and the trees
planted or potted around the complex still had tags dangling from young branches.

The sheriff pulled into a slot marked with his name. Parking was fifty feet from the
building. Cameras were mounted on light poles, and I was sure there was plenty of
electronic surveillance on the building, inside and out. “My whole department is here,”
the sheriff told me. “Evidence room, archives, lot of the courts are located here,
the administrative staff except for Doris, road and marine patrols. The building on
the left is our detention facility. We have six hundred and twenty-five beds and about
six hundred inmates. Used the urban high-rise detention center model in Arlington.
State of the art.”

“Why haven’t you moved your office?” I asked.

“I do have an office here. The center was completed a year ago and I have to be here
a lot. But it’s quiet there. I’m interrupted less. And I enjoy walking out the back
door and getting on the boat when life gets stressful.” He grinned at me. “Plus, I
can keep an eye on my investigators.”

I smiled. I was willing to bet Major Brolin didn’t like that, sharing an office with
a detective, even if it was one she was in an intimate relationship with, in a little
house five miles away from this sparkling new hub of justice. I was beginning to see
that Meltzer kept a closer eye on them than I thought. He punished them for their
little betrayals. He robbed them of perks like shiny offices in a spanking-new complex.
I thought about him barely slowing his pace to speak to the major as we walked toward
Lewis Freeman’s house, his icy demeanor. I wasn’t sure who he was just yet.