Don’t Talk to Strangers: A Novel (7 page)

“A basement would work if it could be secured,” Neil added. “And a lot tougher to
spot. Sometimes you can tell on satellite, sometimes not. Might have to go to real
estate records but it’s doable.”

Latisha pulled an iPod out of her drawer, plugged in earphones, and tuned us out.
We took a moment to watch her turn her computer on and take the first pile of work
out of her inbox.

“It’s a long shot,” I told Neil. “The sheriff was right. It’s the non-registered offenders
that pose the greatest threat. But it’s worth a look.” I wondered what had attracted
the killer to Tracy Davidson and Melinda Cochran. A look? A word? Opportunity? Did
he know them, their families? Was it simply that he had a type—white, female, and
young? I showed Neil the sheriff’s report with the name of the creek and coordinates.
“Can you bring this up on satellite?”

His keys began to click. Hitchiti County came up on the screen, a small, pear-shaped
county hugging the northeast edge of Lake Oconee. He zoomed in until we had an overhead
view of Catawba Creek snaking through the Georgia woods. No residences close by. No
roads. “Pull in as tight as you can in the area of the disposal site.”

Neil followed instructions, and what we saw was thick woods. No landmarks. Trees and
more trees with glimpses of a creek. “Okay, let’s see,” he said. “The disposal site
is about half a mile from this eastern point of Lake Oconee. In the other direction
another half mile there are a couple of farms, lots of pasture. Half mile north there’s
a small campground. South is just more forest. There’s a little break in
the trees here.” He used his cursor to show me. “Coordinates are right. Must be the
natural embankment the sheriff mentioned.”

“Where they found the bodies,” I said, studying the screen. It was a dense forest,
yet the killer remembered where he’d left a body ten years earlier, and he’d delivered
the second victim to that exact spot. If it weren’t for a piece of rock blocking her
fall, Melinda Cochran would have landed next to the skeletal remains of Tracy Davidson.
Would a tourist or a trucker or someone who passed through now and then be able to
find that location so precisely again? I didn’t think so.

“How about names and addresses of Melinda’s Facebook friends?” I asked Neil.

“You do understand how many resident histories I had to run on those sex offenders,
right?” He looked at me as if I’d just slipped into tap shoes and performed a stirring
rendition of “The Lollipop Guild.” “Am I supposed to pull extra hours out of my ass
so I don’t have to eat or sleep?”

“Are they free when they come out of your ass like that or will you be taking your
salary this month?”

“I hate you.” He fought off a smile. “Go away.”

“Get on it, okay?” I stopped at Latisha’s desk and waited for her to remove the headphones.
“Did you see your dad yesterday?”

“I did. And I have our check. Plus, we have more due in today so after the mail comes
I’ll make the bank deposit. I’m also sending invoices to Fairy Chin, I mean Larry
Quinn, Mr. Snot, I mean Slott, Rapid Placement, Super Nannies On Call, and the bug-sweeping
accounts. Tomorrow the payables are on the schedule. I’ll need you to sign some checks
before you go. ’Cause we all know you’re going.” Latisha had been taking a bookkeeping
course a couple of nights a week and it was paying off.

Speechless in the face of flagrant efficiency, I went to my office and picked up the
landline, pressed in the number for the Hitchiti County Sheriff’s Department. A woman’s
voice answered, “Sheriff Meltzer’s office.” She had one of those nice, pleasant, middle-of-the-road
voices, the kind your credit card company uses to direct you through their automated
systems, the kind of voice that makes you feel good about the 24.99 percent APR. I
asked for the sheriff. She wanted to know
who was calling. I gave her my name and waited for Kenneth Meltzer to answer.

“Keye Street, Sheriff. I’d like to drive down today. I’ll need to see the rest of
your files on the two vics. And I’d like someone to show me to the disposal site.
Is that possible?”

“Done deal,” Meltzer answered without hesitation. “Glad to hear you’re coming. Plan
on hanging around?”

“I’ll need a day or two,” I said.

“We’ll make arrangements for you, then. Nothing fancy but it will be clean.”

“All I need is WiFi and a bed.” And no bedbugs.

“I think we can arrange that, Dr. Street. We have running water down here too.”

I smiled. “Good to know. I’ll see you soon.”

I was on the interstate by noon, sunglasses up, top down, a scarf to keep my hair
out of my face. The sun was beating down, and the heat was rising up off the pavement
like flaming charcoal. It was going to be one of those days in Georgia. Already it
felt like I was wading through sweet sorghum syrup. I-20 east out of Atlanta is not
a pretty drive. It knows nothing of the achingly lush beauty of the South, of the
sweet, heavenly scent of Confederate jasmine, of peach trees so fat with fruit the
branches bend toward the ground, of potted ferns swinging off wide front porches with
spinning ceiling fans, blackberry cobbler and home-churned ice cream on soft, starry
nights. What I-20 knows is chain restaurants, shopping malls, and truck stops, eighteen-wheelers,
horse trailers, and high-powered pickups, and the gassy, chemical smell of exhaust.
Traffic flies out here, really moves. Everyone’s on the way to somewhere else.

Seventy miles out of Atlanta, I exited the interstate and headed south into the countryside.
Green pastures were dotted with rolled hay and grazing cattle and the occasional lightning-struck
tree sitting alone in the middle of mown fields. The air smelled like cut grass. I
covered another few miles of Georgia farmland before billboards
with smiling, copper-colored boaters began to pop up on the rolling fescue shoulder
of the central Georgia highway halfway between Atlanta and Augusta—Jet Ski rentals,
restaurants, hotels, bait shops, boat sales, signs for all things golf: courses, equipment,
cottages.

Minutes later, I crossed a bridge over the silvery blue waters of Lake Oconee. The
city limit sign was waiting at the other end.
WELCOME TO WHISPER, GEORGIA. POPULATION 2,884
.

I slowed when I saw two black-and-whites with red racks on top and gold emblems on
the doors parked in a gravel lot. There were a couple of civilian cars and a black
Police Interceptor utility vehicle with the word
SHERIFF
in giant white letters that stretched across almost the entire length of the vehicle.
The door had the department’s star and black lettering that said
HITCHITI COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT—LAKE OCONEE PRECINCT
. The office was a light gray Cape Cod with white trim, designed to fit in with the
shoreline architecture of a county dependent on tourism.

I parked, got rid of the scarf, raised the top on my Impala, and grabbed my camera
and laptop so they wouldn’t fry in the heat. I heard a voice behind me just as I shoved
my Glock under the seat. I recognized it. It wasn’t the kind of voice you forget.

“Let me take that for you.” The sheriff reached for the case hanging off my shoulder
with my laptop and notebooks. He was wearing a ring on his right hand, gold with a
ruby in the center. His hair was longish, sandy blond, parted down the center and
tucked behind his ears. Brown eyes, and the perfect triangle-shaped dot of a goatee
under his bottom lip. “I assume you want to see the crime scene first,” he said.

“Please. I need to see what he saw,” I answered. “Really helps with context.”

“Understood.” He was lean with a leathery tan. Not the salon tans I see in office
buildings all over Atlanta. This one came from being outside. He was in jeans and
a short-sleeved uniform shirt with his department’s logo over the left pocket. No
weapon, a badge on his belt. He looked young—too young to be a sheriff and much too
young to be in his second term. He opened the door and the resort vibe faded quickly
away. It was a plain, uninspired cop shop with big metal desks
in the front room, heavy on efficiency, light on aesthetics. “The main station is
a few miles down the road. It houses our uniformed patrol units, evidence rooms, admin
clerks, the county and state prisoners under our watch, my deputies, the detention
staff, and our crime labs. I have two people in my Criminal Investigations Department
that work mostly out of this office. Both of them are out on a call. You’ll meet them
later.”

A woman smiled at me from a desk. “This is my administrative assistant, Doris. The
fabric of my life,” Meltzer said.

Doris was somewhere in midlife with thick wavy blue-black hair that looked like she
used big rollers. When I said hello she answered with the calm telephone voice I’d
heard earlier. Conversation trickled down from up an oak-banistered staircase. I heard
phones ringing.

“County call center upstairs,” Meltzer explained. “Two operators per shift twenty-four
hours a day.”

“You do it all,” I commented.

“Have to. We’re just a tiny blip on the map but Hitchiti County has a lot of shoreline
and a lot of highway. And four of our towns don’t have their own police departments.”
He walked to a back office and took a shoulder harness off a coat rack. A couple of
seconds later a Smith & Wesson M&P40 was hugging his ribs on the right side. He filled
an ammo pouch attached to the left side of the holster.

“Is that standard issue down here?” I smiled.

“No, it’s not,” he said. “But it’s what I’ve always used. Plus, well, I’m the sheriff.”
He smiled, too, and waved for me to follow him into the kitchen. I could see an expanse
of ruffled blue water through the back windows, distant shores rimmed with maples
and lime-green pines. He opened the refrigerator, took out a couple of bottles of
water, handed me one. “We don’t get a lot of homicides, Dr. Street. Not like this.
We get the old-fashioned kind with motive you can understand—money or love, greed,
passion. This is different.”

The sheriff gave a nod in the direction of my water bottle. “Bring it with you. It
gets hot out there. You can leave your things.”

I set my case on one of the chairs and kept the camera. Meltzer opened the back door
and I followed him out to a wooden dock and a boathouse with a tin roof and the sheriff’s
department star on the
side. A boat with a T-top was bobbing at the dock, black and white with a star and
the word
SHERIFF
running down the side.

Meltzer tugged on a thick rope and pulled the boat closer. The long vein in his tanned
biceps bulged. He climbed in and held out a hand for me. I hesitated. “It’s the quickest
way,” he said.

I took his hand and climbed over. He started the engine, unfolded a pair of wire-rimmed
glasses from his shirt pocket, and hooked them over his ears with hands I’d imagine
on a musician or artist, not a county sheriff. He eased the boat away from the dock,
glanced back at me standing behind him. “Not a fan of the water, huh?”

“I’m accustomed to enjoying it from land,” I said.

He did a bad job of disguising a smile. “Better hold on, then.”

6

I don’t want a water death. Put me on the coast with sun and sand and salt air. Put
me on one of Georgia’s strikingly raw barrier islands and I feel like I’m being healed
from the inside out. But for the love of God, do
not
put me on top of some huge body of water.

I fixed my eyes on the back of the seat I was white-knuckling. It was the only thing
that wasn’t bobbing and swaying. I took long, slow breaths in through my nose and
out through my mouth as the Yamaha V6 skipped lightly over the lake. The wind felt
good against my face. There was a chance I was going to make it without barfing all
over the sheriff’s boots. Then Meltzer made a sharp turn toward the shoreline and
my stomach came all the way up to my eyeballs.

He pulled alongside a lopsided, weather-beaten dock, got out, anchored the boat. “You
look a little green there, Dr. Street.” His eyes narrowed like he might smile.

“Thanks for noticing,” I said and climbed over the side. Even the half-rotted old
dock felt good under my feet.

Meltzer sprayed his arms with mosquito repellent, then tossed me the can. We headed
up an incline into the thick woods that bordered the lake. “It’s a little bit of a
hike to where we found the bodies no matter which direction you come from,” he told
me. “By water or highway. My department has to have a visible presence on the water
just to keep the tourists from getting drunk and running over each other. We’re committed
to heavy marine and highway patrols. It’s the bulk of the department. But the suspect
obviously slipped by us.

Twice.”

I’d heard about Meltzer’s patrols and the highly successful speed traps. I didn’t
mention it. “Which way presents the least risk?” I was thinking about rhythms. The
rhythm of a place—when people fish and boat and camp, when cops make their rounds.
All the things a killer has to think about.