Don’t Talk to Strangers: A Novel Read online

  “You and that lieutenant made a nice couple,” Meltzer remarked.

  The interview had been done in my living room after Rauser had been released from the hospital. The photographer caught us during a candid moment, the two of us sitting on the couch. It was the largest of four photographs that accompanied the story. We were looking at each other, smiling. And when I remembered that moment and so many more with Rauser, when I thought about the truth and safety in his eyes, in my life with him, I silently cursed myself for what I’d been feeling, for the stupid attraction I’d been playing with. I hadn’t shut the sheriff down. I’d let him look at me the way he looked at me, and I’d let him flirt. “We’re still a nice couple,” I told Meltzer.

  “Too bad,” he said, without looking away from the road.

  By the time we drove down the paved driveway where the second registered sex offender lived, two Interceptor sedans with the sheriff’s star were already waiting. I felt like I needed a shower after being inside Lewis Freeman’s place. And it wasn’t just because it smelled like bacon and sweat and cigarettes. The guy was utterly disgusting. I glanced at the small building thirty feet from Logan Peele’s home, about the size of a one-car garage and freshly painted. Plenty of room on this property to hide a lot of secrets. I’d seen closets and garages and basements and cages and dog crates turned into prisons. You never really know what’s hiding behind the neighbor’s walls or what a human being is capable of until you find something like that.

  An aluminum overhang attached to the roof of the building on one end and stretched out over a dark gray F-150 pickup truck. I studied the basement windows on the side of the two-story brick house near ground level. Had Melinda Cochran spent six months in a sunless basement? I noticed the distance between the houses on each side. It was very different from Lewis Freeman’s unkempt home and property. I didn’t see a trash can or a recycling bin or a piece of lawn equipment. The property was trimmed and landscaped; the garage, the windows on the house, the railing and eaves all looked newly painted. Everything had its place. This was organized. My pulse quickened.

  Meltzer parked and we got out. I was introduced to the deputies, and we repeated to Meltzer’s uniformed officers what we’d told the first group of deputies at the first sex offender’s home—we were there because Logan Peele was a level-two offender who had the space, opportunity, and time, and he was a person of interest in the murders of Melinda Cochran and Tracy Davidson. Peele’s wife had left him, I knew from the background material Neil had emailed. He worked from home, which meant he had the flexibility in his schedule needed to abduct two girls in the middle of the day. He’d been in the area at the time both Tracy and Melinda were abducted, and approximately sixty days ago when Melinda Cochran’s body had been dumped. I needed to know if he had the other tools necessary—the manipulative skills and demeanor to trick a kid into getting close. Predators are superb at that. They use puppies and kittens and fake injuries to lure their prey. This man had raped his own daughter and then tricked one of her friends into getting in the car with him.

  The door opened before we started up the brick steps. Logan Peele stood looking at us. His red hair was short, and he had a closely trimmed carrot-colored Fu Manchu. His eyes were icy blue, emotionless, as flat as a central Georgia blacktop.

  “Morning, Mr. Peele,” Meltzer said, in the same cocky tone he’d used with Lewis Freeman. “How about inviting us in while my deputies look around?” He opened the warrant and held it up. Peele didn’t take it.

  “Do I have a choice?” he asked. No concern in his voice. He was a transplant from Pennsylvania, a Georgia State grad. He’d been married right out of college to a southern girl. They’d made their home here. He pointed to the rubber scraper doormat. “Wipe your feet, please.” He turned his back and walked inside, left the door standing open. He was wearing faded jeans and sandals, a tight short-sleeved red cotton pullover that showed off the width of his shoulders and the taper at his waist. Logan Peele was clearly as meticulous about caring for his body as he was his property. We followed a long hallway with gleaming hardwood floors and narrow woven runners. I saw smoke and carbon monoxide detectors near the ceiling and a security camera with a blinking motion light disguised to look like a smoke alarm. Classical music was coming from speakers wired into the walls. He led us into his living room. I glanced at the bookcase, at the furniture, modern and pricey, carefully chosen. I looked at the end tables and lamp bases. Not a speck of dust. The bookcase was lined with hardcovers—biographies, memoirs, books about how successful people get that way.

  “How about we go to the kitchen where we’ll be out of the way for a while? Coffee smells fresh,” the sheriff said. “Why don’t you make us a cup?”

  Peele’s fair skin pinkened at the sheriff’s suggestion. His jawbone reacted for a split second. Logan Peele didn’t like being told what to do and he didn’t like us taking over his home. He’d given up any expectation of privacy when he’d agreed to the terms of his parole. It would be difficult for a private man, a man who controlled his environment like Peele did, to live with that. It wasn’t sympathy I felt for him. It was simply understanding. He deserved much worse.

  We followed him to a kitchen with slate floors and a white marble island with four stools, two on each side, high cream-colored leather backs. There wasn’t an orange or an apple or a loaf of bread or a crumb anywhere. Everything was put away. It might as well have been a model home on a realtor’s tour. Peele took a glass carafe with milk from the fridge. The cabinets had clear fronts, and the matching onyx mugs and plates were ordered by size. He removed three cups from the cabinet, opened a drawer with a pullout Keurig rack, and took out three K-Cups marked FRENCH ROAST. The sheriff gave me a look that let me know he was enjoying this. We waited in silence while Peele filled our mugs one at a time and set them on the island next to the milk bottle and a bowl of sugar. He placed two spoons on top of a cloth napkin. The sheriff and I were on one side of the island. Peele was on the other with his back to the brushed-steel appliances and sink.

  “Want to tell me what this is about?” Peele asked. He sounded bored. He took a sip from his mug, then set it down. I tried my coffee. It was the first decent cup I’d had since arriving in this creepy little town.

  “You have a nice place, Logan,” Meltzer said breezily, ignoring his question. “You renovated about six months ago, didn’t you? Looks good. Work must be going well. You’re an IT guy, right? You write software or something?” The sheriff dipped a spoon in the sugar. Some of it spilled on the countertop on the way to his cup. Peele’s eyes tracked the spoon, watched the granules land.

  “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 n
ot 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.