Don’t Talk to Strangers: A Novel Read online

  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.

  “Of course, Raymond and Brolin are over here every day at some point,” Meltzer added as we walked toward the doors. “The labs, court appearances. Be a lot more convenient for them here. But inconvenience builds character. Think I’ll keep them in Whisper awhile longer.” The smile again, this time with a wink.

  We pushed open glass doors and cruised through security, Meltzer stopping to talk to the deputies whose responsibility it is to guard the judicial center. He was light with them, friendly; he appeared to know everyone’s name. Ken Meltzer was not a sit-behind-the-desk kind of sheriff. I wondered how that would work for him in Washington if he managed to get elected. He’d like the campaigning, I decided. He was good with people.

  I stopped just past the security check and waited for one of the deputies to hand me the plastic bowl with my keys and phone. Carved into the floor in the atrium were the words, “THE OFFICE OF SHERIFF CARRIES WITH IT THE DUTY TO PRESERVE THE PEACE AND PROTECT THE LIVES, PROPERTY, HEALTH, AND MORALS OF THE PEOPLE.”—GEORGIA SUPREME COURT. I don’t know about you, but I get a little nervous when anyone wants to be in charge of morals.

  In the sheriff’s tenth-floor office, he gave me access to Jeff Davidson’s file and some time to read it in an empty office before I headed for the bridge that connected the two towers and waited alone in an interview room for Jeff Davidson, younger brother to Tracy Davidson, the first victim to disappear and turn up at the bottom of an isolated embankment.

  The room looked like a hundred others I’d seen. A box with sage walls, a table, two metal chairs, a camera angled in the corner, recording, broadcasting live to monitors somewhere, an interior window with an invisible observation room behind it. A deputy had delivered a bottle of water. I asked for a second one.

  Jeffrey Davidson came in with cuffed wrists hanging in front of him. He had his mother’s wide eyes. But the strong bridge of his nose, the dimple on one cheek, the perfectly shaped lips reminded me of the photographs in his sister’s file. His hair was dark and needed a cut. The safety-orange jumpsuit hung on him. He sat down across from me. I asked the deputy to uncuff him. Davidson had been in a string of trouble, none of it violent: petty theft, break-ins when homeowners were away, then grand theft auto. He’d never used a weapon, never been aggressive. He had stayed out of trouble in jail too.

  The deputy unlocked the cuffs and took them with him. I switched the voice recorder on my phone to the on position and set it on the table between us, bare except for the two water bottles. I looked at Jeff Davidson’s thin face. “My name is Keye Street. I’m a consultant to the sheriff’s department. I’m here to assist in the investigation of your sister’s murder.”

  “Murder?” Color drained from his face. “They found her?” No one had told him. Jesus. It never crossed my mind I would be the bearer of this news. I certainly might have delivered it differently. He’d been in jail when the bodies were discovered. He either didn’t have access to news or wasn’t interested. I wondered when or if his mother had last visited. I couldn’t imagine her not making the drive from Silas to inform him. It was less than ten miles away.

  “Yes,” I answered quietly. “They found her. I’m sorry.”

  Davidson clasped bony hands together and looked down at dirty nails. Dark hair fell in front of his eyes. “It’s a little late, isn’t it?” he asked finally. His voice was even and he’d learned how to disguise some of the accent he’d probably had growing up, the one his mother had. But I could hear that country road and that little house where he’d been raised in every word. I thought about the bug lady again and her weird aquarium, her thick drawl, the too-long, too-blond hair, the regrets. I didn’t feel sorry for her this time. I just felt pissed off. Why hadn’t she bothered to inform her son about the discovery of his sister’s body?

  “Yes, it is,” I told him. “But we still have a chance to catch the person who did this.” I handed him the bottle of water across the table. He took it, uncapped it, and gulped some down.

  “Where?” he wanted to know. Of course he wanted to know. They’d been close. Tracy’s disappearance was probably the most traumatic event of a childhood chock-full of trauma. Tracy had protected him from a violent father and had given him what a neglectful mother couldn’t. I silently cursed his bug-killing mama again for not getting her ass over here. Some people should not have children. I thought about my biological addicts, otherwise known as parents. At least they’d had the good sense to give me up.

  “Do you know of a place called Oconee Campground and RV Park?” I asked Jeff.

  “Sure. It’s in the national forest. Or near it. I used to park there and go fishing sometimes.”

  “You ever go down there with Tracy?”

  Davidson shook his head. “Neither one of us was old enough to drive when she disappeared. And we lived miles away in Silas. That was where she was found?”

  “Close to there.”

  “Do they know how?” he asked. “How she died?”

  “Someone hit her very hard,” I said. I didn’t want to tell him the weapon dug into Tracy’s skull and left a pattern of radiating fractures, that she’d been held prisoner, that she’d probably experienced childbirth in captivity. I didn’t want to be the one to tell him she’d been discarded in the woods and left to decompose.

  “So what are you gonna do now?” he wanted to know.

  “Try to understand a little more about Tracy’s life,” I answered. “Do you remember Tracy having any older friends? Maybe someone she kept a secret? An older boyfriend?”

  “We didn’t have no kind of life,” he said.

  I showed him a picture of Logan Peele. “Does this man look familiar at all?”

  He stared at the photo for a few seconds. “Yeah. I seen him. He was in here once when I was here. Mean, I heard. I never got close to him.”

  “But you’d never seen him before that? When you were kids, I mean?”

  He shook his head. “You think he did it?”

  “Was there anyone she confided in? A teacher, maybe? Any adults who may be able to help us now?”

  Once more, he shook his head. “I don’t think so, but we were in different grades with different teachers.” He looked down at his hands again.

  “How about after-school activities?”

  Jeff Davidson looked up from his clasped hands. “You shittin’ me? What we had was get home and do the chores so you didn’t get your ass beat. That was our after-school activity. We went to school and we came right home. And once a week if he felt generous my father would let us
leave on Sunday and go to church. And we didn’t talk to nobody because we knew what was waiting for us if it ever got back to him. I didn’t have no kind of life until that bastard went to jail.”

  16

  Ken Meltzer was on his desk phone. He waved me in. The office was spacious with a view of downtown Muscogee Creek, the county seat, which sat on the banks of the lake. His desk was covered with papers and sticky notes with little arrows pointing to signature lines without a signature. He was agreeing on the phone, reluctantly it seemed to me, to speak at some function. “This is why I don’t like being here,” he told me when he finally hung up. “Someone always finds out. And Doris isn’t here to protect me. How’d it go?”

  “He didn’t know about Tracy,” I said, and knew instantly my darkening mood was evident. “Don’t you notify prisoners when something happens with a family member?”

  “Sure,” Meltzer said. “We have a system. I’ll find out what went wrong.”

  “He didn’t recognize Logan Peele’s photograph. Not from eleven years ago anyway. But he recognized his face from lockup. Told me Peele was mean. Had a reputation.” I thought about Logan Peele, about his bright, amused, utterly confident eyes. The arrogant prick. “He didn’t have a lot of information to offer. But I have a clearer picture of Tracy’s home life. Father sounds like a typical abuser. He isolated those kids. They were terrified of him.”

  “It’s discouraging, isn’t it.” It wasn’t a question. It was an I’ve been there.

  “Jeff Davidson is twenty-one,” I answered. “And he has nothing but a mass of scars from warring parents and violence and kidnapping, and not much chance of turning his life around.”

  “Eighty percent of the kids around here come from families with incomes below the poverty level, Keye. The only rich people in Hitchiti County are the part-timers with summer homes up around the resorts. What we produce here are service people and support staff. It’s got to stop. We have to find a way to give them opportunity. Poverty and hopelessness breed crime.”

  I didn’t know many law enforcement professionals who considered social and economic issues when dealing with criminals. I told him that. “You know why I teach that tae kwon do class on Saturdays?” he asked. “It’s about discipline, respect, humility, meditation, funneling your energy and strength. It gives them self-esteem. These kids will need it later in life. Change is coming to this area, but it’s going to take time. Years.”

  “Spoken like a congressman,” I said. His eyes stayed on mine. Something about the way he looked at me, something knowing in his gaze, made the moment feel too intimate. I entertained a vivid fantasy of flying out the door and down the long, cold marbled corridors, back to my car, back to Atlanta, back to Rauser. Because everything about those moments when he looked at me like that felt too close, too warm, too familiar, too right.

  There was a tap on the door. Meltzer didn’t take his eyes off me when he said, “It’s open.”

  A man with thinning hair and a business suit stepped inside. He was very thin with glasses, dark frames. He nodded politely to me. “May I speak with you privately, Sheriff?”

  “Sure thing.” Meltzer pushed away from his desk, walked out into the corridor. The door closed. I sat there for a moment with just the faint sound of men’s voices through the thick door. I got up and walked to the windows, looked out at Meltzer’s view. What was I doing? What was I doing? I’d had a few flirtations in my life. I knew exactly where those long looks led. The terrible truth that I was as attracted to him as he was to me filled me with guilt. This wasn’t me. I’m not a flirter. Not when I’m in a relationship. Or a cheater. But I had a saboteur’s heavy hand when it came to relationships, career, success. I wasn’t going to do it this time. I wasn’t going to let Ken Meltzer’s dreamy brown eyes do me in. I loved Rauser, handsome, sexy, kind, funny Rauser. I knew what this was about. Rauser was living in my house and the fucking walls were closing in. It was the first time I’d admitted to myself that I wasn’t ready. I was barely pieced back together after my life had totally collapsed. I didn’t want to feel married again. I didn’t want to feel responsible for someone’s happiness. It’s temporary, I reminded myself. Rauser’s house will be back together in a couple of months and he’ll go back home. Fighting to get time together is much better than having too much. I thought about the silverware drawer I’d labeled. That’s why Rauser had been so angry. Because he knew what it meant. Funny how it always seems like you’re doing great until someone is standing in front of you, willing and capable and put together, and you realize how broken you are. I find it unbearable.

  I noticed the sheriff’s iPhone on his desk. For the record, investigators not only have a suspicious nature but are prone to outright, unapologetic nosiness. I stood very still and listened to the muted voices beyond the wood door. I thought this over. One little voice knew it probably wasn’t right to look at the sheriff’s messages. One little voice wanted to go for it. Three guesses which one won out.

  I picked up the phone and hit the message icon. The first name on his list of messages was Molly. Not Molly Cochran. Just Molly. I was going to click on it when the door cracked open. I saw Meltzer’s hand holding it partially closed, heard affirmative yes sirs. I returned the phone hastily to the homepage and dropped it on the desk.

  I was standing at the window looking out at the town edging up against the lake when he came back in. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting.” Meltzer’s voice was smooth, but I knew as soon as I looked at him that something was wrong. “Come and sit down, Keye,” he said. I took my chair across from his desk and he took the other one, faced me. “It’s the Davidson kid. He’s dead.”

  “How?” I thought of the way his eyes refused to meet mine, how he kept gazing down at his gritted hands.

  “Suicide,” he answered quietly. “Six more months and he was out of here.”

  “Are they sure it was suicide?”

  I could see a white square of sky from the window in his dark eyes. He blinked like someone just coming awake, a long, slow blink. “Found him in the kitchen where he worked. Security cameras got the whole thing, apparently. He used a kitchen knife.”

  “Jesus,” I muttered. I thought again about that thin young man sitting across from me in a chilled interview room. I’m here to assist in the investigation of your sister’s murder. I looked at the sheriff.

  “Model prisoner,” Meltzer said. “Had a lot of freedom. I talked to Tina Brolin. Mrs. Davidson specifically requested we allow her to notify Jeff that his sister’s remains had been identified.”

  “Well, she never made it,” I said. “And I didn’t know.” I heard an unexpected rush of emotion shake my voice. “I didn’t prepare him at all. Shit.”

  “This isn’t your fault, Keye. He had eleven years to prepare. It’s absurd to think he hadn’t considered the probability.”

  “Maybe it was about hope. The last flicker of a flame getting snuffed out. His sister must have been his only connection in life. The person he knew loved him.”

  Meltzer nodded. We were silent for a couple of minutes. “This man who took Tracy and Melinda, he killed Jeff Davidson,” Meltzer said. “Maybe he didn’t hold the knife but he killed him just the same. I see it with Melinda’s parents. Molly and Bryant were happy once. He destroyed them.”

  I thought again about the text from Molly I hadn’t had time to read. “Were they happy? Their marriage, I mean. Before Melinda disappeared?”

  “I think they had some stressors,” the sheriff replied. “Money. Took a while to get the bowling alley profitable, I think. But they wouldn’t have talked to me about that. We’re not that kind of friends. And people around here are quiet about their private lives. Why the interest?”

  “I’m just looking for something else those girls had in common besides age, gender, and blond hair. He accessed their lives somehow. He spotted them somewhere. We know Tracy’s parents had problems. Just wondering if that was true for Melinda.”

  “Even if it w
as, how would that give the killer access to their lives?”

  “It may not be relevant, Sheriff. I’m searching just like you are. But my experience tells me that selection is rarely truly random in series crimes even with strangers. Maybe it’s a physical type, a way these girls carry themselves, speak. Maybe it’s something else, something deeper, a circumstance in their life. He saw them somewhere and he decided he wanted them. We need to entertain every possibility.”

  “I’m going to ask someone from patrol to get you back to your car. I’ve got to deal with this. I need to handle the notification myself this time. Don’t imagine this will be easy for Mrs. Davidson. Maybe she knew Jeff would react this way. Maybe that’s why she didn’t tell him.”

  I thought about Josey Davidson sitting in her carport twisting her wires, blowing glass around her bugs, two dead children and a thug for a husband. Some lives are hard to look back on and find a reason to stay sober. “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe she’s just a shitty mother.”

  I felt a blast of heat coming up off the baking asphalt as I pushed through doors and stepped outside. A police car eased out of a parking space and came to a stop in front of me. The window came down. “Climb in, Dr. Street. We’ll get you over to Whisper. Silver Spoon, right?”

  “Right. Thanks.” I got in. The officer and I exchanged small talk. He was polite. I asked if he minded if I made a call. He didn’t.

  I pressed in Neil’s number. “How’s everything at the office?” I asked. “Any kitchen fires? Lost clients? Injuries?”

  “It’s all good. Pretty quiet, actually.” Neil sounded cheerful. He’d probably used mood-altering substances outside on the docks. This is his idea of not smoking pot at the office. On those rare occasions we have a client come to our business, the one I spent a bazillion dollars redecorating, I’d like for it not to smell like a frat party. “We moved all the DETOUR signs on the street,” Neil told me. I heard Latisha laugh in the background. “There were eight of them.”