Don’t Talk to Strangers: A Novel Read online

  “Moved them? Where?”

  “In a three-block circle,” he said as if it were a perfectly reasonable answer.

  “But why?” I asked.

  “Why? Because it was fun, Kiwi.” He said it as if I had some deficiency that inhibited my ability to grasp the concept of entertainment. “All that annoying construction traffic is going in circles now. Can you not see the fun in that?”

  I glanced at the officer. He was staring ahead through the windshield, politely ignoring my conversation. “I’m speechless,” I said into the phone.

  “Did you call to say you’re coming home? Because people are calling.”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “Tyrone’s Quikbail has a couple failures to appear. Larry Quinn has a job and about half a dozen attorneys need papers served.”

  “Put them off,” I said. “Don’t take anything that has to be done in the next week.”

  “A week?” Neil repeated. “You were talking a couple of days.”

  “I may need more time,” I told him, and glanced at the cop driving. I wanted to be careful about what I said. I didn’t want any rumors seeping out into the general population regarding the investigation. “I don’t know how much yet. You can handle it.”

  “Don’t get sucked in down there, Keye,” Neil said, and irritation shot through me like a bottle rocket. “You know how you get. And we have an employee now. You bring in the big jobs.”

  “I can’t talk about this right now, Neil. I need you to find some photographs real quick and email them to me.”

  “Sure. People or locations? You got names?” Neil asked.

  I glanced at the officer again. “I’ll shoot you a text with the info.”

  We pulled into the diner a few minutes later and parked behind my Impala. I hadn’t told the cop I was driving the old Impala but Whisper was tiny and Meltzer’s patrols probably knew every vehicle in town. And my license plate did say FULTON COUNTY. I thanked him for the ride, went to my car, pushed my key into the door. They didn’t have key fobs in 1969. No Bluetooth. No GPS. No satellite radios. You had to love a ’69 Impala for the sheer beauty of the machine.

  I lowered the top and pulled across my body the new seatbelt my dad had put in to replace the original old lap belts. That’s when I saw it on my windshield. A piece of white paper folded in half, then folded again so it hung like a parking ticket around the wiper blade. I got back out, plucked it off my windshield, and opened it.

  Dear Keye,

  I’m thinking about you too. I thought you would want to know that. I know they hired you to find me. I know all about you. I’ve wanted someone to talk to.

  Listen hard. Can you hear me? More soon.

  I held the note by the top corner and called Sheriff Meltzer. I read it to him as I opened my back door, found the aluminum case I use as a scene kit, and pulled out an evidence sleeve. My eyes swept the lot. Four cars. It was a slow midday at the Silver Spoon. I slid the note into the bag and sealed it.

  “Is it handwritten?”

  “Printed,” I answered.

  “Sounds like the kind of crap Logan Peele would pull. This morning he was gloating over knowing who you were. But we have his devices. So he’d have to go somewhere else to do it.”

  “This letter needs to go to your lab. I bagged it. You have a patrol in the area I can hand it off to?”

  “Raymond’s at the Whisper office. I’ll send him over to pick it up.”

  “He used my first name in this note, Sheriff. I think he feels some kind of connection.”

  “You need protection,” Meltzer said.

  “He doesn’t want me. He wants to challenge me. And himself.” I looked at the diner window. I saw the backs of a couple of customers at the counter. A woman in a booth was watching me through the window as she ate like she was staring at a television. “The more he communicates, the more we learn about him. This kind of offender wants to insert himself into an investigation, attempt to direct it one way or another, influence investigators. He gets off on the cat-and-mouse. Colin Ireland made calls to Scotland Yard. Zodiac was a letter writer and so was Wishbone. This guy may be special but he’s not unique, and judging from the letter he’s not terribly sophisticated either.”

  “You’re telling me we have a full-blown serial.”

  “Unfortunately, I don’t think he’s full-blown yet. His first victim’s injuries were consistent with captivity, struggle, attempts at escape.” I had to be careful. The sheriff knew Melinda Cochran. I didn’t want it to feel so personal that he couldn’t focus. “But the finger breaks in the second victim, her other injuries, that was him dipping his toe in the water. As I said over breakfast, he’s evolving, realizing and fulfilling different needs. And now he’s engaged us with this letter, issued a challenge. Figure me out. Catch me if you can. Listen to me. He just upped the ante. He’s not done, Sheriff.”

  “Then it’s time to go public with that information,” he snapped. “I’m sworn to protect the people here. They have to be made to understand the threat. I have to release the profile.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But, Ken—” I hadn’t used his first name before, and it stopped me for a second or two. “If my name is attached to the profile, Whisper is going to have a media problem and fast.”

  Silence—Meltzer weighing his options. “Understood.”

  17

  I made a quick sweep of the parking lot and the wide street in front of the diner. I could see the sign for my hotel two blocks down, and the shops on Main Street a block over, Whisper Park, the woods skirting it on one side, the middle school and shops and neighborhoods on the others. So many places to hide. Was he watching now? Had he waited to see me read the note, make the call he knew I would to Sheriff Meltzer? I checked the time: 2:12 p.m. How long had the note been sitting on my windshield? My car had been parked at the diner since very early this morning. I hadn’t known when I left the hotel to meet the sheriff that I would end up spending half the day in his vehicle tossing sex offenders.

  I walked inside the diner. Two guys at the counter turned on stools and stared at me. They had coffee cups. No plates. The woman in the booth who’d been watching me through the window had her eyes on me now, eyes without warmth or welcome. I didn’t recognize any of the employees, a server, a cook, a woman behind the cash register clicking the keys on a yellowing old tape calculator. The place was stone-cold quiet except for the sound of her tallying receipts.

  “Help you with something?” She stopped adding up tickets long enough to look at me. Normally, when someone walks into a diner, one assumes they’d like a seat, food, coffee. I wasn’t getting any offers.

  My raised voice, my official voice, the one I’d learned at the FBI, traveled through the nearly empty restaurant. “Did anyone see who left the note on the white Impala in the parking lot?” The counter guys swiveled back around to the counter and said nothing. No one else moved.

  I looked at the woman in the booth. “How about you?”

  “Nope.” That was all she said. It hung in the air, sour as bad milk.

  I looked at the cashier. “You?”

  She’d gone back to adding up receipts—keys clicking followed by the windup sound old tape calculators make when the tape advances. “Nope.” She drew it out so it sounded like new-ope.

  One of the counter guys glanced back. It reminded me of kids on a playground sneaking a look at whoever’s being bullied. We always want to see what that face looks like, don’t we? I wondered what mine looked like now as a spark of anger shot through me.

  “Have a nice day,” I said pleasantly, and walked out.

  Raymond was opening the door of his Crown Vic when I stepped into the steamy air. He was probably part of the reason I was receiving this icy reception. Who knew what he’d said, what he and his girlfriend Brolin had told people about me? I thought about the old server last night pulling away when he discovered who I was and warning me not to get on Raymond’s bad side. I felt the heat in my cheeks.
I was flushed. I didn’t even have to look in the mirror to know that. Okay, so maybe I don’t always light up a room when I walk in, but I’m not accustomed to the pariah treatment. Sometimes it can get weird in small, lily-white towns where I look so different from the general population. The Chinese heritage I know nothing about is all over my face, and the way I move, talk, dress, laugh—all of it—says I’m not from around here. Whisper felt like it was getting a lot smaller.

  “Sheriff said you’ve got something for the lab.” Raymond didn’t sound happy about being an errand boy. He’d gotten a haircut, and his receding hairline made it look like his dark hair started on top of his head. He had thick brows and a beefy face, J. Edgar Hoover–style. He was not an easy guy to like.

  I handed him the sleeve with the letter I’d found on my windshield. “Probably from the suspect,” I told him. “I handled it before I realized what it was. My prints are in the system. They can exclude me quickly.”

  “Could be someone yanking our chain,” he said. “People don’t like outsiders around here. Especially if they’re connected to the law. And watching us spinning our wheels is always fun for the troublemakers.”

  “Could be,” I admitted. I figured Raymond had a lot to do with people disliking law enforcement. “But the letter and the wording are consistent with the offender profile. We’re talking big ego here, Detective. He wants to be heard.”

  He slipped on gloves and laid the Baggie on the hood of my car, extracted the letter, read it, put it back in the sleeve. “Probably just somebody else thinks you’re a pain in the ass.” He stared at me, daring me to take the bait.

  “Thanks for your support.” I opened my driver’s door. “This is a creepy little town, by the way. And the coffee is terrible.”

  “Hey,” Raymond said. “Gotta be scary, huh? Getting something like this.”

  “I’m good,” I said. I got in my car.

  “Look, maybe we weren’t happy about you being here, Street. Maybe we still aren’t. But I already said everything I needed to say to you on the subject. So we’re square.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and watched him walk back to his car, his big hand holding the evidence at his side. Maybe I was growing on him after all.

  I checked my phone and found emails waiting. Neil had delivered the names and photographs I’d requested. I checked the time. Whisper High should be letting out. I wondered if Melinda Cochran’s group of friends had stayed together since her disappearance. Loyalties are an ever-shifting thing in the teenage years. They’d made the jump to high school now—ninth graders standing at the edge of the New World. Did the girls still walk home together from school? Did their parents allow it after their friend had vanished? My mother had talked about the atmosphere during the Atlanta Child Murders. I was too young and too shielded to remember. Twenty-nine black children and young men had been murdered. There was terror in the air before Wayne Williams was arrested and convicted. The children had walked together in tight little groups, latched on to one another like they were crossing rushing water. No one knew why children were being hunted or how the killer’s selection process worked, but he’d hunted in an area where parents had to work, where they didn’t have the luxury of stay-at-home moms or babysitters. So these children stepped out into the world fully aware that someone wanted to kill them. But they held hands and crowded together because there is safety in numbers. Even an offender willing to take some risk acquiring a victim won’t pluck them out of a group. That’s ex-lover and ex-husband territory. The one who stalks and plans and waits, he’s careful. His risk is measured. He has a life. He values it and his freedom.

  There was a tangle of traffic leaving the school—cars driven by students packed with kids. A line of buses curled around the front of the building. The parking lot was full of teenagers still hanging out, laughing, leaning against cars, trying to look cool, sneaking drags off cigarettes and attempting to hide plumes of smoke bellowing from young lungs. I pulled in and idled near a group of four, rested my elbow on my lowered window. The green-and-white sign at the edge of the lot said DRUG AND ALCOHOL FREE ZONE. NO SMOKING.

  “Anyone know Shannon Davis or Heather Ridge?” I asked, glancing at Neil’s email with the photographs of Melinda Cochran’s friends. “Or Briana Franklin?”

  A lanky boy with curly black hair pointed across the street with the cigarette in his hand. One of the girls slapped his arm. They all laughed. I followed his finger and saw three girls crossing the street, their books in their arms. I parked. It was a steamy-hot afternoon. I was wearing a pair of flared Max C’s and my favorite Elie Tahari V-neck button blouse clinging to me under the blazer I desperately wanted to leave in the car. But I needed something to cover the duty holster tucked against the small of my back. No way I was leaving my gun in the car. Maybe the note had shaken me up a little.

  I ran across the street. “Shannon!” I called out. All three girls turned, three skirts midthigh, tight tops, sparkly jewelry. “Hi.” I walked up, smiling. “And you’re Heather and you’re Briana.” I was so bubbly I could have been the head cheerleader.

  “And you’re the FBI lady,” the brown-haired girl answered. Heather. I had her Facebook profile picture on my phone. Her expression told me she wasn’t impressed.

  “Former,” I said. “I’m consulting with the sheriff’s department and I’d like to talk about Melinda Cochran.” Heather started walking. The others did too. It was pretty clear who was running this show. I walked with them. “I know it must have been really terrible to lose a friend like that. I’m sorry. I want to find out what happened to Melinda.”

  “You mean y’all don’t know yet?” Heather asked me. “We heard she was held prisoner by some freak that killed her.”

  Well, there was that. Always one in every crowd. I couldn’t tell if she was being the tough kid to cover her emotions or if she simply didn’t have them. It had been months since they’d lost their friend. Perhaps she’d just dealt with it and put it away somewhere. “What we know we learned because of forensics,” I told them. “What I need to find out is who did that to Melinda.”

  “We don’t know who.” Briana had dark wavy hair and deep blue eyes, some baby fat, but she was going to be a full-on knockout one day. “We all miss her a lot.”

  Shannon hugged her books with long, skinny arms and watched the ground as we walked.

  “The day Melinda disappeared,” I said, “I understand you’d all walked home from school together. Was there anything different about that day?”

  “Um. Yeah. Melinda disappeared off the planet. That was different,” Heather answered. She began to recite their routine in a voice that told me she’d been through it all before. “We left school, we crossed the park, we bought Cokes from the machine at the hardware store, and then we came straight home.”

  “It was just a, you know, normal day,” Shannon said, quietly. “Before that, I mean. Before Melinda.”

  Heather pointed ahead. About a hundred feet down I saw brick-columned entrances on either side of the road, each with a subdivision name. “Melinda lived in the neighborhood there. It’s not as nice as where we live in Lakeshore Estates.”

  Shannon jumped in. “But it’s not like our parents are rich or anything. Our neighborhood is just newer.”

  “Newer, better, and we have the lake on our side. But whatev,” Heather snarked.

  “According to your statements, Melinda turned off toward her neighborhood before you went into yours.” I looked up the street to confirm that Melinda’s turn would have come before theirs. It did. “And you didn’t see or hear anything unusual.”

  “Right,” Heather said. Shannon and Briana nodded.

  “No cars on the street?” I followed up. “Looks like you could have seen into her neighborhood as you passed. Nothing comes to mind?”

  “We can see the main street but we can’t see into the neighborhood. We already told the cops everything,” Heather insisted petulantly. This kid was starting to get on my nerves. “M
elinda turned left and we turned right. We didn’t see anyone and we didn’t hear anything. It’s not like we knew she would fucking just vanish.”

  “Okay,” I said evenly. My mother would have slapped my eyeballs over to my ears if I’d used the F word to an adult at her age. “You remember anyone driving by? Anyone stopping to say hello while you were walking that day?” I looked from Heather to Briana and Shannon. Head shakes all around.

  Heather eyed me. “My brother says the sheriff’s department is really lame if they have to hire a Chinese chick.”

  “Oh my God, Heather!” Briana gasped. Giggles rippled through the group.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I think he’s a racist prick first of all. And second, he’s threatened by strong women.”

  “Good call,” I said. “When did you realize something happened to Melinda?”

  “Her mom and dad started calling everyone after a couple hours,” Briana said. “Her mom was off work that day and I guess she thought Melinda came home with one of us at first. But then she got worried.”

  “And then we all started calling Melinda’s phone.” Shannon was skinny and pale with wide eyes and heavy lids that made her look like she might need a hospital ward any minute. “And all we got was voice mail. Over and over.”

  “Did Melinda have a boyfriend?” I pressed. A beat passed.

  “She was awkward,” Heather answered finally. “Especially with boys. She was, like, one of those girls who was never going to see a dick.”

  “Nice,” I said.

  “God, Heather,” Briana said. “That’s so disrespectful.”

  “It’s not like she can hear us,” Heather defended herself.