Don’t Talk to Strangers: A Novel Read online

“How about you, Heather?” I asked. “See a lot of dick?” I’d surprised her. It was the first time the superior smirk had faded. “It doesn’t take any skill. You know? Pretty much any guy in the world is happy to show it to you. You want to impress people? Start talking about how many A’s you’re pulling in. Because dick is easy. And bragging about it makes you look desperate and stupid.” I shifted my gaze to Heather’s friends. “So what was the usual routine? Y’all hang out in the park or the coffee shop or anything after school?”

  “What does any of this even matter anymore?” Heather asked quietly. I’d embarrassed her and it was taking her a minute to recover her bravado.

  “Sometimes the tiniest things turn out to be really important,” I said. I didn’t talk about how the smallest shred of information might tell us how he got so close, selected Melinda, accessed her life, then ended it, and sliced into all their childhoods.

  “We used the swings in the park sometimes, and sometimes we got ice cream and talked to whoever was in there. Kids mostly,” Shannon said.

  “Wait,” Heather said, as if she’d just remembered. “She had band practice once a week.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Briana confirmed. “On Wednesdays, I think.”

  “She played something geeky like clarinet,” Heather added. “And Mr. Tray is kind of weird and too touchy-feely.” Her bright eyes caught mine. Smart kid. Must give her teachers hell. “And not just with girls either. I mean, he’s older than you are and he’s not even married or anything.” She glanced at my ring finger. “Oh. Sorry.”

  “What exactly do you mean by touchy-feely?” I asked.

  “It’s more like rumors,” Briana said.

  Dangerous rumors, if the teacher hadn’t earned them. “Are you telling me Mr. Tray behaved inappropriately with his students?”

  Briana and Shannon shifted their meek gazes to their friend Heather. “He just, you know, he’s creepy.”

  “Ah,” I said. “You do know if a teacher or any adult is behaving inappropriately you need to tell someone immediately, right?”

  Heather smirked. “We’ve had that lecture.”

  “And I hope you also know that rumors that aren’t true about teachers can ruin them,” I added.

  The girls said nothing. Their eyes said I was being a boring adult.

  “Did Melinda walk home alone after band practice?” I asked, and got affirmative nods. If Brolin and Raymond had performed a thorough victimology this information would have been in the files already. I would have known that our victim walked alone one day a week. Her risk goes up. The offender’s goes way down.

  The sidewalk had sloped down as we neared the entrance to their neighborhood. I caught glimpses of the lake sparkling through the trees over rooftops in their new “nicer” development. On the left I saw the sign for Briarwood Subdivision where Melinda had lived. I could see down the wide main street that ran into the neighborhood. No cars parked against the white curbs. “Did Melinda say anything about having plans that day? Is there a chance she wasn’t going straight home?”

  Shrugs all around.

  “Did she keep a diary that you know of?”

  “I don’t think she was the diary type,” Heather said. “She was more the Twitter and Facebook type.”

  “Does this man look familiar?” I handed my phone to Heather. She studied the photo of Logan Peele, then passed it from small hand to small hand, hands with plastic rings and nail polish and bright rubber wristbands. They took their time looking at Peele’s face, at his piercing eyes. One by one they said they’d never seen him or his gray F-150 in the neighborhood.

  “We heard that girl that disappeared a long time ago was found too, where Melinda was found,” Heather said. “Is it true?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Her name was Tracy.”

  “Is he going to try to get us too?”

  I swallowed the ache I felt for them. “Nah. Just be alert,” I said with a good deal more calm than I felt. “Stay together when your parents aren’t around. Bad guys don’t like groups. Don’t let anyone talk you into anything that doesn’t feel right. Even if it’s just a ride home. And if anyone tries, make a lot of noise, scream, run, and call nine-one-one.”

  Shannon pulled the chain around her neck up out of her shirt. A silver whistle at the end rocked back and forth like a pendulum. “They gave these to everyone at school.”

  “That’s great,” I said. But it broke my heart a little. Kids shouldn’t have to wear whistles. Kids shouldn’t have to worry about being bound and gagged and murdered. “Was anything bothering Melinda? Problems at home, anything?”

  “Her parents were poor. They fought about money sometimes,” Heather said.

  “My parents fight about money and we’re not poor,” Briana contributed. “I don’t think.”

  “Here’s my card. Call my mobile if you think of something.” I gave them each a business card. “Just use your head until we get this creep, okay?”

  18

  I drove to the middle school, where the bell rang half an hour later than the high school. I parked and worked my way against the stream of kids blasting through propped-open double doors. The hall was packed. I stuck my head in a door marked TEACHERS’ LOUNGE, empty but for one woman lowering herself into a chair. She put a can of Coke and a package of cheese crackers on the table in front of her, and looked exactly like you’d imagine a teacher must feel after a day with eleven-, twelve-, and thirteen-year-old kids. Or as my dad would say, “Shot at and missed. Shit at and hit.”

  “I’m looking for Mr. Tray’s room,” I told her.

  “It’s the band room. Take a right at the end of the hall.” She popped the top on the can, leaned back, and blew out enough air to puff her cheeks.

  “Thanks.” I smiled. “Carry on.”

  “Oh hey, Mr. Tray leaves early twice a week. I haven’t seen him since this morning.” She grabbed the crackers off the table and tore the corner with her teeth, spit out cellophane. “I think today was one of his days.”

  I walked through the emptying halls. The band room door was locked. I returned to my car and found Highway 441, then turned south. Just a couple of hundred yards outside the city limits, I spotted the huge white bowling pin against the sky. Under it, a long red-and-white block building. A bowling-pin-shaped sign hung like a marquee on the front of the building. WHISPER LANES. OPEN LATE. The word COCKTAILS blinked in lavender neon on the front door. The building appeared windowless, a bunker the size of a football field. There were a couple of eighteen-wheelers in a dirt parking lot, a pickup truck, a white van, a Cadillac, and an old Dodge Dart that looked like it might have once been a burgundy color.

  I pushed through the door from brilliant sunlight to dimly lit lounge. It took a second for my eyes to adjust. Ahead of me all twenty-four bowling lanes were oiled and gleaming and lit up. But the front of the space was deep in neon shadows like most roadside taverns. I saw the bar to the right with customers on stools. Round tables with chairs were set up like an airport lounge. A silver-haired man in a short-sleeved buttondown and brown dress pants let go of a bright yellow ball. I watched it roll toward the pins, striking them hard. The noise didn’t seem to bother anyone. Apparently a bowling alley was as good a place as any to pull off the highway and have a drink in the early afternoon.

  I went to the lounge, nodded at the man behind the bar. “You’re Keye Street,” he said. He was filling a mug from his tap. “My wife said she met you this morning. I’m Bryant Cochran. Give me a second and I’ll meet you at a table. Want something to drink?”

  Yes, I did. I wanted a big, honking glass of, well, anything. Vodka preferably—coating my throat and loosening up my shoulders and neck. I wanted to feel the heaviness on my tongue. I wanted to forget the way I felt when Meltzer looked at me. I wanted to find out who was taking girls and torturing them and killing them. “I’d love a club soda,” I answered. “With lemon.”

  I waited at a table while Bryant Cochran checked on his customers and po
ured my soda. I kept thinking about Logan Peele, about the way he’d looked at me in his kitchen, standing there with an ice cube held against his bloodied lip, arrogant and taunting. I thought about the way he knew me. I thought about the note on my windshield.

  Two guys at the bar in T-shirts and ball caps drank butter-colored beer from clear glasses and talked about hunting season opening next month and hunting stuff. We don’t do a lot of hunting on Peachtree Street. Not that kind anyway.

  A woman sitting two stools down drank white wine and listened to them. She was in black skinny jeans, flats, a shoulder-length curly perm. “Why y’all wanna talk about killing all the time?” She spoke to them in a teasing way that said they all knew one another. “Didn’t your mamas take you to see Bambi?”

  Bryant Cochran came to the table in jeans, worn to blue-white, and a red baseball cap. He was a big guy, Rauser’s height, but thicker. The jeans were tight around his thighs. He had a close black beard and the kind of chalky complexion you get from living your life inside.

  “Is it hard to be in a bar?” he asked. I looked at his face and believed he was absolutely sincere. He set my soda down, flipped a chair around, and straddled it across from me. He’d obviously Googled me. And boy, was there ever a boatload of information out there, both true and outright fiction. So thrilled alcoholism and meltdown were now an official part of my bio. Always instills confidence.

  “It is, kind of,” I said, and looked into his blue-gray eyes.

  “I know,” he said. In the background, a slow but steady steam of bowling balls rolled down an alley. I’d never bowled. I’d never even been inside a bowling alley. Not that I was above it. I’d spent plenty of time in bars with a pool cue in my hand. “I had to give it up too.” He said it with the matter-of-fact cadence of a country boy. “Drinking, I mean. A couple years ago when the bowling alley business wasn’t supporting us, Molly and me had to think long and hard before I applied for a liquor license. It’s tempting on bad days.”

  “And I know you’ve had some lately,” I said. “I’m sorry about Melinda.”

  His eyes lifted to mine. “It breaks you, Miss Street. It takes a guy like me and snaps him right in half. It was bad enough when we didn’t know where she was. But now knowing she’d been held and all.” He cleared his throat. “Can you find out who did this? I want to look that bastard in the eye. I want him to know what he did to us.”

  He thought confronting the monster who had treated his daughter to inexplicable cruelty would give him closure. Family members can’t wait for those moments in the courtroom. They want to tell him how he dismantled a family, how he broke their hearts and marriages and lives. But telling a psychopath who wants and needs to make his mark on the lives of others how deeply he wounded you is nothing more than handing him a parting gift. It’s another sick memory he can take off to jail with him. I wish judges wouldn’t allow it. I wish families understood that the man they were attempting to shame was soaking it in, savoring their pain, and probably fighting a growing erection. These guys don’t have a heart you can touch with your pain.

  “Mr. Cochran,” I began carefully. He stopped me and asked me to call him by his first name. “Bryant,” I started again. And I was careful. You can’t talk to the family of a victim in the detached way you talk to professionals. You can’t describe the psychological characteristics of a crime scene to the grieving father of a murdered girl. You can’t break them any more than they’ve been broken. “Because Melinda was found in this area with another girl who also lived in Hitchiti County, we believe the suspect is local. Especially given the length of time between their disappearances. I think we’re looking for someone who has been in this area a long time, someone you or your wife may know.” I stopped there. I didn’t mention other similarities—broken bones and sexual abuse. I wasn’t sure how much the sheriff or his investigators had shared with the parents and I didn’t want to drop an emotional bomb for the second time today. I thought again about Jeff Davidson, shaggy and thin and hopeless, staring down at his hands and planning to open his veins with a kitchen knife.

  Bryant Cochran glanced at his customers at the bar, the two guys, the woman, then leaned forward and said very quietly, “I … we … always figured it was a stranger.” There was emotion in his voice and it embarrassed him. “Whisper is surrounded by highway. And some of these truckers that come in here are rough guys. No.” He shook his head. “Nobody that lives around here would do something like that.” He blinked watery eyes, sniffed, touched his nose self-consciously with the back of his hand.

  I took a sip of my club soda and wished again it were loaded with Absolut. “It’s hard to imagine an everyday person could be capable of something so terrible, I know. But one of the things I’ve learned about this kind of individual is that there’s a psychological disconnect between the terrible part-time violence in their life and their real life, the life where they’re part of a community. It’s the same kind of disconnect that a lot of us have in our everyday lives but it’s taken to the extreme. You run a bar. You’ve seen guys talk to women in a way they’d absolutely hate their mothers or wives or sisters being talked to. Multiply that kind of emotional disconnect between behavior and values by about a hundred.”

  Cochran was silent.

  “Did you or your wife know Tracy Davidson and her family?” I asked. “Is there any connection between you at all? Same church, same anything?”

  “That’s the girl they found when Melinda was found?” he asked, and I nodded. “Neither one of us knew any of them. And I don’t believe we ever ran across them doing anything. Molly and me both grew up around here. I don’t know one person in Silas. We only half remember seeing posters of her after she ran away.”

  “Tracy didn’t run away,” I said flatly. “She disappeared under circumstances very similar to Melinda’s.” Another ball rumbled down the alley and cracked into bowling pins. “I want you to think about the people in your life or in Melinda’s life, all the relationships. Did she ever have any interaction with someone that didn’t feel right to you? Maybe you just felt something in your gut. An adult, a friend who paid too much attention to her. Did she ever mention anyone who bothered her? I know this is tough but it will help.”

  Bryant Cochran shook his big head. “Nobody in our life that couldn’t be trusted with a child.” It was a belief held by most people who loved and trusted their friends and family. And it wasn’t true.

  “Was there anyone Melinda may have confided in if something was bothering her?”

  “Just her friends, I guess.”

  “Did Melinda keep a diary?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “I understand she was in the school band.”

  Bryant nodded, smiled a little. “The band got to go to the Rose Bowl last year. Melinda was so excited. That was just a couple weeks before she disappeared.”

  “I’ve heard good things about the band teacher,” I lied. I’d heard terrible accusations from Melinda’s friends. But I figured it would fly with Cochran. If the teacher got the band to the Rose Bowl he must be pretty good.

  “He’s all right, I guess. Only met him a few times,” Cochran said. “But he does good with the band.”

  “Doesn’t sound like you’re crazy about him.”

  “I think he’s gay. Like he-oughta-come-with-track-lighting gay,” Cochran said. “It’s just uncomfortable for a guy like me, you know? I don’t like being around ’em.”

  What I knew about big burly guys who get uncomfortable with gay men is that they need to turn that spotlight inward. I thought about all the times my brother had been picked on by homophobic creeps. I slid my card onto the table. “Please don’t hesitate to call if you think of something.”

  “Thank you, Miss Street. I heard about how they treated you at the Silver Spoon. Molly wouldn’t have let that happen if she’d been there. Somebody put something on your windshield?”

  “A note,” I said casually. “Did you hear who put it there?�
�

  “Nah, but you know how rumors get started in a small place like this. The sheriff is an eligible bachelor.” He said it with a half smile, without bitterness, with something close to admiration. I thought again about the text from Molly Cochran the sheriff had ignored. They were friends, I kept telling myself. He was investigating the murder of her daughter. It was normal. “And some people might have thought y’all looked awful cozy over breakfast.”

  I smiled. “That’s why I’m getting the cold shoulder?”

  He shrugged. “Some cops might think you’re here to make them look bad. Mostly people aren’t used to having an outsider asking questions. Outsiders are usually just tourists. People are private around here.”

  “So I’ve heard,” I said.

  “And, well, you’re a woman and, you know, an Oriental.”

  ——

  He’d seen her on the periphery, coming out of that little stretch of woods behind the park. Right on time. That’s the thing about good girls. You can count on them.

  He didn’t look up. Not even when he felt her next to him, bending into his raised hood, peering into the engine as he was.

  “Whatcha doing over here?” She turned her head and smiled at him. He could smell the grape bubblegum in her mouth. His pulse tapped against his collar. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Wish I knew,” he said.

  She looked back at the engine. “You going to fix it with duct tape?” She giggled at the roll of silver tape sitting on the radiator.

  He laughed with her. “Guess I should have learned something about cars.” He rubbed engine dirt off his hands onto the shop rag he’d stuffed in his pocket. “I can’t find my phone. I need to call somebody.”

  He watched her reach into the leather bag that hung off her slim shoulders and pull out a phone in a rubbery pink case. Her little pink lifeline. She was going to give it up, just hand it over. And she did.

  He keyed in a number, tucked the phone against his shoulder, and leaned back to look at the engine. She leaned in too as if she might be able to help. He jiggled a hose around with the rag, but he was barely aware of his own movements now. His heart was fluttering like a hummingbird. A recorded message that her family had made was playing in his ear, the three of them together taking turns saying their names. Hi, this is Brooks. And Hayley. And Skylar. And then all together—And Luke. You know what to do after the tone. Yes, he certainly did know what to do.