Don’t Talk to Strangers: A Novel Read online

  He grinned. “I see that. You heading out to the boonies?” He knew the details—I’d explained last night while we walked Hank—the girls, both the same age, both of them disappearing on their way home from school, both of them held for months before the heavy swing of a narrow-headed object ended their lives.

  “I want to at least check it out.”

  “It’s bugging you, isn’t it?” Rauser asked. “Because those girls were held somewhere and because there may be another one there right now. I knew you wouldn’t be able to leave it alone.”

  “Professional curiosity,” I said, smiling up at him. He bent and gave me a quick kiss while keeping his body as far away from me as possible. “It’s coffee and orange juice,” I said. “It’s not toxic waste.”

  “Whatever it is I don’t want any.” He slipped past me sideways so his clothes couldn’t brush mine and headed down the hall.

  “Hey, don’t forget to feed Hank and White Trash while I’m gone!” I called behind him.

  He stepped into the elevator, pointed a finger at me. “I got this,” he promised. The doors closed on his big, handsome smile.

  An hour later I was showered and packed and on the way to my office with a suitcase in the backseat of the Impala. Neil was sitting at the kitchen table with an enormous bowl of cereal when I came in. Latisha was there too with her nose in a paperback. This was a first. It was quarter till nine. There was coffee in the French press. I poured a cup and leaned back against the counter.

  “You have a chance to look at sex offenders in Hitchiti County?”

  He looked up at me through blond lashes. “Good morning to you too.” He was wearing the plaid shorts and Vans slip-ons he’d had on yesterday, but his hair was combed and his eyes were clear. “Do you mind if I finish my Lucky Charms?”

  “Is that seriously what you’re eating?” I asked. “Why don’t you just lick the sugar bowl?”

  “Oh really? You want to compare diets?” Neil asked me.

  I looked at Latisha. She held up a palm. “I don’t start work until nine. Besides, I cannot put this shit down.” She used the slate-gray paperback she was reading to fan herself. “Know what I’m sayin’?”

  Neil hunched over his Lucky Charms. His spoon hit the side of the bowl on every bite. I stood there for a minute, sipping my coffee, marveling once again at the turn my life had taken. Five years ago I would have bet good money I wasn’t going to end up running a private detective business with an insubordinate pot-smoking former cyber-criminal and an insubordinate nineteen-year-old potty mouth.

  Neil rinsed his bowl and put it in the dishwasher. “Okay, so here’s the thing. There’s two hundred and thirty-four registered sex offenders in Hitchiti County,” he told me. “A hundred of them are homegrown and either still live there or came back during the right timeframe. A hundred. Out of the hundred and thirty-four transplants, only twelve of them would have been there when Tracy Davidson disappeared eleven years ago. So that’s a hundred and twelve possibilities among registered offenders.”

  “Okay, let’s narrow the pool to something manageable. Exclude everyone in apartment buildings, quadraplexes, or duplexes where holding a prisoner would be too risky,” I said. I found the reports from the sheriff and looked for the name of the town where the first victim had lived. “Melinda Cochran was from Whisper, Georgia, and Tracy Davidson lived in Silas. The towns are twenty miles apart. Draw a circle around that area thirty miles out, see who’s left. He dumped bodies in a remote area. There’s ten years between the murders. He’s working close to home. He knows the landscape. Let’s focus on those offenders with the right kind of property—freestanding structures or fortifications—a barn, toolshed, garage, someplace that could be soundproofed. Or someplace with enough distance from the neighbors that he wouldn’t need those things.”

  “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 th
e 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.

  “There’s a campground half a mile from the site. My patrols can’t see it from the road. A lantern out here on the lake at night is going to be seen. And you need a lantern. Water’s as black as oil at night. But the woods are thick. Nobody would see a flashlight. Plus, the climb isn’t as steep. If it was me and I was dealing with a dead body, that’s how I’d come in.”

  “Is the creek accessible by smaller craft?” I asked. I felt perspiration gathering around my hairline. Even the shady cover of the woods couldn’t take the humidity out of the tropical system hanging over us, so heavy a butter knife would have hung in the air. I took a band out of my pocket and pulled my hair back off my neck as we walked.

  “Catawba is wide but it’s shallow in places,” the sheriff answered. “Good for trout and inner tubes. Around here, mostly what you get is fishermen and hunters. Season for firearms doesn’t start up again until the end of September. I’ve been out here several times since we found the girls and so have my two investigators. None of us has run into a human once.”

  “You run into anything else?”

  Meltzer stopped, looked at me, the light growing in his brown eyes. “Animals, you mean?” He laughed. It was a good laugh, easy and uninhibited. “Not really the outdoorsy type, huh?”

  I’d dressed for a hike through the woods. I’d prepared. I was wearing combat boots and cargo pants, for Christ’s sake. I looked like a member of a SWAT team. What did this guy want from me? Okay, so I don’t like being on water and I think about things like bears. It’s not like I’d shown up in Christian Louboutins. I ignored him and kept walking. “What do you know about the parents of the victims?”