Don’t Talk to Strangers: A Novel Read online

  I stood up, felt Doris’s attention shift to me, walked to the back. If they’d used the floor plan as it was intended, both the back rooms would have been bedrooms. But they were offices instead, one clearly belonging to the sheriff. An antique oak desk held a nameplate with raised gold letters. His windows looked out on the water. The second office had two desks, metal like the one I’d been using in front, both piled with files and papers, the occasional candy wrapper and coffee ring. A box of doughnuts was open on Raymond’s desk, half full. I wanted one, but no one was offering.

  I tapped on the door. “Sorry to bother you, Major, but I need to know if Tracy Davidson and Melinda Cochran had broken bones and fractures prior to their disappearance. There’s no medical records in the file, and it wasn’t covered in the interviews.” I was hoping she’d offer to help. She didn’t. Not even a courtesy glance in my direction. I sharpened my tone a little. “I need the statements from the parents regarding the physical condition of both girls as soon as possible. And I need the medical records.”

  “You hear that, Major?” Raymond asked. “As soon as possible. Guess we better snap to.”

  “We’re a little busy, as you can see,” Tina Brolin told me.

  “I don’t give a damn how busy you are. This is a priority,” I said, and their heads jerked up. I needed to put an end to this before Brolin and Raymond rolled over me completely. “I’m here to do a job with the full confidence of the sheriff. And since we’re obviously not going to be friends, I will hang you and your shitty attitudes out to dry if you get in the way of my doing that. I hope that’s clear.”

  Brolin held my eyes for a few seconds. “Make the calls,” she instructed Raymond, then went back to the work on her desk.

  I returned to my borrowed desk. Doris watched me silently. I heard Raymond’s voice on the phone apologizing for the call, inquiring about any injuries Melinda might have had. “We will, Bryant. I promise you that,” he was saying. I looked back at the reports. Bryant Cochran, Melinda’s father. A sick feeling washed over me. Murder is a wrecking ball. After it slams into your life, everything feels like a betrayal. No one can give you enough support. No one can fill the canyon that has been dynamited into you. It’s unfillable. Melinda’s father was pushing them for answers. And he wasn’t getting any. “Just give us a little more time,” Raymond told him. “We’re doing our best, Bryant.”

  I doubted they were doing their best. In fact it looked to me a lot like they’d all but given up. I heard Major Brolin answer her phone. She came out a minute later. Detective Raymond followed her, slipping into a shoulder holster. “Another robbery in the golf cottage district,” Brolin told Doris. She didn’t look at me before she walked out.

  Detective Raymond stopped at my desk. He was a big, beefy guy in tan slacks with pleated fronts and a short-sleeved dress shirt that pooched out with his belly over the waistband. “Melinda’s father says she never had a broken bone. The medical records should be here later.”

  “Okay, thanks. What about Tracy’s parents?”

  “No answer.”

  “Thanks for making the calls. Not easy, I’m sure.”

  “I know them. Everyone does.”

  “How about we talk about it later,” I suggested. Might as well extend an olive branch and see if he’d grab on to it without his boss around. “And Tracy’s case. I’ll buy the coffee.”

  Raymond’s thick lips curled a little. “I’m gonna be busy.”

  I watched him walk out, then glanced at Doris. “I think I’m growing on him,” I said. She didn’t look up. The sheriff’s little lakeshore office was feeling a little too small at the moment. I loaded up my stuff and left Doris with my mobile number in case anyone gave a shit. The chances were pretty slim.

  8

  Miles of flat county blacktop ran alongside the thick green forest. I cut left on a back road, found a way to the highway, and circled the woods I’d walked through earlier with the sheriff. I drove about a mile before I saw a sign that said CATAWBA CREEK. I U-turned and took a dirt lane that peeled off the road just after the metal railing of a bridge. Fifty yards down, it curved and deadened at a campground. A sign mounted on a post and cemented into the ground read: OCONEE CAMPGROUND AND RV PARK. It wasn’t much to look at. Three picnic tables down near the creek, a big dirt lot, a few hookups for RVs, a few water spigots. A travel trailer with its tow bar propped on a cement block was parked in a grassy area. It looked locked up tight. No vehicles, no one stirring. I checked the location services on my phone and made sure everything was turned on. I sent Neil a text with my location. If this means I’m not the outdoorsy type, as Meltzer suggested, so be it. But I wasn’t walking into those woods alone without someone knowing where I was. I take my share of chances, but I try like hell not to be just plain stupid.

  I sat there for a few minutes in the Impala. The top was down and it was shady in this little dug-in acre of grass and dirt surrounded by Georgia pines. I couldn’t see the highway from here. And the highway couldn’t see me—the ideal place to walk into the forest unseen. The sheriff was betting the killer had come in this way. It made sense.

  A beaten-down trail ran along the creek and disappeared into the trees. I thought about the terror those two girls must have felt, wondered if they knew he was going to kill them. Had he tormented them with that threat? Maybe that was his thing. They must have tried to reason with him, pleaded. They would have seen the weapon in his hand. It was hard to come to terms with that kind of fear, with that long walk of terror they must have taken with their killer. Maybe he’d hidden the weapon in advance. Maybe he’d convinced them he was going to release them. That would say something about him too.

  I reached under the seat for my Glock. I didn’t feel it. I reached farther. No weapon. I got out and knelt down, peered under the seat. There it was. Another thing out of place. First my computer, then my keys, and now my gun. They’d searched my bag and my car while I was out with the sheriff. Sonofabitch, I muttered. I inspected the Glock, checked the magazine, grabbed an extra clip, pushed the flap on a duty holster down inside the back of my pants. I’m not the superstitious type, but there was something dark-hearted down here in Whisper. It was seeping out of those woods like sap. Mean people.

  I headed into the woods, walked until the trail that was beaten down by tourists who stopped at the campground to hook up their campers and get out their fishing poles split to the right toward the lake’s edge. Catawba Creek meandered out of sight to my left, but I knew where it was going. It would circle the incline that led to the crime scene. I stayed straight and looked for the tree Meltzer had described, the one with dead vines as big as his arms.

  The forest was hushed but for chirping birds and insects. Squirrels scurried up trees, and chipmunks rustled the dead leaves at my approach. No breeze. It was late afternoon and the sun was low enough to light up the treetops above me. I slapped the mosquito on my arm and cursed at the smashed gray spot with its splat of my blood. It itched already. There’s no escaping the relentless barrage of hungry mosquitoes in Georgia’s swampy heat unless you’re slathered in chemicals. I could still smell deet on my skin from the spray the sheriff had given me earlier, gamy and oily. I guess smelling is all it’s good for after a few hours because the mosquitoes were not deterred.

  I took my time, paid attention to the trees, the shrubs, looked for landmarks, markers, something carved in bark, anything he might have used to mark his path. I snapped a few pictures. How had he remembered the spot where he’d first marched a girl ten years earlier and swung his weapon? Had he memorized these thin paths and dark trees? They all looked alike to me.

  I could feel my quads starting to work. The incline was beginning—a leaf-covered mountain of earth in the middle of the hilly forest, climbing up toward the disposal site. I spotted the big poplar tree Meltzer used as his landmark, wrapped in thick, woody brown vines. I studied it for a minute, walked around it, photographed it from different angles. Was this the killer’s landmark to
o?

  I followed the sheriff’s directions, moving to the left and climbing east up toward the crime scene. The leaves didn’t make for great footing, and the brush and foliage nearer the lake had all but disappeared. There was nothing to grab on to if you slipped. I thought again about a killer pushing a teenage girl through these woods, knowing all along how it would end, where he would take her, how he would murder her.

  I reached the top and heard water in the distance, trickling lightly over rock. I saw the twin oaks Sheriff Meltzer used as his guidepost when he came in by boat. I could barely detect a hint of kicked-up earth from our earlier visit. I thought about the soil samples they’d taken weeks after Melinda’s murder. The evidence, if there was ever evidence, had spent as much as sixty days in the elements—and the slightest puff of air can dislodge traces. But the samples could be matched to a suspect’s shoes or automobile in order to place him at the scene. Killers don’t always leave evidence that investigators can detect, but they almost always carry something of the scene home with them.

  I walked until I found the place where the earth sucked in like a crater. I peered down at the granite boulder that had stopped Melinda Cochran’s fall, closed my eyes, and remembered the scene photos. Had Tracy Davidson and Melinda Cochran been his only victims? If so, why? Why them? Why a decade apart?

  The sound of shoes crushing leaves on the forest bed got my attention, heavy and undisguised. I reached for my Glock.

  “Put away your weapon, Dr. Street.”

  I didn’t put it away. I liked it just fine where it was at my side. “Detective Raymond, what brings you out here?” I asked cheerfully. “Rethinking that cup of coffee?”

  “Saw your car.” He was winded from the climb. His face was sweaty and his cheeks spattered with color. He came up on my left side and stood beside me. He was a bull of a man, the kind of guy who had played college ball and let his body get flabby. He couldn’t have spotted my car from the highway. He would have had to drive down into the campground. Had he followed me? I turned my attention back to the hollow.

  Raymond stepped forward and looked down into the hole too. “Didn’t you come up here with Meltzer already?”

  I nodded. “I wanted to come in from the campground, get a feel for the walk.”

  “Personally, I think the suspect came in from somewhere along the lake.” I could smell beer on his breath, and I wondered why he’d gone for a beer instead of investigating a robbery at some golf cottage with Major Brolin. Maybe she’d sent him.

  “The sheriff thinks he would have been spotted if he came in that way,” I said. “Plus it’s a steep climb.”

  “It’s not that bad,” Raymond said. “And all he’d need is a little rowboat. He could have pulled the boat up on shore and hid it between marine patrols. No sweat.”

  “The suspect has to be someone familiar with the area.”

  “No shit.” The muscle in his jaw and the dismissive tone told me he was aching for a fight. “That why they call you doctor?”

  “You have something on your mind, Detective?”

  “Nobody wants you here.”

  I glanced over at him. “I’m starting to get that.”

  “We saw all those stories about you being some kind of big serial hunter,” he said.

  “I’m flattered you went to the trouble,” I said.

  “The sheriff may believe that shit but the way it looks to the major and me is that you just found a way to repackage yourself when the FBI kicked you out.”

  “Gotta make a living, Detective,” I said. “And for the record, I was fired because I was a drunk. Not because I’m a shitty analyst.” Though his view was simplistic, he was right. I had repackaged myself. And here I stood, unofficial to the world. No badge. No security pass. Hell, I didn’t even have a wedding ring anymore. My past would always trail me—those failures, those lapses, the consequences of some spectacularly bad decisions.

  Raymond took a pack of Marlboros from his pocket, lit one with thick, steady hands, pulled smoke deep into his lungs. He looked completely comfortable standing there—justified, confident, accustomed to confrontation the way cops are. “Major Brolin and me, we both started out in uniform,” he told me. It was almost conversational. He might have been discussing the drought. He blew out a plume of smoke that hung like a cloud in the heavy air. “We worked hard. She’s one step away from chief deputy and she might be the next sheriff if things go right these next couple of years. Wouldn’t want anything interfering with that.”

  “You’re saying I’m interfering?”

  “The major’s track record will be important at election time. You prance in here and get the glory for closing cases the whole county knows about—hell, the whole state for that matter.”

  “That’s what this is about? Glory?”

  “Don’t be stupid. It’s all politics. You think Meltzer is in a second term because he’s a good lawman? It’s because he’s a charming sonofabitch who knows what asses to kiss. And we got a county full of little old rich, retired ladies who like their asses kissed.”

  “Well, in that case, the major is going to have to sharpen her people skills.” I looked back down into the bowl-shaped depression that had been a killer’s landfill. “There’s a predator out there who forced two innocent girls to live through a nightmare, Detective. That’s what I’m thinking about right now. That’s all I’m thinking about. Politics don’t interest me. And neither do your ambitions. Or the major’s.”

  He cleared his throat and spat on the ground, dropped his cigarette, crushed it under the sole of a cheap brown dress shoe. He stepped close enough so that his arm was brushing mine and I was looking up at tiny red veins that had burst under his cheeks over the years. Hard years, I guessed. With a lot of drinking. “Watch yourself,” he whispered. His eyes were flat. “These woods can be dangerous.”

  I returned the Glock at my side to the holster as Raymond stalked away, let out a breath. You could have bounced a quarter off the muscles in my neck. I watched him start down the hill. He slid in his slick-soled shoes and almost went down. I smiled. I hoped he fell on his fat ass.

  I walked toward the creek, thought about the blouse found with Melinda Cochran’s skin cells around the collar. The killer would have had to come this way. Otherwise the blouse would have ended up hidden in debris at the bottom of the embankment. A fisherman would have never seen it, reported it. But why was the killer near the creek at all? If he’d walked from the campground, he’d have no reason to come this far. Maybe Raymond was right. Maybe he’d come up from the lake and followed the creek, dropped the shirt on his way back to his boat. It mattered to me, not because it was a trail that would necessarily lead to the killer—the area was too wide, with acres and acres of lake, accessible by thousands of tourists and part-time residents. But it would say something about the way he thought and lived, his level of fitness, his precautionary actions, and whether he was comfortable with boats and perhaps owned one. I stood there on the bank watching shallow water trickle over the rocks. Was it some kind of ritual? Perhaps he’d tossed her shirt in the water—a good-bye, closure—believing water would wash away evidence as it usually does. But the blouse had snagged on a branch on the way downstream, and the folds and creases had protected the DNA inside the collar. Everything else had been lost to the elements: the trace evidence that might have told us where she’d been held, the fibers that would have revealed something about his home and automobile, if he had cats or dogs.

  I thought about how they’d died. He’d stood behind them. He’d swung his weapon hard. Melinda had been hit with a heavy sharp weapon consistent with an axe. I pictured him double-clutching that handle like a baseball bat, swinging, the weapon slicing into her neck.

  Spatter. That was it. He’d come to the creek to rinse off Melinda Cochran’s blood. He didn’t want to walk out of the woods and drive away with blood on his face and hands. And that’s when he’d dropped the blouse. Had he come in the night and worked his way up ta
ngled paths with a flashlight and a weeping girl? Or was he comfortable enough to come in daylight? How bold was this killer? Did he know the area and the routines so well that he could walk out here just like I had? He’d made mistakes last time. He’d dropped the blouse and as a result a crime scene I didn’t think he ever wanted exposed was uncovered. Maybe we’d discover he’d made other mistakes too. But he wasn’t stupid. That much I knew.

  I knelt down, cupped my hands in the clear, cool water, splashed it on my face, raked my hair back with wet fingers. I imagined his hands rinsing off Melinda’s blood in this creek, him splashing his own heated face, the evidence tinting the water and trickling downstream. I closed my eyes and breathed in the mossy banks, let myself feel it, feel the serenity of this place falling down around me like rain, feel him kneeling here as I was now, his knees pressing into the soft soil at water’s edge. My ticking pulse, the blast of adrenaline that shoots through me when I’m learning a killer, was as welcome and familiar to me as this place must be to him. It felt good. I don’t know how else to explain that moment when you know you’ve understood something about a scene, something intimate about the dark, veiled movements of a psychopath. All those tiny moments, all those little actions—they add up, one stacked on top of another, building a tower that would sooner or later come tumbling down.

  I’d been here at least an hour. I pushed away from the creek and brushed sandy soil off my knees, walked back to the crime scene and took another look. Raymond’s crushed cigarette butt near the edge of the embankment irritated me, reminded me of his visit, the not-so-veiled warning he’d left me with. Fucker.