All the Pretty Girls

Chapter Eight

Taylor was on full alert when she arrived at Betsy Garrison’s home. Betsy lived in East Nashville, once the habitat of drug lords and crack whores. But the neighborhood was “coming back,” as the residents liked to say. Hip new restaurants nestled in with Victorian homes, restored to within an inch of their former glory. Young professionals ruled the area, BMWs and Lexus SUVs gleaming in the driveways, ones bought with earned money rather than by illegal means. Trees soared into the sky with abandon, even the birds and squirrels had taken on a prosperous hue.

But the street where Betsy lived seemed to be in mourning on this rainy day. When Taylor rolled up in her black Xterra, she only recognized one other car parked strategically along the street, a beat-up Ford F-150 pickup. She sighed. No marked cars for this trip. You could say the police were undercover, protecting one of their own. There was no yellow crime scene tape blowing giddily in the breeze. No news vans lined the street. Word had been kept quiet, a need to know only, nothing broadcast over the air, all calls made to private phones and cells. An ambulance hadn’t even made its way down the narrow streets. Betsy had been taken out her back door and stuffed into the waiting car of her partner in Sex Crimes to be transported to the hospital.

Taylor shook her head at the ratty truck. Fitz definitely needed new wheels. But he stubbornly refused, swearing to stand by his rust bucket until the bitter end. From the looks of it, the end wasn’t far off. She pulled behind it, stepped carefully to the curb to avoid the puddle in the gutter, and snapped open her umbrella. She walked quickly up the driveway and around to the back door of the house. Fitz was standing there, the ever-present cigarette dangling from his lips. It was lit, and though Taylor felt a rush of annoyance at Fitz, who had quit smoking a number of times unsuccessfully, she immediately dug in her pocket for her own pack. Drawing up beside him, she lit her own and inhaled deeply. Only a slight tickle in her throat reminded her that the doctors would be royally ticked off if they knew she was smoking, but she dismissed the thought with a wave of her hand. Fitz caught the motion and grinned.

“Justifying your addiction to the noxious weed to your doctors in your head again?”

Taylor gave him an affectionate smile. Fitz just knew her too well. They’d worked together for several years, and despite the fact that she was nearly twenty years his junior and a woman to boot, he’d never had a problem with her being his boss. Just the opposite, he had been the one who’d stood by her promotion to lieutenant last year when many in the force did not. And he was one of the few who didn’t mind the new chief, either, but that was Fitz. Always willing, near retirement and couldn’t give a care to politics. Besides, the new chief had restructured the department in such a way that Fitz had gotten a promotion and pay raise, which did nothing but improve his mood. More to retire on, as he jovially put it. Now Homicide was set up so that Fitz was the sergeant and had six detectives working under him. He reported only to Taylor, and she, as the department lieutenant, reported only to Mitchell Price. It was a top-heavy hierarchy, but the people of Homicide had managed to come out unscathed and with more power than they had before. Price, being the captain, had control over all the CID, Criminal Investigations Division, and the lieutenants for each division reported to him and him alone. It gave him more authority but less oversight, so he depended heavily on his LTs to make all right in the world for him. He now reported directly to the chief, and the political headaches were worth it to him since he could keep his people out of the fray.

Taylor sucked on her cigarette and forced the thoughts of doctors’ disapproving glares out of her head as she ran two long fingers along the scar on her throat. She gave Fitz a brief hug, tamped the half-smoked cigarette out on the sole of her cowboy boot and pocketed the butt. No sense disturbing the crime scene.

“So tell me what’s happening. You got the background on Shauna Davidson for me, right?”

“I did. Wasn’t a mall rat like I thought, she wasn’t working. Taking some summer courses, but that’s it. The idle rich…” He smiled at Taylor and she shot him the bird. He laughed and continued. “She’d been out with some friends after class. No one has a lot of details to share yet. We’ll get it, don’t worry.”

“Okay then. We’ll have to report all the information to Special Agent Baldwin, he’s going to be working the case.”

“Taylor, about Baldwin.”

“What? What about him?”

He looked at her hard and she realized he knew exactly what type of housekeeping she and Baldwin were doing. Fitz had always been able to figure her out.

She blushed. “Yeah, whatever. Let’s not worry about that right now. Let’s focus on this for the moment, then we can go over all the information you got on Shauna Davidson. Let me ask you this. Is Betsy okay?”

Fitz took one last lung-numbing drag on his cigarette and extinguished it. He pulled out a pack of gum, politely offering it to Taylor. She pulled out a piece and looked at him, waiting. He took his time unwrapping the silvery stick, as if gathering his thoughts. She wondered if he was debating whether to listen to her admonition about discussing her personal life with Baldwin, but he was back in professional, not personal, investigator mode.

“I don’t have the whole story, but I got a call right before you showed up. She’s gonna make it, but they had to take her into surgery to clean something up, some kind of blood pooling in her eye cavity. He broke her cheekbone, Taylor. Beat the shit out of her.”

“That’s not his MO.”

“Nope. He usually ties ’em up and does ’em, then takes off. But this one was personal. Tied her up, raped her, then beat the shit out of her. She managed to get an arm free after an hour of struggling and called her partner, Brian Post, to come get her and take her to the hospital. It wasn’t until she was there that they called Price. Wanted to keep it as quiet as possible. We don’t need the press crawling all over this one. ‘The Rainman’ strikes lead investigator. They’d have a field day with it.”

“Brave girl, keeping her cool like that.”

“You can say that again. I talked to Post, he told me she was totally calm, cool and collected about the whole thing. Only got upset when they told her that they needed to go in and fix the, whaddaya call it…”

“Occipital orb?” Taylor interjected, making a good guess.

“Yeah, that’s it. She was upset that she’d be out of it for a while and couldn’t help with the investigation. Broken face and she wants back in immediately. Ballsy chick, that one.”

Taylor agreed. She didn’t think she could handle herself nearly as well in the same situation. She knew she hadn’t when she’d been the one in the hospital.

“So what do they want us to do?”

“They want us to go through the house and do the crime scene. They don’t even want the CSIs out here, that’s how deep this is getting buried. So far, only you, Price, the chief, her partner and me know. They’d like to keep it that way.”

“Do you have a crime scene kit with you? And a camera?”

He gestured to his feet, where a large case that looked like a tackle box sat. “Picked it up on my way over.”

“Thank you for thinking ahead. Here’s my question. Don’t you think the Rainman will get pissed if he doesn’t see his handiwork on the news?”

“I think Betsy wants to deal with that later.”

“Okay, I’m cool with that. But we need to get a statement from her regardless.”

“Post already did that. When we’re done here, we can head over to Baptist and pick it up, talk to her if she’s out of surgery.”

Taylor contemplated the back door, the lock obviously jimmied. They had a job to do, so they may as well get on with it.

“Let’s do it.”

They snapped on latex gloves, slipped soft booties over their own boots and started working the scene. Taylor started with the broken lock, dusting for fingerprints and thanking the awning above the door for keeping the handle dry. She lifted a decent print from the doorjamb, took pictures of everything and then they slowly worked their way inside.

The inside of Betsy’s home looked like a small tornado had come through. The kitchen table was overturned, the glass top shattered. Blood sparkled on the shards, and a trail of blood left the kitchen. Taylor followed it, taking pictures, to the living room. Blood soaked a corner of the couch, a lamp was overturned, but the rest of the room didn’t look too bad. Taylor could see rope lying on the floor in front of the couch.

“Let me run this by you. He comes in the back door, surprises her in the kitchen. Awful lot of blood. Did he break her nose, too?”

Fitz was nodding. “Yeah, got her good right in the face before she had a chance to do anything.”

“Okay, so he smacks her in the kitchen, drags her into the living room and assaults her on the couch. When did he tie her up?”

“Just from what Post told me on the phone, he disabled her in the kitchen, and she woke up on the couch, trussed like a Christmas pig. When he finished raping her, he tied her legs.”

“Looks like he looped the rope around the back of the couch.” Taylor was working her way around the room, taking pictures. “See the trailing ends here? That must be where she got herself loose. Okay, let’s finish up here.”

They set about their work, processing the scene, collecting some of the meager evidence the rapist had left behind. They bagged the rope—he always brought his own, plain store-bought nylon rope sold in every hardware store in the country, so it was virtually untraceable. There was no other physical evidence they could find. They had the print from the door, but that too was part of his MO. They set the place to rights as they went. They worked quickly but thoroughly, and when they finished they shared a look. Poor Betsy. As brave a face as she may want to put on, she had been through hell.

Her suspected rapist, dubbed with the moniker “The Rainman,” had been terrorizing the women of Nashville for five years. He’d earned his name because he only struck when it was raining. He’d attacked seven women, eight now, by forcing his way in their back doors, tying them up and raping them. Simple, straightforward crimes. He never spoke, wore a ski mask, always used a condom. His victims had been known to say that it seemed he was almost disinterested in what he was doing. Just tied them up, slipped on a condom, forced his way into their bodies and left through the back door. That was it, nothing more. He’d never hit a single one, just threatened them into compliance with a gun to the head or a knife to the side. He had a unique but relatively innocuous MO, one some experts classified as a gentleman rapist. Until today, none of his victims had been physically injured.

Taylor and Fitz finished up and made their way to the backyard. They smoked companionably in silence for a time, until Taylor felt the need to point out the obvious.

“Think it was a copycat?”

“I think we have to look at the possibility, given this new MO. We’ll know soon enough. If that print on the back door was his, they’ll be able to match it to the other rapes. What a kook. Leave the rope and your print behind. They’ve never gotten a hit off the print, he’s obviously never been in trouble with the law. So how a does a law-abiding citizen suddenly turn into a rapist?”

“Fitz, if I knew the answer to that, I could probably hawk it to the daytime shows and make a million dollars. Let’s get over to the hospital and see if Betsy’s out of surgery yet.”

Chapter Nine

Baldwin sat as far back in the cramped seat as his legs would allow and fastened his seat belt for the quick trip to Atlanta. As soon as the plane cleared ten thousand feet and the pilot finished greeting the passengers, he pulled out his laptop and opened his e-mail. The file for the missing girl appeared before him. Shauna Lyn Davidson.

The call had come from Jerry Grimes, the field agent that had been running the cases from Alabama and Louisiana. He’d been instructed to keep Baldwin up to speed on the cases, and he’d complied, albeit reluctantly at first. Handing off his case to the FBI’s most celebrated profiler rubbed him the wrong way. But now, the note of panic in his voice was near the surface.

“Baldwin, they’ve definitively identified Shauna Davidson in Georgia. Her body is in a field off a rural exit, near Adairsville off I-75. Looks the same, body dumped in a field, strangled and she’s missing her hands. What the hell is this guy up to?”

“Grimes, you’ve told them what to look for, right? They need to find it.”

“Awww, shit, I know, I know. They’re looking for the hand now. I’m on my way there, are you coming?”

The accusatory note was not lost on Baldwin, but he chose to ignore it.

“I’m on my way, man. Hang in there.”

Baldwin glanced at his watch and saw it was too early to order a drink. This was supposed to be a beautiful, quiet day, spent in bed with the woman he loved. Not a day to go traipsing through death. Yet here he was, on a plane to Atlanta to hunt for the Strangler.

Being a profiler meant long hours in strange locales, but the longer he worked for the FBI, the more he was struck by the commonality of every situation. Madman kills innocent, then does it again. An MO is established, the FBI is consulted and Baldwin would be thrown on a plane. He’d chosen this life, this world. He had the rare ability to disengage, to be unaffected by the horrifying details of the cases. But it was starting to wear thin. He didn’t know exactly what he should do—stay with the FBI or strike out on his own. He’d love to steal Taylor away from Metro, but he knew in his heart of hearts that wouldn’t happen anytime soon.

He pushed those thoughts away. He needed to stay focused, and thinking about Taylor Jackson would derail even the strongest of men.

Local law enforcement in Alabama and Louisiana had done all the right things in processing their cases. The Alabama authorities worked closely with the Baton Rouge cops. They ran all the right tests, did the right investigation and still had no clue who had strangled eighteen-year-old Susan Palmer, cut off her hands and dumped her body in a field in Baton Rouge. The crimes seemed connected, there were definite similarities—manual strangulation and missing hands. But it was Jeanette Lernier’s case that had drawn the FBI’s attention. When she was examined in the field, the medical examiner had rolled her and found a hand underneath the lifeless body. Everyone assumed it was Jeanette’s. When DNA showed the hand belonged to Susan Palmer, from Alabama, people had gotten interested. Grimes and his partner, Thomas Petty, had been called to give interagency cooperation and support to the local authorities. When nothing happened for a month, the hunt was scaled back, Grimes and Petty went back to other cases, and the murders went into the annals of cold crimes that permeate small-town law enforcement. Grimes still kept a finger in the case, doing interviews with friends and family, but Petty caught the disappearance of a nine-year-old boy and was pulled off to work that crime. Time marches on. New crimes are committed. The cases weren’t forgotten, just relegated to the back burner.

The details of the two cases were kept quiet in the hopes that somewhere down the road an answer would surface. Two families buried only parts of their cherished daughters. Now two more families would be getting their daughters’ incomplete bodies back for burial. He prayed it would end here.

Baldwin had been made aware of the crimes but hadn’t been actively involved in the situation. The call this morning, the call to arms tasking him to the case, was going to change all that. The FBI would be able to claim complete jurisdiction if necessary because the kidnappings and murders crossed state lines, but so far the local police had cooperated and appeared to be a major help in their investigation, not a hindrance.

The original FBI team, Jerry Grimes and Thomas Petty, were smart, seasoned agents. When Jessica Porter had gone missing, her bedroom found full of blood, local law enforcement loaded the details of the case into VICAP. When the MO matched, Grimes and Petty were called in to help assess the scene. When they examined her apartment, they immediately thought of the Strangler. Grimes had called Baldwin and informed him of the case. He’d forwarded the information they had, which wasn’t much. Baldwin pulled this thin folder out of his briefcase and started refreshing his memory. It was written in the dry, impersonal tone of a police report, one that allowed no emotion to creep in and destroy the officers’ and agents’ objectivity.

CASE OVERVIEW—JESSICA ANN PORTER The victim is a Caucasian female age 18. She is 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighs 120 pounds, has long brown hair and brown eyes. She was born on April 27, 1986, in the city of Jackson, Mississippi. She has a strawberry birthmark on her left bicep, a belly-button ring with a small crystal ball and pierced ears. The victim disappeared while walking home from her job as a receptionist at a Jackson community hospital. The victim…

“Ah, hell,” he muttered. “I can’t do it like this.” Too damn impersonal. Baldwin closed the file in front of him and thought back to the discussion he’d had with Grimes. The man had been pretty broken up, too broken up. He had phoned Baldwin as soon as they’d cleared out of the Porter girl’s apartment, finished with the statements of family and friends. Baldwin mentally replayed the conversation. It was a knack he had, being able to tap into his brain and extract what he needed with total recall. Taylor sometimes hated him for it, she could never get away with anything. He smiled at the thought, then plugged into his mental database.

It had been a quiet night. For the past few months, Baldwin had been tasked to the Middle Tennessee Field Office, ostensibly working as a regional profiler. Baldwin had been working cases for the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit out of Quantico peripherally, consulting when needed. He wasn’t exactly in retirement, but on a pseudo sabbatical, allowing him to be in Nashville with Taylor. The arrangement was working wonderfully until this phone call, the familiar voice booming in his ear.

“The esteemed Dr. John Baldwin, I presume?” The sharp bite of sarcasm wasn’t lost on Baldwin, even some of the FBI’s own field officers didn’t like dealing with the profilers.

“It’s Jerry Grimes. I’m down here in Mississippi on a case.”

Baldwin remembered how his heart skipped a beat, revving in anticipation. His senses went on high alert. Grimes wasn’t calling him of his own accord, he’d been instructed to do so by a higher-up. He had dropped the niceties as well.

“We’ve got a missing girl. Young, brunette. Has all the hallmarks of…”

“The Strangler,” Baldwin said, dread mixing with adrenaline in his stomach.

“Now, how’d you go and do that, Baldwin?”

“Good guess.”

“Damn right, good guess. Her name’s Jessica Ann Porter. I’m sure you’ve seen the reports on the news?”

“Haven’t been watching too much. She’s dead, I presume, or else you wouldn’t be calling me.”

Grimes had gone silent for a moment, and then answered with a cracked voice. “No, she’s just missing. We’ve got some blood on the bedsheets but no real signs of a struggle. It’s like she disappeared into thin air. No one saw her after she left work for the day.”

Baldwin fast-forwarded through the conversation to Grimes’s description of the girl.

“She’s a beautiful kid. She’s got all this brown hair, got these big brown eyes, the kind that just shoot right through you. That’s just from pictures. She was the damn homecoming queen, man. Getting ready to go back to college in the fall, wanted to be a nurse or doctor, something she could do that would help people. She volunteered at the homeless shelter in town and delivers meals to shut-ins. The kid’s a saint, and no one we’ve talked to has had anything bad to say about her.”

Baldwin remembered thinking, uh-oh, Jerry’s taking this kind of personal.

Grimes continued. “I knew something was hinky and I should probably give you a heads-up, just in case.”

There wasn’t anything else Baldwin could do but hear the man out. Cases with kids got to every good investigator, and sometimes just talking it out was the best thing. They’d hung up with Baldwin promising to do a little research on the missing hands and what it could mean. Then Jessica Porter turned up in a field in Nashville, with what was presumably Jeanette Lernier’s hand with her.

The phone had rung again early this morning. Baldwin saw the caller ID number and knew it was Jerry Grimes, calling about Shauna Davidson. He was right.

“We got another body, Baldwin. Pretty sure it’s the girl missing from Nashville.”

That call had put him on a plane. He ran it through his head, the cadence becoming a bit like a child’s song.

Susan Palmer, Alabama. Found in Louisiana. Jeanette Lernier from Baton Rouge. Found dead in a field in Mississippi. Jessica Porter, Mississippi girl, found mutilated in a field in Nashville. Shauna Davidson, Georgia bound…

Though he’d gotten a row to himself, the woman in the aisle seat across from his gave him a strange look, half pity, half disgust. He must have been talking aloud. He gave her as reassuring a smile as he could, then fumbled all his folders back into his briefcase. As the pilot came over the radio to tell them they were cleared to land in Atlanta, he realized he was excited by the challenge.

Chapter Ten

Whitney Connolly dragged her eyes away from the television and returned her attention to her computer. Sure enough, the address was there, the message that she was hoping for had arrived. She wet her lips and ran the mouse over the message header. It was innocuous, like all the others. A Poem for S.W. was all it said. The return address was a garbled mass of letters and numbers—IM1855195C@yahoo.com. A generic address from a huge server. She’d asked a friend who was sometimes more than a friend to try to find out who the sender was, but he’d told her that the address bounced off several other servers, so in effect, it didn’t exist. Whoever was sending her the messages was virtually untraceable, and obviously smart enough to cover his tracks. Whitney didn’t worry about that though. When the time was right, her anonymous friend would reveal himself to her. They always did.

She opened the mail and found the following lines:

How can those terrified vague fingers push,

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

How can anybody, laid in that white rush,

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

P.S. From your backyard.

Mmmmmm, she thought. This one was a bit sexual. But of course, if he was murdering girls, why wouldn’t he be writing sexual poetry? He seemed quite talented, at least in her mind.

She felt the goose bumps parade up and down her arms. Man, she was getting messages from the killer her FBI contact called the Southern Strangler. Why he had picked her, she didn’t know. But she didn’t want to go to the police just yet. After all, what would she say? “By the way, Officer, I’ve been communicating with the man who is responsible for murdering those poor girls.” She didn’t even know for sure that this guy was for real. She had nothing to go on, but all of that was going to change today.