Don’t Talk to Strangers: A Novel

by Amanda Kyle Williams

  “I haven’t met Tracy Davidson’s parents. But Melinda’s parents are good people. They’re friends of mine.” We stepped over a fallen tree trunk and pushed our way through brush. “Not a lot of education but hardworking,” the sheriff added. “She’s a waitress at the Silver Spoon and he runs the bowling alley in Whisper. Melinda was a nice kid.” His voice wobbled. “Damn.” He kicked at rock and dry leaves. “Hard to see people hurt the way they did when Melinda didn’t come home.”

  “Do you mind if I have a look at the interviews you did with the parents after each victim disappeared?”

  Meltzer shot me a look I wasn’t sure about. Annoyance, perhaps. “They weren’t interviews exactly. Not with Melinda’s parents anyway. More like informing them we suspected foul play in the disappearance of their daughter and watching their hearts break. I’ll never forget it. Or what it was like when we had to tell them we found her body.”

  He’d known one of the victims. He was emotionally involved and prickly about questions. I understood it. But I wasn’t going to do my job on eggshells. “I need to learn as much as I can about Melinda and Tracy, Sheriff. It’s where I usually start—with the victims. If you have interviews already, we won’t need to go back to the families and reopen that wound. Have you spoken to the Davidson family yet? And do you have the initial reports from her disappearance?”

  “Major Brolin, my head of Criminal Investigations, notified Mrs. Davidson yesterday after the lab reports came in with a positive ID. And I’ve asked her to assemble everything we have on both cases for you.” The sheriff pointed to a thin trail weaving through thickets of privet and woody vines. “We’re going up this way so you can see the dump site. Then we can walk around toward the campground.”

  “I think I’d like to drive over to it later, if you don’t mind, then walk from there.”

  The sheriff uncapped his water bottle and took a long drink. I did the same. “You want to see what he saw if he came in from the road, is that it?”

  I nodded. “Any insight into his thinking helps.”

  “I don’t like looking through a predator’s eyes.” The sheriff said it flatly.

  “You must have had to before in your career.”

  “Started as a beat cop in Boulder, Colorado, made detective two years before I came here. Narcotics. Different kind of predator. I never wanted to be in homicide. I don’t like spending all my time thinking about killers.”

  “I’ve always been drawn to it,” I said.

  Meltzer stood above me on the hill with his open water bottle. He studied me for a few seconds. “Well, you seem perfectly normal.”

  “Do I?” I smiled. “That’s reassuring. What brought you to Georgia, Sheriff?”

  He screwed the top back on his half-empty bottle and started walking again. “My dad passed away. Mom was a southerner. She wanted to come back here.”

  “Your mother passed too?”

  Ken Meltzer turned back and looked at me. “Why do you ask?”

  “You said was. She was a southerner.”

  “God. That’s so telling, isn’t it? My mother developed Alzheimer’s symptoms nine years ago. I guess sometimes it feels like she’s already gone.”

  “I’m sorry. Is that why you came here?”

  “She had relationships here. I thought moving her would add to her confusion. And I was young enough to start over. It made sense.”

  “That had to be tough,” I said.

  “Thanks. It was.”

  Neil’s ringtone, Main Source’s “Fakin’ the Funk,” throbbed through the woods and hushed the birds. I’d forgotten to silence my phone.

  The sheriff looked at me. “My business partner,” I told him. “You mind if I take it?”

  “No problem,” he said.

  “What’s up?” I answered.

  “Jimmy’s here,” Neil told me. I watched the sheriff walk ahead. “He made zucchini bread for the office. Too bad you’re not getting any. So what are the cops like? All gun racks and shit?”

  I glanced at Ken Meltzer moving easily through the woods. “I haven’t met the others but the sheriff is a little bit of a Boy Scout,” I whispered. “He’s also totally hot.”

  “Bradley Cooper hot or Channing Tatum hot?” my brother piped in.

  “Keith Urban hot,” I said.

  “Ah,” Jimmy cooed. “A rebel. A little too wild and uncombed for the city. But sensitive. Probably exfoliates.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Listen, I’m in the woods on the way to the scene. Can this wait?”

  “I found eight registered offenders that meet your criteria,” Neil said. “I figured you’d want to know. They’re in the area we mapped out. The timeframe works and they have sheds, garages, barns, carports, or basements. I’m emailing you the particulars.”

  “Great. Everything okay at the office?”

  “You’ve been gone three hours, Kiwi. I think we’re okay.” Neil used the nickname he’d hung around my neck a few weeks ago when he discovered my middle name was Lei and rhymed with my first name, Keye. Together they sounded to him like, well, Kiwi. “Be careful down there. Lot of history. Weird stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  “For starters, and this should give you an idea of the vibe, the Koasati tribe had a word for that area. At-pasha-shilha. Know what it is?”

  “How would I know that? I didn’t even know there was a Koasati tribe.” I trudged through leaves up the hill and tried to keep my footing. The path was clear now that we were deep into the woods. No thickets to maneuver through, just tall trees and leaves piled on a pine straw bed.

  “How can you grow up Chinese and be so totally clueless about other cultures?” Neil huffed.

  “I didn’t grow up Chinese. I grew up southern.”

  “It means ‘mean people,’ Keye. You’re in the mean people county. Spooky, huh?”

  “Yeah. It is. Look, I gotta run.” I disconnected, and jogged to catch up with the sheriff. He heard me and waited.

  “We found the bodies just up there,” he said when I got closer.

  We topped the hill. I could hear the creek. “How do you remember the spot?” I asked.

  “When you come straight up from the old dock and top this hill, you’re looking right at those two old oaks growing together. It’s thirty yards north from there. When you come in from the road, there’s a big poplar wrapped in dead vines about the size of my arm where the path veers down to the lake. You go east and climb up the hill from there. I spent a lot of time hiking in Colorado. You learn to remember natural landmarks.”

  And so do killers, I thought, and snapped some pictures as we walked, including the double oak tree the sheriff used as a guidepost. We approached the edge of a slope. The dry dead leaves crinkled under our boots. I gazed down at a twenty-foot drop, a natural indentation in the earth that looked something like a sinkhole. I thought about the photographs—Melinda on her side stopped by a rock, Tracy’s remains below her at the bottom. “Can you come in from any other direction?” I asked Meltzer.

  “It wouldn’t be easy. Farmhouses and dogs, private property. The distance would be greater. Nowhere to leave your transportation. And he’d have to cross the creek. I don’t see that happening.”

  I looked back down at the drop-off and thought again about the scene photos. He’d removed their clothes. Was it MO, something to defeat efforts at evidence collection? Or was it signature, something that fulfilled a psychological need, something unnecessary to the commission of the crime? Perhaps it reinforced his dominance over the victims. Had he kept their clothes? “Those girls were alive when they got here,” I told the sheriff. “He walked them out here, made them strip and turn their backs to him. He’s carrying something he can use to dispose of their clothing, something that wouldn’t look suspicious if he ran into someone in the woods. A backpack, maybe. He dropped Melinda’s blouse accidentally on his way out.” I backed up a few feet from the edge, turned, and pointed toward the creek. “He was close to the creek when
he lost it or else it would have either washed down the slope to the lake or ended up in the depression where he disposed of the bodies. And he’d want them back far enough so he could hit them hard without knocking them off. He’d want to check their vitals. He’s careful. He has to make sure they’re not breathing.” I backed up a couple more feet. “So he stands about here and swings his weapon.” I glanced up at the sheriff. His wide brown eyes were fixed on me. “This isn’t just a disposal site, Sheriff; it’s your primary crime scene.” I walked around, took some more pictures. Flashes of sunlight broke through the branches and danced off the creek. There was an enormous granite slab sticking out of the ground like a ledge—not unusual in Georgia, the home of Stone Mountain. The stuff is everywhere. “You collected soil and leaf samples from this area?”

  Meltzer nodded. “A few. Lab hasn’t found anything so far that isn’t natural to the area. Lost a lot of evidence to the elements, I imagine. My investigators bagged a lot of debris around the bodies.”

  “ME’s office get them out of the hole?”

  “We did. On cots with pulleys and ropes. It was a mess. Hitchiti County doesn’t have a medical examiner. We’re on the coroner system. It’s ridiculous. He’s a goddamn real estate agent.” The sheriff shook his head and chuckled, but there was real irritation in his voice.

  “Any deals on waterfront property?”

  “That’s about all he’s good for,” Meltzer answered.

  I went back to the edge and looked down at the piece of granite protruding from a sidewall, the one that had stopped Melinda Cochran’s fall. “The first victim was positioned more toward the center.” I pointed down in the hole. “She would have had to be thrown. But the second victim was rolled off. That’s why she hit the rock. And that’s not the only difference in the behaviors here from victim one to victim two. He used the sharp side of the axe on the second victim. And he left behind evidence. The victim’s blouse.”

  “Maybe he’s getting lazy,” the sheriff suggested.

  “Maybe.” I took a deep breath, just let myself take in the scene—the drop-off where a killer had dumped his prey, the woods humming with katydids and birds and every kind of insect, the creek shimmering through the trees, the brown leaves covering the ground, seasons and seasons’ worth, deep and decaying, the rich scents of earth and pine sap. I took more photos. Sometimes the camera sees what I can’t. The Georgia woods have a lot to hide. I knew this too well. Not long ago I’d wandered upon a madman’s mass graves in the wooded hills of North Georgia.

  “When Melinda disappeared, was she sexually active?” I asked.

  The midday sun was cutting streaks through heavy branches. He rubbed his eyes. I saw tiny creases, white like scar tissue, cut into tanned skin at the corners. “Not according to her friends.”

  “Both parents worked?”

  He nodded. “Melinda spent afternoons with her mom at the diner when she worked second shift every other week. I’ve seen her doing her homework at the counter a hundred times, I guess. They didn’t like her going home alone. Molly was home the day Melinda disappeared. But she vanished between school and home. They blame themselves for letting her walk. But it’s that kind of town. It’s safe. At least it was.” He checked his watch. “I have an appointment this afternoon. Major Brolin is at your disposal if you need something. We have an empty desk at the office if you want to work there. Doris will tell you where to find your hotel. One thing we have plenty of is hotel rooms. I have to tell you, though: The nicer ones are up the road where all the golf courses and resorts are located. But I thought you’d want to stay in Whisper.”

  “Sounds good,” I lied. Room service and a docking station would have sounded good. But I was on the sheriff’s dime. And I knew I needed to stay. You can’t drive in and out of a town and end up with any sense of it. You have to feel it as you’re drifting off, wake to it, hear its voices, smell its smells. I pushed myself off the granite slab. “Mind if we walk along the creek awhile on the way back down?”

  “I’ve never been opposed to walking along a creek, Dr. Street.”

  “It’s okay to call me Keye.”

  “You don’t like the title, do you?” Meltzer said, surprising me. “Why not? Most people would be proud of it.”

  “Long story,” I said.

  We walked for a couple of minutes. The creek was rocky and shallow, clear enough and still enough in places to see the tadpoles feeding near the bank, trout swimming by. “Why do you think he held those girls so long?” Meltzer asked quietly.

  “He gets something from them. At least until he doesn’t anymore.”

  “What?”

  “Sex, a sense of power. Control. He’d keep them until they no longer fueled his fantasy life. Or until it became dangerous to continue holding them. More likely it’s the former.”

  “And then he kills them,” the sheriff said.

  “It’s the logical next step.”

  7

  I could hear the phones upstairs, and the calm monotones of the emergency operators. Doris answered a call now and then on the sheriff’s direct line and carefully put messages in a spiral message pad. I unpacked my case, put my laptop and notebooks on the desk Sheriff Meltzer had offered me in the main room. Meltzer introduced me to his head of Criminal Investigations, Major Tina Brolin, and her detective, Robert Raymond, before he left. Everything had been going pretty well until then.

  A couple of file folders landed on the metal desk in front of me followed by a thumb drive. It skidded across the desktop. I caught it before it fell off the edge. “Just so you know, this wasn’t my idea,” Major Brolin told me.

  “Oookay,” I said, and looked up at her. She had a slight overbite. I zeroed in on two tiny permanent impressions her front teeth had made in her bottom lip. It was hard to look at anything else after that. She was five-five and trim. Size did not inhibit her ability to put out some really crappy energy. I mean, I’m not exactly a spiritual giant but I kind of wanted to set some sage on fire and chant something cleansing. “If I want to see physical evidence, will I have access?”

  “Sheriff says to give you what you want.” Major Brolin’s dark hair was pulled tight off her face. It looked like it hurt. “We can instruct the evidence room at the judicial center if you need something. An officer will have to be present, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said, and glanced over her shoulder at Detective Raymond. “Can we talk after I have a little time with the files? I’d love to discuss the cases. With you both.”

  “You’d love to discuss the cases?” Brolin said. They exchanged an incredulous glance. “This is our case. We live here. We care about the people here. You don’t know anything about this community.”

  “Exactly,” I said. Brolin and Raymond stared at me for three seconds before I was looking at their backs. They disappeared into a rear office.

  I glanced at Doris. “Guess I missed a memo.”

  “You have no idea,” Doris said quietly. I realized for the first time just how unpopular the sheriff’s decision to hire outside help had been. It was not what I had expected to walk into.

  I opened my laptop and waited for it to blink on and give me the password bar. It didn’t. I pressed the POWER button and it came quickly to life. It had been shut down. And I didn’t do it. I’m vigilant about this. I power down every other night for maintenance purposes. I take care of my stuff. I clean my gun, I change the oil in my car, and I shut down my computer on a schedule.

  I checked inside my computer case and saw the manila folders with crime-scene photos and the reports Meltzer had emailed me, the notes I’d begun on a legal pad when Meltzer had first called my office, a list of assignments I’d given Neil. Everything was in order. And then I saw my car keys in the long front pocket of the case. I had intentionally zipped them into an interior pocket. I glanced at my car in the lot out front, then at Doris working at her desk, then toward the back office. One of these people had looked through my things and tried to get into my c
omputer after I walked out the back door with the sheriff.

  I pushed in the flash drive, began to skim back over the reports I’d studied last night from the state crime lab. I then went through the file for Melinda Cochran and studied the statements taken after her disappearance. The sheriff was right. The interviews with Melinda’s parents were bare bones. The cops knew them. They had excluded them quickly. Some effort was made to reconstruct Melinda’s interaction with family in her final days. No big blowups or arguments. Melinda didn’t seem particularly upset about anything, according to her parents, beyond the “usual ups and downs with friends” and the normal concerns of a thirteen-year-old who wanted to “fit in.” There were no medical records either, nothing to explain the broken bones.

  I jotted down names and addresses of Melinda’s closest friends and read over their interviews carefully. None of them remembered seeing anyone unfamiliar in the area in the days and weeks prior to the abduction. They’d been talking, laughing, as they left school that day. There were people around—parents, kids, teachers, all familiar. Melinda and three of her friends walked home together every day. They lived a couple of blocks apart. Melinda walked the last two blocks alone. The police had scoured the area. They’d found her cell phone in the street, crushed by traffic. The pieces had been collected, checked for prints, and stored. No prints. Not even Melinda’s. Not even a partial—wiped clean.

  Eleven years ago, Tracy Davidson’s friends had made similar statements. They’d seen Tracy in school but not on the school bus that afternoon. The interview with Tracy’s parents and brother had been more extensive. Her father had served six years for armed robbery and assault with intent. Her brother, then eleven years old, had been home sick the day Tracy disappeared. I read over their statements carefully and the investigator’s notes. Tracy’s dad had been considered a prime suspect in the beginning. There were multiple domestic abuse calls from their home. Investigators had executed warrants and searched the premises thoroughly after Tracy had been missing for a week. Mr. Davidson had been hauled in twice more for follow-up statements. No evidence had been found to link the Davidsons to their daughter’s disappearance. The case went cold. Tracy was listed simply as missing, and the notations in the file made it clear the investigators suspected she was a runaway. I couldn’t fault them too much. They’d found absolutely no evidence of foul play. And it looked like Tracy Davidson had a lot to run away from.