Don’t Talk to Strangers: A Novel

by Amanda Kyle Williams

  Skylar Barbour played flute in the school band, Brooks Barbour told us in the foyer, while sobs from the kitchen came down behind us like hard fists. She had band practice once a week. It was the day she was out of school late enough for Hayley to pick her up on her way home from work.

  I checked the time. Ten p.m. Seven hours since Skylar stepped on a walking trail and disappeared into the woods.

  22

  We stood by our cars in the Barbours’ driveway, Raymond, Meltzer, and I. Brolin’s Crown Vic was gone. We didn’t ask where she had gone. We didn’t have to. Brolin had acted like an ass and Meltzer had given her a time-out.

  “Hayley said Luke was going nuts when she got home,” I told them. “Maybe the dog heard something. GPS went out up there on the road. Stands to reason that’s our crime scene.”

  “If there is a crime scene,” Raymond pointed out.

  I shook my head. “The runaway theory really doesn’t play for me. No clothes or other personal items are missing, except a hairbrush she probably carries with her every day. There’s cash in her jewelry box. We found her diary. She’d never leave that for her parents to find. Add to that the locked door Skylar never remembers, Luke’s behavior, the fact that we have witnesses who saw her step onto the path for home. She hadn’t talked about having plans. She hadn’t seemed troubled or preoccupied. Something bad happened after she stepped into those woods.” I wished I had talked to Skylar’s friends myself. Because if Brolin had come down like the hammer she was, the girls might have retreated, withheld the way kids do when they think they’re in trouble. I thought about the three girls I’d talked to earlier, Melinda’s closest friends. Something about that conversation was still bugging me.

  “Maybe Barbour got carried away,” Meltzer suggested. “The man is obviously a pressure cooker.”

  I nodded. “The only thing completely implausible at this point is that this girl killed her phone and ran away from home.”

  “Brooks Barbour is tripping my switches,” Raymond said. “Seems like the kind of guy who could lose his shit. We’ll check his alibi in the morning, talk with his employer.”

  “Get their phone records,” Meltzer told him. “Let’s make sure they’ve been calling Skylar’s number and the provider like they said. And schedule polygraphs for first thing tomorrow. Right now, let’s get some deputies. We’ll come in from the park side of that trail. Rob, you start on this end of the woods. Keye, you take the road. And Rob—get that shirt wrapped up. Keep her scent fresh. We may have to get some dogs out here. Dark night.”

  As if on cue we all looked up at the sky. No moon. We followed the sheriff up the driveway and onto Cottonwood Road. Raymond pulled to the side. I parked behind him. Meltzer kept going. I took a super-bright LED flashlight from the glove compartment and felt under the seat for my Glock. It was in the safe at the hotel, I remembered. I hadn’t taken it to dinner with the sheriff.

  Raymond got out, looked back at me. “Happy hunting,” he said, and clicked on his flashlight and headed into the woods.

  I opened the back door of my car, tucked Skylar’s diary into my scene case, got out a fresh package of gloves, and stretched them on. A tight glove on a hot night in Georgia is no fun. They don’t breathe. It’s uncomfortable. I stood there for a second getting my bearings in the starless night, then began crisscrossing the wide, rocky road. Out here away from the city and traffic all I could hear was the swampy buzz of insects and night birds rustling the leaves. I saw Raymond’s flashlight weaving side to side as he stepped in the tree line on a beaten-earth path and began his search. What we found tonight and where we found it would speak volumes about what had happened to Skylar Barbour. And how it had happened. Every chilling, screaming detail. Brooks Barbour said she’d carried a purse. Had it been dumped in a struggle? Had someone tossed it aside and left us with prints, trace evidence, DNA?

  There was a ditch on the right edge of the road. I followed it, slowly sweeping my light around the area, then crossed the road again, taking short steps, trying to illuminate as much ground as I could. It wasn’t enough. A flashlight didn’t have a chance against a country night. I went back to my car, turned it around. My headlights lit up the road. And I was looking at Brooks Barbour and Luke. My breath caught. I threw the car in park and got out. “Mr. Barbour, what can I do for you?”

  “I saw your light from the house. If you think she’s out here somewhere, I want to help.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  “I get it. I’m a suspect. You think I’ll mess with evidence or something but—”

  I interrupted him. “This area has to be protected until it can be thoroughly searched. Please leave now.”

  “Look,” Barbour insisted. “I’m not the most demonstrative guy in the world. I admit it. But I love my daughter. I would never hurt her.”

  “You’ll have a chance to say whatever you need to say in the morning at your interview and polygraphs. I’m sorry,” I repeated.

  “You haven’t met Skylar.” He wasn’t leaving. “If you had, you’d remember her smile, her great big wide smile …” His voice trailed off. I waited. It was the first time I’d heard emotion from him that hadn’t instantly turned to anger. “We won’t survive this, me and Hayley. Our marriage, I mean. Skylar’s our glue. And now we’re in that house together. And I realize I can’t even stand to look at her without our daughter in the room.”

  “Go home, Mr. Barbour,” I said. “Be kind to your wife. And wait.”

  “At least take Luke,” he said. “He’s Skylar’s dog. He can help.”

  I wasn’t sure if Luke would like that idea, but it sounded good to me. I held my hand out. Barbour dropped the leash. Luke came forward, sniffed my fingers, then leaned against my leg—the big dog hug. I rubbed his shoulders and back. He sat down next to me. “Good boy,” I told him as Barbour’s footsteps crunched away from me. Luke made no move to follow him.

  I watched until he was a dim shadow in the light from my headlights, then picked up Luke’s leash. “He’s not the most touchy-feely guy, is he, fella?” Luke looked up at me. “I guess it’s just you and me.” He stood up with a dog’s intuition. He knew he had a job to do.

  We started to walk, Luke putting his nose alternately in the air to catch a scent too faint for a human’s blunt senses, then to the road as he led me until my headlights were too far away to provide enough light and I had to switch on the flashlight again.

  The dog’s pace suddenly picked up. He was pulling me and he was strong. I was trying hard not to slide on gravel. He stopped, made a few circles in the middle of the road, whined, then strained his leash and tugged me toward the ditch. I felt that rush every investigator gets when they know something’s about to happen, something hidden is about to be revealed—excitement tinged with dread and fear.

  Luke pulled me to the edge of the ditch. I made him sit while I swept my light over tangled grass. The ditch was dry from weeks without rain, and the sandy bottom was smooth from the runoff of storms past. I caught a glimpse of something in clumps of weeds on the side of the bank. “Stay, Luke,” I commanded. He shifted nervously on his haunches but obeyed while I climbed down awkwardly into the ditch and pushed through a mound of broad-leaved weeds with gloved hands. I felt it, and then went in for a closer view with my flashlight, carefully separating the grass. A pink case with a bitten apple on the back that said OTTERBOX. My light picked up something glistening on the case, a tiny smudge. I said a silent prayer for ridge detail, pulled out my phone, snapped a picture, then called Ken Meltzer.

  “I found something,” I told him. “It fits the description of the case on Skylar’s phone. We need lights out here, Ken. Before whatever else we have is lost or contaminated. Can you send Raymond back with evidence tags and bags? I don’t want to move until we can collect the evidence and mark this spot. And I need to turn off my headlights before my battery dies.”

  I knelt next to Luke, put my arm around him. I
heard his tail thumping against the road. That’s the thing about dogs. They have this beautiful way of experiencing joy on even the darkest days.

  Ten minutes later, I saw a light bobbing through the woods. Raymond went to his car first, then walked over to mine and cut the lights. “What’s he doing here?” Raymond eyed Luke cautiously.

  “Long story,” I replied.

  “I don’t like dogs,” he grouched. “Sheriff said you found something.”

  I shone my light on the spikey grass and weeds. Raymond stepped down into the trench and leaned in with his light. “Well, look at that,” he murmured.

  “I thought it would be better if you bagged it in case evidence is challenged later.”

  “Good thinking,” Raymond said.

  “There’s something in the road too. Luke smelled something.”

  Raymond snapped a couple of pictures, then zip-tied a manila tag to the spot where the phone case had lain and climbed back out with the phone case in an evidence bag. We stood there, Luke leaning against my leg, panting, Raymond and I staring down into the ditch.

  “I was thinking about the evidence in the Melinda Cochran case,” I told him.

  “Yeah,” Raymond answered. “That’s right. A phone. The battery was gone. No prints on the pieces we found. It was busted up in the middle of the road.”

  We exchanged a look. I put Luke on my left and let him lead the way. He did, his nose to the ground. He found a spot just left of the center of the road and began working in circles. Raymond and I swept our flashlights around the area.

  “I’ve got something,” I said after a few minutes. My light swept over a crushed glass screen, tiny dusty shards. My heart sank. It had been an iPhone. We’d probably run over it ourselves.

  I took a picture, and Raymond pulled an ink pen from his pocket, squatted next to the flattened phone, used the pen to flip it over. Glass fell out of the shattered frame onto the road. Raymond looked up at me.

  “No battery,” he said.

  23

  The floodlights arrived, clusters of them mounted on tall tripods and set up on the road like a movie crew was at work. Meltzer’s team moved carefully around the taped-off spot we’d determined was our crime scene, the point where I knew Skylar Barbour had lost control of her young life. A generator rumbled. A dozen deputies and a K-9 unit had been briefed before they spread out over the area. Temporary road posts were set up so scene tape could be attached and a perimeter could be built. The road had been blocked and closed. Raymond had taken photographs and left markers where he’d bagged evidence. He now paced slowly inside the big square, eyes on the ground. A crime-scene technician had taken charge of the evidence he’d bagged, marked and organized and stored it, then knelt on the road collecting samples from dirt and glass. I stood watching her, Luke at my side.

  “I know you,” the technician said. She glanced up at me. A strand of hair fell on her forehead. She blew it back. “We studied a case you worked on in school. The Marshland Murders. Master class in nailing an offender with trace.”

  It had been my first case with BAU-2. I’d produced a profile that differed from the working profile at the Bureau. I didn’t believe the offender was someone who cruised I-95 in Florida waiting for an opportunity. I was convinced he made his own opportunities and that he wasn’t a stranger to his victims. I took a lot of heat for arguing my theory against more experienced agents and behavioral analysts. But I had known I was right. I knew him. Some cases, it’s like the stars align. Everything makes sense. That’s what happened for me with the Marshland Murders. In the end, I’d fingered a suspect and shadowed him on my own time. One blazing Florida afternoon I’d followed him out of the city and watched him back his truck into what I would later discover was his dump site. I watched him roll a barrel off his truck. I surprised him that day. He didn’t fight. He could see my hand trembling on the Glock and the sweat from my hairline. He knew I’d fire and he was right. The FBI pulled nine bodies from the marsh fifteen yards away, each of them in a fifty-five-gallon steel drum—a bobbing, shifting, floating graveyard. The killer was a landscaper and handyman, the kind of guy who’d volunteer to clean a neighbor’s gutters, an all-around great guy, a husband, father, friend, who had been slitting the throats of boys and women and stuffing them in metal barrels and dumping them in the glades for years. Scientists were able to connect him to all the murders with tiny particles from the cypress mulch he used in his business. It was on his clothing and shoes and in his vehicle and on the victims and inside the barrels. And the steel drums he was using left more trace evidence: Tiny, nearly invisible flecks of paint had chipped off the drums when he’d loaded them or when a drum tipped over and rolled on his truck bed. They sealed the killer’s fate in the trial phase as tightly as if they’d closed the lid of one of his steel drums. Good old-fashioned police work, as Rauser would say, is usually what leads you to your suspect. It was the case that sent my career and my reputation soaring.

  “I remember it,” I told the tech.

  “I’d shake your hand if I could,” she said. “I’m Sam.”

  “Nice to meet you, Sam. Listen, that phone case you tagged into evidence—I noticed a smudge of some kind on it.” I handed her my phone and she studied the picture I’d snapped of the case and the shiny smudge. “It’s some kind of oily substance. Really interested in what it is.”

  “Sure thing,” she said. She had the kind of southern accent that made thing sound like thang.

  “I want to have Melinda Cochran’s phone pulled from evidence and rechecked as well,” I told her.

  Sam nodded. “Will do.”

  The sheriff joined us. Sam stood up holding an evidence bag full of glass in one gloved hand and tweezers with a tiny piece of black glass in the other. She slipped the tiny piece of glass into a separate small bag and laid it on top of something that looked like a toolbox, hit it with bright light. We leaned in to have a look. “I think we have a serial number.” She read off the number. The sheriff jotted it down, then walked over to where his detective was still walking the area with his eyes locked on the road. I saw Raymond get on his phone immediately, and I knew he was contacting the manufacturer—the advantages of a 24/7 world.

  Sam returned to the place in the road where she’d been collecting evidence. Luke whined at my left leg. “We’ve got blood evidence,” Sam announced a moment later. I followed her light to a single spot in the dirt, smaller than a dime, rusty brown under the artificial light. She took pictures of the stain with a bright flash.

  “What can you tell about the stain?” I asked.

  She looked up at me. “I’m not a spatter analyst but it’s a drip stain. Edge characteristics and directionality says it came straight down. Careful where you walk, Dr. Street. Maybe we got the offender here too. Whatever happened, it didn’t involve a lot of blood. I’d say he probably hit her here, though.”

  Luke whined again, stuck his nose to the ground. He could smell the blood on the road. He’d gone around in circles at something I couldn’t see. His owner’s blood. Skylar’s scent. I decided to walk him home. He’d had enough, and I needed to clear out while the scene was being processed.

  I kept thinking about that school picture, the smiling, brown-eyed girl in a sweater vest. I didn’t want her to be on a hard floor in some dark basement. I didn’t want to think about those bright eyes growing dark and hollow. But the similarities with the other cases were too great to ignore—the MO, the missing battery, the crushed phone, the time of day, the age, race, gender, hair color.

  I started down the road. I felt Luke’s tail hitting my leg, heard him panting, felt his pace quickening. He was excited to be going home.

  Fast footfalls on the pebbly road caused both Luke and me to turn. Luke growled. “It’s okay, boy,” Meltzer crooned. He held out a hand for Luke to sniff. “It’s just me. Thought I’d walk you. Good idea using the dog, by the way. Gave us a jump on finding that phone case.”

  “He found the blood too. But it was
n’t my idea. Brooks Barbour showed up with Luke.”

  “Barbour walked up there?” the sheriff asked.

  “Made my antenna go up too,” I said. Luke stayed close to my leg.

  “What did he want?”

  “Wanted me to know how much he loved his daughter. Said he wanted to help.”

  “Interesting.” Meltzer was frowning. “You buy it?”

  “He confirmed he can’t stand his wife. I believed that part. Jury’s still out on the rest.”

  Meltzer’s phone rang. He answered and listened, then said, “Okay, thanks. First thing tomorrow, cross-check all the teachers at Skylar’s school with the school in Silas that Tracy Davidson attended. Run home addresses too. Let’s see if any of them made the move from one area to the other. Start with Daniel Tray, the music teacher. Keye’s going to talk to him tomorrow. I want her to have whatever we can get first.” He disconnected. “Using your investigative strategy, Dr. Street.” I saw his white teeth in the dark and heard the grin in his voice.

  “Hence the exorbitant consulting fee,” I reminded him.

  “That was Rob,” he said. His deep, fireside voice grew serious again. “It confirmed the serial number is one of three active devices registered to Brooks Barbour’s account. We’ll check the Barbours’ phones but I think there’s little doubt it was Skylar’s.”

  We walked for a couple of minutes. I could hear the rustle of his uniform, his breathing, feel his hips lightly bump into me as we walked. And I felt all those dueling emotions too—exhaustion, excitement at new evidence, sadness at what the evidence meant, guilt at my attraction to a small-town sheriff, and astonishment that the physical pull of his body so close to mine was enough to stir me even in the middle of an investigation. Nothing an addict’s brain enjoys more than a little inner chaos. It’s like jet fuel. Those pathways had been carved out years ago, and they opened up wide for just about any emotional roller-coaster ride I wanted to take. But what rose to the top was sorrow. I felt sick over Skylar, worried, bombarded with images of other victims, dozens of other children in dozens of other cases. I didn’t even know this child and I couldn’t bear to think about her suffering. Life isn’t always kind to the most fragile among us. It’s the hardest injustice to contemplate.