Don’t Talk to Strangers: A Novel

by Amanda Kyle Williams

  “Nice,” I said. “I can see you’ve given this some thought. We just need to clear up a few things, Mr. Tray, and we’ll be out of your hair. I know you’d want us to do the same if it were your daughter.”

  Tray’s greenish eyes darkened and drifted over my shoulder. Meltzer joined us. “I don’t want my neighbors to think—” Tray said.

  “We parked a couple of doors down,” Meltzer told him.

  “Look, I was upset when I found out about Skylar,” Tray told us. His left hand was still on the shovel, stuck in the earth. “And I know I must have looked suspicious to you. It was just such a shock. Skylar was a sweet kid.”

  My heart hit my stomach. Was. She was a sweet kid. The condensing unit a foot away buzzed and clicked on. Hot air from the rusty fan inside rustled our clothes and made a row of tall iris stems shimmy against the side of the house.

  “Is there somewhere we could sit and talk?” Meltzer asked. His voice was friendly, a daddy voice, a bedtime-story voice, a voice that made you forget he was wondering if you were a killer of girls. Tray gave another glance at the street. Meltzer pressed a little harder. “We don’t have time to spare right now, Mr. Tray.”

  Tray’s shoulders slumped. He pulled the shovel out of the dirt and leaned it against the house. He led us around back to a small stone patio. I saw a four-foot Japanese maple sitting in fresh dirt. A tag still hung on one branch limb. The aluminum shed Neil had seen on satellite was open to a lawn mower and neatly stacked garden tools. We sat down at a metal table, a bright orange umbrella overhead. I looked at the row of woods behind the house. You can hide a lot in the woods.

  “You lied about what time you left school yesterday,” I said. “Why?”

  “I don’t even know for sure what time I left, okay?” Tray’s long, bony arms were propped on the gritty tabletop. “I came straight home.”

  “Did you talk to anyone or see anyone?” Meltzer was leaning back in the metal chair, long body relaxed. “Skylar was abducted just a little after three. We have a witness who saw you leave the school at two, but we can’t find anyone who saw you after that.”

  “I didn’t know I’d need a story.” Tray’s eyes were watering, as if he were looking into the sun.

  “You remember where you were when Melinda Cochran disappeared?” I asked.

  “I was at school when I heard about Melinda.”

  “But you don’t remember where you were that day? January seventeenth?”

  “I was at work.”

  “The attendance records show you as absent that day.”

  His right hand opened and closed. Fear blazed in his eyes. “I only used two sick days during the last school year. And if one of them was the day Melinda disappeared, I swear to God it was just some freak coincidence—”

  “Okay, so here’s what’s going to happen,” Meltzer interposed, before I could speak again. His voice stayed even but I felt the coiled energy coming off him. “I’m going to cuff you like a common criminal and bring you in for questioning as a person of interest in the kidnap and murders of Tracy Davidson and Melinda Cochran, and in Skylar Barbour’s abduction. I’m going to haul you in the back of that plainly marked vehicle through town with all the windows down. That’s going to create a lot of buzz. We may even tip that reporter hanging around town. And then we’re going to pick apart every infinitesimal piece of your private life until we understand why you’re lying about where you were yesterday at three—”

  “Whoa!” Tray held up both palms. “Just whoa. Okay, listen.” His fist clenched again. His gaze skittered away from us. He was deciding what to tell, figuring out what to let go of, what to color. “I’ll tell you but you can’t tell anyone.”

  Meltzer’s eyebrow came up. We exchanged a glance.

  “Let me get this straight.” Meltzer leaned forward. “You want to cut a deal or you’ll withhold information in a homicide investigation? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I’m seeing someone. Okay? She’s married.” Tray’s words came out in a panicked torrent.

  “This she have a name?” Meltzer asked.

  “Yes,” Tray answered quietly. And I suddenly knew why he’d run to church today. His lover was an adulterer, and he’d lied to me to cover their deception. A big deal for a guy who gives a good chunk of his income to Christian ministries.

  “Good Lord,” I muttered quietly. I’d sensed deception and rooted out an affair, not a killer. I pinched the bridge of my nose, closed my eyes for a second, as the sheriff took the name of Tray’s afternoon booty call. Daniel Tray wasn’t our guy.

  The breeze spun the umbrella sticking through the hole in the table like a pinwheel and brought us the smell of fermenting apples from a tree next door. I saw them on the ground, brown and rotting, saw the yellow jackets buzzing greedily around them.

  Small towns, I thought.

  35

  A poster with Skylar’s face was taped to a telephone pole. The word MISSING over the photo. We sat there looking at it. RAISE AWARENESS AND HELP BRING SKYLAR HOME! CANDLELIGHT PRAYER—FRIDAY 8:30 P.M.—WHISPER PARK. The minister’s wife came out of the hardware store where we were parked. She put a stack of posters on the sidewalk, then taped another poster to the front door. She saw us and waved. We waved back. She wasn’t smiling either.

  “Let me talk to the florist,” I told Meltzer. “I think she’s more likely to talk about her private life off the record.”

  “Right.” He nodded. “I’ll speak to Bernadette and hit the coffee shop. Are you opposed to more caffeine?”

  “Never,” I said fervently.

  I signed hello to Bernadette Hutchins, then crossed the street and walked three stores up. The door was stenciled in white. PACE FLORAL DESIGN. MON–SAT 9:00–5:00. CLOSED FOR LUNCH 12:00–1:00. Below that, someone had taped another MISSING poster.

  Inside, roses in cheap white vases and carnations stuffed into wet green foam with baby’s breath and other greenery chilled behind glass doors. It all looked and smelled like a funeral to me. The bell had jangled when I opened the door and she’d looked up from a pile of long-stem roses on the counter, clippers in her right hand. She was brown-eyed and pretty in a simple way. Plain, my mother would have labeled her after a Bless her heart or two.

  “May I help you?” she asked, but I saw her lips tighten. She knew who I was and why I was there. Tray had warned her. It had probably sounded something like: She’s Chinese.

  “Mrs. Pace?”

  She snipped a leaf off a rose stem, then cut the end at an angle and put it in a different pile. “The driver will be back soon,” she told me, keeping her eyes and hands on her work. I had a feeling she wasn’t very happy with her boyfriend at the moment.

  “My name is Keye Street. I’m working with the sheriff’s department. I think you already know that. And why I’m here. This won’t take but a minute,” I said.

  She clipped another stem. She still wasn’t looking at me. “I’ve been seeing Dan for over two years. I know it’s wrong. But I’ve been so unhappy—do you have to tell my husband?” she asked quietly. “He thinks I have Jazzercise.”

  Five minutes later, I walked out of the floral chill into the searing sun. Meltzer was crossing the street with two tall plastic cups. Bernadette Hutchins was several doors up with her posters, Skylar’s face plastered all over. “Latte, frozen. For the city girl. How’d it go?” As Meltzer handed it to me, I saw two women staring out the drugstore window across the street.

  “They’ve been meeting for two years twice a month,” I said. “Ferrell verified the reservation at the Marriott in the resort area.”

  “That leaves one suspect on our board,” he said grimly. “He’s been in his cave since he left us this morning. And you don’t like him for this. So where does that leave us?”

  I glanced at the coffee shop next to the drugstore. More curious eyes peering out. “I could be wrong but I simply don’t think it’s possible for Peele not to be noticed. I mean, come on, he has a red Fu Manchu and arms lik
e a weight lifter. And as far as we can tell, Peele is a stranger to all three girls. Besides, no one will ever know about the crimes Peele is or isn’t committing. He doesn’t want to go back to jail. He’s not going to send me letters.”

  “So why doesn’t he just alibi out of yesterday and end this?” Meltzer answered his own question. “You think he has an alibi that he’s not using. Because he likes stringing us along.”

  “It does cost you time and resources,” I told him. “And he probably is hiding something.”

  I saw a flash in the window across the street, a reflection, and turned to see what it was. Brenda Roberts’s cameraman leaned against a lamppost twenty feet away. His camera was pointed our way. I didn’t see the reporter. Meltzer followed my eyes. We started walking toward his vehicle, our backs to the camera. “I’d love to bring Peele in,” he said. “I could hold him for a while without charging him. But if he is our man, you know he’s not going to tell us where Skylar is. And who knows if …” He stopped.

  “He’d let her die,” I said, finishing his thought. “Which is another reason we can’t rule him out. That’s exactly the kind of man we’re looking for.”

  We got in the truck. Meltzer looked back at the street. “Camera’s still on us,” he grumbled.

  “Must be getting stock footage. I don’t see Roberts.”

  Meltzer sighed. “They’ve got me coming out of a coffee shop. The only thing that could make that more clichéd would be if I had a doughnut in my hand.”

  “And a beer belly,” I said.

  A single bell tolled on the sheriff’s phone. He tucked his cup between his legs and pressed the phone against his left temple. “Meltzer,” he said. He listened. “How long was he gone?” His right thumb turned the small ruby on his ring finger in tiny, uneasy half circles. “Stand by, Major.” He put the phone against his leg. “Plainclothes unit on Peele said he jogged by them thirteen minutes ago. Hooded sweatshirt, shorts, sweaty. He was going home. Which means he slipped out and we don’t know how long he was unaccounted for.”

  “He’s jogging? This time of day? In a hooded sweatshirt? I don’t think so,” I said. “He knows he’s under surveillance. He knows he was missing for an undetermined amount of time. He understands the implications of that. And he understands that you will have to respond to this. He’s playing with you, Ken. Why else would he make sure they saw him?”

  “Because he’s arrogant enough to believe we can’t catch him.” He lifted the phone and gave Brolin orders. “Let’s see who we can pull off patrol and get them out there. We’re going to have to cover every inch within a mile of that place. Look at everything, talk to everyone. Rob checked one of Skylar’s shirts into evidence. Have him give it to the K-nine unit and let’s get them moving. And the unit that lost Peele—I want them back in uniform within the hour sitting in their squad on the highway. In the sun. For a week.”

  He clicked off, said damn under his breath. The muscles flexed in his jaw. “I gotta get a new job.” He threw the Interceptor in gear, then hit his brakes hard enough that I almost lost my frozen latte. The florist, Nora Pace, appeared at my window. She was holding one of those white vases I’d seen in the cooler. It held a single pink carnation. A note card was stabbed into a fork-shaped plastic stem.

  She thrust the vase at me. “I recognized your name and realized this was for you. We were supposed to deliver it to your hotel, but since you’re here …”

  I didn’t take the vase. “Where’d this come from?” I asked her.

  “There was a note under the door when I got back from lunch with some cash and the card that’s on here, with instructions to deliver it to you at Whispering Pines Inn,” she said. “I threw in the carnation and the vase since we’re a florist, not a courier service.”

  “A secret admirer,” Meltzer said, and almost as the words were coming out of his mouth he seemed to realize what Nora Pace might be holding. He reached in the back and opened the latches on his scene kit, handed me gloves and an evidence pouch.

  “He doesn’t know I’ve changed hotels,” I said, as I stretched on the gloves.

  “Interesting Mr. Fu Manchu was conveniently AWOL when this arrived,” he remarked.

  “Yes, it is.” I lifted the card off the plastic pitchfork and slid it into a paper evidence pouch. Plastic looks good on TV but condensation can corrupt evidence. I turned to Nora. “You got back at one o’clock?” I remembered the CLOSED FOR LUNCH sign on the door.

  She was starting to look nervous. She glanced back at her shop, then at the cameraman easing across the street. “A few minutes before.”

  “You still have those instructions? And the cash?”

  “In the trash,” she said, standing there in the sun with her little white vase. “The note, I mean. The cash is in the register. It was a twenty. It would be on top.”

  “I’ll take the florist. You take the cameraman,” Meltzer said. He was out of the vehicle with his scene kit held by its handle like a businessman with a briefcase. “I’m calling Ferrell to pick up that card and whatever else we have inside.”

  I pushed open the door, and Nora Pace stepped out of the way. She looked scared. “You can keep the flower,” I told her. “And not a word of this to anyone. Please.” She nodded. She didn’t have to be reminded we were keeping some secrets for her too.

  The sheriff disappeared inside the shop. Daniel Tray’s married lover followed him, holding the vase out in front of her like it had been contaminated. I headed for the cameraman. “How long have you been here?”

  I saw his finger hit a switch on the camera. He lowered it to his side. “I got here when you got here,” he answered. Which probably meant he’d been tailing us from a distance and definitely meant he hadn’t gotten the offender on tape. “They’re preparing the park for a candlelight vigil tonight. I’m supposed to get some video.”

  “The park is back there,” I told him, and watched him walk away. He pulled out his phone and glanced over his shoulder.

  I looked at Main Street, quaint and tidy, cars parked in angled slots in front of the storefronts. Was he out there, looking out of one of those windows, watching us trying to figure out what we had and how to keep a lid on it? Behind Main Street, Whisper Park prepared for the prayer service. Was he playing the concerned neighbor, helping out? Or had Logan Peele delivered that card while he was out on his jog?

  I heard the bell jingle on the florist’s door. The sheriff crossed the street and handed me his case. We got back in the truck. I checked to make sure the camera guy wasn’t hovering, then released the metal latches on the hard-sided case. I lifted the manila envelope lying flat on the top and opened it, peered down inside to see a lined piece of paper, hole-punched, with ragged edges.

  Please deliver this card to Keye Street at the Whispering Pines Inn.

  I stared at it, felt it plucking at nerves already stretched as tight as guitar strings, felt its silky fingers slipping around my neck. “Ken,” I said, “it’s Skylar’s handwriting.”

  36

  Nothing is more accustomed to the ordinary, more tuned to the predictable footfalls of its regulars, than a main street in small-town America. We notice the extraordinary—orange running shoes, blue hair, tats, a stranger hovering, dark sunglasses, a car creeping behind a bicycle. Main Street was on alert today. Whisper was full of posters and dark speculation, and still I hadn’t found one person who’d noticed someone slipping a card under the florist’s door.

  The hard, jagged truth that someone was targeting children in this honeysuckle town had engulfed the population like the hot fangs of a fire. Reality was setting in for everyone.

  I’d glimpsed the sheriff coming out of one store across the street and going into another. A shake of his head told me he hadn’t scored yet either. How long had it taken—two, three seconds—to slip an envelope under a door? Bernadette Hutchins had been on the street half an hour before we arrived, and the florist had been open when she papered its door with Skylar’s photo. The shop
s that faced the florist—the hardware store, the coffee shop, the drugstore—all had a view that was partially obstructed by the cars parked in front. And Whisper wasn’t the kind of town that needed traffic cameras and sidewalk monitors on every block like downtown Atlanta, which was as wired and closely watched as a high-stakes poker game.

  I had begun at the top of the street and worked my way back down to Smith’s Hardware, near Meltzer’s vehicle. I checked the time. Another half an hour had been chewed up, thirty more minutes ticking away like a detonator.

  I saw the sheriff on the other end of the street. He was about to go into the Italian restaurant. I looked over the shops. I could see a slice of the park from here and beyond that the middle school. I could hear voices, young voices, in the park.

  Mr. Smith came out of his store and stood beside me, a big, barrel-chested guy in his seventies with liver spots on white fleshy hands. He pulled a pipe from his pocket and tapped it. Ash and burned-black tobacco drifted down to the sidewalk. From the other pocket came a pouch of new tobacco. The cherry scent roused a memory of my dad in his shop tinkering and smoking the pipe my mother wouldn’t let him have in the house.

  “It’s a damn shame something so bad could happen in a town like this.” Smith lit his pipe with short puffs, stared out at the street.

  “It’s a shame anywhere,” I said.

  “What happened here today?” he wanted to know. “Why all the questions?”

  “We have reason to believe the man responsible for the murders and abductions was here,” I answered. I wasn’t going to share the evidence with him.

  “I didn’t see anything. Me and my only employee have been in the back most of the day.”