The minister talked about the value of faith in trying times. I wasn’t even sure what that meant. Faith that Skylar would come home? Faith that bad things don’t happen to innocent people? Because they do. He finished with another prayer, and Ken Meltzer stepped in front of the microphone. Pastor Hutchins touched my shoulder as he passed and slipped in next to his wife. Someone handed us candles. Bernadette let go of my arm for the first time.
Meltzer was brief and professional. He seemed comfortable behind a lectern, commanding, reassuring. He repeated the information from the Amber Alert, and added new information we’d obtained from forensic evidence. The kidnapper—he was careful not to say killer—is likely to be holding his captive in an abandoned or vacant property without electricity, he told the people of Whisper. He might keep odd hours, be secretive about why he leaves work or home. Someone may have detected a kerosene scent about him or his clothes. Meltzer appealed to everyone to search his or her memories. Were you on Cottonwood Road around three-fifteen yesterday? Had you noticed any broken-down vehicles or vehicles out of place? Did you know anyone who was in the area of the abduction? He reminded everyone that the tip line number was on flyers all over town and that sign-up sheets were available for volunteers who wanted to help. He then spoke briefly about the oath he’s taken twice, and what the community means to him and to his mother, who had traveled back to her roots a decade ago. I spotted her for the first time when he gestured to her. She sat in a folding chair, her caretaker sitting next to her, and Ginger the golden retriever mix at her feet.
Hayley and Brooks Barbour followed the sheriff to the microphone. Hayley’s voice wobbled and broke as she said Skylar’s name. Brooks bit his lip and stared straight into the night. I had to look away. Feel it, push it aside. Feel it, push it aside. That’s what you do. That’s what you must do. Save it. Stuff it in your pocket and pull it out on your own time. Have a complete, magnificent fucking breakdown only when the case is closed. Think about the victim and the killer, I reminded myself. Forget the collateral damage.
I said good-bye to the minister and his wife, set my burning candle on a folding table with other burning candles, and worked my way back through the crowd. I wondered if his eyes were on me now. He had the advantage of knowing who I was.
I saw the playground as I pushed out of the packed crowd, the wooden fort and the swing set, a few kids playing, parents hovering and talking. A boy was sitting on top of the fort, watching over the heads of the crowd, as Hayley Barbour’s frail, breaking voice followed me out of the swarm. Robbie Raymond lifted his hand shyly in a half wave.
“How you doing?” I stopped at the base of the fort, looked up at him. His long legs dangled off the side.
“I don’t want to be here. But I couldn’t stay home either. You know?”
“I know,” I reassured him. He pushed himself off and landed on his feet next to me. When his face came out of the shadows, I saw the bruise around his eye and cheekbone.
“Robbie—what happened?”
“Ran into a door,” he said, and smiled a little.
“Ah,” I said. “Door must have had a big old fist attached.”
Robbie was silent.
“You sure you’re okay? You need to talk about anything?”
I saw his eyes drift past me, saw them widen. He took a step back. I felt a heavy hand on my arm, spinning me around. I looked up into Detective’s Raymond’s sour face. I grabbed the hand and jerked it away. “What the hell, Raymond?”
“I told you to stay the fuck away from my kid.” His tongue was thick, and I smelled booze.
“Dad,” Robbie said. “Stop. Okay? Just stop.”
“You shut the fuck up,” Raymond ordered. He was a mean drunk, the sheriff had told me.
“Detective,” I said firmly. “You smell like a brewery. You’re in a public place representing the sheriff’s department and you’re making a scene. This is such a bad idea.” We already had the attention of the parents at the playground. “Go home,” I told him quietly. “Robbie, can you drive him?”
“Fuck you,” Raymond snarled. “Fuck you. Fuck both of you.” He stalked off, wavering just a little when he turned but doing a good job of not appearing like a drunk.
I looked at Robbie. “He do that to you?” I reached up and touched his cheek. He winced away.
“It’s okay. I’m okay. He’s under a lot of pressure.”
I looked back at Raymond lumbering out of the park. “You have someplace to go tonight?” I asked, and Robbie nodded. “Stay here, okay?”
I sent the sheriff a text. Brooks Barbour was at the lectern when I saw the sheriff emerge from the crowd. I told him about Raymond, about Robbie’s black eye. Meltzer was furious. “I’m going to kill him,” he fumed quietly as we walked. “But first I’m going to have a deputy follow him home. And when he’s sober, I’m going to fire his ass. The only reason I haven’t fired him around a million times is because I was worried about how he would support his kid. I happen to like the boy.”
“I don’t think Robbie should go home until Raymond’s sober.”
Robbie was still standing near the wooden fort. I saw Meltzer tense when he stepped into the light. “That’s quite a shiner,” he said playfully, and put his arm around Robbie’s shoulders. His expression, his voice, didn’t betray what I knew he was feeling. “How about you go home with me when this thing is over tonight. We’ll grill a steak and put some ice on that eye.”
“Sounds good.” Robbie nodded.
“Dr. Street, care to join us?”
I shook my head. “Sounds like a guy thing.”
“Well, we all need a good night’s sleep. That means you too, Dr. Street. That’s an order,” Meltzer said. “Been a tough day for everyone.”
“Sheriff Meltzer! Dr. Street!” Brenda Roberts was running at us. She moved on three-inch heels like they were cleats. Her cameraman had his camera out. Robbie stepped back into the shadows. Meltzer sighed.
“And it just got tougher,” I said.
41
I spread my notes out over the double bed, every thought I’d put down on paper since Sheriff Ken Meltzer had called my office at the first of the week. It seemed like a decade ago. There were more notes in my phone I’d made when there wasn’t time to find pen and paper. I rolled a chair over, sat next to the bed, and started organizing. The entire day had been spent reacting to new information. He liked it that way, I thought. He’d thrown us some scraps to keep us busy.
The entire blanket was covered with lined yellow sheets I’d pulled from my legal pad. I looked at them all, read them, made checkmarks on the ideas that had been explored and exhausted. I made new notes about the dirt and fibers Sam had found on the letter. Meltzer had done a good job of getting the information out tonight, and he’d given an interview to Brenda Roberts to further that agenda while I slipped away with Raymond’s battered son to find Mrs. Meltzer, her caretaker, and Ken’s dog, Ginger.
I pushed in the flash drive Brolin had given me and clicked through a page at a time, rereading witness statements, the lab reports. It was after one when I turned off the light. We were starting early, meeting in the war room at five a.m. and then fanning out. The search teams would begin again at daybreak. It was a small county. Eventually they would find his lair.
The room was icy. I pulled the sheet over me, thought about the day—Daniel Tray and his lover, the girl in the park staring down into the flame she held, praying for her friend’s safe return. Raymond seeing the photo of Skylar’s broken finger, the dog, Peele laughing and heckling, Sam’s emotionless twang reciting the letter. Dear Keye, I’ve started hurting her. I thought you’d want to know.
A thought crossed my mind, then grabbed me by the throat. I sent Sam a text. I’m sorry. I know it’s late. Just a quick question. The first letter, the one I found on my windshield, what prints did you find?
I reopened my Mac and pulled up the software we use for background checks while I waited for Sam to hear her phone and resp
ond. Neil could have done this faster. Neil could have done it with his eyes closed. But his eyes probably were closed right now.
Sam’s text came back. No prints. No fibers.
One-thirty in the morning, more than thirty-four hours into Skylar’s abduction, and something was finally making sense.
By two, I’d found our man’s connection to Silas, Georgia, where Tracy Davidson had lived until that day after school when she had been lured away. I’d always wondered how he’d done that. Now I knew. And I learned a few other things that ignited my hopes, sent them soaring, and cemented the suspect in my mind.
I got dressed—field clothes—and left my hotel again. I’d wrestled with whether to notify the sheriff’s department. But I couldn’t. Not yet. I needed more than flimsy connections. I needed evidence. In the end I’d decided to keep my eye on him until morning, make sure he was home or at work, not somewhere tormenting Skylar. And then I’d lay it all out for the department and hope they’d run with it, start the quiet process of investigating, building their case, surveillance, GPS tracking. He would lead us to her if we were careful.
I coasted past the house, followed the street to its end, and turned around at a tangle of kudzu-wrapped pine trees. Then I cut my lights, eased back up the street. I parked along the curb a few houses down.
A streetlight buzzed, blinked, made popping sounds, dimmed like headlights in a fog by the heavy, moist air that settles in on hot August nights. My windows were down. I heard the roar of air conditioners wedged in windows and the whirling fans in condensing units alongside the houses.
I reached around to the back floorboard and found my travel pillow. It’s the kind of thing you keep in your car when you spend a lot of time parked on streets watching people. I stuck the pillow behind me and leaned my back against the driver’s door with my binoculars in my hand. I studied the house, the front door with no deadbolt, the darkened single-pane windows. No security. No need.
His vehicle was here. He was home, probably sleeping just fine. That meant he wasn’t with Skylar. I’d rather she be alone and hungry and scared than dealing with this monster. I had him now, or thought I did. But I only had one chance. If I confronted him with circumstantial evidence, Skylar was dead. He’d never go back to her. He’d never risk it. If I stayed cool and laid out a good case in the war room in a few hours, we could start closing in. He knew the county was being searched building by building and shack by shack. Old storm cellars and wells were being pried open. It was all out there now, practically every piece of information law enforcement had. He’d have to clean the scene, remove anything that was suspicious so some deputy’s antennae didn’t go up. And he’d have to move Skylar. He’d kill her. It was the only conclusion, the only way to protect himself now.
I lowered my binoculars and leaned into the pillow against my door. My eyes ached and I let them close, but my mind was doing 110, racing back over every moment since I’d arrived, questioning myself, the sheriff’s department, seeing all those candlelit faces in the park, probing Whisper’s darkest corners. Every investigator in the world has had those cases where they’d have bet the bank on a suspect and found out later they had it all wrong. Investigations are twisty, changing things, as thin and ephemeral as August mist. They remind you of your own humanness and that at the height of all your perceptive rectitude, you could be as wrong as hard desert rain. And I’d been wrong too many times in the past thirty-six hours.
I think it was the sound of the screen door banging. Or maybe it was the scrape of the key in the ignition that roused me out of a drifting sleep. The car was backing out of the driveway, the fog blurring his brake lights. My heart thumped against my rib cage. He was on the move. He’d set his clock to slip out early, when the streets and highways were empty.
I waited for his taillights to disappear off the street, then started my car. The moon was a ringed crescent. A bad moon, my mother would have called it. August fogs and moon rings meant dark days in winter.
I kept my distance as he curved through Whisper for the highway. One glimpse of my white Impala in his rearview and he’d pull off, change plans, perhaps even lead me somewhere to do to me what he’d done to them. I felt for the Glock next to me on the seat.
His headlights touched the tasseled edges of a cornfield as I followed him down a dark two-lane, my own lights off. My right knee had a tremor when I pressed the accelerator. My body was generating the hyperaroused cascade of hormones that prepares you for danger. I could taste them, feel them coursing through me, terrifying and addictive. It must have been close to what he feels in those moments when he’s talking to them but not hearing, when norepinephrine is blasting through his system, when he’s getting an erection and his snake’s brain is telling him the exact moment to strike.
He touched his brake lights and slowed, almost stopped. He’d seen me, I thought. He turned onto a narrow one-lane dirt road. I waited, then followed, kept his brake lights in front of me for a mile, red dust rising up off the road and clinging to the haze. I tensed with every curve, expecting to see him waiting for me around each bend.
He turned again. South this time. I saw tall grass and weeds in his headlights. I stopped and picked up my binoculars, watched his car creeping through a field.
I pulled up location services on my phone. I’d completely lost a sense of where I was.
His brake lights glowed crimson. He’d stopped, the arc of a small structure illuminated briefly before he cut his lights.
“Skylar,” I whispered, and thought about the panic and terror she must feel at hearing that engine. I pressed in Meltzer’s number, picked up my gun, and started through tall, wet grass that rippled like water as I ran, soaking my legs. “I need backup now, and an ambulance.” My voice shook.
The lake was near. I could smell it—a thousand pungent, intoxicating scents hanging in the heavy air. The woods edging the field looked like a ragged black wall. Everything alive in Georgia on a late-summer night buzzed and bit and scampered as I ran. My heart was ricocheting off my eardrums. I looked up at a thin web of light emitting from the structure ahead. The lantern, the kerosene residue on the note. My foot hit a rock and I went down; dirt and pebbles tore into my palms.
And then I heard it, and the world tipped up on its axis—Skylar’s scream, hoarse and jagged, like breaking glass in the night.
“Let her go. Let her go!” I screamed, and ran hard and fast in that swaying, disorienting blackness toward the building ahead. I fired my gun. I had to distract him.
A bullet kicked up the earth in front of me. The pop of his service weapon registered in my brain a moment after. I kept moving. He fired again. I felt the dirt spray my cheek, and dove into the grass. A third shot nearly hit its target.
“Let the girl go!” I yelled. “It’s over, Raymond.”
42
I could make it out now. It was small, a ramshackle woodshed, a smokehouse. Raymond was standing at the corner of the shack. The lantern was burning on the ground behind him, making him darker, bigger, bulkier. He fired again. Nowhere close. He’d lost me.
I inched slowly toward him through reedy grass, felt the dry ground burning my elbows raw. I found my keys, wrapped a firm fist around them so they wouldn’t jangle, then hurled them with all my might. I heard them hit the ground, heard his weapon discharge again. I scrambled up and fired.
Raymond howled, grabbed his leg, nearly crumpled. His gun hit the ground. “Don’t move,” I yelled as I ran toward him, the Glock in front of me. My own voice sounded foreign, packed with adrenaline and fury. I scooped up his gun and wedged it in my pants, saw his shredded pant leg and the blood spreading over his thigh. “Give me your cuffs and your keys, asshole.”
Raymond made a move toward his belt, winced. I took a step closer and aimed at his forehead. “Keys and cuffs. Now.” I looked at the shack, shouted out. “Skylar, honey. You’re safe. It’s going to be okay, sweetheart. I’m coming in to get you.”
“How’d you know?” Raymond as
ked.
“The note you took to the lab. My prints weren’t on it. I handled it without gloves, which means you wiped it clean. You had to make double sure you hadn’t left anything on it. And the iced coffee in your car. You’d been in town. Robbie said so too. No one would have noticed you leaving the note.”
His legs were stretched out in front of him awkwardly. He dropped the cuffs. “Put them on,” I ordered, and called out to Skylar again. I heard no cries for help. No screams.
“So now you think you’re gonna get to be the big shot,” Raymond growled, not moving. “You have no idea—”
“I did some checking on you. Your sister lives in Silas. She’s a teacher where Tracy went to school. You were around there a lot back then since Robbie lost his mom in the lake and all. Funny thing about your wife.” I bent and snapped the cuffs on him. He didn’t move. “She was a pretty blond, wasn’t she? Found out she was a good swimmer in high school.”
Raymond grimaced. His pant leg looked slippery and dark in the lamplight. “None of it matters now,” he said.
“You move while I’m gone and I’ll kill you when I come back.” I grabbed his keys. “You even look at her when I bring her out, I’ll shoot you.”
I took the lantern. Thirty-seven hours into her nightmare, I was finally going to dig her out.
The stench of urine and mildew and worse slapped me in the face when I pushed the door open. “Skylar, honey. I’m here. It’s going to be okay.”
I held the lantern in front of me and saw that smiling girl in the photos looking up at me. Her mouth was stretched wide and silent, eyes fixed with the terror and betrayal she’d taken to death. The axe lay next to her head, gleaming with blood and tissue. He’d killed her like he’d killed Tracy, as if it were just a necessary task. He’d used the axe because he didn’t want to discharge his weapon. Not when the whole county was watching and listening.
Don’t Talk to Strangers: A Novel Page 31
