Don’t Talk to Strangers: A Novel

by Amanda Kyle Williams

  I knelt down next to her, smelled her blood and excrement and her dirty hair. I saw a single mattress, stained and reeking. I saw the Nine West handbag he’d let her keep. Skylar was on her back with her legs straight out in front of her, ankles rubbed raw and bruised. Chains had been secured around an old engine block and stretched out four feet, rusty ankle cuffs attached to them. He was dragging her out when he’d heard me running and screaming, running and screaming, then firing my gun. It was too late. I was too late. I hadn’t screamed loud enough. I hadn’t fired fast enough. I’d let the world have her. I’d let it crush her and break her parents’ hearts.

  I put her head in my lap, touched her warm forehead, pushed blond hair out of her eyes. “I’m so sorry,” I told her. I choked on the words. Even they were too late.

  I put her head down gently, staggered outside, furious and heartsick, sucked clean air into my lungs. Raymond watched me, my bullet burning in his leg, his cuffed wrists in his lap. He was sweating.

  “You fucker!” I cried. He stared up at me in the lantern light. “You could have let her live. You knew this was almost over. You knew we were closing in.”

  “I had to end this my way,” Raymond said. “You don’t understand, Street—”

  “Oh I understand,” I snarled. “Remember, I’m the one who gets you.”

  I heard that panicked scream again, raw and sharp—I heard it shooting across the fields to the lake, ripped open and full of terror. I thought about Hayley and Brooks Barbour. This sunrise was going to feel to them like the swing of that axe. I thought about Bryant and Molly Cochran holding their candles in the park for the little girl he’d taken and tortured and dumped like trash. I thought about him standing over that hole with me, grinding his cigarette into the dirt and leaves, threatening me. I thought about Josey Davidson, childless, twisting her wires.

  Sirens screamed through the night. Rack lights flashed in the distance and lit up low pockets of sky like a lightning storm.

  I lifted my Glock, and I shot him again.

  43

  I didn’t go back inside that stinking, broken-down prison. Meltzer and Brolin were inside now. They had walked past Raymond without a word after I’d briefed them at their vehicles. Brolin had nearly broken down when she looked at him. She’d made a tiny sound like a sick cat. Meltzer had reached for her arm to steady her, to keep her moving.

  The path to the shack was alive with squad cars and deputies and light in the fog, and the squawking of police scanners. Sam and Mori had arrived in the crime-scene van. Lights had been erected as they had the night we’d searched for evidence on Cottonwood Road. Sam had swabbed Raymond’s hands for gunshot residue and other evidence, had photographed his clothes before they went in to process the crime scene. She’d instructed the deputies to bag his clothes at the hospital. Under the bright lights I saw now that the front of his shirt was speckled with blood spatter.

  I turned Raymond’s weapon in to evidence, then walked out in the field alone to search for the keys I’d thrown, the keys that had bought me time, and maybe saved my life.

  Sometimes it ends this way, I reminded myself. Sometimes things don’t work out.

  I heard Brolin’s voice behind me. “Was the second shot just for fun? Or was that self-defense too?”

  An ambulance howled up the path. I turned. “My weapon accidentally discharged.”

  “Mine would have accidentally discharged in his face,” she spat. She wasn’t kidding. She helped me look for my keys. The sheriff came out and we all watched Raymond loaded onto a gurney. Two deputies piled into the ambulance behind him. An EMT slammed the doors.

  “What am I going to tell Robbie?” Meltzer asked quietly. “He’s at my house sleeping.”

  “I just can’t believe it,” Brolin said, not for the first time. “How could he do something like this?”

  “Let’s find Raymond’s sister,” Meltzer said. “Robbie’s going to need her.”

  “She’s in Silas,” Brolin and I said simultaneously. She looked at me, and I saw it in her eyes. She’d realized all the ways she’d looked right past him, ignored the connections. “He used me,” she said. “He kept me close to protect himself.”

  “He used us all,” the sheriff told her. “Nobody’s getting out of this clean.”

  “I have to go to the hospital and get his statement,” she said. “We can’t give him time to think.”

  “I’ll send Ferrell and the tech guy with video,” Meltzer told her. “I think you should sit this one out, Major.”

  “Ferrell’s a rookie,” Brolin argued. “He’ll lawyer up on her.”

  “I’ll go,” I said. “He told me he wanted to end this his way. He’s ready to talk. He didn’t even put up a decent fight. Funny how it goes like that. In the end, they’re just cowards. They just put their fucking hands up.”

  “You can’t go,” Meltzer said. “You shot the man, Keye. I’m sure the evidence will support you, but if you were one of my people, you’d be on paid leave right now and nowhere close to the case. You’re done. You’re a witness now. Meet us back at the judicial center so we can get your statement. Come on, Tina, ride with me. We have to wake up Skylar’s parents.” He looked at me before he got in his truck. You okay? he mouthed.

  The coroner’s van zoomed past. I gave him a thumbs-up. But as I walked back through the field to my car, I knew I’d lied.

  44

  The statement I gave to Meltzer and Brolin in an interview room at the judicial center was long and detailed. It had to be told, then written and signed. I started with the notes in my hotel room, the memory of Raymond’s messy car, the melted iced coffee inside, remembering Robbie mentioning his father being in town, the dog from the K-9 unit tweaking to Raymond. We’d thought it was because he’d mishandled evidence, but it was because he’d been near Skylar. I told them about the first note, which had been wiped clean. I’d run a check and discovered Raymond’s wife was a strong swimmer, that she was small and blond just like Tracy and Melinda and Skylar. That’s why he punished them. He was trying to punish his wife. And that’s why he’d gotten drunk then and why he’d gotten drunk last night. Because he knew how close we were and he knew he had to kill Skylar and clean up his dungeon. I told them how I’d found his sister had taught at Tracy’s school. He was in uniform then, and Tracy probably knew him as the police officer brother of a teacher. And even as cautious as she was about upsetting her abusive father, she might have accepted a ride from him. I told them I’d gone to his neighborhood, slept on his street, and woke to his brake lights backing out. I told them I hadn’t notified them before we arrived at that field because I wasn’t sure, and because he was one of theirs. I wanted a smoking gun. I didn’t know I’d find a dead girl. No one said it, but I knew we all thought it. Might the ending have been different if I hadn’t acted alone? Would Skylar have lived? How would we have acted as a unit if I’d called them from the hotel when my suspicions first piqued? We’d never know. And the weight of that fell hard on my shoulders.

  I looked through the glass at Robbie Raymond in the next room. His fair skin was splotched with red, his blue eyes were puffy and watery. A bruise covered his cheekbone and circled one swollen eye. A woman stood with her arms around him, tall and dark-haired like Raymond, but with softer features. His sister, I realized, Robbie’s aunt. The woman who’d cared for him after his father had murdered his mother in Lake Oconee. She held him. I saw the tremors shake his big body. Meltzer followed my eyes.

  “Both his parents are gone now.”

  “He have a clue at all?” I asked.

  “No,” Meltzer said. “Said his dad didn’t talk much. He went out a lot and Robbie never knew where. But it scared him when he heard about the kerosene last night. He’d smelled it on Rob. He was trying not to believe it.”

  Ferrell returned from the hospital and we all watched the video—me, Meltzer, Brolin, Ferrell, and the tech guy who had cued it up. We saw Raymond in a hospital bed, propped up, given enough pain me
ds to take the edge off. He wanted to talk.

  “When did you first meet Tracy Davidson?” Ferrell asked him.

  “The day I took her,” Raymond said. Beside me, I heard Brolin suck in air. Any doubt she was harboring had been torn away from her. “But I’d seen her at my sister’s school. And I don’t know what happened. I swear to God, I don’t know what happened. Something just snapped in my brain. And then I had her. I couldn’t do anything but keep her or kill her. I couldn’t let her identify me. I had Robbie to take care of—”

  “Yeah, you’re a real hero, Raymond,” I muttered.

  Ferrell’s voice was calm, steady, no judgment. “Did you kill Tracy Davison, Mr. Raymond?”

  I smiled. She wouldn’t refer to him as detective. Not now, not with the dishonor he’d shown the department.

  “Yes.” Raymond’s big head drooped from pain or shame or exhaustion. “I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t take care of her.”

  “Did Tracy Davidson become pregnant and give birth while you held her?”

  “Yes,” Raymond said.

  “What happened to the baby?”

  “It died,” Raymond answered quietly. “I dropped it down an old well.”

  “Did you kill Melinda Cochran and Skylar Barbour?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you kill your wife?”

  “Yes,” he said. Nothing but resignation in his voice. He was ready to send himself to death row. “I caught her with someone, another man. I was just going to scare her …”

  “God,” Meltzer muttered. Brolin covered her mouth and walked out. I didn’t move. I’d heard too many statements. Something just snapped. I don’t know what happened.

  “I don’t get something,” I said, watching the screen. “Why did he look at the picture of Skylar’s broken finger and throw up?”

  “You said it yourself. He’s a psychopath. He’s whatever he needs to be.” Meltzer said it grimly.

  Fluorescent lights buzzed above us, the room still and cold as a cathedral.

  “And Luke,” I said. “Why didn’t he spark to Raymond that night?”

  “Keye,” Meltzer said gently. “We have him. It’s the only good thing that came out of this. We have him red-handed and he can’t hurt anyone else. We have his confession. And when the scene is processed, you know as well as I do that it’s going to lock in the case against him. Come on, look at you. You’re exhausted. Go home.”

  I looked down at my torn-up hands and knees, the blood on my shirt and pants. I hadn’t even known it was there. I’d lifted Skylar’s sweet head into my lap and I’d apologized to her. Too late.

  “Go,” Meltzer said. “Sleep. You did your job. This is the part we know how to do.”

  ——

  I went back to the hotel and stood under a hot shower, raw skin stinging from the fall I’d taken in the field. I stood there until the water ran cold, twisted my hair in a towel, and climbed into bed. It was noon. Brooks and Hayley’s daughter’s body was in Atlanta now, probably already on an autopsy table at GBI. I thought about Skylar’s eyes, her blood and tissue clinging to the axe. I thought about the last thirty-seven hours of her life. And I forced myself to close my own eyes.

  I didn’t open them again until six. I made a terrible cup of coffee from a tiny pot that poured water over a bag, and switched on the television. It was all there, the sensational news that a local police detective who had worked on the cases had been arrested for three murders.

  “According to the Hitchiti County sheriff,” Brenda Roberts reported, “the suspect in custody would have been a uniformed deputy at the time of the first abduction and murder. Local townspeople are in shock. The detective was a longtime resident …”

  I saw a clip with the sheriff, scruffy and unshaven the way he was when I’d last seen him. Meltzer gave me full credit for identifying the killer. He didn’t share any other details regarding the capture or the hours Skylar had endured at the hands of a killer. The victims were lost in the news reports. They were all about Raymond and his sick subterfuge, not Skylar, who loved movies and reading and dogs and boys. Not Melinda, who loved music and art. Not Tracy, who cared for her brother and mother, protected them. Tracy, who was probably too polite and too cowed by authority not to climb into his car that day.

  I brushed my teeth, splashed some water on my face, and got dressed. My phone trembled on its charger at the bed table. I saw Meltzer’s name and reached for it.

  “So I’m just thinking, you’re probably leaving soon,” he said. “And I’d like one chance to have dinner with you when I’m not the sheriff and you’re not the consultant.”

  I sat down on the bed. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Because you’re afraid,” he said.

  “Yes,” I told him. “I’m scared to death of turning my life upside down. And if I ever decide to do that, I’m not going to do it this way. He’s a good man, Ken.”

  “I understand,” he said.

  “How’s Robbie doing?”

  “He’s with his aunt now. Poor kid. We went through Raymond’s house today and confiscated the electronics. We matched the printer to the photograph. Haven’t located the original image. Or any other images. No online storage. Probably deleted whatever he had. But the case is rock-solid, right down to his prints on the axe handle. And we recovered evidence from the well.”

  I was silent. I couldn’t think of that newborn and Tracy’s suffering.

  “You still worried about something?” Meltzer asked.

  “Rough week,” I answered. “I keep seeing Skylar. I’ll get there.”

  “Want to come outside and say good-bye face-to-face?”

  I parted the curtain. He was leaning against his truck. No uniform. A clay-colored T-shirt and faded jeans, boots. Good Lord, he was gorgeous. He smiled. Held up his phone, ended the call and dropped it in his back pocket, then waited.

  His eyes were that soft brown I’d seen over dinner at his house. A slow smile, a blink, long lashes, lips full of color. He’d gotten a shave, and the triangle under his lip was perfect again. “Why’d you have to come here?” I asked as I walked toward him.

  “How could I not? It’s one of those ‘what if’ things, you know? I don’t want that on my shoulders.” He bent and pressed his lips against mine. I felt his hand come around me, felt him step closer, his body relaxing into me, pulling me nearer. His mouth was wet and soft and every taste, every movement, every shiver, told me how much he wanted me. And I knew what my body, my lips, my fingertips, were saying to him.

  “People don’t kiss like that if there’s nothing there, Keye,” he whispered. He’d pulled back, touched my face lightly with his fingertip.

  “I know,” I said.

  He smiled and nodded. “Good-bye, Dr. Street. For now. You have to come back for the court case, don’t forget.”

  I watched him get in his Interceptor. “Good-bye, Sheriff,” I said quietly as his taillights disappeared in the distance.

  45

  I had dinner alone. I packed my things, bagged the clothing with Skylar’s blood, and tossed the bag in the hotel dumpster. And then I slumped down on the bed. I wasn’t ready to go back to my life and my business and my love affair. I wasn’t ready to be touched by the lover waiting at home. Meltzer’s hands, his mouth, felt burned into me.

  I thought about Skylar in cold storage at the crime lab, and her piercing, sorrowful scream clawed through my heart.

  I curled up and squeezed my eyes shut. Because that’s what I do now when alcohol isn’t waiting for me on the other side, when the depression settles in and the only thing that feels right in a dark hotel room is a good cognac warming my throat. It’s the work. It’s trying as hard as you can and knowing sometimes your best isn’t good enough. It’s the death. I’d spent four years drinking my way through it. This is how I do it sober.

  And so I slept off the cravings, showered, packed my car, and ate halved figs with Gorgonzola and balsamic and Greek yogurt as the su
n came up at a restaurant on the lake. I took my time. Nothing to hurry for now. A Sunday morning. The lake was still and quiet, the mist rising up off it like a spirit. Another sunrise for Hayley and Brooks Barbour without Skylar, without the routines. I thought about her diary, the family rituals. The little things, it’s what you miss most.

  I looked back at the lake and drank my coffee, ignored the Atlanta paper a waiter had put on the table for me. I was thinking about driving, just getting in the car and heading for the coast, for Jekyll Island, for salt air and twisted-up old oaks with black, sea-smoothed limbs.

  My phone vibrated and growled on the table. I glanced at the display. Heather, it said. Melinda Cochran’s friend. I’d locked in her number when she’d called me at the justice complex. I let it ring. I was ready to leave Whisper, leave Melinda and Tracy and Skylar. The display lit up again a minute later. “Shit,” I growled, and hit ANSWER.

  “This is Keye Street. What’s up, Heather?”

  “I didn’t tell you the truth about something,” she said. I looked back at the lake and listened as it came pouring out of her like an exorcism. I thought about Meltzer saying, “Nobody comes out clean.” She’d given Melinda to him. They all had. She’d let him have her as I had, as Meltzer had. She hadn’t meant to. They didn’t know the thing they were protecting was the thing that would kill her.

  “No one knew, Heather. It’s not your fault.” I gathered up my keys and left money for the check.

  “I was glad at first when she was gone,” she confessed, and started to sob again.

  I got in my car and mapped out my route, found the highway and headed south. Thirty minutes later I parked in front of a blue split-level and walked up the sidewalk past red geraniums and gerbera daises. I picked up the newspaper on the sidewalk and carried it to the door, knocked lightly.

  “Ms. Raymond,” I said. “I’m sorry to disturb you so early. I’m Keye Street.”