“Not them,” McDaniel said, gesturing to Linton and Mayfield, who were squatting side-by-side in the shade of a big oak tree, talking on their cell phones and smoking. “Nor him.” He pointed at Walt Wilson, pacing the parking lot and looking at the other two like a man who wished he still smoked. Or him,” he said, pointing at Armand, who was pacing aimlessly.
Stephanie and Ayesha had positioned themselves on the church’s wooden porch, as far from Linton and Mayfield as it was possible for them to be, while remaining safely in sight of Faye and McDaniel.
“Laneer and Sylvia aren’t back,” he said, “and if they don’t show up again, I’m going to go look for them myself.”
“They won’t come back without Kali. Not unless you send your people out there to drag them.”
“Not doing that. But if I tell them they need to let my people and their dogs do their work, maybe they’ll listen to reason.”
McDaniel’s professional opinion was that Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth looked miserable, like a woman born for action who wasn’t getting any action. He decided to give her a chance to act. “Did your husband teach you some of his tracking tricks?”
“He did,” she said. “I don’t have his skills, but I’m better than a lot of people. Even if I do say so myself.”
“Maybe I was wasting your talents by assigning you to parking lot duty. Show me those skills.”
She led him to the church door, where she stood and mused out loud, “If I were a little girl coming out this door and I wanted to get away from a crowd, where would I go?”
McDaniel saw several directions that he might run, if he were in the little girl’s shoes. He probably would have gone to the road, where he could make the best time, and that’s why he’d called in some officers to check the road in both directions. Traffic was light, this far out of town. The pavement wasn’t too rough. Yes, that would be his first choice if he were trying to run away, but not if he were looking for a place to hide. It was obvious that the little girl was trying to get away from all those sympathetic eyes, but how was she trying to do it? Was she running or was she hiding?
Faye was looking away from the road, toward the creek and the woods beyond. The trees and underbrush were thick there. It was a place for hiding. Faye knew the child. She must think Kali had found a place to hide.
Just on the other side of the parking lot, a narrow stone-paved path took a winding route to the church cemetery. That’s where McDaniel would go if he were looking to hide, and that’s why he’d gone there immediately. The graveyard was appropriately spooky, rows and rows of leaning headstones and crumbling crypts and silence. He’d looked behind all the headstones and in all the crypts. He’d even peered down into Frida’s open grave. There had been no little girl there, and there were no tracks to say that there ever had been.
He’d continued down the only other path serving the graveyard, but that walk had been just as fruitless. An opening in the trees at its other end had lured him on, but it had turned out to be nothing but the same road that passed by the church, so he’d turned back to find more promising places to search.
So Faye thought the child was hiding, and he knew that she hadn’t run to the graveyard to hide. That left the acres and acres of woods backing up to the church. Everybody but him had seized on those woodlands immediately and had begun to search them. Even Faye was sure that this was the answer, and maybe she knew what she was taking about. After all, she was the one who said she’d seen the girl’s love for the great outdoors.
She had stood outside the church’s door for an uncomfortably long moment, studying the ground. Then she’d begun an organized search of the church’s small yard, fanning out from her starting place inch by inch, just as she must organize her work as an archaeologist. Rather than risk stomping on whatever it was she was looking for, he sat on the church doorstep and watched her progress. It occurred to him that her approach was as instinctive and thorough as the work of the police dogs who would soon arrive.
She worked slowly, choosing where she put her foot before she took each step, but she got results. On a spot of sand miraculously missed by the trampling feet of searchers, she found a single footprint, child-sized, with a millimeter-deep impression at the heel. McDaniel’s own daughter had worn black patent-leather Mary Janes, so he had smiled when he saw Kali in hers. There were no other little girls Kali’s age at the funeral. He knew deep down that this footprint belonged to the missing child.
The footprint was too close to home for him. It made him imagine his own daughter cowering in the woods or in a very old cemetery or in the trunk of a car. The footprint was dangerous. It threatened to knock him off balance and steal the clear thinking he needed if he hoped to find this child.
Kali had left the print very close to the church building, so it told them little about where she might be. It served no function other than to remind him that the girl was real. Faye didn’t even look at him as she resumed tracking the girl, following the direction of the single footstep and walking steadily away from him. He rose and followed.
He heard voices and looked far ahead, into the trees. Armand was out there again, talking to Jeremiah, but Kali was not with them, so he was not interested. Where was the little girl in the patent-leather shoes?
Faye was moving more swiftly than she had been before she saw the footprint, but her pace was still deliberate. McDaniel’s frustration was a physical thing. His stomach hurt. His head hurt. His heart hurt. He simply followed her and held back the urge to tell her to hurry.
When they reached the creek, she paused at the edge, standing on a patch of grass and examining the sandy clay of the creekbed. He barely heard her murmur, “Yes,” but he knew what the single soft syllable meant, and he leaned over to see what she’d found.
It was only a partial print from Kali’s mid-foot, surrounded by mud tramped by all the people searching for her. Again, he saw the shallow depression made by her low heel. Its sharp edge cut across the footprint, separating the heel from the print of the Mary Jane’s midsole. It wasn’t much, just a few square inches of information, but it gave them a direction.
“She was headed upstream,” Faye said, heading left. He followed her.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Faye, with McDaniel close behind, found Kali in a hollow that the creek had carved into the riverbank, cowering in water up to her waist, surrounded by rushes. Faye was astonished by how well the girl had hidden herself. Any number of people had walked past without seeing this child who didn’t want to be found.
From the reflexive way McDaniel reached out both arms to seize her, Faye knew that he had spent time with children he cherished. She realized that she knew nothing of his off-duty existence, and she supposed that it hadn’t occurred to her that he might have a life outside of his work. This did not make her feel good about herself.
Kali fought him, slapping at the hands reaching out for her until Faye knelt in the cool water and reached out her own arms. She would never forget the steely power of the girl’s hands grasping her. Kali clutched Faye’s neck and wrapped both wet legs around her waist, staying that way for the long walk between her creekside hiding place and her frantic Uncle Laneer.
After that, Faye withdrew to the stone bench behind the church, where McDaniel brought her a blanket, a cup of coffee, and his thanks. He settled beside her, maybe because he felt like taking a break and maybe because watching dripping-wet and overstressed citizens for signs of shock was part of his job description.
From Faye’s perch on the stone bench, she could keep her distance from all the hoopla in the church parking lot, while still having a good vantage point for viewing the goings-on. This gave Laneer and Sylvia plenty of privacy for showering Kali with kisses while delivering the obligatory “What were you thinking?” lecture, but it didn’t keep Faye from seeing their every move.
Cars were rolling out of the parking lot now, moving slow
ly to miss the remaining searchers, who were still milling around as if they couldn’t believe that the crisis was past. Mayfield, Linton, and Richard waited in a clump, shuffling their feet now and then, but standing still. Their pants’ hems were muddy, their ties were gone or loosely knotted, their white dress shirts were sweat-stained, and they were all holding their suit coats draped over one arm.
Jeremiah was leaning into the passenger door of his car, carefully draping his suit coat over the passenger seat headrest. Nearby, Walt was doing the same thing. The two of them joined Mayfield, Linton, and Richard for a conversation that looked, from Faye’s distance, pretty cordial for one involving a group of men who differed so widely in age and life history. Judging by body language, she thought they all looked happy that Kali had been found.
Faye’s phone buzzed. She pulled it out of her pocket to take a look. Then she looked again.
Her surprise must have shown, because McDaniel’s faced tensed. “What?”
“I asked Phyllis Windom to run some stats on unsolved murders of black women under thirty within a five-hour drive of Memphis. Here, look.” She handed him her phone.
“Five hours is a long way to drive. That’ll take you to Chattanooga. Jackson, Mississippi. Up into Illinois. Further.”
“This is my point. There are apparently a lot of people to kill within a day’s drive of Memphis, and we can’t be sure the police departments in all those cities are communicating with each other.”
He was still processing the big chunk of America that lay within easy reach of where he sat. “God. Five hours will take you to St. Louis. And think of how many states. Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Alabama, Illinois. Maybe Indiana. But St. Louis beats them all when it comes to killings.”
“Murder isn’t all that common and Windom needs enough data to work with. Thus, St. Louis.”
He looked to the northwest as if he could see St. Louis and its arched stainless-steel gateway. “What other instructions did you give your numbers-cruncher?”
“First, I asked her to filter out women who were definitely shot or knifed or basically just killed any other way besides being beaten to death. Bodies with no known cause of death? I told her to keep them in the data set. I also asked her to remove victims who were raped.”
“Wind all this back a minute, Faye. You’re putting a lot of stock in some flowers found in a few graves. It’s a big jump from a bunch of flowers to a rampaging serial killer. The odds are still hugely in favor of Frida being killed by an angry boyfriend. Like maybe one of those guys—”
He waved in the general direction of the cluster of men chatting several yards away. Linton saw him and pointedly turned his back.
“—or maybe a thief, or a rapist who didn’t have time to get what he wanted. In the grand scheme of things, people who just keep killing for no good reason are rare. Extremely rare, compared to all the regular old shitheads I deal with on a daily basis.”
She shifted herself on the bench, trying to find a cool spot of concrete and trying to think of a way to explain her logic to him. “You don’t have to agree with me. The citizens of Memphis pay you to follow your best ideas. It’s probably the most economical use of your time to go with the usual scenario. Do the people of Memphis want you to waste your time playing long shots?”
“Probably not.”
“Me? I’m just the woman you asked to be your go-between with a community that doesn’t like police officers much. Nobody’s paying me, so I can chase all the long shots I like. If I don’t break the law or get in your way, you can’t make me stop. Besides, do you really want me to?”
“Not particularly, but you can’t get insulted if I spend my own time chasing leads I believe in.”
“Shall I stop telling you about what Phyllis Windom did for me?” She waggled the phone at him. “I have news….”
“Go ahead. Give me your news that I didn’t ask for.”
“Fine. When I talked to Windom about how to massage the data, I told her to ignore bodies that were dumped, because I was only interested in victims who were buried.”
“That’s going to cut your numbers. It’s hard work to bury somebody, and a lot of killers don’t take the trouble. And also, there’s bound to be victims who get buried and we never find them. That’s why you bury people—to put them out of sight.”
“Isn’t cutting the numbers a good thing? We want to cut them down to one, right? One killer. And then we want to nail him.” Faye dragged a finger over her screen, scrolling through Windom’s massive text. “You’re right, though. It sure did cut the numbers. It cut them enough to make me think that we were headed in the right direction. I also asked her to slice the data by month, based on the victim’s estimated date of death.”
“Now you’re dreaming. You’re not always going to get that date, not if she’s been buried awhile.”
“Agreed. But Phyllis Windom is a guru of big data, especially partial data. She’s good at filling in the gaps.”
“If you say so.”
“I also asked her to go back twenty years, hoping that would give her enough data to do statistics.”
“Twenty years?” He laughed, and stretched his long legs out in front of him, crossed at the ankle. He looked like he wished very much that the concrete bench had a back. Faye certainly did. “Damn, woman. You don’t ask for much.”
“I wanted to get back to a time before this killer was active. And also, when you’re dealing with a guru of big data, you’ve gotta give her big data to work with.”
“You certainly did that.”
Faye tapped Windom’s attachment and took a look at her data. There were so many numbers. It was as if they were metastasizing on her phone’s screen, right in front of her eyes. Faye squinted at the screen, then gave up and pulled her reading glasses out of her purse.
“After that, I asked her to hand-prune the data.”
“Do what?”
“I asked her to highlight entries that looked promising, then look at the notes and use her own judgment about keeping each one.”
“Is that cool? Scientific method, double blind, and all that jazz.”
“We’re not writing a dissertation. Instinct and dumb luck work sometimes, you know.”
McDaniel laughed so hard that she thought maybe he was having a breakdown. The man had been through a lot. He stopped just as she gave him an uncomfortable “You okay?”
“So,” she continued after he pulled himself together, “hand-pruning the data. I told her that if anything in the police notes made it sound like it wasn’t our killer, because…oh, I don’t know…the victim had been dismembered and buried without her pelvis, then she should throw it out.”
“No pelvis? You still haven’t convinced me that we’re dealing with a serial killer, but you have a helluva imagination.”
“Maybe so, but Windom works cheap. And by cheap, I mean free. Shouldn’t we at least let her look?”
He took a long slow breath through his nose and blew it out through pursed lips. Then he handed her phone back to her. “Why don’t you just tell me what you think this chart says?”
“My mind has been focused on July ever since Syvlia told me that two of the other women she knew about had also been found in July. The coincidence of three women found in the same month made me ask myself, ‘Why July?’”
“July is one of the months when murder peaks, that’s why. Also August and December.”
“You knew that, but I didn’t, so I kept asking Windom questions. And thinking.”
“You do a lot of that.”
Faye wasn’t sure how to take that, so she just said, “Yeah.” Then she tapped on the phone screen and held it up to his face. “Here’s a graph of all the murders that Windom thought were worth keeping in her data set. She sees a pattern that stretches back six years. You can see peaks in t
he data in July, August, and December, just like you’d expect. See here? And here and here? But do you see another one? Look, she’s put in a baseline charting what you’d expect to see in those months.”
He took the phone again and said, “Are you talking about March? That’s not much of a peak.”
“No, it’s not, but Phyllis Windom says it’s enough different from the baseline to be statistically significant.”
“I’m almost following you. What happens in March?”
“Spring Break.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
He’d almost gotten there first. He would have managed it, if he had chosen to go upstream instead of down when faced with the sweet-sounding babble of an untrammeled creek. It had been a coin flip and he had lost.
Now he needed to decide how to play his end game.
The girl was close by, so close, but she was flanked by Laneer and Sylvia, and he couldn’t imagine how long it would be before they would willingly let her out of their sight.
If he couldn’t silence her, then he must go far away and stay gone, because she had seen him at his work. But if the next hour went well, and if he found a way to neutralize Dr. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth, there was a chance that he could stay right where he was, living out his days in a place where he knew how to do his killing and how to hide it.
There was a comfort in his mundane, everyday existence. The fear of leaving it was profound. It drove him. He had a sense that his job, his house, and his lumbering old car constrained the beast in him. Without those things, he might disappear into the beast completely, never withdrawing into the everyday. His murderousness would no longer be cyclical. It would be ongoing. Normality would no longer be an option and, without that refuge, he would undoubtedly be caught, jailed, executed. Frida’s death would stand as his last act of passion, and he was not ready to be done with passion.
Undercurrents Page 24
