ALL THE PRETTY GIRLS BOOK 1 (23 page)

Quinn’s face drained of color. “Oh dear God, you don’t think he’s…? Could he have gotten in touch with Whitney somehow?”

“Well, I don’t know. Has he ever reached out to you or your sister before?”

Quinn started pacing, a pale manicured hand clasped to her throat. She looked as if she might shatter into a million pieces all over the foyer.

“No, we’ve had no contact from him. It was part of his sentence. And he’s still in jail, I know, because I check every so often to make sure he’s not getting out. He’s not due for parole for another fifteen years.”

Taylor digested that for a moment. Kidnapping was one thing, but Chase had been sentenced to at least thirty years. She made a mental note to look up the case and find out what exactly he’d been sentenced for. It probably wasn’t germane to this case, but it wouldn’t hurt to have the whole story.

“Okay, Quinn. I’ll go and sort through Whitney’s things. If I find anything of note, I’ll let you know.”

“Thank you. Tell me, when will her body be released? I need to start making plans for the memorial.”

“Just give the M.E.’s office a call. They’ll be able to give you all of that information. It’ll be soon, I promise.”

As they made their way toward the door, they didn’t hear the chime go off on the computer to announce that Whitney had another new e-mail.

Christina Louise Dale, better known as Christy to her family and friends, was a sad case. Nineteen years old, petite and brunette, Christy was always hustling, always looking for a way to get it done. She didn’t have the money to go to college nor the grades to get a scholarship, so she worked hard and associated with the college students around Roanoke as often as possible. She was autodidactic, and when she mentioned that, most of the college kids didn’t even know what it meant. On one hand, it was outrageous that she could be so much smarter than the rest of them and still not have a chance to go to school with them. But on the other hand, she secretly gloated, knowing that no matter what, she was better than all of them.

She continued her quest to educate herself and read everything she could in her spare time. She landed herself a job that would afford her the opportunities that had been denied to her so far in her short life. The parent company of her small community hospital had a program to give scholarships to those needy employees who demonstrated a will and a dedication to getting a higher education, but only in the medical field. That was fine with her. She could always do her time with the company and then branch out when she got a little older.

Christy bided her time. She was a diligent employee, even if the things she did outside of work were a little questionable. Admittedly, she drank too much. She drank too much and smoked too much. And oftentimes she did a few drugs that probably weren’t the most legal things in the world. Nothing hard-core, but the soft stuff, the campus drugs. That way she felt she was experiencing the same things that all nineteen-year-old college girls experience. The booze, the drugs, the boys. Oh yes, the boys. She really liked the boys. But that wasn’t exactly a bad thing, at least in her mind. She was in control of her body, she had the last word in everything she did. The fact that she might have sex on a given night with a guy that never asked for her number wasn’t a problem. If she wanted to see him again, she could find a way to do it.

So maybe she dressed a little provocatively. Maybe she drank too much, slept around a little too much. What difference did that make?

Baldwin knew all of this, and more, so when he stared down at Christy’s lifeless body, tossed off the edge of the road in Asheville, North Carolina, he couldn’t help but wonder if poor Christy had any idea of the danger she was putting herself in, over and over, having sex with strange men, riding off in cars that didn’t belong to her and, most importantly, taking a stranger back to the motel that she used when she didn’t want her mom to know she was out fooling around. But Christy’s mother had known. She knew everything her daughter did, and either didn’t care enough to do anything about it, or just didn’t believe she could make a difference. When Baldwin had sat down with her, mere hours after they knew Christy’s body had been taken from room 3 at the Happy Roads Inn, Charlie Dale didn’t seem surprised.

Charlie Dale smoked continuously throughout their interview. Baldwin thought he would choke in the dim air of her trailer, and wondered if there had ever been an open window in the place. It was stacked with laundry, washed or unwashed was anyone’s guess, trash, full ashtrays and dirt, layer upon layer of dirt. Charlie wasn’t much of a housekeeper, and told Baldwin that. He’d smiled and pretended things were fine, which he assumed Charlie had been doing for at least a decade.

She didn’t have a lot of nice things to say about her daughter. Christy had been a surprise in her mother’s life, a surprise that had come along when Charlie was fifteen and madly in love with a boy from uptown Roanoke. When she found herself pregnant, she never heard from him again. It had been her and Christy all along, she told Baldwin. And that girl was never going to amount to anything, the way she ran around, whoring and drinking. Just ’cause it was good enough for her mama didn’t mean it was good enough for her. I always wanted something better for Christy, she told Baldwin, but I never knew how to get it for her. As Baldwin gazed down at Christy, he felt a sadness that was as much sorrow for the girl’s death as it was for the raw deal she’d gotten in her short life. When they’d gotten the call that a body had been found in Asheville, North Carolina, Baldwin hadn’t even blinked. The killer wasn’t thinking too far ahead. Now that they were hot on his trail, he was grabbing, killing and dumping, and he’d really gotten on a tear. Christy hadn’t even been missing a day, and now Baldwin stood over her battered body, looking at the knife wounds in her chest, the bloody wrists, wondering where her hand would show up. Marni Fischer’s neatly manicured hand was a few feet away. Baldwin calculated. Where were the rest of the girls’ hands?

His careful, methodical serial killer had escalated into a vicious spree maniac. At first glance, the killer was trying to draw them in, a heavy spider in a silken web of intent. But as each thread unraveled, each victim killed quicker than the last, the web tore. A sophisticated, organized killer could last for years off one kill. This one was decompensating at a rate Baldwin hadn’t seen for a decade.

The change was fascinating from an empirical standpoint. It was Baldwin’s talent, the ability to separate the victims and their lives from the crimes being committed. Psychologically, it was a simple issue. The killer’s message wasn’t getting through. This was frustrating him, and in turn, he was taking chances, not as worried about possible consequences. His endgame had started. Forensics had a field day in the motel room. It was obvious that Christy had been repeatedly stabbed, and that blood added to the cast-off spray from the arterial cuts in her wrists created a gory miasma for the techs to comb through. The room hadn’t been wiped down, so there were many fingerprints, almost too many to take exemplars from, considering the number of people who had been through that room. Baldwin assumed the killer was wearing gloves, they hadn’t gotten a fingerprint from any of the scenes that they could place him at.

For the first time, they’d found a minute amount of semen mixed in with the blood on the bedsheets. In a regular case, that would have been cause for celebration. Because there had been no evidence collected from the earlier event with the ripped condom, there was nothing to compare with this DNA. Another telltale sign that the killer was on the edge, losing control. He was getting sloppy.

Baldwin had instructed the techs to file the DNA into the CODIS system, hoping for a match from deep within the bowels of the database, but he wasn’t holding his breath. Something about these kills felt fresh to him. His profile stated that these were the man’s first significant crimes, that his earlier record would be minor, if there was one at all. As he delved further into the case and the pace of the murders increased, the more on target his original assessment seemed. Not finding a match would reinforce at least one element of the profile.

Baldwin had asked Grimes to send men in to the bar Christy frequented, to find out if anyone remembered seeing her talking to someone or, better yet, leaving with someone. But Grimes had reported that no one saw anything out of the ordinary. One bartender had gone so far as to joke that keeping up with the men Christy was seen talking to would take an entire police force. His humor wasn’t appreciated, and he quickly apologized and let them know that seriously, she could have been with anyone, no one paid attention to a crazy girl flirting her way through a few hours of drinks. On a lark, Baldwin had asked Grimes to see if anyone remembered a young, dark-haired man, but that got a laugh. They were in a college bar; at least half the patrons fit that description. No one in particular had stood out to the bartender.

They just didn’t have a lot to go on. Baldwin signaled that they needed to get Christy’s body out of the brush and onto a gurney so she could be unceremoniously cut open and slid into a refrigerated drawer in the Asheville morgue, while Baldwin twiddled his thumbs and looked stupid, not having any idea how to stop this mercurial killer.

It was time to take a room, have a drink and try to sort all of this out. Preferably over the phone with Taylor. He’d realized lately that just talking to her cleared his mind, and his mind needed a lot of clearing now. He needed a strategy session, he needed to lay it all out and see what he was missing. Because he was missing something huge, and that wasn’t going to get this killer stopped any time soon.

He watched through squinted eyes as Christina Dale was loaded into a bag, placed onto a stretcher, then set gently on a gurney that was slid into the open back doors of the M.E.’s cream-colored van. The trees seemed very green, the haze off the mountains very purple, the summer air surprisingly crisp and clean and only slightly mottled with the smell of death. Everything here seemed larger than life, realer than real, and it made Baldwin’s head ache. Mountains always did that to him.

Baldwin came out of the shower and flipped on the television set. His hotel room was too hot, so he sat on the edge of the bed in his towel and watched the local news. The lead story was about Christina Dale’s body being found. The reporter went through the details, which were sketchy, as Baldwin had made sure that not a lot of information was getting out. She traced the killer’s moves over the past weeks, and she finished with a warning to all of the young women of Asheville.

“All women in the Asheville area are warned not to stay alone, and to keep your doors and windows locked. If you go out, please find someone to go with you. Don’t speak with anyone you don’t know, and carry pepper spray. We can’t emphasize enough that you have to be on your guard. Keep your cell phone charged and handy. Don’t get into cars with strangers. Everyone needs to be aware.”

It was a good warning, nothing that any woman didn’t hear on any given day, but given with such vehemence that it should give one or two women pause. Unfortunately, there was nothing in particular they could tell the women of Asheville to actually keep them safe.

He flipped the TV off and pulled out his files. He spread them on the bed in chronological order and started to go through them, beginning with Susan Palmer. There were definite similarities to the victims. Each had dark hair and eyes, they were between eighteen and twenty-eight. Body types were comparable; they were all strong and athletic. And they all worked in the medical field to some degree. Was he dealing with a deranged doctor who’d gone over the edge? That was as good a theory as any he’d had so far. He was beginning to feel impotent. This killer was moving fast, and though there was a distinct pattern to his motions, there was no way to predict what city he would hit next. All they could do was catch him. And they weren’t getting any closer to that goal, either. He’d had cases like this before, that the killer’s actions overrode the police investigation. He was more accustomed to the kind of killer that took his time. Patterns generally were established over weeks and months, not in days. This guy was on a frenzied killing spree, and spree killers were the most dangerous. But they almost always tripped up, and were caught quickly. They certainly didn’t go from state to state taking women and depositing their bodies minus their hands in other states.

His escalation was actually a good thing. At this pace, he was bound to screw up. No killer was that smart. Leaving his DNA behind was the first of what Baldwin hoped would be many mistakes.

Baldwin’s cell phone rang as the number to the FBI tip line appeared on the screen. He shut the TV off and glanced at the caller ID. It was Taylor.

“Hi, sweetheart,” he said gently.

“Baldwin, are you okay? I’ve been following all of this on the news, you must be exhausted.”

“Yeah, well, crime waits for no man. This situation just goes from bad to worse. Every time we catch up with him, he takes off again. I can’t find a single predictor of where he’s going to go next.”

“Do you want to run it through with me? Maybe a fresh set of eyes, well, ears will help.”

“Yeah, that might be a good idea. But first, is everything okay there? How’s your rape case?”

He heard her get quiet, a moment of time in which he could almost hear the thoughts flowing through her brain over the phone. When she answered, he thought she sounded a bit discouraged.

“Things are fine. Have you seen the news? National media’s picked up the Rainman story. Just their cup of tea, a real mystery. And who doesn’t love a serial rapist?

To top it all off, we have a victim who thinks the rapist is a cop, which isn’t going over well. Oh, did you hear about Whitney Connolly?”

“Honey, I’ve been up to my ears here. Whitney Connolly from Channel Five? What happened?”

“She was in a car accident yesterday. Killed her and three others. It was pretty bad. I went to the scene with Sam before we knew it was Whitney. It’s been awful, you can’t turn on the news without seeing tributes to her. I’ve been working with her sister, Quinn Buckley, to try and find out if there was anything of a more sensitive nature that she was dealing with. She died on her way over to Quinn’s house to warn her about something. We just haven’t come up with what. I’ve been going through her personal effects all day, first at her house, then the things that they took out of her car after the accident. I’m not coming up with a lot.”