All the Pretty Girls

Thirty-Five

Taylor sat at her desk, tapping her fingers on the bleached wood. Where the hell was Baldwin? She had caught his excitement over the phone and had been trying to go through the case herself. She was lacking the details, and the frustration mounted. She wanted to be out there chasing the killer rather than sitting in her office. She knew she’d helped, but damn, it would be great to be out there, gun in hand, stalking the stalker.

Lincoln and Marcus came into Taylor’s office, interrupting her fantasy of shooting the bastard between the eyes. She started and smiled at them. For at least an hour, she’d forgotten all about Betsy Garrison and the Rainman case. She tried to play it off.

“Hi, guys. Good timing. Did you catch me a rapist?”

“Would that it was so easy to woo me, lady, simply drop a bad man in her lap and call him rapist.” Lincoln gave her a smile through his pidgin Shakespearean answer.

“I take it that’s a no?”

“It’s a no. The print you lifted belonged to Brian Post. So that was a dead end. Marcus and I have been going through all the personnel files from the area, looking for a cop who lives in the general vicinity that would go to those stores and that gym. We also asked around about the gym, and there are a few guys that go there. Problem is, none of them match the description of the cop that the latest victim is giving. And we talked to Betsy, and she can tell us for sure that it isn’t any of these guys. She’s familiar enough with them that she really didn’t think they were worth looking at any further.”

Taylor nodded to the chairs in front of her desk, indicating that they should sit. They did and she leaned back in her own chair.

“Marcus, what do you think? Do you think it’s a cop?”

“No, I don’t. At least not one of Metro’s. Now, it’s possible that she got the uniform or the car wrong, that it belongs to a Williamson County cop or something like that. We don’t have the right to go into their files as of yet. We did go through the victim’s background a little bit. She has a collar for resisting arrest and a DUI. I’m just wondering if she’s fingering the cop that arrested her during her DUI, whether consciously or subconsciously. She has a restraining order filed against a guy named Edward Hunt. Thought we’d have a chat with him, as well. See if maybe he’s been hanging around. Maybe she’s just seeing things. Rape’s traumatic enough. Anyway, it would be nice to get the DNA back from the TBI, but I suppose that’s not going to happen anytime soon.”

“Well, sounds like you have a plan, then. Go bug the TBI, see if they can help. I’m going to be working with Baldwin for the rest of the day, but I’ll have my phone if you need me.”

They both looked at her but shrugged. It was her prerogative if she wanted to work off the reservation for an afternoon. They went on their way and Taylor opened Whitney Connolly’s laptop, clicking on the button that took her into the dead woman’s e-mail. There was nothing new, so Taylor got out of the program and started trolling through files until one caught her eye. Whitney had a file marked “Notes” that was dated the day she died. It had last been accessed that very morning.

Taylor opened the folder and saw a jumble of remarks and annotations. Whitney took notes on the computer in modified shorthand that would make more sense to a teenager text messaging her best friend. It was garbled and words were shortened, but she saw the six poems in their entirety with the postscripts, and the letter Q appeared several times. There were a few QJB entries, which she assumed stood for Quinn and Jake Buckley. But the rest was too garbled for her to make sense of. She knew some journalists took notes in a proprietary way so no one could steal their work, and it was obvious that Whitney was one of them.

She closed that file and started going through others. They were almost all in her peculiar shorthand. Better to wait and let Baldwin or one of Whitney’s workmates figure it out.

Just as she thought of him, Baldwin appeared in her doorway as if she’d conjured him up from the dark recesses of her mind. Her heart skipped a beat when she saw him. Taylor got out from behind the desk and gestured for him to come in and close the door. He did, and she put her arms around him, drawing him into a hug.

Baldwin gave Taylor a deep kiss, one that she returned almost gratefully. He could sense that something was off, something had been off for a few days now, but he thought he knew her well enough to know that she’d talk to him about it when she was ready. In the meantime, he needed to find out if there was another victim out there.

Taylor broke off the kiss and gave him a smile, running her hand along the back of his neck in a way that made him want to forget all about the case and take her right there on the table. But she stopped, smiled a knowing smile, then reached down and turned the laptop so it faced the guest seat. She pushed slightly on his chest and he flopped into the chair, and she pushed the laptop across the desk so he could have easy access to it.

He took a deep breath, steadying himself, then became all business. “This is Whitney Connolly’s e-mail?”

“Yes, it is. I have been through the e-mails and tried to go through her notes file, but she uses some crazy sort of typing shorthand and I can’t make heads or tails out of it. What I do know for sure is that Quinn Buckley’s husband is the vice president of Health Partners, you said three victims worked at hospitals that were owned by Health Partners, and Whitney is receiving e-mails of poems from the crime scenes. Since you said no one knew about the notes, that means the killer has singled her out to make contact with. I haven’t put in a request to have her car checked for sabotage, it seemed like she had a legitimate accident. But I can have them start an investigation into it if you want me to.

“Plus, I think we need to do a little history on Jake Buckley’s traveling schedule, don’t you?”

Baldwin was popping his fingers across the keyboard on the laptop. He bit his lip, thinking.

“So the last e-mail came in after Whitney’s accident, right?”

“Yes, it did. You can look at the time stamp, but it was definitely after she was dead. Why, Baldwin, what are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that the killer doesn’t know that Whitney is dead. Which means he’s not here in Nashville, because I assume there was a lot of coverage on Whitney’s accident over the past few days.”

“It’s been a lot of feel-good stuff. Her history, her credentials, her journalistic life, that kind of stuff. Nothing about her and Quinn’s kidnapping. Just very sweet, respectful stories. You would think that she was everyone in town’s best friend. But yes, there has been a lot of it.”

“And I bet none of it went national, huh?”

“Well, I don’t know for sure. We can call the network and ask. Why?”

“It doesn’t matter. I talked to Garrett on my way in. The geographical profile has Nashville as one of three central staging points-it’s less than a day’s drive from each crime scene. If the GP is accurate, and the killer is from Nashville and doesn’t know that Whitney’s dead, that would explain why he’s still sending her e-mails. What we need to do is start getting a back-trace on this e-mail address, and I need to get over to Health Partners and talk to Louis Sherwood. Have you talked to Quinn yet?”

“No, I didn’t want to put it all out there, not until we know more.”

“Why don’t you talk to her, see if you can get something. Don’t fill her in, just see if she drops anything good. I’ll meet you back at home after our meetings, okay?”

He leaned across the desk and gave her a kiss, a kiss that was full of promise, and started for the door. His cell rang before he could get out into the hallway. He checked the ID. It was Grimes.

“Baldwin, we’ve got a report of a body in Louisville, Kentucky.”

“But we never had a missing persons report from Asheville, right?”

“No, and we’re hopeful that perhaps this isn’t related. But Louisville is one of the cities on the list that Health Partners is in, so I thought we better check it out.”

“Yeah, but did he grab someone from Asheville and take her to Louisville, or snatch someone in Louisville?”

“I can’t tell you that. You’re going to have to figure that one out for me. Are you going to Louisville? Do you want me to meet you there?”

“Right now, I need to follow this trail here in Nashville. Let me work this out for you, because some of this information I’m guessing at. The geo profile indicates that Nashville may be a staging area. I think the killer may be based here. I believe he’s been in contact with one of the local reporters. I’ve been waiting to go over all of this with you until I could get a positive confirmation. I wanted to make sure the poems that were at the scenes match the poems he was e-mailing the reporter. They do.

“Now, the story gets a little crazy here. The reporter, Whitney Connolly, was afraid for her twin sister, was trying to pass along a message to her. But she was killed in an accident before she divulged the information. We’ve found out that the sister’s husband, Jake Buckley, is a vice president with Health Partners. So there is definitely something to this side of things, and we need to get to the bottom of it.

“The killer e-mailed another poem to Whitney Connolly’s e-mail, one that doesn’t match what we have found so far. There’s a body in Louisville. Most likely, that’s what the poem correlates to, but we won’t know until we get some identification.”

“I don’t know, Baldwin, I just don’t know. This case, it’s gotten away from me. From all of us. Do you even know when he sends the poems? Is it when he takes them? Or when he kills them? Where’s he sending them from? Does he have a laptop?”

“I don’t know the answer to that one, Grimes. Did you check with the community hospital in Asheville to see if they have any employees unaccounted for?”

“I did, and they don’t have anyone that hasn’t shown up for work. There’s not a lot else I can do unless we get a missing persons report.”

“What about the colleges? There are several schools in Asheville. We know that Shauna Davidson didn’t work for a Health Partners hospital but attended a class there. Maybe there are students who come in to do lab work or something.”

“Baldwin…”

“I know, man, I’m grasping at straws. I’m just trying to think…”

“No, Baldwin, wait. I think I’ve got an idea. Student health centers, right? They probably wouldn’t have any ability to do lab work. Maybe they send out.”

“Grimes, that’s a great idea. Start at UNC-Asheville, it’s the school closest to the hospital. Double-check they don’t have anyone missing, make some calls to the other schools, try to track this down. Then you can head out to Louisville. I’ll do what I can here to find out what’s going on.”

Disappointment spilled from Grimes’s mouth. “Oh. Okay. I’m waiting on some more information to come in from Louisville, but I’ll check things out here. In the meantime, you’ll let me know as soon as you hear something?”

“Will do. Go get the college checked out. I’ve got a feeling about that.”