All the Pretty Girls

Nine

B aldwin sat as far back in the cramped seat as his legs would allow and fastened his seat belt for the quick trip to Atlanta. As soon as the plane cleared ten thousand feet and the pilot finished greeting the passengers, he pulled out his laptop and opened his e-mail. The file for the missing girl appeared before him. Shauna Lyn Davidson.

The call had come from Jerry Grimes, the field agent that had been running the cases from Alabama and Louisiana. He’d been instructed to keep Baldwin up to speed on the cases, and he’d complied, albeit reluctantly at first. Handing off his case to the FBI’s most celebrated profiler rubbed him the wrong way. But now, the note of panic in his voice was near the surface.

“Baldwin, they’ve definitively identified Shauna Davidson in Georgia. Her body is in a field off a rural exit, near Adairsville off I-75. Looks the same, body dumped in a field, strangled and she’s missing her hands. What the hell is this guy up to?”

“Grimes, you’ve told them what to look for, right? They need to find it.”

“Awww, shit, I know, I know. They’re looking for the hand now. I’m on my way there, are you coming?”

The accusatory note was not lost on Baldwin, but he chose to ignore it.

“I’m on my way, man. Hang in there.”

Baldwin glanced at his watch and saw it was too early to order a drink. This was supposed to be a beautiful, quiet day, spent in bed with the woman he loved. Not a day to go traipsing through death. Yet here he was, on a plane to Atlanta to hunt for the Strangler.

Being a profiler meant long hours in strange locales, but the longer he worked for the FBI, the more he was struck by the commonality of every situation. Madman kills innocent, then does it again. An MO is established, the FBI is consulted and Baldwin would be thrown on a plane. He’d chosen this life, this world. He had the rare ability to disengage, to be unaffected by the horrifying details of the cases. But it was starting to wear thin. He didn’t know exactly what he should do-stay with the FBI or strike out on his own. He’d love to steal Taylor away from Metro, but he knew in his heart of hearts that wouldn’t happen anytime soon.

He pushed those thoughts away. He needed to stay focused, and thinking about Taylor Jackson would derail even the strongest of men.

Local law enforcement in Alabama and Louisiana had done all the right things in processing their cases. The Alabama authorities worked closely with the Baton Rouge cops. They ran all the right tests, did the right investigation and still had no clue who had strangled eighteen-year-old Susan Palmer, cut off her hands and dumped her body in a field in Baton Rouge. The crimes seemed connected, there were definite similarities-manual strangulation and missing hands. But it was Jeanette Lernier’s case that had drawn the FBI’s attention. When she was examined in the field, the medical examiner had rolled her and found a hand underneath the lifeless body. Everyone assumed it was Jeanette’s. When DNA showed the hand belonged to Susan Palmer, from Alabama, people had gotten interested. Grimes and his partner, Thomas Petty, had been called to give interagency cooperation and support to the local authorities. When nothing happened for a month, the hunt was scaled back, Grimes and Petty went back to other cases, and the murders went into the annals of cold crimes that permeate small-town law enforcement. Grimes still kept a finger in the case, doing interviews with friends and family, but Petty caught the disappearance of a nine-year-old boy and was pulled off to work that crime. Time marches on. New crimes are committed. The cases weren’t forgotten, just relegated to the back burner.

The details of the two cases were kept quiet in the hopes that somewhere down the road an answer would surface. Two families buried only parts of their cherished daughters. Now two more families would be getting their daughters’ incomplete bodies back for burial. He prayed it would end here.

Baldwin had been made aware of the crimes but hadn’t been actively involved in the situation. The call this morning, the call to arms tasking him to the case, was going to change all that. The FBI would be able to claim complete jurisdiction if necessary because the kidnappings and murders crossed state lines, but so far the local police had cooperated and appeared to be a major help in their investigation, not a hindrance.

The original FBI team, Jerry Grimes and Thomas Petty, were smart, seasoned agents. When Jessica Porter had gone missing, her bedroom found full of blood, local law enforcement loaded the details of the case into VICAP. When the MO matched, Grimes and Petty were called in to help assess the scene. When they examined her apartment, they immediately thought of the Strangler. Grimes had called Baldwin and informed him of the case. He’d forwarded the information they had, which wasn’t much. Baldwin pulled this thin folder out of his briefcase and started refreshing his memory. It was written in the dry, impersonal tone of a police report, one that allowed no emotion to creep in and destroy the officers’ and agents’ objectivity.

CASE OVERVIEW-JESSICA ANN PORTER The victim is a Caucasian female age 18. She is 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighs 120 pounds, has long brown hair and brown eyes. She was born on April 27, 1986 in the city of Jackson, Mississippi. She has a strawberry birthmark on her left bicep, a belly-button ring with a small crystal ball and pierce ears. The victim disappeared while walking home from her job as a receptionist at a Jackson community hospital. The victim…

“Ah, hell,” he muttered. “I can’t do it like this.” Too damn impersonal. Baldwin closed the file in front of him and thought back to the discussion he’d had with Grimes. The man had been pretty broken up, too broken up. He had phoned Baldwin as soon as they’d cleared out of the Porter girl’s apartment, finished with the statements of family and friends. Baldwin mentally replayed the conversation. It was a knack he had, being able to tap into his brain and extract what he needed with total recall. Taylor sometimes hated him for it, she could never get away with anything. He smiled at the thought, then plugged into his mental database.

It had been a quiet night. For the past few months, Baldwin had been tasked to the Middle Tennessee Field Office, ostensibly working as a regional profiler. Baldwin had been working cases for the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit out of Quantico peripherally, consulting when needed. He wasn’t exactly in retirement, but on a pseudo sabbatical, allowing him to be in Nashville with Taylor. The arrangement was working wonderfully until this phone call, the familiar voice booming in his ear.

“The esteemed Dr. John Baldwin, I presume?” The sharp bite of sarcasm wasn’t lost on Baldwin, even some of the FBI’s own field officers didn’t like dealing with the profilers.

“It’s Jerry Grimes. I’m down here in Mississippi on a case.”

Baldwin remembered how his heart skipped a beat, revving in anticipation. His senses went on high alert. Grimes wasn’t calling him of his own accord, he’d been instructed to do so by a higher-up. He had dropped the niceties as well.

“We’ve got a missing girl. Young, brunette. Has all the hallmarks of…”

“The Strangler,” Baldwin said, dread mixing with adrenaline in his stomach.

“Now, how’d you go and do that, Baldwin?”

“Good guess.”

“Damn right, good guess. Her name’s Jessica Ann Porter. I’m sure you’ve seen the reports on the news?”

“Haven’t been watching too much. She’s dead, I presume, or else you wouldn’t be calling me.”

Grimes had gone silent for a moment, and then answered with a cracked voice. “No, she’s just missing. We’ve got some blood on the bedsheets but no real signs of a struggle. It’s like she disappeared into thin air. No one saw her after she left work for the day.”

Baldwin fast-forwarded through the conversation to Grimes’s description of the girl.

“She’s a beautiful kid. She’s got all this brown hair, got these big brown eyes, the kind that just shoot right through you. That’s just from pictures. She was the damn homecoming queen, man. Getting ready to go back to college in the fall, wanted to be a nurse or doctor, something she could do that would help people. She volunteered at the homeless shelter in town and delivers meals to shut-ins. The kid’s a saint, and no one we’ve talked to has had anything bad to say about her.”

Baldwin remembered thinking, uh-oh, Jerry’s taking this kind of personal.

Grimes continued. “I knew something was hinky and I should probably give you a heads-up, just in case.”

There wasn’t anything else Baldwin could do but hear the man out. Cases with kids got to every good investigator, and sometimes just talking it out was the best thing. They’d hung up with Baldwin promising to do a little research on the missing hands and what it could mean. Then Jessica Porter turned up in a field in Nashville, with what was presumably Jeanette Lernier’s hand with her.

The phone had rung again early this morning. Baldwin saw the caller ID number and knew it was Jerry Grimes, calling about Shauna Davidson. He was right.

“We got another body, Baldwin. Pretty sure it’s the girl missing from Nashville.”

That call had put him on a plane. He ran it through his head, the cadence becoming a bit like a child’s song.

Susan Palmer, Alabama. Found in Louisiana. Jeanette Lernier from Baton Rouge. Found dead in a field in Mississippi. Jessica Porter, Mississippi girl, found mutilated in a field in Nashville. Shauna Davidson, Georgia bound…

Though he’d gotten a row to himself, the woman in the aisle seat across from his gave him a strange look, half pity, half disgust. He must have been talking aloud. He gave her as reassuring a smile as he could, then fumbled all his folders back into his briefcase. As the pilot came over the radio to tell them they were cleared to land in Atlanta, he realized he was excited by the challenge.