Don’t Talk to Strangers: A Novel

by Amanda Kyle Williams

  I tapped on the door and Mrs. Barbour opened it. Luke ran inside, positioned himself immediately at her ankles. She patted him, still looking at us, then at the road behind us ablaze in light, lamps weaving through the woods behind the scene like skiers on a downhill course.

  “Did you find anything?” I saw again the stunned, shattered look in her eyes I’d seen when she was huddled in her kitchen.

  “No,” we lied in unison. Tomorrow at the judicial center, after their polygraph tests, they would be brought up to date. But not tonight. Too much was uncertain tonight. Hayley looked again at the road and the lights, then back at us. She’d registered our withholding with the built-in lie detector of a mother. Tears and betrayal filled her eyes again. She might even have understood the significance of our lie—that we’d found something and the news was not good, and for all those mystical reasons law enforcement uses in lieu of full disclosure, she wasn’t being told the truth. But the world is full of suspects. Even glistening-eyed mothers were not free from suspicion. We had to be careful.

  “For our records,” the sheriff asked casually, “do you know Skylar’s blood type?”

  “B-positive,” she answered, faintly.

  He smiled at her, and his voice stayed calm and smooth and reassuring. “There’s a message in that, Mrs. Barbour. Stay positive. She could walk in any minute.”

  We left her standing at the door with her missing daughter’s dog, in the home she shared with a husband who couldn’t stand the sight of her.

  “It’s going to be a long night in that house,” Meltzer remarked as we walked back toward the road. “You think they’re for real?”

  “Grief-stricken and guilt-stricken look a lot alike. Too soon to tell.”

  “Listen, Keye, I wanted to thank you for tonight, for just going with the flow.”

  “With your mom, you mean?”

  “Yeah. She has a tendency lately to ditch Patricia and barge in.”

  I laughed. “I for one am grateful for her timing.”

  “I was going to kiss you,” he said, and I felt my heartbeat catch in my throat. “And you were going to let me.”

  Shadowy figures performed their strange rituals behind scene tape under the lights ahead. We walked toward the scene—a desolate, weeping movie set.

  “Can I be really honest, Ken?”

  “Please,” he said.

  “This chemistry thing—it’s going to be a distraction. And it’s not simple for me. You know that. I’m just not ready to set off a stick of dynamite in my life right now.”

  “I understand,” he said quietly.

  “I need to think about what happened on that road up there,” I told him. “I need to think about digging this creep out of his filthy hole and bringing Skylar home.”

  Our shoes cracked down on dirt and pebbles. Insects screamed from trees, deputies’ voices called for Skylar from the woods beyond and reminded me of the way it sounds to search a house and hear “clear” after each room is secured. I saw a deputy moving slowly through the ditch where Luke found the phone case.

  “Mom liked you, by the way,” Ken said. “I’m told she may not remember me for much longer. So I’m just trying to enjoy these moments with her. It gets crazy sometimes. She thinks Ginger is a dog I had growing up. Half the time she thinks I’m my father. It makes some people uncomfortable. You seemed okay with it.”

  “Well, my business partner is a pot smoker. So I’m used to it.”

  Meltzer laughed, that big, rumbly laugh, probably the first laugh on this road today. He stopped and looked at me. “Christ, how can you make me laugh in the middle of all this?”

  The sheriff of Hitchiti County was a romantic, I realized, the kind of guy who’d fall for you because you’re nice to his mom and his dog.

  Deputies were piling out of the woods and moving into a field on the other side of the road as we neared the scene. We knew Skylar wasn’t out there. But the search had to be done. I squinted at the floodlights. I had to raise my voice over the generator.

  “Interesting he removes the battery,” I said.

  “He wants to disable GPS,” Meltzer said.

  “But GPS told us exactly where the phone was disabled,” I argued. “He’d know that. Plus, he’s leaving the device behind. It’s no threat. He’s wiped it down. So why take the batteries? If he needs to disassemble the phone why not just toss the battery in the ditch too?”

  Raymond had lumbered up and pulled a cigarette out of his pocket. He didn’t light it. “He has a thing for batteries?” he suggested sarcastically.

  “That’s insightful for you, Detective,” I answered, not taking the bait. “I think it’s a trophy. A memory. He likes this part.” I swept my hand in the direction of the road. “The part where he overpowers his victim. He’s all jacked up on chemicals then. It’s probably the only time in all his interaction with the victim he’s able to get that rush. He wants to commemorate it.”

  Raymond blinked heavy lids at me. “And you think we’re the creepy ones?”

  “You find anything else?” the sheriff asked him, before I could reply.

  “Found a few more drops of blood,” Raymond reported. “Drag marks too. Although we fucked them up with our cars. If I had to guess from the marks and the blood, he hits her there.” He pointed to where Sam was photographing the ground. “Lot of displaced rock and dirt there, like maybe he was trying to get control of her. There’s some kind of disabling blow, first blood hits the ground, then he drags her back around to his vehicle.”

  Meltzer nodded his agreement. “Sounds right.”

  “Good news is, there’s not much blood,” Raymond added. “He wasn’t trying to kill her. He just wanted to disable her.”

  “And take her to his hole,” I said thickly.

  Raymond threw up his hands and walked away.

  24

  It was a silent ride to the hotel, curling through Whisper’s back streets. I’d left the sheriff conferring with his deputies. Another scene tech had arrived to help process that square of road and the ditch. They’d asked us politely to leave. No one had to twist my arm. I wasn’t doing anyone any good standing there.

  I climbed the outside steps up to my hotel room. My key card was in my hand when I reached to push it in the door and realized I was staring into a blank space, a darkened room, a door already cracked open.

  I stepped back, heard the growing thump, thump, thump in my ears. Fight or flight. There it was. What was it going to be? My gun was inside. I had no flashlight. No anything.

  I spun around and hit the door with the side of my foot, kept moving. The door swung open hard and slammed into the wall. Adrenaline and cortisol. I could taste it in the back of my throat. I waited. No sound. No movement inside. I reached one arm inside and found the light switch.

  Empty room. Dresser drawers pulled out. The contents of my suitcase dumped on the bed. I went quickly to the closet and checked the safe. The readout said it was locked. I keyed in the four-digit code, popped open the safe, grabbed my Glock and shoved in a clip. The bathroom door was closed. And I wasn’t the one who’d closed it.

  I turned the knob with my left hand, gave it a little push, then swung in with my Glock. Nothing. I snatched open the shower curtain and saw an empty square.

  I let myself breathe. I’m an emergency person. I have an inexplicably cool head for the unexpected. It’s the aftershocks that wreck me. I felt them now in my knees.

  I inspected the door. Whoever had broken into my room had used some kind of pry bar and torn the heck out of it. It was bent and scarred. Definitely not a professional job. The lock wouldn’t slide into place. I attached the chain to hold it closed while I cleaned up the room and assessed the damage. My clothes were there. The shaving kit I use as a makeup bag sat on the bathroom counter. My toothbrush was where I’d left it in a plastic hotel cup. Good bet I’d never use that toothbrush again. I went back to the safe. My Mac, my digital camera, my notes—everything was still there. There were no mar
ks on the safe to indicate someone had tried to open it without the code. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to take nothing. Was this another message? Or was it something else entirely? According to Bryant Cochran, there were a whole lot of folks who didn’t like having me around. I thought about Logan Peele, then glanced back at the door. I’d ruffled some feathers in the thirty-six hours I’d been in town. One sex offender was sitting in jail, another had had his devices confiscated. Tina Brolin hadn’t even tried to disguise her venom. And when she had misdirected it at the family of a missing girl tonight, Meltzer had ordered her away. Where had she gone? But why would Brolin do this? Why would Peele? Why not take something? Or leave something? Could this be random, some teenage prank or a thug looking for credit cards and cash? Why was the safe untouched?

  I repacked my suitcase. The weight of the day made my shoulders and head ache. I slipped the lip of my duty holster in the back of the navy slacks I’d been in all day and walked outside with my computer bag hanging off my left shoulder and my suitcase in my left hand. I wanted my right hand free. I wasn’t feeling the love in Whisper at the moment.

  A dozing clerk, roused by the bell on the door, blinked when I walked into the lobby, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. I put my key card on the counter in front of him. “Checking out?” He got out of the desk chair he’d been sleeping in behind the counter.

  “Someone broke into my room.” I gave him the room number. “So yeah. I’m checking out. Door was jimmied and it won’t lock now. You see anyone?”

  “Did they take anything?” He seemed to brighten up. He’d probably hoped for a good robbery. “We never have break-ins here.”

  “Right,” I said. “So did you see anything?”

  “No!” He came around from behind the counter and peered out the doors into the parking lot as if he could see something helpful now. “Want me to call the cops?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Tell them what you just told me. Be a lot of help.”

  I lugged my things out and loaded my car. Yellow streetlamps softly lit the shops and the narrow lanes of Main Street as I drove out of Whisper. It was a postcard town. Everything about Whisper and the surrounding area—the thick forests, the rolling farmland, the vast, icy-blue water, the manicured resorts—all of it beckoned, invited. It was one big fucking WELCOME sign. But to me it whispered locked basements and eyes in windows, and secrets. And murder.

  I drove toward the resort area I’d jogged through a couple of miles out of town. I found a Fairfield Inn with a room. It wasn’t exactly the Ritz, but when does a PI get the Ritz? The room was clean. The door hadn’t been pried open, and it wasn’t in downtown Whisper. I performed the bedbug check, turned corners back on all the bedding, checked the seams and crevasses in the mattress. There are few things that can fill my heart with dread like a bedbug. They’re sneaky. And they bite. I shivered at the thought.

  I took a shower and toweled my hair, brushed my teeth with a hard toothbrush I’d bought in the lobby, fell into bed with my stomach rumbling. The sheriff’s spinach quesadilla had worn off hours ago. I considered the hotel vending machine again. I would have paid ten bucks for a package of Hostess Ding Dongs—chocolate cupcakes stuffed with cream. Well, they call it cream. Lord knows what it is. My mother would have slapped it out of my hand.

  I used the key I’d found taped under Skylar’s desk drawer and opened the tiny pink padlock hanging off her diary. Notes of varying size torn from lined school paper tumbled out on the bed. Skylar must have opened it carefully, kept it flat, knowing special memories were stuffed inside the cover. I thought about Skylar handling this diary, sitting down to record secrets and dreams. I thought about Raymond not wanting me to have it.

  I unfolded one of the notes, a torn-off scrap bent in half with ragged edges. My brother says Robbie says he likes you. I opened another one. They totally made out. And another. OMG! Did you see her shoes? I read on through each bitchy, hormonal, funny, childish, innocent note; some of them had clearly been passed around and contained two or three styles of handwriting.

  A photo among the notes got my attention, Skylar and a girlfriend hamming it up in an old-fashioned photo booth. Did they still make them? Four frames. Girls smiling self-consciously, giggling as they grinned. Earrings dangling. The department would access her photo stream online. I’d make sure of that. No one used paper anymore, at least not a teenager. Everyone’s lives, mine included, passed through our smartphones into a storage cloud somewhere. Raymond might have thought about online storage already and gotten the ball rolling. The detective had some thug in him, but he wasn’t stupid. I’d watched him at the scene tonight and with Skylar’s parents. His reconstruction of the abduction based on drag marks and blood spatter was careful and thoughtful.

  I flipped through the diary, went to the last entry, dated yesterday. One line. I HATE my parents!!!!!

  She wrote about her fears that her arguments with her parents contributed to the tension between them. She regretted the fights later but held stubbornly to her belief in the utter injustices perpetrated against her by Hayley and Brooks Barbour. Based solely on Skylar’s complaints in her journal, they appeared to be protective parents, not abusive ones. Skylar was interested in music but bored with band practice and scathingly critical of the “lame” music teacher. I learned that her primary interest since the new school year began was in a boy named Robbie. Saw Robbie. He’s so gorgeous. Saw Robbie. He’s so smart. The entries ran from a line one day to a crowded page another, from the flippant and shallow and self-absorbed to the dark and shallow and self-absorbed, which was exactly where she was supposed to be emotionally at thirteen. That thought—the protected unworldliness with which she approached life, the pure innocence of inexperience—wedged in my throat like a cotton ball.

  I read back a couple of months before my eyes burned and I was no longer absorbing anything. I switched out the light and lay there in the dark. I thought about that smiling girl with caramel-colored eyes. Where was she tonight? Chained to a pipe in some barn or shed, shivering with cold and fear? Was she hungry? We knew from the lab reports that Tracy and Melinda had been fed just enough to be kept alive until they’d served their purpose. Offenders don’t take prisoners and cook them balanced meals. These people can get up from a steak dinner upstairs, clean their plates off in the trash, and walk down basement steps with a two-month-old package of cookies from the vending machine at work and toss it at their captives without a thought. Look at Ariel Castro and the hellhole he’d created for three women and a child in Cleveland. Look at Brian David Mitchell, who took fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Smart and chained her to a tree, starved and raped her, and held her for nine months. I’d seen predators’ lairs, their filthy dungeons littered with Frito bags and plastic water bottles, excrement and shackles and ropes and knives and dildos and pornography. The victims’ only value is in what needs they satisfy in the offenders. Age, innocence, suffering, starving, the terrible sin of breaking a child—none of it matters.

  I flipped over on my side, stared at a parking lot light through a separation in the heavy curtains. I took a shaky breath. God, I wanted to find that kid. I wanted to find her and watch Luke slobber her face with kisses. I wanted to find the sonofabitch who was holding her and put a bullet in him before those light brown eyes of hers grew dark and vacant.

  I reached for my phone to call Rauser, to say good night, to tell him I loved him, to hear the voice that had steadied me for years, as both friend and lover, the man I’d nearly betrayed. Or had I already betrayed him by letting the sheriff get so near? I’d enjoyed it, after all—the fantasies, the flirting. And if that weren’t enough, here I was parsing the definitions of sex and betrayal like Bill Clinton at a deposition. How would Rauser define cheating? I reviewed every moment I’d spent with Ken Meltzer. The almost-kiss would have hurt Rauser far less than the walk on the dark road tonight with Meltzer next to me, sharing the tension and heartache and fear and exhilaration of an investigation like thi
s. That connection, that intimacy, those moments, I knew exactly what that would feel like to Rauser. I dropped the phone back on the bed table.

  At six a.m. I stood in front of the mirror looking at the tiny creases at the corners of my eyes, the ones that hadn’t been there a couple of years ago. Some foundation, blush, a little pencil under the corners of my bottom lashes and I was beginning to look human. I searched for my mascara. And then I searched again. I poured everything out of the makeup bag. What the hell? It was Lancôme Ôscillation Intensity. Power mascara. Thirty-six bucks a tube and it had probably ended up on the floor of that hotel bathroom after my room was tossed. Shit. So far central Georgia was about as much fun as Gordon Ramsay at a redneck picnic.

  I headed downstairs. The smell of bacon hit me as soon as the elevator doors parted. I followed it to a room off the lobby with tables and chairs and a television. Sunken trays, steaming at the seams, were filled with scrambled eggs and grits, bacon and sausage. There were bagels and waffles and syrup and jelly. And tall dispensers that squirted OJ or thin brown coffee into cups. I ate breakfast alone at a small table and watched the hotel guests move in and out, some piling up plates and heading back to their rooms with puffy eyes and bed head. Some stayed, slurping the hot, tasteless coffee and pouring watery syrup on toaster waffles. A guy came in wearing a Krispy Kreme uniform and carrying a crate full of green-and-white boxes. I watched him slide the boxes into a rack on the counter. I waited for my chance to move in. Here’s the thing about Krispy Kreme’s original glazed doughnuts: They are flat-out awful cold and hard. But if you pop them in the microwave for a few seconds, the glaze melts and they get soft and pliable and they are almost as good as when they come off the conveyor in Midtown. I grabbed a fresh plate and two doughnuts, then nuked them for ten seconds. The day was looking up. I took Skylar’s diary from my bag and read while I washed Krispy Kremes down with weak coffee. I missed Neil and his espresso maker.