Their waitress returned with two plates groaning with food. Pancakes, scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage and a bowl of grits filled platters big enough for ten men. To top it off, soda biscuits paraded off the edges of the plates.
Baldwin couldn’t hold back a laugh. “This is the works, isn’t it?”
“It is, sugar, and you leave anything behind, I’ll have your hiney. You two look like you could use a good meal.” She placed the plates with a flourish, pulled an assortment of jams from her apron pocket, reached behind her and refilled their coffee, all without her gaze leaving Baldwin’s eyes. Her braids clicked softly as she moved about, getting them settled. He sensed she wanted more, so he sat silent, not making a move toward his plate. He was right.
“Sugar, you here about that sweet young doctor that went missing?”
“Yes, ma’am, we are.” Grimes looked at Baldwin, excitement and hope brightening his eyes. Ma’aming a waitress was the universal signal that meant “Please, tell me everything you know.” She obliged.
“You know, she came in here all the time. Had a thing for my Eugene’s pancakes. Said they were the best she ever tasted.” She raised a disapproving eyebrow. “You’re not tasting yours.”
Baldwin tucked his fork into the fluffy mound and steered a bit to his mouth. It was heaven. Marni wasn’t off the mark as far as Eugene’s pancakes were concerned. He told Lurene so.
She nodded gravely. “He’s got a secret, won’t tell me a thing. We’ve been running this place for twenty years, and he still won’t tell me what he does to ’em.”
Grimes had watched this exchange absently while shoveling food into his mouth. He tried to croak out a question, but Lurene gave him a stern look.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full.” Grimes covered his mouth sheepishly, sending Baldwin a mental message instead. Get her to talk, his eyes implored. This could be the best information we get.
“Lurene, you said Marni Fischer came in here often. When’s the last time you saw her?”
“Friday morning. She always comes in before work on Friday, says it’s her treat for the week. Boy, that girl sure could put away some food. Always had what you’re havin’, finished the whole plate and usually asked for more biscuits. They’re my own recipe, you know.”
Baldwin took the hint and demolished a biscuit. He was amazed, he’d never had anything quite so good. Having grown up in the South, that was saying something. He gave Lurene the compliment and she practically purred. Baldwin imagined Eugene must have his hands full.
“So you say you saw Marni on Friday. She didn’t stop in Saturday?”
“Nope, sugar, she didn’t.”
“Any chance you had a stranger in here on Friday? A man, maybe?”
She pursed her lips and thought hard, air leaking out the small O where her lips weren’t entirely closed in a tinny little whistle. “Honey, we have strangers in here all the time. There was a boy in here, cute kid I hadn’t seen before. But he was just a kid. Maybe seventeen, eighteen. He wasn’t legal, I’ll tell you that. Figured he was in here while his momma had an appointment or somethin’.”
“What did he look like?” Eighteen was younger than Baldwin expected the killer to be, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask.
“Handsome boy, dark hair, like yours. Don’t really remember much about his features. Just a good-looking kid. Came in, ate and left, he was only here about twenty minutes, tops. Didn’t linger like you men.” She winked at him. “I’m sorry for that girl, I liked her a lot. You finish your breakfast now, y’hear?” She topped off their coffee and left them to their thoughts. They finished as much of the food as they could, and Grimes wisely mopped up the remainder of his eggs with the last biscuit. They got up and went to pay, but Lurene waved them off.
“You just find that girl, okay?”
“We’ll do our best, ma’am. Thank you for a wonderful breakfast.” Baldwin surreptitiously slipped a twenty-dollar bill under a saltshaker on the counter and they made their way out onto the quiet street.
* * *
They sat in Baldwin’s hotel room, waiting. At least, Baldwin sat. Thinking about how young his killer could actually be. A kid, that wouldn’t fit. This guy was too organized, too mobile to be that young. He needed his own place, his own wheels and a lot of cash to circulate himself around the Southeast. Naw, that didn’t work.
Grimes paced a few feet away. A member of his team had called a few minutes earlier. Shauna Davidson’s apartment had been searched and a poem found in her desk drawer. Baldwin read and reread the lines Grimes gave him.
How can those terrified vague fingers push,
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
How can anybody, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating
where it lies?
This was not good at all. Baldwin closed his eyes to shut out the sight of Grimes’s relentless pacing. He could still hear the man’s shoes passing through the industrial-grade carpet—swoosh, swoosh, swoosh, swoosh.
As Grimes made his latest turn, his phone rang. He looked at Baldwin. “Finally.” He snapped the phone open. “Grimes.” He listened, then motioned for a pen and pad to write on. He scribbled furiously, nodding and uh-huhing for a few minutes, then hung up and looked at Baldwin.
“I really fucked up, didn’t I?”
Grimes’s admission of the mistake was surprising. An undercurrent of animosity had plagued their relationship from the beginning, yet here he was, ready to confess all his sins, to be absolved by the one man he didn’t want in the investigation. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Baldwin couldn’t justify the blunder, but he could understand it.
“Grimes, you’ve been dealing with three separate law enforcement agencies in three states. Countless people, high-stress situations. Anyone could have missed it.”
“But you didn’t,” he said miserably. “See, I haven’t really been on my ‘A’ game with this. I’ve been having some trouble at home, been thinking about retiring. Turn in the badge, get a real life.” The melancholy in his tone was alarming. “I should take myself off the case. I could have blown the whole thing. I might have been able to save one of those girls.”
Baldwin clapped a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Hey, I didn’t find the note in Nashville attached to Shauna Davidson’s murder.” He waited until Grimes met his eyes. “Listen, I need you to keep your head in the game. Yeah, it was a miss. A big miss. But we need to move forward now, okay? I want you on this case. Read me what they found.”
Grimes nodded, swallowing hard.
Jesus, Baldwin thought. Just what I need.
Grimes shook his head, cleared his throat, tried to gain an element of dignity and control. “All right. Let’s see how you do with these.”
“More poetry?” Baldwin felt his heart beating just a little harder. His instinct was right.
“Yep. The notes have been there all along. Each girl had one in their personal effects. According to Petty, Lernier’s and Palmer’s were in their gym bags, Jessica Porter’s was in her date book. We just didn’t see it. God, how could we have missed this? They’ve been collected, they’ve already been printed, but nothing showed. Jesus, I’ve blown the whole case.” Grimes was back off on his “woe is me” tangent, and Baldwin was getting impatient.
“Grimes. The poems?”
“Yeah, yeah, let me read them off to you. Ready?”
“Okay, shoot.”
“This was in Susan Palmer’s car.” He read the verses aloud.
“A perfect woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort and command;
And yet a Spirit still, and bright
With something of an angelic light.”
Baldwin scribbled and nodded, murmuring to himself. “Wordsworth. Okay, who’s next?”
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“Jeanette Lernier. Here we go.
“A creature not too bright or good
For human nature’s daily food
For transient sorrows, simple wiles
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears and smiles.”
Baldwin smiled. “Another stanza from the same poem. What was found in Jessica’s dayrunner?”
Grimes flipped the page of his notebook. “Jessica, Jessica… Here.
“A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By his dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.”
“Same poem?” Grimes asked.
“No, that’s one’s Yeats. Excellent poet, Yeats.” He reached for Grimes’s notebook. “Let me see that.” Grimes handed it over and Baldwin read the lines again.
“Jessica’s, Shauna’s and Marni’s poems are from ‘Leda and the Swan,’ William Butler Yeats. Jeanette’s and Susan’s are from a William Wordsworth poem, ‘She Was a Phantom of Delight.’ Our killer knows some of the classics.”
Grimes scratched his head. “Apparently you do, too. But what does it mean?”
“See, that’s the problem. It means something different to different people. What I’m concerned about is this stanza of Marni’s poem. Being so caught up, so mastered by the brute blood of the air…indifferent beak… When he started, with Susan and Jeanette and Jessica, he worked hard. He stalked them, took his time, seduced them. Now he’s picking up speed, moving too fast to get involved emotionally with his victims. These girls are a means to an end now, not an object worthy of worship and desire.
“And if he’s become indifferent to their plight, then we’re going to see an escalation in violence. ‘Leda and the Swan’ is classically recognized as a rape poem, a violent poem. Marni has drawn the mention of blood, I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t have some sort of brutality done to her that’s more severe than was done to any of the other girls. But I’m just guessing, Jerry.”
Grimes had his hands shoved deep in his pockets, his head bowed. “I wouldn’t have known all that. Wasn’t much good with that stuff in school.”
Baldwin drew in a breath. “I think we’d better go regroup. Give you some time to get yourself back together. And give me some time to think about this.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
He looked at his watch. It was time. He’d been sitting in silence in the rest stop, waiting for the right moment. The highways had quieted, the light of dawn still two hours away. He’d been driving all night, and had reached his destination right on time. Just enough time to sit back and reflect for a few moments. It was perfect. It was all perfect.
He looked over his shoulder into the back seat of the car. Luminous brown eyes glared back at him. She wasn’t cowed, not this one. She was a fighter. Well, we’ll see how she feels when she’s under me, when she feels the breath leave her. He felt himself harden and licked his lips.
Half an hour later, the defiant eyes no longer burning a hole through his brain, he put the car into drive and slid, silent as a shark, toward the on-ramp.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Taylor walked across the steaming parking lot at the Criminal Justice Center in Nashville, mentally planning her day. She shielded her eyes against the sun, gazing at the office building she called home. The CJC was a squat, nondescript building that housed the main units of the Criminal Investigations Division, as well as the administrative headquarters for the Metro Nashville Police Department. In the reorganization, a number of offices moved out of the headquarters building and into various sector offices. The chief had killed the five sector divisions and cut them into three: South, West and North. Detectives that were originally slated to work in departments like Homicide and Robbery were now housed in the sector offices as general detectives. Taylor’s team of homicide detectives had gotten to stay in the old headquarters and worked on homicides that had an element of ambiguity to them. If there wasn’t a suspect, there was no evidence or the job just looked too tough, Taylor’s team got the case. It meant a lot less busywork for them. The rest of the detectives scattered across the mid-state region pulled up the slack, covering basic plainclothes duties.
The Strangler case was spinning out of control, the media was screaming for answers. Cable news had seized upon the story and was creating a panic, updating every half hour, pointing out the failures on the part of law enforcement in all five states. Jessica Porter was lying in the morgue in Nashville, and Shauna Davidson’s parents were begging for their daughter’s body to be returned to them for burial. That part of the case was out of her hands. The FBI was working with, cooperating fully with, local law enforcement agencies, but in essence, they had taken the case from them. She let Price deal with the politics of the situation, duking out the jurisdictional issues. And no one could deny that the Feebs had access to better labs and more timely results; at least the forensics would be handled quickly and thoroughly.
She made her way up the back steps, stepping around the industrial ashtray that crowded the landing. She felt a brief pang of addiction and desire but soldiered on, slipping her access card through the slot. The door opened with a hiss and she entered the bland linoleum hallway. Following the green-striped arrow, she made her way to the Homicide office.
It was quiet this morning. Granted, most of the weekly departmental meetings were going on, so none of the brass was around. She wondered briefly if anyone had found out about Betsy, but dismissed it. That wasn’t her job right now. Her job was to look over the Rainman case.
As she passed the Homicide office, she felt a moment of bitterness toward Baldwin. Her most interesting murder in weeks had been slipped right out from under her, another tasty case whisked away into FBI jurisdiction. She understood, but she couldn’t stop the sense of disappointment. Not that a serial rapist was anything to sneeze at. On the contrary, the Rainman had proved so elusive over the past few years that she welcomed the chance to look at the files, see if she could find anything that the other detectives had missed.
But she wished, for a brief moment, that she was out on the road, tracking the Southern Strangler.
She walked through the overcrowded Homicide office. Even though a number of detectives from each of the three shifts had been moved to other offices, discarded junk remained. There were still sixteen tiny workstations packed into the room, but carpenters had begun reassembling the cubicles to make the spaces larger and more open. They’d end up with ten or so workstations: a little more private and a lot less cramped. She couldn’t wait for things to be done.
With the reorganization, Taylor had moved up in the world. She’d taken over Captain Price’s office when he’d moved to the second floor to be with the rest of the administrative corps. The desk, the chairs and, more important, the door, were now hers. She’d offered to share with Fitz, allowing him some privacy when she wasn’t around, but he’d turned her down. He liked being out with the troops. Though she was a scant few feet away, she understood. The separation was palpable, and was taking some time to get used to. She still started when anyone knocked on the door frame. She rarely shut the door, it seemed only fair that she have the same lack of privacy that her detectives had.
The normally bustling office was peacefully silent. She knew two of her detectives, Marcus Wade and Lincoln Ross, were in court this morning. She’d sent Fitz home to get some sleep. The rest of the night shifts had gone home. She had the place to herself.
She was used to solitary time, almost always welcomed it. With Baldwin around, that was changing. He spent a lot of time working from her home. His technical transfer to Nashville’s field office as the mid-state profiler meant he could curtail his travel, make his own hours, participate in cases that interested him. If a major case popped, like the Strangler, he was pulled in to wo
rk it. He was still the FBI’s leading behavioralist, albeit one in semiretirement.
They weren’t officially living together, but he’d taken over her home office, and she was secretly pleased with the messy decor. She felt like she belonged to someone for the first time, and if that meant he messed up her office, so be it. He also messed up the kitchen, but she’d forgive him just about anything if he cooked dinner. So many nights she came home tired and unwilling to put out that extra effort.
Since the “incident,” as she liked to call it—it was nicer than blurting out “when I got my throat cut”—she found herself more tired than usual. The doctors said that was normal. The gash in her throat had severed an artery; her blood loss had been exponential. “You nearly died,” they said. “Give yourself a break,” they said. “The body doesn’t bounce back that easily.” It had taken three months before her voice had returned to normal. Always a bit throaty, she was now downright husky, which Baldwin loved. He teased that she would make a great late-night radio announcer, or a phone-sex operator. She ignored his jibes, and worked hard on her rehab. There was a time when they thought she’d never be able to speak again, but she’d astounded them with a croak three days after her last surgery. Through hard work and dedication, she’d gotten herself back in shape and was stronger every day.
Amazing how her near miss with death had cemented their relationship. For the longest time, Taylor worried that he’d stayed out of pity. Now she knew better.
Smiling to herself, she went down the hall to the Sex Crimes office. The room wasn’t empty, but all the detectives seemed preoccupied. She knew that Brian Post had told everyone that Betsy had been in a car accident and was in the hospital. This was the most plausible excuse anyone could come up with, and it masked her injuries wonderfully. He’d mentioned that Lieutenant Jackson from Homicide was going to look over the Rainman files while Betsy was laid up, and when she entered, she got a couple of friendly waves. Waving back, she walked over to Betsy’s desk, where some kind soul had already pulled the files and bound them with a rubber band for easy transport.
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