Undercurrents

by Mary Anna Evans

  “Worse than terrible. And it makes you wonder how many times he covered up the grave so well that nobody ever found it.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What else makes you think the Arkansas murder is related to Frida’s?”

  “The police never did turn up a murder weapon. Never even decided what it was. Laneer’s cousin would tell you she didn’t think they tried too hard, but maybe that’s just her.”

  Faye tried to retain her objectivity. Lots of murder victims were buried by their killers, or so she thought. Maybe they were almost all dumped without a burial. How would she know? She didn’t have McDaniel’s experience, which is why Sylvia should have been talking to him and not to her.

  She supposed a good percentage of those lonely corpses, buried and unburied, were beaten to death by unidentifiable weapons. It was hard to make a case that all murders accomplished by bludgeoning were related.

  “Can you think of anything else, Sylvia? Anything that would make you think that the same person did all the killing?”

  “The only other thing I know about is that all three of ’em turned up right around the Fourth of July.”

  It crossed Faye’s mind that bodies, even well-buried bodies, might be easier to find in July, when the heat would make odors more noticeable. To people…to animals…to insects and larvae and worms…

  She stopped her mind from traveling down that path. “I’ll tell McDaniel everything you’ve told me, Sylvia. I’ll tell him right now.” She almost said, “You should talk to him yourself. I think you can trust him,” but she didn’t, because she was no longer sure that it was true.

  She said good-bye to Sylvia and dialed McDaniel, trying and failing to make herself feel safe in the spartan but well-lit stairwell.

  When he answered, Faye got right to the point.

  “Sylvia called and she told me some things that can’t wait until morning. She wanted me to tell you about an unsolved case in Corinth you should check out. A woman was found buried in an unmarked grave in a church cemetery.”

  “I’m already on it. Not a lot of clues that I know of, but I’ve got the case file in my stack of things to read.”

  “What about the woman found near Earle? In Arkansas.”

  “Don’t know about that one. What did Sylvia say about it?

  “She said that the body turned up buried in a state park.”

  Faye could almost hear McDaniel sit up straighter as he said, “Another state park?”

  “Yes.”

  “Murder weapon?” he asked.

  “None found. They don’t even know what he used to beat her to death.”

  “I’ll get on the phone with folks in Earle first thing in the morning. Tell Sylvia thank you for me. And tell her that she could have told me this herself. I don’t bite.”

  “It never occurred to me before how important it is for people to trust the law. The people, I mean. Laws aren’t much good without trustworthy people to enforce them.”

  He didn’t answer her right away. Finally, he said, “Maybe I’m missing your point, because I am really, really sleepy, but do I hear an accusation in what you just said? And a passive-aggressive one, I might add? Because honestly, Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth, I didn’t sleep last night and I don’t expect to sleep tonight. It wears on my nerves to think that I’m working myself to death hunting Frida Stone’s killer, but her family still doesn’t trust me. Or you.”

  “Trust goes both ways.” Faye was flabbergasted to hear her voice tremble. Where did her unflappability go? If she couldn’t hang onto that, she was in uncharted waters.

  “What are you saying? That I should have told you how Frida died before I told her family?”

  “You’re in charge of how information flows. It’s your case. But you asked me to help you, then you talked to me for the better part of an hour and didn’t tell me something really important. Critically important. It’s hard for me to tell Frida’s family how trustworthy you are when, at the very same time, they can see that you’re keeping things from me.”

  “As you said, it’s my case.” His voice had dropped in pitch. Faye couldn’t tell whether she was hearing his anger or whether she was hearing an effort to soothe hers. “Faye, I can see that you care about Frida’s family. Why wouldn’t you want to help me help them?”

  “I do. And I will. But sometime when you’re not working night and day, you might think about whether you could help people more if you made sure they knew that you respected them.”

  Faye wasn’t sure what it was about McDaniel that pissed her off so. He had listened to what she had to say. Yeah, he still clung to his theory that Frida was killed by one of her exes, but he’d also asked her about the women found in the Mississippi churchyard and the Arkansas state park. He hadn’t completely dismissed her concerns about a serial killer.

  “Sylvia wanted you to know that those two women weren’t stabbed or shot. They were beaten with something that was never identified. When Laneer told her that Frida was beaten with a shovel, she immediately wondered if that’s what had happened to them.”

  She only knew what Frida’s cause of death was because Sylvia had told her. Faye was pursuing this line of conversation for Sylvia’s sake, but also because it conveniently reminded McDaniel that she wasn’t dependent on him for information. Or for anything at all. And her confrontational tone of voice let him know that she was pissed that he hadn’t told her himself.

  Should McDaniel have told her everything he knew as soon as he knew? Maybe not. It wasn’t required of him, but he needed her. In the space of just a few hours, Kali and Sylvia had told her things that they would never have told him—important things that he needed to know.

  “I guess it might have been good to tell you about the shovel, now that I think about it. You work with shovels every day of the week,” he said, and his nervousness was audible. It slowed his speech and accentuated his Tennessee drawl.

  “You were under no obligation. But telling me would have been a gesture of cooperation. And respect.”

  And there it was, the uncomfortable thing that had been nibbling at her psyche from the moment she met Detective Harold McDaniel. Minutes after she had given her all to save Frida’s life, he had treated her like a suspect. He had been self-aware enough to back away from that presumption, even going so far as to ask her to be his go-between with Frida’s family. Yet there was the undeniable fact that, even after all that, he had chosen not to tell her how Frida died.

  How did he expect her to help him if he couldn’t be straight with her? In all their conversations, she felt a stiffness, a formality, a barrier.

  Was that barrier really based on something as simple and undeniable as her skin color? Kali and Jeremiah had been forthright in saying that she didn’t fit into their neighborhood, presumably due to her education and her middle-class pocketbook. They didn’t see her as one of them. Yet McDaniel did, despite the fact that Faye probably had about as much money as he did and her doctorate presumably put her far ahead of him in education.

  Faye put a hand to her cheek. Without looking in a mirror, she knew that it was brown. She always knew that it was brown. Was she touching the one and only reason that McDaniel had chosen not to trust her? There was no way for her to know.

  And this meant that she couldn’t afford to trust him, not fully. There was no such thing as one-way trust. There just wasn’t.

  Sometime between puberty and becoming a mother for the second time, Faye had gained confidence that was often hard for very young women to come by. She’d lost the need to believe that other people thought she was pretty, because she liked the way she looked just fine. She’d also lost the need to be liked by everyone, because she had true friends who loved her the way she was.

  After the need to be liked and the need to be desired fell away, it had become far easier for Faye to see what was important to her now, as
a full-grown woman. She needed respect, and she had learned to demand it or walk away.

  Detective McDaniel might not like her, and it was completely immaterial to her whether or not he thought she was attractive, but if he wanted her help, then he had damn sure better learn to take her seriously.

  Respect goes both ways.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Faye crept back into the motel room so quietly that Yvonna never stirred. Grabbing her laptop off the nightstand where it was charging, she returned to the stairwell and opened it. After poking around in her bookmarks for a minute, she found a link to the article she wanted and clicked it. If McDaniel wanted to keep things from her, maybe she could keep a few things from him without breaking the law.

  The article was called “An Algorithm to Die For,” which was a dumb headline, since it was about a woman who had developed an algorithm that could save lives. A sexier title like “The Woman All Serial Killers Should Fear” would have gotten more clicks. Faye had read it a week before, and its message had stuck with her.

  The article was about a data scientist who believed that lives were being lost because investigators were too busy to share information. And maybe because they didn’t trust each other enough to reach out to someone who could help. And maybe because they had evolved to be suspicious and territorial. The reasons didn’t matter. The dead did not care why the people working for justice didn’t make the best use of the information that they had.

  The woman all serial killers should fear was seventy-two years old, short, slight, and wheelchair-bound. Phyllis Windom was a data scientist who had spent her retirement chasing notorious serial killers without ever leaving her house. A lifelong lover of true crime books, her fascination with unsolved murders had blossomed into something much more when she realized that her skill with interpreting data was uncommonly useful in tracking down serial killers.

  She had reasoned that a single killing generated a lot of single data points—time of death, murder weapon, age of victim, and so on—but that a murderer with multiple victims committed a series of data-generating events that repeated themselves. To a woman like Phyllis Windom, each serial killer was operating under a personal algorithm that was hard for human beings to perceive in the pile of data generated by all of America’s killers. But if she turned all that information over to a computer? She believed it would find patterns in those data sets that could be used to track down some of the most terrifying people who ever lived.

  No. That was wrong. She didn’t just believe that she could find patterns that identified serial killers. She knew it for a fact.

  She knew it because she had found the most notorious serial killer in North Carolina by combing through publicly available data, and she’d done it from the comfort of her bedroom. Much of her information came from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, which was like a playground for a data scientist with a certain morbid mindset. Once she was comfortable that her work was solid, she’d built a website and had given her database and search algorithm to the public for free.

  The article on Faye’s screen gave Windom’s website address, saving Faye the trouble of searching the Internet for it. She entered through the public login portal and started working her way through Windom’s database, using search strings and drop-down menus.

  She found the Corinth murder immediately and spent some time studying the file. The victim had been petite, female, African-American, and in her mid-twenties, just like Frida, but so, tragically, were a lot of murder victims. Everything Sylvia had told Faye was correct. The unidentified woman had been found in July in a church graveyard and she’d been bludgeoned with an unidentified weapon. She had not been raped and there had been no evidence for robbery as a motive.

  The victim buried in an Arkansas state park, however, did not come up in a search of Windom’s database. This was not a surprise. Windom herself had put a big “Help Wanted” banner on her home page, with a caption saying:

  Police budgets are tight. Reporting often falls through the cracks. None of the databases I’ve tapped to build my own data set is complete. If you know of a case that should be here, WRITE ME. “Big Data” is nothing but individual data points. Send me your data, and you may save lives.

  Faye shot off an e-mail to Phyllis Windom, telling her everything she knew about the Arkansas murder victim and about Frida. Then she started exploring Windom’s database.

  First, she searched “Unsolved murders in Mississippi,” “Unsolved murders in Arkansas,” “Unsolved murders in Tennessee,” just to get a sense of the scope of the problem. Her answer? The scope was big, too big for any one person or any one police department. Once a serial killer began roaming over a wide territory, it just might take an algorithm like this one to find the tracks the killer had left through the data.

  Faye was no data scientist, so she just kept entering search strings and pushing go. What was she hoping for? A miracle, probably.

  Missing women in Mississippi

  Missing women in Arkansas

  Missing women in Tennessee

  There were just so many of them. This fact alone made Faye want to crawl into bed and resign from the human race.

  The clock had rolled on past three when she started another round of random, fruitless searching.

  Unidentified bodies in Mississippi

  Unidentified bodies in Arkansas

  Unidentified bodies in Tennessee

  Again, there were just so many. She was getting nowhere and her body needed sleep, so she stomped on her desire to filter those searches by “Unidentified murder weapon” and “Body disposal by burial.”

  Instead, she navigated back to the WRITE ME button and dashed off a second e-mail to Phyllis Windom.

  I know of three women murdered and buried within an hour’s drive of Memphis. They were all bludgeoned in the summertime, one with a shovel and two with unidentified weapons. I’m working with your database, but I don’t know it well and I’m slow. One of the murders happened two days ago, so the clock is ticking. Can you help?

  She included a signature line that identified her as a PhD archaeologist, which she hoped gave the subtle message of “I’m not crazy.” After pressing send and closing her computer, she wanted to sleep, but she couldn’t wipe her mind clean of all the unsolved killings she’d seen on her silent, glowing screen. Who did such things? More importantly to Faye, who had done such a thing right here in Memphis? And was it possible that the person who killed Frida had struck before, many times, and would strike again?

  Or maybe McDaniel was right. Maybe Frida’s killing had been an isolated crime, committed by someone who knew her. If this was true, she would say that Linton was the prime suspect. He had a history of violence, both in the Navy and toward Frida herself. She could still feel the unwelcome touch of his finger on hers.

  But there was something deeply disturbing about Mayfield’s sullen eyes.

  On the other end of the charming-to-sullen continuum, it was hard to suspect the smooth and handsome Armand, but he was the last man known to have been near Frida, and that counted for something. Besides, serial killers were known for being charismatic. Ted Bundy lured dozens of women to their deaths with nothing more than a fake limp, a cane, and his satin-smooth patter.

  But Faye’s mind wouldn’t stick with the three obvious suspects. It strayed. It considered every man she’d met since coming to Memphis.

  There was Jeremiah, who was certainly big enough to overpower a woman Frida’s size. What did she know about him anyway?

  There was also Kali’s teacher, Walt Walker. It made Faye feel unkind and suspicious to suspect a man who had given Kali nothing but kindness, but unkindness and suspicion came easily after two a.m.

  Kali’s minister, Reverend Atkinson, came to mind as a sign that Faye’s ability to suspect people knew no bounds.

  Her suspicious mind even turned to Detective McDaniel him
self. Wouldn’t a job as a homicide detective be a convenient one for a serial killer?

  And now Faye realized that she was straying far from what she knew to be true, tiptoeing alone out onto a precarious emotional ledge. She needed stability. She needed calmness and love. She needed Joe.

  She pulled her phone out of her pocket to check her notifications. It wasn’t like Joe to wait so long to answer her call.

  And he hadn’t. She had turned her ringer off hours before, afraid of disturbing Chez Philippe’s intimidating silence and its intimidating diners, and she’d never turned it back on. Joe had called at bedtime, and she smiled at her mental image of him in a rocker on their front porch, reaching out to her from Joyeuse Island’s familiar trees and blue-green water. Her home grounded her. There was a reason that she rarely strayed far or stayed away long.

  She could see that Joe’s call had been a video call, probably so that Amande and Michael could join in. Michael was long asleep, and Amande was in her room, either asleep or doing whatever seventeen-year-old girls liked to do on their favorite social media sites, all of which were too cool for the likes of Faye. She went to the stairwell and hit return on the video call anyway, because seeing her husband’s face would make her feel better. Or maybe seeing her husband’s face would put her in a car heading home. She wasn’t sure.

  He answered on the first ring and she wasn’t surprised. While she was away, Joe always kept his phone on at night with the ringer maxed out. And she could tell by the dizzying scene on her screen that he had indeed been sleeping. She saw their bedroom walls and ceiling careen by as he pulled his phone first to his ear and then to his eyes.

  “Hey, Faye. Damn, you look good.”

  Her short, straight black hair was glued to her head with nervous sweat and her skin was shiny-bare, so she took this statement as evidence of love. Or sleepiness. Joe was lying flat on his back in bed, holding the phone up toward the ceiling. He probably couldn’t see much through those drowsy eyes.