Undercurrents

by Mary Anna Evans

  “A toy store. Get out.” Now he was laughing. “The department probably has something I can use. If they don’t, I’ll go to the toy store.” He stacked up the historical photos they’d been studying. “You don’t seem to have any right-this-minute aerial photos. If drones are so great for checking out a big piece of land, how come you’re not using one?”

  “Tennessee state law includes requirements for hiring somebody with the right insurance and such. But there’s a clause in the law that specifically says it’s okay to take a picture with a drone for law enforcement purposes. That’s you.”

  He slapped both thighs and laughed. “Yes. It is.”

  “My crew is cooped up in a motel room, eating bologna sandwiches and watching movies. If you want to make that up to me, you’ll give me a copy of that drone footage so I can use it for my project.”

  “You’ve got a deal.”

  Ayesha, Richard, Davion, Stephanie, Yvonna, and Jeremiah stood in the motel lobby looking expectantly at Faye. They were all so young and innocent, even Jeremiah, who obviously considered himself far older and more worldly than the rest. Since she’d last seen them, they had watched a movie together and eaten sandwiches and nobody had, to her knowledge, gotten drunk or misbehaved. From a managerial standpoint, today was a much better day than yesterday.

  “I’m going to Frida’s funeral and I’ll be happy to give a ride to anybody who wants to come.” At the mention of Frida’s name, Jeremiah lowered his eyes. Faye’s own eyes were burning.

  “I’m taking my car, too,” he said, “if anybody wants to ride with me.”

  “It’s no secret that the police uncovered another body today,” Faye continued, “so you won’t be surprised when I tell you that they are barring us from our worksite again. I can’t say that I blame them, given the circumstances, but this may mean that we have to put the project on hold. There’s just not much more we can do without access to the site. Our contact with the state of Tennessee is aware of the situation. He was already planning to be here tomorrow to monitor our work, so we’ll be able to talk face-to-face then about how, or even whether, we will go forward. But we’re not going to do that today. Today is a day to pay our respects to Frida.”

  Faye was still trying to grab hold of the day’s events and change her world view to fit them. Only in this moment was she realizing that she had a bigger reason for closing down the project than mere scheduling and budgeting.

  “Let me back up a bit and try again. I’m not at my best today and my thoughts are all jumbled up. It really doesn’t matter what the state’s representative says tomorrow. I’ve got to shut this thing down. I have no other choice.”

  Jeremiah shifted on his feet, like a man who was trying hard not to argue with her.

  “Yesterday,” she went on. “I based my decision to keep you here on the police department’s belief that the attack on Frida was personal. They believed that the killer was someone who knew her and wanted to hurt her, and I had no reason to doubt their judgment. Over the past day, evidence has surfaced that made me think otherwise. Our discovery of a hidden grave today convinces me that there has been a serial killer at work here in Memphis and the surrounding area for years. I cannot in good conscience keep you here. Frankly, I’m running for home myself, as soon as Jeremiah and I do what has to be done to shut this project down. I wish none of these things were true, but they are.”

  Now Ayesha, Yvonna, and Stephanie were standing with their arms around each other, weeping.

  “Look after each other. Try not to be alone until you’re all safe in your homes. Well, you can be alone in the shower, as long as your roommate is outside watching the door.”

  She was relieved to hear that they were still able to laugh.

  “We’ll gather after the funeral for a good-bye dinner, then we’ll talk about how we’re going to get you all home.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  They’d found another of his women. He had never known her name, but he remembered the act of saying good-bye. It had been Christmastime, so nobody had blinked at a man buying a bouquet from a grocery store’s florist counter that was bloody with scarlet flowers, all of them tied with spruce green ribbons. He remembered how lovely the red chrysanthemums and white baby’s breath had looked as he placed them in her limp hands.

  His neighborhood’s corner of Twitter was alive today with the discovery of her bones. Everyone on Faye Longchamp-Mantooth’s team had been sworn to secrecy, but at least one of them had lied. That person had told Sylvia and she had told the world.

  That person had also told Sylvia that the archaeologist was closing down her project. This was good, since she seemed to be better at finding his women than the police were. However, the end of her project meant the end of the archeologist’s time in Memphis, and he didn’t intend to follow her to Florida just for the pleasure of silencing her. Today was the day. It had to be.

  What flowers should he buy today? Perhaps he should go buy a bunch of white daisies. Their simplicity made him think of Faye Longchamp-Mantooth and her effortless grace. He would venture a guess that she loved daisies and would smile if a man presented her with a bunch of them. How much more would they suit her in death?

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Joe was suffering his very first bout of road rage. For Joe, road rage took the form of drumming his fingers on the steering wheel really hard.

  Perhaps the highway construction in Birmingham was the reason they were running so late. Amande had thought that they could detour around it, but she had been wrong.

  Certainly, the horrific accident on US-319 between Panacea and Tallahassee that had closed both northbound lanes had put a crimp in their plans before they’d gone fifty miles. And perhaps the GPS had complicated things by being overly optimistic with its pre-lunch arrival time. Joe was going with that theory, because there was no way he was going to point his finger at his sweet and well-meaning daughter and ask, “Why in the heck aren’t we in Memphis yet? Did you mess up somehow? Did you put the wrong address in the GPS?”

  Joe didn’t know who or what was to blame, but he knew he was ready to get a good look at his wife and make sure she was okay. He picked up the phone to call her, but remembered that she might hear the road noise in the background and ask him where he was going. He didn’t want to warn her that he was on his way, and he wasn’t much of a liar. She’d have a harder time being mad at him for coming when she was looking him in the face.

  The sight of yet another long stretch of orange cones ahead made him grip the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. The orange speed limit sign instructed him to slow down on pain of some fearsome fines, so he did so, even though there wasn’t a highway worker in sight. Amande was dozing. He hoped she stayed asleep, because she was going to want him to pull over so that she could do the driving through this construction zone. Then she would want to keep the wheel through Tupelo.

  Joe was not convinced that he was as bad at driving as his daughter and wife thought he was. He could certainly navigate through a town the size of Tupelo, and he intended to do so. He was too nervous to sit quietly while somebody else, even Amande, took him from this spot to where he needed to be. Even if the state of Mississippi had torn up every road between his car and the Tennessee border, he was hell-bent on getting to Faye by suppertime.

  Faye pulled her new dress over her head. It was plain and sleeveless, and its A-line skirt stopped at the knee. It wasn’t particularly flattering but it was black, so it was appropriate for a funeral. It was also comfortable enough to move in, which was a decided plus. She stepped into a pair of flat black pumps, slicked on a subdued shade of lipstick, and called herself dressed.

  Letting her hair air-dry, she sat down at her computer to spend a few more minutes with Phyllis Windom’s database until it was time to go.

  She wanted to try some goofy searches that might not occur to law enforcement, so she
started with the goofiest search of all:

  Murdered women found in July

  After thinking about it for a minute, she opened the search up with a search string that was going to double her list.

  Murdered women found in June and July

  Being found around Independence Day might well mean that the killings had happened in June, so she was willing to lengthen her list enough to find more killings that fit the mold.

  Now it was time to start winnowing that list down. First, she sorted to find the women who were black and in their twenties. She was able to filter out the ones who were buried, instead of being unceremoniously dumped by the side of the road, and that helped, but the length of the list was still daunting.

  It made sense to narrow the search to a two-hundred-and-fifty-mile radius of Memphis, because it was a reasonable distance for a day trip. Why would the killer want to risk being caught by a hotel receipt or a spot of blood left behind in a motel bathroom?

  This search cut the numbers to the point that it made sense to start reading the notes, copied laboriously from countless case files. Phyllis Windom must have a herd of volunteers working for her. Faye rather liked the idea of crowd-sourced murder investigations.

  Even after narrowing the search, there were still too many murders for her to read about in one sitting. This was too depressing to think about, so she tried not to think at all as she randomly clicked around during the last moments before she needed to leave for the funeral.

  Within five minutes, she’d uncovered the case file of a woman in Bowling Green, Kentucky, who was buried in a state park with a rose in her hands. A few minutes after that, she learned that, just the previous June, a woman had been found near Knoxville with daisies in her hair. And the previous March, there had been a murdered prostitute in Birmingham who was found, not with flowers, but with a grocery store receipt. Faye had almost clicked away from this file, but a grocery store receipt was just weird enough to make her look.

  She found that the Birmingham police had been particularly diligent in contributing to the database. They hadn’t just mentioned the receipt. They had scanned and uploaded it.

  Faye clicked on the image and expanded it as far as the image’s resolution allowed. It was dated, which gave the last possible date that the woman was alive, June 26. The police had noted the date, but they hadn’t thought that the list of purchases was significant. Faye was sure that they’d been hoping for a knife, a shovel, duct tape, and bleach, and they didn’t get it. But she was looking for something different, and she most certainly got it.

  The receipt said, “Bouquet, Mixed Snapdragons.” They had cost the killer fourteen dollars and ninety-nine cents.

  Bingo. She had another data point to present to McDaniel.

  Yvonna was standing beside her, and there was an insistent rap at the door for the second time. She needed to go. The database would be waiting for her when she got back.

  Faye’s phone rang as she was hurrying down the long drab hallway outside her hotel room, late for the funeral. She took it because the screen said “Phyllis Windom.”

  “Madame Archaeologist?” Windom’s voice didn’t sound any stronger than it had the time they spoke.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve got something for you. I think it might tie the Arkansas and Mississippi cases together.”

  Faye pushed the phone hard against her ear. The motel’s icemaker was loud and the sound of ice dropping into somebody’s ice bucket was even louder. Windom’s wheezy, airy voice couldn’t compete.

  “You can tie the two deaths together? How?”

  “When you have time to explore my database, you’ll see that selected information transcribed from the case files is included in a ‘Notes’ section. I’ve got plans to incorporate keywords, so that it will be more searchable. Right now, it is what it is.”

  “We’re on the same page. I found the ‘Notes’ section a few minutes ago, and I’ve already found some interesting stuff. What do the notes say for those two unsolved killings? What makes you think they’re connected?”

  “The Mississippi investigators seem to have been more thorough. If you remember, they properly recorded their data in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, and the Arkansas investigators working at the state park in Earle didn’t do that.”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, Madame Archaeologist, I’m willing to say that the Mississippi folks also paid closer attention to the soil in their victim’s grave, because they sifted a whole bouquet out of it.”

  Now she had Faye’s attention. “They what?”

  “The killer had buried the poor woman with a bouquet of flowers. If you remember, they found her within a few weeks from the time she went missing. This means that the flowers weren’t completely rotted and there was still some integrity to the body. They found the stems in what was left of her hands, fanned out across her chest. Carnations, roses, ferns, all of it. And there were hundreds of little white flowers—”

  “Baby’s breath?”

  “Yeah, probably. He’d picked each little flower off its stem and scattered them all over her body. It doesn’t make sense that he did all that while he was standing over the body. It would take too long. He must have bought the flowers, then made a bag of the little white ones to bring with him while he was looking for someone to kill. And then he used them to decorate her corpse. Creepy, right?”

  “No joke,” Faye said. “Or maybe he didn’t have to look for someone to kill. Maybe he carried the flowers around while he stalked the woman he’d already chosen as his next victim.”

  “Exactly right. Some serial killers choose their victims at random. Some prefer to stalk.”

  Faye pictured an automobile trunk holding a large shovel and a slowly wilting bouquet. What else would he pack? A change of clothes? Soap? Bleach? A small ebony box to hold the soul he had relinquished?

  “What about the dead woman in Arkansas?”

  “The case file didn’t mention finding any flowers, but they were pretty sure she’d been dead for years. The flowers would have rotted with the body. Bits of stem and flower could even have sifted through the rib cage over time and ended up underneath the body. Weird things happen to organic materials left underground.”

  “Did the note say whether they sifted the soil?”

  “No, and who’s to say how well they did it, if they did? These are the people who didn’t bother filing a report with the FBI. The notes do, however, mention that they found a small plastic ampoule like the ones florists use. You know, the little vial they fill with water, so that they can stick a flower stem in it and keep it fresh?”

  She sounded satisfied as she delivered this exciting news, and that made her voice sound younger, healthier.

  “I know the vials you’re talking about.” Faye said. She was thinking that if they’d missed a whole bouquet of flowers, rotten or not, it was a good thing they’d been paying enough attention to find the ampoule. The ones Faye had seen were half the size of her index finger or more. Anybody who missed a piece of plastic that size should probably hang up their trowel.

  “So do you think that the bouquet of flowers and the florist’s ampoule is enough to say that the same person killed those two women?” she asked Windom.

  “Of course not. Any murderer can stroll to the grocery store and buy some flowers, but it seems like a mighty big coincidence. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what I say about it. I’m just a civilian with a database. What do you think your investigator is going to say?”

  “Considering that his forensic archaeologist just dug up a chrysanthemum and some baby’s breath, and considering that I just found three more burials that involved flowers listed in your database, he’s going to have a hard time arguing with our hypothesis.”

  “I love it when that happens.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Flowers. There
were flowers everywhere.

  And in the middle of them, he saw Frida.

  She was wearing yellow. Of course, she was wearing yellow. Seeing her there, lying in a satin-lined casket with pink carnations garlanded around her pretty face, she looked the way he had wanted her to look when he put her in the ground.

  He was nervous. He had attended many funerals in his day, but none that he had personally caused. That was because none of his other women had been Frida.

  The others had been women of convenience. A woman might be chosen because of the appealing angle of her head as it met her neck. Another might be chosen because of the titillating flutter of her eyelashes when he walked too close to her and she pulled away in fear. They had been random women who had done nothing to merit their deaths beyond standing in the wrong place on a day when he’d pointed his car down a highway and gone hunting.

  Frida had possessed all his triggers, from the top of her shapely head to the soles of her tiny feet. She had been frail, nervous, pretty, giggly, vulnerable. She’d had the power to trigger a protective pity that was new for him. How Frida had birthed that stony-faced child was anybody’s guess.

  It was dangerous for him to be here, but he was standing his ground. If anyone suspected him, he would see it on their faces, and he would know that he needed to move on. He was proud of how long he’d been able to stay in one spot without being caught, but he’d always had a backup plan. St. Louis seemed like a place where a man like him could get lost.

  In the meantime, he would enjoy the cognitive clash of being in a room full of people who usually couldn’t be bothered to be nice to each other. But just let somebody die and watch the tears start to fall. These people knew the things they’d said to each other about Frida, and they knew how they had treated her, but they were pretending for one short hour that all of that judgment had never happened. None of them had loved her like he did.