14

by J. T. Ellison

  “Yeah. She thinks Zac is some kind of idiot because he plays football. He isn’t, but she just turns up her nose. She’s like that—has the literati attitude. Like just because she can manipulate words, she’s smarter than everyone. She was actually having kind of a difficult time here. She pissed off a few people at the paper with her attitude. I mean, yeah, she’s brilliant, but sometimes you don’t need everyone in the room to know just how brilliant you are.”

  Taylor leaned back against the door and crossed her arms. “Who did she piss off?”

  Daphne laughed softly.

  “Who didn’t she piss off? She just grates some people the wrong way—it’s the Yankee in her. She doesn’t see the need for subtlety that often, and you know how it is here. People bristle when you put on airs. Not that she was so bad, but any time you get a young, pretty little thing mouthing off, it’s going to cause problems.”

  “Any idea where she might have headed when she left the house last night?”

  “No. I mean, she’d go to Starbucks sometimes, hang out there with her laptop. But she left it at home last night, just took some book and jammed, obviously pissed at me. I wasn’t really worried about it, that’s just how she gets sometimes. Likes to have a quiet environment, and Zac’s a little rowdy sometimes. Especially during the season, he can get temperamental. But since the Titans put him on injured reserve, he’s been kinda down. We were planning on having a couple of drinks and hanging out, watch a movie or something. Nothing terribly loud. She didn’t really have to go. I think she was just in a mood.”

  “She a big drinker?”

  “Naw, not too bad. She’ll have a few beers at a bar, or some wine, but she’s not into the hard stuff. She’s a little goody-goody like that. Total lightweight.”

  “Does she talk to home often?”

  Daphne shook her head. “Not that I know of. She isn’t close to her family, she did tell me that. I think her dad is dead. Jane has only ever talked about him in the past tense. She had a picture of him in her room a while ago, but I haven’t seen it lately. Her mom must have remarried—she left a message for Jane once and her last name was different. It’s not a topic she’s ever been open about, you know? I don’t think we’ve ever gone in-depth about her background.”

  “That’s a little strange for roommates, isn’t it?”

  “Naw. We met through Craig’s List. I needed a roommate fast, so we didn’t know each other at all when she moved in. We’ve only been in that apartment since September, and we can go days without seeing each other. We don’t hang out or anything. Just aren’t all that close.”

  “Okay, Daphne. I’m going to have a uniform take you back to your apartment. After you gather some things for me, he can take you back to work if you’d like. I’d like you to give the officer her date book, if you can find it, and any pictures you might have. You said her laptop was still there? Give that to him, too.”

  “It’s password protected. You’ll never get in.”

  Taylor smiled at her. “We’re actually pretty good with that kind of stuff, Daphne.”

  “Jane wouldn’t like that, though. She’s really proprietary about her stuff.”

  “You let us deal with that, okay? We’ll take full responsibility. If you hear anything from her, I want you to call me, okay? I’m sure this is all going to work out.”

  “No, it won’t. This creep, he does bad things to women. He doesn’t let them go once he has them.” She teared up, and Taylor laid a hand on her shoulder.

  “You’re making assumptions. You spend all day with journalists, you know better. Let us look into this. Everything is going to be fine.”

  I hope, Taylor thought. I hope.

  Taylor arranged for the girl to be taken home, watching Baldwin stalk her office. Two steps, turn, two steps, turn. There wasn’t enough room to pace; he looked more like a caged circus lion in a too-small pen.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He looked over his shoulder at her, a lopsided smile on his face. “What isn’t wrong?”

  “Getting a bit melodramatic, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, come on, Taylor. This is supposed to be a great week, and here we are, chasing another madman. We’ve got the queen bitch out there waiting to drop some sort of bombshell, a possible missing person, and I just want to get on a plane Sunday morning and spend three weeks drinking wine, eating carbonara and fucking you silly.”

  “Hmm. That doesn’t sound so bad when you put it that way.”

  He stopped and turned to her. “You ready to face the ice princess?”

  “Baldwin, Charlotte Douglas doesn’t scare me, ‘doctor’ or not. I can handle myself, thank you very much. Let’s get it over with.”

  As she walked to the door and opened it, she heard Baldwin mutter, “Nothing scares you.”

  Man, she wished that were the truth.

  Charlotte Douglas was right where Taylor had left her fifteen minutes earlier, batting her eyelashes at Marcus and Fitz. Lincoln had retreated to his desk, and Taylor gave him mental brownie points for not falling for the act. She hated women like Charlotte, women who thought the only power they had resided between their legs. Taylor knew where her power was—between her ears and strapped to her hip. She’d never felt simpering a necessity to elicit a response from the opposite sex.

  Taylor cleared her throat, and Charlotte stopped mid-sentence and turned. Taylor looked her up and down—an expensive woman. Finely tailored tweed jacket, a pencil skirt, brown calfskin boots—the outfit probably cost more than Taylor’s truck payment. Her auburn hair was swept into a chignon, her makeup artfully applied. Yep, this was one high-maintenance chick. Beautiful, if you liked the cold, pale look. Taylor didn’t.

  “Dr. Douglas, we can go into the conference room for your presentation now.”

  Charlotte’s eyes were bright. “He took another one?”

  “We have nothing to indicate that, Dr. Douglas. Now, if we could just get to your presentation, I’d like to know what’s so exciting that you felt the need to fly down here to share it with us. After you.”

  I’ll be damned if I’m going to discuss my case with you, you bitch, Taylor told her with her eyes.

  Fuck you, too, Charlotte’s empty gaze said back.

  Ah, detente.

  Left with no choice, Charlotte tossed her head and walked out of the room. Taylor, Baldwin and the rest of the team followed her, a pied piper line of cops. They went the short distance to the conference room. A young woman was already there, cocoa-brown skin glowing in the glare from a PowerPoint slide. The presentation was ready to go.

  Charlotte took a seat at the head of the table. “This is Dr. Pietra Dunmore. She’s the lead forensic investigator for this case and will be presenting her findings on the DNA samples you sent. Pietra, we’re ready for you now.”

  Dismissive bitch, Taylor thought. She’d rather die than use that tone with a subordinate. But the woman didn’t seem to notice. Either that, or she didn’t care.

  The rest of the team took their seats. Taylor saw the tech slide her honey-brown eyes over Lincoln as he sat down, and Taylor could have sworn he blushed. Good grief, she’d have to pass out keys to the locker room for cold showers after these two women left.

  “Excuse me, Charlotte.” Taylor went to the young tech, extended a hand. “I’m Taylor Jackson. Thank you for coming all this way to present your findings. We’re grateful for your time.”

  Taylor couldn’t read the thoughts behind those spectacular chocolate eyes, but Pietra nodded as she shook Taylor’s hand. Okay, good. Maybe there was something to be gained from this dog-and-pony show after all.

  “Have you met our team?”

  Pietra opened her mouth to speak, but Charlotte cut her off. “This isn’t a sorority meeting, Lieutenant. We don’t need to play the key game. Let’s get on with it.”

  Pietra’s face closed again, and she went to the head of the room, retrieving a remote control from her bag and stopping by the screen.

  I�
��ll be damned, Taylor thought. “Pietra, this is Lincoln Ross, Marcus Wade and Pete Fitzgerald. You know Dr. Baldwin?”

  Pietra smiled and nodded all around.

  “Good. Now, if you would please present your findings?” Taylor looked to the screen, ignoring the eyes that bored a hole in her head.

  The FBI seal glared at them in all its golden glory. Pietra clicked a button, and Taylor felt like she was in a time warp. The montage of faces floated from the screen just like when she was being interviewed last Monday night. She wondered briefly if the FBI had prepared the slides for the news show, too. She’d been asked to appear again this evening, a request she’d refused. There was no sense going on the news when she had nothing new to say except another girl had died. She had no new information on Giselle St. Claire that could be released. By nine o’clock tonight, word would have spread about Jane Macias, if she hadn’t been found. What was she supposed to do, get waylaid and speculate that a new victim had been taken? No, thanks.

  After ten minutes of rehash, they finally got into the meat of the presentation. Charlotte stood up, walked to the front of the room and took the remote from Pietra. “That’s fine, Pietra. Thank you. I’ll take it from here.”

  Taylor caught Baldwin’s eye and raised her eyebrows. He rolled his eyes in agreement. Charlotte Douglas was living up to her reputation as a real piece of work.

  She clicked the button and a white slide appeared, broken into two screens. Taylor recognized the blue-and-white levels as a DNA profile.

  “The DNA of your current perpetrator does not match the DNA profile of the Snow White Killer.”

  Well, big shock there, Taylor thought. We knew it was a copycat.

  “After extensive testing, there is nothing to indicate that the current killer is even remotely related to the Snow White Killer. Speculations that this might be the work of a son or a brother, can be put to rest.”

  Who the hell was speculating that they were related? Taylor wondered. No one on her team had been pursuing that line of thinking.

  A new slide came up on the screen. It was a map of the United States, with red dots in four areas—Los Angeles, Denver, Minneapolis and New York City. Taylor leaned in. What the hell?

  “As you see here, we have several clusters identified. Within each cluster, there was a series of murders. At each scene, DNA evidence was collected.”

  Taylor felt her heart beat just a touch faster. This time, when she caught Baldwin’s eye, she saw only concern.

  “The DNA profiles from each of these crime scenes are a positive match. The same man committed the murders in each of these regional areas. The killer has not been caught, the cases remain unsolved.”

  As she talked, Charlotte moved the slides forward, each one detailing the murders in each location. There were a total of four in Los Angeles, six in Denver, five in Minneapolis and three in New York City. Eighteen confirmed kills over the past eighteen months. Taylor realized what was coming next and cringed. Holy shit.

  A slide with a map of Nashville came up, with four red points glaring at her like eyes from hell.

  “These four murders in Nashville have been directly connected to the other eighteen. You don’t just have a copycat on your hands, you have an obscenely prolific serial killer with victims in five states. The CODIS results are definitive. His pattern is undeniable. It is quite likely that he will move on to another state and kill more young women if you don’t stop him here in Nashville.”

  A hush had fallen over the room. Charlotte met each eye in turn, stopping with Taylor. I win, her look said. Taylor wondered just how cavalier the woman could be, and why she’d held back the information for so long. There was no reason to hold out over this; they needed to work together. There was another agenda here—Taylor was sure of it.

  Marcus Wade was the first to speak. “Are there any indications from the earlier murders that he’s copying previous killers’ MOs?”

  The PowerPoint screen went dark.

  “Very good, Detective,” Charlotte purred. “Gold star for you.”

  Fourteen

  Taylor pulled down her ponytail, ran her hands roughly through her hair and pulled it back up, winding the rubber band around the ponytail three times. It was nearly midnight, she was starving, thirsty and tired. She picked up her Diet Coke can and shook it, willing the empty metal to fill of its own accord and save her yet another trip to the soda machine.

  Once the power play was over in the conference room, Charlotte Douglas had proved herself a decent profiler. Her bombshell had floored them all. Five cities, five copycat murder scenarios. But only one copycat. An imitator extraordinaire.

  In Los Angeles, he’d copied the Santa Ana Killer from the midfifties, an egregious maniac who dismembered the bodies of the women he killed and left them in the desert. In Denver, it was the LoDo, the Lower Denver Killer, who took prostitutes’ lives by strangulation and left them, posed, on street corners. Minneapolis was a dead ringer for the Classifieds Killer of the 1970s, a twisted older man who picked his victims by placing ads in the Star Tribune for temporary secretarial work. New York City was a variation on the Prospect Lake Killer, who strangled his victims and dumped their bodies into Prospect Lake Park on Long Island. Killer, Killer, Killer, Killer, Killer. By five o’clock, Taylor was contemplating buying the media a thesaurus. The press was terrible at coming up with creative names, and she had to admit, the FBI wasn’t much better.

  There was one big difference between the previous copycat murders and the Snow White case. All of the other original killers had been caught and jailed. Two had been put to death.

  That term popped into Taylor’s head again, though she knew it wasn’t entirely applicable to all of the cases. An apprentice. A student of murder. And he’d saved his greatest imitation for a murderer who’d never been caught. A thought niggled at the back of her mind. If he was so intimately familiar with the Nashville murders, did he know the identity of Snow White? She made a note of the thought, wrote one more thing next to it. Signet ring.

  The ring had disappeared from the evidence files. If it showed up at a murder scene, that would be interesting.

  They’d spent the afternoon going through the files, trying to put the pieces together. The DNA matched all the scenes but didn’t match anything else in the system, which meant he hadn’t been arrested anytime in the past three years. His DNA would have been entered into the system automatically if he’d been taken into custody. It didn’t mean he hadn’t been picked up somewhere else, just that the technology was behind the game. He could have something sitting in the files waiting to be inputted in any number of states, Tennessee included, and he would be right there for the taking. Instead, they had precious little to go on.

  Taylor’s head was starting to swim. There was no sign of Jane Macias. If she had been taken, she would be victim number five. If the copycat followed the original Snow White’s pattern, there’d be five more to go.

  The additional eighteen murders being attributed to Nashville’s killer was too big to keep contained; the leaks began immediately. Mitchell Price and Dan Franklin were trying to handle the media, but sticking solely to the Snow White’s Nashville murders. They deflected question after question to the FBI, letting them answer just how this massive killing spree had gone unnoticed. Granted, some of the original murders had happened in the fifties, sixties and seventies, and while each city knew they’d been dealing with a kook, for some reason everyone, including the FBI, had missed it until Charlotte Douglas’s eyes got on the files. It was one of those proud days for law enforcement.

  Taylor started when the door to the conference room opened. She realized that she had drifted off to sleep, only for a moment, but still… She sat up, wiped a hand across her mouth and saw Baldwin staring at her.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said.

  “You need some sleep,” she replied. “How’s Charlotte?” She held up a hand. “Excuse me. Dr. Douglas.” Taylor drew out the syllables, mimicking Charlot
te’s haughty lockjaw accent perfectly.

  Baldwin half smiled. “At the hotel, drinking cosmopolitans in the bar with a bevy of songwriters at her feet. Some band is staying there. She’s completely in her element.”

  Taylor thought for a moment. Who was playing this week? She knew it was someone big…. “Please tell me it’s not Aerosmith.”

  “Skinny guy, big mouth, funky scarf. That’s all I saw.”

  “Jesus. How in the name of God did you get hooked up with that woman?”

  Baldwin took a seat at the conference table, scratched at his forehead like he could erase the memory. “We were working a case. Late night, too much to drink—hell, you don’t want to hear this. It was over before it started. She scares me. Not a decent bone in her body.”

  “Well, she wasn’t shy about the fact that she’d enjoy your bone in her body anytime you’d see fit. Stay away from her.”

  Baldwin smiled. “Is that an order, Lieutenant?”

  Taylor got up and went to him, plopped down in his lap and put her arms around his neck. “Yeah. ’Cause you and I have a date in a couple of days, and I don’t want her fucking it up. Got it?”

  He nuzzled her hair. “Got it, sugar. Besides, you know you’re the only woman for me. I was lost that first day I saw you, sitting at your desk, up to your ears in reports and Diet Coke.”

  She had the image from that moment seared into her brain. “Well, I didn’t think you were too bad yourself.” She kissed him lightly, then sighed. “I don’t know how much more we can do here tonight. I’m tired and hungry and cranky. Want to cut out and grab something to eat?”

  “Absolutely.”

  They gathered their coats and shut the lights off to her office. Baldwin held her hand as they walked out to the parking lot, the bitter cold making her nose run.

  “What are you in the mood for?” he asked. “Barbecue? We could swing into Rippy’s.”