“I’m on my way, man. Hang in there.”
Baldwin glanced at his watch and saw it was too early to order a drink. This was supposed to be a beautiful, quiet day, spent in bed with the woman he loved. Not a day to go traipsing through death. Yet here he was, on a plane to Atlanta to hunt for the Strangler.
Being a profiler meant long hours in strange locales, but the longer he worked for the FBI, the more he was struck by the commonality of every situation. Madman kills innocent, then does it again. An MO is established, the FBI is consulted and Baldwin would be thrown on a plane. He’d chosen this life, this world. He had the rare ability to disengage, to be unaffected by the horrifying details of the cases. But it was starting to wear thin. He didn’t know exactly what he should do—stay with the FBI or strike out on his own. He’d love to steal Taylor away from Metro, but he knew in his heart of hearts that wouldn’t happen anytime soon.
He pushed those thoughts away. He needed to stay focused, and thinking about Taylor Jackson would derail even the strongest of men.
Local law enforcement in Alabama and Louisiana had done all the right things in processing their cases. The Alabama authorities worked closely with the Baton Rouge cops. They ran all the right tests, did the right investigation and still had no clue who had strangled eighteen-year-old Susan Palmer, cut off her hands and dumped her body in a field in Baton Rouge. The crimes seemed connected, there were definite similarities—manual strangulation and missing hands. But it was Jeanette Lernier’s case that had drawn the FBI’s attention. When she was examined in the field, the medical examiner had rolled her and found a hand underneath the lifeless body. Everyone assumed it was Jeanette’s. When DNA showed the hand belonged to Susan Palmer, from Alabama, people had gotten interested. Grimes and his partner, Thomas Petty, had been called to give interagency cooperation and support to the local authorities. When nothing happened for a month, the hunt was scaled back, Grimes and Petty went back to other cases, and the murders went into the annals of cold crimes that permeate small-town law enforcement. Grimes still kept a finger in the case, doing interviews with friends and family, but Petty caught the disappearance of a nine-year-old boy and was pulled off to work that crime. Time marches on. New crimes are committed. The cases weren’t forgotten, just relegated to the back burner.
The details of the two cases were kept quiet in the hopes that somewhere down the road an answer would surface. Two families buried only parts of their cherished daughters. Now two more families would be getting their daughters’ incomplete bodies back for burial. He prayed it would end here.
Baldwin had been made aware of the crimes but hadn’t been actively involved in the situation. The call this morning, the call to arms tasking him to the case, was going to change all that. The FBI would be able to claim complete jurisdiction if necessary because the kidnappings and murders crossed state lines, but so far the local police had cooperated and appeared to be a major help in their investigation, not a hindrance.
The original FBI team, Jerry Grimes and Thomas Petty, were smart, seasoned agents. When Jessica Porter had gone missing, her bedroom found full of blood, local law enforcement loaded the details of the case into VICAP. When the MO matched, Grimes and Petty were called in to help assess the scene. When they examined her apartment, they immediately thought of the Strangler. Grimes had called Baldwin and informed him of the case. He’d forwarded the information they had, which wasn’t much. Baldwin pulled this thin folder out of his briefcase and started refreshing his memory. It was written in the dry, impersonal tone of a police report, one that allowed no emotion to creep in and destroy the officers’ and agents’ objectivity.
CASE OVERVIEW—JESSICA ANN PORTER
The victim is a Caucasian female age 18. She is 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighs 120 pounds, has long brown hair and brown eyes. She was born on April 27, 1986, in the city of Jackson, Mississippi. She has a strawberry birthmark on her left bicep, a belly-button ring with a small crystal ball and pierced ears. The victim disappeared while walking home from her job as a receptionist at a Jackson community hospital. The victim…
“Ah, hell,” he muttered. “I can’t do it like this.” Too damn impersonal. Baldwin closed the file in front of him and thought back to the discussion he’d had with Grimes. The man had been pretty broken up, too broken up. He had phoned Baldwin as soon as they’d cleared out of the Porter girl’s apartment, finished with the statements of family and friends. Baldwin mentally replayed the conversation. It was a knack he had, being able to tap into his brain and extract what he needed with total recall. Taylor sometimes hated him for it, she could never get away with anything. He smiled at the thought, then plugged into his mental database.
It had been a quiet night. For the past few months, Baldwin had been tasked to the Middle Tennessee Field Office, ostensibly working as a regional profiler. Baldwin had been working cases for the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit out of Quantico peripherally, consulting when needed. He wasn’t exactly in retirement, but on a pseudo sabbatical, allowing him to be in Nashville with Taylor. The arrangement was working wonderfully until this phone call, the familiar voice booming in his ear.
“The esteemed Dr. John Baldwin, I presume?” The sharp bite of sarcasm wasn’t lost on Baldwin, even some of the FBI’s own field officers didn’t like dealing with the profilers.
“It’s Jerry Grimes. I’m down here in Mississippi on a case.”
Baldwin remembered how his heart skipped a beat, revving in anticipation. His senses went on high alert. Grimes wasn’t calling him of his own accord, he’d been instructed to do so by a higher-up. He had dropped the niceties as well.
“We’ve got a missing girl. Young, brunette. Has all the hallmarks of…”
“The Strangler,” Baldwin said, dread mixing with adrenaline in his stomach.
“Now, how’d you go and do that, Baldwin?”
“Good guess.”
“Damn right, good guess. Her name’s Jessica Ann Porter. I’m sure you’ve seen the reports on the news?”
“Haven’t been watching too much. She’s dead, I presume, or else you wouldn’t be calling me.”
Grimes had gone silent for a moment, and then answered with a cracked voice. “No, she’s just missing. We’ve got some blood on the bedsheets but no real signs of a struggle. It’s like she disappeared into thin air. No one saw her after she left work for the day.”
Baldwin fast-forwarded through the conversation to Grimes’s description of the girl.
“She’s a beautiful kid. She’s got all this brown hair, got these big brown eyes, the kind that just shoot right through you. That’s just from pictures. She was the damn homecoming queen, man. Getting ready to go back to college in the fall, wanted to be a nurse or doctor, something she could do that would help people. She volunteered at the homeless shelter in town and delivers meals to shut-ins. The kid’s a saint, and no one we’ve talked to has had anything bad to say about her.”
Baldwin remembered thinking, uh-oh, Jerry’s taking this kind of personal.
Grimes continued. “I knew something was hinky and I should probably give you a heads-up, just in case.”
There wasn’t anything else Baldwin could do but hear the man out. Cases with kids got to every good investigator, and sometimes just talking it out was the best thing. They’d hung up with Baldwin promising to do a little research on the missing hands and what it could mean. Then Jessica Porter turned up in a field in Nashville, with what was presumably Jeanette Lernier’s hand with her.
The phone had rung again early this morning. Baldwin saw the caller ID number and knew it was Jerry Grimes, calling about Shauna Davidson. He was right.
“We got another body, Baldwin. Pretty sure it’s the girl missing from Nashville.”
That call had put him on a plane. He ran it through his head, the cadence becoming a bit like a child’s song.
Susan Palmer, Alabama. Found in Louisiana. Jeanette Lernier from Baton Rouge. Found dead in a field in Mi
ssissippi. Jessica Porter, Mississippi girl, found mutilated in a field in Nashville. Shauna Davidson, Georgia bound…
Though he’d gotten a row to himself, the woman in the aisle seat across from his gave him a strange look, half pity, half disgust. He must have been talking aloud. He gave her as reassuring a smile as he could, then fumbled all his folders back into his briefcase. As the pilot came over the radio to tell them they were cleared to land in Atlanta, he realized he was excited by the challenge.
CHAPTER TEN
Whitney Connolly dragged her eyes away from the television and returned her attention to her computer. Sure enough, the address was there, the message that she was hoping for had arrived. She wet her lips and ran the mouse over the message header. It was innocuous, like all the others. A Poem for S.W. was all it said. The return address was a garbled mass of letters and numbers—[email protected]. A generic address from a huge server. She’d asked a friend who was sometimes more than a friend to try to find out who the sender was, but he’d told her that the address bounced off several other servers, so in effect, it didn’t exist. Whoever was sending her the messages was virtually untraceable, and obviously smart enough to cover his tracks. Whitney didn’t worry about that though. When the time was right, her anonymous friend would reveal himself to her. They always did.
She opened the mail and found the following lines:
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?
P.S. From your backyard.
Mmmmmm, she thought. This one was a bit sexual. But of course, if he was murdering girls, why wouldn’t he be writing sexual poetry? He seemed quite talented, at least in her mind.
She felt the goose bumps parade up and down her arms. Man, she was getting messages from the killer her FBI contact called the Southern Strangler. Why he had picked her, she didn’t know. But she didn’t want to go to the police just yet. After all, what would she say? “By the way, Officer, I’ve been communicating with the man who is responsible for murdering those poor girls.” She didn’t even know for sure that this guy was for real. She had nothing to go on, but all of that was going to change today.
She printed out the e-mail, then carefully archived it in three places to make sure she didn’t lose it if her computer was to suddenly crash. She copied and pasted the verses into her notes and looked back at the three previous entries, starting with the first.
A perfect woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort and command;
And yet a Spirit still, and bright
With something of an angelic light.
P.S. This was found at the crime scene.
She had made copious notes underneath the entry, trying to make sense of the poem. And what crime scene? She’d gone through nearly every crime in Nashville that she could find, badgered detectives, worked her sources. No one knew anything about a poem found at a crime scene. She chalked it up to a nutcase and filed it away. It was silly, a little love poem sent to her private e-mail address. She even imagined for a moment that it was from an anonymous lover, someone that she knew but didn’t want to reveal himself to her.
But when she received the second e-mail, she realized that this wasn’t a message meant for her.
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.
P.S. This one was from LA.
That had sent her scrambling. LA could be one of three things, Los Angeles, Louisiana or Lower Alabama, as Nashvillians jokingly referred to the Gulf Shores area. A quick search showed a young girl had been kidnapped from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She did some checking, followed the case, and when the body of Jeanette Lernier was found, she attached the name to the poem in her files. But there had been nothing on the media coverage that said anything about messages or notes. She knew that all investigations left things out of the statements allowed to the media, if only to rule out the copious nut jobs who called and confessed to the crimes. Despite repeated probing, none of her sources had any inkling about the notes.
Then the third note had come, right on the heels of the word that a body was found in Nashville. This one was alarming.
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.
P.S. Do you get it yet?
Chilling, yet she was oddly exhilarated by the words.
Now that the word was out, that the Southern Strangler was on the loose and had killed three girls, she understood that the messages left with the bodies must correspond to these notes. After realizing the pattern, she’d gone back and marked the first entry Susan Palmer, then corresponded the notes to the names of the dead. She wondered for a moment about why she would be getting these messages. But she threw that thought aside as quickly as she had it; what did it matter? She was going to get the scoop.
This new message made her blood race. She was going to be a star.
This fourth note could reference the missing Nashville girl, Shauna Davidson. She’d cover the story tonight—on the heels of the murder, the missing person’s case would generate a lead story on the ten o’clock news.
Whitney realized she didn’t have any information that would lead her, or the rest of the media, to believe that Shauna Davidson was anything but missing. With the last three girls, she only received the messages after the girls’ bodies had been found. Maybe this one had been found dead and they weren’t reporting it. But no, they wouldn’t be holding that kind of information back.
P.S. From your backyard. That struck a chord in her immediately. My backyard. It wasn’t meant in the literal sense. He was too elegant for that. The other postscripts referred to locations. Her backyard must mean her hometown. Nashville.
That meant that she, Whitney Connolly, and she alone, knew that Shauna Davidson was dead.
She headed for the shower. She’d take a little extra time putting herself together for tonight’s broadcast. She felt certain the whole town would tune in for her and the biggest story in Nashville tonight.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jerry Grimes met Baldwin as he came out of security in Hartsfield International. Baldwin took in the gray hair, the white face, the slight pinching around the mouth and knew that Grimes was taking this latest disappearance hard. He stuck out his hand and gave him a smile, trying for cordiality.
“Grimes, you are getting grayer by the day.”
Grimes looked vaguely alarmed for a moment, as if he hadn’t realized that age was leaching the black out of his hair. Then he recovered and ran his hands through the silvery strands. “Well, at least I still have some. That’s saying a lot in this job.”
They walked out the doors to Grimes’s waiting car. He had left the car on the curb in the departures area. FBI got special privileges at airports these days. A uniformed officer stared with frank curiosity as they climbed into the sedan. Grimes removed the FBI placard from the windshield of the car. Pulling away from the curb, he got down to business.
“Okay, here’s the deal. Media has the story, the locals couldn’t keep it quiet. They’ve found the hand, it’s been sent to the medical examiner, as well. We’ll head straight to the morgue in this little town, Adairsville. I want to hurry up and get there, so buckle your seat belt.”
All that bravado, Baldwin thought. Oh well. The ride went quickly, their conversation desultory. Grimes had theories about the cases, and Baldwin heard him out, though each one was as implausible as the next. Satan worship seemed to be Grimes’s favorite. He finally stopped talking and the car went silent, each man lost in his own thoughts.
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br /> They arrived within an hour. Miraculously, the traffic had been relatively light through downtown Atlanta, and they branched off onto I-75, finding the exit for Adairsville easily. Grimes shot the car off the exit, and as they drove west toward the center of town, he pointed out the crime scene. Not that Baldwin could have missed it. Media vans lined the right side of the divided highway, a makeshift tent lean-to the focus of all their cameras.
Baldwin shook his head at the media trucks. They may have been able to contain the stories in Alabama and Louisiana, but it didn’t look like they were going to be able to do that anymore. He started mapping out a strategy to use the media for their own purposes.
*
Grimes dropped Baldwin in front of a small, anonymous office building, promising to return as soon as he’d arranged a place for them to stay. Baldwin understood, not many people wanted to attend an autopsy. A young man who looked to be barely out of his teens met him in the lobby of the building. Introducing himself as Arie, he showed Baldwin to the autopsy suite. Arie handed him a gown and gloves, then took a seat on a stool next to the table, a notebook in hand. Baldwin took the last few steps into the room and saw the dead girl.
Shauna Lyn Davidson had not gone gently into that good night.
Her body was stretched out on a stainless-steel slab, her head cradled in a hard plastic U. She had bruises on her face, on her body. A large chunk of hair was missing from the right side of her head. Her nose was misshapen, a lip split. All the signs pointed to a struggle. Shauna had been badly beaten, a departure from the previous murders. He had a brief second of wonder—a different MO could mean a different killer. Normally, Baldwin would look to the hands to see what kind of shape they were in. In this case, all he saw were bloodied stumps. Definitely the same suspect.
The coroner was a jovial man, at least ten years past retirement age. His face was red from exertion, his hair white and straggly, his pants two sizes too small for his waist. He didn’t look like he missed too many meals. He stripped off a glove and stuck out his hand. Baldwin took it, surprised at the strength of his handshake.
Lieutenant Taylor Jackson Collection, Volume 1 Page 34