All That I Dread

by Linda J White

  Nate didn’t flinch. “What happened then? How’d he behave toward you?”

  “He shook it off.” Tears came to my eyes. “Three seconds later his tail was wagging.” I pressed my cheek against the top of Luke’s head. “I guess he forgave me.”

  “He gave you grace.”

  There was that word.

  Something about that moment stirred Sprite, and she came over and climbed in Nate’s lap. He was sitting on the floor, cross-legged, and he started stroking his dog’s head. I sat mesmerized by his hand moving across her body.

  Nate said softly, “Dogs see us for who we are. They don’t expect us to be better than that. And they give us grace when we mess up.”

  “What do you mean, grace?” On another day, that would have been an angry snap, but today, vulnerability softened my tone.

  “Grace is when you make a mistake, and the other person chooses to overlook it. It’s forgiveness and forbearance mixed together. It’s your dog loving you despite you mistreating him. It’s … it’s what God offers us through Christ.”

  I bristled. I groped for some way to redirect the conversation. “So this is when you tell me I need to give Scott grace. I need to forgive him.”

  “Scott, he’s got his own burden to carry, a pretty heavy one.”

  I challenged him. “Like what?”

  Nate bit his lip. He didn’t take his eyes off Sprite. “It’s his story to tell. Basically, his younger sister was murdered when he was seventeen.” He looked up at me.

  I blinked, trying to process what I’d just heard. “Wow.”

  “That’s what’s got him fixated on these murders; they’re too much like his sister’s. It’s a hard road he’s on too.”

  I swallowed hard, my throat tight. I thought about my little sister Brooke. I couldn’t imagine losing my sister, as annoying as she can be. The weight of all the losses, of my dad, of Lee Park, of the three women, of Scott’s sister, lay heavy on me. “How old was she?”

  “Fifteen.” Sprite wriggled into a different position on his lap. “There’s lots going on in other people we cain’t see. That’s why givin’ folks grace is a good idea.”

  I didn’t know what to do with that, so I kept my face buried in Luke’s fur.

  “But sometimes, the hardest person to give grace to is your own self. You got to look outside yourself, to God. It’s his love fueled by his grace that you need to receive.”

  “You pray for me, don’t you?” I asked. There was bitterness in my voice.

  “Oh, he’s heard your name right much these last months,” Nate said, grinning.

  I shivered. I asked Luke to move, and I stood up. I’d had enough.

  Nate got up too. “Want to go for a run?”

  “No.”

  “Mind if I take the dogs out?”

  “That’s fine.”

  I just wanted to be by myself, away from Nate, away from the God-talk. In about a minute, I burst into tears and sobbed until my chest ached.

  31

  Scott Cooper stood over the walnut table in the conference room at his office, where he’d spread printouts from the Caldwell case. So far, they’d found absolutely no link between the victims, except for their general body type and hair color. They didn’t know each other, didn’t live near each other, didn’t go to church together, hadn’t dated the same man. They didn’t even root for the same sports teams.

  The only relevant thing they had in common was coffee. As far as Scott could tell, each one may have stopped for a cup of coffee before being abducted. But that didn’t explain how the UNSUB actually abducted them.

  Both Julie and Faith’s cars had GPS units that tracked their locations. Faith’s was already known—straight down I-95, around Washington, and off the exit in Prince William County, Virginia, where she stopped for a cup of coffee. Analysis of her GPS unit confirmed that. Her car was abandoned just up the road.

  Julie had left Warrenton, where she’d stopped for coffee, and headed for 95 on back roads. Her car hit a tree on a two-lane road, about two miles from the woods where she was found.

  And Sandy? Her car was too old to have a GPS, but Scott had sent Robert Hudson on a hunt, and sure enough, security cameras at a different gas station—not Bobby’s—showed her buying a cup of coffee about 10:25 p.m. the night she disappeared. Her car was found seven miles away.

  He’d tasked Dana with following up on those leads, asking customers and staff if they’d seen the women or a big guy that same night. He’d told her to check security camera footage again as well.

  The ME reports were consistent regarding body type. The three women were within an inch and a half in height and approximately ten pounds in weight of each other. Two, Julie and Faith, were strangled and had their necks broken. Sandy apparently died from a ruptured spleen. Plus, she had multiple fractures—ribs, arm, and ankle—along with a concussion. Scott’s question was, did all that happen when her car rolled? If so, why did the UNSUB remove her from her crashed car?

  One other forensic finding … the women had not been raped, but none were wearing underwear. Did the UNSUB remove the underwear as a souvenir?

  He’d asked the BAU people about that, and they’d factored it into their preliminary profile. They thought they were looking for a white male between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five, strong, probably into porn, and passive. He might have come across as a genial, helpful country boy.

  There were only about a million guys who fit that description in the three-state area around Washington.

  Dana was unsuccessful so far in developing anything more specific from the coffee shop leads, so he sent her on another quest. Remembering Nate’s suggestion, he told her to check out woodchucks in the counties in Virginia around the crime scenes. Of course, she didn’t know what a woodchuck was, but he explained it, and told her to pose as a homeowner inquiring about buying a cord of wood.

  He could only hope she’d be able to pull that off.

  Scott had one other thought, and for that, he called Nate. “Hey, Nate, what kind of knife do people use when they’re whittlin’?”

  “Well now,” Nate said, “depends on how fancy you want to be. Most folks just use a pocketknife. The folks carving figures in wood, they’re gonna use a whittlin’ jack, like a Flexcut.”

  “Where do you find them? Outdoors stores?”

  Nate laughed. “Walmart. Amazon. ‘Bout anywhere.”

  Scott thanked him. They talked a little more and then hung up. He scratched his chin. Checking out whittlin’ knives sold in the area would be a long shot but it might be worth doing.

  There was so much to pursue.

  Scott gathered up his papers and headed back to his own office, where he stashed them in an attaché case. He’d called Gary Taylor of BAU and asked if he could drop by about four. There were some facts he wanted to clarify, thoughts that kept him thinking late at night when he should have been sleeping.

  Gary greeted him dressed in a white shirt and a tan, tweed-cardigan sweater over dark-brown dress pants. Scott suppressed a smile. The man looked like an academic, not a street agent, and he wondered about his background.

  He was a good guy, though, and knowledgeable, and Scott gave him a pass on his soft clothes. After all, he spent all day studying criminals. It was his mind that needed to be tough, not his outfit.

  “So what’s up, Scott?” Gary asked. He gestured toward a chair across from his.

  Scott sat down. “I’ve been thinking about the profile you all came up with. Something tells me this guy is an outlier, doesn’t fit the mold.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “The wood shavings. The absence of rape. The clumsy way he’s grabbing them contrasted with the aesthetic of their posing.”

  “So, what are you thinking?”

  “I’m wondering, is he a psychopath? Or could he have been brain damaged—you know—by an accident or something? Did his brain development get stopped and now he has the physical drive to have a relationship with wom
en but not the skills?”

  “Those are good questions.” Gary picked up a pen and held it in both hands while he thought. “There are a lot of things that can stop someone’s social development. Brain damage, mild retardation, social factors like an abusive or alcoholic parent. Time in prison, actually. All those things can keep a person from developing social skills.”

  “So in the meantime, he’s watching porn all the time and thinking that maybe he needs a woman who won’t fight him.”

  “Like one that’s small,” Gary said. “Or even one that’s dead. Then he poses her in an idealistic, Sleeping Beauty kind of way, because he’s got this fantasy in his head.”

  Scott straightened his back. “And he sits there and whittles and fantasizes.”

  “Right.”

  “So, does he return to the site again and again?” Scott asked.

  “Maybe, but only until the bugs and decay start in on the body.”

  “Because then she loses her ideal image.”

  “Yes.” Gary scratched his chin. “Depending on the weather, that could only be a couple of days. The bugs get started pretty quickly.”

  “Right.” Scott tapped his thumb on his leg.

  “Serial killers are actually pretty rare. There’s still a lot we don’t know about them.”

  Scott rubbed his neck. “What I can’t figure out is how he got these women to go with him. I mean, the others were on isolated rural roads, but Faith was abducted near the interstate.”

  Gary nodded, his eyes drifting to the ceiling as he thought. “I’d like to check out that location. Have you been there?”

  “No, I haven’t.” Scott stood up. “Want to go now?”

  “Sure. Now if I remember, according to her GPS, she stops for coffee, but when she pulls out of there, she turns right instead of left, heading away from the interstate.”

  “Right.”

  “So let’s go to the coffee place first.”

  The Buzz Stop wasn’t far from BAU, about twenty minutes up Interstate 95. Gary said he would follow Scott because it was late in the day and his home was up in that direction. His wife was expecting him for dinner at six-thirty.

  The coffee shop stood by itself on the outskirts of the parking lot for a strip mall. A one-story building, its cement block walls were painted to look like coffee with swirls of whipped cream. A sign advertising locally roasted beans hung in the window.

  Scott parked near the edge of the lot so he could scope out the whole scene. Gary pulled up next to him and climbed in Scott’s passenger seat so they could talk.

  Scott had a diagram of the store and parking lot on his laptop. “So we have Faith on the security camera walking into the store from the west side.” He ran that grainy video. “The camera doesn’t cover that part of the parking lot. So we don’t know where she parked.”

  “But it probably was over by that line of cedars,” Gary said.

  “Right. Ten minutes later she comes out of the place and goes back around the building, sipping her coffee. Then we have her car leaving the lot.”

  “Let’s see what we can find,” Gary said.

  They got out of the car and walked slowly around the building. Scott gestured toward the security camera. “It doesn’t rotate, so this area isn’t covered.”

  “Okay, then. He parks near her—”

  “Because maybe he spotted her on 95 and followed her,” Scott said, speculating.

  “Or he was already in the lot, and she parked near him.”

  Scott nodded. He turned and looked up at the building. “There’re no windows, so he had access to her car for like, ten minutes.”

  “What would he do?”

  “He could get in it—hide in the back seat.”

  “He’s a big guy.”

  “Okay, so he’d do something to disable it. Because he wasn’t going to abduct her in this parking lot.” Scott rubbed his chin as he fleshed out the scenario.

  “Yeah, it’s too busy.”

  “And at three o’clock in the afternoon, the stores in the strip mall are all open. There’s lots of activity.”

  The two men stood there for a few minutes, trying to imagine what took place. Then they walked back to Scott’s car to retrace her final drive.

  Scott pulled out of the coffee shop’s parking lot and paused at the main road. “Why’d she turn right?” he asked.

  “There’s no traffic light. Maybe there were too many lanes to cross and too many cars. Or maybe she got confused. There’s no sign pointing you back to 95.”

  Scott turned right, drove up the road for about two miles, then pulled onto the shoulder at a place fringed with woods. “This is where her car was found.” The location had been marked with a small, red, spray-paint dot.

  The two men got out. “What happened to the car? What made her stop?” Gary said, thinking out loud.

  Scott stared at the red dot. “The forensic report showed no problem with the car, except one tire was low on air.”

  “That’d be a pretty easy thing to make happen,” Gary said. “And newer cars have low tire-pressure warning lights. That might be enough to make someone pull over.”

  “Especially, if she got encouragement from a driver behind her flashing his lights.” Scott remembered reading about a series of abductions where the suspect pulled up next to a woman and gestured as if something was wrong with her car. She stopped on the shoulder and was never seen again.

  “Okay, so she pulls over. Why not just wait for help? Or drive slowly to a gas station? Or call 911?” Gary asked. “I used to tell my daughters, you’re a woman driving alone. That’s enough reason to call 911 if you break down.”

  Would he remember to tell Mandy that, Scott wondered? She was only three years away from driving.

  Scott shifted his thoughts. “Our interviews with her friends and family indicated Faith was a conservative young woman, not used to making long trips on her own, prone to thinking the best of people.” He looked at Gary. “She still lived with her parents in a rural area near Lancaster. So probably not street smart.”

  “And she was driving to meet her maid of honor to shop for a wedding dress, so her mind wasn’t focused on danger.”

  Scott frowned. “So she gets some indication there’s a problem with her car. She pulls over here, and this guy pulls in behind her.”

  “Or in front,” Gary said, “so it would be harder for her to just hit the gas and go.”

  Scott nodded. “He’s low-key. Not slick. He just seems like a gentle giant, a good ol’ boy who stopped to help. So she lets him. But why does she get in his truck? I’m picturing him having a truck.”

  “What was the weather like?” Gary asked.

  The weather. Scott hadn’t seen anything about that in the report. He pulled out his smartphone and began searching. He looked up as a rush of adrenaline ran through him. “Storms. Same as with Sandy Smith.”

  Gary nodded. “There you go. It starts to rain. It’s November, so it’s chilly. He invites her to wait in his truck or car. Then he kills her. The other drivers are distracted by the rain; they don’t see it happen.”

  “Or, he disables her somehow. Drives off and ends up in the park. She doesn’t know where he’s going, and by the time she realizes what he’s doing, it’s too late.”

  Gary crossed his arms. “Let me think about that.” He took a deep breath. “What do you say we get a cup of coffee?”

  32

  I knew on some level I was using Nate. He was my friend and mentor, but also my punching bag. I said things to provoke him. I challenged him and got angry at things he said just to make myself feel like I was in control.

  He never gave up on me.

  The day I had my last meltdown, he’d gone outside with the dogs. When he came back in, he told me he’d noticed some work that needed to be done on the house, something about downspouts and water runoff. He’d even called Bruce, right then and there, and volunteered to do it, an offer my busy landlord was happy to accept.

>   I knew it was just an excuse to be at my house. To keep an eye on me. I’d told him I was seeing Sarah Pennington. She was unearthing some ugly parts of my soul, and I was rattled. She’d been right when she said it would get worse before it got better.

  I asked Nate where, besides the whole God-thing, his breakthroughs had come from. He had to think about that, because his faith was so entwined with his recovery. I was looking for something I could grab onto—a program, a list, a book. Something besides God, something practical.

  I even used those words, and I saw by the way he looked at me that he thought finding God was the most practical thing a body could do.

  But he didn’t challenge me. He scratched his beard, his blue eyes focused on the carpet. “I think,” he said finally, “that EMDR was good. Sometimes your brain just needs a reboot.”

  EMDR stands for “eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy” and it’s a physical technique some psychologists use to do just that—reboot the brain. Sarah said she was going to try that with me after we’d made progress with some other stuff.

  “In addition to that,” Nate continued, “I’d say talking things out, regular exercise, and not isolating helped me the most. Of course, getting my dog Maggie made a big difference. But I don’t know, Jess, sometimes you just need a different perspective. A change in the way you look at life. And that can come from anywhere at any time.”

  For me it came in a text from, of all people, Scott Cooper.

  What was your dad’s first name? he texted me one evening.

  Why? I texted back.

  He apparently thought texting was too slow. So he called. “Jess!”

  I caught the excitement in his voice.

  “What?”

  “Your dad’s last name was Chamberlain, right? What was his first name?”

  “Michael,” I said, curious enough now to share that information. “They called him Mike.”

  “He was with the NYPD, and he died on 9/11.”

  “Right.” My heart beat hard. “So what?”

  “I met someone who knew him!”

  I sat down hard on the couch, suddenly dizzy. My throat felt like someone had stuffed a wad of cotton down it.