14 BOOK 2 (14 page)

“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.”

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 Charlotte’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.”

The thought of fighting the crowds didn’t appeal to her. Rippy’s was legendary, on the corner of Broadway and Fifth, a regular honky-tonk with a view of Nashville’s touristy party life and the best pulled pork in the city. It was a happy, crowded bar with live music and a devil-may-care attitude.

“No, I want something more quiet. How about Radius 10?”

“Oh, good choice. They changed the wine list last month. Let’s go see what they did with it.”

Baldwin drove, and Taylor watched life pass her by outside the window. Even at this late hour, people jammed the streets. Second Avenue was populated with gangbangers and reckless high schoolers trying to get into the bars with fake IDs. The old staples were gone from the strip now. Her favorite late-night haunt, Mere Bulles, had pulled up stakes and moved to a much more serene location in Brentwood, twenty minutes south of town. Instead, pop and techno music blared into the night; allhours clubs had forced Metro to maintain a presence. She was sad to see it so lost, so different from what she’d grown up with.

Baldwin turned onto Broadway and they passed through Lower Broad, the country joints and honky-tonks packed with strange faces striving to see one they recognized. The songwriters hung out here—people who couldn’t make their own records but wrote for the more famous musicians, the session players who did the music on spec for submissions, all crowded the bars of Lower Broad, plying their wares.

They turned at Union Station, swung by the Flying Saucer taproom, then turned left onto McGavock, stopping in front of the valet at Radius 10. Baldwin tossed him the keys and they retreated from the noise and craziness of the city into a cool, modern space with exposed beams and an L.A. aesthetic. A very nouveau-Nashville restaurant.

Nashville had gotten schizophrenic over the past decades. The reputation as Little Atlanta was well deserved—while the country music scene still ran the show, there were many more avenues for pleasure. The stunning Schermerhorn Symphony Hall and the First Art Center drew a more refined crowd downtown, and esoteric restaurants and sophisticated bars had opened to provide succor to the cultivated set. Taylor liked these places; they were a retreat, a way to get away from her sometimes mundane world.

They ate well—pan-seared grouper for Taylor, osso buco for Baldwin—and shared a bottle of Shiraz. Sated, they leaned back in the chairs and talked in low voices about the case.

“I’m worried sick for Jane Macias.” Taylor toyed with her wineglass, the ruby liquid swirling gently in the bowl as she twisted the stem between her fingers. “I hate this, Baldwin. I don’t want to find her like we did the others. Did I tell you Giselle St. Claire’s grandparents called me today? They were so…sweet. Complimented Marcus’s interview of them, how we’re working the case. Here they are, overwhelmed with grief because their granddaughter is dead, and they are calling to provide support and let us know they’re praying for us. Don’t get that too often.”

“Were you able to track Giselle’s last moves?”

“It’s turning into a nightmare. Marcus has hit a dead end. Giselle and her grandparents were skiing in Gatlinburg. They had dinner, drove back to Nashville. They’d done a full day, were tired and went to bed as soon as they got home. Last time they saw Giselle, she was in their living room, reading a book. It wasn’t until they got up the next morning and went to get her for breakfast that they realized she was gone. We found her before they knew she was missing. Pattern is just the same as with the other girls. They disappear out of completely normal settings, no one misses them until it’s too late. At least maybe with Jane we’ve got a chance. If we just knew where to look.”

“That’s always the issue, Taylor. Have you heard from Giselle’s mother yet?”

“She’s doing a movie in Poland, can’t get back until tomorrow. With the media swarm, she’s going to make our lives difficult. God forbid someone get between a camera and Remy St. Claire. But we can handle her. There’s something else that’s bugging me. This damn signet ring. Why would that piece in particular be missing from the evidence room?”