ALL THE PRETTY GIRLS BOOK 1 (24 page)

“Well, she always seemed kind of flighty.”

“John Baldwin, are you telling me you dated her?

What little secrets are you hiding? I thought you said you didn’t know them.” Taylor hadn’t known Baldwin at Father Ryan, either, but he knew her. It was impossible for anyone not to know Taylor Jackson—her ability to befriend students in all walks and her devilmay-care attitude had made her stand out.

“I didn’t date her. We never even spoke. I’m just saying she seemed a little flighty. And I’ve always wondered what the real deal was with that kidnapping.”

“Good segue. I mentioned the kidnapper’s name to Quinn, to see if there was a chance Whitney’s fears had to do with him. She mentioned he was still incarcerated and not up for parole for another fifteen years. I wanted to see what the deal was, so I pulled the file. Nathan Chase is in jail for more than just kidnapping. Sexual assault, sexual battery, aggravated rape and sodomy. Those girls went through a little more than just a kidnapping. I don’t know how they kept it all so secret.”

“I remember it was kept pretty quiet. And they had a lot of influence and power on their side. Peter Connolly, that’s their dad, was a pretty high-powered attorney, if I remember correctly. They had the protection of being juveniles, too. Wasn’t there some innuendo when they transferred to Father Ryan?”

“Well, sure, but nothing came of it. The staff kept a pretty tight rein on anyone who joked around about the incident, and it just faded away. I think it was easier for them to be in a new environment, no one really paid too much attention. Of course I know now that they must have been going through hell.”

“So Whitney was trying to get to Quinn when she had the accident? And you haven’t found anything?”

“No, I haven’t. There was nothing in her car other than her cell phone and purse. No files, no notes, nothing.”

“Did anyone check the memo function of her phone?

I do that sometimes if I’m out driving and don’t want to stop to record my thoughts.”

Taylor started laughing. “You’re brilliant, you know that? I better go check and see if there’s anything on it, I bet you a million no one thought to check. Let me get to work on that, and I’ll call you back.”

“You should probably go to bed, sweetie, it’s nearly midnight. I’m sure the phone can wait until tomorrow. You need to keep your strength up. Go to bed.”

He was amazed when Taylor didn’t argue with him, just told him that sounded like a good idea and she’d talk to him in the morning.

They said their I love yous, hung up and Baldwin went back to his files. He spread the pictures of each girl out on the bed and stood over them, staring into their accusing eyes. He went over the facts in his head. Their obvious connection was the link to the medical field. Maybe their killer had been molested by a pretty brunette nurse when he was little. He stopped himself from rolling his eyes. It could be as simple as that. He decided to reorganize the files. It would be easier to spot similarities and differences if they all resided in one file with subfiles in it. Where they liked to eat, where they liked to work out, where they were employed, all the information was culled and put into new piles. Baldwin went back to the work pile. What if he looked at employer instead of industry?

Okay, he thought. Susan Palmer had just gotten a job at the Huntsville Community Hospital. Jeanette Lernier was an intern with a marketing company. Jessica Porter worked as a receptionist at the Mississippi Community Hospital in Jackson. Shauna Davidson was working…damn, it didn’t say. Only that she was premed at MTSU. Marni Fischer was a resident, working at Noble Community Hospital. Christy was a receptionist at Roanoke Community Hospital.

Baldwin flipped open his phone and called Grimes. The voice mail came on and he left a message. “Grimes, it’s Baldwin. Did you get a work history for Shauna Davidson? It’s not in the file. Call me as soon as you get this, okay?”

He hung up and paced around the room. Jeanette Lernier didn’t fit the profile, she was in marketing. All the other girls worked at a local hospital. Shauna was premed. Community hospital. Community hospital. Hmm. Time to make a leap. He opened his phone again, dialing the 800 information number. When the operator came on he asked for the number for a community hospital in Jackson, Mississippi. There was a pause, and the woman came back to him. She had a listing for a Jackson Community Hospital. He’d been operating under the assumption the community hospital was just a designator, not the name of the place. Well, damn. He thanked her and hung up, fumbling open his laptop and plugging “Jackson Community Hospital” into the Google search engine. Sure enough, it popped up. He read through the site and saw a link at the bottom. It was called “About Health Partners”, and as he opened it his cell rang. Grimes had finally gotten back to him.

“Shauna Davidson had been taking some summer courses, mostly in microbiology and immunology. She had to spend a few weeks doing practical applications. That’s it.”

“But Grimes, where did she do the practical work?”

“At the local hospital. Nashville Community Hospital. Why, Baldwin, you got something?”

“I’ll let you know.” He hung up, gave his attention back to the Web site and clicked on the Health Partners link. He entered a sophisticated and accessible Web portal. Someone had spent a lot of time and effort to make it pop. It quickly became apparent that Health Partners was the parent company of the community hospital organizations. He went through all of the information, gleaning names and sites. The company had hospitals in several states, all up and down the eastern seaboard and throughout the Southeast. That was a bust. If the killer was focusing on hospitals this company owned, they would have to put out alerts from Florida to Delaware. Baldwin closed the laptop, deflated. That had to be the link, and yet it only served to widen the field, not narrow it.

He dialed Grimes’s number again, and again got voice mail. Damn, was the man sleeping already? He’d just talked to him and told him he’d call him back. Baldwin looked at the clock. It was 2:00 a.m. He’d been trolling through the Web for a couple of hours. Well, yes, Grimes probably was sleeping. This could wait until morning. The best he could do was have a background check done on all employees of the community hospitals in the cities where the girls were taken and hope that some aberration jumped out at him. There had to be something else.

Baldwin decided he’d better get some sleep. Maybe something would come to him in his dreams. 

Noelle Pazia stopped pedaling, rested her foot on the gravel and coughed for what felt like an eternity. She’d been coughing like this for a week, and the student health center, realizing she needed more than they could provide, had finally sent her in for chest X-rays. She suffered from asthma, and used an inhaler, but it wasn’t touching this nasty cough. So she’d pedaled her mountain bike down to the Asheville Community Hospital, sat for two hours, gotten her X-ray and cycled back toward campus. Not that cycling was great for her cold or bronchitis or pneumonia or whatever sickness she had that made her feel so horrible. She could hear her father now, in his heavy Italian accent, “Noelle, you knowa you shouldn’t be riding that crazy bike up and down those hills when you sick. You’re smarter than that,
cara.
” Yes, she was, but she didn’t have a car, nor did she feel like begging a ride off of one of her friends. As she coughed and tried to catch her breath, she wished that she was back home in D.C., sitting at a table in the back of her parents’ restaurant, watching her father, Giovanni, put the finishing touches on a fragrant pot of pasta e faglioli, a traditional pasta-and-bean soup that Noelle always craved when she wasn’t feeling well. When she was growing up, her father would take one look at her pale face and start for the kitchen. No doctors, no drugs, just a big pot of
zuppa
to make her feel better. The remedy almost always worked. The one time she remembered it didn’t was when she contracted the chicken pox from a Romanian boy who lived down the street and came to play in her backyard. The soup didn’t help then.

But she wasn’t anywhere near home. She was on the side of a road in North Carolina, sick with the croup and not a bowl of soup in sight. She needed to get back to campus and get to her study group in the library. Even sick, she felt the responsibility of schoolwork, and wouldn’t miss the group. Most everyone had this crud anyway, so she didn’t need to worry about giving it to anyone. There was a lot of work to be done now that she was fully into her major coursework, and if that meant she had to put off bed for a few more hours, that’s just what she would do. She pushed her damp bangs out of her eyes, swung her leg back over the bike and started pedaling.

Thinking about her father’s soup brought back more memories. As she rode, she remembered the compromise that she’d come to with her father. Giovanni was a stern man, hardworking and strict. He’d emigrated the family to America from a small mountain town in Italy called Sestriere so his six children could attend American colleges. Noelle was his youngest child, the last to go to college. She wanted to go to Colorado and study climatology, to go skiing and mountain biking in the biggest mountains in the country. Giovanni thought that Colorado was too far away. So they’d come to a deal after Noelle found the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of North Carolina—Asheville. It gave her the mountains, and it gave Giovanni the peace of mind that she was only a few hours from home instead of three days’ drive.

For the quiet, serious Noelle, UNC–Asheville was a dream come true. She loved her department heads, her roommate and the environment of the campus. She’d joined the cycling club and had made many friends. She’d even found a group of Catholic students that went to the church off campus, and she joined them as often as she could. Now, her sophomore year, she felt right at home. She had a lot of attention from the boys on campus, too. She was five-six, a hundred twenty pounds of lean muscle, shiny brown hair and soulful ethnic brown eyes, and she got quite a bit of attention from the opposite sex. But she was her father’s daughter, and shunned formal dating because it was his wish. It didn’t bother her, she had a lot of work to do for school and dating wasn’t the most important thing on her plate. She pedaled back through the gates to the university, rode through campus and pulled up to her dorm, West Ridge Hall. Securing her bike in the rack, she chained it and went inside. Wheezing as she walked the hall to her room, she wondered if she should cancel her attendance at the study group for her climatology class. She came to her door, unlocked it and went inside. She and her roommate kept the blinds up; their room afforded a beautiful panorama of the mountains, and they both enjoyed lying in bed gazing at the view. Noelle put her backpack down on the floor and stretched out on her twin-size bed.

Oh, that felt good. Too good. She knew she needed to get up and get going. Being sick was no excuse for missing that study group. So she managed to get herself up, slip on a jacket, grab her books and make her way out of her cozy room toward the library. Ramsey Library stood in the center of campus, and the walk felt good. Physical activity had always been Noelle’s cure when she didn’t feel well, so a short walk to the library wasn’t going to hurt. She walked along the quiet pathways, waving at people she knew, and went into the library to her study group. They worked for a couple of hours, and Noelle was starting to feel pretty crappy. Just as they decided to take a break, her cell phone rang. Noelle excused herself and made her way to the side entrance of the library. She hated talking on her phone in a group setting, she found it rude when people talked on phones in restaurants and grocery stores. So she was mindful of the other students in the library, and she needed some air anyway. It was a friend from the cycling club, asking if she wanted to go biking in the morning. As much as she wanted to, she turned the offer down, until she was done with her antibiotics, it just wouldn’t be smart to push herself too hard. They chatted for a while as Noelle walked out of the library and sat on the steps. It was getting full dark, and as she hung up the phone, she thought she saw a shadow on the side of the building. She shook it off, there were so many people on campus, anyone could be walking around the corner of the building. Regardless, she decided it would be a good idea to go inside. She’d heard about that poor girl from Virginia, and as she moved toward the door, the hairs on the back of her neck stood up. She glanced behind her and saw that the shadow had become a man, but she laughed when she realized it was just another student. He was certainly too young and too handsome to be anything but. She gave him a smile and held the door for him.

He smiled back, and that was the last thing Noelle remembered.

Taylor woke up with a sense of purpose. Showered, dressed and fed, she grabbed the
Tennessean
from her front step and plopped down on the couch. Lee Mayfield, a crime reporter who Taylor didn’t get along with, had the byline for the Rainman lead. She read through the article, scoffing. As usual, Mayfield had the details wrong. It wasn’t just the police who couldn’t stand her, her fellow reporters got fed up with her, too. She was infamous for showing up at the end of a press conference, or after shootings had wrapped at a scene, and getting her stories from the other media on the scene rather than doing her own work.

Taylor didn’t bother finishing the article, or the paper, for that matter. Disgusted, she threw the paper on the floor and turned to business she had some control over. Whitney Connolly’s cell phone. Scrolling through the options, she found memo and hit playback. Whitney’s voice floated through the air, running down a to-do list. The last item was interesting, and Taylor replayed it several times. 

“Need to talk to Quinn about the notes.”

That was it. No clues, no other directions. It didn’t even sound like this was important. Was she talking about the e-mails?

Taylor picked up the phone and called Quinn Buckley. Quinn answered on the first ring.

“Quinn? It’s Taylor Jackson. I have been going through Whitney’s personal effects that were in her car, and I have your sister’s cell phone here. There’s a recorded memo on the cell phone, I want to play it for you and get your impressions. Okay, I’m going to play it now.”