Don’t Talk to Strangers: A Novel (20 page)

“Could be someone yanking our chain,” he said. “People don’t like outsiders around
here. Especially if they’re connected to the law. And watching us spinning our wheels
is always fun for the troublemakers.”

“Could be,” I admitted. I figured Raymond had a lot to do with people disliking law
enforcement. “But the letter and the wording are consistent with the offender profile.
We’re talking big ego here, Detective. He wants to be heard.”

He slipped on gloves and laid the Baggie on the hood of my car, extracted the letter,
read it, put it back in the sleeve. “Probably just somebody else thinks you’re a pain
in the ass.” He stared at me, daring me to take the bait.

“Thanks for your support.” I opened my driver’s door. “This is a creepy little town,
by the way. And the coffee is terrible.”

“Hey,” Raymond said. “Gotta be scary, huh? Getting something like this.”

“I’m good,” I said. I got in my car.

“Look, maybe we weren’t happy about you being here, Street. Maybe we still aren’t.
But I already said everything I needed to say to you on the subject. So we’re square.”

“Thanks,” I said, and watched him walk back to his car, his big hand holding the evidence
at his side. Maybe I was growing on him after all.

I checked my phone and found emails waiting. Neil had delivered the names and photographs
I’d requested. I checked the time. Whisper High should be letting out. I wondered
if Melinda Cochran’s group of friends had stayed together since her disappearance.
Loyalties are an ever-shifting thing in the teenage years. They’d made the jump to
high school now—ninth graders standing at the edge of the New World. Did the girls
still walk home together from school? Did their parents allow it after their friend
had vanished? My mother had talked about the atmosphere during the Atlanta Child Murders.
I was too young and too shielded to remember. Twenty-nine black children and young
men had been murdered. There was terror in the air before
Wayne Williams was arrested and convicted. The children had walked together in tight
little groups, latched on to one another like they were crossing rushing water. No
one knew why children were being hunted or how the killer’s selection process worked,
but he’d hunted in an area where parents had to work, where they didn’t have the luxury
of stay-at-home moms or babysitters. So these children stepped out into the world
fully aware that someone wanted to kill them. But they held hands and crowded together
because there is safety in numbers. Even an offender willing to take some risk acquiring
a victim won’t pluck them out of a group. That’s ex-lover and ex-husband territory.
The one who stalks and plans and waits, he’s careful. His risk is measured. He has
a life. He values it and his freedom.

There was a tangle of traffic leaving the school—cars driven by students packed with
kids. A line of buses curled around the front of the building. The parking lot was
full of teenagers still hanging out, laughing, leaning against cars, trying to look
cool, sneaking drags off cigarettes and attempting to hide plumes of smoke bellowing
from young lungs. I pulled in and idled near a group of four, rested my elbow on my
lowered window. The green-and-white sign at the edge of the lot said
DRUG AND ALCOHOL FREE ZONE. NO SMOKING
.

“Anyone know Shannon Davis or Heather Ridge?” I asked, glancing at Neil’s email with
the photographs of Melinda Cochran’s friends. “Or Briana Franklin?”

A lanky boy with curly black hair pointed across the street with the cigarette in
his hand. One of the girls slapped his arm. They all laughed. I followed his finger
and saw three girls crossing the street, their books in their arms. I parked. It was
a steamy-hot afternoon. I was wearing a pair of flared Max C’s and my favorite Elie
Tahari V-neck button blouse clinging to me under the blazer I desperately wanted to
leave in the car. But I needed something to cover the duty holster tucked against
the small of my back. No way I was leaving my gun in the car. Maybe the note had shaken
me up a little.

I ran across the street. “Shannon!” I called out. All three girls turned, three skirts
midthigh, tight tops, sparkly jewelry. “Hi.” I
walked up, smiling. “And you’re Heather and you’re Briana.” I was so bubbly I could
have been the head cheerleader.

“And you’re the FBI lady,” the brown-haired girl answered. Heather. I had her Facebook
profile picture on my phone. Her expression told me she wasn’t impressed.

“Former,” I said. “I’m consulting with the sheriff’s department and I’d like to talk
about Melinda Cochran.” Heather started walking. The others did too. It was pretty
clear who was running this show. I walked with them. “I know it must have been really
terrible to lose a friend like that. I’m sorry. I want to find out what happened to
Melinda.”

“You mean y’all don’t know yet?” Heather asked me. “We heard she was held prisoner
by some freak that killed her.”

Well, there was that. Always one in every crowd. I couldn’t tell if she was being
the tough kid to cover her emotions or if she simply didn’t have them. It had been
months since they’d lost their friend. Perhaps she’d just dealt with it and put it
away somewhere. “What we know we learned because of forensics,” I told them. “What
I need to find out is
who
did that to Melinda.”

“We don’t know who.” Briana had dark wavy hair and deep blue eyes, some baby fat,
but she was going to be a full-on knockout one day. “We all miss her a lot.”

Shannon hugged her books with long, skinny arms and watched the ground as we walked.

“The day Melinda disappeared,” I said, “I understand you’d all walked home from school
together. Was there anything different about that day?”

“Um. Yeah. Melinda disappeared off the planet. That was different,” Heather answered.
She began to recite their routine in a voice that told me she’d been through it all
before. “We left school, we crossed the park, we bought Cokes from the machine at
the hardware store, and then we came straight home.”

“It was just a, you know, normal day,” Shannon said, quietly. “Before that, I mean.
Before Melinda.”

Heather pointed ahead. About a hundred feet down I saw brick-columned
entrances on either side of the road, each with a subdivision name. “Melinda lived
in the neighborhood there. It’s not as nice as where we live in Lakeshore Estates.”

Shannon jumped in. “But it’s not like our parents are rich or anything. Our neighborhood
is just newer.”

“Newer, better, and we have the lake on our side. But whatev,” Heather snarked.

“According to your statements, Melinda turned off toward her neighborhood before you
went into yours.” I looked up the street to confirm that Melinda’s turn would have
come before theirs. It did. “And you didn’t see or hear anything unusual.”

“Right,” Heather said. Shannon and Briana nodded.

“No cars on the street?” I followed up. “Looks like you could have seen into her neighborhood
as you passed. Nothing comes to mind?”

“We can see the main street but we can’t see into the neighborhood. We already told
the cops everything,” Heather insisted petulantly. This kid was starting to get on
my nerves. “Melinda turned left and we turned right. We didn’t see anyone and we didn’t
hear anything. It’s not like we knew she would fucking just
vanish
.”

“Okay,” I said evenly. My mother would have slapped my eyeballs over to my ears if
I’d used the F word to an adult at her age. “You remember anyone driving by? Anyone
stopping to say hello while you were walking that day?” I looked from Heather to Briana
and Shannon. Head shakes all around.

Heather eyed me. “My brother says the sheriff’s department is really lame if they
have to hire a Chinese chick.”

“Oh my God, Heather!” Briana gasped. Giggles rippled through the group.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I think he’s a racist prick first of all. And second, he’s threatened by strong women.”

“Good call,” I said. “When did you realize something happened to Melinda?”

“Her mom and dad started calling everyone after a couple hours,” Briana said. “Her
mom was off work that day and I guess she thought Melinda came home with one of us
at first. But then she got worried.”

“And then we all started calling Melinda’s phone.” Shannon was skinny and pale with
wide eyes and heavy lids that made her look like she might need a hospital ward any
minute. “And all we got was voice mail. Over and over.”

“Did Melinda have a boyfriend?” I pressed. A beat passed.

“She was awkward,” Heather answered finally. “Especially with boys. She was, like,
one of those girls who was never going to see a dick.”

“Nice,” I said.

“
God
, Heather,” Briana said. “That’s so disrespectful.”

“It’s not like she can hear us,” Heather defended herself.

“How about you, Heather?” I asked. “See a lot of dick?” I’d surprised her. It was
the first time the superior smirk had faded. “It doesn’t take any skill. You know?
Pretty much any guy in the world is happy to show it to you. You want to impress people?
Start talking about how many A’s you’re pulling in. Because dick is easy. And bragging
about it makes you look desperate and stupid.” I shifted my gaze to Heather’s friends.
“So what was the usual routine? Y’all hang out in the park or the coffee shop or anything
after school?”

“What does any of this even matter anymore?” Heather asked quietly. I’d embarrassed
her and it was taking her a minute to recover her bravado.

“Sometimes the tiniest things turn out to be really important,” I said. I didn’t talk
about how the smallest shred of information might tell us how he got so close, selected
Melinda, accessed her life, then ended it, and sliced into all their childhoods.

“We used the swings in the park sometimes, and sometimes we got ice cream and talked
to whoever was in there. Kids mostly,” Shannon said.

“Wait,” Heather said, as if she’d just remembered. “She had band practice once a week.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Briana confirmed. “On Wednesdays, I think.”

“She played something geeky like clarinet,” Heather added. “And Mr. Tray is kind of
weird and too touchy-feely.” Her bright eyes caught mine. Smart kid. Must give her
teachers hell. “And not just with girls either. I mean, he’s older than you are and
he’s not even married or anything.” She glanced at my ring finger. “Oh. Sorry.”

“What exactly do you mean by
touchy-feely
?” I asked.

“It’s more like rumors,” Briana said.

Dangerous rumors, if the teacher hadn’t earned them. “Are you telling me Mr. Tray
behaved inappropriately with his students?”

Briana and Shannon shifted their meek gazes to their friend Heather. “He just, you
know, he’s creepy.”

“Ah,” I said. “You do know if a teacher or any adult is behaving inappropriately you
need to tell someone immediately, right?”

Heather smirked. “We’ve had that lecture.”

“And I hope you also know that rumors that aren’t true about teachers can ruin them,”
I added.

The girls said nothing. Their eyes said I was being a boring adult.

“Did Melinda walk home alone after band practice?” I asked, and got affirmative nods.
If Brolin and Raymond had performed a thorough victimology this information would
have been in the files already. I would have known that our victim walked alone one
day a week. Her risk goes up. The offender’s goes way down.

The sidewalk had sloped down as we neared the entrance to their neighborhood. I caught
glimpses of the lake sparkling through the trees over rooftops in their new “nicer”
development. On the left I saw the sign for Briarwood Subdivision where Melinda had
lived. I could see down the wide main street that ran into the neighborhood. No cars
parked against the white curbs. “Did Melinda say anything about having plans that
day? Is there a chance she wasn’t going straight home?”

Shrugs all around.

“Did she keep a diary that you know of?”

“I don’t think she was the diary type,” Heather said. “She was more the Twitter and
Facebook type.”

“Does this man look familiar?” I handed my phone to Heather. She studied the photo
of Logan Peele, then passed it from small hand to small hand, hands with plastic rings
and nail polish and bright rubber wristbands. They took their time looking at Peele’s
face, at his piercing eyes. One by one they said they’d never seen him or his gray
F-150 in the neighborhood.

“We heard that girl that disappeared a long time ago was found too, where Melinda
was found,” Heather said. “Is it true?”

“Yes,” I said. “Her name was Tracy.”

“Is he going to try to get us too?”

I swallowed the ache I felt for them. “Nah. Just be alert,” I said with a good deal
more calm than I felt. “Stay together when your parents aren’t around. Bad guys don’t
like groups. Don’t let anyone talk you into anything that doesn’t feel right. Even
if it’s just a ride home. And if anyone tries, make a lot of noise, scream, run, and
call nine-one-one.”

Shannon pulled the chain around her neck up out of her shirt. A silver whistle at
the end rocked back and forth like a pendulum. “They gave these to everyone at school.”

“That’s great,” I said. But it broke my heart a little. Kids shouldn’t have to wear
whistles. Kids shouldn’t have to worry about being bound and gagged and murdered.
“Was anything bothering Melinda? Problems at home, anything?”

“Her parents were poor. They fought about money sometimes,” Heather said.

“My parents fight about money and we’re not poor,” Briana contributed. “I don’t think.”

“Here’s my card. Call my mobile if you think of something.” I gave them each a business
card. “Just use your head until we get this creep, okay?”

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