Don’t Talk to Strangers: A Novel (43 page)

I said good-bye to the minister and his wife, set my burning candle on a folding table
with other burning candles, and worked my way back through the crowd. I wondered if
his eyes were on me now. He had the advantage of knowing who I was.

I saw the playground as I pushed out of the packed crowd, the wooden fort and the
swing set, a few kids playing, parents hovering and talking. A boy was sitting on
top of the fort, watching over the heads of the crowd, as Hayley Barbour’s frail,
breaking voice followed me out of the swarm. Robbie Raymond lifted his hand shyly
in a half wave.

“How you doing?” I stopped at the base of the fort, looked up at him. His long legs
dangled off the side.

“I don’t want to be here. But I couldn’t stay home either. You know?”

“I know,” I reassured him. He pushed himself off and landed on his feet next to me.
When his face came out of the shadows, I saw the bruise around his eye and cheekbone.

“Robbie—what happened?”

“Ran into a door,” he said, and smiled a little.

“Ah,” I said. “Door must have had a big old fist attached.”

Robbie was silent.

“You sure you’re okay? You need to talk about anything?”

I saw his eyes drift past me, saw them widen. He took a step back. I felt a heavy
hand on my arm, spinning me around. I looked up into Detective’s Raymond’s sour face.
I grabbed the hand and jerked it away. “What the hell, Raymond?”

“I told you to stay the fuck away from my kid.” His tongue was thick, and I smelled
booze.

“Dad,”
Robbie said. “Stop. Okay? Just stop.”

“You shut the fuck up,” Raymond ordered. He was a mean drunk, the sheriff had told
me.

“Detective,” I said firmly. “You smell like a brewery. You’re in a public place representing
the sheriff’s department and you’re making a scene. This is such a bad idea.” We already
had the attention of the parents at the playground. “Go home,” I told him quietly.
“Robbie, can you drive him?”

“Fuck you,” Raymond snarled. “Fuck you. Fuck both of you.” He stalked off, wavering
just a little when he turned but doing a good job of not appearing like a drunk.

I looked at Robbie. “He do that to you?” I reached up and touched his cheek. He winced
away.

“It’s okay. I’m okay. He’s under a lot of pressure.”

I looked back at Raymond lumbering out of the park. “You have someplace to go tonight?”
I asked, and Robbie nodded. “Stay here, okay?”

I sent the sheriff a text. Brooks Barbour was at the lectern when I saw the sheriff
emerge from the crowd. I told him about Raymond, about Robbie’s black eye. Meltzer
was furious. “I’m going to kill him,” he fumed quietly as we walked. “But first I’m
going to have a deputy follow him home. And when he’s sober, I’m going to fire his
ass. The only reason I haven’t fired him around a million times is because I was worried
about how he would support his kid. I happen to like the boy.”

“I don’t think Robbie should go home until Raymond’s sober.”

Robbie was still standing near the wooden fort. I saw Meltzer tense when he stepped
into the light. “That’s quite a shiner,” he said playfully, and put his arm around
Robbie’s shoulders. His expression, his voice, didn’t betray what I knew he was feeling.
“How about you go home with me when this thing is over tonight. We’ll grill a steak
and put some ice on that eye.”

“Sounds good.” Robbie nodded.

“Dr. Street, care to join us?”

I shook my head. “Sounds like a guy thing.”

“Well, we all need a good night’s sleep. That means you too,
Dr. Street. That’s an order,” Meltzer said. “Been a tough day for everyone.”

“Sheriff Meltzer! Dr. Street!” Brenda Roberts was running at us. She moved on three-inch
heels like they were cleats. Her cameraman had his camera out. Robbie stepped back
into the shadows. Meltzer sighed.

“And it just got tougher,” I said.

41

I spread my notes out over the double bed, every thought I’d put down on paper since
Sheriff Ken Meltzer had called my office at the first of the week. It seemed like
a decade ago. There were more notes in my phone I’d made when there wasn’t time to
find pen and paper. I rolled a chair over, sat next to the bed, and started organizing.
The entire day had been spent reacting to new information. He liked it that way, I
thought. He’d thrown us some scraps to keep us busy.

The entire blanket was covered with lined yellow sheets I’d pulled from my legal pad.
I looked at them all, read them, made checkmarks on the ideas that had been explored
and exhausted. I made new notes about the dirt and fibers Sam had found on the letter.
Meltzer had done a good job of getting the information out tonight, and he’d given
an interview to Brenda Roberts to further that agenda while I slipped away with Raymond’s
battered son to find Mrs. Meltzer, her caretaker, and Ken’s dog, Ginger.

I pushed in the flash drive Brolin had given me and clicked through a page at a time,
rereading witness statements, the lab reports. It was after one when I turned off
the light. We were starting early, meeting in the war room at five a.m. and then fanning
out. The search teams would begin again at daybreak. It was a small county. Eventually
they would find his lair.

The room was icy. I pulled the sheet over me, thought about the day—Daniel Tray and
his lover, the girl in the park staring down into the flame she held, praying for
her friend’s safe return. Raymond seeing the photo of Skylar’s broken finger, the
dog, Peele laughing and heckling, Sam’s emotionless twang reciting the letter.
Dear Keye, I’ve started hurting her. I thought you’d want to know
.

A thought crossed my mind, then grabbed me by the throat. I sent Sam a text.
I’m sorry. I know it’s late. Just a quick question. The first letter, the one I found
on my windshield, what prints did you find?

I reopened my Mac and pulled up the software we use for background checks while I
waited for Sam to hear her phone and respond. Neil could have done this faster. Neil
could have done it with his eyes closed. But his eyes probably
were
closed right now.

Sam’s text came back.
No prints. No fibers
.

One-thirty in the morning, more than thirty-four hours into Skylar’s abduction, and
something was finally making sense.

By two, I’d found our man’s connection to Silas, Georgia, where Tracy Davidson had
lived until that day after school when she had been lured away. I’d always wondered
how he’d done that. Now I knew. And I learned a few other things that ignited my hopes,
sent them soaring, and cemented the suspect in my mind.

I got dressed—field clothes—and left my hotel again. I’d wrestled with whether to
notify the sheriff’s department. But I couldn’t. Not yet. I needed more than flimsy
connections. I needed evidence. In the end I’d decided to keep my eye on him until
morning, make sure he was home or at work, not somewhere tormenting Skylar. And then
I’d lay it all out for the department and hope they’d run with it, start the quiet
process of investigating, building their case, surveillance, GPS tracking. He would
lead us to her if we were careful.

I coasted past the house, followed the street to its end, and turned around at a tangle
of kudzu-wrapped pine trees. Then I cut my lights, eased back up the street. I parked
along the curb a few houses down.

A streetlight buzzed, blinked, made popping sounds, dimmed like headlights in a fog
by the heavy, moist air that settles in on hot August nights. My windows were down.
I heard the roar of air conditioners wedged in windows and the whirling fans in condensing
units alongside the houses.

I reached around to the back floorboard and found my travel pillow. It’s the kind
of thing you keep in your car when you spend a lot of time parked on streets watching
people. I stuck the pillow behind me and leaned my back against the driver’s door
with my binoculars in my hand. I studied the house, the front door with no deadbolt,
the darkened single-pane windows. No security. No need.

His vehicle was here. He was home, probably sleeping just fine. That meant he wasn’t
with Skylar. I’d rather she be alone and hungry and scared than dealing with this
monster. I had him now, or thought I did. But I only had one chance. If I confronted
him with circumstantial evidence, Skylar was dead. He’d never go back to her. He’d
never risk it. If I stayed cool and laid out a good case in the war room in a few
hours, we could start closing in. He knew the county was being searched building by
building and shack by shack. Old storm cellars and wells were being pried open. It
was all out there now, practically every piece of information law enforcement had.
He’d have to clean the scene, remove anything that was suspicious so some deputy’s
antennae didn’t go up. And he’d have to move Skylar. He’d kill her. It was the only
conclusion, the only way to protect himself now.

I lowered my binoculars and leaned into the pillow against my door. My eyes ached
and I let them close, but my mind was doing 110, racing back over every moment since
I’d arrived, questioning myself, the sheriff’s department, seeing all those candlelit
faces in the park, probing Whisper’s darkest corners. Every investigator in the world
has had those cases where they’d have bet the bank on a suspect and found out later
they had it all wrong. Investigations are twisty, changing things, as thin and ephemeral
as August mist. They remind you of your own humanness and that at the height of all
your perceptive rectitude, you could be as wrong as hard desert rain. And I’d been
wrong too many times in the past thirty-six hours.

I think it was the sound of the screen door banging. Or maybe it
was the scrape of the key in the ignition that roused me out of a drifting sleep.
The car was backing out of the driveway, the fog blurring his brake lights. My heart
thumped against my rib cage. He was on the move. He’d set his clock to slip out early,
when the streets and highways were empty.

I waited for his taillights to disappear off the street, then started my car. The
moon was a ringed crescent. A bad moon, my mother would have called it. August fogs
and moon rings meant dark days in winter.

I kept my distance as he curved through Whisper for the highway. One glimpse of my
white Impala in his rearview and he’d pull off, change plans, perhaps even lead me
somewhere to do to me what he’d done to them. I felt for the Glock next to me on the
seat.

His headlights touched the tasseled edges of a cornfield as I followed him down a
dark two-lane, my own lights off. My right knee had a tremor when I pressed the accelerator.
My body was generating the hyperaroused cascade of hormones that prepares you for
danger. I could taste them, feel them coursing through me, terrifying and addictive.
It must have been close to what he feels in those moments when he’s talking to them
but not hearing, when norepinephrine is blasting through his system, when he’s getting
an erection and his snake’s brain is telling him the exact moment to strike.

He touched his brake lights and slowed, almost stopped. He’d seen me, I thought. He
turned onto a narrow one-lane dirt road. I waited, then followed, kept his brake lights
in front of me for a mile, red dust rising up off the road and clinging to the haze.
I tensed with every curve, expecting to see him waiting for me around each bend.

He turned again. South this time. I saw tall grass and weeds in his headlights. I
stopped and picked up my binoculars, watched his car creeping through a field.

I pulled up location services on my phone. I’d completely lost a sense of where I
was.

His brake lights glowed crimson. He’d stopped, the arc of a small structure illuminated
briefly before he cut his lights.

“Skylar,” I whispered, and thought about the panic and terror she must feel at hearing
that engine. I pressed in Meltzer’s number,
picked up my gun, and started through tall, wet grass that rippled like water as I
ran, soaking my legs. “I need backup now, and an ambulance.” My voice shook.

The lake was near. I could smell it—a thousand pungent, intoxicating scents hanging
in the heavy air. The woods edging the field looked like a ragged black wall. Everything
alive in Georgia on a late-summer night buzzed and bit and scampered as I ran. My
heart was ricocheting off my eardrums. I looked up at a thin web of light emitting
from the structure ahead. The lantern, the kerosene residue on the note. My foot hit
a rock and I went down; dirt and pebbles tore into my palms.

And then I heard it, and the world tipped up on its axis—Skylar’s scream, hoarse and
jagged, like breaking glass in the night.

“Let her go. Let her go!”
I screamed, and ran hard and fast in that swaying, disorienting blackness toward
the building ahead. I fired my gun. I had to distract him.

A bullet kicked up the earth in front of me. The
pop
of his service weapon registered in my brain a moment after. I kept moving. He fired
again. I felt the dirt spray my cheek, and dove into the grass. A third shot nearly
hit its target.