Say Goodbye (6 page)

SIX

“Brown Recluse Spiders are challenging to control, largely because of their secretive habits.”

FROM
Brown Recluse Spider,
BY MICHAEL F. POTTER, URBAN ENTOMOLOGIST, UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE

RITA COULDN’T SLEEP. IT WAS ONE OF LIFE’S LITTLE ironies; now that she finally had the time to rest, she had lost the ability. Seemed like every night followed the same long gray arc. She would watch the glow of the moon sweep across the far wall. Catch the ripple of the curtains as the cold wind seeped through the edges of the aged windows. Listen to her tiny old house creak and pop as winter treated its wooden joints as poorly as it treated her flesh-and-blood ones.

By the time the sun finally peeked over the mountains, she would wonder for the fiftieth time why she didn’t head to Florida like so many of her friends had done. Or maybe Arizona. Less humidity. More heat. She thought she would like Arizona.

She wasn’t going anywhere and she knew it. She had been born in this house, back in the days when the midwife came to you and labor was no reason to see a doctor. She and her four sisters and three brothers had run through these hills, climbed these trees, trampled the flowers in her mother’s beloved garden.

She was the only one left now. The wizened old woman everyone expected to disappear into a nursing home, much as her mother had done. But Rita was made of sterner stuff. She avoided the diabetes, high cholesterol, and brain cancer that had stolen so many members of her family. She held on, whipcord lean, barely a pound above bird weight, but still capable of splitting a cord of wood every fall in preparation for winter. She hoed her own garden. Shelled her own beans, swept her own porch, and beat her own rugs.

She kept on keeping on, waiting for something not even she understood. Maybe because at her age, waiting was about all she had left.

Once upon a time, her high school sweetheart had whisked her away to the big city of Atlanta. Donny had wanted to see the world. Mostly, he’d seen the airspace above Germany before some Nazi had shot him down, and Rita went from being a young bride to a young widow in less than two years. She’d hardly been alone in her fate. Plenty of other pretty young things crying in their coffee or, more like it, their mid-afternoon brandy. But then the war ended, a stream of handsome men returning and scooping up most of those girls in a whirlwind of thank-God-we’re-alive sex.

Rita had considered her options. Twenty was too young to be sitting home every night, and while she enjoyed her secretarial job, maybe some of Donny’s wanderlust had rubbed off on her. She’d already cut the umbilical cord once. Might as well go out and see what there was to see. Find a strapping young man. Have an adventure.

It didn’t work. In the end, she was not giddy or euphoric or, truth be told, that interested in clumsy, back-of-the-seat sex. Rita just wanted to be Rita. So she settled into the little house she bought with Donny’s death benefit. She grew a garden. She built a front patio. And when the loneliness grew too much, she did the last thing in the world anyone expected her to do: She became a foster mom.

She took in kids for nearly twenty years, from squalling infants to sullen ten-year-olds. She would pick them up at the local Chick-fil-A, their worldly possessions filling a single black Hefty bag, easily tossed in the backseat. She would buy them lemonade, then take them home and give them the lay of the land.

She adhered to basic rules. Follow them, and things ran relatively smooth. Disobey and be punished. Some kids took to the system easily. Others learned the hard way.

Couple of kids scared her, though she liked to believe they never knew. Couple of the kids, she genuinely loved. Though again, she liked to believe they never knew. Life was tough enough without believing a single foster mom could make a difference.

She gave the kids a roof over their heads, three solid meals a day, a place to feel secure, and, hopefully, a foundation for someday, when they finally escaped the system and managed their own lives. She liked to think there were people scattered across Atlanta who still smiled when recalling the time they lived with a woman who ironed even the doilies and made them say prayers every night, and while they resented her at the time, they understood her now. And, maybe, they even loved her a little, though of course, it was only proper that she would never know.

Thinking you could change a life by becoming a foster parent was nothing but romantic claptrap, of course. Of the nearly thirty children Rita had seen in her day, at least five were dead. Drugs, violence, suicide, risky behavior. Did it matter?

Donny died. Her children died. And then one by one, her father, her mother, her brothers, her sisters, until here she was, back in the home of her childhood, one week from her ninetieth birthday, acutely conscious of the slow passage of time and the very real presence of ghosts.

She got out of bed, the sky barely a paler shade of gray, but close enough to call morning. She shuffled her feet into fat blue slippers, grabbed her thick terry cloth robe and shrugged it on over her long flannel pajamas. She wore a sleeping cap, not at all fashionable, but very helpful when your skin was thinner than paper and the old circulation system was moving so slowly she sometimes caught a chill while standing in front of the heated radiator in the parlor.

She made it downstairs, moving at an unhurried pace. In the kitchen, she got the water boiling for a cup of tea. Then it was over to the refrigerator for eggs. She ate two scrambled every morning with one piece of toast. The protein kept her strong, and the breakfast never failed to bring back memories of her youth.

Even now, she heard the floorboard creak behind her; her brother Joseph, in one of his moods again. Joseph had always been a trickster, liking to pull out her chair right before she took a seat.

“Now, now, Joseph,” she chided, without turning around. “I’m getting too old for these games. Last time, you nearly cost me a hip!”

Another creak. She caught a glimpse of a shadow, dashing across the wall. She thought it was Michael, or maybe Jacob. They visited often, no doubt enjoying the familiarity of their childhood kitchen as much as she did.

She saw her parents less often, her mother mostly, hunched over the kitchen sink, humming a mindless tune as she washed vegetables or tended to dinner. Once, she’d encountered her father, standing in the middle of the parlor smoking his pipe. The moment she entered, however, he disappeared, seeming almost embarrassed.

Locals said it was the gold and crystals lining the hills that kept the ghosts so busy. An Indian shaman had explained in the paper that gold was the highest vibrating substance on earth, activating things, concentrating energy. Anywhere there was a large quantity of gold and crystals, he said, you had the perfect recipe for spirits.

Rita accepted that explanation at face value. Her house was nearly one hundred and fifty years old and had sheltered five generations of her family. Of course it was haunted.

As to why her mother would want to spend eternity cooking in the kitchen…well, Rita figured that she’d get to find out for herself soon enough.

She had her eggs done. Her wheat toast. Her Earl Grey tea. She set everything down on the small wooden table, one by one. Then, after a last glance to ensure that Joseph had left her chair alone, she took a seat.

Sun had spread out over the glorious expanse of the Blue Ridge Mountains, staining everything it touched a bright rosy pink. She thought it was a beautiful morning.

Meaning it was time to do what must be done. She got up, shuffled her way to the back door. It took her two or three hard yanks to get it to budge. When it was finally open, she stuck her head out and said firmly, in a voice that thirty foster children had learned never to argue with: “Son, you can come out now.”

Nothing.

“I know you’re there, child. No need to be afraid. If you want to talk, just be polite about it and say hello.”

After all these years of living with ghosts, Rita was nearly as surprised as anyone when a flesh-and-blood child materialized on her back porch. He couldn’t have been more than eight or nine, scrawny shoulders hunched against the morning frost, sandy head down, expression clearly uncertain. Two weeks ago, he’d started appearing in her backyard. Every time she’d made eye contact, however, he’d bolted. This time, at least, he stayed put.

“Hello,” he whispered.

“Heavens, child, you’re gonna catch your death of cold. Come on in. Shut the door. I’m not paying to heat the world.”

He hesitated again, but then his gaze went to her breakfast and she saw his hunger like a spasm across his face. He stepped inside, carefully shutting the door behind him. The motion showed off shoulder blades sharp as razor blades.

“What’s your name, child?”

“I don’t—”

“What’s your name, child?”

“They call me Scott.”

“Well, Scott, this is your lucky morning. My name’s Rita, and I was just fixin’ to make more eggs.”

He didn’t argue, but took a seat in the nice warm kitchen that smelled of scrambled eggs and fresh toasted bread.

Rita cooked. She fed. She cooked some more. Finally, when his stomach was a tight, round drum beneath the faded expanse of his yellow-striped shirt, he pushed his empty plate away.

“Rita,” he said at last. “What do you think of spiders?”

SEVEN

“When the spider first spins the silk, it is liquid, but it soon hardens into thread that can be stronger than steel.”

FROM
Freaky Facts About Spiders,
BY CHRISTINE MORLEY,
2007

SPECIAL AGENT SAL MARTIGNETTI WAS WAITING FOR Kimberly outside the station. Minute she exited, he flashed his lights. She glanced at his unmarked car, then pointedly looked at her watch. She was tired, hungry, and not in the mood.

In the end, however, she crossed over. Mostly because he’d taken Mac’s advice and was holding up vanilla pudding.

He had the heat blasting, a welcome change from the early morning chill that stung, even in Atlanta. She took the six-pack of pudding, the offered bottle of water, and a plastic spoon. After an internal debate, she grudgingly offered him one pudding back, but he waved her off.

“No, no, all for you. The least I can do.”

He’d been listening to the radio. Some conservative talk-show host ranting about how the ACLU was ruining the world. As Kimberly settled in, however, Sal snapped it off.

“Been waiting long?” she asked, digging into the first pudding. She knew Sal only in passing. Had bumped into him at a barbecue, some police function somewhere. Both the GBI and the FBI were large organizations, meaning more of the agents were names she’d heard rather than faces she knew, and Sal was no exception.

Small, dark, and wiry, he possessed the sinewy build of someone who grew up hard, probably not far from the streets he now patrolled. He wore a light gray suit this morning, but still managed to look more like an up-and-coming hoodlum than a state investigator.

“Been here twenty minutes,” he commented, held up a greasy fast-food bag. “Had my breakfast.”

“More comfortable inside the station,” Kimberly said.

“Not sure what I think of ’em yet,” Sal stated, jerking his head toward the Sandy Springs PD, which was an icebreaker of sorts coming from a GBI special agent.

Kimberly finished the first pudding, opened a second. Something about this felt all wrong. A GBI agent’s insistent middle-of-the-night phone call that she needed to talk to some pinched prostitute. Then the same special agent waiting for her afterward. Kimberly tried working the angles in her mind, but came up empty.

“Sal,” she said at last, “much as I appreciate the pudding, I’m not giving away the keys to the kingdom for snack packs. So if you want something, start talking. I have another appointment in thirty minutes.”

Sal laughed. It brought a spark to his eyes, eased the tightness around his jaw. He should laugh more. Then again, so should she.

“Okay, here’s the deal: You know I’m on VICMO?”

Kimberly nodded.

“One of the whole points of VICMO being to bring law enforcement agents together from all across the state to look for larger patterns of crime.”

“I’m an FBI agent, Sal. I know my acronyms. We’re tested every Friday.”

“Really?”

“No.”

He laughed again, dark eyes flashing bright. “Okay, well, I have a theory on a larger pattern of crime: I believe someone’s picking off prostitutes.”

Kimberly frowned, dug into her pudding. “What do you mean you have a theory? The girls are declared missing or they’re not. Missing stats go up, or they don’t.”

“Not these girls. Runaways, hookers, addicts. Who cares enough to file a claim? They disappear and no one’s the wiser.”

“They’re also transient,” Kimberly countered. “If they go missing, maybe it’s because they hopped on a bus.”

“Absolutely. You’re not talking about one of the population groups most likely to fill out the U.S. Census Bureau questionnaire. On the other hand, get a lot of officers in a room, and they each have a story of some girl or addict or whomever, who was pinched lately, and first question she asked them is have you seen so-and-so? She’s looking for a lost friend, roommate, partner in crime. ’Course, no one knows what she’s talking about, so end of story. You’re right, these girls
don’t
file missing persons reports. But one by one, they’re raising the exact same question: Where have all the hookers gone?”

“Very poetic of you, Sal.”

“I play an open mic night, every Thursday at the Wildcat…”

Kimberly stared at him.

“Oh, you weren’t serious.”

“I’m going to eat another pudding,” Kimberly said, and opened a third, not because she was hungry, but because she needed something to do.

“I don’t get it,” she said at last. “So girls are whispering about missing girls. Okay, but where
have
the missing hookers gone? If someone is ‘picking them off ’ as you say, where’s the evidence? Shouldn’t missing Girl A, last seen here, correlate with unidentified Body B, now found there?”

“Tried that. No unidentified female bodies have been found lately.”

She gave him a look. “Seems to shoot down your theory right there. If a predator was preying on prostitutes, he’d be disposing of the bodies somewhere. In Dumpsters, back alleys, along the interstate. Something would’ve turned up.”

Sal shrugged. “How many of Ted Bundy’s victims are still undiscovered? He favored rolling them down ravines. Let’s face it, this state has a lot of ravines. And chicken farms, and marshlands, and miles and miles of nothing at all. You wanna hide a body, Georgia is the place to do it. Or,” he conceded, “maybe the guy crosses state lines. It’s always a possibility, but you’d know better than me.”

Kimberly could already hear the skepticism in his voice. After all, if a subject was picking up prostitutes in Georgia and killing them in Louisiana, then it definitely would be a federal case and Sal didn’t think this was a feebie case. He thought it was
his
case, so for that reason alone, the subject could only be operating inside Georgia lines.

Kimberly studied him. She was doing some math in her head and it wasn’t working out in his favor. “Trevor said they picked up Delilah shortly after one. But I didn’t get called until after three. Anything you want to add to that timeline, Special Agent?”

Sal didn’t bother to appear repentant. He simply shot her a grin. “Heard you were smart.”

“Violent, too. Don’t let the belly fool you.”

His grin broadened. “Okay, sure, so maybe I took a shot at her.”

“Mmmm-hmmm.”

“If it’s any consolation, little Miss Muffet wouldn’t bite. Was adamant from the moment the police picked her up that she would speak with you and only you.”

“Liked her tattoos, did you?”

“How do you know her?” he asked curiously. “Drug activity? Meth? Seems kind of low level to be narc’ing for a fed.”

“You never know where the good information might come from.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Why this level of intensity, Sal? Poaching an informant, rousing a fed in the middle of the night. From the sound of it, you don’t even have a case, yet you’re jumping through a lot of hoops to talk to one inked-up hooker.”

Sal didn’t answer her. His gaze had gone out the window. He wasn’t smiling anymore, and the dark look on his face had probably scared an informant or two.

“I got a package,” he said curtly. “Fourteen months ago. No name on it, no note in it. Just three Georgia-issued driver’s licenses stuffed in a plain white envelope and placed beneath the windshield wiper of my car. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“Driver’s licenses? You talking forgeries or the real deal?”

“Real deal. I have valid photo IDs for Bonita Breen, Mary Back, and Etta Mae Reynolds. White females, roughly twenty years of age, addresses from the greater Atlanta area. I did some digging and guess what?”

“They’re all missing hookers.”

“They’re all working girls,” he fine-tuned, “who haven’t been spotted in months. Now, according to the grapevine, Mary headed for Texas, while Etta Mae ran off with some bartender. I’ve issued BOLOs for both, without any hits. So in my world, that makes them missing, though it’s possible my supe has other ideas on the subject.”

Kimberly had to smile. She might know something about disagreeing with a superior. These things happened.

“Then,” Sal continued, “three months ago, same thing. I come out to my car and discover a new envelope, with three new licenses: Beth Hunnicutt, Nicole Evans, and Cyndie Rodriguez. Except this time I get lucky. Beth Hunnicutt
has
been declared missing, by her roommate,
Nicole Evans
.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. The same Nicole Evans whose driver’s license is in the envelope?”

“The very same. According to the missing persons file, Hunnicutt was last seen heading out for a ‘big job,’ by her roommate Evans. Furthermore, Evans asserted that Hunnicutt never would have taken off without grabbing her stereo equipment and collection of CDs from their apartment. Of course, when I tried to follow up with Evans, I discovered that she also hadn’t been seen in months, and in fact, the third roommate, Cyndie Rodriguez, had disappeared, as well. Three more IDs, three more missing girls.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“So says you, so says me. Brass, on the other hand…”

“Six missing girls and you can’t make a case?” she asked in shock.

“No evidence of foul play. And technically speaking, of my six names, only one has been declared missing. The others are simply ‘unaccounted for.’ According to the bureaucrats we got bigger fish to fry—you know, the growing meth problem, gangland shootings, new requirements for Homeland Security, yada, yada, yada.”

Kimberly sighed. She’d like to say she’d never heard of such garbage, but she would be lying. Bureaucrats ran the world, even in law enforcement.

“Back to the envelope,” she mused. “Someone is making the effort to outreach not once, but twice, to the police. That’s something.”

“Envelope was unsealed and yielded no physical evidence. So for kicks, I ran it by a shrink friend who sometimes consults for the department on cold cases. His first thought was sure—a lot of killers like the spotlight just as much as celebrities, and are driven to reach out to local cops or press. The fact the package contained driver’s licenses interested him, as the BTK guy out of Kansas liked to mail in driver’s licenses of his victims to the press. So maybe a classic copycat element—hey, look how famous that schmuck is, I can do that!

“Problem is, the predators who make the effort generally crave recognition. It’s about bragging, gamesmanship, and arrogance. Meaning there should be a note, poem, follow-up phone call, something. This…In Jimmy’s own words, it’s like mailing out a party invite without any directions on where or how to play. His best guess: The stash came from a third party.”

“Third party?”
Kimberly asked incredulously. “Like who, the guy’s cleaning lady?”

“Think of it this way: A wife cleans out her husband’s sock drawer. Comes across a stack of photo IDs. Now, there can’t be any
good
reason for her husband to have the driver’s licenses of three young women. Then again, she’s afraid to confront him with it. So she sticks the plastic in an envelope, and discreetly passes it to the first cop she sees. Eases her conscience while keeping her distance.”

“Until she comes across three more driver’s licenses,” Kimberly said drily.

“Hey, maybe the guy needed his underwear drawer organized as well.”

Kimberly arched a brow, turning the matter over in her head. The whole scenario bothered her on so many levels she didn’t know where to begin. Six missing girls, only one of whom could be considered missing. No bodies or other evidence of foul play, but two care packages that could be considered to contain “trophies” from a serial predator. Except maybe the envelopes didn’t come from the unidentified subject, but a companion of the UNSUB who was too scared to contact police directly but savvy enough to deliver the licenses in a manner that left behind absolutely, positively no physical evidence.

Which, she supposed, brought them to Delilah Rose, a young prostitute pinched just this evening, claiming to have evidence about another missing hooker and adamant about speaking only with Kimberly.

Delilah troubled her. Kimberly didn’t like the impression that the girl had homed in on her, all because of something she’d once seen on TV. The Eco-Killer had been a long time ago. And while the press had made out Kimberly to be a hero, she hadn’t gotten to all the girls in time.

Sal turned to her now. “Did Delilah give you something good? Mention any of these names? Because depending on what she said, maybe we could make it a multijurisdictional task force. My supervisor might finally green-light me if the case came from the feds.”

“Sorry, neither of us is that lucky. Story I got from Delilah Rose reads more like a Mad Lib than a three-oh-two. She was vague on all relevant details, including her own name.”

“Gosh darn, she’s not really Delilah? Didn’t Sandy Springs at least run her prints?”

“Oh, I’m sure they’ll call me with the results. Maybe in five to six weeks.”

“So what’d she say? You were there an hour. I gotta assume you discussed more than just the weather.”

Kimberly considered the GBI special agent again, hand in her pocket now, feeling the weight of Ginny Jones’s ring. Information was a game. With informants. With fellow law enforcement officers. Even with husbands and wives. For all his talk of cooperation, Sal clearly felt he owned this case. And if Delilah had opened up to him earlier this evening, like hell Kimberly would’ve been called.

“Delilah didn’t mention any of the names from your photo IDs,” Kimberly told him honestly. “She didn’t mention a pattern of multiple girls disappearing, or anything like that. She does, however, fall into your first category of one working girl looking for a friend. Virginia ‘Ginny’ Jones. Went missing about three months ago. Name ring any bells?”

Sal shook his head, taking out a piece of paper, jotting the name down. “No, hasn’t come up yet. But I’ve found three more names of missing girls that don’t match the known driver’s licenses. Can’t decide what that means yet. Maybe these girls simply left town, or maybe the wife hasn’t cleaned out the T-shirt drawer, you know.”

“How long have you been working this, Sal?”

“Year,” he said absently. “More since getting the second envelope.”