Speak No Evil (27 page)

Caroline thought maybe she understood how Augie felt.

Life here had never quite seemed like a fairy tale, but since they’d come home, everything was stained a pale shade of death.

“There’s something so magical about fireflies,” Augusta said wistfully, peering at Caroline with one eye closed. “Remember when we used to catch ’em and put ’em in jars and pretend they were fairies?”

Caroline nodded and Augusta drained her lemonade and set the glass down next to her on the other side of the step. “It would be sad if they vanished.”

“I know what you mean,” Caroline admitted. “You know, I’m starting to understand what’s keeping me here this time and it has nothing to do with money. . . .”

Augusta lifted a brow in challenge. “Liar . . . it has something to do with the money.”

Caroline couldn’t stifle a chuckle at Augusta’s glittery-eyed expression. “Okay, maybe a little, but seriously. I think the real magic we were feeling way back when wasn’t about what we thought we were putting in those jars,” she explained. “It was about the fact that we were trying to catch those bugs together.”

“So they could live out their short miserable existences in our stinky peanut butter jars instead of out here where they belong,” Augusta added with false wonderment, waving a hand at the expansive great outdoors.

Caroline grimaced, but laughed.

“Jesus!” Augusta exclaimed suddenly. “
We
are responsible for killing off the fireflies!”

Caroline laughed again. “Well . . . if we are, the least we can do is sit out here and take a survivor count together. I’m in if you want the company.”

Augusta smiled a nostalgic smile and shook her head. She sighed loudly. “There’s got to be something more to this place than bad shit and good people dying, doesn’t there? I still feel a little magic out there . . .
somewhere
.”

“So do I,” Caroline agreed, and leaned unexpectedly to kiss her sister on the cheek . . . and they sat together, waiting for nightfall . . . and the reassurance of a single firefly.

 

Jack couldn’t stand the thought of going home.

He couldn’t get the image of Kelly’s sightless eyes out of his head.

He stopped by the Dive Inn—ironically still avoiding Kelly, though now he was avoiding the confusing emotions her death left him with—particularly the gut-wrenching guilt. He sat at the bar, and thankfully even the bartender avoided him, probably responding to the dark look on Jack’s face. Without a word, he poured Jack a Guinness and slid it over the bar toward him along with the remote, eyeing the television.

Jack blinked at the screen, grabbing the remote and turning it up in time to listen to the last minute of the clip of Caroline with Sandra Rivers.

“. . . are you stepping in now because you’ve lost faith in our boys in blue?” the bitch said. “And will you continue the more hardcore stories or do you plan to abandon them now that it seems too risky for your employees?” She pushed the microphone in Caroline’s direction.

Although he knew she was in distress, Caroline’s expression reminded him of her mother’s—she had the same grace under fire—the same cool gaze—but if he said as much to Caroline, she would think he meant it as an insult. The truth was that he admired the way her spine straightened in the face of challenge, the way her chin hitched high against adversity.

“I was sorry to hear,” the bartender offered. “She was . . . er . . . a sweet girl.” He only knew Kelly at all because she had tracked Jack to the bar one night. He’d been annoyed, and he’d given her a bit of the cold shoulder, earning questions from the bartender later.

Jack nodded, staring at Caroline’s face, needing her. He focused on her lips, watching them move and even in his grief, his body responded as it always did.

Caroline tilted Rivers a sly glance. “Do you tweet, Ms. Rivers?”

His lips twitched.

“. . . who doesn’t?” the blond reporter replied, looking a little like a mouse facing a cat.

Caroline smiled confidently. “We don’t.”

Jack broke into a smile for the first time all day.

“She don’t look much like her mama, but she sure acts like her,” the bartender remarked, grabbing a hand rag and starting on the mugs still in the sink. He waved at a customer walking out the door. Jack heard the door close, then the small barroom was empty.

“Mind if I turn this off while I finish my beer?” Jack asked.

“Take your time,” the guy said, moving out from behind the bar, going to the door to lock up. That’s what Jack liked most about him. He wasn’t a huge talker and he didn’t mind a little silence.

Jack clicked off the TV, bathing the dimly lit barroom in easy silence.

He wanted to call Caroline, but didn’t know what to say. He stared at the blank screen, replaying the events of the last two days over in his head.

The game seemed to have changed. Once again, he thought that Kelly’s murder felt personal. And Pam Baker’s disappearance was too close for comfort. However, without a body, there was no murder. She was just another missing person.

What if they weren’t meant to find more bodies? What if the sole purpose of planting Kelly’s was meant to confirm their worst fears and remove Jack from the case in one fell swoop?

Where was their guy stashing the bodies?

Did they have another Dahmer on their hands? Were they stuffed in someone’s deep freeze? Was he burying them somewhere? Where?

There was another aerial search planned for the morning.

Not often, but whenever a gator took prey—mostly dogs—they found some underwater burrow to stash the meal until the meat was soft and ripe enough to eat. Could that be what the killer was doing? Burying them somewhere in the swamp where the tide couldn’t carry them to the surface? If that were the case, the state of South Carolina had more than four million acres of wetlands, and even if they concentrated a search on the greater Charleston area, it was impossible to comb every inch of that boggy land. Over much of that wet terrain, even dogs wouldn’t be able to track a scent.

To top it off, Caroline’s note was clean—not a single print to be found—but that didn’t surprise Jack. Why should the slip be different from the rest of the forensic evidence? The guy was meticulous. What it did affirm, however, was that it wasn’t a calling card for some church salesman. There was no way the slip would be so clean if it had been handled by some Holy Roller.

The guys in the lab had made one connection Jack didn’t—not until he saw the pink slip on Pam’s car. They were carbon copies. Without another piece of carbon-laden paper, a single sheet wouldn’t look or behave any differently from a normal sheet, but combined with another piece of carbon-laden paper, they made copying possible. Not that it mattered—because there were no prints—but if they had used conventional fuming techniques, it would have turned the paper black and any retrievable prints would have been irrevocably lost.

But unlike carbon copies of the past, there would be no black residue on the hands of someone using it, though there might be chemical residue. There were a slew of chemicals used to make the sheets—enough that their safety in everyday use was being questioned. Some of the chemicals included phenol-formaldehyde resins, Bisphenol A, AZO dyes and others. How long would traces of these chemicals remain on the skin?

It was a moot point if he couldn’t find probable cause to connect Patterson to the slip.

It seemed impossible to commit two crimes so close together and not leave loose ends . . . somewhere. At some point, the guy must have made a mistake and Jack was going to find it and nail him.

He squeezed his eyes shut, piecing everything together. Today was Wednesday. Kelly’s body had been discovered Tuesday evening. Provided the killer had, in fact, been the one to nab Baker, when would he have taken her? Over the weekend or sometime Monday . . . but the streets were mostly flooded Monday and Tuesday. If he didn’t nab her straight from work, he would have had trouble getting the car back into the garage . . . which meant he must have snatched her sometime before the rain began . . . with enough time to get the car back into the garage.

Baker’s laptop was being scrubbed, along with her Honda, but the car was spotless—not a watermark on it so it probably hadn’t been driven through the rain and probably wouldn’t yield any prints. But he doubted the killer would leave a laptop if it might contain evidence. . . which told Jack there probably hadn’t been any previous contact between them. Baker’s cell phone was missing among her belongings. Jack had already contacted her provider to ask about GPS tracking. He had also subpoenaed her phone records.

What were the chances both girls had been in the wrong place at the wrong time? More importantly,
where
was the wrong place?

Everything had happened so quickly, they hadn’t even had time to wonder about Kelly’s Jeep. After the discovery of Baker’s car in the Meeting Street parking garage, they’d sent a patrol car out and found the Jeep missing from her house so they sent out an immediate bulletin. If her Jeep were a newer model, they might have had the benefit of GPS tracking, but no such luck. First thing in the morning, with fresh new light, he was going to see if they’d let him go up in one of the choppers.

Unless . . .

A thought occurred to him, and he jumped up. “Hey Kyle, can you unlock the door please?”

Almost as though he had forgotten Jack’s presence, the bartender stopped in the middle of cleaning his mug, blinking, but, seeing the look on Jack’s face, he didn’t say another word. He hurried out from the bar to unlock the door. Jack slapped a twenty on the countertop and grabbed his keys and cell phone.

No cop wanted to assume something so shitty could happen on his own doorstep—and because the kid had witnessed a swimmer, they’d all surmised the body was transported and dropped at Brittlebank Park, but what if Kelly was taken straight from work? No one had even considered checking the Lockwood parking lot for Kelly’s car.

Caroline spent the entire night hearing Savannah’s words bounce around her head. She tossed and turned, trying to figure out what she might have done differently.

She was missing something. Brad had been the one to talk to Jennifer Williams’s mother, but what if Brad had handed Pam the baton, knowing he wasn’t going to get the limelight for the story, and what if Pam were pursuing some lead they didn’t know about?

She probably could have called, but rather than take the chance of being turned away, Caroline got in her car the next morning and instead of driving into the office, she made the hour-and-a-half trek to Murrells Inlet to talk to Jennifer Williams’s mother. Some interviews were better done in person. Although she had promised Frank she wouldn’t write another story, this wasn’t about seeing her name in a byline, or about needing to control the paper, it was about locating a young woman Caroline felt responsible for.

Amanda Hutto had never been found. Jennifer Williams was still missing. Was Pam still alive?

If there was something—anything—Ms. Williams might tell her about her daughter’s disappearance or about Ian Patterson, it was worth the drive. She called Frank to let him know where she was going. He surprised her by not offering a single objection.

The trip, however, yielded nothing, except to highlight the ambivalence of the woman’s faith in Patterson’s innocence. It seemed to Caroline that the woman’s guilt over the falsified charges was keeping Ms. Williams from looking at circumstances clearly.

In her late forties, the woman lived alone in a small house along Creek Drive. She welcomed Caroline warmly, made her tea and brought out her most recent picture of Jennifer. She printed it out on her color printer and brought it to Caroline, her hands shaking slightly.

Caroline stared at the photograph of the teenager with strawberry blond hair. She looked a little like Augusta, not just her coloration or features, but that defiant look in her eyes.

Caroline felt a little pinprick in her chest when she recognized the spot where she and her sisters had played so often as children. The image was faded, the colors all blending together, making it hard to distinguish boundaries. But no matter what the quality of the photo, she would have recognized the location regardless. Behind Jennifer, one of the crumbling chimneys soared into the trees, the top covered by limbs that were dripping with Spanish moss.

Caroline waved the photograph. “Do you know who took this photo?”

Ms. Williams shook her head, uncertainty peeking through her dark brown eyes.

Was Jennifer there checking out the ruins . . . or was there something more sinister at work? Who took the photo?

“How did you get this photo?” Caroline asked.

“Ian Patterson e-mailed it to me.”

The little hairs on Caroline’s nape prickled. She stood at once. Suddenly, she felt the need to get back to Charleston. She had to call Jack. Had to talk to Frank. Ian Patterson had questions to answer, but Caroline realized that anything she said now would only distress Ms. Williams all the more. “Thank you,” she said, standing. She waved the photograph again. “May I keep this?”

“Of course.”

Caroline said her good-byes and left, folding and tucking the photo into her purse. Once she was in the car, she called Jack three times. He didn’t answer. Then she called Frank and left a message, telling him what she’d discovered. Afterward, she tried both her sisters. Neither answered, so she just drove.

 

Augusta met with Daniel. She’d spoken to him only briefly to get the OK for the reward money and the reward notice was supposed to have been published in this morning’s edition. But he’d been difficult to pin down lately, so when he offered to see her to help her iron out details for the auction, she took him up on it, literally running out the door.

She was glad to see that he seemed completely recovered, bruises healed, and had a skip to his step that she attributed to something other than work, but she didn’t pry. She really didn’t want to know—especially if the explanation included Sadie.

When they were finished with their meeting, he apologized for the need to lock up and rush off, but he didn’t want to leave the office open and he had a court case that had reached its final continuance and couldn’t be missed. Ushering Augusta out the front door, he locked up and exited through the back of his building, where his car was parked, leaving Augusta standing on the street, annoyed that he hadn’t offered her a ride to her car. She hadn’t been able to scoop a parking spot anywhere near his office, nor on King Street and now she had to walk down a pretty iffy street.

She lived in New York, for God’s sake. She had been down a million iffy streets.

The difference being, in a city with more than eight million people, it was difficult to find one with no one on it.

But it was still light out, she told herself, even if the street was strangely empty and the lamps were off despite a new set of dark clouds rolling in overhead. They needed the summer rain to take the edge off the heat, she thought, but it would sure suck to get stuck in it.

The ambient light was fading, shadows falling like a gray curtain over the city. In the historic district, there was always the added glow of gas lamps burning day and night. But here, the city was only beginning to correct the shortage of lights and a few were broken—not because they were being neglected, but probably because they hadn’t been reported. If you preferred to do your business in the dark, why would you want lamps?

About thirty paces down the road, Augusta regretted the decision to park so far away and she regretted wearing heels—even short ones.

What time was it? It
felt
late.

Cool air blew in, and steam rose from the blacktop. She passed a pothole that had recently been filled and her heel sank down into the hot asphalt. Suddenly, she felt rather than heard a presence behind her.

The footfalls were quick and lithe, rushing past her. The kid had her purse even before she could turn around to see who was coming. He was no older than twelve, his sneakered feet too big for his skinny body. He made away with the only designer purse Augusta had ever bought in her entire life. Instinctively she bolted after him, incensed.

If she caught him, she was going to turn him over her knee like a baby and paddle the daylights out of him in front of everyone watching—if anyone was watching—and then she was going to march him to his house and make him tell his mama what he’d done.

But he was too fast and turned into an alley before she could catch up. By the time Augusta reached the alley, she was winded, and even angrier, realizing he had her car keys.

At this point, she could give a damn about the purse. She just wanted her keys. In fact, if he would only come back, she would happily donate the Town Car to him for the price of a ride home. He probably needed it way more than she did anyway.

The sky was darkening fast. Shadows crept up the buildings along the alley. A Piggly Wiggly bag dragged itself over the brick pavement, the wind teasing it with a promised sail.

He was just a kid.

Suddenly, Savannah’s words echoed in her head.

Augusta hesitated—something she rarely did.

She stood at the entrance of the alleyway considering what to do as the wind kicked up leaves and trash. Daylight was fading fast. Her eyes skimmed the second-story windows. Some of them were boarded up. Others were simply empty black holes in decrepit wooden facades. Inside one of them, she thought she saw a face peering out from the shadows.

Although it usually took a lot more than a darkening alley, a few shadows and a windy afternoon to daunt her, Augusta turned away from the alley and hurried back toward King Street.

To hell with it! She could get a new purse and phone and change the locks. As for the Town Car, if it was still there in the morning, she’d have a locksmith come out and let her in. In the meantime, she wasn’t about to stick around and wait for one.

Hurrying toward King Street, she wondered if she even remembered either of her sisters’ phone numbers—something she was going to have to remedy going forward.

 

They gave up the choppers by late afternoon.

Kelly’s car was not in the Lockwood parking lot, nor was there any sign of it abandoned along the Ashley River.

While he waited to hear from Garrison, Jack pored through the contents of Baker’s laptop. Officially, she wasn’t a murder victim so the cases weren’t linked, which only meant that, for the moment, the laptop was flying under the radar of the county solicitor’s office. The cases had nothing in common—not even the note, which had been found in the same parking lot where Caroline’s note had appeared and could have been placed there on her windshield by virtually anyone. But Caroline wasn’t a victim, and until Kelly’s car was found and they knew for sure whether it had a similar note attached to it, there was no way to connect Caroline’s and Pam’s notes to Kelly’s murder. It was purely conjecture. In fact, if someone were to look at these cases from a high level, there was nothing to connect them, except coincidence . . . yet . . . Jack somehow knew they were connected.

He had two dead girls . . . another missing . . . what was the connection?

He tried to clear his mind to think clearly.

One of the missing girls had a direct connection to Caroline. The other to Jack. In his gut, Jack sensed that the game had turned personal. Were the notes a message, not for the police, but for Jack?

He thought about the message itself...
Death and life are in the power of the tongue; those who love it will eat its fruit.

What did it mean? Had the victims been targeted because of something they’d said? Something that was said about them? Something they didn’t say? Was the psycho eating their tongues because he believed they held some sort of power?

In Greek mythology Tereus raped his wife’s sister and cut out her tongue to keep her from telling anyone about the crime. For Andrei Chikatilo, a Ukrainian serial killer, biting off the tongue was an extension of his lovemaking. Natives in the southernmost part of New Guinea supposedly ate the tongues of slain enemies to take their bravery. Serial killer and cannibal Joachim Kroll killed and ate his victims to save on his grocery bill. And Dennis Rader considered his victims projects and likened killing them to putting down animals. He strangled them multiple times, reviving them, getting off on their struggles, until he finally killed them and ejaculated into one of their personal items.

Questions raced through Jack’s mind, but none of the answers were cohesive, none gelled and he was still poring through the laptop when Garrison walked into his office around four
P.M.

“You know that tail we put on Patterson . . . you’ll never guess where he went today.”

Jack was skimming through Baker’s e-mails. “Where?”

“Apparently, his girlfriend has a part-time job at the Wash ’N’ Shine, a car wash owned by her stepbrother out in Mt. Pleasant.”

“Girlfriend?”

“The chick who gave him his alibi.”

Jack’s head shot up. “Anyone been out yet to ask questions and take a look at their invoices?”

He and Garrison locked gazes. He knew Garrison had already discarded the messages as evidence, or at least put them at the bottom of his priority list, and he was unconvinced Pam’s disappearance was connected to the case. As far as everyone was concerned, the reference to the tongue was nothing but a coincidence. The white copy, like the pink copy, had been whistle clean, but both were found in the same parking garage on cars belonging to employees of the
Tribune
.

“I’m going now,” he said. “I just wanted to let you know.”

Jack stood, grabbing his keys, ready to ride with him. If Garrison wasn’t going to ask the right questions, someone had to.

Garrison shook his head. “Sorry. Can’t,” he said. “Condon wants you to sit this out. Just wanted you to know,” he said again, sounding apologetic, if just a little superior. This was his chance to outshine Jack and become the star detective—Condon’s pet. At least that’s how Jack thought Garrison perceived it. He sat back down, feeling impotent and angry.

“What about the computer?” Garrison asked, probably as a consolation. “Find anything yet?”

“Nothing.”