Charli Cross 01-Dark Purpose, page 23
part #1 of Charli Cross Series
She’d held onto the weak hope that one of the female teachers might have caught something her male peers missed, but she was disappointed. The only new detail had come from Willa Mayfield, who had wrinkled her nose and claimed both Maddie and Regina liked to push the dress code boundaries and dress a little provocatively upon occasion.
Given the geometry teacher’s modest attire—a loose floral-print dress with a high neckline and calf-length hem, paired with old-school, low-heeled pumps—Charli didn’t put much stock in the comment. Her last interview subject, Mariela Lynch, confirmed as much when she repeated the remark without naming names.
The pretty Spanish teacher had snorted. “If by provocative they meant that Maddie dressed like eighty percent of the teen girls in the country, then sure.” She’d tucked a strand of light brown hair behind her ear before shaking her head. “I swear, every time I think we’re finally emerging into modern times, I hear something like this and weep.”
All in all, none of the interviews turned up much. None of the teachers had been able to recall any overlap between Maddie and Regina or remember anything troubling.
The only details of interest remained the fishing photo on Drummond’s desk and the boys from Potter’s classroom, but all of that was flimsier than a straw house in a tornado. Matthew was right. Baldwin was the most interesting find by far. That still didn’t make him a suspect.
She followed the corridor back to the main office, texting Matthew along the way to see if he’d finished yet. Hopefully, her partner’s interviews had yielded better results.
Her phone pinged.
Done. Meet me at the truck.
When she passed by the front desk to reach the parking lot, the receptionist made a point of glancing up this time.
Good. If nothing else, maybe at least the staff would be more vigilant going forward.
Country music blasted from Matthew’s pickup truck when she opened the passenger door. He dialed back the volume as she climbed in. “Well?”
“Not much.” She quickly filled him in on Drummond, the boys in Potter’s class, and the geometry teacher’s comment about the way the girls dressed. “You?”
“Maybe. I decided to do a little poking around about Baldwin, and two of Regina’s teachers definitely had a reaction when his name came up. One of them clammed up, but Regina’s English teacher said there’d been some talk when he first arrived a year ago. I couldn’t get any more out of her, though, so I hit up the guidance counselor again afterward.”
“And?”
“After a little prodding, she lowered her voice and admitted she’d heard when he’d applied for the job there might have been some weirdness with his old school, some kind of baggage, but the principal was tight-lipped, and they’d been desperate at the time because the last P.E. teacher left without giving notice.”
Charli drew her eyebrows together. “Surely if the baggage was anything that bad, the school wouldn’t have given him a good reference?”
“You know how it is. No one wants a scandal or the responsibility…they just want to make the trouble someone else’s problem.” When her expression remained skeptical, Matthew sighed. “Think about how often police departments let bad cops resign instead of forcing them out and reporting them?”
Much as it pained her to admit it, Matthew had a point. She could name two cops off the top of her head who’d left under those exact circumstances. The practice was a frustrating holdover from the old boys’ network of the past. One Charli personally hated, since the practice often ended up biting the new precinct—and the public—in the ass. Bad cops didn’t magically change their stripes just because they moved to a new town. They took their crappy tactics with them.
If that happened with police, it probably happened in other professions. “Did she say anything else?”
“No, the principal walked by then, and she changed the subject. She wouldn’t say anything else after that.”
Charli considered that information while Matthew drove them back to the precinct. There could be something to his line of thought. Principal Moen definitely came across as the type of administrator who’d go to great lengths to avoid a scandal…but still. Even if Baldwin had committed some disciplinary violation, that didn’t make him a killer.
The secrecy around his hiring did make him worthy of follow-up, though.
Once inside the precinct, she and Matthew split up. He headed straight to Janice to see if there was any progress on the background checks while Charli retreated to their office to do a little digging on the two boys Potter had mentioned.
She found one of them on Instagram. His photos and captions didn’t sound any alarm bells. None featured any of the dead girls. The other boy didn’t appear to have a social media presence. She copied their names to a blank page, adding the names of the other students mentioned by teachers as being friendly with the victims. Jayden, Ashley, and Brooke from Baldwin’s P.E. class went on the list too. Tomorrow, they could start interviewing them.
Next, she hunted down the phone number for the marina Drummond mentioned. Half an hour later, she’d learned Mike Drummond owned a small speedboat with no below-deck storage. The manager she spoke with said the teacher was there a lot over the summer and more sporadically during the spring, but he’d never seen him with any girls, only another man.
Frustrated, she headed back to the conference room where they’d all met that morning.
She wondered if Fields and Powell had made more progress. “Not like they could have done much worse,” she muttered.
The rolling whiteboards were still spread out in front of the table. Charli reviewed the information on each victim again before turning to study the map.
A few fruitless minutes later, she pulled out her phone and typed in the information she knew about Blake Baldwin. She found the right one in under a minute. His home address was a little trickier.
After coming up empty-handed, she shot off a text to Matthew: Shoot me Baldwin’s address when you get it.
Another two minutes passed before he sent her a reply with the information.
She added the pin to the map before stepping back and folding her arms. Baldwin lived less than half a mile from the Hanleys, but that put him on the opposite side of town from the Feists.
When nothing else popped out at her, she scooted farther away, closed her eyes, and opened them again.
Nope. Still nothing. No overlap, no obvious patterns. Unless the fact that the three pins representing the victims’ addresses covered the west, north, and east sides of Savannah counted as a pattern. Could that be some kind of code, suggesting the killer’s next victim would come from the south? Or was she so desperate to find a clue that she was making things up? Because she was definitely desperate.
Groaning, Charli clasped her hands together behind her neck. “And you give Matthew a hard time for his hunches. Next thing you know, you’ll be reading tea leaves to find the murderer, or better yet, calling in a psychic.”
Her gaze was drawn back to the tight cluster of three pins near the Vernon River.
The marsh. He’d buried all three victims within three-quarters of a mile of each other in the same stretch of wetlands. Could there be something about the crime scene they’d all missed?
If she stood here twiddling her thumbs while staring at the map any longer, she might be driven to do something drastic. Like, say, google crystal balls.
She turned her back on the whiteboards and headed for the door. Hopefully, Artie down in Cyber was having better luck than her.
A short time later, Charli trudged back up the stairs. She’d sat in Artie’s little command station for the better part of the past hour, scouring Shana’s photos and in-app messages. The most exciting thing she’d found was a picture of a cat wearing a pair of hot pink sunglasses. Nothing had appeared off. Although, she wasn’t confident she’d even recognize “off” if she stumbled across it, short of a man holding up a tube of lipstick with a big arrow pointing to his face. There just wasn’t enough to go on.
Her mind wandered back to the marsh, and from there, the construction site. If their killer wanted a viewing point for all the hoopla he’d instigated, the dirt lot was perfect.
On her way up the stairs, she checked her phone. No voice mails yet from the foreman. She typed up a quick reminder to call back tomorrow for that list of employee names and background checks. Although, their killer was smart. Too smart, maybe, to attach himself to the site by name.
That didn’t mean he couldn’t be sneaking in after hours.
She dialed down to the front desk. “Hey, it’s Cross. I need someone to push through the paperwork to get security cameras installed at a construction site ASAP. It’s for the Marsh Killer case.” Matthew jogged up as she was rattling off the address, his cheeks flushed. Charli wasn’t sure if it was from exhaustion or because he hated when the press gave serial killers such cringy names.“Notify me as soon as you get the approval. Oh, and can we send a patrol car by after hours? Tell them to take down the license and vehicle information of anyone they find and call me immediately.”
Charli hung up and gave him her full attention. “What’s up? Background checks show something?” She motioned to the files in his hand.
He lifted his other hand, showing her his phone. “I’ve got Lainey Ashe on the line.” He closed the door. “She wants to talk to us in private about Baldwin.”
26
I slouched behind the wheel in the dark, keeping my eyes trained on the stretch of sidewalk ahead while Nat King Cole crooned from the speakers. A streetlight provided soft illumination of the area beyond where I’d parked by the curb, in front of a house with a “For Rent” sign poking out from a weedy patch of dirt in the front yard.
The dashboard clock showed the time as a little after eight o’clock. I’d been sitting here waiting since before the sun had started to set a good fifteen minutes ago. What little light lingered in the sky was rapidly fading. Within the next ten minutes, this little neighborhood would be in full twilight, something I’d noted during my previous visits over the last few weeks, just like I’d charted all the other pertinent details. If I’d learned one thing from teaching, it was the importance of planning ahead.
I knew her route home from the pizza parlor to her house well enough to walk it blindfolded in my sleep, along with the time I could expect her to appear within each particular segment.
Without fail, she left work promptly after her shift finished at seven forty-five, always setting foot out the door no later than eight. Her walking speed varied depending on whether or not she was reading something on her phone, chatting with a friend, or listening to music, but not by much. On each occasion I’d timed her, she’d arrived home within sixteen to twenty-one minutes. The only outlier was the time she’d jogged part of the way, when she’d completed the route in fewer than fourteen minutes.
I’d planned for this occasion with meticulous care. I was confident I had all the details down. The biggest lingering uncertainty in my head was one I couldn’t control…what if she got a ride home tonight?
The concern didn’t come from left field. My girls were still the leading news story across all the stations. Good thing I was packing up and leaving soon. Even if I’d been able to stay in Savannah, hunting would have become so much more difficult. Too many frightened parents concerned about their darling daughters’ safety after a lifetime of neglect.
“And where were you when they needed you most, to teach them about moral safety, hmm?”
I checked the clock again. Ten after eight. Five more minutes before I could expect her to strut down the sidewalk like a little tart in those skintight black pants she wore to work with her fitted red uniform tee.
I shifted my body in the seat as excitement drummed through my veins. She would show up. I had faith. After all, if the trained peace officer who’d come out to the school today couldn’t figure out who I was or stop me, that had to be a sign that my cause was just.
I’d faced the officer as politely as could be, answering all those questions while concentrating on not getting a hard-on that would be difficult to explain away. Certain doom had been only a few feet away from me and had been none the wiser. The thrill of deceiving them was intoxicating, like guzzling a glass of champagne on a hot day.
The only experience that surpassed that one in terms of dizzying, walking-near-the-edge-of-a-cliff delight was when I captured and repurified one of my girls.
My pulse ratcheted up in anticipation. This would be my last girl in Savannah, so I needed to make it special. Back at my old house on the farm, I’d stashed all of them in the cellar. Sadly, my house here didn’t have a cellar to speak of…but it did have an attic. At first, I was hesitant to use it for those purposes because of the heat, but the high temperatures had turned into one of my favorite parts.
So much sweet, delicious sweat. I shivered, remembering how damp and perfect Maddie’s skin had been. Glistening and pure, like her body was cleansing itself under my watch.
“But I messed up a little with you, didn’t I? Too much tranquilizer.” I sighed. Tragic, really. Poor Maddie had never fully recovered from her dose, so she’d never had a true opportunity to repent. I checked the syringe in the center console for the tenth time.
For my last girl in Savannah, I was going out on a limb. I’d halved the tranquilizer dosage from what I’d used before. That way, she’d still have some fight left in her. Hopefully, a lot of fight. I’d even decided to go a step beyond and zip tie her hands in front of her when I locked her in the attic rather than behind her like the others. That ought to make her extra feisty.
Even the mere thought of the fear that would etch itself across her face while she attempted to shove me away sent blood surging between my legs.
Up ahead, movement grabbed my attention, but it was only an older woman heading out from her house and onto the sidewalk. I ducked low in the seat when she started in my direction, heartbeat accelerating. The tinted windows should do their job, unless she was one of those busybodies who took it upon themselves to snoop through every unknown vehicle in the neighborhood.
Peeking through the openings in the steering wheel, I waited as she crossed the street and cut through the alley on the opposite side. The stranglehold on my lungs released when she disappeared from sight.
Eight-sixteen gleamed from my dashboard. Two minutes behind her usual schedule. Disappointment tunneled through my heart.
Maybe my luck had run out, and she really had gotten a ride tonight.
“I’ll give you five more minutes.” Any more than that and I’d be forced to abandon ship. Straying too far from the plan was too dangerous at this juncture.
At eight-seventeen, she appeared beneath the streetlight. My pulse gave a little jump for joy.
Even in the dim light, the way she carried herself and her lithe, freshly bloomed body reminded me of my daughter. Just like she had that very first day I’d laid eyes on her back in May.
Only selecting girls from my school would have been too obvious, so I’d had to branch out. Luckily, my side gig also put me into contact with plenty of other girls who were ripe for the picking.
A car cruised down the street, headlights forming an eerie glow on the dark road. The girl’s eyes tracked the car until it disappeared before continuing toward me.
My breathing quickened. My fingertips tingled. Her vigilance as she drew closer only made her more enticing.
“You’ll be my last hoorah in this town…we’ll have to make sure it’s a memorable one.”
Jenny Withers waited until the car disappeared down the street behind her before walking down the sidewalk again. She was probably being silly, letting her mom’s warnings get to her. Yeah, they’d found three dead girls in the marsh, but that was, what? Three girls out of however many tens of thousands who lived in this city?
The reassurance allowed her to relax a little. In less than ten minutes, she’d be home. Her mom worked until eight forty-five at the grocery store, or else she would have picked her up. She’d tried to get Jenny to wait at the pizza place once her shift ended, but no, thank you.
By the end of her workday, she smelled like a salami stick. She couldn’t wait to get home and shower.
In the past, she’d rarely worried about anyone bothering her on the walk home. Tonight, though, the street appeared darker somehow. More foreboding.
Or maybe she was just a big wimp, like her friends said. She was the only one in their group who refused to watch horror movies.
In the distance, a car alarm pierced the night. She jumped, her head whipping in that direction. The shrill ringing stopped a few seconds later, making her laugh at her nerves.
See? Not a boogeyman. Just some idiot accidentally setting off their own alarm.
Officially spooked, she picked up her pace. For the next few weeks, she’d take her mom up on that offer of a ride. No big deal. She could sit in the back and do her homework while she waited. She’d survive an extra hour of smelling like spicy pork.
Homework, ugh. After her shower, she had a buttload left to do. That’s what she got for signing up for honors and AP classes this year. Getting out of work on time tonight had been tougher than usual. Her boss had pulled her aside and made her go over the weekend’s schedule for the third time and all but sign her name in blood that she’d show up for the Saturday afternoon-evening shift.
Once she promised—also for the third time—that she definitely wouldn’t flake at the last second to attend the first high school football game, he’d finally let her leave.
Football was fine and all, but she much preferred the tips she’d earn from the packed restaurant before and after the game. She already had a little more than a thousand dollars saved. Pretty soon, she’d be able to afford a cheap car. Besides, the after parties were much more fun than sitting in the bleachers sweating her butt off. She’d leave work in plenty of time to hit one of those.
