All the Pretty Girls. J.T. Ellison
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sold in every hardware store in the country, so it was virtually untraceable. There was no other physical evidence they could find. They had the print from the door, but that too was part of his MO. They set the place to rights as they went. They worked quickly but thoroughly, and when they finished they shared a look. Poor Betsy. As brave a face as she may want to put on, she had been through hell.
Her suspected rapist, dubbed with the moniker “The Rainman,” had been terrorizing the women of Nashville for five years. He’d earned his name because he only struck when it was raining. He’d attacked seven women, eight now, by forcing his way in their back doors, tying them up and raping them. Simple, straightforward crimes. He never spoke, wore a ski mask, always used a condom. His victims had been known to say that it seemed he was almost disinterested in what he was doing. Just tied them up, slipped on a condom, forced his way into their bodies and left through the back door. That was it, nothing more. He’d never hit a single one, just threatened them into compliance with a gun to the head or a knife to the side. He had a unique but relatively innocuous MO, one some experts classified as a gentleman rapist. Until today, none of his victims had been physically injured.
Taylor and Fitz finished up and made their way to the backyard. They smoked companionably in silence for a time, until Taylor felt the need to point out the obvious.
“Think it was a copycat?”
“I think we have to look at the possibility, given this new MO. We’ll know soon enough. If that print on the back door was his, they’ll be able to match it to the other rapes. What a kook. Leave the rope and your print behind. They’ve never gotten a hit off the print, he’s obviously never been in trouble with the law. So how a does a law-abiding citizen suddenly turn into a rapist?”
“Fitz, if I knew the answer to that, I could probably hawk it to the daytime shows and make a million dollars. Let’s get over to the hospital and see if Betsy’s out of surgery yet.”
Chapter Nine
Baldwin sat as far back in the cramped seat as his legs would allow and fastened his seat belt for the quick trip to Atlanta. As soon as the plane cleared ten thousand feet and the pilot finished greeting the passengers, he pulled out his laptop and opened his e-mail. The file for the missing girl appeared before him. Shauna Lyn Davidson.
The call had come from Jerry Grimes, the field agent that had been running the cases from Alabama and Louisiana. He’d been instructed to keep Baldwin up to speed on the cases, and he’d complied, albeit reluctantly at first. Handing off his case to the FBI’s most celebrated profiler rubbed him the wrong way. But now, the note of panic in his voice was near the surface.
“Baldwin, they’ve definitively identified Shauna Davidson in Georgia. Her body is in a field off a rural exit, near Adairsville off I-75. Looks the same, body dumped in a field, strangled and she’s missing her hands. What the hell is this guy up to?”
“Grimes, you’ve told them what to look for, right? They need to find it.”
“Awww, shit, I know, I know. They’re looking for the hand now. I’m on my way there, are you coming?”
The accusatory note was not lost on Baldwin, but he chose to ignore it.
“I’m on my way, man. Hang in there.”
Baldwin glanced at his watch and saw it was too early to order a drink. This was supposed to be a beautiful, quiet day, spent in bed with the woman he loved. Not a day to go traipsing through death. Yet here he was, on a plane to Atlanta to hunt for the Strangler.
Being a profiler meant long hours in strange locales, but the longer he worked for the FBI, the more he was struck by the commonality of every situation. Madman kills innocent, then does it again. An MO is established, the FBI is consulted and Baldwin would be thrown on a plane. He’d chosen this life, this world. He had the rare ability to disengage, to be unaffected by the horrifying details of the cases. But it was starting to wear thin. He didn’t know exactly what he should do—stay with the FBI or strike out on his own. He’d love to steal Taylor away from Metro, but he knew in his heart of hearts that wouldn’t happen anytime soon.
He pushed those thoughts away. He needed to stay focused, and thinking about Taylor Jackson would derail even the strongest of men.
Local law enforcement in Alabama and Louisiana had done all the right things in processing their cases. The Alabama authorities worked closely with the Baton Rouge cops. They ran all the right tests, did the right investigation and still had no clue who had strangled eighteen-year-old Susan Palmer, cut off her hands and dumped her body in a field in Baton Rouge. The crimes seemed connected, there were definite similarities—manual strangulation and missing hands. But it was Jeanette Lernier’s case that had drawn the FBI’s attention. When she was examined in the field, the medical examiner had rolled her and found a hand underneath the lifeless body. Everyone assumed it was Jeanette’s. When DNA showed the hand belonged to Susan Palmer, from Alabama, people had gotten interested. Grimes and his partner, Thomas Petty, had been called to give interagency cooperation and support to the local authorities. When nothing happened for a month, the hunt was scaled back, Grimes and Petty went back to other cases, and the murders went into the annals of cold crimes that permeate small-town law enforcement. Grimes still kept a finger in the case, doing interviews with friends and family, but Petty caught the disappearance of a nine-year-old boy and was pulled off to work that crime. Time marches on. New crimes are committed. The cases weren’t forgotten, just relegated to the back burner.
The details of the two cases were kept quiet in the hopes that somewhere down the road an answer would surface. Two families buried only parts of their cherished daughters. Now two more families would be getting their daughters’ incomplete bodies back for burial. He prayed it would end here.
Baldwin had been made aware of the crimes but hadn’t been actively involved in the situation. The call this morning, the call to arms tasking him to the case, was going to change all that. The FBI would be able to claim complete jurisdiction if necessary because the kidnappings and murders crossed state lines, but so far the local police had cooperated and appeared to be a major help in their investigation, not a hindrance.
The original FBI team, Jerry Grimes and Thomas Petty, were smart, seasoned agents. When Jessica Porter had gone missing, her bedroom found full of blood, local law enforcement loaded the details of the case into VICAP. When the MO matched, Grimes and Petty were called in to help assess the scene. When they examined her apartment, they immediately thought of the Strangler. Grimes had called Baldwin and informed him of the case. He’d forwarded the information they had, which wasn’t much. Baldwin pulled this thin folder out of his briefcase and started refreshing his memory. It was written in the dry, impersonal tone of a police report, one that allowed no emotion to creep in and destroy the officers’ and agents’ objectivity.
CASE OVERVIEW—JESSICA ANN PORTER The victim is a Caucasian female age 18. She is 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighs 120 pounds, has long brown hair and brown eyes. She was born on April 27, 1986, in the city of Jackson, Mississippi. She has a strawberry birthmark on her left bicep, a belly-button ring with a small crystal ball and pierced ears. The victim disappeared while walking home from her job as a receptionist at a Jackson community hospital. The victim…
“Ah, hell,” he muttered. “I can’t do it like this.” Too damn impersonal. Baldwin closed the file in front of him and thought back to the discussion he’d had with Grimes. The man had been pretty broken up, too broken up. He had phoned Baldwin as soon as they’d cleared out of the Porter girl’s apartment, finished with the statements of family and friends. Baldwin mentally replayed the conversation. It was a knack he had, being able to tap into his brain and extract what he needed with total recall. Taylor sometimes hated him for it, she could never get away with anything. He smiled at the thought, then plugged into his mental database.
It had been a quiet night. For the past few months, Baldwin had been tasked to the Middle Tennessee Field Office, ostensibly working as a regional profiler. Baldwin had been working cases for the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit out of Quantico peripherally,