Lincoln’s eyes grew wide. “The rapist? Did he kill someone?”

“No, he didn’t. But he raped Betsy Garrison last night.”

She waited for that news to sink in. Lincoln opened his mouth, then closed it with a brief shake of his head. Marcus spoke first.

“I assume you want this kept quiet?”

“Got it in one, puppy. We need to keep Betsy’s name out of it at all costs. She doesn’t want the people in her unit to know she’s been raped. She got beat up pretty badly, too, and Brian Post’s been informing people she had a car accident. Bless her heart, she’s okay about the rape. I was at the hospital talking to her and she really was holding up well. Better than I would be.”

“Did she have any information that we can go on?” Marcus had already switched into investigator mode.

“Fitz and I processed the scene, and we got a whole lotta nothing. There was a print on the back door that I lifted, and we need to see if that matches up with the prints on file from his past rapes. There’s good and bad news, too. They have DNA, from all the rapes. They haven’t released it to the public, or any of us for that matter, because TBI can’t get the more recent rapes into CODIS. We’ve got DNA from Betsy, and the spermicide that was found in her PERK matches the condom brand he’s been using. We’ve got the rope, but it’s the same generic kind he’s been using all along.

“Here’s what I want. Both of you look at this like it’s never happened before. New rapist on the street. Brand-new case. We have no usable evidence, no leads. Just find out who he is for me. Start here.” She handed them both a copy of the summary sheet.

While identifying information was scarce, the Rainman had an incredibly unique pattern that was baffling the police. He only raped in months that ended in the letter Y-January, February, May and July. He only struck when it was raining, sometimes even in violent thunderstorms. Every attack came on the third Thursday of the month. And he’d only done two rapes a year. He’d struck twice in 2000, 2002 and 2004.

“This is the name and address of his last victim. She thinks she may have an idea of who he is.”

“You’re kidding?” they both chimed.

“No, I’m not. Betsy spoke with her after the latest rape, said she was really reluctant to relive the crime and give decent information. Problem is, she couldn’t identify him. Doesn’t know his name, can’t remember where she knew him from. It’s more like something about him seemed familiar to her. So go talk to her and see if you can jog her memory.”

Marcus was reading the summary sheet. “There are a couple of major discrepancies here. He didn’t hit on a Thursday, for one. We’ll have to wait on the DNA-Taylor, are you sure we don’t have a copycat?”

“I’m not sure of anything. Betsy seems positive that this was the Rainman. But you’re right to question that. Get the print run. That should tell you pretty quick if it’s him or not. Criminals break their patterns. Trust the evidence, it won’t lead you astray.”

“Okay, LT. We’ll let you know.” Marcus stood and stretched.

“Yeah, no problem, boss. We’re on it.” Lincoln gave her another crooked smile and they left her office, talking to each other quietly about the next steps they’d take.

Okay, she thought, one down. The nice thing about management, she got to give more orders. She smiled to herself. She would be right there with them, she just had one thing she needed to do first.

She picked up the phone and dialed her doctor’s phone number from memory. The constant tests and checkups were past tiresome. Some of the medication she had been taking after the accident had wreaked havoc on her liver, so the doctors had taken her off the medicine but insisted on monthly checks of her liver function. A cheery voice answered the phone. “Dr. Gregory’s office!”

“Shelby, it’s Taylor Jackson. I wanted to get my test results.”

The cheer kicked up a notch. “Oh, Taylor. Hi! Dr. Gregory was just about to call you. Hold on a second while I get him to pick up the phone.”

Taylor stared at the watermark in the corner of the ceiling. She really needed to put a call into maintenance to see if they could replace that tile. It drove her nuts. As she started fiddling with a pencil, Dr. Gregory’s baritone practically forced its way through the phone.

“How’s my favorite cop?”

“I’m fine, Doc. Tell me you have good news and I don’t have to get stuck anymore.”

The doctor was quiet for a second, then cleared his throat. Taylor’s heart sank. Dammit, she’d done everything they’d told her, and she felt fine. Well, as fine as she could, considering everything she’d been through.

“Please, Dr. Gregory, I thought everything would be okay by now.” She heard the whine in her voice and straightened in her chair. She sounded like a petulant eight-year-old.

“No, no, Taylor, your liver function is completely back to normal. Are you feeling okay otherwise?”

“Well, yeah. A little tired maybe, but that’s nothing new.”

He breathed a slight laugh into the phone. “Well, honey, you’re probably going to feel that way for a while.”

As he continued talking, Taylor felt the world spin.

Seventeen

T he sun leaked into the room, its wavering light barely brightening the small square space where Whitney Connolly was working furiously at her computer. She’d broken protocol this morning, skimming through her e-mails but not bothering to answer them. The only one that mattered, the only one she opened, was from her mysterious friend with the untraceable Yahoo account. The note was simple:

Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

There was no postscript. She didn’t need them now. She appreciated that he recognized that she’d figured it out. How he knew was beyond her, but that didn’t matter.

After seeing that note, knowing what must have happened, Whitney got to work. Another girl was dead. So she was doing research. Any good journalist would, right? If she was getting messages from the Southern Strangler, she needed to have background. She needed to build the elements of the case, just like a cop would do. She had to start thinking about her reel, make everything come together so that when she broke the story and had the first interview with this guy, everything was in place. Why else would he be sending her messages, unless he planned on talking to her?

She flew through cyberspace, fingers clicking on the keyboard. She decided on Court TV’s ultrainformative Web site on serial killers. Plugging in the search criteria, she sat back, waiting for the answers to be spit out at her. She wanted to see incidences of killers using poems at crime scenes.

She stopped for a second. There hadn’t been anything on the news about the notes. She was assuming they’d been found at the crime scenes. At least, that’s what her source in Louisiana said. The poem was in Lernier’s gym bag, but no one thought anything about it. She’d heard, through that same source, that the FBI now had the notes, that they saw the significance of them. That just meant she had to work harder and faster.

Shauna Davidson had been found in Georgia, but her crime scene was still here in Nashville. Whitney placed a call, just trying to confirm that there was a note in Shauna’s effects, and was shut down entirely. No one was talking to her. That in and of itself confirmed it for her-she was tight with her source in Metro’s police, and if he wouldn’t talk to her, things must really be heating up.

She went back to the computer. The search results were varied and numerous-apparently lots of serial killers liked to use poetry. Some wrote their own, some copied others. Some sliced famous authors into their own works. She bookmarked an article about the BTK killer in Wichita, Kansas, for good measure. At the very least, maybe something about Bind Torture and Kill would jump out at her.

She sat back and thought for a minute. At the very least, maybe she could find out if the poems were originals or copies. She bookmarked the site and pulled up Google, typing a line in from Susan Palmer’s poem. A

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