Quinn’s face took on a soft countenance, and her eyes got moist. “It’s nothing, really.”
Taylor wasn’t going to let that go; the look on Quinn’s face told her that there was something about the poem. “I think there may be something here. There’re several more. Are you sure they don’t mean anything to you?”
Taylor looked at Quinn, who was trying to look away. Taylor could see that her shoulders were shaking slightly, and she was amazed to see a tear fall down Quinn’s lovely face.
“What’s wrong?” she asked softly. “Is this getting to you?”
Quinn laughed out a sob. “No, it’s nothing like that. I loved my sister, and I’m sick at heart that she’s dead. But the poems, that’s got nothing to do with it. My husband used to send me poems. He doesn’t anymore.” She turned away and gathered herself by walking through the kitchen, grabbing a paper towel, splashing some water on it and holding it to her face. When she turned back to Taylor, her eyes were shining but she was back in control.
“Silly of me, to think of Jake in the middle of all this. I guess seeing that Whitney has an admirer made me wish that Jake felt like that about me still.” And with that, she left the room. Taylor could hear her rummaging around but decided to leave her alone for a while.
Taylor swept through the rest of the house, looking for anything that would give them a clue as to why Whitney Connolly was in such desperate straits to reach her sister. If only the maid hadn’t wiped away any obvious intent by straightening and cleaning. If there were papers left out, notes or the like, there was no way to know. Then she had a thought.
“Quinn?” she called out. “Have the officers from the accident scene given you any of Whitney’s personal effects?”
Quinn came back into the kitchen. “No, I’m supposed to go to the morgue and pick them up. They said there were a few things in the car…Oh, now that was dumb of me, wasn’t it? We should have gone to get her things before we came all the way out here.”
Taylor stifled a laugh, as if Bellevue, a scant five minutes farther out from downtown than Belle Meade, was on the other side of the universe. “It’s really no trouble. We can head over there now if you’d like. I think we need to go through and see if anything in her stuff gives us a better idea than what we’ve gotten here.”
“That’s fine. I can write you a release and you can go through the information on your own, if that’s okay?”
Taylor studied her for a moment. “I can do that, but you may want to be there.” She hesitated, then decided it would be dumb not to ask. “Quinn, you don’t think this has anything to do with Nathan Chase, do you?”
Quinn’s face drained of color. “Oh dear God, you don’t think he’s…? Could he have gotten in touch with Whitney somehow?”
“Well, I don’t know. Has he ever reached out to you or your sister before?”
Quinn started pacing, a pale manicured hand clasped to her throat. She looked as if she might shatter into a million pieces all over the foyer.
“No, we’ve had no contact from him. It was part of his sentence. And he’s still in jail, I know, because I check every so often to make sure he’s not getting out. He’s not due for parole for another fifteen years.”
Taylor digested that for a moment. Kidnapping was one thing, but Chase had been sentenced to at least thirty years. She made a mental note to look up the case and find out what exactly he’d been sentenced for. It probably wasn’t germane to this case, but it wouldn’t hurt to have the whole story.
“Okay, Quinn. I’ll go and sort through Whitney’s things. If I find anything of note, I’ll let you know.”
“Thank you. Tell me, when will her body be released? I need to start making plans for the memorial.”
“Just give the M.E.’s office a call. They’ll be able to give you all of that information. It’ll be soon, I promise.”
As they made their way toward the door, they didn’t hear the chime go off on the computer to announce that Whitney had another new e-mail.
Thirty
Christina Louise Dale, better known as Christy to her family and friends, was a sad case. Nineteen years old, petite and brunette, Christy was always hustling, always looking for a way to get it done. She didn’t have the money to go to college nor the grades to get a scholarship, so she worked hard and associated with the college students around Roanoke as often as possible. She was autodidactic, and when she mentioned that, most of the college kids didn’t even know what it meant. On one hand, it was outrageous that she could be so much smarter than the rest of them and still not have a chance to go to school with them. But on the other hand, she secretly gloated, knowing that no matter what, she was better than all of them.
She continued her quest to educate herself and read everything she could in her spare time. She landed herself a job that would afford her the opportunities that had been denied to her so far in her short life. The parent company of her small community hospital had a program to give scholarships to those needy employees who demonstrated a will and a dedication to getting a higher education, but only in the medical field. That was fine with her. She could always do her time with the company and then branch out when she got a little older.
Christy bided her time. She was a diligent employee, even if the things she did outside of work were a little questionable. Admittedly, she drank too much. She drank too much and smoked too much. And oftentimes she did a few drugs that probably weren’t the most legal things in the world. Nothing hard-core, but the soft stuff, the campus drugs. That way she felt she was experiencing the same things that all nineteen-year-old college girls experience. The booze, the drugs, the boys. Oh yes, the boys. She really liked the boys. But that wasn’t exactly a bad thing, at least in her mind. She was in control of her body, she had the last word in everything she did. The fact that she might have sex on a given night with a guy that never asked for her number wasn’t a problem. If she wanted to see him again, she could find a way to do it.
So maybe she dressed a little provocatively. Maybe she drank too much, slept around a little too much. What difference did that make?
Baldwin knew all of this, and more, so when he stared down at Christy’s lifeless body, tossed off the edge of the road in Asheville, North Carolina, he couldn’t help but wonder if poor Christy had any idea of the danger she was putting herself in, over and over, having sex with strange men, riding off in cars that didn’t belong to her and, most importantly, taking a stranger back to the motel that she used when she didn’t want her mom to know she was out fooling around.
But Christy’s mother had known. She knew everything her daughter did, and either didn’t care enough to do anything about it, or just didn’t believe she could make a difference. When Baldwin had sat down with her, mere hours after they knew Christy’s body had been taken from room 3 at the Happy Roads Inn, Charlie Dale didn’t seem surprised.
Charlie Dale smoked continuously throughout their interview. Baldwin thought he would choke in the dim air of her trailer, and wondered if there had ever been an open window in the place. It was stacked with laundry, washed or unwashed was anyone’s guess, trash, full ashtrays and dirt, layer upon layer of dirt. Charlie wasn’t much of a housekeeper, and told Baldwin that. He’d smiled and pretended things were fine, which he assumed Charlie had been doing for at least a decade.
She didn’t have a lot of nice things to say about her daughter. Christy had been a surprise in her mother’s life, a surprise that had come along when Charlie was fifteen and madly in love with a boy from uptown Roanoke. When she found herself pregnant, she never heard from him again. It had been her and Christy all along, she told Baldwin. And that girl was never going to amount to anything, the way she ran around, whoring and drinking. Just ’cause it was good enough for her mama didn’t mean it was good enough for her. I always wanted something better for Christy, she told Baldwin, but I never knew how to get it for her.
As Baldwin gazed down at Christy, he felt a sadness that was as much sorrow for the girl’s death as it was for the raw deal she’d gotten in her short life.
When they’d gotten the call that a body had been found in Asheville, North Carolina, Baldwin hadn’t even blinked. The killer wasn’t thinking too far ahead. Now that they were hot on his trail, he was grabbing, killing and dumping, and he’d really gotten on a tear. Christy hadn’t even been missing a day, and now Baldwin stood over her
