escaping his throat. “No, no, no, no, NO! No, I didn’t do any of those things. I didn’t, I swear it! I may be a jerk, but I’m not a killer. I didn’t kill anyone. Christ, you have to listen to me. Lawyer. I want my lawyer. Right now!” he roared, eyes white with panic.
Taylor turned tail and walked out of the room. Baldwin followed suit. They left Jake Buckley blubbering like a baby in the interrogation room and joined the rest of the homicide team.
They met her in the hall, all four men grinning. “Nice performance, Lieutenant.” Price congratulated her. “You scared him so shitless he forgot to ask for a lawyer until the very end. Well done, girl.”
“Thank you, thank you. But we have to get him to say something other than ‘No, I didn’t do it.’ Baldwin?”
Baldwin was staring at the floor, lost in thought.
“Baldwin?”
He met her eyes. “Something’s not right about him.”
“Well, we know that. Your average guy doesn’t like to kill his dates at the end of the evening,” she said.
“No, it’s something more. He was really cocky with you when you let him think he was in control. But the second you turned on him, he cowered like a beaten dog. This killer wouldn’t do that. The notes he’s sending, the sensational nature of the crime-I think he’d be bragging about it. I don’t think he’d let you get under his skin like that.”
“C’mon, Mr. Fed, give the girl some credit. She can waltz back in there and he’ll tell her anything she wants to hear.” Fitz wasn’t quite growling at Baldwin, but he definitely was pushing things.
“He just might. But I don’t know if it’s him. We need to get some of the forensics together, get his DNA. We can compel a DNA sample from him now, right?”
Taylor nodded.
“Then let’s do that. We can try to match it against the semen taken from Christina Dale’s crime scene. I just can’t get my head around him as the killer. Not the way he backed off when Taylor got in his face. An accomplice, maybe. Hell, I don’t know. Let’s get some proof.”
Fitz stared at Baldwin as if he were an alien. “Baldwin, the man had Ivy Clark all laid out in the trunk of his car. He was speeding back to Nashville to get rid of the body. He had the bag of tools right there in the car with him, his own damn initials stamped on it. What the hell more do you need?” He raised a beefy paw. “Naw, don’t answer that. I’ll go get the sample, have it run over to be tested.” He disappeared into the hallway.
Baldwin turned to Taylor, whose smile had faded. It had felt right. “Let Buckley stew for a little bit. I want to go over the file on Whitney and Quinn.”
Forty-Six
Baldwin set up shop in the conference room across the hall from Jake Buckley’s interrogation room. The files from Quinn and Whitney’s kidnapping were spread before him. He buzzed through them, absorbing all the information. The story was all too familiar.
Whitney and Quinn were bright, bubbly twelve-year-olds when they went missing. They’d been playing that day, innocent and pure, two sisters enjoying an afternoon of free time after school, no responsibilities other than make-believe and fun. They were both towheaded, blue-eyed and happy. All this Baldwin gleaned from the photos of the girls that accompanied the files. Photos from before the kidnapping.
The after shots, pictures taken when the girls were recovered and taken to police headquarters while their parents were notified, told a different story. Their eyes were troubled, no smiles, just blank stares. Both girls had been beaten, eyes blackened, and Quinn had a split lip. The only way he could tell them apart was the small white label affixed to the bottom of each photo designating each girl. There was a shot of Whitney staring into the camera as if she hadn’t realized her picture was being taken. There was no innocence in the gaze, she had the eyes of a woman twice her age that had seen a lifetime of abuse. What three days could do to a child was overwhelming.
They’d been riding their bikes that day. They’d ridden down a garden path they’d discovered that led from the back edge of their parents’ estate. The path traversed a wooded area and opened onto a grassy clearing, which bordered the west edge of Belle Meade Boulevard. It was hidden from the road by a long line of crepe myrtle trees. Whitney’s bicycle had gotten a flat. Instead of making their way back through the woods, they’d decided to go the long way, to push their bikes along the boulevard, back to their house.
He flipped the page and stared at the photo of their kidnapper. The file identified him as Nathan Chase, a thirty-seven-year-old construction worker, more often out of a job than in one. He had approached the girls, offering them some ice cream, a treat to cool them down on a hot summer day, and a ride back to their house so they didn’t have to push their bikes.
In the time of innocence, before Amber Alerts and children being schooled day in and day out about the horrors lurking behind every stranger’s shadow, the girls had accepted. They were on the Boulevard after all. They wheeled their bikes to his truck. After Quinn’s bike was safely in the back and she was climbing into the cab, he’d grabbed Whitney, shoved her in behind Quinn and taken off, leaving Whitney’s flat-wheeled bicycle behind. And then they were gone. Disappeared. Vanished.
But their story had a happy ending. Three days later, the girls appeared on Charlotte Avenue, disheveled, dirty, bloody, but alive. A Good Samaritan had seen them stumbling toward home and called the police.
It was Whitney who had explained how Chase had gotten drunk, had passed out, that the girls had seen an opportunity and had made a successful break for freedom.
It was Whitney who had identified Chase and his truck. She gave detailed descriptions of his home, a tiny, dirty two-bedroom bungalow off of Charlotte Avenue. The girls had only been five miles from home for the duration of their captivity. Quinn never volunteered any information, had only nodded in confirmation as Whitney told their story. PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, was Quinn’s biggest problem. She’d suffered such a shock that she’d been mute for weeks after the kidnapping, the file said. Whitney, having told the story, given all the information she could remember, had sat quietly waiting for her parents to take her home. The stronger of the twins.
The police had followed the directions Whitney gave them and found Nathan Chase alone in his living room, sucking on a Budweiser, watching a movie on television. He’d just smiled as they’d cuffed him, refused to confirm or deny the charges against him.
He’d been tried and convicted on the strength of Whitney’s testimony, Quinn refused to come to court, wouldn’t take the stand, but the jury decided in only two hours that Nathan Chase was guilty as hell. He’d been sentenced to thirty years, a decent amount of time and punishment for a kidnapper in the early 1980s, and was serving out the remainder of his time at Riverbend, a maximum-security prison that had opened in 1989. He spent his days watching television, reading, working in the library and being a model prisoner.
Baldwin sat back in his chair, rubbing his eyes. Nathan Chase. What kind of man kidnaps two little girls, beats them, but lets them get away? Then sits in his house, drinking a beer and waiting for the cops to come a-calling?
Baldwin leafed through the pages again. There was no sign of the sheets that mentioned the sexual assault. The girls’ reports were of multiple beatings and sleepless nights. They said he’d talked to them, told them stories, tried to entertain them. The odds that they weren’t assaulted were so slim that Baldwin finally sought Taylor out. She was in her office, sipping a Diet Coke and reading a case file.
“Whatcha up to?” Baldwin lounged in her doorway, drinking in her beauty. She should look frazzled and tired, it was the middle of the night, they’d been working for so many hours Baldwin had lost count. But she sat serenely at her desk, eyes wide and clear, looking like she’d just gotten up from a refreshing twelve hours in the bed. Except for the black eye. It gave her a rakish air. He briefly imagined her in his bed and smiled. She caught the look and laughed, closing the file in front of her.
“Lincoln just brought me up to speed on our Rainman suspect. Norville Turner. He works at the precinct filling station, doing mechanical work on the squad cars. Apparently, there’s no great psychosis behind his pattern. He’s a cop buff, couldn’t get on the force. He failed his entrance exams at the Academy four times, so he’s spent all this time trying to get back at us. Thought that setting up his crimes in a bizarre pattern would make him look mysterious. He’s just an everyday rapist. The good news is, he admitted to the rapes, which is an excellent first
