Nope. Crime statistics were clear, and she knew them because she had looked them up. Something like two-thirds of murdered women in America are killed by an intimate partner, and the statistics are even worse for black women like Frida. What is more, only ten percent of murdered American women are killed by strangers. It was overwhelmingly likely that Frida was killed by someone she knew, and it was overwhelmingly likely that her killer had no interest in killing someone he didn’t know. Specifically, he had no interest in killing Faye, since she knew almost none of the people in the woman’s life.
Nevertheless, Faye had gotten out of bed twice in an hour, once to jam a chair under the cabin’s front doorknob and again to jam a second chair beneath the knob of her bedroom door. Now she was eyeing her bedroom window, the entry point for the rustles and grunts made by every nocturnal animal in Memphis. Should she move her bed in front of the window, letting the headboard block most of the opening? Or would that cut off her escape if somebody homicidal made it past both of her inexpertly blocked doors?
As much as she tried to herd her wandering mind onto safer paths, she found herself reliving the moment she had laid eyes on Frida’s face. The memory took her back to the moments afterward that she had spent freeing a living woman from the earth, feeling flesh under her hands and cold dirt under her knees.
The wordless groaning of a mortally injured woman crawled back into her ears. It had never left her ears, not really. Every time Faye laid her head on her pillow, she heard Frida’s suffering voice.
Chapter Seventeen
It had been almost a full day, and still the police hadn’t shown up at his door.
He’d been doing this for years without getting caught. By now, it was reasonable to assume that he never would, because he was that good at what he did.
His cool façade covered a careful attention to detail. Rubber gardening gloves contained his fingerprints, and they kept his skin oils and DNA off the women’s bodies. If rape had interested him, he would have had more trouble keeping his DNA to himself, but no. Physical intimacy could never compare to the rush of locking eyes with a woman who knew to her soul that he was preparing to take every single minute she had left.
He was obsessive about containing their hands, so he had a perfect record of staying out of reach of his victims’ razor-sharp nails. The trick was to incapacitate the woman fast, leaving her alive but unable to do a damn thing to save herself from the grave already waiting.
A rain jacket with tight-drawn hood kept him from leaving behind a stray hair or flake of dandruff. The jacket’s surface, slick and waterproof, didn’t absorb blood, so it was easy to clean. So were the high-topped rubber boots and the water-repellent hiking pants.
Not that he needed to clean any of his stuff very much. From the distance of a shovel handle, he usually managed to stay clear of spatter, and the shovel blade itself was easily cleaned. Most of the blood came off while he was shoveling dirt over the still-warm corpse.
As the investigation cooled down, everything would leave his house, one piece at a time. Freshly washed with bleach, it would all be donated to charity or packed into garbage bags thrown deep into far-flung dumpsters. He got rid of the shovels quickly, after taking a sledgehammer to them. He’d gotten very good at making it look like they were going to the dump because they had finished their useful lives. As far as he was concerned, they had.
All of this care didn’t mean that there wasn’t a dangerous window when the police might show up with a search warrant. He was smart enough to understand that he could never know when his tools were clean enough to fool a lab. The answer to that question was “Probably never.”
It was far more important to fool the people doing the investigation. Evading their attention was what he did best. If they never got close enough to his trail to send evidence out for testing, then how could their forensics labs ever uncover the truth?
After a kill, while the police were trying and failing to find him, his nervous itch had always subsided for a while. He could live for weeks, months sometimes, on the lingering thrill. It distracted him from the paycheck that was too small and the bills that were too large.
But not this time. He’d been robbed of the climax to Frida’s murder. Another woman had come to save Frida, stealing his tender ritual of laying his victim’s limp form in the grave. She had left him hungry, and he was dangerous when he was hungry.
He had followed the interloper, lurking close enough to see the warmth in her dealings with Frida’s little girl. The sight of Frida tenderly caring for a child was a trigger for him, and here it was again. Same child, different woman.
Still hungry, he stood in the shadow of a yet another tree, leaning on a shovel and watching the dim light of a lamp through the window of his new quarry’s bedroom window…through Faye Longchamp-Mantooth’s bedroom window. He knew her name now. Sylvia should really learn to keep her mouth shut, and she
