He waited beside the bush for an interminable period, far longer than was safe, but he used the waiting time to his advantage. By the time he left, he had thought through five scenarios that would extricate him from this situation. All of them left Dr. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth dead and buried.
If a bird, perhaps a duck in flight, could have looked down at the Peabody Hotel, nestled in the heart of downtown Memphis, it would have seen a woman and child leave via a door on South Second Street, then head south. It would also have seen a big man in a hat and a jacket too heavy for the summer day, waiting patiently near the corner of Union Avenue and South BB King Boulevard. The man would have stood motionless for quite a long time while the woman and child moved steadily away from him, making their way downriver and west.
The bird would have seen the woman and child approach Riverside Drive, cross it, and find the walking trail that parallels the great Mississippi River. The pair’s journey would take a while and, after some time, the bird would see the man begin to pace, looking from time to time at the hotel’s grand entrances in consternation. After more time passed, the duck would see him walk away, unlock his car, and leave. When the man’s car began to move, the woman and child would be finding a park bench and settling down for a little rest. As he faded from sight, they would still be sitting comfortably on that bench, watching the river do what rivers have always done.
The duck, who dived and swam for its supper, would have known that the rivers show different faces as you go deeper. The surface waters are riffled by the wind, and the direction the ripples go has no bearing on what the water beneath is doing. The deepest water hugs the bottom of the river and the underside of its bluffs. Its undercurrents tug at the carcasses of dead trees and the broken bellies of sunken boats.
The deeper you go, the colder the river water grows. It wants to suck the heat from your blood. It wants to drown you. It wants to tug you downstream, deeper, until it makes you realize that you will not go on forever, but the river will.
Chapter Twenty-five
It had been a mistake for Faye to rush back to her car after taking Kali home, hurrying to place a phone call to the detective. She was a deliberate woman, usually, and she liked to gather a small mountain of facts before she acted on important matters. When the facts were there, though, she didn’t hesitate to share them and then to act. The details of Frida’s case had led her to an unsettling and unlikely conclusion, but facts were facts, so she’d laid her argument out for McDaniel and waited for his response.
Now she was listening to him dismiss her ideas, using his years of experience as a bludgeon. She couldn’t compete with his experience, but that didn’t mean that she was wrong.
“You think a serial killer killed Frida? Everybody thinks their case is the biggest and baddest, Faye,” he had said. “Everybody thinks they’re chasing a serial killer. This man may have killed people before. He may kill again. I agree that he’s dangerous. But I have no reason to think that he was the kind of deranged serial killer you see on TV.”
McDaniel’s tone was respectful, more or less, but he was putting Faye in her place. He was the experienced detective and she was not. He was happy to use her to open communications with a community that distrusted him, but he didn’t want to consider her input.
His voice was firm when he said, “The only thing special about this case is that she was buried alive.”
Faye drove slowly as she talked, peering into the evening shadows on either side of this street where a dead woman had lived. They were deep and dark enough to hide anything or anyone. “Being buried alive is pretty special, don’t you think?”
Her almost-obsolete cell phone only distorted McDaniel’s chuckle slightly as he said, “You got me there. I agree that it would be special if I thought he buried her alive on purpose, but we don’t know that he did. Maybe he got in a hurry because he heard you coming. There may even be a shred of evidence that he did hear you coming.”
“What makes you think that? What evidence?”
“Frida wasn’t raped and her purse was found nearby, with money still in the wallet. If he planned to rob her or molest her sexually, you interrupted him, so he covered her up and ran away.”
Faye considered that a good thing, sort of, but its goodness was mostly counterbalanced by Frida’s death. “Maybe he wasn’t a rapist. What if he never intended to do anything but kill her? What if he is a serial killer and all he wanted was the experience of snuffing out her life?”
“If I thought the Zodiac Killer was prowling around Sweetgum State Park, I would have brought the FBI into this way before now. If you really think some phantom killer is running around this part of the South, why haven’t you run home to Florida?”
What could she say to McDaniel? Maybe the truthful answer was “I’m still here because of Kali.”
Or maybe the right answer was, “Deep down, I don’t think I’m in any more danger now than I was when I agreed to do a job in a tough neighborhood.”
The rock-bottom truth might even be “I need this job, my employees need this job, and I’m not scared enough to cancel it. Yet.”
Instead of answering his question, she bounced it back at him. “If you were in my
