“I do. And I will. But sometime when you’re not working night and day, you might think about whether you could help people more if you made sure they knew that you respected them.”
Faye wasn’t sure what it was about McDaniel that pissed her off so. He had listened to what she had to say. Yeah, he still clung to his theory that Frida was killed by one of her exes, but he’d also asked her about the women found in the Mississippi churchyard and the Arkansas state park. He hadn’t completely dismissed her concerns about a serial killer.
“Sylvia wanted you to know that those two women weren’t stabbed or shot. They were beaten with something that was never identified. When Laneer told her that Frida was beaten with a shovel, she immediately wondered if that’s what had happened to them.”
She only knew what Frida’s cause of death was because Sylvia had told her. Faye was pursuing this line of conversation for Sylvia’s sake, but also because it conveniently reminded McDaniel that she wasn’t dependent on him for information. Or for anything at all. And her confrontational tone of voice let him know that she was pissed that he hadn’t told her himself.
Should McDaniel have told her everything he knew as soon as he knew? Maybe not. It wasn’t required of him, but he needed her. In the space of just a few hours, Kali and Sylvia had told her things that they would never have told him—important things that he needed to know.
“I guess it might have been good to tell you about the shovel, now that I think about it. You work with shovels every day of the week,” he said, and his nervousness was audible. It slowed his speech and accentuated his Tennessee drawl.
“You were under no obligation. But telling me would have been a gesture of cooperation. And respect.”
And there it was, the uncomfortable thing that had been nibbling at her psyche from the moment she met Detective Harold McDaniel. Minutes after she had given her all to save Frida’s life, he had treated her like a suspect. He had been self-aware enough to back away from that presumption, even going so far as to ask her to be his go-between with Frida’s family. Yet there was the undeniable fact that, even after all that, he had chosen not to tell her how Frida died.
How did he expect her to help him if he couldn’t be straight with her? In all their conversations, she felt a stiffness, a formality, a barrier.
Was that barrier really based on something as simple and undeniable as her skin color? Kali and Jeremiah had been forthright in saying that she didn’t fit into their neighborhood, presumably due to her education and her middle-class pocketbook. They didn’t see her as one of them. Yet McDaniel did, despite the fact that Faye probably had about as much money as he did and her doctorate presumably put her far ahead of him in education.
Faye put a hand to her cheek. Without looking in a mirror, she knew that it was brown. She always knew that it was brown. Was she touching the one and only reason that McDaniel had chosen not to trust her? There was no way for her to know.
And this meant that she couldn’t afford to trust him, not fully. There was no such thing as one-way trust. There just wasn’t.
Sometime between puberty and becoming a mother for the second time, Faye had gained confidence that was often hard for very young women to come by. She’d lost the need to believe that other people thought she was pretty, because she liked the way she looked just fine. She’d also lost the need to be liked by everyone, because she had true friends who loved her the way she was.
After the need to be liked and the need to be desired fell away, it had become far easier for Faye to see what was important to her now, as a full-grown woman. She needed respect, and she had learned to demand it or walk away.
Detective McDaniel might not like her, and it was completely immaterial to her whether or not he thought she was attractive, but if he wanted her help, then he had damn sure better learn to take her seriously.
Respect goes both ways.
Chapter Twenty-six
Faye crept back into the motel room so quietly that Yvonna never stirred. Grabbing her laptop off the nightstand where it was charging, she returned to the stairwell and opened it. After poking around in her bookmarks for a minute, she found a link to the article she wanted and clicked it. If McDaniel wanted to keep things from her, maybe she could keep a few things from him without breaking the law.
The article was called “An Algorithm to Die For,” which was a dumb headline, since it was about a woman who had developed an algorithm that could save lives. A sexier title like “The Woman All Serial Killers Should Fear” would have gotten more clicks. Faye had read it a week before, and its message had stuck with her.
The article was about a data scientist who believed that lives were being lost because investigators were too busy to share information. And maybe because they didn’t trust each other enough to reach out to someone who could help. And maybe because they had evolved to be suspicious and territorial. The reasons didn’t matter. The dead did not care why the people working for justice didn’t make the best use of the information that they had.
The woman all serial killers should fear was seventy-two years old, short, slight, and wheelchair-bound. Phyllis Windom was a data scientist who had spent her retirement chasing notorious serial killers without ever leaving her house. A lifelong lover of true crime books, her fascination with unsolved murders had blossomed into something
