Joe was not convinced that he was as bad at driving as his daughter and wife thought he was. He could certainly navigate through a town the size of Tupelo, and he intended to do so. He was too nervous to sit quietly while somebody else, even Amande, took him from this spot to where he needed to be. Even if the state of Mississippi had torn up every road between his car and the Tennessee border, he was hell-bent on getting to Faye by suppertime.
Faye pulled her new dress over her head. It was plain and sleeveless, and its A-line skirt stopped at the knee. It wasn’t particularly flattering but it was black, so it was appropriate for a funeral. It was also comfortable enough to move in, which was a decided plus. She stepped into a pair of flat black pumps, slicked on a subdued shade of lipstick, and called herself dressed.
Letting her hair air-dry, she sat down at her computer to spend a few more minutes with Phyllis Windom’s database until it was time to go.
She wanted to try some goofy searches that might not occur to law enforcement, so she started with the goofiest search of all:
Murdered women found in July
After thinking about it for a minute, she opened the search up with a search string that was going to double her list.
Murdered women found in June and July
Being found around Independence Day might well mean that the killings had happened in June, so she was willing to lengthen her list enough to find more killings that fit the mold.
Now it was time to start winnowing that list down. First, she sorted to find the women who were black and in their twenties. She was able to filter out the ones who were buried, instead of being unceremoniously dumped by the side of the road, and that helped, but the length of the list was still daunting.
It made sense to narrow the search to a two-hundred-and-fifty-mile radius of Memphis, because it was a reasonable distance for a day trip. Why would the killer want to risk being caught by a hotel receipt or a spot of blood left behind in a motel bathroom?
This search cut the numbers to the point that it made sense to start reading the notes, copied laboriously from countless case files. Phyllis Windom must have a herd of volunteers working for her. Faye rather liked the idea of crowd-sourced murder investigations.
Even after narrowing the search, there were still too many murders for her to read about in one sitting. This was too depressing to think about, so she tried not to think at all as she randomly clicked around during the last moments before she needed to leave for the funeral.
Within five minutes, she’d uncovered the case file of a woman in Bowling Green, Kentucky, who was buried in a state park with a rose in her hands. A few minutes after that, she learned that, just the previous June, a woman had been found near Knoxville with daisies in her hair. And the previous March, there had been a murdered prostitute in Birmingham who was found, not with flowers, but with a grocery store receipt. Faye had almost clicked away from this file, but a grocery store receipt was just weird enough to make her look.
She found that the Birmingham police had been particularly diligent in contributing to the database. They hadn’t just mentioned the receipt. They had scanned and uploaded it.
Faye clicked on the image and expanded it as far as the image’s resolution allowed. It was dated, which gave the last possible date that the woman was alive, June 26. The police had noted the date, but they hadn’t thought that the list of purchases was significant. Faye was sure that they’d been hoping for a knife, a shovel, duct tape, and bleach, and they didn’t get it. But she was looking for something different, and she most certainly got it.
The receipt said, “Bouquet, Mixed Snapdragons.” They had cost the killer fourteen dollars and ninety-nine cents.
Bingo. She had another data point to present to McDaniel.
Yvonna was standing beside her, and there was an insistent rap at the door for the second time. She needed to go. The database would be waiting for her when she got back.
Faye’s phone rang as she was hurrying down the long drab hallway outside her hotel room, late for the funeral. She took it because the screen said “Phyllis Windom.”
“Madame Archaeologist?” Windom’s voice didn’t sound any stronger than it had the time they spoke.
“Yes.”
“I’ve got something for you. I think it might tie the Arkansas and Mississippi cases together.”
Faye pushed the phone hard against her ear. The motel’s icemaker was loud and the sound of ice dropping into somebody’s ice bucket was even louder. Windom’s wheezy, airy voice couldn’t compete.
“You can tie the two deaths together? How?”
“When you have time to explore my database, you’ll see that selected information transcribed from the case files is included in a ‘Notes’ section. I’ve got plans to incorporate keywords, so that it will be more searchable. Right now, it is what it is.”
“We’re on the same page. I found the ‘Notes’ section a few minutes ago, and I’ve already found some interesting stuff. What do the notes say for those two unsolved killings? What makes you think they’re connected?”
“The Mississippi investigators seem to have been more thorough. If you remember, they properly recorded their data in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, and the Arkansas investigators working at the state park in Earle didn’t do that.”
“I remember.”
“Well, Madame Archaeologist, I’m willing to say that the Mississippi folks also paid
