He took a long slow breath through his nose and blew it out through pursed lips. Then he handed her phone back to her. “Why don’t you just tell me what you think this chart says?”
“My mind has been focused on July ever since Syvlia told me that two of the other women she knew about had also been found in July. The coincidence of three women found in the same month made me ask myself, ‘Why July?’”
“July is one of the months when murder peaks, that’s why. Also August and December.”
“You knew that, but I didn’t, so I kept asking Windom questions. And thinking.”
“You do a lot of that.”
Faye wasn’t sure how to take that, so she just said, “Yeah.” Then she tapped on the phone screen and held it up to his face. “Here’s a graph of all the murders that Windom thought were worth keeping in her data set. She sees a pattern that stretches back six years. You can see peaks in the data in July, August, and December, just like you’d expect. See here? And here and here? But do you see another one? Look, she’s put in a baseline charting what you’d expect to see in those months.”
He took the phone again and said, “Are you talking about March? That’s not much of a peak.”
“No, it’s not, but Phyllis Windom says it’s enough different from the baseline to be statistically significant.”
“I’m almost following you. What happens in March?”
“Spring Break.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
He’d almost gotten there first. He would have managed it, if he had chosen to go upstream instead of down when faced with the sweet-sounding babble of an untrammeled creek. It had been a coin flip and he had lost.
Now he needed to decide how to play his end game.
The girl was close by, so close, but she was flanked by Laneer and Sylvia, and he couldn’t imagine how long it would be before they would willingly let her out of their sight.
If he couldn’t silence her, then he must go far away and stay gone, because she had seen him at his work. But if the next hour went well, and if he found a way to neutralize Dr. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth, there was a chance that he could stay right where he was, living out his days in a place where he knew how to do his killing and how to hide it.
There was a comfort in his mundane, everyday existence. The fear of leaving it was profound. It drove him. He had a sense that his job, his house, and his lumbering old car constrained the beast in him. Without those things, he might disappear into the beast completely, never withdrawing into the everyday. His murderousness would no longer be cyclical. It would be ongoing. Normality would no longer be an option and, without that refuge, he would undoubtedly be caught, jailed, executed. Frida’s death would stand as his last act of passion, and he was not ready to be done with passion.
He said his good-byes to the men around him. As he did so, he painstakingly began to sow confusion.
Chapter Forty
“Spring Break?”
McDaniel was shaking his head. “Are you saying that these women were killed while they were on vacation? Is Corinth, Mississippi, a hot spot I don’t know about?”
“No, but the killer could be on a school schedule.”
“A teacher. Are you talking about Walt Walker?”
“Yes, maybe. Or a student. Or, I suppose, somebody who just happens to kill during school vacations.”
She watched him mentally sort through his suspects. Unless he was keeping some of them to himself, all the people on it were with them now. Several of them lived their lives by the academic calendar.
Faye’s suspect list ranged wider than McDaniel’s, taking into its grasp people she didn’t know who lived in Birmingham, St. Louis, Nashville, and beyond, but it also encompassed people right here in Memphis. Her suspects included everyone McDaniel had put on his short list because they knew Frida personally.
Mayfield. Linton. Walt. Richard. Armand. Reverend Atkinson. Even Jeremiah, who seemed earnest about helping the men and women who worked for him, fit the profile.
Kali had described a big man, and they were all big. Walt was a teacher, and Richard and Jeremiah were students, so they had school vacations off, generally speaking. Walt volunteered at the playground, but she didn’t have the impression that he was there every day. Jeremiah took contract work like the job they were doing for Faye, but as far as she knew, he hadn’t had any clients since the university ended its spring semester. Richard was working now, but she had no knowledge of any other jobs that would have kept him busy during school breaks. Armand worked for himself. She had no idea what schedule Reverend Atkinson kept, nor Mayfield and Linton.
It made Faye antsy to realize that she could throw a rock and hit several people whom she and McDaniel both thought were capable of murder. But had all of them been in the Memphis area for that long? Jeremiah had lived in Memphis all his life. He and Armand seemed to go way back. Richard had said that he’d visited his grandmother in the summers. Linton was definitely newer to town than the rest of them. She didn’t know about Walt Walker, but he seemed established in the community.
McDaniel’s thoughts were tracking closely with hers.
“Students,” he mused. “Your data went back twenty years. That’s a long time to be a student. It’s even a long time to be a teacher. How old is Walt Walker?”
“Old enough to have been a teacher for twenty years. Maybe twenty-five years. But that’s beside the point. Look at Windom’s data again. We’re not talking about twenty years. The elevated murder rate in March only goes back six years.” She could see him doing math in his head so she did the same
