Faith felt overwhelmed by the need to state the obvious. “If we discover during an investigation that Lena lied about how the porn was found on Nesbitt’s computer, then every single case she’s ever worked on will be put under a microscope. And Nesbitt can make a damn good argument to kick that porn charge off his sheet. We would basically be helping a pedophile.”
“You just said he’d remain in prison.”
“But it would be a nicer prison.”
“We’ll burn that bridge when we cross it.” Amanda paced off the space between the pulpit and the wall, her hands clasped together under her chin. “Tell me about the newspaper articles.”
Faith wanted to stew on Nesbitt some more, but Amanda was right.
She said, “All of the articles appear to be from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution except for the Grant County ones, which are from the Grant Observer. When I asked Nesbitt how he got the articles, he said ‘a friend’ sent them.”
“Mother? Father?”
“According to his jacket, Nesbitt’s mother died from an overdose when he was a kid. His stepfather raised him, but that guy’s been serving time in the Atlanta Pen for almost a decade. They don’t write or talk on the phone. Nesbitt’s got no other family. He hasn’t had a visitor since he entered the system. He doesn’t make phone calls or send emails. Unless he’s using a contraband phone, then all bets are off.”
“I’ll put in a request for Nesbitt’s mail. There’s a central station where all inmate correspondences are scanned and cross-checked for suspected criminal activity.” Amanda typed the order into her phone, asking Faith, “What’s the importance of Nesbitt’s one-week deadline? What happens in a week?”
“The prison is taken off lockdown. Maybe his phone smuggling information won’t be relevant when the inmates are out of their cells. Maybe they’ll kick his ass if they find out he’s been talking to the po-po.” She shrugged. “Maybe he’s been inside long enough to know that inertia is the enemy of progress.”
“Maybe.” She dropped her phone back into her pocket. “Should I be worried about Nick?”
Faith’s stomach clenched. “Everybody needs worrying about sometime.”
“Thank you, Agent Fortune Cookie.” She rolled her hand at the wrist to move along the conversation. “Return to the articles.”
“Eight possible victims total. And obviously that’s not including Grant County.” Faith looked back at her notes. “They were all Caucasian females between nineteen and forty-one years old. They were students, office workers, an EMT, a kindergarten teacher, and a vet tech. Married. Divorced. Single. The articles start with Grant County. The other cases spanned the subsequent eight years and took place in Pickens, Effingham, Appling, Taliaferro, Dougall, and if he’s right about the woman found yesterday, White County.”
“So, someone took a dartboard to the state.” Amanda turned and paced back to the pulpit. “MO?”
“All the women were reported missing by friends or family. They were found anywhere from eight days to three months later, usually in a wooded area. Not hidden, just laid on the ground. Some were on their backs. Some were face-down, on their sides. A lot were ravaged by local wildlife, especially the ones up north. All of the victims were dressed in their own clothes.”
“Raped?”
“The articles don’t say, but if we’re talking murder, we’re more than likely talking about rape.”
“Cause of death?”
Faith didn’t have to look at her notes, because the deaths had all been classified the same way. “None of the coroners saw anything untoward, so we’ve got: unknown, no suspected foul play, unknown, undetermined, wash, rinse, repeat.”
Amanda frowned, but she was clearly unsurprised. At the county level, only coroners had the power to officially rule a death suspicious and request an autopsy by a professional medical examiner. They were all elected officials and a medical license was not required to do the job. Only one county coroner in Georgia was a physician. The rest were, among other things, funeral directors, teachers, a hairdresser, the proprietor of a car wash, a heating and air technician, a motorboat mechanic and the owner of a shooting range.
Faith said, “There’s speculation in some of the newspaper articles about murder, but nothing concrete. Maybe the local cops disagreed with the coroner and leaking to the press was their way of juicing an investigation. I would need to go to the individual counties to request the case files, then we’d need to interview the investigators and witnesses to find out if there were any suspects. That’s eight different local law enforcement agencies to negotiate with.”
Faith left unsaid the resultant shitshow. The GBI was a state agency the same way the FBI was at the federal level. With limited exceptions, they had no jurisdiction over local cases, even murder. They could not just waltz in and take over an investigation. They had to be asked by the local sheriff, the local prosecutor, or ordered in by the governor.
“I can query some sources on an informal basis,” Amanda said. “Tell me about the victims. Blonde? Plain? Pretty? Short? Fat? Did they sing in the choir? Play the flute?”
She was looking for a detail that connected the women. Faith said, “All I can go by is the photos that accompanied the articles. Some blonde. Some brunette. Some of them wore glasses, some didn’t. One had braces. Some kept their hair short, some wore it long.”
“So,” Amanda summarized, “taking out Grant County, we have eight different women of different ages who were working in different fields, looked nothing alike, and were all found dead showing no discernable cause of death, located in different areas of a state where thousands of missing women cases remain open, in a country where roughly 300,000 women and girls are reported missing every single year.”
“The woods,” Will said.
Amanda and Faith turned to look at him.
He said, “That’s what connects them. Their bodies were left in wooded areas.”
Amanda said, “Two thirds of the state is covered in forests. It would be difficult not to leave a body in the woods. The phone rings off the hook during
