14 - J. T. Ellison [47]
There was one big difference between the previous copycat murders and the Snow White case. All of the other original killers had been caught and jailed. Two had been put to death.
That term popped into Taylor’s head again, though she knew it wasn’t entirely applicable to all of the cases. An apprentice. A student of murder. And he’d saved his greatest imitation for a murderer who’d never been caught. A thought niggled at the back of her mind. If he was so intimately familiar with the Nashville murders, did he know the identity of Snow White? She made a note of the thought, wrote one more thing next to it. Signet ring.
The ring had disappeared from the evidence files. If it showed up at a murder scene, that would be interesting.
They’d spent the afternoon going through the files, trying to put the pieces together. The DNA matched all the scenes but didn’t match anything else in the system, which meant he hadn’t been arrested anytime in the past three years. His DNA would have been entered into the system automatically if he’d been taken into custody. It didn’t mean he hadn’t been picked up somewhere else, just that the technology was behind the game. He could have something sitting in the files waiting to be inputted in any number of states, Tennessee included, and he would be right there for the taking. Instead, they had precious little to go on.
Taylor’s head was starting to swim. There was no sign of Jane Macias. If she had been taken, she would be victim number five. If the copycat followed the original Snow White’s pattern, there’d be five more to go.
The additional eighteen murders being attributed to Nashville’s killer was too big to keep contained; the leaks began immediately. Mitchell Price and Dan Franklin were trying to handle the media, but sticking solely to the Snow White’s Nashville murders. They deflected question after question to the FBI, letting them answer just how this massive killing spree had gone unnoticed. Granted, some of the original murders had happened in the fifties, sixties and seventies, and while each city knew they’d been dealing with a kook, for some reason everyone, including the FBI, had missed it until Charlotte Douglas’s eyes got on the files. It was one of those proud days for law enforcement.
Taylor started when the door to the conference room opened. She realized that she had drifted off to sleep, only for a moment, but still… She sat up, wiped a hand across her mouth and saw Baldwin staring at her.
“You’re beautiful,” he said.
“You need some sleep,” she replied. “How’s Charlotte?” She held up a hand. “Excuse me. Dr. Douglas.” Taylor drew out the syllables, mimicking Charlotte’s haughty lockjaw accent perfectly.
Baldwin half smiled. “At the hotel, drinking cosmopolitans in the bar with a bevy of songwriters at her feet. Some band is staying there. She’s completely in her element.”
Taylor thought for a moment. Who was playing this week? She knew it was someone big…. “Please tell me it’s not Aerosmith.”
“Skinny guy, big mouth, funky scarf. That’s all I saw.”
“Jesus. How in the name of God did you get hooked up with that woman?”
Baldwin took a seat at the conference table, scratched at his forehead like he could erase the memory. “We were working a case. Late night, too much to drink—hell, you don’t want to hear this. It was over before it started. She scares me. Not a decent bone in her body.”