All the Pretty Girls - J. T. Ellison [123]
“C’mon, Mr. Fed, give the girl some credit. She can waltz back in there and he’ll tell her anything she wants to hear.” Fitz wasn’t quite growling at Baldwin, but he definitely was pushing things.
“He just might. But I don’t know if it’s him. We need to get some of the forensics together, get his DNA. We can compel a DNA sample from him now, right?”
Taylor nodded.
“Then let’s do that. We can try to match it against the semen taken from Christina Dale’s crime scene. I just can’t get my head around him as the killer. Not the way he backed off when Taylor got in his face. An accomplice, maybe. Hell, I don’t know. Let’s get some proof.”
Fitz stared at Baldwin as if he were an alien. “Baldwin, the man had Ivy Clark all laid out in the trunk of his car. He was speeding back to Nashville to get rid of the body. He had the bag of tools right there in the car with him, his own damn initials stamped on it. What the hell more do you need?” He raised a beefy paw. “Naw, don’t answer that. I’ll go get the sample, have it run over to be tested.” He disappeared into the hallway.
Baldwin turned to Taylor, whose smile had faded. It had felt right. “Let Buckley stew for a little bit. I want to go over the file on Whitney and Quinn.”
Forty-Six
Baldwin set up shop in the conference room across the hall from Jake Buckley’s interrogation room. The files from Quinn and Whitney’s kidnapping were spread before him. He buzzed through them, absorbing all the information. The story was all too familiar.
Whitney and Quinn were bright, bubbly twelve-year-olds when they went missing. They’d been playing that day, innocent and pure, two sisters enjoying an afternoon of free time after school, no responsibilities other than make-believe and fun. They were both towheaded, blue-eyed and happy. All this Baldwin gleaned from the photos of the girls that accompanied the files. Photos from before the kidnapping.
The after shots, pictures taken when the girls were recovered and taken to police headquarters while their parents were notified, told a different story. Their eyes were troubled, no smiles, just blank stares. Both girls had been beaten, eyes blackened, and Quinn had a split lip. The only way he could tell them apart was the small white label affixed to the bottom of each photo designating each girl. There was a shot of Whitney staring into the camera as if she hadn’t realized her picture was being taken. There was no innocence in the gaze, she had the eyes of a woman twice her age that had seen a lifetime of abuse. What three days could do to a child was overwhelming.
They’d been riding their bikes that day. They’d ridden down a garden path they’d discovered that led from the back edge of their parents’ estate. The path traversed a wooded area and opened onto a grassy clearing, which bordered the west edge of Belle Meade Boulevard. It was hidden from the road by a long line of crepe myrtle trees. Whitney’s bicycle had gotten a flat. Instead of making their way back through the woods, they’d decided to go the long way, to push their bikes along the boulevard, back to their house.
He flipped the page and stared at the photo of their kidnapper. The file identified him as Nathan Chase, a thirty-seven-year-old construction worker, more often out of a job than in one. He had approached the girls, offering them some ice cream, a treat to cool them down on a hot summer day, and a ride back to their house so they didn’t have to push their bikes.
In the time of innocence, before Amber Alerts and children being schooled day in and day out about the horrors lurking behind every stranger’s shadow, the girls had accepted. They were on the Boulevard after all. They wheeled their bikes to his truck. After Quinn’s bike was safely in the back and she was climbing into the cab, he’d grabbed Whitney, shoved her in behind Quinn and taken off, leaving Whitney’s flat-wheeled bicycle behind. And then they were gone. Disappeared. Vanished.
But their story had a happy ending. Three days later, the girls appeared on Charlotte Avenue, disheveled, dirty,