All the Pretty Girls - J. T. Ellison [28]
“Grimes, talk me through the girls’ profiles. Pretend I haven’t heard anything about them. Start from scratch.” Baldwin dug in his briefcase and brought out a notepad. Opening to a fresh sheet, he waited.
“Okay, anything you want. I’ll start with Susan Palmer. Quiet girl, according to her family. She’d just graduated from nursing school, gotten a job at the Huntsville Community Hospital. She was a bit mousy, not a beauty like Jessica Porter. She lived in an apartment above their garage, mother has some sort of debilitating illness and Susan liked to be close by. They had a full-time nurse, but it was a woman and she was cleared immediately. No father, he died when Susan was young. It was just her and her mother. She was found by a canal in an old section of Baton Rouge, not a great part of town. No reason for her to be there, that’s why we assumed he transported her, rather than her going to Baton Rouge, then getting killed. The M.E.’s report showed hesitation marks in the cut on her right arm. Said it looked like he was trying to get up the nerve to get the hand off. The left didn’t have anything but the saw marks.” Grimes cleared his throat, looking out the window as if he’d conjured the autopsy scene right there in the kudzu-choked hillside.
“It was weird. No one can remember her leaving after work, she didn’t have a lot of friends at the hospital. Came in, did her thing and went home. We haven’t figured out how she came across our boy’s radar. She kept her nose clean and didn’t make any waves.”
“Invisible,” Baldwin murmured.
“What’s that? Invisible? Yeah, I guess you could say that. A safe choice then. But Jeanette Lernier, now, she wasn’t invisible. Brash, daring, vivacious, all those words were used to describe her. She had a paid internship with some marketing company in Baton Rouge, trying to get some experience between college and graduate school. She had boyfriends, girlfriends, too, if you know what I mean, and was a regular on Baton Rouge’s social circuit. There was word that she’d just had an affair with some big muckety-muck at the company she worked for, was very upset that things hadn’t worked out. Came from a good family, had two brothers and a sister who are still in complete shock. It was like she was the life of the family and when she was gone, they died right along with her.
“Really sad case, if you think about it. She had everything going for her, but she ends up dead on the side of the road. Honestly, if we hadn’t found Susan Palmer’s hand at the scene, there’s a good chance we wouldn’t have connected the crimes. Even though the MO was the same, they just seemed so different. At least to me.”
“I can understand that. But it definitely is the same killer.”
“So tell me this. Why did he take a month off? Seems like he was on a roll, then quit.”
“That’s an excellent question. I’m getting a better sense of our suspect, but I’d like to know the exact why behind these killings, too. There must be some motivation…Anyway, keep going. Jessica Porter.”
“Jessica Ann Porter, eighteen years old, five-four, hundred twenty pounds. Born in Jackson, shared an apartment with a friend. She was really trying to be independent. Her parents were dead set against the idea, but she charmed them into it. Tina and Steve Porter. Dad’s a mechanic, Mom’s a teacher. Down-home American family. She’s got two brothers, Joseph, sixteen, and James, thirteen. They’re pretty broken up—they worshiped her.
“She was attending the University of Mississippi, studying for premed or nursing, she hadn’t decided which. She was working as a receptionist in the Mississippi Community Hospital so she could get a taste of being around medical personnel. I told you she was volunteering at the local homeless shelter and delivering meals, what’s it called