All the Pretty Girls - J. T. Ellison [38]
“And if he’s become indifferent to their plight, then we’re going to see an escalation in violence. ‘Leda and the Swan’ is classically recognized as a rape poem, a violent poem. Marni has drawn the mention of blood, I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t have some sort of brutality done to her that’s more severe than was done to any of the other girls. But I’m just guessing, Jerry.”
Grimes had his hands shoved deep in his pockets, his head bowed. “I wouldn’t have known all that. Wasn’t much good with that stuff in school.”
Baldwin drew in a breath. “I think we’d better go regroup. Give you some time to get yourself back together. And give me some time to think about this.”
Fifteen
He looked at his watch. It was time. He’d been sitting in silence in the rest stop, waiting for the right moment. The highways had quieted, the light of dawn still two hours away. He’d been driving all night, and had reached his destination right on time. Just enough time to sit back and reflect for a few moments. It was perfect. It was all perfect.
He looked over his shoulder into the back seat of the car. Luminous brown eyes glared back at him. She wasn’t cowed, not this one. She was a fighter. Well, we’ll see how she feels when she’s under me, when she feels the breath leave her. He felt himself harden and licked his lips.
Half an hour later, the defiant eyes no longer burning a hole through his brain, he put the car into drive and slid, silent as a shark, toward the on-ramp.
Sixteen
Taylor walked across the steaming parking lot at the Criminal Justice Center in Nashville, mentally planning her day. She shielded her eyes against the sun, gazing at the office building she called home. The CJC was a squat, nondescript building that housed the main units of the Criminal Investigations Division, as well as the administrative headquarters for the Metro Nashville Police Department. In the reorganization, a number of offices moved out of the headquarters building and into various sector offices. The chief had killed the five sector divisions and cut them into three: South, West and North. Detectives that were originally slated to work in departments like Homicide and Robbery were now housed in the sector offices as general detectives. Taylor’s team of homicide detectives had gotten to stay in the old headquarters and worked on homicides that had an element of ambiguity to them. If there wasn’t a suspect, there was no evidence or the job just looked too tough, Taylor’s team got the case. It meant a lot less busywork for them. The rest of the detectives scattered across the mid-state region pulled up the slack, covering basic plainclothes duties.
The Strangler case was spinning out of control, the media was screaming for answers. Cable news had seized upon the story and was creating a panic, updating every half hour, pointing out the failures on the part of law enforcement in all five states. Jessica Porter was lying in the morgue in Nashville, and Shauna Davidson’s parents were begging for their daughter’s body to be returned to them for burial. That part of the case was out of her hands. The FBI was working with, cooperating fully with, local law enforcement agencies, but in essence, they had taken the case from them. She let Price deal with the politics of the situation, duking out the jurisdictional issues. And no one could deny that the Feebs had access to better labs and more timely results; at least the forensics would be handled quickly and thoroughly.
She made her way up the back steps, stepping around the industrial ashtray that crowded the landing. She felt a brief pang of addiction and desire but soldiered