All the Pretty Girls - J. T. Ellison [42]
She picked up the phone and dialed her doctor’s phone number from memory. The constant tests and checkups were past tiresome. Some of the medication she had been taking after the accident had wreaked havoc on her liver, so the doctors had taken her off the medicine but insisted on monthly checks of her liver function. A cheery voice answered the phone. “Dr. Gregory’s office!”
“Shelby, it’s Taylor Jackson. I wanted to get my test results.”
The cheer kicked up a notch. “Oh, Taylor. Hi! Dr. Gregory was just about to call you. Hold on a second while I get him to pick up the phone.”
Taylor stared at the watermark in the corner of the ceiling. She really needed to put a call into maintenance to see if they could replace that tile. It drove her nuts. As she started fiddling with a pencil, Dr. Gregory’s baritone practically forced its way through the phone.
“How’s my favorite cop?”
“I’m fine, Doc. Tell me you have good news and I don’t have to get stuck anymore.”
The doctor was quiet for a second, then cleared his throat. Taylor’s heart sank. Dammit, she’d done everything they’d told her, and she felt fine. Well, as fine as she could, considering everything she’d been through.
“Please, Dr. Gregory, I thought everything would be okay by now.” She heard the whine in her voice and straightened in her chair. She sounded like a petulant eight-year-old.
“No, no, Taylor, your liver function is completely back to normal. Are you feeling okay otherwise?”
“Well, yeah. A little tired maybe, but that’s nothing new.”
He breathed a slight laugh into the phone. “Well, honey, you’re probably going to feel that way for a while.”
As he continued talking, Taylor felt the world spin.
Seventeen
The sun leaked into the room, its wavering light barely brightening the small square space where Whitney Connolly was working furiously at her computer. She’d broken protocol this morning, skimming through her e-mails but not bothering to answer them. The only one that mattered, the only one she opened, was from her mysterious friend with the untraceable Yahoo account. The note was simple:
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
There was no postscript. She didn’t need them now. She appreciated that he recognized that she’d figured it out. How he knew was beyond her, but that didn’t matter.
After seeing that note, knowing what must have happened, Whitney got to work. Another girl was dead. So she was doing research. Any good journalist would, right? If she was getting messages from the Southern Strangler, she needed to have background. She needed to build the elements of the case, just like a cop would do. She had to start thinking about her reel, make everything come together so that when she broke the story and had the first interview with this guy, everything was in place. Why else would he be sending her messages, unless he planned on talking to her?
She flew through cyberspace, fingers clicking on the keyboard. She decided on Court TV’s ultrainformative Web site on serial killers. Plugging in the search criteria, she sat back, waiting for the answers to be spit out at her. She wanted to see incidences of killers using poems at crime scenes.
She stopped for a second. There hadn’t been anything on the news about the notes. She was assuming they’d been found at the crime scenes. At least, that’s what her source in Louisiana said. The poem was in Lernier’s gym bag, but no one thought anything about it. She’d heard, through that same source, that the FBI now had the notes, that they saw the significance of them. That just meant she had to work harder and faster.
Shauna Davidson had been found in Georgia, but her crime scene was still here in Nashville. Whitney placed a call, just trying to confirm that there was a note in Shauna’s effects, and was shut down entirely. No one was talking to her. That in and of itself confirmed it for her—she was tight with her source in Metro’s police, and if he wouldn’t talk