All the Pretty Girls - J. T. Ellison [79]
Christy bided her time. She was a diligent employee, even if the things she did outside of work were a little questionable. Admittedly, she drank too much. She drank too much and smoked too much. And oftentimes she did a few drugs that probably weren’t the most legal things in the world. Nothing hard-core, but the soft stuff, the campus drugs. That way she felt she was experiencing the same things that all nineteen-year-old college girls experience. The booze, the drugs, the boys. Oh yes, the boys. She really liked the boys. But that wasn’t exactly a bad thing, at least in her mind. She was in control of her body, she had the last word in everything she did. The fact that she might have sex on a given night with a guy that never asked for her number wasn’t a problem. If she wanted to see him again, she could find a way to do it.
So maybe she dressed a little provocatively. Maybe she drank too much, slept around a little too much. What difference did that make?
Baldwin knew all of this, and more, so when he stared down at Christy’s lifeless body, tossed off the edge of the road in Asheville, North Carolina, he couldn’t help but wonder if poor Christy had any idea of the danger she was putting herself in, over and over, having sex with strange men, riding off in cars that didn’t belong to her and, most importantly, taking a stranger back to the motel that she used when she didn’t want her mom to know she was out fooling around.
But Christy’s mother had known. She knew everything her daughter did, and either didn’t care enough to do anything about it, or just didn’t believe she could make a difference. When Baldwin had sat down with her, mere hours after they knew Christy’s body had been taken from room 3 at the Happy Roads Inn, Charlie Dale didn’t seem surprised.
Charlie Dale smoked continuously throughout their interview. Baldwin thought he would choke in the dim air of her trailer, and wondered if there had ever been an open window in the place. It was stacked with laundry, washed or unwashed was anyone’s guess, trash, full ashtrays and dirt, layer upon layer of dirt. Charlie wasn’t much of a housekeeper, and told Baldwin that. He’d smiled and pretended things were fine, which he assumed Charlie had been doing for at least a decade.
She didn’t have a lot of nice things to say about her daughter. Christy had been a surprise in her mother’s life, a surprise that had come along when Charlie was fifteen and madly in love with a boy from uptown Roanoke. When she found herself pregnant, she never heard from him again. It had been her and Christy all along, she told Baldwin. And that girl was never going to amount to anything, the way she ran around, whoring and drinking. Just ’cause it was good enough for her mama didn’t mean it was good enough for her. I always wanted something better for Christy, she told Baldwin, but I never knew how to get it for her.
As Baldwin gazed down at Christy, he felt a sadness that was as much sorrow for the girl’s death as it was for the raw deal she’d gotten in her short life.
When they’d gotten the call that a body had been found in Asheville, North Carolina, Baldwin hadn’t even blinked. The killer wasn’t thinking too far ahead. Now that they were hot on his trail, he was grabbing, killing and dumping, and he’d really gotten on a tear. Christy hadn’t even been missing a day, and now Baldwin stood over her battered body, looking at the knife wounds in her chest, the bloody wrists, wondering where her hand would show up. Marni Fischer’s neatly manicured hand was a few feet away. Baldwin calculated. Where were the rest of the girls’ hands?
His careful, methodical serial killer had escalated into a vicious spree maniac. At first glance,