All the Pretty Girls - J. T. Ellison [80]
The change was fascinating from an empirical standpoint. It was Baldwin’s talent, the ability to separate the victims and their lives from the crimes being committed. Psychologically, it was a simple issue. The killer’s message wasn’t getting through. This was frustrating him, and in turn, he was taking chances, not as worried about possible consequences. His endgame had started.
Forensics had a field day in the motel room. It was obvious that Christy had been repeatedly stabbed, and that blood added to the cast-off spray from the arterial cuts in her wrists created a gory miasma for the techs to comb through. The room hadn’t been wiped down, so there were many fingerprints, almost too many to take exemplars from, considering the number of people who had been through that room. Baldwin assumed the killer was wearing gloves, they hadn’t gotten a fingerprint from any of the scenes that they could place him at.
For the first time, they’d found a minute amount of semen mixed in with the blood on the bedsheets. In a regular case, that would have been cause for celebration. Because there had been no evidence collected from the earlier event with the ripped condom, there was nothing to compare with this DNA. Another telltale sign that the killer was on the edge, losing control. He was getting sloppy.
Baldwin had instructed the techs to file the DNA into the CODIS system, hoping for a match from deep within the bowels of the database, but he wasn’t holding his breath. Something about these kills felt fresh to him. His profile stated that these were the man’s first significant crimes, that his earlier record would be minor, if there was one at all. As he delved further into the case and the pace of the murders increased, the more on target his original assessment seemed. Not finding a match would reinforce at least one element of the profile.
Baldwin had asked Grimes to send men in to the bar Christy frequented, to find out if anyone remembered seeing her talking to someone or, better yet, leaving with someone. But Grimes had reported that no one saw anything out of the ordinary. One bartender had gone so far as to joke that keeping up with the men Christy was seen talking to would take an entire police force. His humor wasn’t appreciated, and he quickly apologized and let them know that seriously, she could have been with anyone, no one paid attention to a crazy girl flirting her way through a few hours of drinks.
On a lark, Baldwin had asked Grimes to see if anyone remembered a young, dark-haired man, but that got a laugh. They were in a college bar; at least half the patrons fit that description. No one in particular had stood out to the bartender.
They just didn’t have a lot to go on. Baldwin signaled that they needed to get Christy’s body out of the brush and onto a gurney so she could be unceremoniously cut open and slid into a refrigerated drawer in the Asheville morgue, while Baldwin twiddled his thumbs and looked stupid, not having any idea how to stop this mercurial killer.
It was time to take a room, have a drink and try to sort all of this out. Preferably over the phone with Taylor. He’d realized lately that just talking to her cleared his mind, and his mind needed a lot of clearing now. He needed a strategy session, he needed to lay it all out and see what he was missing. Because he was missing something huge, and that wasn’t going to get this killer stopped any time soon.
He watched through squinted eyes as Christina Dale was loaded into a bag, placed onto a stretcher, then set gently on a gurney that was slid into the open back doors of the M.E.’s cream-colored van. The trees seemed very green, the haze off the mountains very purple, the summer air surprisingly crisp and clean and only slightly mottled with