All the Pretty Girls - J. T. Ellison [88]
He called Grimes and told him what he was planning on doing, and told him about the meeting with Louis Sherwood. Grimes thought that sounded great and asked for Baldwin to keep him filled in. Baldwin didn’t mention the poems on Whitney Connolly’s e-mail. He figured it would be better to have some kind of confirmation on them before he threw that little wrinkle into the mix.
They hung up and Baldwin called down to the front desk of the hotel and asked for them to secure a rental car for him. They told him it would be quicker for him to get it himself, the rental-car agency was on the same block, just on the opposite side of the building. He agreed and checked out of the room. Within ten minutes he had a car and was on his way home.
Thirty-Three
Taylor was sitting in front of Whitney’s laptop computer, looking through the e-mail that had been piling up in the two days since Whitney’s accident. She was distracted, worrying. Baldwin’s case was completely out of control, but hopefully, these notes would be the key. She had to search through at least two hundred e-mails, some boring, some interesting, most completely irrelevant. She continued to scan and soon found the original six messages with the love poems. She sent the messages to the printer so Baldwin would have a hard copy.
She reached to close the laptop and saw that there was another e-mail from the same address that had been sending the poems. She’d missed one in her distracted state. This one was marked “Unread,” which meant it had come in after Taylor and Quinn had left Whitney’s house.
She opened the e-mail and saw another poem. She sent it to the printer. Knowing now that these were possibly copies of notes that had been left at the scene of the murders was very disconcerting. And Baldwin had not given her enough information about them for her to deduce anything. She decided it would be best to send the e-mails to Baldwin’s e-mail address and let him look at them firsthand.
She started forwarding the messages and decided to send them to her home computer, as well. Ah hell, why not just take the whole computer with her? She could get out of there now, being in Whitney’s house made her uncomfortable. It made more sense to do that anyway. God forbid, if Whitney continued to get these messages, they wouldn’t have to come over to her house every time they wanted to check something out.
She looked for and found the case for the slim laptop, and unplugged the components and packed them into the carrying case. She rummaged through the desk and found a manila file folder. She slipped the printed copies into the folder, pausing briefly to read the latest installment, the one that had been sent after Whitney had died.
Mark but this Flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Taylor recognized that one. John Donne, a poem known as “The Flea.” Easy enough, it had been a hit in high school. The whole sucking business had every guy in her English class beet red when their teacher, a comely young woman, had read the poem aloud. Well, Baldwin said the poems are some of the classics. Now they just needed to figure out what they meant to Whitney and the man who was sending them to her. Taylor pulled her cell phone out of its holster and dialed Baldwin’s number. She got his voice mail and left a message for him to call her as soon as he got the call. That was the best she could do for now. She carried the laptop out to her truck, then went back in to make sure she hadn’t left anything.