All the Pretty Girls - J. T. Ellison [91]
Thirty-Five
Taylor sat at her desk, tapping her fingers on the bleached wood. Where the hell was Baldwin? She had caught his excitement over the phone and had been trying to go through the case herself. She was lacking the details, and the frustration mounted. She wanted to be out there chasing the killer rather than sitting in her office. She knew she’d helped, but damn, it would be great to be out there, gun in hand, stalking the stalker.
Lincoln and Marcus came into Taylor’s office, interrupting her fantasy of shooting the bastard between the eyes. She started and smiled at them. For at least an hour, she’d forgotten all about Betsy Garrison and the Rainman case. She tried to play it off.
“Hi, guys. Good timing. Did you catch me a rapist?”
“Would that it was so easy to woo me, lady, simply drop a bad man in her lap and call him rapist.” Lincoln gave her a smile through his pidgin Shakespearean answer.
“I take it that’s a no?”
“It’s a no. The print you lifted belonged to Brian Post. So that was a dead end. Marcus and I have been going through all the personnel files from the area, looking for a cop who lives in the general vicinity that would go to those stores and that gym. We also asked around about the gym, and there are a few guys that go there. Problem is, none of them match the description of the cop that the latest victim is giving. And we talked to Betsy, and she can tell us for sure that it isn’t any of these guys. She’s familiar enough with them that she really didn’t think they were worth looking at any further.”
Taylor nodded to the chairs in front of her desk, indicating that they should sit. They did and she leaned back in her own chair.
“Marcus, what do you think? Do you think it’s a cop?”
“No, I don’t. At least not one of Metro’s. Now, it’s possible that she got the uniform or the car wrong, that it belongs to a Williamson County cop or something like that. We don’t have the right to go into their files as of yet. We did go through the victim’s background a little bit. She has a collar for resisting arrest and a DUI. I’m just wondering if she’s fingering the cop that arrested her during her DUI, whether consciously or subconsciously. She has a restraining order filed against a guy named Edward Hunt. Thought we’d have a chat with him, as well. See if maybe he’s been hanging around. Maybe she’s just seeing things. Rape’s traumatic enough. Anyway, it would be nice to get the DNA back from the TBI, but I suppose that’s not going to happen anytime soon.”
“Well, sounds like you have a plan, then. Go bug the TBI, see if they can help. I’m going to be working with Baldwin for the rest of the day, but I’ll have my phone if you need me.”
They both looked at her but shrugged. It was her prerogative if she wanted to work off the reservation for an afternoon. They went on their way and Taylor opened Whitney Connolly’s laptop, clicking on the button that took her into the dead woman’s e-mail. There was nothing new, so Taylor got out of the program and started trolling through files until one caught her eye. Whitney had a file marked “Notes” that was dated the day she died. It had last been accessed that very morning.
Taylor opened the folder and saw a jumble of remarks and annotations. Whitney took notes on the computer in modified shorthand that would make more sense to a teenager text messaging her best friend. It was garbled and words were shortened, but she saw the six poems in their entirety with the postscripts, and the letter Q appeared several times. There were a few QJB entries, which she assumed stood for Quinn and Jake Buckley. But the rest was too garbled for her to make sense of. She knew some journalists took notes in a proprietary way so no one could steal their work, and it was obvious that Whitney was one of them.
She closed that file and started going through others. They were almost all in her peculiar shorthand. Better to