All the Pretty Girls - J. T. Ellison [93]
“Yeah, but did he grab someone from Asheville and take her to Louisville, or snatch someone in Louisville?”
“I can’t tell you that. You’re going to have to figure that one out for me. Are you going to Louisville? Do you want me to meet you there?”
“Right now, I need to follow this trail here in Nashville. Let me work this out for you, because some of this information I’m guessing at. The geo profile indicates that Nashville may be a staging area. I think the killer may be based here. I believe he’s been in contact with one of the local reporters. I’ve been waiting to go over all of this with you until I could get a positive confirmation. I wanted to make sure the poems that were at the scenes match the poems he was e-mailing the reporter. They do.
“Now, the story gets a little crazy here. The reporter, Whitney Connolly, was afraid for her twin sister, was trying to pass along a message to her. But she was killed in an accident before she divulged the information. We’ve found out that the sister’s husband, Jake Buckley, is a vice president with Health Partners. So there is definitely something to this side of things, and we need to get to the bottom of it.
“The killer e-mailed another poem to Whitney Connolly’s e-mail, one that doesn’t match what we have found so far. There’s a body in Louisville. Most likely, that’s what the poem correlates to, but we won’t know until we get some identification.”
“I don’t know, Baldwin, I just don’t know. This case, it’s gotten away from me. From all of us. Do you even know when he sends the poems? Is it when he takes them? Or when he kills them? Where’s he sending them from? Does he have a laptop?”
“I don’t know the answer to that one, Grimes. Did you check with the community hospital in Asheville to see if they have any employees unaccounted for?”
“I did, and they don’t have anyone that hasn’t shown up for work. There’s not a lot else I can do unless we get a missing persons report.”
“What about the colleges? There are several schools in Asheville. We know that Shauna Davidson didn’t work for a Health Partners hospital but attended a class there. Maybe there are students who come in to do lab work or something.”
“Baldwin…”
“I know, man, I’m grasping at straws. I’m just trying to think…”
“No, Baldwin, wait. I think I’ve got an idea. Student health centers, right? They probably wouldn’t have any ability to do lab work. Maybe they send out.”
“Grimes, that’s a great idea. Start at UNC–Asheville, it’s the school closest to the hospital. Double-check they don’t have anyone missing, make some calls to the other schools, try to track this down. Then you can head out to Louisville. I’ll do what I can here to find out what’s going on.”
Disappointment spilled from Grimes’s mouth. “Oh. Okay. I’m waiting on some more information to come in from Louisville, but I’ll check things out here. In the meantime, you’ll let me know as soon as you hear something?”
“Will do. Go get the college checked out. I’ve got a feeling about that.”
Thirty-Six
Grimes drove through the gates of the University of North Carolina at Asheville and was struck by the beauty of the campus. It seemed like a very nice place to spend four years of your life. He followed the entrance drive to a large board that had all of the buildings laid out in a map. He looked for the student health center, found it and drove over there.
He got out of the car and went into the quiet building. There was a reception area, and he asked a pretty, blond girl sitting behind the desk if he could speak to the head of the center. She told him to hold on and disappeared. While he waited, he thumbed through a brochure that extolled the virtues of the campus health system.
A few minutes later, a woman came out from a back room, black hair shot with gray, hard lines etched deep in her upper lip. “I’m sorry, sir, but this is a private health center for the students of the university and you have to leave.”
He badged her, making