Читать книгу Sleep Softly - Gwen Hunter - Страница 12

Tuesday

By noon I had found my way through horrid traffic to the South Carolina FBI field office. Luckily, I discovered a parking spot close by, not that easy in a metropolitan area that was growing so congested. The inner city had been designed with gracious living and farming in mind, rather than good use of government resources, and many of its streets were narrow and twisting. And I was sure its belt loop and interchanges had been designed by a caffeine-charged five-year-old with a box of crayons.

Inside the entrance, my ID was carefully checked, twice, my photo compared to my face, and my reason for coming to feeb headquarters questioned by a guard with the personality of a block of stone. Finally I was given a name badge with a security locator device attached so I couldn’t get lost or misplaced, and directed to a room on the second floor.

I passed large rooms, some full of frenetic activity and ringing phones, and offices with closed doors. I heard a variety of languages, though most conversations were in English or Spanish, and foreign-sounding names interspersed with names Bubba might have been born with. Everyone I passed or glimpsed wore a look of intense concentration or anger or some combination of the two. The expressions seemed unrelieved by even brief moments of levity or relaxation, and I was glad I didn’t work here.

As a forensic nurse, I was expected to work with law enforcement. I had toured the local LEC—law enforcement centers—in three counties surrounding Dawkins, and had even taken a tour through SLED, the State Law Enforcement Division. But no one who set up the training had envisioned a forensic nurse needing to work with FBI, so that locale had not been on my list of suggested places to visit.

I entered a conference room and nodded to the officers gathered around a coffeepot and three boxes of glazed Krispy Kremes. How trite was that? Cops and doughnuts. As I walked across the room and looked out the dirty window into the street below, they inspected me from head to foot, cataloged and filed me under Not a Cop, and promptly went back to their muted conversation.

I was glad I had opted for basic khaki-green woven trousers and a hip-hiding darker brown jacket with short-heeled pumps. With an amber necklace dangled between my breasts, and with my ashy-blond hair up in a French twist—which pretended to give me some height—and gold hoops instead of pearls, I blended, at least, though the cops seemed to go for black and blue with power-red ties. Even the women wore dark, subdued clothing. Unlike the TV heroines, none of these women showed cleavage or wore Armani. Jas would be distraught.

I caught sight of Jim as I took a seat at the long table in the room’s center. He looked secure and confident, even when wearing the same intense look as the other cops. His suit coat was tailored and his own power-red tie was knotted in a full Windsor. I recognized it for several reasons, chiefly because Jasmine’s father had had difficulty knotting his ties himself and I had always tied them for him. But Jim wasn’t Jack. I felt some unidentified tension begin to uncoil inside me at that thought.

“Afternoon, Ash,” Steven said, pulling out the chair beside me and easing his frame into it. The big cop was a weight lifter, the kind who went into the sport with the intention of building muscle mass, not simply getting into shape. Beside him, I looked like a matronly housewife, something he might break in half with two fingers and thumbs. Steven passed me a cup of coffee, a cream and pink packet of sweetener.

I didn’t drink coffee often as it upset my digestion, but I mixed, stirred and sipped to have something to do with my hands. Steven bit into a glazed doughnut and washed it down with half a cup of coffee, cop-style. “We should have driven up together,” he said. “Traffic is worse today than downtown Charlotte.”

“I thought about it, but I’m on call this afternoon and might have to leave at any time.”

“You’re like a combination of nurse and cop now, aren’t you? Doing both jobs?” The chair groaned as he shifted around, trying to find a comfortable position.

“Sort of,” I said. “I still have my job at CHC in the Majors Emergency Department, but the forensic nursing position is taking more and more of my time. My callback hours are starting to look like another full-time job.”

“Welcome to my world,” he sighed, sounding tired. “But you’re making big bucks, not a lowly cop salary.”

Steven was fishing, and I grinned sourly. “Yeah. Mega bucks. Call time for forensic nurses is about what you made as a first-year beat cop.”

“Now that sucks.”

Of course, that was on top of my nursing salary. I wasn’t hurting, at least not financially.

“Thank you all for coming.” Jim Ramsey stood at the front of the room, which had filled up while Steven and I talked. He bent forward, hands flat on the table, a position that said, I’m offering you all I have. I’m just one of the guys, and then he stood and seemed to take over the room. Nice ploy. Effective. I had seen Jas’s father do the same thing in business meetings. I wondered for a moment why I was thinking so much about Jack, but I pushed the question away. I wasn’t ready to look at the fact or the question, knowing both were snarled up with my evolving feelings for Jim Ramsey.

“The investigators from the Criminal Investigative Analyst Unit from the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime in Quantico are in the building, being escorted up, so let’s get started. We hope this will be the only time we all gather in this room, but we may be back. We will be, if we find another body before we catch the person or persons responsible for these crimes. Tacked to the corkboard to my left are the photographs of the missing girls.”

I looked back over my shoulder and saw eight-by-ten photos of girls, all blond or strawberry-blond, with blue or possibly gray eyes. Below each photo was a list of personal statistics: height, weight, eye and hair color, age, distinguishing characteristics, where they’d been abducted, time and place. Not all the girls had been recovered. For two of them, the date and location where their bodies had been found was on the bottom of the form. One had gone missing after a school event, the other after a dance rehearsal. I remembered Jim and the other cop saying something about a tutu.

I could remember Jasmine in a pink tutu at age ten, long bangs curling over dark eyes and hair tumbling down her back. My daughter had hated dancing. I turned back, having missed part of Jim’s message.

“—introduce ourselves briefly. I’m Jim Ramsey, agent coordinator of South Carolina FBI Violent Crime Unit.”

Introductions went to Jim’s left. A woman, wearing a black suit with a white blouse that featured a bow beneath her chin, stood and nodded. Emma something, her title had supervisory in front of the words. A VIP in the South Carolina FBI office, I was sure. The man beside her was thin enough to be ill. On around the table, all the cops spoke their job titles and what they’d be doing with the task force. When my turn came, I stood and said, “Ashlee Caldwell Davenport, forensic nurse.”

As I was sitting back down, Jim amended that for me by adding, “And the woman who discovered the red sneaker belonging to the second victim and tracked the body.”

That won me an even better scrutiny from the gathered cops. I smiled sweetly at Jim, my expression promising retribution for that. He lifted his brows fractionally and smiled sweetly back. I wasn’t quite sure what that might mean but it didn’t bode well for our relationship if he was going to turn my psychological ploys back on me. Jack Davenport had never been that sly or that smart. Men.

The introductions continued around the room and I heard the name Julie Schwartz, the special agent who’d interviewed me. I liked Julie. That might not be a smart thing to feel for a cop who was hoping to arrest a member of my family for serial murder.

A small, slightly rounded white man and a taller black man stepped through the door and stood behind empty chairs. Jim nodded, and the small man said, “Haden Fairweather, Ph.D. in behavioral sciences and a master’s in criminal justice. I’ve worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation for fifteen years, the last seven as a supervisory special agent, field-office program manager and violent-crime assessor with the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, or NCAVC.”

This was the profiler. Not a very charismatic man for such a fancy title.

Haden introduced his junior partner, whose name sounded like Joshua Timmodee. Joshua nodded to us, spoke greetings with a South African accent, and sat down beside Haden. Jim passed out folders as Haden stood again.

Haden nodded to the room. “Last night and on the flight down, my partner and I studied all the information e-mailed and faxed to us, including many of the crime-scene photographs, the preliminary postmortem autopsies and all the physical evidence available before our flight took off. I will be meeting with the team leaders of the ERT, the medical examiner and various others of you to garner information as needed. We will also be studying the grave sites, and we appreciate you keeping both as pristine as possible for us.”

Haden touched a forefinger to the bridge of his nose as if pushing up sliding glasses, his gaze taking in the entire room. “However, from the evidence reviewed thus far, we have drafted a preliminary victimology profile. A very hasty, inadequate, preliminary report. Please remember that. A detailed report takes time, and much more information than we now have, most importantly the cause of death and any evidence gathered that might point to physical or sexual assault on the victims.

“While I know you all are eagerly awaiting the final, full report, I’m unable to give you much this morning that you don’t already know.” Haden blinked and put a fingertip to his eye, as if a contact lens was sliding around on his cornea.

“Our perpetrator is likely to be a white male, age thirty-five to fifty, with a very organized mind, a competent understanding of South Carolina state history, Chadwick family history, and/or the ability to use the Internet to research complex state records. He has very specific preferences in his criminal methodology, as per the placement of the bodies and the sites chosen for burial, though he appears to be inventive and creative, as indicated by the implements buried with each victim.”

Haden shuffled two papers and centered a third on the podium that stood at the front of the room. “At this time, we believe your perpetrator has a higher than average IQ and a minimum of four years of higher education, likely more, possibly with a liberal arts or history emphasis. Your subject has a need to dominate the victims, as is evident in the tying of the girls’ hands. However, the lack of gross physical damage on the victims, no evidence of prolonged violent physical abuse, neglect or sexual abuse may indicate that the perpetrator feels he is being kind to the girls for as long as he keeps them, perhaps even fatherly.”

The attention level in the room went up a bit. I noted that even Steven, who was likely the least experienced man in the room from an investigative standpoint, angled his head in interest. “This, however, may be revised or negated by any future information on the COD or evidence acquired by the forensic PMs,” Haden again reminded the group.

“Until we receive the report from the forensic pathologist, my partner and I can offer you no more of a psychological profile, though we hope to have something substantive within twenty-four hours after the final ME report.”

“For the purposes of this orientation for our new members,” Jim said, “we have two folders before us. Please open the red folder to page one.”

I opened the folder and looked into the eyes of a pretty little girl. I had seen her photo hanging on the wall behind me. With cold fingers, I touched the matte paper of the small, grainy, color copy.

“We’ll give an overview now, but take and study each file to bring yourself up to date on the first body recovered. The volume of evidence tested on the first victim is obviously much greater than what we have so far on yesterday’s victim,” Jim said. “Our first vic’s name was Jillian LaRue, a twelve-year-old student taken from a dressing room immediately following a dance rehearsal eight months ago. No witnesses, no evidence at the scene.

“There was some reason to believe that the victim went willingly. Initially it was suspected she left with her biological father, who had been spotted several times by the instructor in the past few months, trying to speak to her. However, he was located in the county jail two days after Jillian disappeared, having been pulled for DUI and resisting arrest. He had been locked up for five days prior to the LaRue girl’s disappearance. We lost two days. It won’t happen again. Now that we know we have a serial case, Amber Alerts will go out if a child takes too long in the bathroom or hides too well while playing hide-and-seek. We won’t lose any more children through technical glitches or inattention.”

I noticed Emma purse her lips across the table. She didn’t like that comment at all, as if it reflected badly on her, but she kept quiet. I looked at her name badge. Emma Simmons, SAC. I wondered if she was Jim’s boss. I closed the folder on the photo of the lost little girl. I would read it tonight, and knew I’d have nightmares for days after.

“Her body was discovered partially buried in a Confederate-era cemetery in Calhoun County, dressed exactly as she had been in rehearsal, lavender-and-purple leotards, tights, pink tutu and pointe shoes. Best estimates are that she was in the ground a little over two months, which means he kept her for six months.”

The body in my family cemetery had been in the ground for at least that long. Had the red-sneaker girl been taken and killed just before the dancer? Or had there been others in between? I closed my eyes.

Six months in the hands of a stranger. Six months.

Haden took over from Jim. “Like our latest victim, she was buried with a doll—a blond, nine-inch-tall ballerina doll—which she did not have in her possession when taken. In the front of her leotard, placed over her heart, which placement appears to be significant, was a folded piece of heavy paper with writing on it. Unfortunately, it was so heavily damaged by the elements and the conditions of the grave site that only a portion could be read. You’ll see a partial transcript on page eleven, though the lab is still working on it.”

“The paper was handmade, which I understand is still possible,” Jim said, sounding skeptical. “The lab is tracing the paper and the dyes used in the ink back to the manufacturers. We hope one of the manufacturers will be able to pinpoint where the ingredients were purchased.”

I waited patiently for someone to tell Jim that papermaking was all the rage now in the arts-and-crafts crowd, that products could be purchased in every craft store, every Michaels, every Wal-Mart and Garden Ridge store in the nation. No one did. Unless the maker had put something very odd into his paper or used a rare ink, it would be nearly impossible to trace who had bought the paper ingredients. But no one pointed that out. Maybe I could tell him later, after the meeting.

“Fiber evidence is finally back from the lab, revealing a wealth of information. It appears the leotard and tights may not have been washed following the abduction and were not continually worn in the intervening months. This allows us a visual of specific moments in the victim’s life. The victim’s bedroom, the short ride to the dance studio, the fabric fibers picked up in the dressing room, the immediate moments after the abduction. And the last hours before her death.

“The most common fiber not originally from the victim’s own environs and the dance studio was a short, smooth, black fiber, most likely nylon. The analysts speculate the fibers are from velour or velvet, as if she was wrapped in a black velour robe or blanket. Fibers were found head to foot, even under the dance shoes she was wearing.”

Other people in the room were following along in their red folders, most taking notes. From my peripheral vision I could see Steven’s color copies of microscope photos of the fibers and his pen, writing fast, firm comments on a yellow legal pad. But my mind was seeing something else entirely. A little girl goes to the bathroom, perhaps walking down a long corridor. A man tosses a black throw over her, silencing her screams, and runs out an exit into the darkness, holding her down while she screams and struggles.

My maternal instincts were kicking in as they never had when taking the forensic nursing course. As they never did when dealing with victims in the emergency room. I understood my own reactions. In the E.R., I was helping, doing something to make it right, to make it better. Here, I was on the sidelines. And no one had helped the victims. Little girls had been stolen and kept by a stranger, killed. I wanted to cry and rage and I couldn’t.

Someone at the front of the room stood and someone else sat, and I realized Jim and two other suited types had covered the rest of the fiber evidence while I wool-gathered and grieved. Knowing I was missing important parts of the meeting, I forced my emotional reactions down into a dark hole inside of me. I pulled myself back to Jim’s words. Breathed deeply to center myself. Watched my hand as it flipped pages in the red folder.