LITMIR.BIZ

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working wonderfully until this phone call, the familiar voice booming in his ear.

      “The esteemed Dr. John Baldwin, I presume?” The sharp bite of sarcasm wasn’t lost on Baldwin, even some of the FBI’s own field officers didn’t like dealing with the profilers.

       “It’s Jerry Grimes. I’m down here in Mississippi on a case.”

      Baldwin remembered how his heart skipped a beat, revving in anticipation. His senses went on high alert. Grimes wasn’t calling him of his own accord, he’d been instructed to do so by a higher-up. He had dropped the niceties as well.

       “We’ve got a missing girl. Young, brunette. Has all the hallmarks of…”

       “The Strangler,” Baldwin said, dread mixing with adrenaline in his stomach.

       “Now, how’d you go and do that, Baldwin?”

       “Good guess.”

       “Damn right, good guess. Her name’s Jessica Ann Porter. I’m sure you’ve seen the reports on the news?”

       “Haven’t been watching too much. She’s dead, I presume, or else you wouldn’t be calling me.”

      Grimes had gone silent for a moment, and then answered with a cracked voice. “No, she’s just missing. We’ve got some blood on the bedsheets but no real signs of a struggle. It’s like she disappeared into thin air. No one saw her after she left work for the day.”

      Baldwin fast-forwarded through the conversation to Grimes’s description of the girl.

       “She’s a beautiful kid. She’s got all this brown hair, got these big brown eyes, the kind that just shoot right through you. That’s just from pictures. She was the damn homecoming queen, man. Getting ready to go back to college in the fall, wanted to be a nurse or doctor, something she could do that would help people. She volunteered at the homeless shelter in town and delivers meals to shut-ins. The kid’s a saint, and no one we’ve talked to has had anything bad to say about her.”

      Baldwin remembered thinking, uh-oh, Jerry’s taking this kind of personal.

      Grimes continued. “I knew something was hinky and I should probably give you a heads-up, just in case.”

      There wasn’t anything else Baldwin could do but hear the man out. Cases with kids got to every good investigator, and sometimes just talking it out was the best thing. They’d hung up with Baldwin promising to do a little research on the missing hands and what it could mean. Then Jessica Porter turned up in a field in Nashville, with what was presumably Jeanette Lernier’s hand with her.

      The phone had rung again early this morning. Baldwin saw the caller ID number and knew it was Jerry Grimes, calling about Shauna Davidson. He was right.

       “We got another body, Baldwin. Pretty sure it’s the girl missing from Nashville.”

      That call had put him on a plane. He ran it through his head, the cadence becoming a bit like a child’s song.

      Susan Palmer, Alabama. Found in Louisiana. Jeanette Lernier from Baton Rouge. Found dead in a field in Mississippi. Jessica Porter, Mississippi girl, found mutilated in a field in Nashville. Shauna Davidson, Georgia bound…

      Though he’d gotten a row to himself, the woman in the aisle seat across from his gave him a strange look, half pity, half disgust. He must have been talking aloud. He gave her as reassuring a smile as he could, then fumbled all his folders back into his briefcase. As the pilot came over the radio to tell them they were cleared to land in Atlanta, he realized he was excited by the challenge.

      Chapter Ten

      Whitney Connolly dragged her eyes away from the television and returned her attention to her computer. Sure enough, the address was there, the message that she was hoping for had arrived. She wet her lips and ran the mouse over the message header. It was innocuous, like all the others. A Poem for S.W. was all it said. The return address was a garbled mass of letters and numbers—[email protected]. A generic address from a huge server. She’d asked a friend who was sometimes more than a friend to try to find out who the sender was, but he’d told her that the address bounced off several other servers, so in effect, it didn’t exist. Whoever was sending her the messages was virtually untraceable, and obviously smart enough to cover his tracks. Whitney didn’t worry about that though. When the time was right, her anonymous friend would reveal himself to her. They always did.

      She opened the mail and found the following lines:

       How can those terrified vague fingers push,

       The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

       How can anybody, laid in that white rush,

       But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

       P.S. From your backyard.

      Mmmmmm, she thought. This one was a bit sexual. But of course, if he was murdering girls, why wouldn’t he be writing sexual poetry? He seemed quite talented, at least in her mind.

      She felt the goose bumps parade up and down her arms. Man, she was getting messages from the killer her FBI contact called the Southern Strangler. Why he had picked her, she didn’t know. But she didn’t want to go to the police just yet. After all, what would she say? “By the way, Officer, I’ve been communicating with the man who is responsible for murdering those poor girls.” She didn’t even know for sure that this guy was for real. She had nothing to go on, but all of that was going to change today.

      She printed out the e-mail, then carefully archived it in three places to make sure she didn’t lose it if her computer was to suddenly crash. She copied and pasted the verses into her notes and looked back at the three previous entries, starting with the first.

       A perfect woman, nobly planned,

       To warn, to comfort and command;

       And yet a Spirit still, and bright

       With something of an angelic light.

       P.S. This was found at the crime scene.

      She had made copious notes underneath the entry, trying to make sense of the poem. And what crime scene? She’d gone through nearly every crime in Nashville that she could find, badgered detectives, worked her sources. No one knew anything about a poem found at a crime scene. She chalked it up to a nutcase and filed it away. It was silly, a little love poem sent to her private e-mail address. She even imagined for a moment that it was from an anonymous lover, someone that she knew but didn’t want to reveal himself to her.

      But when she received the second e-mail, she realized that this wasn’t a message meant for her.

       A creature not too bright or good

       For human nature’s daily food

       For transient sorrows, simple wiles

       Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears and smiles.

       P.S. This one was from LA.

      That had sent her scrambling. LA could be one of three things, Los Angeles, Louisiana or Lower Alabama, as Nashvillians jokingly referred to the Gulf Shores area. A quick search showed a young girl had been kidnapped from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She did some checking, followed the case, and when the body of Jeanette Lernier was found, she attached the name to the poem in her files. But there had been nothing on the media coverage that said anything about messages or notes. She knew that all investigations left things out of the statements allowed to the media, if only to rule out the copious nut jobs who called and confessed to the crimes. Despite repeated probing, none

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