Sleep Softly

“We can start now if you like, Miz Davenport.”

I looked up into the blue eyes of a young looking cop.

“I’m Special Agent Julie Schwartz.”

“Well, dantucket,” I said.

Julie Schwartz found that remark inordinately funny.

6

He heard a soft noise above him, a scraping sound like a shoe on wood flooring. Quietly, he locked all the doors, pocketed the key and went up the steps. On the way, he lifted a hammer, tested its heft and balance. Just in case. Not that he expected it to be a trespasser.

At the top of the stairs, he paused and turned off the basement lights, the door behind him open. The only light downstairs now came from the window into the pink room. It cast a soft glow in the hallway.

From the kitchen he heard off-key humming, familiar, congenial. Still silent, he set the hammer on the step and carefully stood, locking the door behind him. Again he pocketed the key. Pasting a smile on his face, he went to the kitchen.

After Special Agent Julie Schwartz left, I stood at the kitchen sink and washed dishes by hand. Neither of us had eaten all day, so I had whipped up cheese omelets with bacon, and we’d eaten while she’d questioned me. The meal obviously wasn’t by the book, but we both had wanted to get the day and the interview over with, so Julie had compromised.

I put the plates in the drainer and turned to the skillet and omelet pan. I had a top-of-the-line Kenmore automatic dishwasher, so it wasn’t as if I had to wash them by hand, but my body was exhausted and my brain needed the mindless chore of washing and rinsing. When the last dish was clean and left to airdry on the plastic drainer, I poured myself a glass of wine and walked out to the swing on the screened back porch.

Night was falling. The cop cars were long gone. Jas would be home soon, and Nana and Aunt Mosetta were sure to come by. Even if my lack of sleep hadn’t left me with a sensation of cotton wool between my ears, the coming confrontation would have. The moment Julie had left, I should have gone directly along the path through the woods to Nana’s house. The woman was psychic. She would know when the last cop was gone; Nana knew everything about her land, everything except that a little girl had been buried on it. And what Nana didn’t know, she would spy out through the side porch with the binoculars she had kept there since Jack had died.

In spite of what I knew I should do, I was just too tired. Let them come to me. I sipped the wine, smelled the fresh scent of horse and hay, watched as Johnny Ray let the last mare out into the back pasture, her form moving darkly against the setting sun, bright red on the horizon. Mabel, I figured, from the size and the way she moved, lumbering and just a bit stiff from the day’s ride.

Elwyn was long gone. I hadn’t even seen the horse trainer today, but I was fairly certain the cops had. They had spoken to everyone associated with the land except Jas, and they would get to her tomorrow.

Johnny Ray stumbled and went to his knees while closing the paddock fence, pushed himself back to his feet, using the gate as a prop. Drunk as two skunks. He would sleep it off in the barn tonight.

Could Johnny Ray be the killer? How about Elwyn? Do I have a murderer on the payroll? Jas dated Elwyn for a short time after he came to work here. Did she date a murderer?

It was a silly thought. Johnny Ray was too wasted to carry out a murder except maybe one of drunken passion. If someone tried to take away his bottle before he was ready to let it go, he might do some damage, half by accident as he fell on them. Elwyn was from up north. He lived in town in an apartment. He didn’t know about the family graveyard plot or much of anything about South Carolina. He had Internet access to look up graveyards, and he had enough time off to do any crime he might be capable of. But where would he keep a young girl? In his apartment in DorCity, as locals called nearby Dorsey City? In the tack room in the barn? No. Not Johnny Ray or Elwyn.

“I hope that’s bourbon and you have enough for me.”

I jerked, sending the swing off at a jittery angle and back. “Nana.” I hadn’t heard them walk up. Nana and Aunt Mosetta climbed the steps and walked onto the dark porch. “It’s wine. Let me get—”

“I’ll get my own liquor,” Nana said and moved into the house. She knew her way around as well as I did and she saw better in the dark. The bourbon was kept on hand just for her anyway. I hated the stuff.

“I been telling that old woman she got to give up hard liquor. At her age it be going to kill her,” Aunt Moses said as she levered herself into the heavy captain’s chair she preferred. The chair had wide arms to bear her weight, and its legs splayed out at slight angles to make it steady. The firm cushion I had supplied supported her back and protected her thighs from the wooden seat and was pretty, according to Aunt Moses, a bright floral pattern totally at odds with the rest of the porch.

“I’ll drink if I want to. Stop badgering me. I’ve been badgered enough today by self-important cops not old enough to drink this.” She saluted us with the lowball glass, bourbon straight up, no ice, no water. The very thought made my stomach ache.

“So. Fill us in.” Nana settled into a cushioned deck chair with her denim-clad legs out in front, ankles crossed, her hands warming the glass across her T-shirted middle. Even in the dark, I could tell that she had showered and pulled on tomorrow’s work clothes, her steel-gray hair still wet and curling around her ears.

Aunt Moses pulled her terry-cloth housecoat closer around her shoulders and said, “You badgering the girl you own self. Whyn’t you jest set and be quiet. She tell us in her own time.” When I didn’t respond, Aunt Moses said, “Well?”

I guess that meant my own time was now. I started from the beginning and walked them through my day, through everything I saw and remembered. After my recital, they were silent, the only sound the wind through the trees, the squeak of the swing as I moved it with a toe. “It was pretty awful,” I finished, “and they seem to think it could be a Chadwick who killed her.”

“Ain’t none a my peoples. Ain’t,” Aunt Moses said. “But I answer all they questions and lets ’em look around all they wants. They gots to clear my peoples ’fore they can find the real suspect.”

“She’s been watching CSI reruns. Thinks she can help the cops,” Nana said.

“I can help the police. They sends a real nice black woman to the house to ax me questions. I ’member time when a black woman woulda been cleaning the toilets at the police station. This gal was a special agent with the FBI. She treat me real nice when she ax me questions and I answered her. You was mean and rude to the man who talking to you. I hear that tone on your voice when he axing you questions.”

“The so-called man talkin’ to me was young enough to be my great-grandson and had a disagreeable manner. He never once called me ma’am. My grandsons speak to me without a ‘yes, ma’am’ and a ‘no, ma’am’ and I wouldn’t be polite to them either. I didn’t have to be polite, I only had to answer his questions, that little officious, pipsqueak Yankee.”

I smiled into my wine and wished I had brought the bottle. I caught a whiff of Aunt Mosetta’s latest favorite perfume, night-blooming jasmine, a gift from my daughter for Mother’s Day last year.

“You look all done in, Ashlee,” Nana said.

“I haven’t slept in two days. I’m worn out. In fact, I’m not sure I’m not dreaming right now.”

“You come to your senses about that new forensics job? It ain’t you, girl. It ain’t you.”

“Ash can do that job and any other one she want. I seen how they gather up all the evidence and find the killer. Ash can do that iffn she want.”

Nana shook her head. “Ash has been like a boat with no rudder since Jack died. First trying to run his business, then selling it.”

“She made a fortune. Ash no silly girl.”

“Then leaving the Dawkins County Hospital and going to that new, big hospital in Columbia. Now this forensic stuff. She doesn’t know what she wants. Hasn’t, since finding out Jack had cheated on her with that worthless best friend of hers.”

Something twisted painfully deep inside, burning. It was a familiar pain, one I always felt whenever I remembered that I had lost Jack and my best friend Robyn, all in one fell swoop. Whenever I remembered that he hadn’t loved me as he should. As he’d promised. “I am sitting right here with the two of you, if you’ll remember. And I’m not deaf.” My voice sounded cool and controlled, not as if it were burning a hole in me. “If you’d like me to go inside so you can gossip over me in private, I’ll be happy to.”

“Sounds jist like her mama, don’t she.”

“Josey is not what I’d call a good influence. But at least she knows what she wants.”

“Nana,” I said, to stop the bickering. “You are absolutely right.” That shut them both up. “I have no idea what I want to do with the rest of my life. I’m still trying to get it all together inside. I know you think I should have it all figured out by now, but I haven’t.”

Jack’s heart attack and my subsequent discovery of his affair with Robyn had indeed played a huge part in my inability to direct my own future. I hadn’t told my family about the affair. I wouldn’t ruin my daughter’s vision of her father. But Nana had her own ways of discovering the truth, and she had eventually found out. I pushed thoughts of the past away.

“All I can say is, I always wanted to be a nurse and I’m still nursing. I’m just not nursing exactly the way you wanted me to, working in the county hospital with Wallace Chadwick as my boss and surrounded by family. I want more, and I’m not sure what kind of more. So I’m trying new things, going new places. And I’ll find myself.”

“Jack left you enough money to sit and play pinochle all day if you wanted to. You don’t have to drive into that dangerous city to work. Next thing you’ll be moving there, taking Jas with you.”

Ahhhh. Understanding nestled in me. Nana was worried about my health a lot less than she was worried about the possibility that I might move to the state capital. Leave home in my midlife crisis. Cleave a chasm in her comfortable world “Crime is everywhere, Nana,” I said softly. “Even on Chadwick Farms. We can’t hide from danger or troubles. And I promise I’ll find myself. Without moving away.”

“Tole you she figure out what you doin’. Ash got your number.”

“Shut up, old woman.”

Before the bickering could start up again, a small truck pulled into the yard and cut its lights. Jas was home. I felt something inside lighten as she slid from the truck, something tight and frightened that I hadn’t even been aware of. Jas skipped up the steps and stopped when she saw us. “What’s up?” she said, trepidation in her voice. My Jas was smart. Smart enough to know that there was trouble just by reading our body language in the deep dusk light.

“Nothing. We going home. Jist stop by to say good-night to your mama.” In a slow and ponderous process, Aunt Moses stood, crossed the porch and enveloped Jasmine in a mama-bear hug. Nana hugged right behind her and they were both gone, slow steps crunching across the gravel, leaving me to explain to my daughter about a body, cops and a task force.

Once she got over the shock of hearing that a child had been buried at the old family homestead, my daughter thought it was cool to have a crime scene on the property and even cooler that she would be questioned by the FBI. Youth, I thought, disgusted. So tired I weaved when I walked, I made my way to my room, showered the stink of the grave off me and fell into bed.

7

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.