J.T. Ellison - All the Pretty Girls

“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.

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—IM1855195C@yahoo.com. 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 of her sources had any inkling about the notes.

Then the third note had come, right on the heels of the word that a body was found in Nashville. This one was alarming.

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

By his dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

P.S. Do you get it yet?

Chilling, yet she was oddly exhilarated by the words.

Now that the word was out, that the Southern Strangler was on the loose and had killed three girls, she understood that the messages left with the bodies must correspond to these notes. After realizing the pattern, she’d gone back and marked the first entry Susan Palmer, then corresponded the notes to the names of the dead. She wondered for a moment about why she would be getting these messages. But she threw that thought aside as quickly as she had it; what did it matter? She was going to get the scoop.

This new message made her blood race. She was going to be a star.

This fourth note could reference the missing Nashville girl, Shauna Davidson. She’d cover the story tonight—on the heels of the murder, the missing person’s case would generate a lead story on the ten o’clock news.

Whitney realized she didn’t have any information that would lead her, or the rest of the media, to believe that Shauna Davidson was anything but missing. With the last three girls, she only received the messages after the girls’ bodies had been found. Maybe this one had been found dead and they weren’t reporting it. But no, they wouldn’t be holding that kind of information back.

P.S. From your backyard. That struck a chord in her immediately. My backyard. It wasn’t meant in the literal sense. He was too elegant for that. The other postscripts referred to locations. Her backyard must mean her hometown. Nashville.

That meant that she, Whitney Connolly, and she alone, knew that Shauna Davidson was dead.

She headed for the shower. She’d take a little extra time putting herself together for tonight’s broadcast. She felt certain the whole town would tune in for her and the biggest story in Nashville tonight.

Jerry Grimes met Baldwin as he came out of security in Hartsfield International. Baldwin took in the gray hair, the white face, the slight pinching around the mouth and knew that Grimes was taking this latest disappearance hard. He stuck out his hand and gave him a smile, trying for cordiality.

“Grimes, you are getting grayer by the day.”

Grimes looked vaguely alarmed for a moment, as if he hadn’t realized that age was leaching the black out of his hair. Then he recovered and ran his hands through the silvery strands. “Well, at least I still have some. That’s saying a lot in this job.”

They walked out the doors to Grimes’s waiting car. He had left the car on the curb in the departures area. FBI got special privileges at airports these days. A uniformed officer stared with frank curiosity as they climbed into the sedan. Grimes removed the FBI placard from the windshield of the car. Pulling away from the curb, he got down to business.