14

“Very good, Detective,” Charlotte purred. “Gold star for you.”

Fourteen

Taylor pulled down her ponytail, ran her hands roughly through her hair and pulled it back up, winding the rubber band around the ponytail three times. It was nearly mid

night, she was starving, thirsty and tired. She picked up her Diet Coke can and shook it, willing the empty metal to fill of its own accord and save her yet another trip to the soda machine.

Once the power play was over in the conference room, Charlotte Douglas had proved herself a decent profiler. Her bombshell had floored them all. Five cities, five copycat murder scenarios. But only one copycat. An imitator extraordinaire.

In Los Angeles, he’d copied the Santa Ana Killer from the midfifties, an egregious maniac who dismembered the bodies of the women he killed and left them in the desert. In Denver, it was the LoDo, the Lower Denver Killer, who took prostitutes’ lives by strangulation and left them, posed, on street corners. Mi

J.T. Ellison

was a variation on the Prospect Lake Killer, who strangled his victims and dumped their bodies into Prospect Lake Park on Long Island. Killer, Killer, Killer, Killer, Killer. By five o’clock, Taylor was contemplating buying the media a thesaurus. The press was terrible at coming up with creative names, and she had to admit, the FBI wasn’t much better.

There was one big difference between the previous copycat murders and the Snow White case. All of the other original killers had been caught and jailed. Two had been put to death.

That term popped into Taylor’s head again, though she knew it wasn’t entirely applicable to all of the cases. An apprentice. A student of murder. And he’d saved his greatest imitation for a murderer who’d never been caught. A thought niggled at the back of her mind. If he was so intimately familiar with the Nashville murders, did he know the identity of Snow White? She made a note of the thought, wrote one more thing next to it. Signet ring. The ring had disappeared from the evidence files. If it showed up at a murder scene, that would be interesting. They’d spent the afternoon going through the files, trying to put the pieces together. The DNA matched all the scenes but didn’t match anything else in the system, which meant he hadn’t been arrested anytime in the past three years. His DNA would have been entered into the system automatically if he’d been taken into custody. It didn’t mean he hadn’t been picked up somewhere else, just that the technology was behind the game. He could have some

thing sitting in the files waiting to be inputted in any number of states, Te

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Taylor’s head was starting to swim. There was no sign of Jane Macias. If she had been taken, she would be victim number five. If the copycat followed the original Snow White’s pattern, there’d be five more to go. The additional eighteen murders being attributed to Nashville’s killer was too big to keep contained; the leaks began immediately. Mitchell Price and Dan Franklin were trying to handle the media, but sticking solely to the Snow White’s Nashville murders. They deflected question after question to the FBI, letting them answer just how this massive killing spree had gone u

ment.

Taylor started when the door to the conference room opened. She realized that she had drifted off to sleep, only for a moment, but still… She sat up, wiped a hand across her mouth and saw Baldwin staring at her.

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

“You need some sleep,” she replied. “How’s Char

lotte?” She held up a hand. “Excuse me. Dr. Douglas.”

Taylor drew out the syllables, mimicking Charlotte’s haughty lockjaw accent perfectly.

Baldwin half smiled. “At the hotel, drinking cosmopoli

tans in the bar with a bevy of songwriters at her feet. Some band is staying there. She’s completely in her element.”

Taylor thought for a moment. Who was playing this week? She knew it was someone big…. “Please tell me it’s not Aerosmith.”

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J.T. Ellison

“Ski

“Jesus. How in the name of God did you get hooked up with that woman?”

Baldwin took a seat at the conference table, scratched at his forehead like he could erase the memory. “We were working a case. Late night, too much to drink—hell, you don’t want to hear this. It was over before it started. She scares me. Not a decent bone in her body.”

“Well, she wasn’t shy about the fact that she’d enjoy your bone in her body anytime you’d see fit. Stay away from her.”

Baldwin smiled. “Is that an order, Lieutenant?”

Taylor got up and went to him, plopped down in his lap and put her arms around his neck. “Yeah. ’Cause you and I have a date in a couple of days, and I don’t want her fucking it up. Got it?”

He nuzzled her hair. “Got it, sugar. Besides, you know you’re the only woman for me. I was lost that first day I saw you, sitting at your desk, up to your ears in reports and Diet Coke.”

She had the image from that moment seared into her brain. “Well, I didn’t think you were too bad yourself.” She kissed him lightly, then sighed. “I don’t know how much more we can do here tonight. I’m tired and hungry and cranky. Want to cut out and grab something to eat?”

“Absolutely.”

They gathered their coats and shut the lights off to her office. Baldwin held her hand as they walked out to the parking lot, the bitter cold making her nose run.

“What are you in the mood for?” he asked. “Barbecue?

We could swing into Rippy’s.”

The thought of fighting the crowds didn’t appeal to her. 14

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Rippy’s was legendary, on the corner of Broadway and Fifth, a regular honky-tonk with a view of Nashville’s touristy party life and the best pulled pork in the city. It was a happy, crowded bar with live music and a devil-may-care attitude.

“No, I want something more quiet. How about Radius 10?”

“Oh, good choice. They changed the wine list last month. Let’s go see what they did with it.”

Baldwin drove, and Taylor watched life pass her by outside the window. Even at this late hour, people jammed the streets. Second Avenue was populated with gangbang

ers and reckless high schoolers trying to get into the bars with fake IDs. The old staples were gone from the strip now. Her favorite late-night haunt, Mere Bulles, had pulled up stakes and moved to a much more serene location in Brentwood, twenty minutes south of town. Instead, pop and techno music blared into the night; allhours clubs had forced Metro to maintain a presence. She was sad to see it so lost, so different from what she’d grown up with.

Baldwin turned onto Broadway and they passed through Lower Broad, the country joints and honky-tonks packed with strange faces striving to see one they recog

nized. The songwriters hung out here—people who couldn’t make their own records but wrote for the more famous musicians, the session players who did the music on spec for submissions, all crowded the bars of Lower Broad, plying their wares.

They turned at Union Station, swung by the Flying Saucer taproom, then turned left onto McGavock, stopping in front of the valet at Radius 10. Baldwin tossed 144