All The Pretty Girls

He glowered at her, hostile and demanding. Taylor could see this man as a killer, and the thought made her blood run cold. She almost dropped the act, nearly spit out what she was actually thinking about the bastard, but she held her tongue and simply nodded and crossed her legs.

“I understand completely, Mr. Buckley. I can’t apologize enough, for the whole department. We are truly sorry we inconvenienced you. I’m sure you understand, we have just one little problem to clear up and then we’ll do our best to get you out of here. Get you home to Mrs. Buckley. Qui

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right now, crying her eyes out because she doesn’t know what’s happening. Would you like to call her?”

“I’m on the news? Why the hell is that?”

Taylor chose to stall him. “Tell me, Mr. Buckley. Your wife mentioned that you like poetry.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Oh, I think you know. Love poems. She mentioned you used to send them to her, way back when. Are you still in that habit now, Mr. Buckley?”

“What difference does that make? So I send my wife love notes. Doesn’t make me any different than the next guy.”

“And when you send them to your wife’s sister?

Does that make you any different?”

“Send poems to Whitney? What exactly are you accusing me of, Detective?”

“It’s Lieutenant. And I’m asking if you were having an affair with your wife’s sister. Identical-twin sister, at that, who happens to be very, very dead.”

Jake Buckley opened and closed his mouth, took a breath and spoke, menace in his voice. “I don’t know anything about Whitney’s death. I’ll have your badge for this, Lieutenant. I may not be a lawyer, but I know slander when I see it. Is that what you’ve been telling my wife? That I cheated on her with her own sister?

What do you think I am, some kind of monster?”

“Perhaps you are.”

“And perhaps I’d like to know what you meant by me being on the news.”

It was time to get to it. Taylor raised her hands, palms up, entreating him for calm. “Well, Mr. Buckley. Sir, I’m sure you understand that we’ve been looking for 360

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you for a couple of days now. And there’s that little technicality we’ve been dealing with. Sir, how do you explain the girl in the trunk of your car?”

Buckley’s eyes widened and his bullying veneer dropped for an instant. “What girl? What the hell are you talking about?”

“How about the bag with the knives, rope and tape…your tool kit, full of bloody evidence?”

Buckley shifted in his chair. “I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

Taylor stood now, ready to hit her stride. She paced the room. “Let me guess, no one mentioned that you had a dead girl in the trunk of your BMW, Mr. Buckley? A girl named Ivy Ta

It’s okay, Mr. Buckley. I understand how these things work.” She sidled up to him. “You meet a girl, maybe get a little friendly with her. Maybe things get a little rough, and suddenly, BAM! She’s dead, and you don’t know what to do. So you stash her in the trunk of your car and drive toward home, figuring you’d find a good place to dump her along the way. Is that how it happened, Mr. Buckley? Isn’t that what you’ve been doing here for the past couple of months? Meeting a girl here or there, sweet-talking her to go somewhere with you? Getting a little frisky, okay, maybe a lot frisky, and she somehow accidentally ends up dead?” Taylor stopped pacing and planted herself two feet from Buckley. He reared back in his chair as if he’d been hit.

“No. No, no, no, that’s impossible, that’s not right. I never killed any girls. I have no idea—”

Taylor interrupted him, all the sweetness and light gone from her voice. “Oh yes, yes, yes, Mr. Buckley, All the Pretty Girls

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that’s just what you’ve been up to. Your happy little road trip throughout the Southeast? Picking up girls, murdering them, transporting their bodies. Or has that little tidbit slipped your mind? What about their hands, Mr. Buckley?” Taylor was two inches from Buckley’s face now, each word biting and cutting as well as a knife. He looked terrified.

“What do you do with their hands, Jake? Do you mind if I call you Jake? Do you tell them your name before you kill them, Jake? Were you just trying to get yourself a little bit of ass and it went awry? You found out how much you liked it, didn’t you? You liked forcing them, liked choking the life out of them. And then you administered the coup de grâce, didn’t you, Jake? You cut off their hands, took one with you to throw down at the next dead body, the next mutilated girl. Isn’t that how it went, Jake?”

Her voice was sharp, loud, and Buckley flinched away from her, shaking his head, a low keening sound escaping his throat. “No, no, no, no, NO! No, I didn’t do any of those things. I didn’t, I swear it! I may be a jerk, but I’m not a killer. I didn’t kill anyone. Christ, you have to listen to me. Lawyer. I want my lawyer. Right now!” he roared, eyes white with panic. Taylor turned tail and walked out of the room. Baldwin followed suit. They left Jake Buckley blubbering like a baby in the interrogation room and joined the rest of the homicide team.

They met her in the hall, all four men gri

“You scared him so shitless he forgot to ask for a lawyer until the very end. Well done, girl.”

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“Thank you, thank you. But we have to get him to say something other than ‘No, I didn’t do it.’ Baldwin?”

Baldwin was staring at the floor, lost in thought.

“Baldwin?”

He met her eyes. “Something’s not right about him.”

“Well, we know that. Your average guy doesn’t like to kill his dates at the end of the evening,” she said.

“No, it’s something more. He was really cocky with you when you let him think he was in control. But the second you turned on him, he cowered like a beaten dog. This killer wouldn’t do that. The notes he’s sending, the sensational nature of the crime—I think he’d be bragging about it. I don’t think he’d let you get under his skin like that.”

“C’mon, Mr. Fed, give the girl some credit. She can waltz back in there and he’ll tell her anything she wants to hear.” Fitz wasn’t quite growling at Baldwin, but he definitely was pushing things.

“He just might. But I don’t know if it’s him. We need to get some of the forensics together, get his DNA. We can compel a DNA sample from him now, right?”

Taylor nodded.

“Then let’s do that. We can try to match it against the semen taken from Christina Dale’s crime scene. I just can’t get my head around him as the killer. Not the way he backed off when Taylor got in his face. An accomplice, maybe. Hell, I don’t know. Let’s get some proof.”

Fitz stared at Baldwin as if he were an alien.

“Baldwin, the man had Ivy Clark all laid out in the trunk of his car. He was speeding back to Nashville to get rid of the body. He had the bag of tools right there in the car with him, his own damn initials stamped on All the Pretty Girls

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it. What the hell more do you need?” He raised a beefy paw. “Naw, don’t answer that. I’ll go get the sample, have it run over to be tested.” He disappeared into the hallway.

Baldwin turned to Taylor, whose smile had faded. It had felt right. “Let Buckley stew for a little bit. I want to go over the file on Whitney and Qui

Forty-Six

Baldwin set up shop in the conference room across the hall from Jake Buckley’s interrogation room. The files from Qui