“Yeah, no problem, boss. We’re on it.” Lincoln gave her another crooked smile and they left her office, talking to each other quietly about the next steps they’d take. Okay, she thought, one down. The nice thing about management, she got to give more orders. She smiled to herself. She would be right there with them, she just had one thing she needed to do first.

She picked up the phone and dialed her doctor’s phone number from memory. The constant tests and checkups were past tiresome. Some of the medication she had been taking after the accident had wreaked havoc on her liver, so the doctors had taken her off the medicine but insisted on monthly checks of her liver function. A cheery voice answered the phone. “Dr. Gregory’s office!”

“Shelby, it’s Taylor Jackson. I wanted to get my test results.”

The cheer kicked up a notch. “Oh, Taylor. Hi! Dr. Gregory was just about to call you. Hold on a second while I get him to pick up the phone.”

Taylor stared at the watermark in the corner of the ceiling. She really needed to put a call into maintenance to see if they could replace that tile. It drove her nuts. As she started fiddling with a pencil, Dr. Gregory’s baritone practically forced its way through the phone.

“How’s my favorite cop?”

“I’m fine, Doc. Tell me you have good news and I don’t have to get stuck anymore.”

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The doctor was quiet for a second, then cleared his throat. Taylor’s heart sank. Dammit, she’d done everything they’d told her, and she felt fine. Well, as fine as she could, considering everything she’d been through.

“Please, Dr. Gregory, I thought everything would be okay by now.” She heard the whine in her voice and straightened in her chair. She sounded like a petulant eight-year-old.

“No, no, Taylor, your liver function is completely back to normal. Are you feeling okay otherwise?”

“Well, yeah. A little tired maybe, but that’s nothing new.”

He breathed a slight laugh into the phone. “Well, honey, you’re probably going to feel that way for a while.”

As he continued talking, Taylor felt the world spin. Seventeen

The sun leaked into the room, its wavering light barely brightening the small square space where Whitney Connolly was working furiously at her computer. She’d broken protocol this morning, skimming through her e-mails but not bothering to answer them. The only one that mattered, the only one she opened, was from her mysterious friend with the untraceable Yahoo account. The note was simple:

Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

There was no postscript. She didn’t need them now. She appreciated that he recognized that she’d figured it out. How he knew was beyond her, but that didn’t matter.

After seeing that note, knowing what must have All the Pretty Girls

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happened, Whitney got to work. Another girl was dead. So she was doing research. Any good journalist would, right? If she was getting messages from the Southern Strangler, she needed to have background. She needed to build the elements of the case, just like a cop would do. She had to start thinking about her reel, make everything come together so that when she broke the story and had the first interview with this guy, everything was in place. Why else would he be sending her messages, unless he planned on talking to her?

She flew through cyberspace, fingers clicking on the keyboard. She decided on Court TV’s ultrainformative Web site on serial killers. Plugging in the search criteria, she sat back, waiting for the answers to be spit out at her. She wanted to see incidences of killers using poems at crime scenes.

She stopped for a second. There hadn’t been anything on the news about the notes. She was assuming they’d been found at the crime scenes. At least, that’s what her source in Louisiana said. The poem was in Lernier’s gym bag, but no one thought anything about it. She’d heard, through that same source, that the FBI now had the notes, that they saw the significance of them. That just meant she had to work harder and faster. Shauna Davidson had been found in Georgia, but her crime scene was still here in Nashville. Whitney placed a call, just trying to confirm that there was a note in Shauna’s effects, and was shut down entirely. No one was talking to her. That in and of itself confirmed it for her—she was tight with her source in Metro’s police, and if he wouldn’t talk to her, things must really be heating up.

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J.T. Ellison

She went back to the computer. The search results were varied and numerous—apparently lots of serial killers liked to use poetry. Some wrote their own, some copied others. Some sliced famous authors into their own works. She bookmarked an article about the BTK

killer in Wichita, Kansas, for good measure. At the very least, maybe something about Bind Torture and Kill would jump out at her.

She sat back and thought for a minute. At the very least, maybe she could find out if the poems were originals or copies. She bookmarked the site and pulled up Google, typing a line in from Susan Palmer’s poem. A perfect woman, nobly planned, she typed, and hit enter. Bingo.

Apparently, the Southern Strangler wasn’t creative after all. The poem was written by William Wordsworth. 4,950 hits on the search engine. From a poem called “She Was a Phantom of Delight.” Well, how apropos.

Whitney realized she was on the right track. She did the same thing for Jeanette Lernier’s note. For a creature not so bright and good. Whoa, that had 304,000 hits. She pulled up the poem and realized that both notes were simply stanzas from the same poem. She printed it, whipping the paper out of the printer almost before it was through and read aloud.

“She was a Phantom of delight

When first she gleamed upon my sight; A lovely Apparition, sent

To be a moment’s ornament;

Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair; All the Pretty Girls

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Like Twilight’s, too, her dusky hair; But all things else about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful Dawn; A dancing Shape, an Image gay,

To haunt, to startle and waylay.

“I saw her upon nearer view,

A Spirit, yet a Woman, too!

Her household motions light and free, And steps of virgin-liberty;

A countenance in which did meet

Sweet records, promises as sweet;

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.

“And now I see with eye serene

The very pulse of the machine;

A Being breathing thoughtful breath, A Traveller between life and death; The reason firm, the temperate will, Endurance, foresight, strength and skill; A perfect Woman, nobly planned,

To warn, to comfort and command;

And yet a Spirit still, and bright

With something of angelic light.”

She finished and thought hard for a moment. Something wasn’t right. Reading through it again, she realized she wasn’t seeing the lines from the latest poem she’d received. She followed the same process. The 132

J.T. Ellison

author of the poem fragment in the newest note was William Butler Yeats. She printed it out and read it aloud.

“Leda and the Swan

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.