The Stranger You Seek

10





The War Room was makeshift but organized. It had been thrown together quickly when FBI databases linked the four killings. Wound patterns, tool marks, scene staging all added up to the same signature, same killer, same knife. This one wasn’t an opportunist like Gary Hilton or someone who worked within strictly defined parameters like Wayne Williams—an ethnic group, an age group—and therefore likely targets could be protected. This one was different. Atlanta had never seen anything like it.

I stood at the door, unnoticed except for a nod here and there from familiar faces. Rauser was on the telephone, his back to me. The long table in front of him was littered with papers. Crime scene and autopsy photographs, numbered and dated, covered an enormous bulletin board. Pushpins marked the murders on maps of Georgia and Florida. Another board was devoted to leads, witnesses, interviews, detectives’ reports. Yet another was for the victims—candid shots of them in life. Elicia Richardson standing at an outdoor grill with a metal spatula in her hand, smiling shyly at the camera. Bob Shelby with his feet on a coffee table and a beer in his hand, shorts, shirtless and sunburned. Lei Koto with her son, Tim. The boy was holding a swimming trophy in his hands. Here they all were, laughing, playing, breathing. We’d put up family photos at the Bureau too. It was meant to remind everyone that these people hadn’t always been victims, that they were real people who’d left behind them daughters and friends and grieving parents and lovers and stunned husbands and gardens half planted, papers half written, groceries still in the bag, dinners on the stove, and full lives. Rauser had told me he’d practically been living in this room. He wanted to surround himself with the information. Maybe it would make sense after a while, sink into him by osmosis.

The department today had the atmosphere of being under siege. Pressure was crashing down from offices high in our local government. Detectives with already knee-buckling caseloads pushed by me and hustled in and out of the War Room, drinking from Styrofoam cups, posting reports, tapping at keyboards, kicking around ideas. One posted a sign over the bulletin boards that read WISHBONE MURDERS, and for a moment everyone in the room fell silent. Harsh reality had suddenly slammed into an odd and disconcerting sense of history in the making, of a terrible bloody legend still forming.

“Christ,” Rauser muttered.

I pulled a chair from the conference table and sat down beside him.

“Let’s get to work, huh?” I said.

Rauser stared at me. Then he pushed back his chair and stood up. “Attention, people,” he said, and movement ceased. A couple of detectives left their cubes to stick their heads in. “For those of you who don’t know, this is Keye Street. She’s an experienced criminalist trained in interpreting physical evidence. Keye’s coming on as a consultant to our task force, so play nice, full transparency, please, and share your doughnuts, people.”

With that, he sat back down and we went to work. I spent the afternoon in Rauser’s War Room, and my notes quickly filled a couple of spiral notebooks—pages jammed with bad artwork and fat question marks and nearly indecipherable stream-of-consciousness stuff. It was the way I had always worked. I’d take it apart later. The important thing was not to edit. Not yet. Just keep it going, lay the foundation for a coherent assessment. Instinct and training, an instructor at Quantico once told me, you couldn’t trust one without the other.

“I’m looking for the interviews with the first officer or the EMTs,” I said to Rauser, shuffling through mountains of paper at the messy War Room conference table. I was starting to hurt from a shortage of sleep. I couldn’t imagine how Rauser was functioning at all.

“I handed you their reports. Jacksonville didn’t do interviews.”

I pointed to one of the crime scene photos pinned to the board. A coffee table was flipped on its side next to the body. Bob Shelby. I glanced up at the board and studied him in life, beer, baseball cap, same couch, same coffee table that was at the death scene, only pushed several feet away from the sofa. The room was in disarray. Furniture out of place, according to the impressions left on the carpet. The remains of a fast-food dinner were spilled on the floor; bloody footprints led from the area where the victim lay facedown near a pool of blood to the front door and then toward the back of the house. The victim was completely naked. Bruising stained the top and inside of his upper arms. Sharp force and incised wounds on the pale white skin of his lower back and buttocks, thighs. And bite marks.

“If you had to reconstruct this scene, what would you say?” I asked.

“Guy liked Taco Bell?”

“Funny.”

Rauser didn’t have to think about it long. He’d looked at these pictures a thousand times, read the files again and again, and clearly formed his own conclusions. “Bob Shelby,” he said. “Sixty-four. Not many defensive wounds. Contusion on the back of the skull. Some food and furniture got turned over, control bruising on the top of the arms. Ligature marks around the wrists. Pooling on the floor. Cast-off on the furniture and carpet. Killer beat him senseless, stabbed him about twenty times while he was still breathing and another thirty-three times after he was dead, slit his throat, then tracked the blood out and left us a size-ten impression.”

“Was the first officer male?” I asked, and Rauser nodded. “Do you know what he did on arrival?”

“He followed first-officer protocol, notified dispatchers, secured the scene.”

“Did he step in the blood? Do you know what size shoes he wore and what type? Do you know if the EMTs moved the furniture and knocked over the food?” I used my pen to point out details in one of the photographs. “Body’s over here near the sofa. So did the med techs push this table out of the way to get to him or is this the way the killer left it? Do you know what size shoes they wore and what type? Also, that could be therapeutic bruising on the arms. There can be some postmortem bruising. You need to get clear on this with the ME.”

Rauser said, “What’s bugging you?”

“Well, if the offender gained control using a blitz, and from the blunt-force trauma here it looks that way, there wouldn’t have been a struggle. Shelby was down, unable to fight back. It doesn’t make sense. So without interviews, we don’t know if we’re reconstructing victim and offender interactions or if we’re actually just analyzing the first officer’s and med techs’ effect on the crime scene, and because of this, we don’t have an ice cube’s chance in hell of being certain the killer’s in a size ten.”

Rauser sighed and made a note. “This wasn’t our case,” he reminded me.

“So where are the interviews on the cases in Atlanta? I haven’t seen anything but written reports from first responders, which are bare bones. You know that. These people won’t take the time unless you force them.”

“We’ll follow up with the officers and the med techs on the Koto and Richardson scenes here.”

“Remember Locard,” I told him. Locard’s Exchange Principle states that everyone entering a crime scene both takes something of the scene with them and leaves something behind. It was one of the founding principles in crime scene investigation. “I hate to say it, but the offender more fully understands Locard than the Atlanta Police Department. He’s highly skilled, Rauser. The scenes have to be processed with that in mind. Your people have to know what kind of evidence to collect, and part of that is a detailed interview from everyone who steps into your crime scene.”

Rauser nodded. “I’m onboard,” he said with that restless, nearly kinetic energy of his that was both contagious and a little disconcerting. He stayed revved up during cases like this, barely slept, had a flood of ideas. But he paid for his manic episodes. In the next few days or weeks or whenever this project no longer needed him, he’d bottom out, hit a low so debilitating that just getting out of bed was overwhelming. He called it “the flu” and I had seen those moods knock his feet out from under him. I called it hypomania, but he wasn’t interested in my opinions regarding his mental health.

I called Neil from the station with information about the victims—date of birth, Socials, full names. Neil had laserlike focus when it came to anything that remotely resembled spying. We needed to examine the lives of each of these four people in a more intimate way, profile each as thoroughly as the offender, and complete an in-depth risk assessment. If we understand the victim, we understand the killer. He gets something from them. What? What need is he fulfilling? What does his behavior say about motive? What is he acting out and how does that behavior work in relation to the physical elements of his crimes? At what point were these victims first at risk? Just answering that question alone would solve a hundred others about what the killer’s willing to do to acquire his victims, about location and triggers and motive.

Movement caught my eye. Jefferson Connor, Atlanta’s twenty-fourth police chief, was walking heavily down the hallway toward the War Room. Connor was in uniform, which he always wore for press conferences. I wondered if that accounted for the sour expression on his face. Perhaps it was the two-hundred-million-dollar budget or the twenty-four hundred employees he managed. Perhaps it was a serial offender at work under his watch. I had never met him personally, but I’d seen him calmly fielding questions on everything from homicide investigations to corruption inside the department, and Rauser had talked a lot about him. They had been friends and partners in DC as uniformed cops. Both had twenty-plus years in law enforcement. Connor had wanted to climb through the ranks. Rauser, on the other hand, had refused promotions in order to do the work he still loved. Rauser came to Atlanta, while Connor went to LA, where he rose to chief, created positions for community liaisons, began a Public Integrity Division and, through partnerships with the community, drastically reduced homicides under his watch. The hype that surrounded the chief’s coming to Atlanta was memorable—the press surrounding him like he was a rock star when he passed through the gate at Hartsfield-Jackson, the mayor beaming at their first press conference together.

He was a big guy, six-four, wide shoulders, with a veiny round nose and the ruddy complexion of someone who’d spent some time either in the sun or at the bar. Trailing closely behind Chief Connor was Jeanne Bascom, APD’s official spokesperson. Bascom gave daily press briefings, handed out progress reports, worked damage control, and according to Rauser, she was generally pummeled for her trouble. Bascom not only took a daily battering from the press, she was the person who took the calls from the families of victims and answered to the chief and the mayor for any public misstep. I could not imagine what attracted anyone to such a position.

The chief pushed open the door and nodded at the tangle of detectives in the room, let his gaze settle on me for a moment, and then said to Rauser, “Powwow, Lieutenant, before the press conference. You gotta stand there too. They like seeing us all lined up. It’s like target practice.” He nodded again to the room. “You’ve got about two minutes, Aaron.”

Rauser looked at his team. “Listen up. Street’s been working on a psychological sketch. Pay attention, please, listen, make notes, and then I want you back out there. Thomas,” he said to one of only two female detectives on the task force, “go back to Lei Koto’s neighborhood, talk to the neighbors again, and keep talking and walking around until something makes sense. There was a car watching that street or a motorcycle or a bike. Some neighbor, some kid, some nosy old lady saw him. Maybe they don’t even know it. Maybe they just need the right question to jog their memories. I want to know everyone who ever stepped in that neighborhood in the two weeks before this lady was killed. Stevens, make sure we got all the interviews Fulton County did when Elicia Richardson was killed. Track them all down. Neighbors, paperboys, service people, first responders, whatever. There was five years between Richardson and Koto, so you gotta track everyone down and talk to them again. Bevins, communicate with every jurisdiction in the Southeast, then branch out state by state. Maybe it hasn’t been five years. Maybe we got more vics out there. Maybe we got a crime scene somewhere that’s not so clean. Williams, Balaki, if you gotta go to every elevator in the city until you figure out where this freak is doing his hunting, do it, ’cause the only thing we know right now about David is that we don’t know shit. You get any sense at all of what building that bastard is writing about, I don’t care if it’s just a feeling, put in requests for the surveillance tapes. We got nothing to lose.”

He left us there and headed down the hall. From the War Room we could see Jeanne Bascom perched on one of the vinyl chairs in Rauser’s tiny office. Chief Connor was in Rauser’s desk chair.

“Poor Lieu,” Detective Andy Balaki said. He had a swampy southern drawl and a Braves cap. “That don’t look so good.”

I cleared my throat and addressed the room. “This person’s family, his friends, and possibly his coworkers would have experienced his tendency to be hypercritical, moody, perhaps even verbally abusive.” No one even bothered to look up. Everyone kept on doing what they were doing. I was an outsider, no matter what Rauser had told them. “Okay, listen,” I said, louder. “I want this sonofabitch off the streets just like you do.” A few heads turned. “I’m not going to get in your way. I don’t want to direct your investigation. I’m here to assist, not to interfere. I used to do what you do. My background is in law enforcement. I know how hard you work.” A few more detectives gave me their attention. “His crime scenes and his letters, they have a story to tell. He’s skillful, this guy, and careful about showing his temper. He doesn’t want to be observed losing it.”

“What about his personal life?” Detective Thomas wanted to know. She was in jeans and athletic shoes, an army green hoody. “Are we looking for somebody married, divorced, gay, straight?”

“Never been married,” I replied. “Intimate relationships are fraught with obstacles. They don’t last. He dates and is sexually active, but this is about appearances. He’s straight, but his orientation has nothing to do with victim selection.”

I had their attention now. One by one, the twelve detectives assigned to this task force came back to the table. Detective Brit Williams, well dressed and handsome with very dark skin, spoke up. “Koto and Richardson and both murders in Florida happened during the day. So we assume he works the night shift.”

“Well, he needs both daylight and evening hours for surveillance purposes, planning and fantasizing. So the most important consideration in his work is mobility and freedom. He could have a mobile profession like sales, construction, route driver, but I think it’s more likely he has these freedoms because he’s in upper management. He’s educated, and it’s very important to him how the world sees him. There’s also knowledge of evidence collection and forensics, obviously, since the scenes are spotless. How much knowledge? It’s hard to determine, but at the very least he will subscribe to trade journals in these areas. So the mailing lists for these kinds of publications and the traffic at these websites could be helpful.”

Williams nodded and scribbled a note. Detective Andy Balaki frowned. “What about the blogs? I mean, he’s such a f*cking bragger. These letters are all look how smart I am.”

“Yes!” I agreed. “That’s exactly what they’re about, and there’s a very good chance he’s blogging or at least making regular hits on websites devoted to him. My tech guy tells me there are dozens already. And now he has a name—Wishbone—so the websites will multiply. This is part of the thrill for him. He’ll want to know everything law enforcement is saying and everything the profilers are saying, so he’ll be extremely dedicated to the news. Check children’s organizations too. He may donate to them since he experienced abuse as a child. Those mailing lists up against the trade journals’ mailing lists might net you something.” I paused, looked at each face in the room. “The killings are becoming more frequent and the cooling-off periods shorter in duration. It’s not an unusual pattern in the active years of a serial, but it’s a dangerous one.”