The Stranger You Seek

12





It was nearly two in the morning. Rauser had his lights flashing but no siren, no need to wake the natives. We took Peachtree into Buckhead and cut over to Piedmont Road, silent on our way to the scene of another murder—a male victim, facedown, visible bite marks, stab wounds. The Crown Vic’s windows were lowered, warm air blowing our hair, the squawking police scanner making for strange background music. Rauser’s severe profile in the flashing blue light looked like something out of Dick Tracy. Nothing seemed real. A crime scene when it’s new is an invaluable tool. Seeing it just the way the killer left it, smelling it, feeling it, listening to its story. Crime scene photographs don’t always slap you in the face with first impressions and subliminal connections like a fresh scene. And they never give you a sense of angle and distance and space. But there’s never much time. Once discovered, the landscape of a scene begins to change forever. Lights are switched on, evidence is bagged, the air begins to circulate, the body is disturbed. Trace evidence is collected, some drifts away.

I glanced at the speedometer. Rauser was doing seventy-five down Peachtree and barely slowing at the lights, but it wasn’t fast enough to suit me. I just wanted to get there. Like Rauser, I was thinking only of the prospect of new evidence, the seconds ticking away on a perfectly preserved scene. I wasn’t contemplating the loss of life or the shame and sin and horror in that. That part comes later. One learns to compartmentalize emotionally for the sake of efficiency. Unfortunately, that particular talent doesn’t translate well in personal lives. The divorce rate is high for people like us.

We had been in the War Room with detectives and interviews and coffee mugs and cold takeout cartons, and the victims, all four of them up there on the bulletin boards, reminding us constantly what could happen to David, when the call came. I watched Rauser’s face change. The War Room had emptied out in seconds as Rauser shouted out instructions. He was already on his cell with a bloodstain analyst as we skipped the elevators jammed with detectives and ran down the stairs. Minutes later, his Crown Vic screeched through the parking garage at City Hall East.

“I want to process the shit out of this scene,” Rauser told me. “No mistakes this time. First officer secured the scene. No one gets in. I got CSI techs waiting for us and our spatter analyst on the way. We need anyone else there?”

“No. But you’ll want a good forensic odontologist at the morgue for the bite marks.”

Rauser was quiet for a few blocks. “I wanted to find David, Keye, find him alive, save his life.”

“Lots of people end up dead on their stomachs, Rauser,” I answered, and turned toward the window in time to see the huge fins on Symphony Tower glowing like something from Star Wars. “Lots of folks get stabbed and bitten. Doesn’t make it a Wishbone scene. Doesn’t mean it’s David.”

Minutes later, Rauser whipped the Crown Vic into the parking lot of an upscale extended-stay hotel off Piedmont in Buckhead. Immediately ahead we saw a tangle of police and emergency vehicles, lights in blue and red, officers stringing crime scene tape, dealing with arriving news crews and a gathering crowd. Unmarked vehicles, Crown Vics in different shades and in different states of disrepair, were pulling in—task force members. Rauser handed me a pair of surgical gloves from the scene case on his backseat, and I followed him across the parking lot past half a dozen police cruisers with blaring scanners. I watched him say a few words to some of the officers outside. Rauser had the heart of a beat cop. In his memories and in his stories, he was happiest back then. He missed feeling the grit in his shoes and still thought of himself as climbing into “civilian clothes” each morning even though he’d been in Homicide twelve years.

We passed a crowd at the roped-off entrance. “Someone filming?” I asked.

Rauser nodded. “Williams and Balaki were in the area when the call came, so they got things moving. Let’s hope this one likes to hang around. Lots of ’em do.”

A chill suddenly lifted the hair on my arms. I looked back at the crowd. Something out there looked back. I felt it, and tried not to let my hopes sink. The signature elements and the physical evidence, tool marks, wound patterns—that would tell us if this was another Wishbone murder.

Guests had gathered in the lobby. The night shift manager was doing her best to keep some order amidst a storm of rumors. In the background there was a constant, faint ringing of the switchboard while the clerk stood idle and gaping at the front desk. Detective Brit Williams was standing next to her with an open notepad in his hand, but she wasn’t talking, wasn’t looking at him. Her face was gray, expressionless. I’d seen the look. She’d found the body, I realized, and she’ll never be quite the same, never push open a darkened door without remembering. I thought about Tim Koto finding his mother stabbed and beaten next to the stove where she had cooked for him. Who was taking care of him now? The night shift manager had started to sob. Murder disrupts everyone in its path forever.

More than thirty years ago, I sat on an old tiled floor watching as my grandparents’ blood drained from them and pooled up around me. I don’t really remember them or anything much before that moment. It’s like being born into a crime scene at five years old. I had been playing behind the counter when I heard the door open, heard angry voices. Where’s the money, old man? Give us the f*cking money. Grandfather had pressed his palm firmly against the top of my head that day and held me down so I wouldn’t pop up and get it blown off. When he fell next to me, and when another shot collapsed my grandmother too, I didn’t make a sound. In obedient silence, I watched the blood soak through my clothes and the pale pink shoes I wore.

Now, lights from television crews lit up the street and reporters spoke into cameras with the hotel and the crime scene tape as their backdrop. Uniformed officers kept them as far from the scene as possible. Already there were whispers about it being another Wishbone murder, and it seemed that everyone outside the ropes had a phone to their ear.

“It’s that freak who wrote to the newspapers,” someone said into their BlackBerry, and Rauser and I exchanged a quick glance. He was chewing on his lip.

We followed one of the officers through the parking lot and walked past a few buildings. Uniformed officers and plainclothes cops fell silent as we passed them on our way to Building G, Suite 351.

Rauser had strict instructions that no one should notify the ME’s office until the scene had been properly processed. All hell would break loose over that, I knew. He’d had disputes before with the medical examiner over jurisdiction and procedure, but preserving the scene and whatever evidence was left on the body was crucial before it was released.

We stood outside the doorway while the first officer briefed us. He had followed Rauser’s instructions to the letter. No one, not even an annoyed crime scene investigator, had been allowed inside. Everyone who had come in contact with the scene had been detained and was now unhappily waiting to give a detailed interview.

“Victim’s name is David Brooks,” the officer told us.

Rauser glanced at me. The muscle in his jaw was busy. He gave the officer a pat on the shoulder and said quietly, “Good work.”

I spoke briefly at Rauser’s request with Ken Lang, the specialist from the crime lab. I told him a bloodstain analyst was on the way and that no samples or scrapings or any kind of blood evidence should be collected unless there was pooling. In that case wet and pooled blood could be swabbed without jeopardizing other spatter evidence. I let him know Rauser wanted it processed thoroughly and as if it were a Wishbone scene. Lang promised if there was a fiber, any DNA, a fingerprint, any trace at all, he would find it. I wasn’t so confident.

If David had a family and the killer couldn’t take him as he had the other victims, in their own environment, which he had meticulously surveilled, then what better place than this? Hotel property covered a couple of acres. The lobby was small and freestanding, and two-story brick buildings were spread out with what appeared to be only a couple of town house–style units per building. I hadn’t seen any cameras except at the lobby entrance and inside at the front desk. And even with a good housekeeping staff, hotels are crawling with DNA and fiber and trace evidence.

Rauser was handing out assignments to the detectives and uniformed cops. The parking lot entrance was now blocked off. “Nobody leaves the hotel,” he ordered, “and everyone in the place is interviewed no matter how far away their room is from the crime scene. Split up two to a building and get the guest interviews,” he told the cops. “Make sure we got statements from everyone on staff before anyone goes home. Balaki, get the credit card receipts from the front desk. Somebody needs to talk to the businesses around here and see what they saw. Looks like the Krystal and the pancake house are open. Bevins, you and Velazquez check out all the vehicles, search the property again.”

The tension was palpable. Rauser patted his shirt pocket for a pack of cigarettes, then stopped himself. You can’t smoke in a closed crime scene no matter how bad you want one. “Move your ass, people. Maybe we got a perp still hanging around.”

Rauser looked at Lang, who stood with a video camera in one hand, an aluminum case in the other, a digital Nikon hanging around his neck. He’d already slipped into a paper cap, booties, and a lab coat designed especially to reduce the transfer of fiber evidence.

“Thanks for waiting,” Rauser told him. “We’ll suit up and be right behind you.”

A woman carrying a scene case in each hand was speaking to a couple of the uniforms. She was wearing jeans, tennis shoes, and a worn Army T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and the bottom shortened.

“That’s our blood-splatter guy,” Rauser said, and grinned at me.

He shook her hand, then wrapped an arm around her. She was pretty with a strong jaw, five-tenish or more with the lean V-shape of a swimmer, short wavy hair, creamy skin, looked like she ate nuts and berries. Probably had soy milk in her fridge, and absolutely never touched a Krystal cheeseburger.

Rauser walked her back to me and introduced us. “Keye, I want you to meet Jo Phillips. Jo, this is Keye Street, our friendly neighborhood profiler. Jo here used to make an honorable living. Now she’s just one of the ghouls.”

“I was a cop. It was seven years ago,” Jo Phillips said, and smiled at me. We all pulled paper booties over our shoes and slipped into coats. Jo stretched examination gloves over long fingers, then elbowed Rauser and added, “But you know how old men are. Always trying to relive the past.”

Her voice was husky and soft all at once, southern smoky. Kind of Lauren Bacall. I hated her already. Let me count the ways. Who comes to a crime scene in the middle of the night with their belly button showing? And what’s Jo short for anyway? I hoped it was Joseph. And the familiar elbowing thing she did with Rauser, hated that. And the way she used his first name. They were just way too chummy for my comfort.

Rauser pushed open the door to the suite and Ken Lang went in first with video, maneuvering around carefully. Trace evidence is a delicate matter. Just the breeze created by someone crossing a room can dislodge trace.

The rooms looked expensive. They were clearly designed for upscale business travelers, two levels with fireplaces and full kitchen, a bar, a wireless office, a conference table in the dining area. Was this rendezvous site the killer’s idea? Or the victim’s? Which one of them was familiar enough with these hotels to make this choice? No—the location would not have been left to chance. Not with this careful and precise offender. The killer chose this place deliberately. We were looking for a professional, someone with enough successes and enough of an expense account to accommodate this type of hotel, I told Rauser.

The room was chilled, a dramatic contrast to the eighty-seven-degree soup we’d just waded through outside. Humid Georgia nights dampen your clothes, bead up around your hairline, sit heavy on your chest. Walking into a room air-conditioned to sixty degrees gets your immediate attention. A gas fire was burning in the fireplace. I thought about that for a moment, remembered going away with Dan for a romantic weekend and doing the same thing with the air-conditioning. Nothing inspires a romantic evening like a fireplace. I wondered if the killer enjoyed the fire before or after the murder.

It was an odd feeling, standing here and knowing this space was something very different before it became a crime scene. How did it begin? I wondered. Was it gentle with a kiss? Or violent and instantly intense? So far there was no sign of a struggle. A two-story suite like this would take ten, twelve hours to process. Only then the story would come to light and we would understand what happened here. Lang would handle collecting the bulk of the physical evidence apart from bloodstain; he was in for a long night.

Standing at the bedroom door while Lang made the first video of the room that appeared to be the primary murder scene, I let my eyes skip over the bedroom. The body was facedown on the queen-size bed. A large bloodstain had seeped deeply into the sheets and mattress around his neck and chest and was turning the color of old brick. One sheet was pulled up to the waist, tucked around his open legs to outline the lower body. The fabric was peppered with blood. Somewhere in the suite, music played softly.

I saw a sweaty bottle of fifty-dollar Chardonnay and two moisture rings on the bed table near the phone. I didn’t see any glasses, and stood there thinking about that for a moment. The crime scene specialist followed my eyes to the bed table.

“Two rings and only one glass,” Lang said, and continued his work. “It’s over here on the rug next to the bed. Looks like the victim might have dropped it.”

One missing glass? The killer took a glass away from the scene? Why? A souvenir, something for his trophy collection? Or was it just for safety and speed? Never know when you might leave behind a bit of saliva, a partial print, an eyelash, some tiny piece of DNA evidence in the rush to leave a scene.

I looked down at the corpse on the bed. David Brooks was white, the pale blue dress shirt was pushed up on his lower back, exposing a perfect set of bite marks. One arm hung off the bed, one arm was raised above his shoulder. He’d been muscled and fit.

“I know you must be the reason I’m here,” Jo Phillips said from behind me, then lowered her voice so no one else could hear. “Most of the time APD just uses their own people and they’re pretty good, but this is my thing. Spatter is all I do. Three years, I’ve been telling ’em bloodstains are the physical manifestation of the inside of a perp’s head, that it’s physical and behavioral evidence and it deserves an expert.” She laughed a soft, frustrated laugh, then shook her head. “All I get is it’s not in the budget. Man, you must have some pull, Keye.”

“Pull? With Rauser? He’s desperate,” I answered.

“I think I’m going to like working with you,” she said, and gave me a good, long look, then brushed against my arm, stepped in front of me, and leaned over the body. She pressed a cotton swab into the sheet where blood had first pooled, then became absorbed into the sheets and mattress. I watched as the swab in her hand slowly turned dark. She allowed it to air-dry before placing it into a sterile test tube. She looked up at me and smiled again. It crossed my mind that she might have been flirting with me, but this was work, a death scene, and that would have been, well, creepy.

She stooped to look at the headboard and the bed table. “Cast-off here,” she said, and scraped a few samples off each piece of furniture and dropped them into a test tube, then filled out labels for each sample. She took pictures from several angles. In the next couple of hours, Jo Phillips would have what she needed to set up an elaborate system using string to help fashion a three-dimensional point-of-origin determination, precisely measuring distance of blood drops from the body, the distance of the stains from one another, on the victim’s clothes, the sheets, the headboard and walls. She would identify each type of stain—spatter saturation stain, drops, arterial spray, or cast-off from a bloody weapon and the associated edge characteristics. By drawing a line through the long axis of a group of bloodstains, the point of origin could be determined. So could trajectory and impact angle. Back at the lab, she’d use a computer to make the calculations that would finish telling the terrifying story of victim and offender interaction. Analysts like Phillips played a huge part in a thorough reconstruction. And bloodstain patterns were nearly indisputable in court. I stepped back to give her room to work. She was methodical, careful—everything you wanted in a spatter analyst. God! If she’d been any more perfect I think I would have gagged. Already I felt a rash coming on.

“What do you make of the sheet?” Rauser asked from the bedroom door. “We clearly got wounds under there, so why cover him up?”

I had no idea how long he’d been standing there. Rauser was one of those guys who could memorize the scene, close his eyes, and envision it later inch by inch. Scenes made sense to him. He was a natural and instinctive investigator.

“He was protecting the victim. Trying to minimize his humiliation by not exposing him,” I answered. “That could indicate a prior relationship. Or the victim may symbolize someone significant to the killer—a parent, a spouse, a brother, someone thought of with genuine affection. It’s a protective and loving gesture.”

“Hell of a way of showing love,” Rauser muttered. “Even I could do better than that.”

“So you say,” Jo Phillips answered without looking up from her work.

Rauser grinned and said something about never breaking his word, then took his time looking around the bedroom. “Brooks checked in about eleven, according to the front desk. No reservations. Appeared to be alone.” He got down on hands and knees and picked up the wineglass with an ink pen from his pocket, examined it, and returned it to the same spot on the floor. “That’s pretty late for a check-in. Maybe they went out first, had dinner, and then came here.”

“ME’s report on stomach contents should tell that story.” I looked around at the drawn curtains, the radio set to a local jazz station, the bottle of wine. “This was definitely a date. It was on someone’s appointment book or at the very least there are calls on his cell. This wasn’t spur-of-the-moment. It was planned.”

“I agree,” Rauser said just as someone called for him from downstairs. When he returned, he told us, “Williams interviewed the desk clerk who found the body. She noticed the door open, stuck her head in, and called out. When no one answered, she got worried, came upstairs and walked into the bedroom, found the body, then ran like hell. Swears she didn’t touch anything but the door and the railing.” Rauser thought for a minute. “He left the door open. Bastard wanted to make sure the scene was discovered right away. How come?” He paused, and then answered his own question. “So he could hang around and watch us pulling in, lights going, all of us falling over ourselves to clean up his mess. Probably took off as soon as we started filming. But let’s hope not, huh?”

Two and a half hours passed before Jo Phillips let us know she’d gotten her measurements and was ready to have the sheet pulled back. Ken Lang slid brown paper lunch sacks over David Brooks’s hands and secured them with rubber bands to reduce loss of evidence when the corpse was moved and eventually transported to the morgue. Evidence is hard to come by in fingernail scrapings. On television, scientists get loads of DNA cells and fiber evidence from under fingernails. In life, what you usually get is so much dirt and gunk you can’t distinguish real evidence.

Rauser peeled the sheet away and Jo Phillips stiffened when we saw for the first time the signature stab wounds on the dead man’s legs and buttocks.

“Guess that answers that,” Rauser said quietly. “Somebody turn off that damn radio.”

Another scene tech had arrived and taken over the videotaping of the scene. Ken Lang spoke into his recorder as he snapped stills. “Sharp-force injuries, incised stab wounds to the buttocks, back of the thighs, sides, and lower back. Minimum blood and bruising there. Probably postmortem. Bite marks back of neck, shoulders, buttocks, lower back, and inner thighs.”

All the signature elements were in place. The stabbing and the bite marks were in the same areas as on the previous known victims, and the positioning of the body, the scene staging. This was Wishbone all right, but this victim was different. I was certain of it. There were no abraded ligature marks. No struggle, I thought. Why? I had a feeling knowing that would answer a ton of other questions.

“Jesus,” Rauser said, when Lang had finished examining Brooks’s back and the body was finally turned over. An ugly stab wound appeared in the area of the jugular notch. That explained the amount of blood that had soaked the mattress. Brooks’s expression told us nothing, gave away no secrets. He looked as if he’d fallen asleep. There were multiple stab wounds around the groin and deep bite marks on the fleshy areas on both the right and left side of his body between the ribs and pelvic girdle.

Someone called for Rauser from downstairs again, and this time I followed him. I needed air. I wanted to get out of that room. One of the detectives had found Brooks’s car unlocked in the parking lot, which told us that David and his killer had taken separate cars or the killer had left on foot or—if we were lucky—by cab or bus. Rauser opened Brooks’s suit coat and slid a wallet out of the inside breast pocket with his gloved hands as lovingly as a pickpocket. “And what do you know: business card says he’s an attorney.”

Our eyes met as we made the connection. A moment later I was on my phone waking Neil up. David Brooks was not the first lawyer to be among the Wishbone victims. My heart beat faster at knowing it was the first time we’d found any commonality regarding selection. Was this it, the link that would finally blow the case wide open?

“Hey, Lieutenant,” Detective Brit Williams called out. He held up a newspaper. “Early morning edition, AJC.”

Rauser jerked the newspaper out of his hand, looked at it, and thrust it at me. “At least they had the decency to black some of it out this time.”

The headlines read: Do You Know David? New Letter Vows More Killing.