The Stranger You Seek

16





I was exhausted. I’d spent hours at the LaBrecque scene, being questioned hard by detectives who wanted to know how it was that I happened to be consulting on the Wishbone cases while tracking a bail jumper who, it certainly appeared, happened to be the newest Wishbone victim. None of this was explainable, but I did my best until Rauser arrived at the scene and saved me, followed by Ken Lang and the CSI van. There was no small amount of tension. The Gwinnett County cops didn’t like having APD on the scene and Rauser wasn’t at all happy about someone else processing it. They finally reached some agreements but until then it was a full-on pissing contest.

It was very late in the afternoon before I got away. Rauser hadn’t wanted me to leave the scene, but there was nothing I could do there, and I still had a business to keep afloat and work I hadn’t even begun. I was also starving.

I called Neil. “Want some breakfast?”

“It’s after five,” he answered.

“Tell me about it.” Happy hour was tapping at my shoulder once more. It rarely passed unnoticed. And how I wanted one today.

“Rough day?” Neil asked.

“Not at Waffle House,” I said in a singsong way to tempt him, knowing full well it was one of his weaknesses. If there’s one thing you can count on down South, it’s Waffle House. The grill is cranking 24/7—eggs, bacon, waffles, and hash browns scattered, smoothed, and covered, crispy outside, soft inside, and glistening with oil. Eat them every day and they’ll flat-out kill you. But from time to time there’s nothing like them alongside a pair of eggs scrambled with cheese, over-buttered white toast angles, and a couple cups of thin Waffle House coffee surging through your system like Liquid-Plumr.

We talked about LaBrecque over a pile of food, kicked it around for a long time. We knew a lot about him. That knowledge gave us a jump start, a first: The other victims had been big question marks. Not this guy.

“Can you run the vics’ names for anything like domestic abuse calls?”

“Yeah, but Rauser can get this stuff easy.”

“Let’s see if there’s any merit to it before I put anything else on Rauser’s plate. How about hospital records? Emergency room visits? Can you dig those up on all the victims? And on their immediate families?”

“Depends on how old they are.” Neil made a face as I squeezed yellow mustard over the hash browns I’d ordered scattered with jalapeños, then he asked our waitress for a second pecan waffle.

“I have to go check out the laser treatment gone wrong for Quinn,” I told him. “Want to come? No bullet holes this time.”

“Man, that was cool,” Neil said.

“Uh-huh. That why you turned that pretty shade of green?”

“Yeah, well, it’s like your first roller-coaster ride, you know? You kind of want to hurl but you keep going back.”

We left Waffle House big-eyed and hopped-up with our stomachs rumbling from too much rank coffee. The storms had moved through the way late summer storms do, and I folded the top down on my old Impala. It was just before seven. The heat was slacking off finally.

Vincent Feldon lived off McLendon in the Candler Park section of Atlanta near Little Five Points, where it is not uncommon to see within a stretch of blocks gleaming Vespas, nicely dressed gay and straight couples with strollers, tattooed street people, corner musicians, teenagers pierced from toe to tongue, and the homeless curled up shoeless on the sidewalk. “Diversity run amok,” Rauser said one afternoon while we ate on the patio at Front Page News along with a couple of trans men, their soft packs looking like enormous boners; Whitney Houston and a recording team that was apparently following her around for some reality TV thing; a group of lesbian writers fresh from a book signing at Charis Books, the lesbian feminist bookstore around the corner; a table of really loud beer-drinking athletic types; and a guy sitting alone with a parrot.

I pulled over a few doors down from Vincent Feldon’s address, put the top up on the Impala, then parked one house away and cut the engine. “What are we doing here?” Neil wanted to know.

I nodded toward the house. “That’s where Feldon the laser tech lives.”

Neil squirmed. “I know that house.” I looked at him and waited. “My guy John lives there,” he added reluctantly.

“Your guy John? What does that mean?”

“Well.” More squirming. “He’s kinda my pot dealer.”

“You are kidding me! Vincent Feldon lives with a pot dealer?” I laughed. “Quinn is going to do cartwheels. Oh my God, no wonder she has a permanent mustache. Good Lord.”

“I didn’t know he had a roommate,” Neil said. “I never saw anyone there, but it’s a big house.”

We heard a door close and keys rattle. A heavyset guy in jeans with the crotch at knee level was locking Feldon’s front door. The big guy turned and waddled down the walk, a tiny phone to his ear. I reached for the file in the backseat and studied the picture I’d received in the file from Quinn’s office.

“That’s him,” Neil said.

“Oh, so you have seen him?”

Neil gave me a pained look. “That’s John.”

I looked back at the picture. Neil’s guy John and Vincent Feldon were one and the same.

I opened my phone and called Larry Quinn’s office. Danny, Quinn’s assistant, told me Larry had been out of the office for hours. Did I have his cell phone number? I did.

“Look,” Neil was saying as I scrolled for Quinn’s cell number on my contact list. “I didn’t sign up for this. I don’t want any part of him getting busted.”

“Nobody wants to bust him,” I told Neil, and heard Larry Quinn answer. “Larry, hey, it’s Keye. Got a minute?”

“Keye, you okay? I heard about the murder and you finding the body. Christ, how awful for you.”

“How’d you hear that?”

“Murder’s all over the news, kiddo.” Quinn spoke in that slow southern accent he’d made famous on his commercials. “And, well, being in the legal biz and all, I’ve got a few friends in law enforcement. You all right?”

“I’m fine,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it. I hadn’t even had time to think about it beyond trying to work out why William LaBrecque had been lying on the floor naked and beaten to death. The very last thing I wanted was for someone to try to comfort me. Just pushing through it was usually a better choice for me. Whatever was left, I’d give to Dr. Shetty during our next hundred-and-eighty-dollar hour. “I wanted to talk about the laser center case, the med tech.”

“Okey-dokey,” Quinn said.

“He supplements his income by selling pot and I have reason to believe he smokes a good amount of it too.”

“I’ll be goddamned,” Quinn said. “That’s why he didn’t show for the pee test. Said he had the flu or something. We had to reschedule the deposition too.”

“He looks healthy to me,” I told Quinn, and made sure the time and date stamp were active on my camera. Then I snapped a few pictures of Vincent Feldon standing in his yard talking on his phone, pacing back and forth, then folding his big body into a tiny Chrysler Crossfire and driving away. I waited a few seconds, then pulled out behind him.

We followed Feldon down Moreland, took the turn for Reynoldstown, curved into a residential section, and watched him pull up to a small white frame house, get out, and knock. When the door opened and Feldon disappeared inside, I grabbed my camera and got out. Neil sank down low in the seat.

“Hey, look on the bright side,” I told him. “Feldon loses his job at the treatment center, he’s going to have to keep dealing pot.”

Through one of the windows, I saw Feldon talking to a woman, then sitting down on the couch and tossing a sandwich bag with a zipper top onto the table. It looked like pot in the bag. I’d seen a lot of it since Neil and I had been friends. The series of shots I took showed Feldon opening the bag, filling a bowl, lighting it, blowing out a huge cloud of smoke, passing the bag over, and receiving cash. Less than that had gotten Michael Phelps into a world of trouble. I didn’t think Quinn would need anything else.

I called Rauser to check in. They were still at the LaBrecque scene. I told him I had to leave for a day, fly to Denver for a client. He didn’t want me to go. He never wanted me to go. Unfortunately, what APD was paying me as a case consultant wouldn’t even buy my groceries.





Denver had always seemed to me a surprisingly ordinary city. One can spend days here and almost forget entirely that the city happens to be surrounded by extraordinary scenery. From the streets of downtown, the pedestrian’s view is of corporate office buildings and unending development, with lots of coffeehouses tossed in for atmosphere.

When I leave Atlanta, where downtown real estate ran short years ago and buildings had to grow tall in order to grow at all, everything looks as if a giant weed whacker had sheared the tops right off the buildings. Here, a mile high, Denver seemed a bit stoop-shouldered as I drove from the airport to the hotel at Logan and Eighteenth.

I was standing on my balcony soaking it in when the sun began to set and light switches and streetlamps all over the city seemed to flick on at once. The thin, dry air rushed my lungs like a football team, and I saw the Rockies in silhouette against Colorado’s broad night sky. Nothing at all like my last assignment here, when my view had been the laundry room on the back side of a Best Western and room service meant picking up something from the greasy spoon across the street and bringing it back in an oily paper sack. By Bureau standards, that was first-class treatment of an agent on assignment.

I showered, settled into the soft terry-cloth robe I found hanging in the bath. My room was one of several corporate suites leased year-round by my client; my assignment was to strike up a deal with an accountant named Roy Echeverria, who, I had recently been made aware, had not only run off with a huge amount of cash, he’d also stolen audiotapes, a dozen of them, of private executive meetings. I’d been authorized to offer Echeverria as much for the tapes as he’d snatched initially, five hundred thousand, and once I had his signature on a confidentiality agreement drafted by company lawyers, I was done. My client was betting that the tapes, which were apparently inflammatory enough to have every corporate executive wetting himself, would surface eventually. Why not track the thieving weasel down, make an offer, make it high, nail down an agreement, and be done with the little traitor? At six hundred a day plus expenses and a luxury suite, it sounded like a pretty good plan to me.

I ordered pan-roasted asparagus, rosemary and goat cheese mashed potatoes, and seared rare ahi, then turned on the television and sank into the couch while I waited for room service. A brief but energetic craving for a drink resurfaced and caught me off guard. I could almost hear the ice tinkling against a glass as a uniformed member of the waitstaff balanced a silver tray toward my room. At the height of my drinking, I had used hotels for privacy, to be alone with what I loved most back then. Tonight, I would settle for a Diet Pepsi.

I opened my laptop. My friend Madison from Quantico, my only cordial relationship left at the Bureau, wanted to check in. She had once been a deep-cover operative for the CIA, had her cover blown wide open. She’d ended up at the Farm, the CIA’s training center, trying to teach a bunch of kindergartners, as she had called the new recruits, the deceptive and dangerous trade of intelligence. Madison had been later lured to the Bureau, where I met her by chance. We’d become instant friends. Her email today was blunt. Desperate for someone who doesn’t leave a diamond on their desk chair. Her proper British way of saying she was working with a bunch of tight asses.

I had mail from my mother, who had only recently discovered the joys of the Internet, and now faithfully forwarded religious messages to me. I never read them. If I receive something with three hundred other names on it, I’m not reading it. I don’t care if it says Jesus is coming back. My father, thankfully, has not yet shown an interest in the Internet.

Where have you been, child? the subject line in my mother’s message asked, and I could almost hear her thick drawl. Emily Street had grown up on the Albemarle Sound of North Carolina, not far from Virginia, where words like “about” sound like “a boat.” Her voice was butter and swamp water all at once, soft and strong, and when I was a child, it calmed me. She read me to sleep at night and insisted I read to her in the afternoons, all kinds of books, magazines, newspapers. Words were her flying carpets. Wherever she wanted to go that day, we went. She taught me about that kind of escape and I grew up loving it and books.

I didn’t call her back. I have to build up to it with Mother, the princess of passive aggression, especially when she perceives neglect from her children. A real live southern belle, my mom makes true the expression that southerners can say anything to anyone no matter how insulting as long as it begins or ends with “bless your little heart” or “you poor darlin’.” Emily Street has turned it into a kind of art form. Honey drips from her lips as she extends her long claws and prepares to pounce. Melanie, you poor darlin’, are you still struggling with that awful weight problem? And with Harvey cheating on you and all, bless your little heart. Don’t you worry, honey. You’ll have lots of support. I’ve told everyone.

When my phone rang, I was watching blooper reels and using my asparagus instead of a fork to eat mashed potatoes. This is what I do in hotels now instead of crack open the little bottles in the minibar.

Neil sounded breathy and hyper.

“By George, I think I’ve got it,” he said in a bad Hollywood accent. “The link, old girl. I’ve got it. Elicia Richardson and David Brooks were both attorneys, as you know. Civil attorneys, both of them. Richardson was not in criminal law, which is what the file says. It was incorrect.”

“Okay, and …?”

“The second victim, Bob Shelby, lived on disability, barely scraped by, but he had a huge payment pending on a personal injury suit he’d won four months before his murder. Another month or two and Shelby would have been able to afford some stuff. Now here’s the interesting thing: Lei Koto won a wrongful death suit against the electric company her husband worked for when he was killed on the job. The litigation took almost six years.”

I tried to wrap my mind around this. “So there’s no connection to the domestic abuse thing at all. But you’re telling me there’s a link to civil lawsuits or civil law in general?”

“Looks like it. Weird, huh?”

“Very. Maybe the killer sees civil cases as being about greed, as being frivolous. Really sets him off, he sees the plaintiff as the problem. Interesting.”

“Maybe he got a raw deal, got screwed over by the system, or some judge or jury found against him. Maybe it trashed his business or livelihood. Whoa! Just got a big idea. Maybe that’s how our guy gets them to open the door, he goes with this injury thing, and pretends to be disabled. Who wouldn’t open the door for someone in a chair, right?”

It was something to consider. We were quiet thinking about it. “Where were the suits filed?”

“Shelby’s was in Florida, but Koto’s was in Fulton. And it looks like the bulk of the cases filed by Brooks and Richardson went through Fulton as well.”

“What about LaBrecque? And the first vic in Florida, Anne Chambers?”

“No connection with LaBrecque and, well, it’s not all that easy to find anything on Anne.” He paused, and his voice had softened a little when he spoke again. “She was just a kid, you know? Why would someone do that to her?”

If you think about it, really allow yourself to contemplate the violence and terror in murder, to feel any of the fear and confusion the victim might have felt or consider what they left behind, all that collateral damage, the shock and loss and lives derailed, it will break your heart. Neil had never been this close to it. I was quiet while he collected himself.

“Find out where Anne Chambers’s family is now, would you, Neil? I want to speak with them. I’m going to call Rauser and let him know what you found. He’s going to be bouncing off the walls. This is huge. You did good, Neil. Really.”

I set my phone down for a moment and thought about this. Had David Brooks and Elicia Richardson been murdered because they practiced civil law? How many more victims were out there that hadn’t been logged into a database or didn’t fit the MO and signature? We knew now that this killer was adaptable. Did Lei Koto’s young son find her butchered on the kitchen floor because his mother had decided to sue an electric company over her husband’s death? I remembered the pot of cabbage left burning on the stove, scorched and stinking, as the boy called 911, and then waited alone with her body for the police to arrive at the scene. I can still envision my murdered grandparents when I close my eyes, smell the nervous sweat of their killers, the blood, the piercing sourness of a shattered jar of cranberry juice that had fallen from a grocery shelf. To this day, I can’t get near cranberry anything without my stomach doing flip-flops. Murder marks and orphans children, and it rips families apart. I wanted this killer off the streets.

My mind was clicking along. Civil suits and civil attorneys. What did they have in common? Judges, clerks, process servers, stenographers, a courthouse. And then it hit me. The courthouse. Is that the elevator mentioned in Wishbone’s second letter? Is that where the killer saw David Brooks? Was Atlanta’s Fulton County Courthouse the hunting ground for a serial murderer?