The Stranger You Seek

18





From the southbound lanes of I-85 just a couple of miles south of downtown and Turner Field, the airport was a glowing smear in the distant, jet-streaked sky. Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport is a mammoth, bustling municipality all its own, a borough without community or heart, a city of unnamed passersby, and an excellent place to blend in.

Hartsfield-Jackson overwhelms. The very place we are told to be most vigilant these days is the place that also makes it nearly impossible. From the moment the sliding glass doors open into the enormous terminals, one is confronted with announcements, posted instructions, recorded messages, moving sidewalks, bars and lounges, escalators, video screens, security checks, shops, food, underground trains, the roar of forty-three thousand employees, soldiers, cops, bomb-sniffing dogs, and travelers. One of the world’s busiest international airports is sluggish in all the wrong places, and everywhere else it is a blizzard of information and sound and light. Unless one is there to observe, to watch while others are absorbed. The singular concerns of travelers render them only vaguely conscious of those around them, despite the new threats and heightened awareness. With some simple changes to the appearance—a pair of glasses, a baseball cap, plain clothes, unremarkable in design and color—one could pass a close acquaintance without detection or linger in the same newsstand without a glint of recognition. In a place like this, people don’t really look at one another. They see in categories and stereotypes—a traveler, a customer, a cop, a businessperson. Being invisible in a public place is a very easy thing to do.

A couple of hundred yards away from the gate where I arrived with other passengers on the flight from Denver, Concourse B took an abrupt dive into steep escalators that led to the underground sidewalks and trains. From the top of the slow-moving metal steps, I surveyed the crowd of strangers. I was trained for this. I knew how to spot a sudden movement, the odd footfall, something off in the crowd, someone paying too much attention. I was wearing Levi’s and a sleeveless pullover and still my body temperature had hit about two hundred, it felt, on the plane, and had not yet normalized. My black leather computer case hung from one shoulder. The scrolling digital signs overhead read one minute until the next train. I could feel it coming under the slate floors in the transportation lobby, a barely perceptible vibration accompanied by a low rumble a moment before it rolled into the dock and the glass doors hissed open.

I quickly slipped through the crowd to make the train before the doors sucked shut again, and grabbed on to one of the poles in the center for balance. My eyes swept the compartment. It wasn’t hard to suppose an egoist, a voyeur, a violent sociopath like the one we sought might like to see me when I returned. Might want to check my face for fear, for stress. The whole game—and it was a game—was really about changing and maiming the lives of others. Now this killer had both Rauser and me in his communication loop. He’d want to play cat and mouse for a while. Was I really feeling someone watching me or was this merely a reaction to the email I’d received? I had read it over and over on the plane and it was enough to raise the hair on my arms. My DNA can do only one thing for you: give you some reference for the next one.… Isn’t it so like the media to take something out of context without telling the whole story? What will they leap at next? W.

It made for a long walk through the airport and across the long-term parking decks, which even during the day are shadowy and uninviting, but just after midnight when air traffic is down and there is only the occasional ghostly whine of a jet engine to interrupt the sound of my suitcase rolling and bumping over concrete, the feeling was … sinister, like someone was about to jump out of the bushes. Okay, so I realize there are no bushes at Hartsfield-Jackson. The point is, I no longer seemed capable of distinguishing between real and imagined danger.

Was I next? I kept thinking. No. I didn’t fit the victim profile at all, but then, what really fit with this offender? How was he profiling his victims? We had one connection with some of the victims but not all, not enough to understand the selection process. I willed myself to move casually at a normal pace, not to turn around. Just get safely to my car. Occasionally I’d hear a door slam shut or an engine growl to life. Every sound seemed to be amplified. Perhaps he didn’t want me at all. He’d already passed up an opportunity, or so he bragged, at the LaBrecque scene. Was this about watching? Watching was fuel.

Watching was power.

I imagined eyes burning into my shoulder blades as I neared my old Impala. It took everything I had inside me not to just dump my suitcase on the concrete and run like hell. With this killer, a line had been crossed. In my experience working on all types of serial offender cases with the Bureau, profiling serial murderers, child molesters, rapists, I’d never been pulled in personally. There was always a barrier between the offenders and the criminologists. Emotionally, my work had taken its toll. I’d taken it home with me and into the bed I shared with my husband. Night sweats, a drink to settle my nerves, to put in perspective the horrific acts I’d spent the day reconstructing in excruciating detail. A drink before work to numb the exhaustion, the depression. A drink to kill the hangover. Anyone capable of empathy, I am convinced, is marked by the ability to comprehend victim suffering. Some of us handle it better than others, that’s all. But that dark existence had never physically knocked on my door as it did now.

I unlocked the car, slung my suitcase across the seat, and hopped in with my heart slamming. Thank God my father had taken the beat-up Impala I’d driven in high school—V-8 with four hundred and twenty-seven horses—redipped it in chrome and completely restored it for me just before I went off to college. So it certainly had what I needed to ditch a tail. Even now with the bullet hole in the windshield, my old Impala gave me a thrill. It rumbled like an underground train and I loved the sound when the top was down. After all, I’d come of age in Georgia, surrounded by muscle cars and guys in tight jeans. Mother packed picnic baskets for the drag races at Yellow River on Saturday afternoons when Jimmy and I were kids. We ate cucumbers with black pepper and white vinegar, potato salad out of plastic containers, and little black hamburgers that my father charred the shit out of on a portable charcoal grill. We came with a card table and a checkered tablecloth, which were meant, I think, to add class to our operation. The smell of exhaust and burning rubber was part of the meal. And the sound was absolutely deafening. But Saturdays at Yellow River Drag Strip, my father was a happy man. It was about the only time he wanted to leave our garage, where he tinkered constantly, and the only time he could not hear my mother’s voice.

I was eleven when he decided I should learn to drive. He stuck me in our beat-up Chevy pickup truck on a dirt road and nearly peed his pants laughing when I tore down part of a cornfield before I found the brake. Later, as teenagers, my brother and I would take long, silent drives with him. We’d stop for boiled peanuts and fresh peaches at roadside stands, then climb back into the truck and keep going, just me, my lily-white father, and my black brother, while the locals stared after us. Sometimes for me even now, tires humming against a paved road sound like the ocean. I can drive and drive, forget everything.

I found my phone and called Rauser. He was notoriously grouchy about wake-up calls. Cops at the station usually flipped a coin to see who had to wake him. It was after midnight now and I had the honors.

“This better be good,” he answered.

“It’s me,” I said as I paid the cashier and eased my old ragtop toward the airport exit. “I opened an email on the plane, a Wishbone letter addressed to you. A new one. Then I had the feeling I was being watched, but I’d already had this crazy dream, so I was totally creeped out. By the time I got to the parking deck, it was like he was all over the place. I felt him, Rauser. I think Wishbone was waiting for my flight. I don’t know why. I just felt it—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. There’s another letter?”

I paused at the exit and looked in my rearview. Three cars were coming out of different parking decks and approaching the cashier lanes. One pulled out behind me; the driver leaned on his horn when I didn’t move. Reluctantly, I pulled out into the stream of airport traffic and moved toward the ramp to I-75/85 North.

“Talk to me while I get dressed,” Rauser ordered. “And slow down. A letter came to you from Wishbone? Hmmm. This could be good news. We can trace that.”

I explained in detail and with a bit more calm the email I’d found in my mailbox, the letter Rauser hadn’t read yet, which included the promise of more killing.

The vibration in his voice told me he was walking fast while he listened. I imagined him locking his front door and heading down the sidewalk to the Crown Vic. “You think you’re being followed now?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t really make sense, I guess. Lot of cameras here. He would know we’d look at surveillance.”

“Well, I’m not taking any chances. Take your time getting out, give us a few minutes if you can. You’re coming 75/85 North, right? In the Impala?”

“Getting on the ramp now.”

I heard Rauser on his radio calling for backup. “Okay, Keye, go to the Capitol Avenue exit, hang a left on Pollard, and curve around past the ballpark. You’ll hit some traffic lights. Stay alert. Lock your doors, for Christ’s sake. We’ve got units close by. I’m working on getting the exits covered. Hopefully, I can get someone to pick up your tail before Langford Parkway.” He paused. “You sure you’re not just paranoid?”

“I think he wants to see if the letter’s spooked me. He needs to know that he’s gotten under our skin. There’s control in that, like moving the game pieces around.” I checked my mirror again. Nothing.

“Don’t stop for anything, Street. I don’t give a shit if Tonya f*cking Harding skates out in the middle of the road and shakes her ass. You don’t stop.”

I knew what Rauser was worried about. We both knew too much about the ways killers acquire their victims. My mind automatically began a risk assessment. Almost no traffic on a Tuesday after midnight. It takes mere seconds to shatter a car window, disable the driver. And I had no weapon. It didn’t matter that I was licensed in fugitive recovery and had a permit to carry. Unless I had a fugitive in custody, I couldn’t have a weapon on an airplane, and even then it took some doing since 9/11.

“Would the fat guy with the bat be there too?” I asked Rauser. “Or are we just talking Tonya skating out by herself?”

I make jokes when I’m nervous. It was one of the things my ex-husband hated. Dan believed that I used humor as a way to cut off any real dialogue, anything that might lead to a deeper understanding of my core issues. Jesus. Dan doesn’t have the depth to recognize a core issue. Rauser doesn’t always appreciate the timing or flavor of my jokes either. He didn’t laugh this time.

“What if the fat guy shook it for me?” I asked. “Do I stop for that?”

Rauser chuckled finally. “There’s something really wrong with you, Street, you know that, right? I’ll call you back in a couple minutes,” Rauser told me, and disconnected.

In my rearview mirror, headlights looked back at me like cat eyes in the dark. Every car behind me, every car that passed, sent my heart racing. What was it, this feeling, this terrible feeling? God, how I wanted to floor it, get away from this menace, this thing I felt at the back of my neck, burning my skin. I didn’t want to be this close. But maybe that was a lie. Maybe the life I had lived, the thoughts I’d let occupy my mind, the things I’d read and studied and talked about and talked about and talked about, had created some kind of magnetic field that drew it to me—violence, the thing that frightens me so profoundly it sets my teeth on edge and intrigues me so deeply I cannot run from it.

I considered taking the next exit, killing my lights, making a quick turn into the first side street, and trying to figure if I was really being followed. But I stuck with Rauser’s plan. The benefits of teamwork had been drilled into me at the Bureau, and for good reason. Any individual action might risk an offender avoiding apprehension, and when the offender was killing people, risky rogue behaviors were unpardonable.

A couple of miles ahead, the downtown skyline looked like a jagged checkerboard turned upright. Another hot August evening, the stink of jet fuel still fresh in my nostrils. On a normal evening, I would have lowered the top, cranked up 102.5, but this wasn’t a normal—

A sound as hollow and unmistakable as a rifle shot ripped through the quiet night and interrupted that thought, sliced up my nerves and spit them out again. The front end of my car swerved toward the pavement. I fought to keep control. I saw my tire and wheel bouncing off the road without me. I was skidding at sixty miles an hour on three wheels and a fender. My telephone started to ring as I screeched across white lines, bumped hard on and off the shoulder.

I remember sliding sideways toward the metal bridge railing ahead, remember not being able to get control of the wheel, remember the headlights behind me creeping ever nearer.

I don’t remember hitting the windshield.