The Stranger You Seek

22





How I came to own two thousand square feet on the tenth floor of Atlanta’s Georgian Terrace Hotel is a testament to, well, blind luck. I had done a job for the property owner that required some diplomacy and discretion during a divorce. He had a mistress, a wife, a child, a boyfriend, and lots of property. Fortunately for him, I discovered the wife also had a mistress and a boyfriend. He paid me to negotiate her down privately without the attorneys squabbling over his massive assets. Miraculously, I pulled it off without a hitch. In the course of doing business with him, I discovered his intent to return the private space he kept for himself in the hotel back into hotel suites. The building had been converted to luxury apartments in the eighties, and when my client bought the property, he turned all but one apartment into hotel space. I had fallen in love on my first visit with the white-bricked walls, the hand-carved crown molding, the marble bathrooms, the twelve-foot ceilings, the glistening wood floors, the rows of Palladian windows with their view of Peachtree Street. I offered to waive my fee, all future fees, and promised to surrender to him my firstborn just to have the chance to make a bid. I had some cash at the time. An insurance company had just paid me a percentage of what I’d recovered on an art fraud case. Still, swinging a down payment on a place like this took every penny I had, every penny I could get out of my parents, and nearly everything I owned that could be converted to cash. I mortgaged myself up to my ears and spent the next three years in chaos, knocking down walls, living with carpenters and sawdust and tools. The experience had permanently marked White Trash, but it also turned the apartment into the rambling loft I now call home. It hasn’t been decorated. That’ll happen when I am flush again, maybe in fifty years or so. In the meantime, a bed, a dresser, an enormous couch, a Moroccan-tiled table that I found irresistibly attractive in Piedmont Park during the Dogwood Festival, a television, a CD player, a computer, three rugs, one scraggly white cat, and me. It’s enough for now.

I am the only permanent resident to inhabit the hotel, and I know most of the people employed here by name. I eat dinner downstairs at Livingston Restaurant quite often and sit on the restaurant’s terrace on Peachtree whenever possible, breakfast and dinner a few times a week. I have none of the privileges of a guest, however. Not during the day anyway. The hotel manager seems to resent my presence here. He makes sure the weight room, the media room, and the pool are off-limits to me. The months of workmen stomping in and out of the Georgian’s pristine lobby might have something to do with the manager’s hostility. But the second- and third-shift managers let me have the run of the place. Rauser and I have a midnight dip in the pool now and then, and sit on the roof hugging our knees and talking with a view of the downtown skyline that takes your breath away at night when the city is lit up. The Georgian provides a soft landing on those days when I’ve been attacked from several directions and retaliated by slamming a knee into a mentally challenged man’s forehead and feeding stoner brownies to the public face of APD’s Wishbone task force. Good Lord, what was I thinking? Charlie had earned a smackdown, but the brownies … well, that was a shameful lapse in judgment and in ethics. And I’d been so judgmental and righteous about Dobbs.

It must be the pressure, I thought. Only three days ago I’d received the Wishbone email and wrecked my Impala. Yesterday two dozen very expensive white roses had sent a distinctly chilling message. I’m the reason your tire came off. I’m the reason your dirty laundry landed in the hands of a reporter. And I know where you are right now. It was a lot to take in. And then handing my notes over to Dobbs, the victim sketches I’d worked hard on, hearing his disdain for my preliminary profile. What a dick! Suddenly I wasn’t feeling so bad about the brownies.

Oh, for an Absolut martini, dirty. Or a Dewar’s and soda with a twist. Either would do the job after a long day. Just one. What’s the big deal? Is it true what they tell you about never being able to handle just one? Not ever? I didn’t want to believe it. At least at that moment I chose to not believe it, to believe that I could have this again in my life and control it. My deceptive addict’s brain was searching for loopholes. I decided to call Diane, who had been an unwavering support for me while I was getting sober. Diane was a devotee of Al-Anon. She had liked the meetings. Too much. She began twelve-stepping her way right through Debtors Anonymous, Shopaholics Anonymous, and Sex Addicts Anonymous. I actually began to seriously worry about her the day she asked if I could go to a CoDA (Co-Dependents Anonymous) meeting with her because she hated going alone.

I reached for the phone to call her.

I told her about the cravings and that the desire to drink again had intensified. I told her I really wanted to go downstairs and sit at the bar, that I wanted to laugh and feel free again. She reminded me gently but in vivid detail what that kind of freedom had to offer, about how I had been chained to a bottle. Then, in case I had missed the point, she went on to cover some of my more disgraceful behaviors—scenes that included toilets and bathroom floors and hanging out car windows and crying and passing out and making scenes. She finished up with the Serenity Prayer. Suddenly a drink didn’t seem like that great an idea. I thanked her and we made a lunch date for next week. I’d forgotten again to ask her about the new person in her life. I was a crappy friend, I decided. It was always all about me.

My phone rang and Neil didn’t even wait to say hello. Instead, he began with “I was thinking about something. Charlie came in one day, said his computer wasn’t working and he likes to email his folks, so he wanted to use ours. Doesn’t take skill to email, right? So I didn’t think anything about it. You know he can type? Uses all his fingers. I guess the brain is pretty specialized. Anyway, when he was finished, I figured I’d check out what he did on the Internet, you know? Just for fun look at what a guy like Charlie does. But it took some time. You know why? Because Internet history, browsing history, cookies—all of it was cleaned out.”

I sat down on my couch and stared out the long windows facing Peachtree Street and the Fox. It was dusk. The streetlights were on.

Neil continued. “So, one—he’s smarter than I give him credit for. And two—he didn’t want anyone to know what he was looking at on your computer.”

“Wait a minute. He was on my computer?” I’d had to log in recently to all the websites that usually recognized my computer—online banking, email accounts. Now I understood why. The tracking cookies had all been cleaned out.

Neil hesitated. “This is why I didn’t want to tell you. I figured you’d be pissed off, but I was using mine, so I let him use your desktop. Anyway, it was pretty harmless stuff. A Hotmail log-in screen, some news reporting sites.”

“You look at the sites? You remember the stories he was reading?”

“Nope.”

“Could he have been in my documents?”

“If he had more than half a brain, he could have, since you don’t password-protect your shit. What are you thinking, Keye?”

What I was thinking was about the email to Rauser with my name on the copy line, about feeling watched at the airport, about my dossier being delivered to a reporter. Why me? Because the killer knows me, that’s why. That’s why my appearance at the Brooks scene set off alarms and why I was copied on the next letter. Someone who knows me saw me there or saw the footage and suddenly I was too close. That’s why the killer had to then do anything possible to get me off the Wishbone case by trashing my reputation, by embarrassing me and the department publicly, by frightening me by loosening the lug nuts on my tire, sending the roses. Was this why Charlie needed to get to my computer? To find out if I had notes about the investigation and discover if he was a suspect? My pulse quickened. A tiny window flew open in my brain and I leapt through it.

Was Charlie capable of that kind of deception, the kind required to evade law enforcement for so long? To be successful, a serial offender must have the ability to disassociate entirely from their violent self and live an outwardly harmless life. Today, for the first time, I’d seen violence in Charlie. I’d seen his eyes. I’d seen sadistic pleasure in them, but his volatile impulsiveness was inconsistent with the organized killer I’d been profiling. And I couldn’t see the killer choosing Charlie’s lifestyle and façade for himself. I saw him as vain. He’d want to appear educated, successful. That wasn’t Charlie. Charlie elicited sympathy. But I knew too that an investigator must never attempt to sway an investigation in order to meet some theory. That’s something Dobbs would do. I had to be open to the evidence—whatever it was and whether I liked it or not.

I took a moment to reconsider the growing list of things that did make sense. Charlie had gained access to my computer with a ruse. He could have emailed my history in letters and documents for the last several years to himself and put together enough information to entice a journalist into doing more digging. He was the right height—the angle of the stab wounds at each scene put the killer at about five-ten. He’d bragged about his ability with a knife, a fishing knife. It would be serrated and about the right length. I’d seen him slicing figs with amazing dexterity considering his normal bumbling. The knife and the bragging fit. People trusted Charlie. He had enormous freedom and mobility. Who notices the brain-damaged guy who pedals around the city all day? Everyone and no one. I thought about William LaBrecque, about the rolling pin, about his shattered face, the bloodstain under his head, the edge characteristics of the pool. His blood had begun to react to the outside environment. Serum separation was taking place even though his body was not yet cold. This kind of thing sticks in your mind. Could Charlie have murdered LaBrecque, exhibited that kind of rage? Why? Had Charlie seen the bruised wrist LaBrecque had given me or read my notes about the incident at the church when I’d served LaBrecque with the restraining order? I knew an event like this—feeling the object of one’s preoccupation had been mistreated—could set off someone nurturing a love obsession. Was that what it was? Had Charlie’s crush on me turned deadly? Yes, I’d glimpsed something in Charlie today I hadn’t known existed—violence and jealousy. But even if he did kill LaBrecque, could he have killed the others? Why? Was I too close to see the motive? I thought about the aggression Charlie had displayed toward me today, the mobility in his job as a bike courier, his invisibility, his regular visits to the courthouse. He couldn’t have done what Wishbone had done on a bicycle. The area was too wide. The killing was not confined to the city limits. Was Charlie hiding a car somewhere?

A thought brought me to a screeching halt. Charlie was educated. An engineer or something scientific, so the rumors went. Charlie once had a highly functioning brain. He’d had a career, a family. Then the accident that had changed his life forever. And after that? Had there been a suit filed against the company whose truck very nearly killed him? Could that be Charlie’s connection to the justice system? Did he get a bad deal, hate those who had done well within that system? Could Charlie Ramsey, the guy who steals pansies just to see me smile, really be a killer?

I closed my eyes. My throat ached. I remembered Neil saying, “I did some checking around and, well, there’s some stuff you need to look at. I’m sending it now.”

I pulled out my laptop and began to open the links and attachments Neil had emailed. The first one reached out and grabbed me by the neck.

Star Player Charged with Rape. Community Shocked. Charlie Ramsey, Winston Upstate University star running back, was accused of sexually assaulting a fellow student Friday night at the Ramsey estate near Ithaca. Warrants were issued to search the property after a WUU cheerleader reported to local police that she had been given drugs and was incapable of having consensual sex. Two other players were named in the complaint.



The article, archived from the local newspaper, was more than twenty years old. I went to the next.

Ivy League running back guilty of assault. Rape charges expected to follow.



And the next one.

Star player leaves Orange Crush for biomedical engineering program with 4.0 grade point average.



This article had a photograph. It was not the Charlie I knew, but there was little doubt this was the young Charlie Ramsey, powerful and handsome, smiling, holding his orange helmet against his uniformed chest. There were other articles too, ones that detailed his troubled and sometimes violent career in college football, which included three rape charges—two settled out of court, one withdrawn—and two assault charges—one that stuck and earned him eighteen hours of community service for putting his fist through someone’s car window at a stoplight. Neil had included copies of court documents outlining a settlement between the university and a seventeen-year-old woman who claimed Charlie raped her when she refused sex with him at a university event. There was another settlement between the Ramsey family and another young woman a year later. Then a long gap in reporting on Charlie. Five years of no headline-grabbing at all elapsed after the Ramsey family settled the last lawsuit with a check from the family trust for $300,000. The next story reported Charlie’s parents had been killed in the crash of a private plane in upstate New York. Charlie was the sole heir to a considerable estate. He had told Neil he wanted to use my computer to email his folks. Another lie.

Local Football Star Blames Athletics for Derailment.

This article came eight years later and talked about his troubled past with drugs and alcohol, trouble with the law, his recovery, losing his parents and finally turning his life around. He’d flown through WUU’s master’s program and moved on to a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering. At the time the story was published, he was preparing to move himself, his wife, and two young children to Atlanta, where he’d been offered a job in biomedical product design. His specialty was tissue design, artificial skin. But the headlines were about his claim that the athletic programs there encouraged a culture of no responsibility, of drugs and violence, and that lawyers were on retainer to do nothing but get the players out of trouble for everything from breaking and entering to assault and rape. He was quoted as saying, “It doesn’t matter if you leave the university drug-addicted or mentally and physically broken by steroids. It doesn’t matter if you leave without an education or unable to function normally in society. All that matters is that you play well. It took me years to find myself and to find some calm.”

One tiny blurb surfaced a couple of years later. It was a human interest piece in the Living section of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about an old friend from WUU searching for Charlie after hearing he’d been disabled in an accident and had come upon hard times. The article was two years old now, mentioned briefly Charlie’s college football career, but focused on his work at the university with a vascular surgeon developing artificial skin and artificial heart valves for vessel grafts. “Everyone knew Charlie’s impact in artery design and artificial tissue would be substantial. He was going to save a lot of lives.”

I thought about that and felt terribly sad. The next attachment was a lawsuit. Charles E. Ramsey v. Wells Fargo in the State of Georgia, County of Fulton, City of Atlanta. I scanned the original petition, and found what I had already learned about Charlie. An armored truck had run a light and struck him while he crossed the street on a walk signal at Tenth and Peachtree. There was a weak Answer on file denying responsibility but soon after that the case was settled.

I went back to the complaint that Charlie’s lawyers had filed in Fulton County and took a closer look at reports from the physicians, which detailed months of physical therapy, pain, problems with cognition, memory, and reasoning, sensory-processing difficulties—sight, hearing, smell—communication and comprehension problems, depression, anxiety, personality changes, aggression, acting out, and social inappropriateness all due to traumatic brain injury. Some issues might or might not be temporary; others were permanent disabilities. There were still a lot of unknowns about the brain, about whether it was capable of healing itself over time. The petition also talked about loss of income, career, and any semblance of normal family life. He’d lost everything and then they’d handed him a couple of million dollars to shut him up. I didn’t think he’d been able to enjoy it much. I thought about the day he talked about how quickly life can change. Was Charlie bitter enough to kill? Perhaps. But did he still have enough brain power left to pull off this kind of crime, to leave a scene clean? It would mean being fully lucid. Was Charlie that? I didn’t think so and I didn’t think the signature characteristics of these scenes—the stabbing to sexual areas and other staging elements—fit with Charlie. And there was no physical connection to Florida where the murders began. Or did they begin in Florida? How many more people had fallen victim to this killer who had not yet been connected? I thought about the day we ate together at my table. I clean fish real fast. Was Wishbone that simple? Was I just overthinking it?

I called Neil back. “Can you check the New York area, particularly Ithaca and central New York, for murders involving sexual assaults and stabbings during the years Charlie was at school there?”

“Already on it,” Neil said.

I needed to know more about Charlie Ramsey, where he lived, how he lived. I looked at the windows over Peachtree Street. It was dark now, the late summer sun was gone. Must be about nine. What the heck.