The Stranger You Seek

23





I had driven past the town houses where Charlie lived every couple of days since they were built three years ago. They faced DeKalb Avenue, which ran straight from downtown Atlanta into Decatur, where my parents lived, but I hadn’t known Charlie lived there, of course. We’d all assumed that with Charlie’s special issues there would be financial problems too. Had we assumed or had this seed been planted? I tried to remember how I came to this idea and the notion he lived in public housing. Charlie had told me once that a local church had accepted him into an employment program. Perhaps I’d made the leap from there to arranged housing. A lot wasn’t adding up with Charlie. I thought about this. He’d need a job whether he needed money or not to become a functioning part of the community. Part of his diagnosis included emotional problems. I assumed he was in therapy. It made sense he would need assistance to get work. Not that easy for a guy with a crooked walk and a slur, I imagined.

I was sitting on the street in the car I use for surveillance purposes, a white Plymouth Neon. There are about a million of them in Atlanta and no one looked twice. The Neon might not be a great choice for a perfectly manicured Buckhead community, but it did the job within the diverse, infilled city limits of Atlanta. The white paint was graying and the hood was slightly dinged up, which made the car even less remarkable. I’d run up under the spare tire on an SUV at a stoplight while driving and texting. Lesson learned.

I wasn’t alone out here tonight. Two of Rauser’s detectives, Balaki and Williams, were parked half a block up. They weren’t easy to spot. The street was lined with parked cars, but my headlights had hit them just right when I’d pulled onto the street from the other direction and I’d seen Williams clearly, then realized Balaki was behind the wheel. Rauser had said nothing to me about having Charlie under surveillance. Was he hinting at it earlier when he mentioned seeing Charlie so frequently on courthouse surveillance? He did seem very concerned when I’d told him Charlie had gotten out of line, but that was just Rauser, I thought. I’d seen that muscle in his jaw start to work. Did Rauser know more about Charlie than he was letting on? Or was it simply that a routine background check had pulled up Charlie’s violent college years, his parents’ death, the huge inheritance, details on the armored truck accident that had damaged his brain? That would be enough to start some bells ringing at headquarters.

I looked again at the tidy row houses that backed up to Edgewood Avenue where I was parked. Occasionally another light came on or off. I tried to imagine Charlie getting up for a snack or the bathroom, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t picture him anymore. I’d had to let go of the idea that I knew this man and had begun to look at him from an investigator’s perspective. While Neil had searched for killings in New York, I’d gone online to the Fulton County real estate records and found the deed for this town house. A local lender had financed the $340,000 “town-home” with fifty grand down from Charlie and a guarantee from a law firm called Benjamin, Recworst, Stickler, and Paille.

By eleven I was bored; while one earplug quietly transmitted a book on tape to help keep me awake, the other ear was free to hear the neighborhood. In the seat next to me, two Little Debbie wrappers, a testament to my nutritional concerns. I didn’t know what I was waiting for on Charlie’s street. I had just wanted to get a feel for where he lived. It was late. I really didn’t expect anything to happen. Tomorrow I’d come at different times when I could observe Charlie’s life in action.

A light appeared near the entrance that faced Edgewood. The front of the row houses looked out at DeKalb Avenue, which had no parking. The town house door opened. I picked up my binoculars and zeroed in. Charlie was pushing his bicycle through the door onto the porch steps. I cringed. White tape ran up and then across the bridge of his nose. He turned to lock his door, then carried the bike down the steps and pushed it, silent and agile, down the walkway. My blood pressure spiked. Where was the funny walk, the way he held his head to the side, all the ways Charlie moved that told you his disfigured brain was misfiring? Perhaps what was wrong in Charlie’s brain wasn’t at all what we had believed. The thick tongue slur had been gone earlier today, I suddenly remembered. I think I should f*ck you the way Mr. Man f*cks you.

He jumped on the ten-speed and turned right, down Elizabeth Street, heading deeper into the Inman Park neighborhood toward Highland, which was only moments from my office. All those visits from Charlie, all those times he’d ridden in with his squeeze horn honking, it had been a five-minute ride. I had just assumed, like we had all assumed, that Charlie lived in housing for the disabled. No. It wasn’t merely an assumption. All at once I remembered the moment Charlie had planted that seed. He’d told us a local church got him into their employment program and found him the courier job. And then he’d said, “They make sure I have a place to live.”

I saw Balaki and Williams pull out after Charlie, so I eased the Neon into gear, kept the lights off, and slipped into the space they’d left open, which was a full half block closer to Charlie’s town house.

A MARTA train whizzed by on the DeKalb Avenue side, inside lights bright, the passengers in silhouette. All those lives zooming past, all those destinations. How many of them would be afraid tonight when they stepped out of their train stations because another monster had fixed murderous eyes on our city? Across those tracks, on the edge of Cabbagetown, which was a millworkers’ district in the early part of the century, the huge old cotton mill had been turned into lofts like just about everything else in Atlanta. The area was littered with cool restaurants pushing fresh, local fare, farm-to-table, inspired. A few years ago an Atlanta fireman made the Cotton Mill Lofts famous when a five-alarm fire broke out and CNN filmed him plucking a trapped crane operator off his equipment while dangling from a helicopter rope inches above the flames. More recently a tornado had added to the history, cut a path through downtown Atlanta and ripped the top four floors off the old mill.

My phone went off. Jesus. The volume was way too high and Rauser’s “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)” ringtone scared the crap out of me.

“Look, we know he’s moving, Keye. We’re on it, okay? My guys made you, by the way. I don’t mind another pair of eyes, but you cannot pursue, understood?”

“Understood,” I said, and hung my equipment bag over my shoulder, stepped out onto the street, closed the car door quietly.

“By the way, Dobbs slept off the brownies. He thinks he’s coming down with something. Poor bastard.” Rauser chuckled. “I almost felt sorry for him.”

“Can we just never talk about that again?” I was moving along the east side of Edgewood, staying in the shadows.

“Ah, she’s capable of remorse,” Rauser said. “Good to know.”

I ignored that. “Hey, nice of you to tell me you had Charlie under surveillance.”

“Yeah, well, you haven’t exactly been forthright, have you? What are you doing right now? Sounds like you’re moving. Keye? You’re out of your car! No, you are not breaking and entering. Tell me you’re not.”

“You don’t want to know,” I answered, and worked my way through a couple of well-tended backyards and headed for the town houses.

“Shit,” Rauser spat. “I’m on my way.”

“Oh, that’s smart. Chief Connor would love that. Better keep your distance in case this doesn’t work out. I’m putting my phone on vibrate. Make sure somebody gives me a heads-up if he’s coming back, would you?”

“Keye, wait—”

I dropped the phone into the pocket of the black cargo pants I wear when I’m working at night—loose with plenty of pockets for my tools, easy to move in, dark, soft cotton and practically noiseless. I studied the town houses. There were tall privacy fences around twelve-by-twelve backyards. Unless I was ready to scale a ten-foot wooden fence, I wasn’t going to be lucky enough to have access to the private garden doors, the ones that were more likely to be unlocked.

I moved quickly back around the building, staying close in the shadows, found the main entrance, and pulled on tight vinyl gloves. I knelt to examine the lock. It was a standard cylinder lock, pin and tumbler, the kind of deadbolt most people used, easy to open with a key and not so easy without one. I opened my kit, withdrew a tension wrench and a long pick. I twisted the wrench enough to apply pressure to the lock and slid the pick in over it. One at a time, as each pin inside was pushed up with my pick and aligned, I heard a tiny click. One, two, three, four, five clicks, a little more pressure with the wrench and the cylinder, and I pushed open Charlie Ramsey’s front door and heard the last sound in the world I wanted to hear at that moment. Steady warning beeps. An alarm system. Charlie-with-only-half-a-brain had an alarm system. Crap. I figured I had forty-five, maybe sixty seconds at the most before all hell broke loose.

The town house was nicely furnished, earth tones mostly, guy stuff. Leather furniture with beefy steel rivets and a recliner facing a huge television mounted over the fireplace. The television was on.

I had to make the most out of a few seconds. I went straight for the steps. No one puts anything they want to keep out of sight in a common area.

Two bedrooms upstairs. In the second, a mattress on the floor, no frame, unmade. It was strewn with newspapers and magazines, clippings, a laptop, a couple of Coke cans. A bottle of Astroglide sat on the bed table.

I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for. Something, anything, to exclude Charlie from my dark suspicions. He was my friend. Funny goofy Charlie who forgot to take his meds and simply freaked out when I stood him up. Charlie with a sweet crush on me. I didn’t want to believe the churning in my gut.

I pulled open a bedside drawer. Magazines—porn, hetero leather stuff, bondage, S/M. Under the magazines, a hardback written by none other than Jacob Dobbs titled The Criminal Behaviors of Serial Rapists.

I kept looking. I found the safe on the floor near the closet. A small one, eighteen inches deep, the kind you buy at an office supply store to protect documents. It was locked, of course. I moved it a little to check the weight. Heavy. I was running out of time. How long had I been here? Twenty seconds? Forty?

On the mattress, next to the laptop, I saw clippings from the AJC and the New York Times, Time magazine. All of them were about the Wishbone case. I rifled through them, desperate to get a feel for what was going on in this room, in Charlie’s head. And then I saw a shot from the Washington Post of Rauser and me walking toward the crime scene tape at the Brooks scene. The caption: Crime scene investigators approach another bloody scene associated with a serial murderer dubbed the Wishbone Killer. A circle had been drawn around us with a fat black pen. The words lying bitch!!! were scrawled over the picture in bright yellow highlighter.

Queasiness hit my stomach hard. I swallowed it back and stuffed the clipping in my pocket, then jiggled the laptop mouse. It asked for a password. No time. My phone vibrated. Rauser’s warning? Shit.

I felt for the Glock 10 I’d wedged in the back of my pants as I raced toward the front door, taking the stairs two at a time. The beeps on the alarm system had gotten closer together.

It’s odd what the brain registers when normal timekeeping stops. I remember thinking that there were no pets here in Charlie’s house. No family pictures, no art. Bare walls. And the television had been left on some true-crime station. A cop wannabe? A CSI freak?

And then the world exploded in my ears, a blaring, whirling siren accompanied by a loud male voice shrieking “Intruder! Intruder! Get out!” The alarm system blasted it all to the neighborhood. “Intruder! Intruder! Get out!”

I grabbed the doorknob and felt resistance, heard keys jingling. Through the peephole, I saw Charlie’s bike dropped on the front sidewalk, the bike I’d seen him ride away on.

I tore through the living room, pushed open the sliding glass doors, then remembered there was ten feet of solid wood fence without a gate. Intruder! Expletives I didn’t know I knew flew out of my mouth. Caged, I made a couple of stupid circles. Then I grabbed a heavy iron patio table and dragged it to the fence, scrambled on top and pulled myself up. It wasn’t pretty. My muscles were trembling. I needed to join a gym, really. The ground on the other side nearly knocked the wind out of me, but I kept moving as fast and far away from Charlie as I could, scrambled into my car and pulled out without lights, nearly sideswiping a Volkswagen. The phone in my pocket vibrated again.

“Hey,” Rauser said when I answered. “Great work. Discreet too.”

I pulled over near the Candler Park MARTA station and tried to stop trembling. My heart was still going great guns. Serve me right if I had a heart attack. “At least you’ve got a reason to go in now, right? You’ve got an alarm.”

“I don’t expect him to invite us in, do you? We’ll know in a second or two, but I’m not optimistic.”

“The things I go through for APD. And for what?”

“Uh-huh. Always thinking about everyone else. And maybe Hilary’ll come down here and give me a spanking.”

“Power types. Fascinating. This is why you’re always on CNN, isn’t it?”

Rauser was quiet for a minute. “That was some stupid shit, Keye. Jeez. Don’t do that anymore. I can’t protect you when you act crazy.”

“I don’t need protecting,” I reminded him, but my heart was still doing about one eighty-five.

“Hang on. We’ve got uniforms at Charlie’s door. They’re talking, talking, and just like I thought. He’s telling them everything’s fine and sending them away. He’s doing the brain-damaged thing.” I heard him hit his cigarette. “So, tell me what you got.”

“See, I knew you wanted me to go in there.” I smiled and, feeling calmer, pulled my car back onto the road. Rauser had never been a strictly by-the-book guy, but he was a good and honest cop. I wasn’t under the same restrictions. Not anymore. The private sector has its advantages.

I told him about Charlie’s town house, about the clippings, particularly the one I still had in my pocket. We couldn’t use it, of course. Rauser couldn’t even order DNA testing on it without having to explain how he got it.

“Look,” he said when I finished. “I need you to press charges so we can haul him in, shake him up a little.”

“Press charges for what?”

“Assault, sexual battery, attempted rape.”

I was silent.

Rauser said, “Isn’t this exactly the kind of fraud you’ve been talking about? Duplicitous lifestyle, just a pack of lies under the layers. It makes sense—the accident, the roses. You press charges, Dobbs’ll want to see him interviewed, and the chief can’t say anything about you being there since you’re filing the complaint. Did you see how he was moving?”

Rauser was excited. I could almost feel his energy through the phone. “This guy got well, Keye. He recovered from that accident and kept on playing sick.” He paused. “You don’t think it’s him.” It wasn’t a question.

“I don’t know what he is yet,” I answered quietly.

“Fair enough,” Rauser said, but his voice was tight. I’d heard this voice before. Rauser trying not to blow. He didn’t want caution right now. He wanted me to go with him to this place of excitement at having a suspect. “But you agree we got to find out what he is, right?”

“Yes.”

“Look, I get you like this guy. We all liked Charlie. Poor harmless Charlie, right? Is that why they open the door?”

It started as a chill, a shiver, then turned electric. She smiled when she opened the door.