The Stranger You Seek

25





We had taken the elevator to garage level, where Rauser’s Crown Vic was parked. As we reached the car, I heard heels against the concrete and spun around.

“Oh shit,” Rauser said.

She was coming at us fast across the parking garage. A heavyset guy was huffing behind her with a camera on his shoulder, and she was holding a microphone out in front of her like it was an Olympic torch.

“Wait, Lieutenant, wait, please,” she was yelling. “Lieutenant, is it true you have a suspect in custody in the Wishbone case?”

Her name was Monica Roberts and she liked following cops and city workers around to make sure they were doing their jobs. I’d watched her reports and rooted for her. Not so much at the moment, however. My mind was clicking. Rauser’s must have been too. Here we were together again on camera. When Chief Connor got wind of this, I imagined a giant black cloud spinning with debris like a twister over City Hall East.

“No comment.” Rauser had been well warned that only officials much higher up than he were to speak to the press regarding the Wishbone investigation.

“But you’ve interrogated a suspect.” It was not a question.

“Press briefings are at noon every day,” Rauser said. “You know that, Monica.”

“Can you explain why the profiler hired by the Atlanta PD, Dr. Jacob Dobbs, was not present for the interview?” Monica looked at me and the camera followed. I eased the car door open and sank quietly into the passenger seat.

“No comment,” Rauser repeated.

“Okay, then can you explain why the profiler who was sacked from the case was present at the suspect’s interrogation?”

Rauser climbed in and threw the old Ford into gear. “Christ,” he groused, slamming his door. “Where’s she getting her intelligence? If she knows that much, she already has Charlie’s name.” He seemed to think about that for a minute. “Actually, more pressure on Charlie boy may not be a bad thing.”

He pulled left out of the garage onto Ponce de Leon and headed toward Peachtree. It was that odd time of day when the city seems buttoned up. Lunch was over and it was still a couple of hours before quitting time, when the office buildings would empty out and jam our streets. The afternoon was so still and cloudless it might have seemed entirely without weather but for the stinging heat. The tires on Rauser’s Crown Vic were a steady crackling against the city streets. The windows were down. Rauser had had bad luck with air conditioners lately, he said. The police scanner was chattering in the background. We were silent. I was tired and maybe even a little depressed. I thought Rauser must be too.

“Ten-fifty-four-D-B, possible one-eighty-seven,” the scanner reported, and got Rauser’s attention. “Juniper and Eighth.”

“Two-thirty-three responding. ETA two minutes,” he said into his radio, and glanced at me. “Possible dead body, possible homicide. It’s just around the corner. I gotta take it.”

He flipped on his lights and siren and the cars in front of us began a paranoid migration into different lanes. Rauser barreled up another block and turned off Ponce. Moments later we were pulling up on Eighth Avenue near Juniper. I saw two women standing in the front yard of a Victorian with baby-blue shutters. They were big-eyed, both of them, with their arms folded across their chests. A cruiser pulled up and then another unmarked Crown Vic. A silver Lincoln was parked on the street.

Rauser used his radio. “Two-thirty-three, Dispatch. I’m ten-ninety-seven,” he said. “I’ll get you home as soon as I see what we got here, Street. Wait, okay? I don’t want you walking.”

I could have walked home in less than ten minutes, but I said, “I’ll wait.”

Rauser’s car was like a furnace. I got out, leaned against the door. It wasn’t much help. A whiff of a breeze rustled a leaf from a pecan tree, then died. I watched Rauser approach the two women, speak to them a moment. Then he talked to the uniformed officer and two detectives. They all walked toward the silver Lincoln. Rauser unsnapped the holster that was almost always at his ribs and opened a door. For a split second, I thought I saw him react physically to whatever was in that car. It was almost imperceptible, a slight stiffening, something with his shoulders. Whatever it was, I saw it, and I didn’t like it.

Rauser pulled away from the car and walked to the back, looked at the tag. He was on his phone. The crime scene unit showed up, then a station wagon from the medical examiner’s office. Frank Loutz, Fulton County’s ME, got out.

I watched Rauser take a few steps away and wipe his forehead. He had never fully adjusted to Atlanta’s long, smoldering summers. Another crime scene van pulled up, followed by Jo Phillips in a gold Ford Taurus. Oh great, Jo the flirty spatter analyst. Rauser didn’t seem to notice. He turned and looked at me, then turned away, frowning.

The ME approached him and they spoke, then Rauser walked toward me.

“It’s Dobbs,” he said.

“What?”

“He’s dead.”

Fifty yards away, two of the uniforms started sealing off the area around the silver Lincoln with yellow crime scene tape. In the distance, car horns and brakes told me the afternoon rush hour was picking up. The officers worked quickly to secure the scene. They needed to establish boundaries that would keep out the cameras and onlookers who would swoop down on it as soon as word got out.

“Liver temp indicates he’s been here ten, twelve hours, and there’s rigor in the limbs,” Rauser told me. “That’s a couple hours before we picked Charlie up this morning. There’s multiple stab wounds.”

Evidence techs and detectives were still pulling up, getting out of their cars. I remembered the way I’d treated Dobbs the last time I saw him, leaving him asleep at my office. I thought about the brownies. God. Had that broken down his defenses enough to make him vulnerable to an attack? I slid down the Crown Vic and sat on the curb, feeling suddenly gutted.

Rauser’s hand was on my shoulder. He wanted to drive me home.

I looked up at him. “I want to see Jacob.”

He looked annoyed. “So now it’s Jacob? Because usually it’s just Dobbs. Why do you have to romance everything? He was a sonofabitch, Street. And just in case you’re taking the blame, Dobbs wasn’t stumbling into walls and shit because he had a little THC in his system. He slept it off. I’m sure he woke up on your sofa his clearheaded bastardly self.”

“Well, that’s a shitty thing to say, Rauser, given what’s happened.” I scrambled to my feet. “I need to see the scene.”

I didn’t wait for Rauser. I stalked toward the Lincoln—the disposal site. A casket on wheels.

Rauser caught up and handed me a pair of surgical gloves. “Okay, sure. Have at it. And if the press and the chief see you down there at my crime scene and the fallout interferes with my job, no big deal, right? As long as you get what you need.”

“Screw you.”

“F*ck the investigation.” He was walking fast next to me. “F*ck my job. F*ck me. Keye needs closure. It’s always about you, Keye, isn’t it? Or maybe you just want to supervise. Is that it? You can do it better than everyone else, right?”

I stopped. “Goddamnit, Rauser. You’re the one that asked for my help.”

“Yeah, so tell me that wasn’t a mistake, because right now I’m asking you to f*cking stop.”

I slapped the gloves he’d given me into his palm. “Fine. I’ll walk home.”





I didn’t answer the phone for hours. I heard Rauser’s ringtone a couple of times, but I ignored it. I wasn’t mad at him anymore. I was just furious at how right he’d been. About everything. It wasn’t the first time he had accused me of romanticizing the shitty things in my life, especially my relationship with Dan. I get all gooey when I’m lonely and forget what life with Dan was really like. I don’t think the human psyche has the capacity to fully recollect pain. There are pros and cons to this, of course.

Sometime around midnight, I decided that swallowing a little pride and calling Rauser back was the right thing to do.

There was exhaustion in his ragged voice. “I called Dobbs’s wife. A couple of local cops were there so she wouldn’t be alone when I told her. She seemed really weirdly calm, Keye, and then there was a noise like she dropped the phone. Officer told me she’d fainted.”

I thought about what that must have been like for Rauser. I thought about the pain Dobbs’s wife must be feeling knowing how brutal and squalid her husband’s death must have been. I didn’t know Jacob’s wife personally. I knew only that she ran the sociology department at a Virginia university and that they had been married for many years.

“I’m sorry,” I told Rauser, and I meant it.

“I f*cking hate this job sometimes.” I heard Rauser’s shoes against a hard floor, squeaky hinges, and a heavy door closing.

“Where are you?”

“Pryor Street,” he answered, which meant he was at the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Center, the morgue, one of his least favorite places to hang out, I knew.

“Was the Lincoln a rental?”

“Yep. It’s at the crime lab. Spatter says he was killed in it.”

“I don’t get it. What was Dobbs doing in that neighborhood in the middle of the night? Did he pick someone up? Was he forced to drive there? Was he meeting someone?”

“We’re working on it. We have a witness says he was alone at the hotel valet station a few minutes after midnight when he asked for his car. We know he’d consumed enough alcohol to be impaired. Here’s what I think. He slept half the day away on your sofa, so by late last night he’s wide awake. Strange city, he’s alone so he goes out to cat around a little, drinks too much, and lets his guard down. We’ve canvassed the street. Nobody knew Dobbs except from the news and no one remembers exactly when the Lincoln showed up. I think the location was random. The street was quiet. Killer forced him to drive to the site. So we’ve got three, maybe four hours we haven’t accounted for yet between Dobbs leaving his hotel and the DB call.”

I closed my eyes. It was still hard to wrap my mind around a dead body call for Jacob Dobbs.

Rauser said, “Fatal wound in about the same place as Brooks, the substernal notch. Angle tells us the killer was in the passenger seat and reached across the car. Had to be right-handed to get enough power to sink the blade.”

“He’s upping the ante,” I told Rauser. “The pictures he says he’s taking, the letter writing, using the Internet to copy me on emails, tampering with my car, dealing with a florist, and now a high-profile target like Dobbs. His need to fuel his evolving fantasies is escalating. It’s trumping his instinct for self-protection. He’s taking risks. His illness is progressing.”

“Which means he’s not being as careful. Loutz got fiber evidence. He thinks it’s a carpet fiber. I went to Dobbs’s hotel and got a carpet sample. It didn’t match. I’m trying to get a warrant to get samples from Charlie’s place. Fiber evidence may be all we got by the time we get in there. I got a feeling he dumped the knife and the pictures and anything else the little freak likes to hold on to even before we arrested him this morning. That’s what I woulda done if I’d just stuck a knife into a big shot a few dozen times.”

I thought about Charlie’s town house and remembered seeing a fireplace downstairs, an easy place to destroy pictures. Erasing them off a phone or digital camera would be easy too. And it wouldn’t be hard for a bike courier to ditch a knife. APD could not possibly cover every step Charlie took. He was in and out of office buildings, commercial centers, and public restrooms all day. Rauser was probably right about the evidence disappearing.

“What else do you know about Dobbs?”

“Wound patterns are consistent with the knife from the other scenes. But get this: no bite marks. None.”

“Not enough time for the rituals.” I was thinking aloud. “Residential neighborhood, foot traffic.”

“Keye, there’s something I haven’t told you yet. It was a pretty bad mess, what happened in that vehicle.”

I remembered watching as Rauser leaned into the car at the crime scene and his physical reaction. Mentally, I braced for what was coming.

“Dobbs’s pants were down,” he said. “And, well … his dick was gone.”