The Stranger You Seek

26





It had been determined that the black fiber the Fulton County medical examiner had pulled from inside one of Dobbs’s wounds was from automotive carpeting. My theory, Rauser told me, agreed exactly with his—the killer probably had the knife on the floorboard of his own vehicle before attacking Dobbs. Fibers clung to the knife, and when it had been plunged into Dobbs’s chest and pulled back out, a wisp of carpet fiber had attached to wound tissue. The ME’s office had entered the microscopic characteristics of the recovered fiber into the FBI’s automotive fiber database, which has over seven hundred samples from new and used cars. The origin of the fiber had been narrowed to fifteen models. Unfortunately, the database didn’t have enough searchable samples on file to nail down a year. It might have been a Jeep Wrangler, a Chrysler LeBaron, a Dodge Challenger, a Toyota Camry, or any one of eleven other models. The field was still too wide, but it was the first bit of fiber evidence ever recovered from a Wishbone scene. And Frank Loutz had gone from zero to hero in Rauser’s book overnight.

The bad news for Rauser was that the DMV didn’t have a vehicle listed in the name of Charlie Ramsey, his prime suspect. Charlie also had no driver’s license, which he would need in order to rent a car. Rauser’s gut was telling him Charlie was right for these murders, and he wasn’t going to stop until he proved it. If Charlie didn’t have a car of his own stashed somewhere, then he had probably stolen one, Rauser thought. Detectives were going over all the stolen vehicle reports and comparing them to the list of models with carpeting that matched the fiber.

Rauser asked me to stay with my parents until he had Wishbone in custody. He was worried that the next contact I had with Wishbone might be more than an email or a wrestling match in my office or a wheel on the highway. He wanted me to stay out of sight for a whole host of reasons. I had considered for all of two seconds staying with my parents. Wishbone was inching closer: Dobbs’s death was a message for everyone involved in this investigation. I didn’t want to expose my parents to that. And I’d become homicidal myself if I had to spend that much time with my dear, sweet mother. Bless her heart.

Whatever Wishbone’s motive, I knew it was a good bet that Rauser and his detectives could become targets too. Wishbone had veered out of one lane and into another. It wasn’t just civil suit plaintiffs that set him off now. Rauser was the biggest threat to the killer’s freedom. He was the head of Homicide, of the task force, and the adversary with whom the killer had already established a cat-and-mouse relationship through letter writing. And it was no secret that Rauser and I were close. Wishbone’s letters had suggested Rauser’s relationship with me was sexual, just as Charlie had suggested it in my office the day he attacked me.

Rauser promised me he was looking over his shoulder.

I met a locksmith early at my office and called Neil to ask him to come meet me for the new keys. I told him we were going to have to change the way we did things. He couldn’t work with the door propped open anymore. The door was to stay closed and locked.

The locksmith followed me back to the Georgian, and by eight-thirty my locks had been rekeyed at home too. I made coffee and cleaned out White Trash’s litter box, gave her fresh food and water, then flipped on the television.

Dobbs’s murder was all over the news. The networks were running the juicy interviews with him they had on file. It was excruciating even for someone who had disliked the man as I had. I thought about Dobbs’s wife and children watching while newscasters described the gory details of his murder and sexual mutilation. I couldn’t even guess at what they must be feeling.

Why hadn’t I been skilled and smart enough to provide concise enough information for APD to stop this killer before he struck again? The question weighed on me. And another one too: Could Charlie Ramsey really be the cruel, bloodthirsty killer we called Wishbone?

He’d been so rough and so profane when he’d grabbed me in my office. How cold his eyes had been, his grip. I thought about the Brooks scene, then about finding Billy LaBrecque beaten to death, about Lei Koto’s child walking into a blood-spattered kitchen, about the wreck on the interstate, about Jacob Dobbs.

Fear as sharp as a switchblade stabbed at me. I didn’t want to be afraid for Rauser, for myself, for Neil or my family. I didn’t want to live that way.

Start at the beginning, I told myself. That’s where you always go on a case—back to the beginning.

I called my mother and asked her to take care of White Trash for a few days. The two had formed an alliance. White Trash accepts handfuls of Pounce and anything else Mother hands her, bumps her ankles, and consents to snuggle sessions. Mom disapproves of her name and refuses to use it. She calls her White Kitty or White One or Whitey.

I made some phone calls and cleared my schedule for the week and sloughed off as much work on Neil as he was willing to take. White Trash followed me to the bedroom and watched me pull out the suitcase. She fully understands it is a prelude to my leaving and she doesn’t appreciate this betrayal. She watched me steadily, her bright green eyes resentful slits.

I was headed south. The first two murders attributed to Wishbone were in Florida. A full victimology had been unattainable on Anne Chambers, the first murder on record. The files available from that time had been thoroughly reviewed, but Anne’s private life was still very much a question mark. If the murders began in Florida, there was a reason. Chambers appeared to have no link to our court system. She was the victim treated with the greatest cruelty and shown the most rage. Fifteen years ago a young woman had been brutalized, then sexually mutilated. The pattern was almost identical to Dobbs’s murder yesterday. Whatever this was, it had started in Florida. I needed to know why.

The peal of the front door buzzer did nothing to improve White Trash’s mood. She scurried underneath the bed. I went to the door in shorts, an old T-shirt, no shoes. When I stood on tiptoes to peer through the peephole, I found myself looking at my ex-husband. It was like licking my finger and sticking it into a light socket. I think my eyes even bulged a little.

Not once during our relationship had I looked at Dan and felt nothing. He always stirred something in me. What it stirred wasn’t always positive but it was always superconcentrated. I swallowed the cotton ball stuck in my throat and opened the door.

“Cold?” he asked, and gave me that sexy, impossibly white smile. I realized with great displeasure that my nipples were staging some kind of coup d’état over my good sense.

He handed me the flowers I’d already spotted behind his back, a bouquet of fresh-cut ones, bright yellows and purples and reds, no fillers. Dan actually knew flowers by name, had probably requested each one individually, possibly even supervised the arrangement. When we were married, he brought them home whenever he’d been unfaithful. Flowers became a sort of subspecialty for him; his specialty, of course, was bullshit.

I folded my arms over the insubordinate little traitors poking through my shirt, looked at him, looked at the flowers, then turned on my heel and returned to the bedroom.

“Listen, Keye, I know I wasn’t a good husband to you.” He didn’t follow me. He simply raised his voice so I could hear.

“You’ve done something horrible, haven’t you?” I asked. I was only half kidding.

“No, no. It’s nothing like that. I’ve just been thinking about things. Listen, I know I haven’t been there for you. I was a crummy husband and an even crummier friend. Hell, I’ve had trouble just being a decent man half my life.”

I was silent, waiting, cautious as I always am with Dan. White Trash, on the other hand, was fearless. Hearing his voice, she slipped out from under the bed, stretched, and sashayed out. She had always adored Dan. A minute or two later when I came back into the room, Dan was kneeling, stroking her back. He was wearing boot-cut Levi’s that fit him just right. His skin looked dark against a crisp banded collar. White Trash had her paws stretched out in front of her and her butt in the air.

He rose slowly to full height, all of about five feet nine even in his western boots. “She missed me,” he said.

I rolled my eyes. “You probably smell like fish.”

He smiled gently. “I’m changing, Keye. I’m working hard to turn my life around. To make things right.”

I ignored that. “Why do cats like fish anyway? It’s not like they’re out there trout fishing in the wild. Ever see a cat rip a fish out of a stream on Wild Kingdom?”

Dan was undeterred. “I don’t know how you can forgive me for the kind of man I’ve been to you, but if you’ll just try, I won’t let you down this time.”

Of course he would. It’s what we do. We make promises, he breaks them, I’m wounded and pissed off. Then we start all over. Sick, I know, but I didn’t care suddenly. I just wanted him. I didn’t exactly stretch out my paws and stick my butt in the air, but I must have signaled him in some basic animal way, because he came to me, held my jaw, and kissed me. His mouth tasted like Starburst, the orange ones he loved and probably had a bag of in his banged-up old car. He smelled like drier sheets and soap, and when he pressed against me, when he whispered, “I’m crazy about you, Keye. I always have been,” he was already hard. He didn’t ask why I’d been packing when we moved to the bedroom and pushed my suitcase onto the floor.

Dan was a submissive lover, sweet and silky and hard. He liked kissing. He liked being undressed. He liked to be restrained. He liked letting me do whatever I wanted with him for as long as I wanted. In some circles, he was called a Bottom, and it was one of the things I adored about him. There was something boyish and wounded in him when we made love. He was responsive and open, eager and utterly awed by me—everything I wanted from him in life and more than I could ever expect.

We were silent for a while after we’d made love. My head was on his chest, his fingers skipping lightly over my bare shoulder. “You awake?” he murmured finally, but I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to talk. I just wanted to fall back asleep like this, in the softness of this moment.

He shook me a little. He wasn’t giving up. “What’s with the suitcase?”

I kissed his neck, pressed a finger against his lips. The sun was setting and I was sleepy. White Trash jumped on the bed and immediately went for the exposed half of Dan’s fuzzy chest. She paused briefly to sniff my eyelashes, then put her butt in my face and relaxed her whole body on top of him. The phone began to ring. So much for the moment.

“Want a failure to appear with priors?” It was Tyrone from Tyrone’s Quikbail. “Money’s good,” he added. “Meaty.”

Tyrone could say things like “meaty” and still sound cool. I rose up on my elbow. “What priors?”

“Assault, armed robbery.”

I hadn’t exactly been running down new work. I was sucked into the Wishbone investigation and all the crap that always swallows up my life—background checks, service of process, and about a hundred applications to verify for Rapid Placement, the employment agency that used up a couple thousand dollars’ worth of my time each month. I needed them, but the work was so excruciatingly boring that I always put it off until the last possible minute every week, drooling into my keyboard till I fell asleep on Sunday nights, groggily turning in my reports on Monday mornings.

I told Tyrone I wouldn’t be available for a few days. He took the news well. He had a long list of agents who wanted work. He had called me first because he liked me. That was the rumor anyway. It’s hard to tell with Tyrone.

I curled back up to Dan and the scraggly white cat that seemed to no longer give a damn about me. “It’s a business trip,” I said before Dan had to ask again. “A few days maybe. I’m not sure yet.”

He moaned a little, kissed the top of my head, pulled me closer. “And just when we’re getting along so well.”

I smiled. “This is the easy part, remember?”

“No, it’s not. It’s what reminds us how connected we are and it kills me later, Keye. I ache for you. I do. Why can’t it be like this all the time?”

Maybe he was sincere. Maybe it was a line from a play. Maybe he was back in daytime television. I couldn’t tell anymore. I wasn’t sure he could. He’d been acting for so many years, rehearsing for one role after another, always waiting for the role, the one that would put him over the top.

“So what do you think about me staying here?” he asked. It came out of nowhere. I must have looked at him as if his lips just fell off, because he added hastily, “I mean, just for a week or so. There’s a gas leak or something in my building. Everybody’s kicked out. They’re digging up the street.”

I got up and yanked my bathrobe around me. White Trash caught a bad vibe and leapt off Dan’s chest onto the floor, fighting hard for traction on the hardwood. She vanished under the bed.

“So that’s why you showed up with flowers and all the I-was-such-a-bad-husband crap. This was just another goddamn audition.” I smacked my forehead with my palm. “Sonofabitch. I bet you’ve got a suitcase in your car. You do, don’t you?”

“Wait, Keye, listen. It’s not how it looks.” He was out of bed, hurrying behind me naked as I stomped toward the kitchen. There was Greek yogurt cheesecake with a pomegranate glaze in the fridge from the restaurant downstairs, and I meant to have it. Some people reach for a Xanax. Cheesecake is my mood elevator.

“I said those things because they’re true. And the apartment thing, I hadn’t even planned to ask. Really. It just crossed my mind and I blurted it out without thinking.”

“Uh-huh.” I opened the fridge and found the cheesecake. “So, what’s the truth about your apartment, Dan? Did you let the utilities go? Or forget a little thing like rent again? You need money?”

The telephone rang.

“Don’t answer it,” he ordered.

I grabbed it before the second ring and Dan threw his hands up and stalked to the long windows that face Peachtree and the Fox Theatre.

It was Rauser. “You busy?”

I covered the mouthpiece and told Dan, “Would you get dressed? Peachtree Street is probably only half as interested in your dick as you are.”

“Gee, sorry to interrupt,” Rauser said. “I really would love to hear more about Dan’s tiny cock. I was beginning to think you no longer liked men.”

“I don’t.”

“Maybe you’re a lesbian.”

I looked at Dan’s exposed genitalia and considered that seriously. I had never been given cause to label my sexuality. I’d never suffered through a sexual identity crisis or needed therapy to reach orgasm. In my most liberal assessment of myself, I like to think I could fall in love with a woman. But I’ve never tested it, unless you count a college make-out session after four lemon Jell-O shooters.

“You always think women are hitting on you,” Rauser continued. “You know you do.”

“I do not.”

“ ’Member that waitress at Hooters?”

“She was hitting on me.”

“Uh-huh, and what about Jo? You thought she was hitting on you too, didn’t you? That night at the Brooks scene?”

“How’d you know that?”

“She could tell.” Rauser chuckled. “She told me you got all weird when she touched your arm. Like you were gonna curl up in a goddamn fetal position or something.”

I sighed. “Great.”

“Homophobes are usually just big ole closet cases,” he said, and made some kissing noises.

My front door opened and my mother walked in. I looked at her, looked at my nude ex-husband sulking at the window, then back at my mother. I hung up on Rauser.

“Mother! What are you doing here?”

“Neil gave me the new key. I thought you were leaving town.” She glanced at Dan, then at her own shoes. A smile played lightly at the corners of her lips.

Dan turned from the window, nodded at my stunned mother, and said, “Nice to see you, Mom.” His calm took me by surprise considering the thing he was most proud of in life had withdrawn to about the size of my thumb. He and his poor shrunken penis walked past us and down the hall. Mother held a covered dish in one hand and a small suitcase in the other. She seemed unable to speak, a rare occurrence and one I might have enjoyed had I not been so completely irritated.

“I’m glad you two are working things out,” she said, her eyes following Dan’s bare ass, which was, thankfully, almost to the bedroom, where I hoped it would find some clothes.

I raised my voice so he could hear my opinion loud and clear. “We’re working out how fast he can get dressed and leave, that’s what we’re working out.”

“My Lord, Keye. You don’t have to be so rude, do you?”

“Mother, why are you here?”

“Why are you here?” she countered. “I’m taking care of White Kitty, remember?”

“It’s White Trash. Not White Kitty or Whitey or White One or Snowflake or whatever you’re calling her today. It’s White Trash.”

“I was going to stay here while you’re gone so she won’t get lonely,” Mother said, then shook her head. “And, well, it will give your dad some time alone.”

Uh-oh. Mom and Dad having problems? Visions of Mother living with me danced through my head.

“Are you and Dad okay?”

“Howard’s very upset, Keye. I’m sorry to tell you that your grandfather Street was killed.”

My father’s parents had always referred to me as “the little Chink,” so this news didn’t exactly rock my world. We had never been close, but I knew my father loved his father and must be hurting. “You left Dad alone?”

“You know your father. He can be just inconsolable. And it doesn’t help his fool father got himself run over on his own lawn mower. Can you believe it?”

“Somebody drove into Granddaddy’s yard and ran him over on the lawn mower?” I tried not to laugh, really I did. I knew in my heart of hearts that would be wrong. At the very least, Mother would consider it inappropriate.

“No, no. He was on the road, the main road, going to see your grandmother.”

“Going where to see Grandma?”

Exasperated, my mother puffed out her cheeks, set her suitcase down, and took her covered dish to the refrigerator. “They split up after Granddaddy Street got that snake. Your grandmother wouldn’t live in the house with a snake and I don’t blame her. Idiot was half blind too. They took his driver’s license away a few years ago, so he started riding around town on that hideous green thing. Damned old fool. And your poor grandmother, Keye.” She shook her head again in disgust. “Just one humiliation after another.”

“Granddaddy had a snake?” I struggled to keep up.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Keye. Don’t you know anything that goes on in this family?”