The Stranger You Seek

36





Chief Connor was livid. He had scored an enormous public victory and he was not going to let anyone take that away. He glared at newly appointed Homicide Lieutenant Brit Williams as if there were an ear sticking out of his forehead. “That is absolutely not going to happen,” the chief growled. Williams had been put in charge the night Rauser was shot.

“Chief Connor,” I tried. I was standing next to Williams, in front of the huge mahogany desk in the chief’s office. “This text message I received, the rhythm and phrasing, it’s very, very Wishbone. Charlie Ramsey is a criminal, yes. He should stay in jail, yes, but—”

“And you seriously expect APD to reopen the investigation after what this city’s been through, Dr. Street? I know you have a personal interest in this. I appreciate that. We want this person just as much as you do, and I have absolutely made it understood that we will use any and all resources APD can muster in order to bring this monster to justice, but I will not reopen this painful wound on a theory that has not the slightest shred of supporting evidence. We found a weapon at Ramsey’s residence that tested positive for the blood of two victims, a weapon that had been present at every scene. The science is solid on this. We know it is the weapon. Not at one scene, not two, but present at every scene.” I looked down at my shoes. “Our killer’s in custody awaiting trial,” the chief stormed on. “And four women have come forward to say he assaulted and raped them. One of them will even testify to the ligature being a thin wire.”

“Yes, that’s exactly the point. She’s alive to testify,” I interjected, and Williams shot me a look. I went on stubbornly. “Chief, none of Wishbone’s victims were raped. No other evidence linking him to the killings was found in Charlie’s home or vehicle except an automotive carpet fiber that’s consistent with carpeting in fifteen models. You didn’t find photographs, no trophies, no bloodstains on any of his clothes, his sink, in his vehicle. You have fiber evidence and DNA linking him to the rapes. You’d have to believe that this very intelligent and organized offender is nearly flawless at one scene and stupidly careless at another. Frankly, he does not fit the profile, Chief. He never did.”

“First of all,” the chief boomed. He was on his feet now and red-faced. Connor was a big, powerful man, and when his anger was directed at you, you felt it like a physical blow. “You don’t know that any other trophies existed or that photographs were ever taken. Criminals are liars, as you well know, Dr. Street, and the only indication we have at all of pictures or video or whatever is in the letters, the boastful, lying letters of a deranged predator. Secondly, that text message you received at the park could have come from anywhere. The phone was prepaid, could have been picked up at any store for fifteen bucks. The MO of Rauser’s shooting is all wrong for Wishbone. There has never been a gun. Not once at any scene. If this guy doesn’t fit your profile, that’s your problem, not ours. We did our job. The Wishbone case is closed.” He glared at Williams. “There’s a shooter out there responsible for putting a very good friend of mine and a fellow officer down. I expect you to pull him in. Yesterday. Did I make a mistake putting you in charge, Williams? Because the Lieutenant part of your new title can disappear real quick.”

“You did not make a mistake, Chief,” Williams answered quietly. I don’t think he’d slept since Rauser had been shot. He looked like hell.

The chief turned back to me. “Thank you for your services, Dr. Street. If we’re holding an invoice, speak to Eric Fordice in Accounts Payable. Lieutenant, I’ll expect a report on my desk every morning and every afternoon until this is wrapped up.”

Williams’s hands were tied. Chief Connor refused to commit any resources to reopen the Wishbone investigation. He would use everything the department offered to find the person who shot Rauser, I knew, but I was convinced they were going about it from the wrong angle. It would take too much time. It would put more lives at risk.

I wanted Wishbone so bad. I’d fantasized about blowing his head off, point-blank. He’d taken too much from me. When Rauser fell that night, when his blood soaked through my clothes and into my skin, Wishbone’s serrated knife sawed deeper than ever into my life, and broke my heart.

The night of the shooting still has that old sixteen-millimeter quality in my memory, shadowy and jerky. Blurred one second, too crisp the next. I rode with one of the cops to the hospital. The medical techs wouldn’t let me in the ambulance. Too much work to do on Rauser, they said, too small a space. All I kept thinking was, What if you die and I’m not there?

Jimmy and Miki came to the hospital and never left. My parents, Neil, and Diane put in their time too. Rauser was in surgery a long time that night. The doctor said something about the proximity to the front section of the brain, a traumatic injury, the dangerous chest wound, the loss of blood, the risk of infection, a minefield of warnings. I swear, as she stood there talking to us, it was like her mouth was moving but the words were bouncing right off me. She might have been speaking in tongues. A couple of hours later she came back into the waiting room, her expression grimmer than before.

Rauser had had a heart attack during surgery, she told us, and Jimmy reached out, held on to my arm to keep me steady. They had revived him, but he was fighting for his life. He’d slipped into some kind of vegetative state. He was breathing on his own, but that was it. And this is where the doctors shrug and look sympathetic and tell you to expect the best but prepare for the worst. How the hell do you do that? I felt like I had a hole in my chest like Rauser. Just keep moving, I told myself, just nail the bastard that did this. I was so heartsick I was stumbling, punch-drunk, but if I stopped I’d come apart. I knew it. I wanted a drink. I wasn’t built for grief and loss. Keep moving. Get this bastard!

One of Rauser’s children was in town, his son. The daughter was making arrangements to come in the next day. Aaron, named after his dad, was twenty-six and handsome, had a two-year-old at home. He was very kind to me, but he needed time with his father, especially now. No one knew what would happen. Rauser had a living will that specified parenteral nutrition was acceptable for a limited time, but he absolutely wanted to be let go if he could not breathe on his own. Every time I walked into his room, I prayed to see his chest rising and falling. How drastically life had changed since that stroll on Thanksgiving evening, leaning into him, us laughing at his stupid jokes. I’d replayed it in my brain a thousand times.

I finally left the hospital and faced the world without my best friend. I found my old Impala, which had been repaired with all the additions my father had arranged—new safety belts, an alarm system, and GPS tracking. I headed for home, a shower, food. I needed to make myself eat. I was so drained I couldn’t think straight. How do you eat, how do you even swallow when you’ve been torn in half?

I closed my eyes and breathed in the cold air. The holidays. God. How could I do the holidays without Rauser?

Get this bastard, just get this bastard.

I fed White Trash and slumped on the couch. I was exhausted, but I didn’t want to stay away from the hospital too long. I was terrified he’d die, just stop breathing while I was away. It’s just the 2 of us now. No, it’s not, you a*shole. Your aim wasn’t good enough. Rauser’s still here and I’m not going to let him go. I’m going to find you, I vowed. But exhaustion got the best of me and I drifted off with White Trash curled up tight against me.





When Rauser’s brick house was built, back when Eisenhower was president, a couple of bedrooms seemed like enough. He’d added a screened porch and French doors off the master bedroom and built himself a lower deck, fenced the yard for the dog he’d have when his life slowed down. There was an attic he hadn’t gotten around to doing anything with. It was small, but he’d knocked out a couple of walls and it was light and open.

I walked into the bathroom and saw his razor on the edge of the sink, smelled his aftershave. He’d been so absent at the hospital, a shell I could touch but couldn’t reach. In this house we’d shouted at Braves games and put away iced pitchers of sweet tea and every kind of to-go food Atlanta had to offer. I thought about him letting my mother know at Thanksgiving that he was just fine with our takeout habit. Thought about him looking at me when he said it, reaching for my hand.

I stumbled into the kitchen and turned on a gas burner. Rauser made cowboy coffee in the mornings. It was rugged and imprecise in the same way he was, and it hit your stomach like battery acid. No measurements, just drop some into a pot with water, bring it to a boil, and strain it directly into a cup. It was the best coffee I’d ever had.

One Saturday morning I had shown up early at his house. He opened the door in boxers and squinted at me. I had been crying, something stupid that had happened with Dan, another leap of faith, another crash of disappointment. Rauser must have been channeling Don King, because his hair was standing straight up. He yawned and put his arm around me, found a T-shirt and stood at his gas stove making cowboy coffee. He had been such a good friend to me. It was unbearable being here without him.

I made myself a cup of Rauser’s coffee and looked for the file and journals and yearbooks I’d given him that day at Starbucks … Fivebucks … I found them in the back bedroom he used for an office. It was time to start again at the beginning, with the first killing. Was it a hundred years ago since I’d been to Jekyll Island, met Katherine Chambers, and left her home with this box of her murdered daughter’s things? I had this wild impulse to take it to the hospital with me, comb over these again while I sat with Rauser, talked out my ideas with him. I didn’t know if he could comprehend at all or even hear me, but if there was the tiniest chance that keeping him tied to the investigator he’d been in his life would bring him back, I would try. He’d already slipped too far away from me.

I gathered up the papers and Post-its, the journals and albums, made a neat stack of them. The yearbook from the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice was on top. I sat down in Rauser’s desk chair. We’d suspected from the very beginning that the killer had comprehensive knowledge of evidence collection. The profile revealed he was schooled enough to leave a crime scene clean. He understood Locard’s Exchange Principle, I remembered telling Rauser in the War Room a hundred years ago.

Was the university the source of that knowledge? Had Wishbone learned about forensics on the campus of WFSU? Was it possible Anne Chambers had met her killer there at the Criminology and Criminal Justice building?

I bent over the list of Anne Chambers’s course studies. The curriculum included nothing at all that would give her reason to be in the criminology building. I got out the campus map. Anne had lived in Roberts Hall, one of the older buildings. I had already marked it in red on the map. I traced my finger down Tennessee Street from her residence, over to Smith Street and down to the College of Criminology. On the map it looked like a haul, but I thought about the campus. It was accessible, not as spread out as some rambling campuses could be. Still, it was a reach. How would a college sophomore and a serial killer have crossed paths? Where? If not in class, some other group or club, a rec center?

I opened a desk drawer for a pen and found instead a pack of unopened cigarettes and Rauser’s tarnished Zippo. I remembered the smell of lighter fluid in the air each time he lit it. I’d noticed on Thanksgiving that he had never gone outside for a smoke break. He was trying to quit. I’d been pushing him to do this for years. And he’d broken it off with Jo. All during the Wishbone killings, I realized, Rauser was methodically preparing his life for me, and I had to push back tears.

I opened the album from the year that Anne Chambers was killed and just started going over it again a page at a time. I wanted to look again at every goofy candid shot, the teams and clubs and social groups, the individual class pictures, the group pictures, the faculty, all of it.

I went back to the map and it suddenly hit me. A few doors down Smith Street from the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice was the Fine Arts Annex, the Fine Arts building. Anne was a visual artist. The two buildings were practically next-door neighbors. If their schedules jibed, the killer could have easily seen her in passing, insinuated himself into her life.

I felt my heartbeat quicken hopefully. Was I looking for a student? A faculty member? I thought about Old Emma saying she’d warned Anne. I thought about Mrs. Chambers saying Anne had bounced from romance to romance. I was getting close now. I could almost smell it. I’m going to get you, you bastard.