The Stranger You Seek

37





I was in Rauser’s office with his Zippo in my hand, the tarnished silver tight in my palm. My phone warbled. “So,” Neil began. “I was thinking about this blog thing again. What was front and center about the Wishbone killings?”

“Stabbing?”

“Exactly,” Neil said. “And that’s about what?”

“Power, penetration, control—”

“Dumb it down, Keye. Think nuts and bolts.”

“Um …”

“Sex and cutting, right?”

“Okay.”

“Look, I found these fetish websites where you can brag about all your freaky porn shit without getting kicked off some website or getting hauled off to jail. You can write about doing anything to anybody as long as you call it a fantasy.”

APD’s detectives and Neil had looked long and hard for the blog I always knew existed but had never been able to locate. Maybe we hadn’t asked the right questions.

“We weren’t looking at hard-core porn and fetish groups. A search engine can only do what you ask it to do.” Neil had read my mind. “Keye, I found all these online communities that call themselves edge fetish and knife play fans. Post after post from people turned on by blood and knives and shit.”

“You found the Wishbone blog?” I felt my pulse and my hopes climbing.

“I’m sending you the link. A website called Knifeplay. Look for a blogger called BladeDriver. Brace yourself. It’s pretty hard to stomach.”

At Rauser’s computer, I began to read the blog by BladeDriver at Knifeplay.com. It advertised itself as the place for the adult online edge fetish and knife play community, where sexual fact and fiction was posted without restraint. As Neil had warned, the specifics shocked and sickened me. The blog had about sixty entries over a period of three years. Twisted ramblings, some of it. Complaints about weak, needy people, about traffic, about greed. Some of the entries were chilling in their detail. I recognized descriptions of Lei Koto, David Brooks, Melissa Dumas, Anne Chambers, all of them written about as if they had sexually desired the kind of mutilation they’d had to endure as their lives ended. I read about him stalking Melissa as she took her evening run, and imagined Roy Orbison playing on the car stereo, him watching her, masturbating, thinking about driving his knife into her skin, and then boasting online and calling it sexual fantasy. It was revolting. Why hadn’t this raised a red flag anywhere? I was reading details that had never been made public until the letters began hitting the newspapers. The Lei Koto blog was posted well before the first letter was published, and all of the entries offered details that would only later have been discovered at the crime scenes, details no one outside the investigation could have known about. The killer talked about William LaBrecque having no moral boundaries at all, about him being a bully and a wife beater and deserving a beating himself. No moral boundaries? This killer was judging based on morals!

A short entry talked about the first time he had killed, at sixteen years old, about remaining so unaffected by this that his grades had not even wavered. Wishbone had been killing since he was a teenager! He had bragged once to Rauser in a letter about being active longer than anyone was aware. Who fell victim to the young killer first? Was it Anne Chambers, as we thought? Had it been a crime of convenience that wet his whistle for killing or was Wishbone already plotting out the murder in high school? So many people had been hurt. So many lives destroyed. My heart ached for all of them. But the last entry felt like that mean knife was splitting my flesh, like he was driving it into me, and I relived leaving that park with pieces of Rauser’s skin and blood stuck to my face and hands while this killer must have rushed home to boast to his online fans.





KNIFEPLAY.COM


Your Online Adult Edge Fetish & Knife Play Community blogs > beyond the EDGE, a fantasy by BladeDriver blog title > Memories


It really is not much fun. In fact, it’s a bit of a letdown once you get past the challenge of taking aim. It happens too fast, a quick pop, and it’s over. Not like a blade. Not like seeing everything, every cut, every fluid that leaks out of the dying, the way pain pulls the skin tight and every expression line is exaggerated, painted on. Pop, pop. It’s so … impersonal. I saw his knees buckle. I saw her misery. Her pain was something anyway. However brief, her suffering is a memory to savor.

Soon that will be what I have, just memories. Videos will be deleted and all my beautiful photos, all those triumphant moments will soon be gone too. I hate to see them go, really. But it is time. And I know each picture by heart, cherish each moment with them, each sound, each smell. Tonight I will toss my pictures into the fire and watch them yellow, watch the corners turn up, watch the centers blacken and ignite. It’s nice, actually. Never let it slip away—the first fire of the year, the turning leaves, the first snowflake—small pleasures. Life slips by so quickly.





Quicker than you think, you sonofabitch, I thought, and searched for a way to comment on this blog, read some details from the website. I had to sign up in order to comment. I left this message at the bottom of BladeDriver’s last entry: I won’t rest until I find you. KS.

I was worried for anyone close to me—Neil, my parents, my brother, even Diane. I hoped issuing that kind of challenge would keep his focus on me. There had been too much collateral damage. I sent Lieutenant Brit Williams’s BlackBerry the link with an email, explaining. Neil found this blog, Brit. It’s Wishbone, I’m sure of it. Check out the dates. At least one entry was after Charlie’s arrest.

I walked out of Rauser’s house and locked the door, remembered the million times I’d left this house with him, us laughing or arguing. We’d been good friends so long it seemed we were always doing one or the other. I climbed in the Impala and pointed it down Peachtree toward Piedmont Hospital. I wanted a drink so bad I could feel the stampede of cravings all the way to my back molars.

I kept thinking about the knife at Charlie’s place, the one the police had found under his mattress. The first search had turned up nothing, but the second netted them a bloody knife? Something was wrong. God, why didn’t I listen to my instincts? Wishbone knew Charlie was our prime suspect. APD had gone out of their way to make that public. They’d even organized a leak of his mug shot. Had Wishbone seized advantage of this, framed Charlie, to keep the heat off? Charlie was a thug anyway. Send him off to jail and get some breathing room, rest and plan, kill again. I wondered if Wishbone had gone to the trouble of planting the serrated fishing knife that had ravaged so many lives. Or had he simply left it where Charlie was bound to pick it up?

The game was everything for this kind of killer, even more tantalizing now than the basic compulsions of a violent serial offender. Toying, evading, taunting those who were trying to stop him. That was the hook. That was the whole reason for killing Dobbs, for shooting Rauser. Entertainment. And it didn’t matter who was in the way. The killer no longer needed a specific type of victim, someone who symbolized something. He could have stayed hidden. Charlie Ramsey had been set up beautifully. Wishbone didn’t have to resurface and try to kill Rauser. And yet here he was, so driven by rapacious ego that he couldn’t stay down.

My phone rang at the light at Fourteenth and Peachtree. “Are you all right, Keye?” It was Diane. “Are you taking care of yourself? What can I do?”

“I’m okay. Really. I’m heading back to the hospital. Rauser’s getting better, I think.”

“The doctors are taking care of Rauser. You have to take care of yourself too,” she insisted, quietly but firmly.

I was silent.

“We all miss seeing you around here. Maybe getting away from the hospital would be good, you know? Take your mind off things. Margaret says we have a lot of work we could give you. And I miss you.”

I heard the chimes on my phone letting me know I had unread email. “Hey, I gotta go. Don’t worry, Diane. I’m fine. Really. I’ll call you if I need you, okay? Love ya.”

I went through the light and pulled over in the passenger drop-off area in front of Colony Square. Brit Williams had sent an email saying the police department had contacted the fetish site publishing the BladeDriver blog. They’d requested all the details it stored on this user, including user name and passwords, addresses, phone numbers, but it would take a subpoena to get the records released and that would take time. Williams agreed that the blog was about the Wishbone killings but disagreed there was evidence Wishbone had written it. Anyone who was closely following the investigation could write fiction around the details and publish it. That the style and cadence were practically identical to the Wishbone correspondence Rauser and I had received was not something Brit was ready to accept as evidence. After all, the letters had been published for anyone to copycat. He had made the chief aware of a blog that had an entry the night Rauser was shot that was suspicious enough to warrant investigating. But there was nothing at all, Williams told me, in the vague ramblings of this blogger to link the attempted murder of Aaron Rauser to Wishbone. In his opinion, Wishbone was in custody and neutralized. The shooting in the park was about a thug who had a personal vendetta against Rauser or perhaps against anyone prominent in law enforcement.

I drew in a breath. I realized I was shaking. The air was crisp but still too warm to have stripped us winter bare; the leaves were hanging on and probably would through Christmas. A line of Japanese maples had turned cherry red up on Fifteenth. Colony Square and the High Museum were decked out head to toe for the holidays. NPR was playing the president’s address on health care reform. There was a group of people waiting to get into a restaurant next door, laughing. Life ticked by, unstoppable despite heartache or tragedy. I felt removed from it all. Pain does that. It’s utterly self-absorbed.

I was pissed at Williams. He’d let me down. I answered his email. Bullshit, Brit. What would Rauser do if it was you in that hospital bed? Anything it took regardless of what the chief said, that’s what he’d do.

My phone went off a couple of seconds after I’d hit Send—a text alert, an unknown address. Good to hear from you, Keye. Please do rest, my dear girl. What fun would life be without someone to challenge me? W.

The message I had posted on the BladeDriver blog had obviously been delivered.

I sat there for a minute trying to collect myself before I went back to the hospital. I missed Rauser. I wanted to talk to him again about this. I wanted to hear his voice teasing me about getting so obsessed. I won’t rest until I find you.

I put my nose to the aftershave I’d found in his bathroom, musky and quiet, not too sweet. The scent took me back to moments when he’d climbed in my car or I’d climbed in his, when he’d come for dinner and television smelling like that. I’d brought his razor and shaving cream too.

I stopped at the nurses’ station to say hello. Another hello to the uniformed cop outside Rauser’s door. APD guarded his room 24/7. I had gotten into the habit of coming late, trying not to intrude when his kids were there. His ex-wife came for a day and we had no idea what to say to each other.

Rauser was in the bed just as he had been the night before and the night before and all the nights before that, two weeks now. Eyes closed. Fresh bandages around his head, blue hospital blanket pulled up to his chin. His breathing sounded strong to me tonight, and that had not always been true. Those first couple of days it had been so thin, like winter air.

I found a kidney-shaped bowl and filled it with hot water, used the water to soften his beard, then rubbed shaving cream over his thick stubble. Very carefully, I ran the razor over his imperfect face. I was tired of seeing him look so ratty, like a vagrant, I told him, and whispered that I was frightened as I wiped shaving cream off his face with a warm towel, frightened and so, so angry. Come back to me.