The Stranger You Seek

38





I woke around four to find a nurse in the room. She smiled gently and apologized for waking me, but she needed Rauser’s vitals and to check the amino acids and glucose and electrolytes that flowed through a catheter and directly into one of the fat subclavian veins that twisted through a complicated maze of muscle and vein and helped deliver enough nutrition to keep him alive. I had been sleeping next to him when she woke me, squeezed into the bed on one side, my head against his chest, an arm thrown over his stomach. I listened for his breathing before I got up.

I nodded and said good morning to the officer on duty outside the door, then wandered to the elevator and downstairs, where I could find fresh air, even if it was on a bench under the harsh fluorescent light outside the emergency entrance.

Christmas music was playing as I walked through the main lobby. Happy holidays, I thought. Happy f*cking holidays.

What had I been doing when Neil rang earlier? I’d been getting close to something before the blog had derailed me. What was it? WFSU, the criminology building and its proximity to the Fine Arts Annex. The first victim. Was Anne really the first victim? I was beginning to think not. If the killer was sixteen the first time he’d killed, as his blog had boasted, where had they met? I checked the pocket of my jeans to make sure I had my car keys. That whole pile of stuff on the Chambers murder was still in the car. Might as well get some decent coffee and go over it again. There was a Starbucks counter in the hospital. Fivebucks, I thought again, and smiled, though it hurt to remember his jokes and his laugh and to remember him teasing me, grumpy and scowling over the Wishbone paperwork.

The hospital café was nearly empty. It was not even five A.M. I took my double-shot, skim milk latte to a table, where I spread out Anne Chambers’s photo albums, letters to home, yearbooks, everything her mother and Mary Dailey at WFSU had given me. I bent over the campus map and wondered again if the campus was where Anne Chambers had first met her killer. I’d been through the yearbook so many times and nothing had jumped out at me. Maybe it was time to begin running every name on that campus during Anne’s last year. I imagined Anne coming out of the Fine Arts building and being spotted by her killer. What was it about her that had set him off? Had he stalked her? Did they meet, become friends? I thought again about Old Emma telling me Anne was seeing someone. Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe instead she had spurned his advances. A student? A professor? Maybe he was neither. I felt a spike of frustration.

An intern shuffled into the café in pale green scrubs and booties, looking as if he hadn’t slept in a month. He paid the cashier for a muffin and coffee, then bolted when his pager went off, leaving his uneaten breakfast on the table.

I sent Neil an email and asked if he could get access to the university’s enrollment information, then went back to the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice yearbook. This time I wrote down the names on each page, one by one. It forced me to focus on each individual instead of the group pictures and goofy gag shots and clubs, and it prevented me from missing anyone.

At almost six-thirty, when first light was beginning to seep through the windows and my second latte was gnawing at my empty stomach, my thoughts began to drift to Rauser upstairs in his bed. I could conjure him up, I realized, just by closing my eyes: every line in that rugged face, every way that his mouth moved, and his hands, his smells and sounds, food he loved and despised. I’d memorized him over the years. But all my will couldn’t make him recover. I went back to making my list of names.

Then one of them leapt off the page and slapped me in the face. I studied the photograph. It was a group picture of twelve doctoral students who, according to the caption, had partnered with faculty members and won recognition for research in the field of criminal justice and behavior. The study was entitled “The Biosocial Origins of Antisocial Behaviors.”

Sweet Jesus, could it be? A flood of thoughts, corrosive and incohesive, rushed through my tired brain. I stared at the photograph and thought about the campus, the dogwoods and palms and live oaks. Somewhere here Anne Chambers had met the person who would later beat her with a brass desk lamp until her face was unrecognizable, then slice away her *oris and nipples. All along I had suspected it began there, the nurturing and feeding of a monster. The rage Anne Chambers was shown during their final interaction felt personal. Removing her nipples was a way to say “I hate you, Mommy.” Anne symbolized a mother who for some reason was reviled. My mind was flying now, remembering things; fragments were adding up and beginning to solidify. Something with density and shape was being born at last, something more than theory.

I typed the name into my search engine and began to read, quickly following every link until I found background. The strange obsession with civil law, with turning plaintiffs into victims; it was all there. My throat had gone dry. Wishbone had been hiding in plain sight all along.

Florida Man Convicted in Brutal Killing of Wife. I searched for details of the crime scene. There were none apart from a brief description in the newspaper article, which stated in bold words that the victim had been stabbed several times with a fishing knife. Wishbone’s father had killed his wife? Was Wishbone following an example set by a murdering daddy, copycatting? Or had Daddy simply taken the fall to protect a child who had discovered a passion for killing? Was I right? Had all this begun with a mother? Was that the kill described in the blog, the one that at sixteen never even caused a wobble in the killer’s grade-point average? I’d been wrong about one thing. Anne Chambers was not Wishbone’s first victim. We might never know how many had come before her. Wishbone’s father had died in Florida’s smoking-hot and overused electric chair after years on death row.

There was an article about the woman he’d killed. She had been a kind of celebrity in the southern art scene. Local Artist Gives Back to Community, the headline read, and I followed it until I found her picture. The resemblance to Anne Chambers, the student and artist, took my breath away. Now I could see it. Anne Chambers emerging one day from the Fine Arts building, young and vital and so naïve, an artist just like the murdered mother. Bearing a likeness to her so uncanny it must have set off a firestorm in the brain of the fledgling killer.

My eyes took in every detail of the group photograph in the yearbook. Wishbone. A terrible burning grew inside me, like drinking lava. It rushed through my bloodstream and made my face hot. It was counterinsurgent and infused with an utterly complete and vile hatred, this feeling. I thought about Rauser, about that night in the park, about his arms around me, and I was angrier and more helpless than I’d ever been in my life, even those days when I’d been too drunk to get out of my pajamas. This monster had taken too much from me. Too much from Rauser.

I reached for my phone and called.

“Keye, listen.” Brit Williams’s voice was gentle. “We all want to find out who did this to the lieutenant, but trying to reopen Wishbone—well, we really need to move forward now. If you want to help, help us do that.”

“You’ve got the wrong guy in jail, Brit.”

“See, here’s the thing, since Charlie Ramsey’s incarceration, we haven’t had another murder with that MO and signature. So it’s going to take more than a text message to move this forward. You’re always all about physical evidence, Keye. Give me some physical evidence and I’ll see what I can do. But I got to have more than my dick in my hand when I see the chief.”

Frustrated, I stuffed the urge to unload on him.

“I know you love him,” Brit added, and to my great irritation, I felt my eyes filling.

“And you love him too,” I said. “He trusts me, Brit. He always trusted my instincts—you know that. I need you to trust me too. Look, even if you think I’ve gone completely crazy, just please humor me because Rauser would have. Get me the crime scene reports from this scene in Florida. I need the details. That’s all I’m asking. I can get Neil to do this, but it’s going to be faster and more complete if you’ll contact the police down there. This would have been in Tallahassee PD’s jurisdiction.”

Another silence, and then, “What the hell. I don’t have anything else to do, right?”

I went upstairs and checked on Rauser again, then waited on a bench in the hospital garden with my coat up close to my ears, blowing clouds of steam off my coffee in the cold morning. Fallen leaves from a Flame Maple clung to the dewy ground.

Nine-thirty A.M. I checked my phone for the third time. Power on. Volume up. No missed calls. Finally, when I thought I’d throw it on the ground and stomp on it, it rang.

“You have any idea how hard it is to get an archived case file from Florida?” Williams demanded. “Can you meet me at twelve-thirty?”

We met at La Fonda Latina on Ponce de Leon, about five minutes from Brit’s cube at the station. The place was packed. We sat on the patio upstairs. It was chilly up there but a place where we could talk. Only a few people had braved it. He ordered paella with squid and a waiter delivered chips and salsa to our table. I ordered coffee and, shivering, folded my arms over my chest.

Williams loaded a chip with salsa, crammed it into his mouth. “You need to eat,” he said. “You look like shit and it ain’t that cold up here.” He pushed a letter-size manila envelope across the table.

“It’s all there,” he said. “Everything you asked for. Maybe some shit you didn’t ask for.” He ate more chips and washed them down with Modelo while I opened the envelope. He watched me as I went through the crime scene photos. “Look familiar?” he asked. “By the way, I emailed photos of the husband and his clothing to the spatter guys. Husband’s the one who called nine-one-one. Bloodstains on his clothes were not consistent with the kind of spatter a murder like that would have created. In fact, a lot of the physical evidence didn’t support the DA’s case.”

I looked up at him. “This man went to the chair for murder. How’d they get a conviction?”

“Confession, for one. And get this—teenager testified to finding the father leaning over the mother with the bloody fishing knife. That testimony and his confession—well, it would be pretty hard to argue against. And twenty-three years ago, they weren’t reconstructing like we do now.”

“So many similarities to what we’ve been seeing at Wishbone scenes.” I was studying the photos. “But less organized. Lots of emotion. Fury.”

“I didn’t think a kid could do something like that.”

“It happens,” I told him, “in some kids when they fail to develop affectional bonds.” I looked back at the crime scene photos. I’d studied child psychopathy in my career. It can be lethal for the parent of a fledgling psychopath. They can become the first victims of a deadly emotional cocktail—the child’s lack of abstract reasoning combined with a driving desire for immediate gratification. The scenes are often terrifyingly violent and the children weirdly unaffected by their crime.

My grades never dipped a point.

Williams waited while the paella was delivered in a cast-iron pan. Picking up his fork, he shook his head. “Chief’s not going to reopen the Wishbone investigation based on this. We gotta build the case.” Then he grinned. “Showed a picture of your suspect around the restaurant where David Brooks ate before he was killed and bingo. Immediate recognition by the manager. Still not enough, but it’s a start.” He shoved some yellow rice into his mouth. “You realize how f*cking big a tiger you’re poking at? Your suspect jogs with the mayor. You know that? APD can’t rattle that cage.”

“But I can.”

“Yes, you can,” Williams agreed, surprising me. “After seeing this stuff, me and Balaki and a couple detectives, we’re willing to do what we can to help. On our own time.” He pushed his plate away and looked up at me. His brown eyes were serious and soft. “Until this is under control, is there somewhere you can go? Rauser was right, whether you want to hear it or not. You need protection.”

I already knew the Wishbone blades were sharp. I’d felt them slicing deep into me as my car skidded off the road, as Rauser fell next to me.

“I have protection, Brit. And I won’t think twice about using it.”