The Stranger You Seek

39





Margaret Haze stood when I entered her office, nodded pleasantly, and offered me one of the chairs at her desk. She was wearing Helmut Lang, black, tailored, militant as hell, and so far out of my range that I couldn’t even guess the price tag. She took her seat. I didn’t. My nerves were sizzling. “How can I help you, Keye?” She didn’t seem at all surprised to see me.

“It would help if you’d stop killing people.” I wanted to slap cuffs on her right there, make sure she never got to see Atlanta’s sapphire skies again. I wanted to make her suffer. Maybe then the bitch could experience empathy. Do you feel anything?

“You’ve lost me.” She was calm and, from my perspective, entirely unreadable.

“Can we cut the bullshit and have an honest conversation? No more games. I came here so you’d feel comfortable. I know you’ve had your office swept for bugs. And I’m not wired, Margaret.”

“My clients expect and deserve privacy in their attorney’s office. By the way, I hope you don’t mind that I’ve decided to no longer use your company for that service. We just don’t seem to be a good fit anymore.” Her expression hadn’t changed and neither had her tone. She was utterly confident. I heard the telephone ringing in the outer office and saw a light blink green on Margaret’s phone. She ignored it. “Diane didn’t come in today. She hasn’t missed a day in three years.”

“I called her. I told her not to come. I told her everything. She was devastated, Margaret. You’ve been a hero to her.”

“You never really know anyone below the surface, Keye. I would have thought you of all people had learned that lesson.”

“We need to talk, Margaret.” I held my arms out. “Pat me down, if you’d like. See for yourself. No wire.”

Margaret laughed lightly. “That’s absurd.”

I ignored her. Instead, I stepped out of my shoes, removed my jacket, and began to unbutton my blouse. I removed one piece of clothing at a time and turned it inside out, shook it out for her to see, then dropped it on the desk. She was silent while I stripped, and I was intensely aware of her eyes on me, on my body, amused, arrogant eyes, openly appraising me. I knew what her victims must have seen, someone emotionless and far removed from anything with a beating heart.

Completely nude, I made a circle. She gestured to my earrings without speaking. I removed them, dropped them onto her desk. Margaret scooped them up in her palm, looked them over, then handed them back.

“Get dressed, Keye. What will people say?” She watched while I got back into my clothes. “Are you here alone?”

I sat down. “Lieutenant Williams and Detective Balaki are waiting outside.”

She leaned back, arms relaxed on the armrests of her high-backed desk chair. “Do you really think I’m a danger to you? Is that why you brought them?”

I wanted to tell her all the ways she’d hurt me already, all the deep wounds, but I refused to give her that power. “Honestly, I don’t think I’m your type. But you do seem to be branching out.…”

A smile played over her glossy lips. “Exactly what type is that?”

I picked up the framed photograph on her desk, little Margaret with her parents, standing on the deck of a sailboat. “The type that reminds you of him or his clients or your mother. That’s it, isn’t it? He gave them more than he gave you? Was he sleeping with them too?”

Margaret swiveled toward the window away from me. “You know, if there was evidence—which there is not—they wouldn’t be waiting outside. They would be in here with a warrant.” She said it without scorn or fear or anger. It was as if my response genuinely intrigued her.

“How did you see them?” I asked. “As parasites? All their petty needs, petty problems, petty, greedy lawsuits.”

She was completely still. Through the windowed wall behind her, I could see miles of twisting highway, but not even a faint hum of the city reached her high glass office. The room was utterly silent.

“Who keeps a photograph on their desk of the man who murdered their mother? You did it, didn’t you? You killed her. And then you let him die for it. Was that therapeutic, her paying for stealing his affections, and then him paying for what he did to you? He betrayed you, didn’t he, Margaret? First he loved you. Then he left you for your mother.”

Her eyes seemed to be very bright green in the afternoon light when she turned back to me. “Is this the part where I’m supposed to come undone?”

“That would be nice.”

She laughed quietly, stood and crossed to the bar, poured herself cognac and handed me a small bottle of club soda, unopened, and a dry glass. “If I am the person you think I am, then I’d be a complete sociopath. You’re the expert. You know that. I would be incapable of remorse. I would be able to tell you that I have never missed either of them. Their … passing, as violent and ugly as it was, would have been just another event. Nothing extraordinary. Don’t you find that to be true about life, Keye? That it’s just a thing that happens to us. Life doesn’t really touch us. I think you get that. I think it’s why you drank, it’s why you’ve made the spectacularly stupid choices you’ve made. I think deep down, you’re just as numb as I am.”

“I was,” I said. I could barely contain the hatred I felt for her. I thought about Rauser, about his arms wrapping around me, about feeling for the first time in so long that flesh-and-blood desire didn’t have to exclude love and trust.

She sipped her cognac; her eyes never lifted from mine, never a quiver. “It’s amazing, really. With your education, you could have done so well. And yet you chose the FBI? Trying to make it right, are we? It must have been hard seeing your grandparents killed like that right in front of you. Still chasing down the bad guys?”

I opened the club soda and poured it into my glass, set the bottle down on the table next to my chair, took a sip. I wanted her to see that my hands were steady, that her observations hadn’t rattled me. I was bluffing; my insides hurt like I’d swallowed a razor blade. But bluffing is something an addict learns early on. I’d gotten good at it over the years.

“How’s Lieutenant Rauser?” she asked, and it felt like acid exploding in my veins. I didn’t want his name on her lips. “Someone really should get guns off the street.” She shook her head in mock regret.

“I’m going to get you off the street, Margaret. Whatever it takes to do that.”

This seemed to amuse her. “Really? What are you going to do, Keye? Shoot me? Stab me? I don’t think so. You have the handicap of moral borders. It leaves you ill equipped for real crime fighting, doesn’t it?”

She was so arrogant I longed to reach across the desk and wipe that f*cking smirk off her face. She’d exploited brilliantly a bias in law enforcement regarding women and violence, and she knew it. An unidentified perpetrator is always referred to as he, never she, and women are looked at last in violent and sexual murders. Like everyone else, I had looked right past her because she was a woman.

“You know, this feeling of being infallible, it’s part of your illness, Margaret. It isn’t real. You’re going to pay for what you’ve done. The blog was a mistake. They will trace it back to you. Cat’s out of the bag, Margaret. APD’s watching.”

“Do you have any idea how much money our firm puts into local politics? No, of course you wouldn’t. The mayor and the DA, the police chief, they’d all love to keep their jobs. APD isn’t going to watch me, Keye. And if you’re trying to scare me with those two cops you have waiting, well, it’s not going to keep me up tonight.”

I laughed at her. “I was just thinking what it’s going to be like for you to trade in Helmut Lang for a nice little prison jumpsuit. I think they’re blue in Georgia. Be nice with your coloring. I love the idea of watching your life pull apart at the seams.”

“Then we really aren’t so different. You have an inner sadist just like I do.” Her eyes were steady on me.

“Let me ask you something, Margaret. Just to satisfy my own curiosity: Did you know you wanted to keep killing after you butchered your mother? Or did it happen when you met Anne Chambers? I saw this picture on your desk and it ate at me. They looked so much alike, your mother and Anne. And they were both artists. Is that why you needed to kill her?”

Margaret thought for a moment. I might have been speaking to her about afternoon tea. “To be frank,” she answered, “I knew I had something that hadn’t been quenched. I didn’t know until I met Anne what it was or that it was permanent. It was like having an itch without fully understanding what an itch is. You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve really never had an opportunity to verbalize it. I’m not sure there are words for it.” She held her drink up in a mocking toast, then took a sip. “It is liberating, in a way, to try though,” she mused.

“Then maybe you’d like to make a statement on the record. Think how … liberating that would be.”

A light laugh. “I like you, Keye. I always have. You’re very smart and you’re funny. I’m devastated that you think I might hurt you. It’s no accident that you’re alive, Keye. I protected you, if you must know.”

“Protected me? You made sure the media went after me so I’d get kicked off my APD consulting gig. You rigged my car and I was nearly killed. And you shot my best friend.”

“Don’t be so dramatic, Keye—it doesn’t suit you. You were not nearly killed. You had a lump on your head. And maybe, just maybe, you can open your mind enough to see that you’d have been safer out of the way. But you wouldn’t back off. And you take the most ridiculous risks. LaBrecque, for example—we both knew he was a thug. He hurt you and threatened you and you went back for more. Don’t you think he would have killed you that day at the lake house? Be grateful, Keye. I didn’t want you hurt.”

That’s why LaBrecque never fit in on the victims’ list. I remembered coming to Margaret that day with my bruised wrist. I remembered her concern. “What was the point of killing Dobbs like that?” I demanded. “And sending that package to me, was that about knowing my history with Dobbs?”

“I thought you’d appreciate the package, Keye. You would have preferred cutting it off yourself? And the lieutenant,” Margaret told me. “Rauser wasn’t about you. Everything isn’t always about you. I had a completely separate relationship with him before you started showing up at crime scenes.”

“Relationship? With Rauser? Margaret, get real. A bunch of crazy-ass letters to a cop doesn’t put you in a relationship. That’s your illness talking again. It tricks you, doesn’t it? It’s getting worse. Just so you know, Rauser didn’t take you that seriously. He considered you another irritating thug.”

A smile. “Sticks and stones, Keye.”

“If you ever get close to him again, I swear to God I will not wait for the police to take you down. If you can’t control that itch, Margaret, I’ll do it for you.”

“He’s no challenge anyway. Unless you’re into drool.” She checked her platinum watch, stood, and walked to the door, held it open for me. “Thanks for stopping in. If you’ll excuse me, I need to prepare for a client.”





La la, la la.

A child’s song, without words. It went first high and then low. High-low, high-low. La la, la la. Over and over. Haunting and melodic. The tune never varied and little Margaret never tired of it.

She sat in front of her dollhouse humming softly. It was one of those big dollhouses and she had begged Santa to bring it for Christmas. A three-story dollhouse with a front that opened out like a suitcase so Maggie could look inside, rearrange the tiny furniture, the little family.

La la, la la.

… Uh-oh. Little Maggie frowned, her brow furrowed. Something wasn’t right inside her house.

She reached inside and carefully plucked the tiny daddy doll from the master bedroom. That’s it. She wanted Daddy in her room. Away from Mommy. She used her forefinger to thump Mommy off the little bed. The doll clattered to the floor. All better.

La la, la la.

She remembered the dollhouse so well, remembered that moment just as clearly as she remembered the way her father smelled when he came to her in the night. Sleep and Old Spice. She looked at the photograph on her desk, her in her father’s arms. She was five years old when the picture was taken. He’d been so busy all the time. No time for the family, for Maggie, except in the night when he touched her softly and kissed her. He told her it was about love and her body had responded to him, opened up to him. She couldn’t help it.

Maggie had learned about love this way, in a small damp bedroom with a palm tree outside her open window and the wide Florida sky watching what they did together.

Even now she craved her father’s touch. But she couldn’t have that anymore. Sometimes she touched herself and fantasized that his hands were on her. She loved and hated him for this. But she hated them more, the ones who had taken him away from her.

La la, la la …