The Stranger You Seek

3





The old Sears Roebuck building is an Atlanta landmark. It took seven months to build it in 1926, and even in its day, the building, which includes a guardlike tower in the center, looked more like a prison than the center of retail activity. Two million square feet of faded brick sprawls for acres and rises up nine floors above Ponce de Leon Avenue on the outer edge of Midtown, where you couldn’t stop for gas without getting heckled by street people or hit up for money before the cops moved in. For the last few years the sign out front has read CITY HALL EAST and the building currently houses overflow from our growing bureaucracy and a portion of Atlanta’s massive police force. This will soon change. The mayor closed a forty-million-dollar deal with a developer who says it will be the city’s hottest new address in a couple of years. Condos, live/work artists’ spaces, restaurants. So it goes in Midtown Atlanta, where the landscape is ever changing and scaffolding is a thriving industry. The city was hashing out details on where the current residents will end up, but no one seemed happy about packing up their offices and moving out. At least not the cops I knew firsthand.

A couple of blocks east, a breakfast line was already forming at the community soup kitchen. The temperature hadn’t dropped below seventy-eight degrees at sunrise in a month. We were having a real southern-style heat wave, but the homeless line up for breakfast in jackets. It must be hard to stay warm when your stomach is empty. I wondered how the city’s hottest new address would get along with the soup kitchen regulars.

At the station with Antonio Johnson, I saw Lieutenant Aaron Rauser watching me from his office across the hall in Homicide. Johnson was fully alert by then, cursing, struggling, trying to make a scene, showing off a little. He’d been fine in the car, quiet in the backseat, still fighting off the drugs and the explosives, but when I was using one of the station phones to call Tyrone, whom I worked with as a contractor at Tyrone’s Quikbail, and let him know I’d nabbed Johnson, the rascal started acting up.

Cops, trickling in at the end of their shifts, laughed at the commotion. “Hey, Keye,” one of the uniforms snickered. “You don’t look so good. You let Fat Boy kick your ass?”

I rolled my eyes and handed Johnson over for printing and then waited for the receipt I’d need to collect my money from Tyrone. When I ducked into Rauser’s glass office in Homicide, detectives sitting in their open cubes made kissing sounds. Rauser’s relationship with me was an endless source of amusement at the station. I suppose we seemed an unlikely pair. Rauser is white and twelve years my senior. We had come from different worlds and there were whispers around the station that we were lovers. Not true. But he is my best friend.

“Good morning.” I was trying to be cheerful even though my head was pounding. I hadn’t had time to wash up and I was still picking glass out of my forearms and wiping away dried blood.

Rauser looked terrible too. He gestured to the desk where they were fingerprinting Antonio Johnson. “Why you have to take shit work like that?”

“Money,” I said, but he wasn’t buying it. The smile dropped off my face. It was his tone. Sometimes that’s all it took for Rauser to do that to me, and I didn’t like it. He had that look in his eye. He always picked on me when something wasn’t right in his world.

“Keye, for Christ’s sake. You got degrees and corporate accounts. You don’t have to do that crap. I don’t get the choices you make sometimes.”

I was playing with the pencil cup on his desk and refusing eye contact, which, in his mind, was dismissive and I knew it, but I wasn’t in the mood for all his Daddy stuff.

I briefly ran a mental list of the corporate accounts he was talking about. The retainers were fat. I’d paid down some of the mortgage on my loft with them. But the work was mind-numbing—employment service application checks, nanny backgrounds, lawsuit histories on contractors, workers’ comp cases, unfaithful spouses, service of process. The odd subpoena offered a bit of challenge from time to time, but for the most part it was all excruciatingly boring.

I’d been a licensed Bail Recovery Agent since leaving the Bureau. It bought the groceries while I built my private investigating business, and it still supplemented my income nicely. My shrink, Dr. Shetty, says it’s a power thing, that I have a brutal case of penis envy. What can I say? I like strapping on a big Glock now and then.

And the degrees: criminology from Georgia Southern, doctoral studies at Georgia State in developmental psychology. And none of it, even with eight years at the Bureau, would earn me a real position with a law enforcement agency in this country. Not now. Drinking had changed all that. It entered my records as it tore away at my life and discredited me professionally forever. I couldn’t even jump on the expert witness gravy train. Expert testimony requires an expert who can’t be discredited on the stand. That’s so not me. My closet is full of bones.

I was fifteen when I first heard about the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, and I could think of nothing else after that. I tailored my studies and my life around getting there, and a few years later, there I was. And then I blew it.

Sometimes you only get one chance at something. Sometimes that’s a good thing too. When that door slams shut on the thing you couldn’t live without, what happens next is when the real education begins. You have to figure out how to make some peace with it all, how to have an interior life you can live with. Digging down deep is never really a bad thing in the end, but it will flat-out kick your ass while it’s happening.

“Keep screwing around with bonding-company trash and you’re gonna get hurt,” Rauser grumbled, then muttered something that sounded like “sick f*cks.”

I lowered myself gingerly into a chair across from his desk. There were two of them, thin black vinyl cushions with metal armrests. I was sore from the tumble I’d taken earlier and it was just beginning to sink in.

“What’s wrong?” I demanded.

Rauser slipped a cigarette from his shirt pocket, stuck it in the corner of his mouth. The flint on his Zippo caught after the third try. He wasn’t supposed to smoke in the building, but I wasn’t going to correct him. Not today. “Remember when there was just, like, normal stuff? Somebody shoots the guy in bed with his wife or something? Nothing weird. Just normal everyday murder.”

I shook my head. “Before my time.”

Rauser pulled open his desk drawer and dropped his cigarette into a hidden ashtray and, head down, massaged both temples. For the first time, I realized that there was more silver than black in his hair. He was nearly fifty, handsome and fit, but a lifetime of caffeine and cigarettes, a lifetime of chasing monsters, had turned him to ash.

“Bad case?” I asked.

Rauser didn’t look at me. “Understatement.”

“You’ll figure it out,” I told him. “Good guy always wins, right?”

“Uh-huh,” Rauser said, with about as much conviction as Bill Clinton at a deposition. “And maybe Judge Judy will come in here and shake her ass for us too.”

“I’d like that,” I said, and Rauser showed me his smile for the first time today.