The Stranger You Seek

5





The door opened and Lieutenant Aaron Rauser strolled in on a shaft of morning light and nearly collided with Charlie.

“Charlie, what up?” Rauser asked, and held up his hand.

Charlie laughed too loudly and high-fived Rauser. “Gotta go work, Mr. Man. Hey, Keye can cook,” he added, and left without further explanation.

“Oooo-kay,” Rauser said, and then in a half whisper, added, “Hard to believe he was some kind of biomedical something. Poor bastard.”

“I heard he was an engineer, but I never really believed it,” Neil said, and peeked outside to make sure he was gone. “I just figured him for a retard.”

Rauser chuckled, and I said, “That’s incredibly insensitive, even for you two.”

“Whatever,” Neil said, and returned to his desk with his mug.

Rauser headed for the kitchen, where the coffee was almost always fresh. Neil practically lives on the stuff. And sometimes, when he’s in a very generous mood, he makes cappuccino for Rauser and me. He prefers something dark in the mornings, Café Bustelo mostly. Afternoons in winter, he likes a nice smooth Jamaican Blue. On summer days, cold-pressed Cuban on ice with cream and sugar. He cuts me off when my leg starts to shake.

But that wasn’t why Rauser was here today. He had something on his mind. I watched him chewing the inside of his bottom lip while he stirred half-and-half into his coffee. He looked good with his jacket off, shoulder holster over a black T-shirt, biceps tight against the sleeves, gray slacks. I took a moment to appreciate that while he wasn’t looking. Rauser had a few jagged edges, but he was a handsome guy if you’re okay with off-the-charts testosterone levels, the kind of guy who has to shave down to the collarbone every morning. He’s more Tommy Lee Jones than Richard Gere. More Gyllenhaal than Pitt.

The kitchen where he stood doctoring his coffee was really just a corner of the converted warehouse, with all the necessary appliances, a sink, red marble countertops, no walls or partitions. He saw a couple of leftover figs on the table, glanced at me for approval, then plucked them all off the plate. A raging sweet tooth was just one of the things we had in common.

Big puffy leather sectionals had been strategically placed throughout the wide-open space just beyond the kitchen, along with leather cubes in bright colors—red, purple, mint, red, purple, mint. Most of the main space was painted a very light sage, but the longest, most open wall was periwinkle with a shocking Granny-Smith-apple-green line painted across the center, part lightning bolt, part EKG monitor. I had given away my decorating power of attorney to a local designer based solely on her reputation in the city, a decision I questioned later.

“All we need is a goddamn purple dinosaur!” I’d blurted out upon first seeing our newly designed commercial loft. The designer, standing with hands on hips and her subordinates lined up reverently behind her, had very explicitly and through clenched teeth explained to me as if I had some disability how sophisticated and dramatic the space was. Sure. Okay. I can appreciate drama. Hey, I’d paid good money to have her drag us into the twenty-first century and, by God, I was going to learn to love it. A wide, flat-screen plasma television that lowered itself out of the rafters on demand was the highlight for me. It thrilled me each and every time. Neil, Rauser, me, Diane, even Charlie now and then, we had all spent evenings here watching games and movies, playing foosball on a table Neil and I had ordered and then paid someone else to assemble. Two fights had broken out regarding competing ideas for assembly before we realized we were not equipped for the project. Damn thing must have been in five hundred pieces.

Rauser walked toward us, blowing steam off his coffee and watching us from under arched brows. Neil and I were joking around about something silly and that seemed to irritate him.

“Ah,” he said, loud enough to interrupt. “The intellectual stimulation here, it’s what I come for.”

“Why do you come?” Neil asked with a smirk.

Rauser came back with “To see if you suck dick as good as you make coffee.”

“You wish,” Neil said without looking at Rauser. He was fixed on his computer screen, which was a jumble of shifting letters and symbols and numbers. For all I knew, he was hacking into the CIA. He’d done it before, changed their logo by replacing the word Intelligence with one he liked better.

He swung his chair around, folded his arms over his chest, and studied Rauser. “By the way, I put a mild hallucinogen in the coffee this morning.”

Neil and Rauser seemed to always be in some kind of competition. My presence made it worse, I decided, so I turned for my office before this escalated into scratching and spitting. I had work to do, but Rauser was hot on my heels.

He followed me into the far left corner of the warehouse that is my office. No glass or walls for privacy. Oh no, that would have been too simple. Instead, the design firm simply erected a huge wire fence. It’s something like an enlarged version of barbed wire and about ten feet high—barbed wire on steroids, and backlit in deep blue, sort of an artsy East-Berlin-during-the-Cold-War thing. Really different and, I have to admit, beautiful, in a moody anti-corporate corporate way.

Rauser plopped his ancient leather case on the outside edge of my desk and, after wrestling briefly with one of the brass latches, opened it. I was grinning at him and his old scarred-up case. The bottom corners were worn white and the intricate leatherwork on the outside was too faded to know what the original artist might have had in mind. It tickled me. That was the kind of guy Rauser was. The department had offered him a new car, but he liked his old Crown Vic. “Rauser,” I’d said, “this car has an eight-track. What are you thinking?” He had shrugged and mumbled something about dreading cleaning out the glove box and the window pockets and everywhere else he’d stuffed notes and maps and papers and cigarettes and junk.

He withdrew a stack of photographs from his case and dropped them in front of me. They hit with a loud smack. No warning. Crime scene photographs just tossed at me. Death on my desk. My smile and my good mood faded fast.

“A stay-at-home mom,” Rauser said as I took a photo into my hand and drew in a quiet breath. “Nobody special. Know what I mean?” He lowered himself into the chair across from me. My stomach felt suddenly like it was full of granite.

I turned over the top photo, read the date and the name, her age at death, ethnicity. Lei Koto, Asian female, thirty-three years old, stomach-down on a bloody kitchen floor. You could see the edge of an oven in the upper right-hand corner. Her legs were spread, buttocks and inner thighs naked and bloodied, plenty of stab and bite marks. She looked so small and so alone lying there, I thought, and I was struck, as I always am, at what a solitary business death is, and at how stark, surreal, distorted and telling all at once violent-murder-scene photographs are—the wounds and bruises eerily illuminated by the bright lights used by scene techs, the blood and matted hair, the unnatural positions, the screaming absence of life. Even at a glance, before detail emerges, you know it’s a death scene. One never forgets.

“Who found her?” I asked.

“Ten-year-old kid,” Rauser answered. I looked up from the photographs, and he added, “Her son. His name is Tim.”

This would change him, I thought, change the way he sees the world, sees a stranger, a spot of blood, an empty house. It would change this little boy as it had changed me. We are all of us disfigured in some way by the grief that murder always leaves in its wake. I didn’t want to think about this child or what he felt or what he will feel. Interest in this sort of thing invites darkness to bleed into your life. And even knowing this, I ached for him. A part of me wanted to help piece him back together somehow, warn him of the nightmares, warn him of the shuffling around that would come. No one really knows what to do with a child who has been made homeless by violence. Will relatives take him? the police would wonder aloud, thoughtlessly and with the best intentions. Adults would whisper and worry and shoot concerned glances his way, increasing his terror tenfold. A stranger from social services would come to sit with him while they searched for next of kin. But no reassurances, no kindness can mend that kind of terrible rip in the infrastructure. It would take years.

The crime scene photographs trembled in my fingers.

“Why are you showing me this?”

Rauser handed me a letter addressed to him at the Homicide Division, neatly printed and without a signature. I looked at him for a moment before I began to read. His eyes were steady on me.

Dearest Lieutenant,



Do you want to know how I did it? No—your forensic experts have determined that much by now. Did you find the details troubling? I have such vivid memories of standing on her front steps smelling her small kitchen. She smiled as she pushed open the door for me.



I know where your mind must be going, Lieutenant, but you will not find a trace of me in her life. I was no part of her inner circle. She died not knowing who I was. She died asking WHY? They all want some peace in the midst of chaos. Their chaos, not mine. I do not tell them. I am not there to comfort them.



The papers have called me a monster. I think you know better. What have your profilers told you? That I am intelligent, able to blend into the outer world, and sexually functioning? A pity their methods do not offer you a better yardstick with which to measure mine.



You have withheld certain information about the crime scenes from the newspapers. Did you know their constant and incorrect speculation would compel me to respond? And what does your experience tell you about this letter, this new tool for your investigation? You have either concluded that I am a braggart as well as a sadist or that I have a deep and driving need to be caught and punished. And you must certainly be wondering if I am, in fact, the stranger you seek. Shall I convince you?



The day was hot by ten that morning and the air inside that kitchen was heavy and damp from a pot of boiling cabbage. I felt a breeze from the open window as I stood at the table looking down at her on the floor. She was quiet by then and still and seemed so tiny when I turned her over to make my marks.



The last sound she heard above her own whimper was the click of my shutter and the tiny crack of her neck, like a wishbone snapped in half.