The Stranger You Seek

6





He broke her neck,” I said quietly, and sank back in my chair. I held the photo in my hand of Lei Koto twisted up and bloody on her own kitchen floor, her head bent too far left to be natural.

“Cause of death,” Rauser answered. “The wishbone reference. What do you make of it?”

I pushed through a jumble of emotion. I pushed through it as I always had and I found my trained self, my detached self, and I answered, “Power, domination, manipulating the victim, the victim’s body.”

“Letter’s accurate right down to the cabbage on the stove. We never released cause of death or any scene details to the press. Original’s in the lab. Hopefully, he left a print or licked an envelope or something. We don’t have much so far.”

“You have a letter from a killer. You don’t get handed this kind of behavioral evidence every day.”

Rauser nodded. “It’s a different kind of case, Keye. Motive isn’t understood. The scene isn’t understood. Physical evidence is practically nonexistent. I get that the way we find this guy is to understand what he’s playing out at these scenes.”

A tiny alarm was sounding somewhere deep inside me. I felt that familiar tug to unravel the pathology, to contemplate the violent acts of violent offenders until I got one step ahead. Yes, this one is different, I was thinking, and epinephrine shot through my system. My palms felt sweaty. They all want some peace in the midst of chaos. “She wasn’t the first,” I heard myself saying to Rauser. Yes, this one is different. This killer’s not just some opportunist, not some thug, but something else, something cruel and hungry that schemes and feeds off fear and anguish.

“Four victims we know of.” Rauser’s gray eyes were cold as winter rain. “ViCAP linked them. Detective down in Florida got assigned to cold cases a few months ago and started entering old scenes in the database. ViCAP matched two scenes down there to one here in the northern suburbs, then the flags went up again when we entered the Koto scene two weeks ago. No doubt about it. Same MO. Same signature elements—positioning, multiple stab wounds, staging, lack of physical evidence. Also, the victims are always facedown, legs spread, premortem stabbing to various areas of the body and postmortem stabbing to specific areas, inner and outer thighs, buttocks and lower back. Bite marks on inner thighs, shoulders, neck, and buttocks. Same weapon, serrated blade, something like a fishing knife, four to five inches long. Bite marks are consistent for the same perpetrator.”

“No DNA?”

Rauser shook his head. “He’s using rubber or latex barriers, maybe a dental dam. We’re checking medical supply houses, dentists, medical assistants, doctors.” He chewed his lip. “Four victims that we know of. I mean, how many murders out there haven’t even gone into a database? Or have different characteristics? If he started killing young, are the early ones going to match? I assume he’s been developing and learning.”

“How long since the first murder?”

Rauser didn’t have to look at his notes. “Keye, this guy has been hunting for at least fifteen years.”

How many murders had gone unreported? How many cold cases still not entered in a criminal database? I tried to let this sink in. “The last one didn’t satisfy the craving,” I said. “So he writes to you about it. He’s restless, unfulfilled. He’s telling you he’s becoming fully active, Rauser.”

“You know what really bugs me?” Rauser rubbed the stubble on his face. “The way he leaves them. The bastard knew about the Koto kid. He knows enough about each victim to get in and out at exactly the right time to avoid apprehension. He wanted the kid to find her.”

I didn’t like thinking about the boy or anyone else finding someone they love torn and broken and treated with that kind of disregard. It took me a moment to swallow down the growing lump in my throat. “Ritually displaying the body, leaving it for someone close to the victim to find in positions the killer considers humiliating, leaving the body unclothed, postmortem mutilation, it’s all part of the domination theme. It absolutely establishes the killer’s control over the victim.”

He took more scene photos out of his case, rubber-banded together, each group labeled, and pushed them across the desk. “Why do you think he turns them over?”

“Maybe he’s not okay with their faces,” I answered, and thought about that. “Maybe it feels to him like they’re watching him.”

“Jesus,” Rauser said.

“Positioning the bodies gives him more power. It helps him dissociate and objectify them.”

I went through the photographs one by one. Anne Chambers, white female, 20, Tallahassee, Florida. Bob Shelby, white male, 64, Jacksonville, Florida. Elicia Richardson, black female, 35, Alpharetta, Georgia. And Lei Koto, Asian female, 33. Three women and one man of varying ages and ethnicity, all left facedown, stabbed and bitten.

She died asking WHY. They all want some small peace in the midst of chaos. Their chaos, not mine. I do not tell them. I am not there to comfort them.

I looked at Rauser. “Homicide isn’t the motive in this kind of crime. It’s merely the result of his behaviors at the scene. Manipulation, control, domination—that’s motive.”

Rauser groaned. “Great, that’s gonna be easy to track down.”

I looked back at the Lei Koto scene: the little kitchen, pale yellow walls, yellow countertops, white appliances spattered with blood and smeared with her handprints. I’d seen a lot of crime scenes. They all shocked and disturbed me. They all told a story.

According to the autopsy report Rauser brought with him, there were extensive wounds to the neck and shoulders. The angles suggested that Lei Koto had her back to her killer at some point during their interaction; some of the wounds were clean, some torn and ragged. I looked at the bloodstain analyst’s report. Blood pooled on the kitchen floor, then arterial spray and spatter from her wounds, cast off from a bloodied weapon, dotted the stove, the refrigerator. Walls and floor in the hallway were smeared. I understood what this meant. The initial attack came from behind while Lei was still and unprepared, and then she started to move and it continued and continued and continued. The blood spatter proved that she had somehow broken free at one point and tried to get away. Perhaps she’d been allowed that one brief hope of fleeing, just for entertainment’s sake, just so the killer would have something to chase. Already I was learning something about the offender. A patient sadist, to be sure. And a disciplined one. The attack had gone on, according to the pathologist, for more than two hours. It went all the way through the house. He had then dragged Lei Koto back into her kitchen, leaving bloody drag marks across the living-room floor and down the hallway.

Why? Why did it need to end in the kitchen where it began? I thought back to the letter, to the cabbage on the stove. I looked at the inventory sheets. Ground beef in the fridge in an open bowl. She was making dinner early before the summer sun heated up the house, I realized. That’s why there was cabbage on the stove at ten in the morning and why there was an uncovered bowl of hamburger in the fridge. Dinner for the two of them, her son and herself. A wave of nausea washed over me. He not only wanted the boy to find his mother, he wanted to leave her right there where she was making dinner for him.

I closed my eyes and imagined him coming home. The smell of scorched food would have led him straight to the kitchen. Mom? Mom? You here? The killer would have considered all this, of course. The planning, the fantasizing, the act, the time with the victim—all that was only part of it. The attention that comes later is thrilling, validating. What are they saying about me? What are they thinking? His imprint on this child’s life, that he’d marked someone in an undeniable way, was a huge bonus, invigorating.

I looked again at the autopsy results for each of the four victims they’d linked. A finely serrated knife had done most of the damage, weakened each. But never, not at any of the scenes attributed to this killer, was the knife the actual cause of death. The knife was just a tool, I decided, just part of the fantasy reenactment.

Rauser was digging through his old leather case for his notes. He liked to do this sometimes, just bounce things off me. “The African American female, Elicia Richardson, she was a lawyer, successful, lived in one of those big Alpharetta neighborhoods north of town, killed in her home. Just like Lei Koto, who was widowed and lived with her son. And the two cases in Florida—Bob Shelby lived on disability and was also killed in his home, and the female student at WFSU, the first vic we know of, killed in her dorm room. All during daylight hours.” He leaned forward, arms on my desk. “So we know how he kills them and how he leaves them. But we haven’t figured out what connected them in life. Maybe it’s random. Maybe he sees them somewhere and the crazy sonofabitch just goes ape-shit.”

“I don’t think it’s random,” I said.

“Victimology tells us victims’ lifestyles, ethnicity, neighborhoods, income levels, ages, friends, restaurants, takeout joints, dry cleaners, routes to work, and childhood experiences are too varied to make a connection. I thought the deal with serials is that they choose a type, a race, a gender, an age range, something. These cross all the lines. I can’t find the thread, you know? That one thing that draws him to them. There’s no forced entry at any of the scenes. So they each opened the door for the creepy sonofabitch. Last victim, Lei Koto, even made him tea.” He pointed at one of the photographs from the kitchen. There were two glasses, nearly full, on the table. “No prints. No saliva. He never touched it. He never touches anything. The scenes are freakishly clean. Ligature abrasions are from wire at all the scenes, wrists, in some cases the neck.”

“So they’re conscious and struggling while he’s torturing them,” I said.

Rauser nodded his agreement and we were silent, just letting our minds grasp that, trying not to imagine it and imagining it anyway. We had both processed too many crime scenes to be able to push the images away. What we were better at was pushing away the feelings.

“You send the reports to the Bureau for analysis?” I asked.

Rauser nodded. “And the letter. White male, thirty-five to forty-five, smart, probably able to hold down a job, lives alone, could be divorced, a sexual predator who is living and probably working in the metro area.” He gave a little salute and added, “Great work, FBI. That narrows it down to about two million guys in this city.”

“He needs time and space to engage the fantasies that drive his violent behaviors,” I said. “So it makes sense they’re thinking he lives alone. And, according to his letter, he’s taking pictures, so that helps keep the fantasy ramped up. What he’s doing with them, he’s already imagined in vivid detail. It’s just a matter of inserting the victim. He probably sees himself in a relationship with them somehow. Are there secondary scenes?”

“Primary scene and disposal site are one and the same. Does all his work on them right there. What does that tell you?”

“He doesn’t have to remove them to a secondary scene, because he knows he’s not going to be interrupted. He’s obviously engaging in the kind of precautionary acts that make him feel secure about their schedules, the neighbors, and that the door will open.”

“There’s no evidence of rape, no seminal fluid, but the Bureau labeled it sexual homicide. Why? This just ups the wow factor for the press.”

“Well, the stabbing thing is usually associated with sexual behaviors.”

“Jesus Christ,” Rauser erupted, startling me. “I can’t wait to announce that we’ve got some kind of sexual lust killer out there. We have a press conference in two hours. And I have the pleasure of telling the city we have a serial.”

I remained very still even though I didn’t feel calm at all. My desk was covered in death scene photographs and Rauser was emitting stress hormones that were leaping across the desk and slapping me in the face. We did not have a history of being great together when one of us was stressed out. We’re a bit like puppies, Rauser and I, much better at playing and not so good at calming each other down. Generally a fight breaks out when we’re both cranked up.

Rauser looked away. “I’m grasping at straws and you’re not giving me anything I don’t already know.”

I thought about the taunting letter and about the medical examiner’s report. I couldn’t stand it when Rauser was disappointed with me. I loved and hated the way I felt around him. That Daddy thing again. It was a hook for me and always had been. My father barely spoke a word to me or any other member of our family, and when he did, it was like the clouds had parted and you suddenly felt all warm inside. Both my brother and I spent too much of our childhood trying to draw him out in order to repeat that feeling, and I’ve spent too much of my adult life looking for that from men. My mother, on the other hand, was almost never quiet. She handed out her criticisms liberally and her approval sparingly, which only seemed to compound our psychoses.

“Violent offenders report having had penetration fantasies while they’re stabbing,” I told Rauser. “The theory follows that the offender uses a knife instead of a penis. The stabbing tends to be around the sexual areas of the body, and in some cases the stabbing has also been postmortem and therefore not about victim suffering but something very different. In criminal psych circles it might be called something like regressive necrophilia.”

“What else?” he asked.

“Writing to you now after being silent for so long, if it really has been fifteen years, playing games with law enforcement—it’s all meant to heighten the level of excitement and challenge. Just killing isn’t enough anymore.”

“He doesn’t just kill, Keye, he mutilates them,” Rauser reminded me, and ran a hand through thick salt-and-pepper hair.

“I’m sorry. I wish I could help. I really do.” I only half meant it, of course. It was just what I said when Rauser was worried about something.

“You can,” he said, surprising me. “Come to the station and read all the reports from all the scenes. Break it down to something practical I can use to figure out who this bastard is. I’ll put you in the budget as a consultant.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think that would be a great choice for me right now. This kind of work, I think it’s why I drank so much.”

“Bullshit.” Rauser chuckled, but there was no humor whatsoever in his eyes. He had never been the kind of guy to cut me a lot of slack. “You drank because you’re an alcoholic. What are you worried about?”

“I was fired from the Bureau, remember? Couldn’t stay sober. Oh, and my marriage came apart and I spent three months in rehab. ’Member that? You want to derail your entire case? You need a criminologist whose credentials hold up during the trial phase.”

“DA can get some talking head up there on the stand with a prettier past. I need you now, today, in this phase. I don’t trust anybody else with this pointy-head analysis shit. And I f*cking hate it when you feel sorry for yourself.” He started gathering his things with quick jerky movements. “I know, I know, the Bureau did you wrong. Well, goddamnit, get over it, Street. So you have a drinking problem. You and about fifty million other people. Stop using it as an excuse not to participate. So you had a tough childhood. Welcome to the club.”

Angry and stretched too tight, he shoved his notes and photographs into his leather case. I thought about Bob Shelby, the killer’s only documented male victim. He’d lived alone on disability, Rauser had told me. Life had obviously already handed Bob Shelby enough pain. He shouldn’t have had to endure torture and humiliation and terror in his final moments. I thought about Elicia Richardson. Black, female, young, and successful, she’d shattered all those ceilings. Her family must have been so proud of her. Why did she open her door that day? I thought about Anne Chambers just beginning adult life at WFSU. I thought about Lei Koto and the chaos and horror in that kitchen, and Tim coming home to find her. I thought about Rauser’s eyes on me now, steel with tiny blue flecks. I knew him. It hadn’t been easy for him to ask for help.

I leaned my head back and closed my eyes, took a deep breath. I wanted a drink.

Rauser slammed his case closed, grabbed it by the handle. “Congratulations, by the way. You’re in full agreement with your former employer. Bureau says he’s coming alive again too and that this cooling-off phase will be very brief. You know as well as I do what that means.”

It wasn’t really a cooling off, I thought. It was a gradual ramping up. And even though APD wasn’t turning up bodies at the moment, the killer was out there, and he was fantasizing, reliving his kills, very carefully planning for a later reenactment, and perhaps already stalking his next victim.