Stranger in the Room: A Novel

  
Prologue

H
eadlights arced up over a giant magnolia as she topped the Elizabeth Street hill. The fat white flowers looked lit up against the night, like white teeth under a black light. The Inman Park section of Atlanta was rolled up tight at almost eleven o’clock on a drizzly Thursday. A family neighborhood, renovated, the high side of middle income, quiet.

Two vodka martinis had landed squarely, and Miki Ashton yawned between the slow passes of windshield wipers. Yes, she was fine to drive, she had assured friends. What she hadn’t said was how she dreaded going home to that empty old Victorian. What is it about driving away alone from a place of laughter after a few drinks that can make one feel so utterly abandoned? She missed having animals, a dog to greet her. She’d grown up with them. But her career, the travel—it wouldn’t be fair. She parked the ’76 Spitfire in the cobbled drive. Grass shot up between the stones. How was it her neighbors seemed to have no problem at all keeping manicured lawns?

She pushed open a waist-high wooden gate, painted in the years before she owned it and needing a fresh white coat. The neighborhood association resented her inattention. More than one polite notice delivered to her mailbox had reminded her of her responsibilities. Didn’t they have lives?

Bag over one shoulder, she took long strides in knee-high boots down the wet walkway to the front steps. Her heels sounded hollow
against the painted planks on the wraparound porch. An eerie, ghostlike sensation got her attention—that feeling of being watched. No. That wasn’t it exactly. Being watched she could deal with. Being watched she was accustomed to. Miki Ashton had been told she was pretty for as long as she could remember. This was different. This had teeth and nails. It set the back of her neck on edge. The urge to run hit her like she was six years old—like there was a monster under the bed and she couldn’t get her feet off the floor fast enough. And there had been a lot of monsters over the years—institutions, prescriptions, attempts, razor blades, overdoses. The armed conflict against her own flesh began at fourteen, when she first pushed a razor blade into the paper-thin skin inside her wrists.

She fumbled with her keys under a single globe-covered bulb. She needed better lighting. She’d been putting it off. That feeling again. Alarm. Like someone was going to leap out in a hockey mask with a chain saw. Too many movies. Too many airport paperbacks.

Get the goddamn key in the door
.

And then she heard it. Miki had memorized every complaint and shudder the old house could dish out. Maybe she shouldn’t have stopped the meds. Maybe her imagination—

There it was again—the floorboards.

Inside
.

She inched her way down the porch to the picture window, the tiny penlight from her keychain locked in her hand. She pressed the button and a weak shaft of watch-battery light skipped over her tasseled fainting couch, the wood floors, the antique rocker she’d bought and had shipped home during a road trip, the book she’d left facedown on the coffee table just today.

Then it was gone, the light blocked out. It took a second to understand what she was looking at—the dark outline of a man standing on the other side of the window. He faced her—black clothing, a ski mask—motionless. Then his arm lifted smoothly. He made a gun with his thumb and forefinger, squeezed the trigger.

The shock jolted her back. Dizziness swirled through her head, then hit her soft palate. She lost her martini dinner.

An engine started somewhere on the street.

Miki’s hand was trembling when she dialed 911.

  
1

I
t was ten-thirty when I answered the phone, the Thursday night before Independence Day. Atlanta’s tree-lined neighborhoods flew flags in anticipation from front porches and garden stakes. Red, white, and blue ribbons decorated mailboxes. In town, the city’s diverse population celebrated July’s holiday weekend with food and art and music festivals, rooftop bars and ground-shaking fireworks displays.

“I need to see you,” my cousin, Miki, told me.

Oh boy
. Miki, the daughter of my adoptive mother’s troubled sister, Florence. She’d lived on a houseboat in her own backyard when Jimmy and I were kids. I hadn’t seen Miki in a couple of months. She was probably embroiled in some drama. She might also be in real trouble. Miki had a flair for trouble.

I was in my office late, catching up on the work I’d put off all week, a last-ditch effort to take a long weekend off. The air-conditioning was working overtime. Atlanta’s smoldering summer had dropped down around us like a burning building.

My name is Keye Street. I run a little detective agency in Atlanta called Corporate Intelligence & Investigations. And when I say “little,” I mean it’s just me and my red-eyed computer guy, Neil Donovan. And when I say “red-eyed,” I mean he probably smoked a joint with his scrambled eggs this morning. My background is in law enforcement,
criminology, psychology, and, well, drinking. I was once a criminal investigative analyst in the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) at the Bureau. But I set fire to that and to nearly everything else in my life back then. So this is what I do now. Detective work suits me.

“What’s up, Miki?” I asked. “You okay?”

“No,”
said my lovely sandy-haired cousin. Put us side by side and we looked like the photograph and the negative. I’m a Chinese American recovering alcoholic with a southern accent, white parents, and a gay African American brother. Neil is convinced there’s a way to cash in on this—reaching minority status on so many levels. A government program, perhaps. But that’s what happens when you combine Neil’s Generation-Y sense of entitlement with his subversive stoner’s brain.

Neil handles most of the computer searches and I collect the human intelligence, which means I trail around behind certain folks, search their trash, take unwanted pictures of them, listen in on their conversations when I have the opportunity, and generally intrude on their private affairs. It’s all very glamorous. There’s a pile of Little Debbie wrappers and Starbucks cups in my car to prove it. Our client roster is mostly law firms and headhunting agencies, but we’ll work for anyone who wants the secrets swept out from under the rugs. Missing persons, surveillance, bond enforcement, and process serving keep the cash flowing when business slows to a crawl over the winter holidays. But when Atlanta starts to heat up and the glaring southern sun sets our bloodstreams ablaze, when the clothes get skimpy and overworked servers stagger out with trays of frosty pitchers at packed pavement cafés, my phone gets busy. The badly behaved fill my coffers. I’m fine with that. It buys the Krispy Kremes. Original glazed, warm—the current monkey on my back.

“Keye, I need to see you right away,” Miki insisted. “It’s serious.”

I rolled my neck a couple of times. Everything was always massively serious with Miki. I was tired. I’d served two subpoenas today; one of them meant following someone to work, bullying my way into her workplace, and tossing it at her before she could put her coffee down. I then dealt with the cluster-fuck they call a parking system near Fulton County’s courthouse, filed the paperwork for the attorney,
left there, and picked up a bail jumper for Tyrone’s Quikbail in East Atlanta and delivered him to the police station. Also, my bitchy cat hadn’t had a shot of half-and-half in hours.

“Someone broke into my house, Keye. I don’t even want to be there right now.”

I grabbed my keys. “I’ll pick you up.” Miki’s Inman Park home was just a few blocks from my North Highland office.

“No. Meet me at Gabe’s. I need to be around people. And I need a drink.”

I picked up my ink pen and bit into it. I needed a friggin’ drink too.

“Keye, please,” Miki said, and I heard it for the first time—genuine fear in my cousin’s voice.

Nine minutes later I pulled into the small parking lot across the street from Gabe’s on Juniper. It was a fireplace bar and restaurant with plush seating and room to lounge, a cigar room, the kind of place that served single malt at exactly the right temperature. In spring and summer, the big deck that edged right up to the street with a view of Midtown’s crowded skyline cranked out gourmet tapas and stayed packed late into the evening. Runoff from the 14th Street Playhouse, the Alliance Theatre, Symphony Hall, and The Fox Theatre, all kept it brimming with hip clientele, multitaskers who can chat with you while conducting text conversations, updating their Facebook status, and Tweeting the wine list.