Stranger in the Room: A Novel (28 page)

“Yeah, sounds familiar, doesn’t it?” Rauser said.

“Be consistent with his MO,” Williams commented. “But way out of our perp’s strike zone. And a ribbon hasn’t been part of the other two scenes.”

“Lieutenant,” Bevins said. She’d been on the phone with a detective from Stone Mountain PD. “I have a picture from the Gwinnett County ME’s office.”

“Can you get it up on the main monitor?” Rauser asked, and a very brightly illuminated photograph came up on the overhead. In television shows they have sharp, modern-looking autopsy suites with lots of dim mood lighting in different hues. In life what you get are harsh lights in a sterile hospital environment. The equipment may be state-of-the-art, but it’s not pretty and it doesn’t look or feel like the romantic atmosphere it appears on those shows where some twenty-year-old forensic scientist is so accomplished she’s an expert in every discipline. We all looked up at the body on the screen, laid out on a stainless-steel table. The dead woman’s clothes had not yet been removed—skirt, smudged with what looked like red clay, torn blouse, a silver bracelet. A bedraggled ribbon was tied around her ankle like a shoestring. Scars crossed and crisscrossed her arms.

“You can see it in several of the crime scene photos. The investigators didn’t focus a lot of attention on it,” she said.

“What kind of weapon we talking about?” Rauser asked Bevins.

“Nine-millimeter, Lieutenant.”

Rauser rubbed his hands together like he was standing over a campfire. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Have ’em email their tool-marks reports to our examiners pronto.” He picked up a landline and dialed an internal code. “Lang, we got a ballistics report coming in from Stone Mountain PD. I need a tool-marks examiner to compare it to the slug you dug out of the Honda where Kelly was shot. Pronto, okay?” Rauser put the phone down. “Won’t take long,” he said. “It’s not like DNA. We won’t be in walkers before it gets here.”

I went back to the War Room and the box of items taken from Donald Kelly’s apartment. I picked up the manuscript. It’s about baseball
and hot chicks, Rauser had told me. Baseball was Troy Delgado’s game, wasn’t it? Or one of them. His parents said during their heartbreaking interview that their son had excelled at most sports. I read a few pages before Rauser stuck his head in.

“You wanna come out here, Street? Tool marks line up on the overlaps. Probability is the bullet that went into Donald Kelly and Jane Doe were fired from the same weapon.” We stepped into Homicide and he briefed his detectives. “Williams, get a police courier out to Stone Mountain. And tell ’em we’re coming. They have any issues, let them know we’ll keep them apprised of anything that affects their case. Keye, you got any thoughts?”

“Three disposal sites now,” I said. I was willing to bet everyone in this room had considered that already. There was still a lot of argument about standard definitions of serial killing, but the basic accepted criterion is three victims with a cooling-off period between murders. No one in law enforcement wants to hit that magic number three. The press goes ape shit. “And every scene was meant to be found. The scenes were staged. He had to manipulate a body into a gazebo in the center of town, in and out of a car and into a home in Inman Park. And Troy Delgado’s body was found just a few yards off the street. The offender has to have some understanding of the neighborhoods, the routines of the community. And of local police. Offenders hunt within their comfort zone. Why is he intimately familiar with both areas? I think he moved from Stone Mountain to Midtown since Jane Doe was killed. Or his profession requires him to frequent both areas.”

“If he moved,” Balaki said, and started tapping at his keyboard, “we can look at DMV, voter’s reg, real estate records.”

“What do both areas have in common?” I asked.

“Restaurants, for one,” Williams answered. “And we already have a witness who thought our perp was a waiter. Stone Mountain Village has that little strip with a half dozen restaurants right there.”

“Good,” Rauser said. “Follow that.”

“The fact that he’s leaving some kind of party favor at the scenes is interesting. It might have to do with some obsession with parties. Or maybe birthdays. Kelly died on his birthday. But it could also be a behavior that developed over time,” I said.

“You’re saying he was killing people
before
he was decorating them.” Bevins was frowning. “Or leaving party favors.”

“I’m saying it’s possible.”

“Street people and hookers.” Balaki shook his head. “That’s usually where it starts. Easy targets.”

I nodded. “Prostitutes are more likely to experience exploratory wounds. And their disappearance is slow to get reported, if it’s reported at all. Fewer intimate relationships. Predators count on this.”

“Be nice to know about the fluids, wouldn’t it?” Williams said. “I was in the morgue. I saw that stuff all over the kid. Working without DNA is like being hurled into the goddamn dark ages.”

“Listen to me, people,” Rauser snapped. His fuse had frayed a little. “All that DNA shit, it’s gonna be great in court. But it’s good old-fashioned police work that closes cases. Don’t ever forget that. The district attorney can use it to convict. It’s not our problem. Our job is to act like detectives and bring in suspects.”

“My bet’s on urine,” Bevins said quietly. We all looked at her. “The fluid, I mean.”

“We have a fluid pool?” Balaki asked. Cops are competitive by nature. They’ll bet against one another on just about anything. “I’ll take semen for ten bucks.”

“Stone Mountain ever get an ID on Jane Doe?” Rauser wanted to know.

Bevins looked back at her computer, tapped a few keys, then nodded. “Her name actually
is
Doe. Fatu Doe. Twenty-one years old. She was a prostitute.”

  
25

R
auser knocked the volume back on the blaring police scanner and pushed a piece of nicotine gum through the foiled back of the package. “This stuff tasted like crap at first. But now when it starts to get peppery and release that shit, and I’m like, oh yeah, baby.” He looked behind him, swung out of the parking spot in his Crown Vic. We were about two inches from one of the huge support columns. His car was banged all to hell already. Rauser drove like somebody who had spent his life rushing. On a straightaway, I loved it. I’d grown up with redneck boys in muscle cars, after all. I have a chemical reaction to hot guys in fast cars. But in the garage at City Hall East, not so much. I squeezed my eyes shut.

He turned right onto Ponce de Leon Avenue and hit the first red light. Deep fryers from the Mexican restaurants that dotted Ponce cranked out tortilla chips for the lunch crowds and oily air mixed with exhaust fumes—Atlanta’s summer scent. I had my elbow propped on the lowered window. Rauser’s fan was out in his car again. I could feel the heat coming up from the pavement on my arm. The sun was hammering us. The motorcycle shop on our left was buzzing with perspective buyers. Georgia’s hot summers trick us into thinking this is a good idea. We long for wind in our hair. Lot of bikes on the road this time of year, scooters are all over the city streets. We ditch our gas guzzlers. We suddenly care very much for the environment.
I know. I was once seduced by a little red Vespa. And then the blistering sun cooks you inside your helmet at stoplights. Or you run over your own toe. Or winter moves in. Folks with real winters and heavy snows think it’s funny that we complain about winter down here, but let me tell you, when the windchill hits you on a little scooter doing thirty-five in a business suit in January, your friggin’ lips will freeze to your teeth. I lost five pounds just by shivering. My concern with America’s dependency on foreign oil stopped there.

Ponce de Leon Avenue bustles and quivers and mutters through Midtown Atlanta—theater, art, shopping centers, strip malls, liquor stores, street people, men’s bars—then crosses North Highland and meanders through the historic district lined with southern mansions and landscaped parks. It veers into downtown Decatur and great restaurants, passes MARTA stations and farmers markets before it narrows into a two-lane that runs along weedy railroad tracks past little frame houses and brick apartment buildings. We followed it ten miles into the heart of Clarkston.

I had spent the morning going over Troy Delgado, Donald Kelly, and Fatu Doe’s death investigations, learning the details of their last moments. Pin drag and other distinctive marks on the 9mm bullet that had stopped short of Fatu Doe’s skull wall and lodged in the cranium cavity matched tool marks on the slug that had ripped through an old man’s kidney and ended up inside the volunteer’s 2010 Honda Element. A twenty-one-year-old hooker and a man who didn’t want to celebrate his birthday. Why had the killer chosen them? I didn’t think it was random. But I still didn’t know why they’d been selected.

The trajectory told the ME the killer had been standing behind Fatu Doe. The exterior entry wound was relatively small, between the temple and right ear. The muzzle was pushed against skin and bone, which made a clean entry. But when the bullet was blown in, all those gases exploded inside the wall of her skull and tore a lacerated path through the brain in a millisecond. A rape kit had been done. No ejaculate had been detected. There was blood in the lining of the uterus that was not menstrual in origin and a sizable laceration in the vagina. Medical examiners and coroners avoid legal terms like
rape
, but there was little doubt Fatu Doe had been sexually assaulted before her death. She had blunt-force contusions and abrasions on her
arms and face. Deep color in the wounds. She was alive when she was raped and beaten. Her parents had told the detectives that Fatu had been in a rehab facility for a meth habit and was no longer using drugs or hooking. Toxicology had shown trace amounts of THC in her bloodstream. Marijuana hangs around a long time. It’s not an unusual find in someone who has been drug-free only a few weeks. Doe’s parents had told investigators their daughter had an on-again-off-again relationship with someone they’d never met, someone she called Mister and sometimes Mister R. Still, the Stone Mountain PD had uncovered no suspects. The initial was a lead that led nowhere.

Rauser glanced at me as we crossed the tracks. He turned left on Church Street in Clarkston, a community vibrant with immigrants and refugees. It’s the original home of the Fugees Family, an organization dedicated to child survivors of war, an estimated half the population here.

We drove east a few blocks, then turned right on a side street that looped in a circle, punctuated by potholes and
For Sale
signs in yards where home owners had forgotten to keep up the landscaping in a down market. Half the houses in the neighborhood were vacant. Lanky, dark-skinned boys kicked a soccer ball around in an empty lot. They stopped and stared at us as we passed. Rauser’s Crown Vic was unmarked, but it was obviously a cop car.

We parked in front of a mint-green house. Shingles had peeled away from the roof, exposing black patches of tarpaper underneath, an unrepaired reminder, I guessed, from one of the big storms that had roared through this year. The house was a decade past due for pressure washing and priming and painting, but somebody loved it. The window boxes were bulging with petunias that had lifted their velvety heads to the hot midday sun. Ferns hung from hooks under porch shade, and containers with red geraniums stood on each end of the wooden steps leading to the screen door. A white oak towered over the front lawn and shaded one end of the house. The windows were open. Everyone tries to save those cooling dollars. By the end of July the heat is so heavy and thick, you don’t have a choice but to close the windows and strain the budget for an extra couple hundred a month through September.

Before Rauser had folded up his knuckles to knock, a figure appeared
in the doorway. Wearing a long skirt in washed-out orange and yellow, she had rich brown skin and eyes, high apple cheeks, hair cut close to her head, a white linen shirt. She was tall. She looked at Rauser, then at me, but said nothing. “Good afternoon, ma’am,” Rauser said. “I’m Lieutenant Aaron Rauser from the Atlanta Police Department, and this is Keye Street. Are you Mrs. Doe?”

Her eyebrows pulled together almost imperceptibly. “I am Tomah Doe. This concerns Fatu?” she asked in the Liberian English that is both rhythmic and beautiful and requires concentration. The words
this
and
concern
sounded like
dis
and
cone-sir
.

“May we come in and speak to you?” Rauser’s years as a cop had programmed him to answer questions with questions. “I tried to call, but there was no answer.” He pulled out his identification and held it up to the screen.

She ignored the ID but stepped outside and let the door bang shut behind her. “We’ve been outside. My husband is still in back,” she told us. We followed her down the wooden steps and around the house. Clothesline cord was stretched out from one corner of the house to a small freestanding building that had probably once been a one-car garage. Wooden birdhouses and feeders hung from the line, handmade, hand painted, beautifully fashioned. Dolo Doe was bent over a sawhorse in the center of the garage he’d obviously converted to a workshop. He was working with a tool, a small chisel. His hands looked too big for such delicate work. The floor was covered in wood shavings that smelled sappy and clean. He lifted his eyes, looked at Rauser and me, put the chisel down on the thick plywood table.