Stranger in the Room: A Novel (29 page)

“Tomah?” he asked, simply, but his eyes hadn’t left us. He was a tall man, taller than Rauser, who was six-two.

“Police,” she told him. “About Fatu.”

He brushed his hands off on dark blue jeans. Sweat was glistening on his face. “Come in out of the heat.” He motioned for us to follow him up cement steps into the back of the house. In the small kitchen, the appliances looked old, but they were scrubbed spotless. So was the floor and the sink. The room smelled like banana bread, which my mother bakes, and when I said so, Tomah’s cheekbones rose in a polite but reserved smile.

We sat down at a square kitchen table with four chairs. Dolo
washed his hands at the sink and dried them on a blue towel. I found myself thinking about their daughter on that stainless-steel table. I could see in her mother the features nearly lost behind the bruises on Fatu’s face. Dolo’s arms were long and muscled—working arms. He joined us and waited silently while Tomah took a pitcher from the refrigerator and filled drinking glasses without ice. She then removed cloth from a loaf of bread and sliced four thick pieces and placed them on white plates. She put them in front of us with cloth napkins.

“Rice bread and juice,” Dolo told us, and took a long drink. A trickle of sweat ran down his temple. He had a wide forehead and nose, with prominent ridges over his eyes.

The juice was pulpy and icy cold—pineapple, mango, orange. The bread was moist and dense with mashed bananas and nuts. We broke it off with our fingers. Rauser complimented them. We were patient.

“You have discovered her killer?” Dolo Doe asked finally. Tomah was sitting straight, muscular arms on the table, hands clasped.

“We think we’re close,” Rauser replied. “When your daughter was killed, she had a piece of ribbon around her ankle. Do you know why?”

Mr. Doe shook his head. “Our daughter’s life was largely a mystery.”

“Had you seen it before?” Rauser asked.

“No,” Dolo answered.

Mrs. Doe sat to my right. A tear came to the corner of her eye, balanced there, then cut a streak down her cheek. She didn’t try to wipe it away. She did not lift her eyes from the tabletop. “Fatu had just come from the addiction center. She was just beginning life again.” Her heartache was palpable. Some wounds never heal.

“What was the name of the facility?” I asked.

“It is Peachtree-Ford. Fatu was in the aftercare program. She returned each morning for two-hour meetings.” Peachtree-Ford Hospital was one of the institutions where Miki had spent quite a lot of time. “Our Fatu loved going there. Many kinds of people.” She smiled faintly.

“In the statements you gave police, you mentioned a man your daughter had been seeing. Can you tell us about him?” I asked.

Mrs. Doe shook her head. “We never knew this man. Fatu had ended this relationship before she came back home to us. This man
said she belonged to him. ‘I am the only one who cares for you out here in this world,’ he told her.” She lifted her eyes. “He told the truth. No one cares for a black-skinned girl. She is only a prostitute to you. Only a drug addict. But she is also our daughter.…” She choked on her final words.

“Tomah,” Dolo scolded her. “They are here to help.”

But Tomah Doe wasn’t finished. I imagined how many times she’d longed to express her anger in words. “The police will tell you how many times your daughter is arrested for prostitution and for drug possession,” she told us. “They will tell you prostitutes put themselves in harm’s way.” Tears flooded her eyes. Her chair scraped the linoleum floor as she tried to push away from the table. Dolo’s fingers caught her wrist.

“Fatu was lost for so long to the streets,” he told us. “One day she was a small child and the next she was lost.” He released Tomah’s wrist, patted his wife’s hand. “When our daughter was murdered, she had only been home two weeks.”

“I have children,” Rauser said, surprising me. He wasn’t the kind of guy that shared. “They’re grown up now, but it would just about kill me if I had to go through what you’ve been through. I give you my word that I’ll use every resource I have to find the person who murdered your daughter. Anything you remember might help. Anything. You can call me night or day.” He pushed his card to the center of the table.

“This man, he did not wish to go away,” Tomah said, quietly, the silk in her voice restored. “He called many times. Fatu refused to take his calls. Or she would hang up.”

“Did she have feelings for him?”

“No. He promised her things. This was the attraction. But it was a lie. He had nothing, this man. He was a bother to her.”

“You know what kind of work he was in?” Rauser asked.

“No. My daughter never said.”

“Do you know how they met?” Rauser persisted.

“We were careful what we asked. We were often afraid of the answers.” Dolo said it quietly.

“Can you tell us about the last time you saw your daughter?”

“She was walking fast up our street with her phone against her
ear,” Dolo replied. “We wanted her to stay home and get well. But she was young. She wanted to go out and see people. We were afraid it meant trouble again, and drugs.” He shook his head. “So many times with Fatu, we begin talking and end up shouting.”

“There was no record of a phone recovered,” Rauser told them. “We didn’t find any telephone records either.”

“Mr. R gave her the phone,” Tomah answered. “Another thing we argued over. It was a way to hold on to her. But she wanted things that we could not give her.”

“You have the phone?”

“We never saw the phone again,” Mr. Doe told us.

Rauser and I exchanged a glance. It was a good indication that Mr. R was her killer. He would have taken the phone and destroyed it, knowing its records could lead to him.

“When she was on the streets,” Rauser said carefully, “do you know where?”

“She called us to pick her up only once,” Dolo said. “When she was ready to accept help. We went to the Majestic Diner. She met us there. She was so thin. And her eye was swollen. Someone had struck her.”

The Majestic in Midtown, I thought. Midtown again. The common thread. His comfort zone. “Was your daughter celebrating anything special when she died? An anniversary or birthday?”

“On the day she died,” Tomah told us, “they had given her at the meeting just that very morning a special orange key tag to commemorate being drug-free for thirty days.”

“Is her bedroom intact?”

They shared an uneasy glance. “We waited for some time,” Dolo said after a moment. “We had to grieve Fatu’s life. And then we had to recover ours. We cleaned out the room in order to do that.”

“I understand,” Rauser said. “Was there anything of Fatu’s you decided to keep?”

“We have a box,” Tomah said. “That’s all we have left. Just a box.”

  
26

W
e left Clarkston with a photograph of Fatu Doe, which had been entrusted to Rauser by a reluctant, heartbroken mother. She was smiling in the picture, brown eyes lit by laughter. I saw the high cheekbones she must have inherited from her mother, masked in the crime scene photos by the brutal beating. I didn’t know how Rauser dealt with the grief of suvivors day in and day out. The Bureau and my position in the Behavior Analysis Unit had mostly shielded me from dealing with families. I typically worked with other law enforcement agencies. I’d seen my share of crime scenes. I’d met my share of monsters and learned all about their terrifying interaction with their victims. But I didn’t want to look at the wounds of the living with the zoom lens used by local law enforcement. I was intimately familiar with that kind of wreckage.

Visiting the Does and sitting in their kitchen, waiting for their story, we had learned much about their daughter. She was impulsive, stubborn. She wanted nice things. She had a prior relationship with a man who had stalked her, possibly beaten her, who refused to let her go. And she was willing to maintain some contact with her stalker. I thought about Tomah Doe talking about her daughter’s attraction to the trappings. Fatu wanted to start over. She’d received help from an addiction center, fought a meth addiction. But there’s a lot of shame
in addiction. It tears away at your self-esteem. She’d sold her body to support it. Getting clean or getting sober doesn’t take away that feeling that you’re pretending. Because that’s how addicts live. We pretend we’re present, that we’re clean or sober, that we’re okay when we’re so far from okay on most days. We hide. We lie. Addiction sticks with you even after you’ve crawled back from it. A smart predator could take advantage of this.

Fatu’s parents had put a box in front of us, sealed with red duct tape. Rauser was careful when he looked through her things, respectful. The world wouldn’t have seen much value in the contents, but the Does had kept what was meaningful to them. A couple of handmade leather and beaded bracelets, a pair of silver earrings. A to-do list—
driver’s license, open bank account
—and an unfinished job application for The Home Depot, some poetry scribbled on an envelope, a piece of recovery literature from Peachtree-Ford.

We drove toward Stone Mountain Village, only a few miles from the house in Clarkston, discussing scenarios. Her killer knew Fatu was an addict. Perhaps he’d even been a john. It was easy for him to devalue her, given her choices. He’d tried to emotionally isolate her, I told Rauser.
I’m the only one who loves you
. When he could no longer control her and when he discovered her only interest in him had been for material gain, his rage simmered. Perhaps she’d called him that day after she’d argued with her parents. He’d lured her back in, then beat, raped, and shot her. Perhaps the ribbon, whatever it had meant to him previously, was some symbol of his triumph over rejection. In death, he owned her.

“Probably planned to kill her all along,” Rauser said. “If she got outta line. I mean, like you said, he tried to isolate her. She didn’t have friends except the new ones at the addiction center. And we’re all over that.” He fished around for his nicotine gum. “So what if this guy’s in one of these institutions where your cousin happens to be, he gets a thing for her, feels rejected by her? Later, he meets Fatu. Maybe she somehow reminds him of Miki. The scars on her arms? Then something about the kid and the old man set him off. He’s got an appetite for killing by then. He’s bolder.”

“Dime-store psychology, Lieutenant,” I said. I looked out my open
window so Rauser wouldn’t see my smile. We crossed the railroad tracks and passed the German restaurant I remembered from my childhood.

“You’re just jealous, Street. You’re jealous ’cause I can figure this shit out without a bunch of degrees.”

“It was Donald Kelly’s birthday,” I said. “Fatu Doe’s thirty-day orange key tag. Troy Delgado was on the cusp of something too, wasn’t he? A huge career, an expensive private coach, qualifying for the Junior Olympics. And Miki. What is it about Miki?” I wondered aloud. “Is she connected somehow? She cut herself, just like Fatu did, but she hasn’t been in a hospital in two years. Her career is surging again. She was short-listed for a Pulitzer and actually won other major photography awards. She’s received tons of recognition for her work. She’s also landed in the tabloids for relationships with famous singers.”

“Maybe it’s success that freaks him out,” Rauser suggested.

“Maybe,” I said. “Or transitions. Moving on. Maybe he was unable to move on from something significant in his life.”

We passed shops with canvases from local artists on sidewalk easels, cupcake makers, gift shops, cafés and restaurants, antiques stores, and a pub with tables and chairs on its roof. Rauser found parking near an old Charleston-style home turned restaurant. It was called the Sycamore Grill because for years a huge sycamore tree had overhung the veranda. It had served as a hospital during the Civil War. We didn’t have a lot of those old places standing. Sherman’s torches had lit up everything in sight.

“Something about each of his victims set off their killer. That motivation’s what we need to figure out.”

“That’s what
you
need to figure out,” Rauser said. “Me, I’m just a cop. I deal in whens and wheres. Not whys.”

We stepped out of Rauser’s fanless oven and felt a breeze. The gazebo where Fatu’s body had been left was fifty yards to our left. The Sycamore Grill and several other businesses sat on a slight incline above railroad tracks that split the village in two. There was parking on both sides of the tracks, which made the gazebo more accessible than either of us remembered. We discussed this. The offender could have easily come into the village without using the main drag and
parked above, rather than below, the tracks. No one had seen him. Again, this indicated familiarity with the area—where to enter, where to park, the routines of local cops and business owners. It was important to him to leave her in a public place. Why? A final act of dominance over her? He’d pulled her skirt up to her waist before he walked away from her. He wanted to degrade her. He’d raped and beaten and murdered her elsewhere but dragged her here and pulled up her skirt—he wanted her humiliated, even after death.

As we crossed the park, I told Rauser about having seen the gazebo full of microphone stands and musical instruments when the city of Stone Mountain was having events and the lawn was covered with blankets and coolers and folding chairs and kids running wild. This seemed too innocent a place to be a disposal site. I tried to imagine what the atmosphere in this quaint little village must have been when Fatu Doe’s body was discovered and the word of her murder spread from doorway to doorway, shop to shop. Fatu’s body was found by a startled shopkeeper who had her coffee in the gazebo on nice mornings before opening.