Stranger in the Room: A Novel (31 page)

M
y phone went off—the standard ring, the one that meant unknown caller. I’d been ignoring it all day. So many calls were coming in about Northeast Georgia Crematorium. Tyrone had called twice too, but I wasn’t ready to speak to him. I looked at the display. Media? Or possible new business? I sure couldn’t live on my consulting fee from APD.

“Keye Street,” I answered. I’d left Rauser at the station to deal with bosses and seventeen investigators and six open murder cases. I’d come home to take care of my cat before hitting the office to take care of my business. Larry Quinn would be waiting for a full report from the crematory, I knew, champing at the bit. Now that I was looking at a ball-game date, hair and makeup would be a snap.

“Dr. Street, it’s Mike McMillan. How are you?”

“Well, I’m out of Big Knob, which means I’m probably doing better than you are, Agent McMillan.”

“I wanted to thank you for the excellent detective work and for notifying us right away. And not speaking with the media. I imagine you’ve had plenty of opportunities.”

“A few,” I agreed, and poured black coffee into my cup. Steam rose up off an espresso grind, a gift from Neil. It smelled like dark chocolate. White Trash strode in importantly, stretched out at my feet.

“I thought you’d want to know what we’ve found up here so far.
Strictly confidential, of course, until after the court case. But you certainly deserve some closure on this.”

“Thank you,” I said, and meant it. I wondered if there was such a thing as closure for something like this. Not like I could ever un-see Joe Ray’s disposal sites. “I keep thinking about the families.”

“It’s about the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” McMillan said bleakly. I didn’t know him, but I recognized exhaustion when I heard it. “Those photographs have been a big help in estimating the number of bodies we may be dealing with, since the files were all labeled. We’ve begun the process of contacting families in hopes we can get DNA samples to match what we’re digging up here. There doesn’t appear to be many other records. As you already noted, the crematory log was empty.” I sat down on one of the stools along the kitchen bar with my coffee. “The photography studio was located inside the crematorium in a nonworking refrigeration unit,” McMillan continued. “Lights, backdrop, the clothes you saw in the photos. Loretta Ann Kirkpatrick has confessed to assisting her son in removing the bodies from the property, body harvesting, and falsifying documents so the buyers did not know they were buying illegal, partially decomposed, and/or diseased body parts. We have people following that trail so that patients and families can be notified. We found almost three hundred thousand dollars in cash in the farmhouse and another two hundred thousand in a crawl space. We are talking about suitcases full of money, Dr. Street. They were afraid to bank it. We have reason to believe this extends beyond the Kirkpatricks to a local funeral home director and a local physician. Joe Ray isn’t saying much.”

“I had an opportunity to observe them.” I didn’t mention that I’d been hiding in a ditch with Neil and Mary Kate Stargell, getting eaten by mosquitoes, after we’d broken into the crematory, turned on the conveyor, and dumped a box of corpses out. “Didn’t look like Joe Ray was the one giving the orders,” I told McMillan.

“Yeah. Kind of what we’re thinking, but she’s putting it all on the son. And he’s taking it. Interesting that she says she told him to stop taking the pictures over a year ago. She thought it was
disturbing
. This woman was able to help or supervise the dismemberment of bodies and throw leftovers in the woods, but her son photographing them was over the top.”

“Different requirements,” I told him.

“Psychologically, you mean.”

“Joe Ray wants to remember them,” I said. “Honor them in some way. It assuages his guilt. If I was the one questioning him, I’d use that. Poke at that spot enough, he’ll talk. And Mrs. Kirkpatrick, she wants to depersonalize the whole experience. They’ve both probably convinced themselves they were performing a service. That way they don’t have to look at the deadly implications for the recipients or at their own deception.”

“We have seasoned agents up here that are barely getting through this. It’s bad.” McMillan trailed off. Hours of excavating the Kirkpatricks’ body farm was catching up.

“What happened, Agent McMillan? Do you know how it started? If they’d simply used the crematory after harvesting the tissue no one would have ever known. There wouldn’t have been body parts to stumble over or cement mix in the urns.”

“Greed, pure and simple, Dr. Street. The crematory chamber needed an overhaul. Almost twenty thousand dollars.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “They planned on making the repair and somehow never got around to it.”

“They had enough cash in that place to replace that old crematory chamber many times over. But profit has a way of blinding people.”

It was exactly what I’d begun to suspect after Mrs. Stargell talked about the disappearing vapors and Neil had uncovered the low utility bills—no working crematory and a refrigeration unit that had been turned into a photography studio.

“Agent McMillan, I have to complete my report for the attorney. I can’t really withhold it. He has a good relationship with the media and a way of tossing gas on the fire. Be forewarned. He won’t withhold anything he thinks might benefit him personally or help the civil case.”

“I noticed. We’ll talk soon, Dr. Street.”

I finished my coffee and put a piece of smoked Gouda on top of a cracker. White Trash squinted up at me. She was never happy when I left her alone. I was usually treated to a lot of attitude afterward. “Don’t be a hater,” I told her, and gave her a piece of cheese and some
Reddi-Wip. This was probably doing nothing to extend her life, but it did make her a slightly more pleasant roommate.

My phone played Body Count’s “There Goes the Neighborhood”—Tyrone’s ringtone. Great song. I waited as long as I could to answer.

“Hey baby, what up?” Tyrone asked.

I grabbed my briefcase and headed toward the elevators.

“Hey Keye, you don’t need to return calls now that you’re in the news again and shit?”

I pressed the down button and didn’t bother to hide my irritation. “Sure. Channel Five’s going to pay my mortgage for the year.”

“Sometimes I got time-sensitive issues. Know what I’m saying? I offer you jobs before anybody else ’cause I like you.”

“Really. Is that why you told Rauser I came unhinged or whatever you told him? What exactly did you say to him?”

“Is that what this is about?”

I stepped into the elevator and nodded at two men in business suits. Their suitcases sat next to their ankles. They both straightened, sucked in their stomachs. One of them slid his hand in his pocket, leaned on one hip like a department-store model. I was in a black pencil skirt, a clingy white Elie Tahari button-closed V-neck, hair down. Works every time. I tried to keep my voice down. “I felt threatened by those guys, Tyrone. I don’t have to take that from anyone. And I shouldn’t have to explain why I don’t like being grabbed.”

“All I told the man was that you seemed really stressed. I said it out of love, Keye. Come on, now. Don’t do me like that. Don’t pull some little-baby pouty shit and stop returning calls.”

“I
was
stressed. I’d just been threatened by a gang of thugs.” I glanced at the guys on the elevator. They both found something very interesting on their shoes. “And you have no right to speak to Rauser about anything that concerns me. Really crosses the line for me. I don’t need the men in my life trying to be my daddy.”

“You need to learn to go with the flow,” Tyrone advised. “That’s your problem right there.”

The blood-pressure bell started to ring like someone had just whacked the mallet on one of those carnival strength tests. “Thank you so much,” I said with false politeness, and heard my mother’s
southern influence in my voice. “I’ll be sure to call you the next time I need to know what my fucking problem is.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I love me some anger. It brings me a lot of bail jumpers.”

“I’m not angry,” I snapped, and clicked the phone off. My elevator companions were staring at me.
“What?
I’m
not
.”

First McMillan and then Tyrone. Maybe later I’ll slam my finger in the car door just for fun.

I saw the Blue Marshmallow when I pulled down into the sunken lot for our offices. Anyway, that’s just one of my names for Neil’s car. It’s a convertible Smart Car, midnight blue with silver detailing. He hadn’t had it long, but it had made him smug as hell. I’d noticed his vocabulary now included terms like carbon footprint and greenhouse gases.

My office is located on North Highland Avenue in a row of once forgotten warehouses that have been transformed to fit into the current urban landscape. The landlord gave us some color and slapped on a lot of shiny things—railings and lights, a breezeway with a severe metal V-shape top that looks like a really stoned Metallica fan went on a bender with a torch and a few slabs of nickel.
Modern
, he told us, when the exteriors were overhauled.
Hip
. Sure, it’s hip now. Just wait until the next trend in commercial office space hits Atlanta’s loft districts. We’ll be about as hip as a forty-year-old tattoo. The neighborhood is mostly thirtysomething professionals, cool restaurants and row houses, brunch lines and chocolatiers, elaborate tacos and my favorite pizza at Fritti. We’re three minutes from downtown if you use Glen Iris. In the opposite direction, three minutes to the heart of Midtown, where Rauser’s office was located. I can be home in less than seven minutes, unless it’s rush hour. Then, all bets are off. No way to time that. We slip into doggy years every day at four.

The parking lot sits down low in front of what were once the loading docks, and you have to climb metal steps to get to the office. It can get a little tricky during the freezing rains in February. And the lot floods in the pop-up thunderstorms of spring and summer. All the tenants in the front row—me, a gay comedy theater troupe, a hair salon, and a tattoo and body-piercing studio—still have a dock door. We lift them in fall or spring before or after the bloodthirsty,
Volkswagen-size mosquitoes descend upon us. It’s the only time I have natural light in my office. And the simple act of raising our doors turns us into a neighborhood. After air-conditioned summers and locked-up winters, we hear one another again and we wander outside and talk. Smells from the street up the hill where something is always cooking drift into our rambling spaces.

The air was heavy, gray sky. Showers in the forecast. I thought about Miki and knew she would be in Birmingham by now, probably on her way to meet the weather with a professional storm chaser.

My phone rang. Another unavailable number. What’s with reporters and their blocked numbers? I didn’t want to talk to them.
Crap
. I had to start dealing with this stuff. I couldn’t let my voice mail stay stuffed. I had a business to run. I pushed through the urge to avoid another call. The bills don’t get paid that way. But avoidance is my natural tendency.

“Keye Street,” I answered into the Bluetooth device on my ear. What I heard was something akin to an oxygen tank or an asthma flare-up. For a moment I thought that it was the hissing dead air you sometimes get when a call is dropped. I tried again. “Hello?”

“Where is she?” The words were amplified, slowed down—an old record on warped vinyl.
Where … is … she
. Chilling.

I stayed in my car, glanced around the parking lot. “You must have the wrong number.”

“I know who you are. I saw you go in her house. The rest was easy. Where you live. Where you work. Where you used to work,
Doctor
Street.”

If he wanted to scare me, he was doing a fine job. There’s something so unearthly about voice disguises. It kicked up a kid’s fear in me.

“Where is she?”

He’d yelled it. The device blasted into my ear. I jerked out my Bluetooth and adjusted the volume.

“Why don’t you give her a call?” I suggested, as I reattached the earbud. “Or text. You’re into texting, right?”

More electronic wheezing through the device. “I know the cops have that phone. I’m not stupid.”

“Are you wearing a Darth Vader mask? Because that’s kind of
what it sounds like.” I said it with a smirk I didn’t feel. I hoped refusing him my fear, refusing to give him anything back, would be the hook that would keep him talking. I imagined his childhood full of lukewarm women from whom he’d begged attention. I didn’t want to make myself a decoy. You have to be careful with guys like this. But the more he shared, the closer we were to knowing his identity.

I looked again at the parking lot, looked for anything out of place. I recognized my neighbors’ vehicles—the haircutter’s Malibu, the tattoo artist’s Wrangler, the usual mix of clunkers from the theater company. No movement. Nothing off. “You know what that voice disguiser says about you?” I asked. It was a cheap cell phone device. He’d probably spent ten dollars in the mall. What it actually said to me was what I’d already theorized—he was scraping by. He probably couldn’t hold a full-time job. He’s a big loser with a lousy attitude and a scar on his life he’s making everyone else pay for. But that’s not what I said. “It tells me you really think things through. You’re a careful guy.” I didn’t mention the DNA he’d left at the crime scenes. Or that Kelly’s driver had seen him, noticed him because he stuck out in the lobby of an upscale Midtown address. A suit and some decent shoes would have made him practically invisible. But even that was beyond his reach. “So I have to wonder where you think this is headed.”

“I’m going to kill her. She’s going to die. That’s where it’s headed.”

“You had an opportunity. Why didn’t you?”

“Sometimes it’s just more fun to watch her kill herself.”

A chill skipped over me. How long had he been watching Miki struggle through life? How many times had he contributed to her insecurity? Noises, things out of place, messages, that feeling of being followed—he’d dogged her for months. “If you turn yourself in now, you’ll be safe. Just tell me where you are.”