Stranger in the Room: A Novel (36 page)

The thought of an on-camera interview with Monica Roberts was terrifying. How do people do that? Just walk on television, I mean. I tend to obsess about the little things. Big surprise, right? Me obsessing. Is that really my posture? I look kind of slouchy. My eyes are too far apart. My nose is too narrow at the bridge and turned up at the end. And what’s up with the freckles? Don’t Asians get a pass on freckles? My parents promised I’d grow out of them. And Rauser put media interviews right up there with the opera on Sunday as a way to screw up a perfectly good day. I knew he’d never go for it. I’d had to beg him to sit through the
Rolling Stone
interview. He’d done it because he loved me and he wanted the truth to come out. And, if he was being honest, because
Rolling Stone
magazine was
the
coolest, in his mind.

“Can I think it over?” I wasn’t ready to light a fire under this bridge. Not just yet. I wanted to see what it felt like to be on Roberts’s good side for a change.

  
31

T
he good news is: Even stalkers can’t stalk twenty-four hours a day. It’s how he’d lost track of Miki. He had a job. He had to buy groceries. He had other responsibilities. Maybe he had to walk his dog. It was a comforting thought. Not comforting enough. I had the hotel valet get me a cab rather than use the Neon. Then I checked for a tail out the back window compulsively.

The driver waited while I ran into my office and collected Neil’s things, then dropped me off at the hospital. Neil was having a bad morning. Lots of pain. Lots of pain meds. He was in and out, seemed barely aware of me there. I tucked his phone and iPad under the blanket next to him and pushed his laptop under his pillow. At the front exit, I hailed another cab.

“Where to?” The driver was dark-skinned. Indian, perhaps.

“City Hall East,” I answered, and glanced instinctively at the driver’s ID clipped to the visor. There was a pink ribbon hanging off the rearview mirror, tied in a droopy bow.

The driver watched me in the mirror. What he could not see was my hand coming to rest on my Glock. “Today is my birthday,” he told me. “My daughter made lunch for me this morning and put a ribbon on it. I’m a sentimental man. You have kids?”

“No.” I studied him. He was too small and fine-boned for the man
who’d left a size-thirteen shoe print at the Delgado scene. I relaxed a little, but didn’t take my hand off my gun. My eyes went back to the bow.
Ribbons, wrapping paper, presents, birthdays, baby showers, Christmas
.

“Ma’am?” We’d stopped. “I’m sorry to say the garage is too busy. I’ll have to drop you in front.”

The businesses and other city offices that had used the City Hall building for years had stuffed the garage with moving trucks. Rauser had mentioned the neighbors were moving out. Major Crimes would be the last to go. There was talk of shiny new offices off Peachtree. I paid the driver and got out on Ponce de Leon. Detective Bevins was in her cube when I got upstairs to Homicide.

“The lieu wants me to make sure you have access to what you need,” she told me, smiling. “Want some coffee? I’m headed that way.”

“Absolutely.” I nodded. “I take it black.”

“That’s easy. By the way, the lieutenant’s in interview room one with the burger guy.”

“We have video?” I asked.

“Pick a monitor.”

I turned on the monitor in the empty cube I’d used before and pressed the appropriate button for the interview room I wanted, plugged in earphones. Bob Crammer was sitting across a table from Brit Williams, Ken Lang, and Rauser. Rauser had rolled up his shirtsleeves. It was probably hot as hell in there. He liked to cut the air to his interview rooms just so no one got too comfortable. Crammer had his arms folded over his chest and the metal chair tilted back on two legs.

“He turned surly once he figured he was a person of interest,” Bevins said, and put a coffee mug in front of me. It had a Starbucks logo. Fivebucks, Rauser always called it.

“What? No confession?” I took a sip from the mug and shuddered. “They get anything out of him?”

“Not much once he realized he wasn’t here to look at pictures. Lang’s in there for a cheek swab. I think Crammer’s going to lawyer up. He’s got that look.”

Bevins was right. Crammer refused to answer more questions, and he refused the cheek swab. They had to let him walk.

“Do you have time to search some archives?” I asked Bevins.

“Sure. What you got?”

“I’m looking for anything involving a living child found at a crime scene or a child pulled from a severely abusive situation. Time frame twenty to twenty-five years ago. I’ll start the same process with news reports online.”

“Log-in passwords change every day. I’ll get you logged in. I don’t know what you got in your case”—she nodded at the laptop case I’d come in with on my shoulder—“but this new system they gave us can really fly.”

“Great. I’ll use it. Thanks.”

I felt eyes on me and turned in my chair. Bob Crammer stood, watching me. He’d just left the interview room. He paused, then left. Ken Lang, Rauser, and Brit Williams came out. “What do you think, Lieutenant?” Bevins asked.

“I want to stay all over this guy until we can either bring him in or exclude him,” Rauser said. “Street, the tip lines are ringing. Lot of folks responding to your profile. Williams, get someone on Crammer. And let’s have Balaki and Thomas work tips. Bevins, you on something?”

“I’m running with an idea,” I said. “I could use Detective Bevins.”

Rauser nodded. “We’ll let you have her as long as we can.”

Bevins and I worked for the next ninety minutes. She cruised archived police files. I looked at quarter-century-old headlines that had been converted from microfilm to online archives. APD’s system had access to everything I needed. No logging in to databases to find information. This was never an issue for Neil. Passwords, log-in info, none of it seemed to trip him up. We do subscribe to software programs that allow me access to some databases, but without Neil’s code-cracking brain and expert navigation skills, it was still a painstaking process.

I’d typed in keywords
murder, murder-suicide, double homicide, homicide, child found at crime scene, child at murder scene, neglected child, abused child, killings at Christmas, murder at parties
. I ended all the queries with 1980–1990. The volume of information was overwhelming.
I sorted through the slush with dying hopes until one of the articles stopped me in my tracks.

Police: Murder-Suicide at Child’s Birthday Party

My heart rate accelerated.

I read through the story again. “Gotcha,” I whispered. “Hey, Bevins, can you run May third, 1980? Jackson and Emma Richards.”

Bevins typed in some information. “It’s in Records. A hard file. Closed. A murder-suicide. Hasn’t been put in digital yet.”

“Can you get it?”

“Sure. You think our guy’s in there?”

I felt a rush coming up from my toes. Every investigator gets one when they know they’re close, a little flutter, a slightly elevated heart rate, a split-second blast of chemicals. “It’s him,” I said.

  
32

W
e used the big conference table in the War Room and spread out the case file. The scene photos showed Emma Richards with a dark, wet pool under her skull. She lay only feet away from where her husband, Jackson Richards, had collapsed. He’d shot her, shoved her body aside, then shot himself. I studied the photos. The table was littered with paper plates and the remains of a white birthday cake with blue icing, melted ice cream in little pools on plates, paper cups. Nine chairs. Four of them matched the oak veneer table, five of them appeared to have come from other parts of the house. At the far end of the table, the plastic forks, paper plates, the tablecloth, and the presents were spattered with a fine spray. Emma’s eight-year-old son would have been sitting on that end at the head of the table where the presents were clustered. He must have been covered with his mother’s blood. I thought about that night at Miki’s house when Lang turned on his UV and blue stains appeared on Donald Kelly. I picked up another photo of Emma Richards and finally understood.

“It’s tear fluid,” I told them. “And probably semen.” Rauser, Balaki, Williams, and Bevins gaped at me as if I’d just pulled up in a hovercraft and declared myself a Vulcan. “The mystery fluid,” I explained. “Tears and semen.”

“You saying he’s crying and whacking off at the scenes?” Williams asked. Silence had settled over the room.

I nodded. “It’s the only time he can cry. It’s not about remorse. It’s a release. And masturbating gives him back control. It’s not necessarily sexual. It’s about power over his victim. And his lack of power in life.” I pushed the photo of Emma Richards to the center of the table. One arm was straight out from her body, palm up. She’d been holding a blue ribbon when she fell. “This is why he’s leaving ribbons and balloons and wrapping paper.”

“Look at that,” Rauser said. He’d turned a little pale. “In the mother’s hand. All over the table. Little hand-tied ribbons everywhere. And presents.”

“And red balloons,” Williams said.

“Miki said something to me about how it felt like he wanted to ruin everything just when she was piecing her life together. I don’t think she’s far off. I think the killer’s selection process is somehow connected to transitions. To life changes. Every one of these victims was on the cusp of something. Fatu Doe was recovering, clean, getting strong. Miki’s not cutting herself. She’s not depressed. She received a very public award nomination. She’s moving forward.”

“Troy Delgado was a superstar. He was gonna have a contract before he finished high school.” Balaki was still staring at the picture of Emma Richards.

“He was moving on,” Williams said. “Leaving. Everyone leaves the killer behind.”

“The old man. Kelly,” Bevins added. “He was sick. Not expected to live much longer. Dementia and lymphoma. He was transitioning too.”

“Okay.” Rauser pushed back his chair. “Let’s get to work, see if this is our guy. Balaki, get on the hospital records. Jesse Owen Richards shows up at any of the institutions we have down for Miki, cross-check the dates. Bevins, find out where Richards is now. And get a recent photo. We gotta connect him to the Doe girl, Kelly, and Delgado. Get everything. Credit cards. Bank accounts. We want to know where he eats, lives, walks his dog, who he sleeps with. And take another look at the personnel out there at the ballpark.”

You could feel the energy in the room take off. My heart was hammering.
Rauser’s phone jingled as we all moved back to the Homicide room. He answered, plugged his free ear with a finger, and wheeled away. He was biting his bottom lip when he came back. “GBI lab,” he told us. “Full reports have been emailed, but you were right, Keye. It’s tear fluid and semen. The tears didn’t come from the vics. Williams, get that report downloaded. Run the sequence through CODIS.”