Stranger in the Room: A Novel (40 page)

W
hen the door opened and light from the hallway streamed into the room, my hand tightened instantly around the Glock. Neil didn’t budge. Rauser stepped into the room. He had two coffee cups and a folded newspaper. “Fivebucks coffee,” he whispered, and grinned. Rauser was always snarky about Starbucks, but he always bought it anyway. Just like he made fun of Whole Foods, called it Whole Paycheck, and shopped there all the time.

It was four in the morning and pitch black outside. I could hear Neil breathing smoothly. Rauser and I walked out into the corridor, then sat down in an empty waiting area.

“Got the surveillance video. Several shots of him coming in the main entrance, walking through the lobby, and several angles on this floor,” Rauser told me. “He wore a hoodie and kept his head down. He knew where the cameras were. So we don’t have anything with a clear shot of his face. But we know one thing for sure. He’s not a fat boy anymore. We’re going to release the video to the news channels this morning at seven.”

I took a sip of coffee and rolled my neck. I felt like I’d slept in a chair. “How about Miki?”

“Sleeping by the time I came in. I woke her up and showed her a picture of Richards. She remembered him as Owen, which is why she
didn’t recognize the name Jesse Richards when you asked her. She was completely floored. She thought he was a nice guy.”

“Something happened,” I said. “He took offense at something. Something triggered his rage. That’s how it goes with borderline personalities. He might have been completely in love until she said or did something he perceived as demeaning or dismissive. Then, all that emotion turns to fury. It can turn on a dime.”

“I’ve got a uniform with Miki. Cruiser parked on the street. Even if whacko Owen figures out where she is, there’s a lot to discourage him,” Rauser said, flatly. “APD officers don’t play.” He opened the morning paper to the local gossip section called Peach Buzz. He pointed to a picture halfway down the page of the two of us standing in front of his Crown Vic. I remembered the setting well, a crime scene at rush hour, the murder of a former colleague last year. The caption read:
Atlanta’s hottest crime-fighting duo, Lieutenant Aaron Rauser of APD Homicide and former FBI profiler Keye Street together again on another string of murders in The Atl
.

“Shit.” I looked away.

“I know,” Rauser agreed. “It’s a terrible picture. Of you.”

I laughed and slugged his arm. “At least my eyes are all the way open. You look like a person with mental problems.”

“Yeah, but at least my mouth is closed,” Rauser said.

I looked back at the photograph. We’d been having a hell of an argument that day. I finished my coffee, stood up, stretched. “I need to shower and change and take care of my cat and my cousin. And my business. Jesus. I’m going to see if Tyrone will babysit Neil until he’s released. Then I’ll head to the station.”

Rauser grabbed my hand. “Hey, first of all, this creep Richards, he’s not after Neil. Even Forensics agrees shooting him was an accident.”

“I know,” I said. “But Richards was so close to him when he dropped off the envelope. Just right outside his room. I don’t want to take anything for granted.”

“I’ve already got an officer on the way here. Just to make sure everything goes like it’s supposed to when he checks out and goes home. If this whacko’s objective is to stretch our resources, he’s sure doing
that. Major Hicks is starting to talk about the cost of all the extra details. I gotta make an arrest.”

“Did you guys run marriage licenses and real estate records yet?”

“We did. Big list. Over four hundred couples applied for marriage licenses just last month in the city limits. About a hundred this month and it’s only the seventh. Real estate deeds, new sales, births. We’re looking at all of them, looking for commonality to Richards and Richards’s parents, names, addresses, comparing date of filings to his DOB, to the date of the killings. Anything we can think of.”

The elevator opened and a uniformed cop stepped out, polished shoes, hardware gleaming. No squeaks in the heavy duty-belt. We went to meet him. Rauser briefed him, introduced him to me, then took him to the nurses’ station, showed ID, and introduced him again. He handed the officer his card with his cell phone number and pointed him to Neil’s room.

“I’ll walk out with you,” Rauser told me. “Maybe we can make out in the elevator.”

Making out right now sounded like about as much fun as sandpapering my eyeballs. I hadn’t brushed my hair. Or my teeth. I hadn’t even looked in the mirror. I hoped my mascara wasn’t somewhere around my ears. I marveled at Rauser’s ability to think like a fourteen-year-old boy even under the very worst circumstances. Men really never grow up, which is one of the wonderful things about them, of course.

His phone jangled as we stepped on the elevator. “Rauser,” he answered, and checked his watch. Not quite four-thirty a.m. The dark shadows under his eyes told me he hadn’t been to bed that night. He listened for a few seconds. “Okay. You call CSU and spatter already?” He waited. “Give me the address on Pine.” He disconnected and looked at me. “Balaki and Williams are at an address on Pine near Felton. They were just gonna do a drive-by until the sun comes up, but the dog was sitting in the front yard, and when they got closer, they saw the front door was cracked. Young couple. Both murdered. They applied for a marriage license last week. Cross-checking names raised a flag on the bride-to-be. Name’s Emma Jackson.”

“Emma. Jackson. Richards’s parents,” I said, as we stepped off the
elevator. We crossed the lobby toward the hospital exit. Our pace had picked up. “Emma and Jackson Richards. He targeted their names.”

“Exactly. Richards must have been looking for the right couple. Hell, you can do it online. Pretty sure it’s our guy. Besides the connection to the victims’ names. There’s a dog there that was taken outside. Most perps don’t bother.”

“If we could have just gotten to the grandparents a day earlier and known about those fucking dolls, I’d have known where to look. God.” I felt sick.

“You’re not a goddamn psychic, Keye. Once we had evidence to analyze, you interpreted it correctly. That’s all you can do. No one expects anything else. Come with me to the scene,” he said, and clicked a key fob as we crossed the street to the parking lot. The lights on a new Crown Victoria blinked. “The old clunker bit the dust last night. This baby flies too. And it’s midnight blue. Sexy, huh?”

I didn’t answer. My thoughts were full of the two people who had died because their names were too close to the parents a damaged mind believed had betrayed him.

We turned on Peachtree Street, then hung a left onto Pine. Atlanta in early morning was lit up and still a little sleepy. The sky was as dark as Rauser’s new Crown Vic. And cloudy. I thought again about the crime scene we were walking into and those old rival emotions tapped on my shoulder—excitement and sorrow—and a healthy shot of guilt at feeling either of them.

We pulled up as Ken Lang slid open the side door on the Crime Scene Unit van parked at the curb outside a squat brick home. He and another scene tech pulled covers over shoes and snapped on gloves and coats meant to minimize trace transfer. Williams and Balaki approached as Rauser and I suited up. Balaki peeled off and went to his car. I saw a cocker spaniel, its nose sticking through the cracked window. Balaki was an animal lover. He had several cats and a couple of dogs, and once stopped to pick up a dog and drive it by a vet’s office to check for a microchip while a murder suspect waited in cuffs. He baby-talked the spaniel through the window, then joined us.

“What are you gonna do with the dog, Balaki?” Rauser asked.

“I’ll figure it out later, Lieu. Poor girl. Something like this is tough enough for a dog without having to take a trip to Animal Control.”

Bloodstain analyst Jo Phillips, all five-foot-ten inches of swimmer body and no-need-for-makeup skin, strode toward us with an aluminum case in her hand. Rauser had had an on-and-off affair with Phillips before our friendship turned steamy. They had remained friends.

Phillips stopped at the van, where we suited up to enter the scene. “Well, if it isn’t Atlanta’s hottest crime-fighting duo.” She flashed a brilliant smile at me that makes even straight girls get crushes, and bent to stretch booties over shoes. Size-tens, I thought, with no small amount of pleasure. Don’t get me wrong. Big feet are fine. She’s really tall. She’d tip over without them.

“That mean we can all go home and get some sleep, since Batman and Robin are here?” Lang asked. The scene tech tried unsuccessfully to stifle a snicker. Williams and Balaki found something fascinating on the ground.

“Okay, so everybody knows about the Peach Buzz piece,” Rauser said. “Anybody else need to get anything off their chest?” He looked at his investigators. No one said anything. “I didn’t think so. Let’s go to work. Williams, fill us in.”

We walked down a curved river-pebble sidewalk. “Male victim Jorge Wagner, twenty-six. Female victim Emma Jackson, twenty-four. ID in the house, valuables apparently intact. Female vic has a nasty knife wound. Wagner was shot in the neck at close range.”

The pebbled sidewalk had hidden how much blood had been tracked in and out of the house. But we saw it at the bottom step leading to a small porch and front door. Shoe prints, big ones, with a distinctive tread, some kind of athletic shoe. And dog prints that came from the front door, crossed the porch and went down the stairs.

“We found Pepper with her leash tied to the porch railing.”

“Pepper?” Rauser asked.

“The dog, Lieutenant,” Balaki answered, seriously. “That bowl of water was there when we got here.”

“Careful going in,” Williams warned, and pushed open the door, then stepped aside for the spatter analyst. “Looks like it started when the first victim opened the door.”

There was a pool of blood just inside the door, more shoe prints and dog tracks. Bloody drag marks led to the bodies. They were positioned on their backs, side by side, the male victim in boxers and a T-shirt.
The dead woman wore a green bathrobe tied at the waist and open enough to expose the knife wound that had probably killed her.

“I opened the robe to check her,” Balaki said, before we could ask. “It was closed all the way to her neck.”

Williams squatted over them and lifted their arms so we could see their wrists tied together with the same gauge twine that had held up Donald Kelly’s head so he was staring at Miki’s front door, the twine that had also been used as a garrote to strangle Troy Delgado. A candy “8,” like the ones you put on cakes, dangled from their tied wrists on a piece of blue ribbon.

Lang was examining the shoe prints. “Best impressions yet. Good detail here. Should be able to identify the shoe with this. Looks like about the right size, Lieutenant.”

“So she opened the door,” Jo Phillips told us. “And he stabs her, slices upward. She falls here.” She pointed at the blood at the door. “Then he walks over here and gets the dog, takes it outside.” She was following shoe and paw prints as she spoke. “He comes back in and walks straight back this way. Male victim was shot here, dragged. Then he goes and gets the woman, drags her, positions her next to the male victim. He tracked into the kitchen too.”

“No vics in the kitchen,” Williams said. “But there’s blood on the sink and counter.”

Lang’s scene tech took body temps. Lang studied them for a minute. “Time of death between eleven and midnight.”

“Male vic was in bed,” I said. “He heard something. He gets up and comes in here with his glasses in his hand. Gunman fires. Wagner drops his glasses.” I pointed to a pair of thick-rimmed glasses on the floor where Jorge Wagner was killed, according to the spatter analyst. Spray and spatter dotted beige walls, drops on the floor, then drag marks. “Killer positions them, binds their wrists together. Lot of symbolism there. Then he closes up her robe, goes into the kitchen, washes his hands, and fills a water bowl for the dog. And leaves it on his way out. He knew exactly what he was going to do and how he wanted to leave the scene.”

“He finds them on the list of licenses. He likes her name. And he starts watching them. Let’s get some people out here to interview the
neighbors,” Rauser ordered. “Anyone on the street when you got here?”

“No sir,” Balaki answered. “Real quiet.”

“Check this out,” Williams said, holding up a framed photograph of the male victim in a baseball cap posing with a group of young boys in uniforms.

“All roads lead back to the ballpark, huh? Maybe he didn’t find them through city hall,” Rauser said. “Balaki, follow that trail. See if Jorge Wagner’s name came up anywhere on the list of coaches at the park where the Delgado kid played. And get me the names of closest living relatives for these two.” He looked down at the slain couple on the floor, fished a pack of nicotine gum out of his pocket, and pushed a piece through the foil. He’d go himself to notify the family. He almost always did. “Williams, why aren’t the cruisers here? We need this street blocked off before the news trucks do it for us.”

“Any second now, Lieutenant,” Williams answered.

The scene tech had the video going. The auto-winder on Jo Phillips’s digital camera was singing. She let it hang around her neck while she swabbed pooled blood, dropped samples into vials, then sealed each with a rubber tip.

Rauser scowled at me. “So he closes up her robe.”

I nodded. “So different than Fatu Doe. He pulled her dress up. But this was an attempt to protect her dignity. She had his mother and father’s names. He didn’t want her found exposed.”

“Yeah, he paid her so much respect at the front door,” Rauser said.

“It wouldn’t have crossed his mind then,” I said. “He blitzed her at the door because it was quiet. He knew it would buy him time to get in. He’d probably watched them for some time. He waited for them to go to bed. When the dog barked, she got up. It wouldn’t have mattered which one of them opened the door. He didn’t see them as anything but objects to complete the fantasy. But once he had control, when he owned them, after he cried and masturbated, he felt protective, affectionate.”