Stranger in the Room: A Novel (42 page)

“I want to go home.”

I felt that tic at the corner of my eye. “Not yet. It’s not safe.”

“It’s a free country, Keye. I’m an adult. Besides, isn’t Mr. Uniform out there supposed to protect me? Make him take me home.”

Pain makes people nuts. So does fear.
Cut her some slack
, I told myself. “Why put yourself and the officer in more danger?” I didn’t say that she’d already put my parents at risk or that because of her Richards had added me to his creepy list. “Give Rauser’s team twenty-four hours. They’re closing in. Now, eat something and take the ibuprofen. You’ll feel better.”

“I’m going to call some friends to keep me company,” Miki said.

I pressed my finger against the corner of my eye. “Miki, every time that door opens, every time someone else is introduced, you’re adding risk. No one should know where you are, okay? It’s not safe. Not yet.”

I poured a glass of water from a filtered pitcher in Rauser’s nearly empty refrigerator and set it on the bed table. My phone jangled. My mother is the only one who calls me at seven-thirty in the morning. I looked at caller ID. It was my alarm company.

“This is Peachtree Security. Is this Keye Street?”

“Yes.”

“We have an alarm at your place of business. We’ve notified law enforcement.”

Now what?
Crap
. “Miki, I have to go.” I kissed her cheek.

She refused to look at me. “Tell the cop Tyrone’s coming over later, okay? And tell him not to bother me.”

I turned and left before the scene ended with my hands around her neck. The diva act was wearing on me. I let the officer know about Tyrone’s visit. He’d have to call Rauser to authorize the visit. I didn’t like the idea of anyone coming in and out. It made the officer’s job too difficult, and I believed it would have a psychological effect on his level of vigilance. He would be at his best when he wasn’t expecting anyone, when everyone who stepped on that porch was suspect.

  
37

T
wo police cruisers were parked at my office when I came down the hill in the blue bump. The lot was empty. The surrounding businesses didn’t open until nine or ten. The metal door to my office was wide open. I could see the dents as soon as I stepped out of the car. An officer was sitting in his vehicle with the engine running, writing on a clipboard. The windshield wipers made an occasional sweep. The windows were foggy. The rain we’d been promised had turned from a fine mist to a trickle. Another officer stepped out of my office onto the landing where the bullet that hit my partner had ricocheted.

“You Ms. Street?” she asked when I ran up the steps. She was standing under the tin overhang out of the rain. I glanced behind her into my work space.

“What happened?”

“Looks like vandals,” she said. “We responded within seven minutes, but there’s a lot of damage. Door was open when we arrived. No one on the premises.”

I stood there in my doorway, trying to take it in. She was right: The damage was extensive. It looked like someone had run through our office with a huge hook and just swept everything off the surfaces and onto the floor. Our desktops, monitors, our printer and fax machine
were smashed, broken, kicked. Neil’s expensive chair was on its side. Glass and bits of plastic and paper littered the floor. The smart panel was shattered. There had to be thousands of dollars in damage. Hours of work and love and effort down the tubes.

“Looks like they used crowbars on the door,” the officer commented. “Probably what they used in here too. Hope you’re insured.”

Every drawer in my office had been wrenched out, dumped. My desk chair had been ripped up, vicious slits across the back and seat. The glass top that protects my desk had cracks webbed out across the length of it. He’d used a black Sharpie to write
CUNT
on the glass. There was no question that Richards had done this. His vile energy had coated everything in our offices.

“We checked the whole strip. No other break-ins,” the officer told me. “Looks like somebody has it in for you, Ms. Street.”

I left my office and went to Neil’s desk chair, stood it upright, dusted it off—a tiny island of order in the ugly chaos.

R
auser was in Williams’s cube in the Homicide room. Detectives Bevins, Angotti, and Thomas were at their desks. The other cubes were empty. That meant fourteen homicide investigators were out on the streets today. I didn’t have to guess their focus. Rauser waved me in. I heard Andy Balaki’s South Georgia drawl on the speakerphone. “We’re heading to the job site to see if we can find him.”

Rauser pressed the end call button and looked at me. “Monica Roberts called me awhile ago. Said you’d agreed to an interview with the two of us?”

I glanced at Bevins. She tried to hide the smile playing on her lips, looked down at her keyboard. I figured Rauser had let off some steam after the reporter called.

“Does that sound like something I’d agree to?” I retorted. I didn’t even try to disguise my shitty mood.

“Well. No. Actually,” Rauser said.

“She asked. I was vague. But I did not agree.”

“You catch any news today?”

“I’ve been a little busy.” I didn’t mention watching the press conference.

“The Fox Five morning show had a big discussion about you,” Bevins said.

“Great,” I muttered. Dread hit me like an eighteen-wheeler. Why wouldn’t it? So far the day had been about as much fun as finding a hairball in my shoe. I assumed the worst, of course. On the right day with the right degree of stress and exhaustion, it didn’t take a lot to shake my self-esteem.

Rauser was looking at something on the computer, typing with two knotty fingers, something I usually found cute. It annoyed me today. “Relax, Street,” he said without looking up. “It’s like I said, they like straight shooters.”

“Looks like you have single-handedly broken the stigma of addiction by talking about recovery,” Bevins said. She didn’t try to hide the sarcastic tone. Bevins had her own personal challenges with booze. I knew this from Rauser. It was private. She’d never talked to me about it.

“A few months ago they were going to string me up,” I said, gloomily.

“As long as you know how it works,” Rauser said. “Where you been all morning?” He looked up at me. “You okay?”

“My office was trashed this morning. Richards. He left a note on my desk using one of his favorite words. Everything was smashed to pieces. I had to deal with police reports. Insurance companies, locksmiths, landlords. I had to wait for the door to be repaired before I left.”

“Why didn’t you call?”

“The damage was done, Rauser. The police were there. There was nothing you could do.”

“Seeing you talk to the press outside his crime scene and then a follow-up on the morning show probably really got his bells ringing.” Bevins was frowning.

“No doubt,” I agreed. “So where are we? Anything from the tip lines?”

“Half my unit is out on follow-ups,” Rauser said. “And we located
the landscaping company the grandparents told us about. Big turnover in the ranks. The front office doesn’t really mingle with the workers. Nobody remembers our guy. But they have him on record. They have a supervisor who’s been there a few years. Balaki and Williams are trying to locate him. See what he remembers.”

Lightning flashed so bright we all looked at the windows. I did what I’ve done in storms all my life. I counted in my head, waiting for the thunder. It was a tactic my mother had used to distract me from the storms that had always frightened me.
One, two, three. Boom
. There it was. The lights blinked out in the old building. Computer screens went dark. Bevins cursed softly. There were twelve seconds before the lights and fans and computers came back to life. In the silence, all we could hear was the rain spraying the windows along North Avenue like buckshot.

“Christ,” Rauser said. “Somebody find out if this shit is gonna get worse. Why haven’t we heard back from Balaki and Williams? Bevins, find out where they are with that landscape guy.”

“Landscapers can’t work in this stuff, Lieutenant,” Bevins answered evenly. “They’re probably still trying to locate him.”

“Find out,” Rauser snapped.

“Lieutenant,” Detective Angotti said. “Those storms have crossed the state line. Watches are out for the city and warnings for the south metro counties.”

Ken Lang came around the corner. He dropped a photo of the bloody shoe prints we’d all seen on the floor where Jorge Wagner and Emma Jackson had been shot and stabbed. “They’re plate shoes,” he said. “Size thirteen.”

“As in baseball?” Rauser asked.

“As in umpire.” Lang dropped another photo down on the table. “This particular style just looks like an orthopedic. Super comfortable. But look at this angle. High-traction rubber outsole. It matches our prints.”

Bevins cupped her hand over the phone. “Lieutenant, Balaki and Williams are talking to the landscaper now,” she reported.

“Good. Okay, everybody, go back over that list of officials in the local leagues. Find out if they have photo IDs. Look for anything that stands out. We think he’s still using an
R
name. So start there. These
people are like freelancers. They work different leagues all over the state. Bastard could be anywhere right now.”

The phone rang. Rauser hit speaker. “Found him, Lieutenant.” Balaki sounded excited. “At the Zesto’s on Moreland. He remembers Jesse Richards real well. Said the guy was pretty strange. Pissed off a lot. Fat and real touchy about it. Only other guy that would put up with him was some guy named Rabelo who got him started jogging.”

“What happened to Rabelo?” I asked.

“Julian Rabelo quit his job here in a letter and never came back,” Balaki answered. “Asked to have his last paycheck snail mailed. Crew chief thinks it was pretty close to the time Richards left.”

“I bet it was,” I said. Rabelo’s decomposed body was probably in some stretch of forest or picked clean on the banks of the Chattahoochee so that Mister R, as Fatu Doe had called him, could steal his identity. We’d found our man.

“Crew chief is calling the front office to see where they sent his final check,” Balaki told us. “We got Rabelo’s DMV records pulled up.”

“Crew chief recognize the photo?”

“No sir. He swears it’s not the guy he knew as Rabelo. So we asked if it looked like Richards and he says maybe, if he lost a hundred pounds.”

“Here we go, Lieutenant,” Bevins said. “We have a Julian Rabelo on the list of league umpires. We took his statement in our first sweep. No red flags.”

“Run Rabelo’s DMV records through face recognition with Richards’s. We get any certainty, we can go in without asking,” Rauser said. “Who interviewed Rabelo?”

“I took his statement,” Angotti said. “I remember him. We only talked to two umps that day. Nothing suspicious about either one of their statements.”

We heard Balaki’s muffled voice talking to the landscaper on Rauser’s speaker. “We have the address,” Balaki reported. “They sent the check to the address on the license. We’re on our way.”

“Stake it out. Wait for backup,” Rauser ordered. “Thomas, get a BOLO going on Rabelo. Now, let’s get some background on this address. And let me see satellite imagery of the neighborhood. Everybody
have a look. We want to do this right. That means knowing where we are and what corners the rats run to hide.”

“Face rec gives us a ninety-five percent likelihood Rabelo and Richards are one and the same,” Bevins reported.

Rauser went down the hall to brief Major Hicks. Hicks would release Julian Rabelo’s photograph to the media immediately, he told us when we returned.

“Angotti and Thomas, take a car. Bevins, you ride with me,” Rauser told them.

“I want to go,” I said.

“You can follow us,” Rauser said. “But you gotta stay off the property until it’s secure.” I nodded my agreement. My heart was doing about a hundred and fifty. I could not wait to see the prick that had torn up my office this morning taken down. I hoped they made sure he accidentally walked into a few doors on the way to the station.

The lights blinked off again. The elevators were down. We used flashlights to navigate the pitch-black concrete stairs at City Hall East. Vehicle trunks were popped open in the garage, and we pulled on overt body armor—vests with Kevlar panels that would protect us from a body shot. Even with the protective plates, the vests were surprisingly light. But they were hot. Rauser tossed me an APD rain slicker and got in his car with Bevins. I jumped into Neil’s blue bump. Thomas and Angotti pulled out behind me.

We curled through the Old Fourth Ward toward I-20 and Boulevard. The house was on a month-to-month lease that had been renewed many times in Julian Rabelo’s name. A known slumlord owned the house. Bevins had told us APD had dealt with the guy many times. He’d never cooperated when they’d needed permission to go inside. They stopped asking. Most cops would testify they’d heard something inside that suggested a life was in danger, always weighing one oath against another.

We pulled onto McDonald Street SE and headed toward the block between Berean Avenue and Boulevard. The rain was coming in sideways sheets now. The street started out with freshly painted one-story frame houses and mowed yards and window boxes. But it quickly degenerated into sagging porches and broken fences, chipping paint,
graffiti-covered walls, and overgrown lots with tires and junk cars piled up. We parked behind Williams and Balaki, in front of a house with a fallen porch overhang. A cabless trailer from a big truck had been dumped on the corner. It was covered with elaborate artwork, gang symbols, and graffiti that was both beautiful and alarming. Weeds had grown up around it. The back was open, and a group of kids were standing around inside out of the weather, smoking, laughing. The street was lined with cars. Either the residents were working night jobs or they weren’t working at all. The poor had only gotten poorer in Atlanta for a while now. It was a perfect neighborhood in which to hide.