Stranger in the Room: A Novel (12 page)

I spun the Impala around, and we shot down the dirt road with a trail of dust boiling behind us. I dropped Neil at the resort with the sample from Huckaby’s urn and instructions to get it to the testing lab used by the Wades. All our things were at the hotel. I didn’t want to take the time to pack. I didn’t want to check out. I simply wanted to get home, figure out what was going on with my cousin, get back to Big Knob, and finish the job I was hired to do.

I drove with the top lowered in the hot early evening. The air felt good on overheated skin. Whistling wind, the sound of tires on pavement usually calmed me down. It wasn’t working. A million thoughts were going through my mind. How had White Trash gotten loose? Had Miki gotten drunk? Was she using drugs? I thought about the food tray Marko had handed me, then coming in and finding Miki cooking dinner. What the hell was I thinking leaving her in charge of my cat and my loft? What if something had happened to her? Had the black depression that had plagued her most of her life returned? Or the man in her window? I absolutely hated it that I couldn’t take her at her word, that I didn’t know what was real with Miki. She was forgetting things, using dope, alcohol, refusing to take her meds. It wasn’t a good combination.

Closer to Atlanta, the traffic picked up. Exhaust burned my sinuses. My hair was blowing behind me in the chemical air. I was doing ninety as I approached the city on I-85. I barely heard my phone ringing. “Everything’s all right, honey,” my mother said in her sugar-sweet southern. “I have White Trash and Miki. They are both fine.”

“What happened?”

“Well, we don’t know exactly. Somehow White Trash must have slipped out. Miki said she went to the grocery store. White Trash was here when she left.”

In all the time I’d had my bitchy cat, she’d never once rushed the door. She seemed to prefer the loft over Peachtree to the dumpster behind it where I’d found her. On the other hand, if the door was carelessly left open, she might have gone to investigate the world beyond. I started getting mad all over again. “Why the hell isn’t she answering her phone?”

“Keye Street, you need to remember who you’re talking to.”

There are degrees with Mother. Two names was a warning shot. All three and you were going to get killed. I remember Jimmy and I hiding after he’d decided to trim a neighbor’s prize rosebush. To the ground.
Jimmy Landon Street
. I grabbed him and pulled him under the deck, where we waited quietly until she calmed down. I later heard my parents laughing about it.

“Miki had her phone when she went shopping and she didn’t have it when she got back,” my mother told me. “That’s all I know.”

“Thanks for coming to the rescue, Mom. Rauser is so busy. I’m sorry I snapped at you. It scared me.”

“I understand, honey. You love animals like I do.” Not exactly. I’m okay with just one or two at a time. More than that and
Planet of the Apes
goes dancing through my head. I thought about Mother’s cat-covered porch. “Now just go back to your … work,” Mother suggested. “Everything’s fine here.”

“I’m thirty minutes away, Mom. And Miki and I need to have a chat.”

“Please don’t be too hard on her,” Mother whispered. “Bless her heart. She’s been through a lot.”

  
11

I
felt the manager’s hawkish eyes as I crossed the lobby at my hotel and walked toward the elevators. I was a loose cog in the complicated internal architecture at this gorgeous, historic hotel, which he commanded with the synchronization of a water gymnast. I glanced at the time display on my phone. It was after six. I had hoped the hardworking rascal would have gone home by now.

I heard my mother’s voice when I opened the door. I saw her on the couch with Miki, White Trash sprawled across her lap.

Miki stood slowly, turned to me. “Keye, I’m so, so sorry! I swear, she was fine. We were playing earlier. I was teaching her how to roll over for treats.”

Now I was sure she was lying.

“You have a trick cat, honey,” my mother added.

“I saw her before I closed the door,” Miki said. “I know she was inside. I
know
she was. I’m so sorry you had to come back.”

My cousin’s eyes were wide. She looked sober. I saw the worry and dread on her face. It totally took the air out of me. “Look,” I said, “it’s been a really stressful time. I shouldn’t have piled more stuff on you.” I moved past her and looked at White Trash. She was on her back with her back legs spread, totally relaxed, looking up at my mother adoringly, clearly unfazed by her adventure.

“I know she was here, Keye,” Miki repeated. “Seriously, I saw her.”

“So she got out when you got home with groceries. Did you see her when you got home?”

“No.” Miki shook her head.

“Aren’t we just happy everything worked out?” Emily Street said. “My little Snowflake is just fine.”

“It’s not Snowflake,” I said. My mother absolutely refused to call my cat by her given name.

“I’m going to take off, Keye,” Miki said. “Aunt Emily said she’d come by every day and check on White Trash. I know you. You won’t be able to relax with me here now. And frankly, I lost my phone and your cat in one day. I’m not feeling very confident. I’ve got some time off. Maybe I’ll mow my grass and make the mommy association happy.”

I wasn’t going to argue. “I’ll drive you when you’re ready and make sure the house is secure.”

“That would be great,” Miki said. “I have a friend coming by tomorrow to change the locks.”

“I’ll go too,” Mother piped in. “It’ll be fun. I’ll make something special. We could have a pajama party.”

I followed them to Miki’s Inman Park home after changing out of the fake urn-company uniform and into some jeans. Not surprisingly, Miki had decided to ride with Mom. The sun was low, the last bit of orange light hitting the top of my cousin’s grand Victorian as we headed up the weedy walkway. The house looked like a piece of candy, like it was made of iced gingerbread—pink and blue, with elaborately carved railings in white around oddly shaped porches and balconies. As lovely as they are to look at, Victorians never made sense to me—so many nooks and crannies, like afterthoughts. It felt chaotic. I live and work in loft space for a reason. A busy mind does better in open quarters.

We stepped up on the big wraparound porch. Mother was chattering. I was thinking about Miki walking up those steps and hearing someone in her house. I stepped in front of her and took the key, turned it in the lock. Miki leaned in and reached for the wall switch.

An earsplitting scream erupted from my cousin. I heard my mother saying
“oh my god, oh my god
.”

A corpse dangled from the hallway door frame as if from the gallows.

I pushed them out the door and onto the porch, pulled the front door closed. “Get in the car, lock the doors, and call the police.” I said it calmly, though my thoughts were racing. I was trying to make eye contact with Miki. She looked like she was checking out.

“Mother, take Miki and get to the car. Do you need my phone?” She didn’t move. They seemed cemented to the porch. “
Mother
, I need backup. Do you have your phone?” She nodded. “Call Rauser. Take Miki.
Go
.”

I steadied my Glock and eased the front door open with my shoulder, took in the room. Empty. I moved in closer to the dead man hanging from the hallway door. He was elderly and slight. I saw some kind of ligature—a thin rope, perhaps—running under his chin and back behind his head. It appeared to be attached to the wall over the frame on the other side. Its function was clear. It held his head up so that the corpse was looking at the front door. Rigor will seize any position it’s handed. The distortion of death had twisted whatever he was in life into a kind of Halloween mask.

The rope that affixed the old man to the door frame was wrapped around his body several times above his rib cage and under his arms. I noticed that a wound over his left kidney had leaked. Redbrick stains looked like spilled paint on a pale green dress shirt.

I wanted to explore this further, but there wasn’t time. I had to secure Miki’s house. I thought about her and my mother, outside and terrified.

Behind the body hanging from the doorway, a long hallway went right and left, punctuated by poster-size enlargements of Miki’s most famous photographs—an Afghani girl cradling a newborn from
Time
; a single rock-hurling Iranian protester who refused to run from charging riot police,
Newsweek
. An exploding volcano,
National Geographic
.

I let air into my lungs and quietly exhaled some of the tension elevating my heart rate. Adrenaline. It doesn’t matter how many bodies you’ve seen or how confident you are with a gun in your hands or how often you’ve stepped off into the unknown, it will flat-out scare the hell out of you every time.

The light switch was on my left. I hit it with my elbow and spun out
into the open hallway, first left, then right. Two sets of skinny, s-shaped track lighting made the hall bright. The oak floors creaked as I moved past Miki’s photos and inspected each of the four rooms and the closets off the downstairs hallway, then checked the bathroom, jerked back the shower curtain with my pulse hammering in my ears.

Sirens screamed into the quiet evening. Inman Park was about to be jostled rudely away from the dinner table. Minutes later I heard the front door open, voices. Fearing jumpy cops who didn’t know me, I wedged the Glock in the duty holster on the back of my jeans and raised my hands. “Keye Street. I’m coming out.”

“You’re good, Street.” Rauser’s voice. I loved the sound of it most any time, but especially now. I turned the corner and saw him. Detectives and uniforms were spreading out across the house. Over Rauser’s shoulder, I could see cops running through the yard.

“Rooms off the downstairs hallway are secure.” I pointed toward the back of the house. “But there’s still that end of the house left, an upstairs and a full basement.”

“Where are the stairs?” Rauser asked. I pointed in the appropriate direction. “Balaki, take two officers and secure the upstairs. You guys take the back. I’ll get the basement. Where’s Williams?”

“He took the shooting over at Turner Field with Thomas, Lieutenant,” Balaki answered.

Rauser looked at the dead man hanging in the door frame. No emotion. “Where’s the video guy? Oh and get the victim IDed right away. Don’t wait for CSU.” He had barked at Detective Angotti, who’d just made Homicide a month ago, young, thick-lipped, and compact with dark wavy hair.

“I need to check on Miki and Mom,” I said. “They’re freaking out.”

He looked back at the corpse. “I’ve got an officer with them. They see this?” I nodded. He said, “You know what this is about?”

“No idea.”

“Show me the basement.”

I knew the house well from when Miki had let me stay here with White Trash during the most intrusive part of the renovation at my place.

I led Rauser to a narrow door in the back of the kitchen. Throughout
the house, I could hear cops yelling “clear” each time they’d secured a room.

“How many entrances in the house?” Rauser wanted to know.

“Three. Front. Basement door’s under the back deck, but it’s usually padlocked from the outside. And a storm door with a deadbolt off the sunroom in back.”

Rauser flattened himself against the wall and motioned for me to get behind him. He reached a long arm for the knob, turned it and let the door swing open, waited for a couple of beats, then swung out with his weapon. We started slowly down steep, narrow wooden steps.

“Light’s on a string to the left,” I whispered. I’d been down these steps a few times. The washer and dryer were in the basement.

A shaft of light speared the darkness and stopped us cold. It was a cop’s flashlight from outside looking into the dark ground-level basement windows. Rauser pulled the light cord and a hundred-watt bulb cast a harsh bluish-white light across the basement. We circled, weapons out front, our backs to each other, then spread out and checked behind stacked cardboard boxes with neat labels, a defunct water heater, an enormous working HVAC unit that looked new, an ancient enlarger from one of Miki’s old darkrooms. Everything one expects to find in a photographer’s basement. Through the windows I saw the feet and legs of cops moving around outside.

We holstered our weapons. “We’re not a bad team,” Rauser said.

“That mean you’re ready to sell your soul and go private?” I asked.

“Uh-huh. And maybe Michelle Obama’s gonna help me plant that garden.”

I smiled. Spring fever and too many weeks of convalescing after some injuries got the best of him this year, and he decided he would put a vegetable garden in his backyard. He rented a tiller and chewed up a ten-by-twelve space in the center, which is the only area to get full sun. But then he returned to work and Atlanta hadn’t wanted to behave long enough for him to actually care for the space. The area, now a full-on eyesore, had turned into a litter box for the neighbor’s cat. I’d seen Rauser standing at his deck doors in his boxers in the morning, staring at the cat doing his business while he drank his coffee. “Little bastard,” he always muttered, but I’d never seen him make a move to run the cat off.