Stranger in the Room: A Novel (27 page)

“I’ll take the fifth,” Rauser said.

“Thanks for the support,” I said.

“A source says Street gained access to the property with the help of a neighbor who was there by permission.…”

A source?
I smiled. Mary Kate Stargell had been busy too.

“… Street contacted GBI agents from the property when she allegedly discovered mass graves littering the surrounding woods.…”

While the reporter talked, stock footage began to play of me crossing Peachtree Center Avenue last year dressed for an appointment at Suntrust Plaza with one of my biggest clients.

“Nice shoes,” Miki remarked, with that talent for detachment that runs in our family.

“According to the attorney, Street emailed photographs of the carnage to GBI officials after she stumbled over a severed head.…”

“You like the skirt?” I asked.

“The GBI will attempt to piece together and identify what authorities say could add up to several hundred dismembered bodies.…”

“Hot,” Miki said.

“Christ,” Rauser muttered, and drained his glass.

  
24

S
ongbirds. I heard them as soon as I opened my eyes. I never hear birds at The Georgian unless one of them careens into the palladian windows. But that’s not a happy sound. More of a tragic little thump, really.

I was lying on my side in Rauser’s bed with a white sheet tangled around me. The door to a screened porch was open. The sky was just beginning to brighten. I could see Rauser sitting on the porch. His hair was wet. I smelled coffee and wondered how long he’d been up.

I slipped into one of his shirts and a pair of boxer shorts that had to be rolled at the waist to keep them up, brushed my teeth, splashed cold water on puffy eyes. Four hours’ sleep wasn’t enough for me anymore. Rauser had clearly had even less.

I stood over the gas stove, looking down into a saucepan of liquid the color of tar. Rauser’s I-don’t-give-a-shit cowboy coffee. He could not contain his sarcasm when he visited my office and saw all the devices Neil uses to achieve the perfect cup. But he never turned down Neil’s coffee.

I poured black coffee through a sieve into my cup, set the microwave for thirty seconds, then found my phone in the living room where I’d silenced it last night. Twelve missed calls. Six messages. I knew they weren’t from prospective clients. These calls had all come
in after the report on the crematory aired. Oh joy. Fortunately, I had a great reason not to talk to reporters. I did not want to say anything that could damage the GBI’s case against the Kirkpatricks. GBI would have someone handling the press by this morning, I was sure, someone with a tone more measured and a head cooler than mine.

I stepped out on the screened deck. I kissed Rauser from behind and smelled aftershave on his skin. He reached an arm back for me.

“Been up long?”

“Nah,” he said, but I knew that wasn’t true. He was showered and shaved and he’d made coffee and dressed. He was dreading the day. The Major Crimes Division had a new addition today, Major Herman Hicks. Rauser’s new boss. Hicks was coming in from Internal Affairs. He’d have a lot to prove, Rauser had told me, and that worried him. Rauser would have to reveal the details to Hicks of an investigation that was more complicated and more expensive each day.

I sipped coffee and looked at the place he’d tilled for a vegetable garden and never planted. In the early-morning light, it was a mess of dirt and weeds. It was humid as hell already. No air was moving through the screen.

Something scuffled at the fence and we both turned, instantly uneasy. Rauser’s hand went to his weapon, then slid away when we saw the gray tabby from next door pulling himself up and over the fence. He balanced on top for a couple of seconds, then jumped to the ground and sauntered over to the patch of neglected garden. He dug around, sniffed, turned a few circles, sniffed, dug, then laid back his ears and did his business.

“Little bastard,” Rauser growled, watching the cat with Wile E. Coyote eyes. “Fucker’s looking right at us.” I had to bite my lip and look away. Rauser had unintentionally built a giant cat box in his yard.

He sighed. “Officer here in forty minutes. Time to wake Miki up and make sure we’re straight on everything. And I want to get someone out to your mom’s. I don’t want to risk her picking up a tail and leading him straight to the TV studio.”

I didn’t want to think about Miki or Miki’s safety or the baffling murders of a child and an elderly man. I wanted to sleep it all away—
the murders, the stalker who had gotten too close to my parents, the crematory. All of it. I stood up anyway and prepared to start the day.

R
auser was behind glass in his office, the phone pressed against his left ear, when I walked into the station. It was ten a.m. Miki and my mother had been escorted safely to the television studio Miki had arranged for Mother’s taping. White Trash was fed, and I was showered and changed. Brit Williams spotted me coming up the hallway from the elevators and met me as I turned the corner. Rauser had let his team know I was coming onboard. It wasn’t the first time we’d worked together. They’d waded through distrust and resentment the previous year, when I’d been hired by APD as an outside consultant. We’d worked it out. Trust has to be earned. I understood that. Brit Williams had stepped in for Rauser last year when he was on injury leave. It had earned Williams a promotion to sergeant when Rauser returned and he graciously stepped back down. There were seventeen investigators in Homicide. A couple of them had become good friends. Williams was one of them.

He showed me to a low-sided cube in the room where the Homicide Unit worked as part of APD’s Major Crimes Unit. He was in camel-colored slacks, a white dress shirt, tie loosened. His forehead was glistening, but the shirtsleeves hadn’t come up yet. Mid-morning and it was eighty-eight degrees outside. Gulf air was streaming into our already unstable atmosphere. I think down South we actually enjoy the volatility of the weather. Straight-line winds come in on the afternoon thunderstorms and whip up a lot of drama. Huge fallen trees with shallow roots cause chaos at intersections and street closures. Darkened traffic lights swing in the wind. At lunch tables all over the city one hears terms like
wind shear
and
barometric pressure
. El Niño and Atlanta’s red-hot summers will educate you in a meteorologist’s vocabulary. We’re all experts now.

As usual, the air-conditioning wasn’t keeping up at City Hall East. A couple of pieces of metallic ribbon had been tied to one of the rusted registers, but the whiff of air was so faint coming up from somewhere
below two million square feet of decaying brick and plaster that the ribbon lifted and twisted sporadically.

I sat down inside the gray cube. Williams leaned over me. “I’ve got you logged in to the system so if it’s entered, you can access it. I jotted down the case numbers for you, but you can keyword access too. If it’s real cold, I can get it from Records downstairs.”

“Victims’ families and the volunteer driver is where I’d like to start.”

Williams nodded. “Help yourself. Recorded interviews are part of the official report.”

Rauser came out of his office. “Shooting outside lottery headquarters downtown. Officers on the scene. A suspect has been detained. Thomas, Velazquez, you take it. Angotti, you work the crowd for overhears,” he said, instructing his detective to listen for whispers in a crowd that may not readily be reported to police.

“On it,” Detective Thomas, one of two female detectives in the Homicide Unit, said. All three detectives pushed away from their desks.

“Close one and open two more,” Rauser said, and raised his voice. “Just a reminder: everybody in the War Room at five so everybody knows what everybody else is doing, please. Also, Major Hicks would like to introduce himself.” Scowling, he turned back to his office. Rauser hated having unsolved cases. He was a good cop. He’d been entrusted with a profound duty to the families of victims, and he felt the weight of that with every investigation. He’d sit in his office and study the files for hours, go back to the scenes, brainstorm with his team, push them, push himself. He stopped and turned back to me. “You got what you need?”

I nodded. “All set.”

“Gimme fifteen to finish up some things. If you’re going over interviews, I want a second look with you.”

Twenty minutes later we were sitting in front of a wide flat-screen monitor. Rauser was leaned back with his ankle propped on one knee. I had my legal pad in front of me—yellow with wide blue lines. Easy for rereading notes. On the screen, I watched Troy Delgado’s grief-stricken parents being interviewed. It was hard to watch. Then Williams and Balaki interviewed Donald Kelly’s daughter and granddaughter
and her husband, a grandson. Those closest to the victims had to be excluded first. The detectives carefully reconstructed the hours leading up to the killings, gently pushing the same questions at people who did not want to submit to an interview, who simply wanted to be alone with their anguish. This is just one of the tightropes walked by investigators every day. They are often seen as the enemy by the families. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Rauser told me the grandchildren and great-grandchild stood to profit most from Kelly’s death. He got up, stretched and made a kind of growling noise, left and returned with cold water in two mugs. “Too damn hot for coffee,” he complained, as I went back over the recording of Brit Williams’s interview with Abraam Balasco, Donald Kelly’s volunteer driver.

“He didn’t want to go,” Balasco was saying. His hair was cut short, thin on top, gray with strands of brown. “He was quiet the whole way. Wasn’t himself. I shoulda just taken him to the park instead. He liked it there.”

“Did you have any prior contact with the Kelly family?” Williams asked.

Balasco shook his head. “Only when I took him over there. Sometimes the daughter would be waiting. But mostly I just put him on the elevator. Christ.” His head tilted down. His hand came to his forehead. This interview had been taped only hours after Kelly had been abducted. Balasco had spent most of the time in the hospital. Hard to know when you were looking at real grief and confusion or performance art. But I couldn’t see what Balasco had to gain from Kelly’s death. The man appeared genuinely disturbed, even blaming himself for delivering Kelly to the place he would be abducted, then murdered. “He said, ‘My daughter’s a bitch.’ Said they were just waiting for him to die. His great-grandson was the only reason Don bothered with them.”

“Had he ever said anything like that before?” Williams wanted to know. “Did you ever get the feeling he was in danger?”

“He was a disappointed man,” Balasco answered bleakly. “Not a frightened one.”

I clicked on the left arrow at the bottom of the screen and rewound.
“He said, ‘My daughter’s a bitch.’ Said they were just waiting for him to die. His great-grandson was the only reason Don bothered with them.”

“What was Kelly’s place like, Rauser? Retirement community, right?” Rauser nodded and kept his eyes on the screen. I was playing catch-up. This investigation was five days old already.

“Assisted living,” Rauser said. “Monitored pretty close. Nice little apartment. Sparse. Not a lot of personal items, clothes, a few pictures, TV, bedside clock radio, typewriter. No computer.”

“You have the personal items?”

Rauser got up. “In my office. Haven’t returned them to evidence yet.” He came back with a box labeled with Kelly’s name and case number. He lifted the lid, and I saw a keychain, a wallet, a typed manuscript held together with binder clips titled
Call Me Monday
by Donald A. Kelly.

“Been reading it,” Rauser told me. “Not bad. It’s about baseball and a hot chick. What’s not to like, right? Some of the pages are old, some are newer. Looks like he’d been working on it for years.”

My phone went off. I saw Neil’s name on the display.

“Hey, Keye, remember when you told me to look for anything similar to balloons and wrapping paper?” I put him on speaker. “Found this in the nightly police reports in the Stone Mountain newspaper. About a year ago, a woman was found with a gunshot wound to the head in Stone Mountain Village. She was found in the gazebo. No ID. No personal belongings apart from what she was wearing—skirt, blouse, underclothes, one silver bracelet, and a ribbon tied like an ankle bracelet.”

“What’s the date?” Rauser asked Neil, then jotted it down. We moved into the Homicide room. Rauser handed the note to Bevins. “Get hold of Stone Mountain PD. Find out what they ended up with on this Jane Doe case. And let’s see if we can get a look at her.”

“That gazebo is in the heart of the village,” I said. I’d been there shopping dozens of times with my mother. She loved the village, with its quaint row of restaurants, stores full of antiques and folk art. I remembered going there with her to a German restaurant and watching her flatter and flirt her way into the kitchen. She fully understood the intricacies of authentic German buttercream by the time we left. Mother was a student of restaurants. “It was a disposal site, not a
primary scene,” I added. “You can’t fire a gun there and get away with it. The killer would have known leaving a body there would have drawn a lot of attention.”