Stranger in the Room: A Novel (43 page)

The checks on Rabelo before we’d left the station told us he’d gotten his citizenship just before 9/11 and he’d worked in either food service or landscaping. He appeared to have no family in this country. He wasn’t married. He had no children. He was light-skinned and lived in a dilapidated neighborhood of transients. His neighbors probably did not even know his name. In a neighborhood of month-to-month leases, who would have noticed if he was replaced by someone else?

We all stepped out into the rain. Rauser glared at me. “I’ll stay off the property until it’s secure,” I told him. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to get as close as possible. I was a big girl, and they knew it. I’d worked closely on surveillance ops last year with Rauser’s investigators on a subject I’d been profiling for APD while Rauser was in the hospital.

They checked hardware and vests, turned their attention to a house three doors down, a single-level frame partially obscured by wisteria vines and clumps of privet that must have been eight feet tall. The house had once been painted a light blue, but had been weather-stripped down to raw, bowing board and sagging gutters.

Rauser’s nod was all it took. Angotti and Thomas went over a bent chain-link fence to the back. Balaki, Williams, Bevins, and Rauser went in the front. I pulled up the hood on the rain jacket and positioned myself on the sidewalk in front, made sure vines and shrubs blocked me from the windows. My vest wouldn’t do anything to protect the rest of me. I wanted to be close, but I didn’t want to be a sniper’s target.

A dog started to bark as soon as Rauser and his investigators hit
the front porch, a small dog. Poodle, I thought. No dander. No shedding. No dog hair at crime scenes.

I saw Angotti and Thomas creeping around the back of the house. One week since Troy Delgado’s body had been found. One week and here we were. The investigation had roared full force. Unfortunately, I hadn’t understood until Richards’s grandparents talked about the dolls in his closet what his next move would be, and because of that, a young couple had been murdered just before their wedding. That responsibility felt like a ton of bricks on me right now.

I drew my weapon and positioned myself with my back to a kudzu-covered tree. I could see both ends of the sidewalk this way. I wasn’t going to take any chances on getting clobbered from behind.

Through the slashing raindrops, I watched Williams slam his foot into the door just above the knob. I heard shouting, the investigators clearing rooms, checking in with one another. My pulse was in high gear. I felt something at my feet and looked down. A white miniature poodle was looking up at me, wagging his tail, squinting against the rain. He was wearing a baby-blue bandanna. I bent down and scooped him up, tried to hold him still. He was soaked. His tag said
Hank
.

“Good boy, Hank,” I told him. “Be still, buddy. You’re okay.”

I heard Rauser’s voice. “All secure, Street. Nobody home.” Disappointment washed over me. I had longed to see Jesse Owen Richards marched out in handcuffs.

I carried Hank inside and set him down, closed the front door so he wouldn’t take off again. “Hey Keye, you gotta see this,” Balaki called.

I walked through a living room with a rattling air-conditioning window unit and shabby furniture. I noticed Hank’s food and water bowls were filled in a stand as I passed a small galley kitchen piled high with pots and pans and dirty dishes. The place smelled awful. On my left, a bedroom with an unmade mattress lay on the floor, sheet rumpled and stained. No blankets. I turned the corner at the second bedroom and saw Miki’s blue eyes. Rauser and his detectives were all looking at the collage of photographs—Miki, seemingly unaware of being photographed, in grainy cell phone pictures, some clearer than others. Tacked and taped to the walls were hundreds of Miki’s photographs from magazines. Sticky notes were attached that said
Afghanistan, New York, Texas, California, Alaska, Iraq
. The
dates were written under each location. There was a single chair in the room and a lot of porn, magazines with girls too young to show their breasts showing their breasts anyway. Hand towels were all over the floor. Rauser handed me a pair of gloves.

“You’re going to need those,” Bevins said. “Cum towels everywhere. This shithole’s DNA is all over the place.”

Rauser opened the closet, and we saw a single Barbie doll hanging by its neck. He looked at me. “Miki,” I said.

“He left the dog,” Rauser said. “So he’s coming back. Looks like it’s the only thing in this dump he cares about. If the BOLO doesn’t get him first, we got him as soon as he gets back in the hood. Williams and Angotti, you stake out the street. Thomas, take that intersection up there. What kind of car is he driving?”

“Ninety-eight silver Honda Accord owned by Julian Rabelo with a current registration.” Balaki recited the tag number that had gone out with the Be-On-The-Lookout Bulletin to APD officers and other law enforcement agencies around the state.

“Balaki, dig through this shit and see if you can find something useful. Bevins, maybe that computer has some clues about where he hangs out early in the middle of the day.”

“What about the dog?” Balaki asked.

“Put him in my car. I’ll bring him to the station,” Rauser said. We all looked at him. “What? You want this little guy here if the shit goes down?” Rauser picked Hank up and got his face licked. “I’ll take him myself. Balaki, grab his food for me.”

I stood in the center of the room. Everwhere my eyes looked there were hundreds of photographs of my cousin, indications of a million ways this man had violated her privacy and terrorized her. There were pictures of her house and car, of Miki in workout clothes on a treadmill. I remembered her shivering, saying she felt like she was being watched at the gym. I’d had some flip answer to her concerns at the time. Guilt squeezed the air out of my lungs. “I’m going back to check on Miki,” I told Rauser.

“She’s fine, Street. Officer on duty checked in on time.”

I was silent, scanning the room once more. It made me sick. “I want to be with her when you call to say you’ve got Richards locked up.”

  
38

T
hunder shook so hard I felt it in the blue bump when I parked on Rauser’s tree-lined street. Huge branches on old water oaks bounced in the wind like a rowboat at sea. The sky was blue-black—a perfect day to see Jesse Owen Richards put away where he belonged. I imagined the surprise party waiting for him courtesy of the Atlanta Police Department. I wanted my life back. I wanted my cousin safe. I hoped he dropped the soap in prison every goddamn day. I had no sympathy for him. I’d stood in the room he’d lined with pictures of my cousin, the room where he’d touched himself and planned the terrible things he wanted to do to her, to me, to others. A lot of us had seen some bad shit as kids. Most of us hadn’t turned into monsters because of it.

A line of young maples bowed in the gusts, leaves blowing straight out like flags. I lifted the hood on the APD rain jacket I was still wearing and felt resistance from the wind when I pushed open the car door and stepped out into the rain. A gust nearly knocked me off my feet. The jacket flapped up behind me before I could get it zipped up. I thought about White Trash at home alone. She hated storms as much as I did. Her history as an alley cat had made her good at reading the atmosphere and seeking out a warm cubbyhole. Nothing is as miserable as a wet cat. That she now lives in dry cushy comfort apparently hasn’t sunk in. She still heads under the bed at the first
clap of thunder—learned behaviors, avoidance skills. I knew them well.

Lightning sliced across a dirty black sky. The air was full of juice. I felt the energy on my neck and arms. I didn’t like it. This kind of storm always undoes me a little. Lightning has odd taste. It doesn’t always take the path of least resistance and go for the tallest object. Nope. It indiscriminately knocks the shit out of several hundred people a year. I didn’t want to be one of them.

I rushed up the sidewalk toward Rauser’s house. I hoped Officer Jacobs wasn’t going to shoot me when I banged on Rauser’s front door like a crazy person, but I wasn’t staying out here.

Something hit my foot when I opened the storm door. A cell phone had tumbled out. It must have been wedged between the two doors. It looked like the one I’d seen in Officer Jacobs’s hands earlier—small, white, an iPhone. Why would his phone be out here? Had he gone in and out and accidentally dropped it? Why would he do that hours before his shift ended? He seemed too attached to his phone this morning not to miss it. Had something—someone—drawn him to the door?

The hazard lights started to flash in my brain. I pressed my ear to the wood door. Silence. I stood there for a moment, wet, listening, deciding, and forgetting about the howling wind whipping hair in my face or the strobed, lightning-filled sky.

I found Rauser’s key and pushed it into the deadbolt carefully, turned it quietly. I eased the door open an inch … 
two, three
. The chain caught. Through the opening, I saw a slice of the couch where the officer had set up camp this morning. No one there. No movement. Epinephrine lit up my bloodstream. Every cell knew something was off. My heart started to jackhammer.

I leapt off the porch, ducked under the front windows, moved fast toward Rauser’s office, the guest room, Miki. The room was in the elevated rear corner of the house. I hoisted myself up on the top of the chain-link fence. Rain and wind stung my face. My foot slipped on the wet fence, and sharp metal points ripped the skin down my calf. Opiate receptors shot off their fireworks, but it still felt like someone was holding a torch to my leg. I lost my balance, fell, hit the ground on my back. Muddy red-clay rivers of rain had jumped the curb, sluicing down the yard. I was soaked to the skin. I pushed myself up, climbed
back on the fence, got hold of the windowsill, raised up and looked inside. I was peering through glass and screen into an unlit room. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust. But then I saw the empty bed.

Where was Miki?

Where was Officer Jacobs?

I dropped down, ran under the deck behind the house, and curved up around the side where the dining-room windows were low enough to see inside. Rauser had knocked out some walls. I’d have a view. I’d be able to determine where they were in the house, and, I hoped, what was happening. A million scenarios ran through my head. None of them had happy endings.

I turned the corner and got smacked by tropical storm–force winds and debris. Anything loose—branches, leaves, blossoms, birds’ nests—was being stripped off and sent flying. BB-size hail started to ping off everything. I pressed into the house, back rubbing against brick, leaned forward and tried to get a look inside.

My cousin was at the dining-room table. So was Officer Jacobs. Strips of duct tape covered their mouths. I could tell by the way their shoulders were hunched that their hands were tied behind them, anchoring them to the chairs. Both wore children’s cone-shaped party hats. Candles flickered on a square white cake with blue icing.

I sucked in air, pressed against the brick, feeling sick.
The birthday party—the murder-suicide
. Jesse Owen Richards was desperately trying to relive the scene that had scarred his childhood. And I had a seat at the table. That day when he raged at me on the voice disguiser, he’d meant it literally.

Where was he?

I fumbled for my phone, trying to shield it from the weather, but it was coming down too hard. Rauser answered on the first ring. The wind was so loud I barely heard him. Tornado sirens had started to wail in the distance; recorded emergency messages were blasting out over the city. Atlanta was bracing for a helluva storm. “Richards has Miki and your officer. He’s inside. Rauser’s staging the birthday party.”

Then … 
Bang
. Lightning lit up a transformer on a telephone pole at the curb in an explosion of sparks. I felt the electricity sizzle
through my phone. I dropped it. The house went dark. I fell to my knees under the window, got as close to the house as I could. Richards would come to the window to find out what had happened, wouldn’t he? Hail was piling up, looking like tiny golf balls. The most dangerous part of a storm, I’d always heard.

I waited, my pulse hammering, then rose and peered inside. And nearly fell back.

There he was.
Mr. R
. His face was lit up in the dancing glow of birthday candles. He wore a bright gold foil hat with pink and blue balloons, the elastic strap under his chin. Beneath the cap, his head was shaved. The child’s hat seemed especially small and strange sitting on his big head. The elastic strap cut into his chin. He was sitting between Miki and Officer Jacobs. His mouth was moving. His expression was agitated, his hands flailed like he was arguing.

The umpire
, I realized. The umpire on the ball field who’d yelled at the coach, the man who’d dusted his cap and stalked off angrily.

A balled-up fist slammed the table. I saw Miki’s body jerk. He leaned over into her face and yelled something I couldn’t make out. Her eyes were blank with terror.