The Stranger You Seek (15 page)

The boy lifted his head to me for the first time when I stood to leave. “Are you going to keep my daddy from finding us?”

His fearful dark eyes set off an ache in me. “Is that what you want?” I asked gently.

His attention turned quickly back to the toy car. I thought I’d lost
him, that he was too timid to answer. Perhaps he wasn’t accustomed to being asked what he wanted. But then he found his small voice. “Yes,” he answered simply.

“Well, then, don’t you worry, kiddo. You and your mom are safe here, okay?”

I waited, but it didn’t seem he had anything more to say. Darya ran her fingers through his hair, then bent to kiss the top of his head. I left feeling like a hole had been blown in me.

I
t was just after lunch when I pulled onto the dirt drive on Webb Gin House Road in Gwinnett County. We have a saying in Atlanta:
Stay inside the perimeter where it’s safe
. Not from muggings and murder and robbery, of course. That we have up the wazoo in the city. We mean Jesus freaks and guys named Bubba who only change their overalls once a week. Interstate 285, the perimeter highway, makes a big circle around the city and gives us a false sense of protection. We stay in. They stay out. That’s the way we all like it. Most of us who are non-white, non-blond, and non-Baptist would rather stomp through a shit blizzard in snowshoes than spend time Outside the Perimeter (OTP), yet here I was looking for a guy named Billy who’d already called me a Chink.

The sky had gone gray and a steady drizzle had begun. Steam rose up off the lake as I drove toward the cabin. My wounded windshield had started to fog up. The midday heat was unreal. I reached under the seat for my Glock and put it in my lap. LaBrecque wasn’t going to have a chance to do to me what he’d done to his wife. I thought about Darya’s world-weary eyes peering out behind that contused black-and-blue mask, and the anger felt like a hot iron in my throat.

I wasn’t happy with the driveway. It was three quarters of a mile at least and rose and dipped in a way that gave me glimpses of the cabin and could have easily given someone inside the same view of me, but the rain was starting to come down hard, as it often does when a cold front meets the tropical systems that hang over us in summer. I hoped it would hamper visibility and cover the sound of gravel crackling under my tires. Another hill, another bend, and I could see the cabin getting close. I decided to stop there and take the last couple hundred yards on foot. I pulled over
to the side of the narrow dirt lane and wiped my windshield clear with a napkin from Krystal. Between swipes of the windshield wipers, I could see the cabin roof was tin. I stuck the Glock 10 in the back of my pants and pulled on a gray, waist-length hooded rain jacket that helped me melt into the scenery on days like this but still allowed me mobility. The wind was beginning to act up as I started down the muddy road. Rain pelted my jacket. Lightning slashed over the lake for one stunning millisecond, and I did what I’ve done since I was a kid. I began to count.
One, two, two and a half
, and then came the boom. A tactic my mother used when I was little to take the fear out of thunder. I’ve counted my way through many southern storms.

Deep ruts gouged the saturated red clay earth. Someone had driven here recently. Perhaps LaBrecque had come and already gone. LaBrecque drove a dark blue Dakota pickup truck, I knew from the file, but there was no way to tell now what size tire had left these marks, the ruts softened by rain and indistinct.

I walked down a hill and around a curve and got my first good look at the cabin, brick red and larger than I’d anticipated, one of those vacation homes the rich call cabins or cottages that really just look like houses to the rest of us. I saw no lights in the windows even though the day had turned dark with thunderclouds. LaBrecque’s blue pickup was parked near the front lawn, streaming with rain. A hill with stone steps cut into it sloped down to the lake. Anyone who fishes in the warm months knows it is best done early morning, late night, or after the rain comes and cools things down. Two rowboats had been pulled up to shore and flipped over near a wooden dock. I imagined LaBrecque inside getting his gear ready, a few cans of cheap beer and a hat with hooks and lures.

As I neared the cabin and started down the pebble sidewalk, I saw it.
Shit
. The front door was cracked open a few inches. My pulse quickened. I moved in a half crouch toward the side of the house for cover, releasing the trigger safety on my gun as I did so. It was stifling under the gray jacket. Rain dripped off my hood in front of my face and blurred my vision. I waited. Nothing. No movement, just the rush of wind and rain battering the roof and bouncing off me. Could this day get any shittier? I was about to find out.

I moved to the front door and pressed my back against the outside
wall, used my foot to gently inch the cabin door open, waited a few seconds, then stuck my head round and peered inside. Cold fireplace on the right, a sofa, a recliner. A picture window looking out onto the lake provided the only light. A food bar on the left, a kitchen, lots of cowboy art on the walls. No Billy LaBrecque.

Normally I would have called out, let someone know bond enforcement was in the house, but my gut was telling me something was off. I eased my way through the kitchen into a large open space, Glock double-clutched cop-style. A staircase was railed off in the center of the room and there were four doors right and left of it, all closed. I decided to cover the obvious opening first, the stairs, which—unlike the planked cabin floor upstairs—were carpeted. They led down into an enormous game room paneled with rustic bleached wood, an impressively stocked bar, a pool table, a TV, and an antique pinball machine. No LaBrecque.

Moving slowly back up the stairs, I paused at the top. The main room was exactly as I’d left it—empty and dim except for the natural gray of the day bleeding through the big window.

I went for the door on the left first, stood to the side, tried the knob, found no resistance, pushed it open quietly, and stepped around fast, Glock steady. I was sweating. The rain jacket was clinging to my skin; my heart was pounding in my temples. My body, in all its genetic wisdom, had the nerve cells rapid-firing. Fight or flight? I wasn’t sure yet.

I checked the closet, the bathroom. Empty. I peeled off the jacket and left it, then twice more I went through this excruciating process, freezing each time the floorboard creaked under me or a door hinge complained.

When I opened the last door, I saw LaBrecque right in front of me, and it felt like I’d been smacked with a two-by-four. His face was turned away, but I instantly recognized his build, the thick neck, his heavily muscled arms. But this wasn’t the threatening bully I’d seen at the church, the man who had brutalized his wife and child and grabbed my wrist with an infuriating sense of entitlement. This William LaBrecque had had everything stripped from him. Naked, he lay on the floor, his legs pulled open, his buttocks and thighs bloodied, spattered with vicious bruises and stab wounds.

Wishbone had been here before me.

I stepped in and spun quickly, heart trip-hammering, Glock ready to
open up on anyone behind the door. No one there. I checked the closet and bath, then came back to LaBrecque, touched his neck with two fingers, held his wrist for a moment. No heartbeat, but his skin was still warm. I thought about this. He was a big guy, the cabin was hot, so even naked and with no blood pumping through him, his body would stay warm awhile. I thought again about the ruts I’d seen in the road.

I stooped to see his face. I was careful to disturb as little evidence as possible while remaining alert to any sound, shadow, movement in the cabin. Sometimes I think there’s a block of ice inside me, perhaps in the heart of every investigator, something ghoulish and coldly voyeuristic.

LaBrecque had been beaten viciously with some kind of weapon. His face was battered and bloodied, unrecognizable. A fist couldn’t have done this kind of damage. I studied the spatter in the room. Cast-off on the walls and ceiling and floors, medium-velocity spatter all over, the result of blunt trauma, an intense external force. It was consistent with the pool that had formed under his head.

I used two fingers to lift his chin off the floor. There it was. Blunt-force trauma, a cave-in just above the temple that must have fractured his skull. Why the rage? I thought about Darya. Was that the connection? Had the other victims been abusers of some kind? Only one other victim, the first that we knew about, the student at West Florida State University, had had a lot of facial bruising. What was it about LaBrecque and the first victim that had enraged the killer so?

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and pressed Rauser’s numbers, then noticed a bloody rolling pin on the floor a few feet away. Another connection to that first killing in Florida. When he’d killed Anne Chambers fifteen years ago, the killer had used something at the scene as a weapon. Perhaps it was just for efficiency. A rolling pin here, a lamp there. Not like you can carry those things around in your pocket. I got to my feet. There was something else that intrigued me about this scene. It was contained. It seemed to have begun and ended here in this one room. The rest of the cabin was free of spatter, undisturbed, furniture in place. Had the killer found LaBrecque asleep here in the bedroom, drunk in the middle of the day, let go the controlling blow before he could come to? Or had it been another seduction like Brooks? LaBrecque didn’t seem the type, but what was the type, really?

Rauser was on his way. He was calling Gwinnett County Homicide. I stayed there memorizing the crime scene as long as I could. When I heard the sirens, I took a shallow breath, stuck my Glock in my waistband and my hands behind my head. Then I headed out to greet the Gwinnett County cops, who didn’t know me from Ted Bundy.

I
was exhausted. I’d spent hours at the LaBrecque scene, being questioned hard by detectives who wanted to know how it was that I happened to be consulting on the Wishbone cases while tracking a bail jumper who, it certainly appeared, happened to be the newest Wishbone victim. None of this was explainable, but I did my best until Rauser arrived at the scene and saved me, followed by Ken Lang and the CSI van. There was no small amount of tension. The Gwinnett County cops didn’t like having APD on the scene and Rauser wasn’t at all happy about someone else processing it. They finally reached some agreements but until then it was a full-on pissing contest.

It was very late in the afternoon before I got away. Rauser hadn’t wanted me to leave the scene, but there was nothing I could do there, and I still had a business to keep afloat and work I hadn’t even begun. I was also starving.

I called Neil. “Want some breakfast?”

“It’s after five,” he answered.

“Tell me about it.” Happy hour was tapping at my shoulder once more. It rarely passed unnoticed. And how I wanted one today.

“Rough day?” Neil asked.

“Not at Waffle House,” I said in a singsong way to tempt him, knowing full well it was one of his weaknesses. If there’s one thing you can count on down South, it’s Waffle House. The grill is cranking 24/7—eggs,
bacon, waffles, and hash browns scattered, smoothed, and covered, crispy outside, soft inside, and glistening with oil. Eat them every day and they’ll flat-out kill you. But from time to time there’s nothing like them alongside a pair of eggs scrambled with cheese, over-buttered white toast angles, and a couple cups of thin Waffle House coffee surging through your system like Liquid-Plumr.

We talked about LaBrecque over a pile of food, kicked it around for a long time. We knew a lot about him. That knowledge gave us a jump start, a first: The other victims had been big question marks. Not this guy.

“Can you run the vics’ names for anything like domestic abuse calls?”

“Yeah, but Rauser can get this stuff easy.”

“Let’s see if there’s any merit to it before I put anything else on Rauser’s plate. How about hospital records? Emergency room visits? Can you dig those up on all the victims? And on their immediate families?”

“Depends on how old they are.” Neil made a face as I squeezed yellow mustard over the hash browns I’d ordered scattered with jalapeños, then he asked our waitress for a second pecan waffle.

“I have to go check out the laser treatment gone wrong for Quinn,” I told him. “Want to come? No bullet holes this time.”

“Man, that was cool,” Neil said.

“Uh-huh. That why you turned that pretty shade of green?”

“Yeah, well, it’s like your first roller-coaster ride, you know? You kind of want to hurl but you keep going back.”

We left Waffle House big-eyed and hopped-up with our stomachs rumbling from too much rank coffee. The storms had moved through the way late summer storms do, and I folded the top down on my old Impala. It was just before seven. The heat was slacking off finally.

Vincent Feldon lived off McLendon in the Candler Park section of Atlanta near Little Five Points, where it is not uncommon to see within a stretch of blocks gleaming Vespas, nicely dressed gay and straight couples with strollers, tattooed street people, corner musicians, teenagers pierced from toe to tongue, and the homeless curled up shoeless on the sidewalk. “Diversity run amok,” Rauser said one afternoon while we ate on the patio at Front Page News along with a couple of trans men, their soft packs looking like enormous boners; Whitney Houston and a
recording team that was apparently following her around for some reality TV thing; a group of lesbian writers fresh from a book signing at Charis Books, the lesbian feminist bookstore around the corner; a table of really loud beer-drinking athletic types; and a guy sitting alone with a parrot.