The Stranger You Seek (18 page)

 … And then I saw it. Something dropped in my mailbox just like the wishbone in the glass in my dream. I felt my throat tighten. The woman at my elbow wanted to know if I was all right. “Yes, yes. I’m fine,” I told her.

The style of the letter was unmistakable. The rhythm of it instantly told me its author was the same person who had been writing Rauser and torturing and killing.

And now in life as in my dreams, I felt danger draw very near. The letter was addressed to Rauser. My name appeared on the copy line.

I leaned back and took a shaky breath. The woman in the seat next to me seemed to have disappeared, and it crossed my mind that as my anxiety and tension had increased, so had my body odor. I tried to do one of those quick under-the-arm sniffs without being too obvious. Perhaps she had gone in search of an open seat elsewhere. One could hope.

I looked back at the words on my laptop screen, the words of a psychopath. He’d made fun of the name given by the media, but he’d adopted the
W
as a signature. He was embracing this new identity.

What did the email mean? The point, I assumed, was to deliver two threats. First, a promise of more killing.
My DNA can do only one thing for you: give you some reference for the next one
. Second, a slightly more cryptic threat about something else.
What will they leap at next?
Was this about Rauser? Or Rauser and me?

I clicked on Properties and hit the Details tab on the email program in an attempt to trace it. The email had gone to Rauser’s address and my address; no other addresses visible. I looked at the return path, one of those free email addresses, temporary, of course, but I knew every effort would be exhausted to trace it. It was gutsy using the Internet. Neil and
cyber detectives like him would be able to find the source, the computer where the email originated. Wishbone must be getting bored.

I thought about that night at the Brooks scene when I’d turned to the growing crowd outside the scene tape and felt the killer’s presence there. The air had a wild feel that evening. Something rank and restless had been stirring out there. I was certain APD had been over the video of the crowds at all the scenes, run background checks and comparisons. Maybe a second look was a good idea. I thought about pulling in to the dirt drive in the rain at the LaBrecque scene. I searched my memory. There were cars on the main road, but I hadn’t suspected I was walking into a murder scene. All I was going to do was pick up a bail jumper, a wife beater. I’d been looking only for his blue pickup truck. Why LaBrecque? How did he fit in? How did the killer know I was coming for him?

I gave her LaBrecque. Did you know that? And what a thrill that must have been for the profiler to walk into. She was all alone out there on that land, in that cabin. I could have so easily come back for her
.

Is it true that you “gave” me LaBrecque? Or did you simply get ahold of the police reports and decide to make this boast? A little more drama just for fun? Trying to rattle the profiler? What is it about me on this case that bothers you so much? And why didn’t you come back for me that day?

I used the decaf Barbra with the big red lips brought me to swallow a couple of Advil. My shoulder still ached from Roy Echeverria sinking his teeth into me, and my head was pounding. The dream, the letter, the case, this killer—it all fascinated and repelled me, like wiggling my toes around in a shark pool, which was, of course, the attraction and the terror of this kind of work.

You’re wondering why David was different, aren’t you?

Yes. Tell me. Why was Brooks different? He’s another key to your past, isn’t he?

The killer had referred to him in the letter by his first name only. Again, something that indicated familiarity, even affection. Was it real or symbolic?

And William LaBrecque.
He was different too. Have you even begun to figure out how?

No, goddamnit, I haven’t even begun to figure it out, but I’d known
the moment I’d seen LaBrecque in that cabin that it was you who’d been there before me. I saw your marks all over him.
Why do you turn them over?
Rauser had asked me this once. I still didn’t know the answer.

I got out my notebook and made another list of the victims in order of their murders, then drew columns for date, location—living room, kitchen, hotel, cabin—cause of death, time of death, number of ante-mortem and postmortem wounds, and approximate survival time after the first assault according to the autopsy. A check mark identified those victims with a connection to civil law. A star next to Brooks’s name reminded me there was sexual contact.

I drew an arrow from the first name, Anne Chambers, to the last, William LaBrecque. Both had been treated to an extraordinary amount of rage, both beaten savagely with a heavy tool, both died from blunt-force trauma. Did these two people have some personal connection to the killer? To each other? I tried to remember the details of Anne Chambers’s file. I’d been over the police file, the autopsy and crime scene reports and photographs, reviewed the physical evidence. It had been determined that the primary crime scene and the disposal site were one and the same, which was typical for this offender. Anne’s murder took place in her dorm room and it was a particularly brutal killing. There were deep ligature marks around her neck and wrists, and she was so badly beaten with the fat end of a lamp that the bones in her face and skull were crushed. I thought about LaBrecque’s face, about the bloody rolling pin. Only at these two scenes was the weapon recovered. After each victim was beaten badly enough to be half conscious and manageable, they were restrained so the killer could begin what we now know is a ritual—the stabbing and biting to the sexual areas of the body. But even that was different with Anne Chambers, the first victim. With Anne, the brutality went beyond the lower back, buttocks, inner thighs. Anne had been penetrated with the knife. Her clitoris and nipples had been removed. The medical examiner counted over a hundred stab wounds—inconceivable rage and lust, a frenzy like we have not seen in four of the more recent organized scenes, as if, in this first killing, there was some connection in life, some extraordinary hatred and anger. I needed to compare the lab reports on LaBrecque to see if the humiliation theme ran as deep with him.

David Brooks had known a different killer from Anne Chambers. His
killer had ended his life quickly and from behind, silently, and then covered his body to protect his dignity. There was no physical evidence to indicate any sadistic behavior. Sadism is about victim suffering, about getting off sexually on the victim’s terror and pain. By definition, sadistic behavior cannot include postmortem activity because the victim is no longer conscious, cannot suffer, cannot beg or cry out to their tormentor. All the bites and stabbings to the sexual areas on Brooks had been postmortem. David Brooks couldn’t have felt the pain of them. So they were about something else, something sexual and ritualistic, something the killer craves.

Anne Chambers suffered more, was kept alive longer and sexually mutilated. LaBrecque was so badly beaten I hardly recognized the mush that had been his face. Brooks suffered less. He was the only one of the three to share a link to civil law, yet they all had one thing in common: Wishbone’s signature staging, stabbing, and biting to the same areas of the body. What did it mean?

I leaned back and closed my eyes. I had to speak to Rauser. I wondered if he’d read his copy of the third Wishbone letter yet and what he thought about it. I prayed it wasn’t already on the way to the newspapers. Dread swelled up, then turned to sandpaper in my throat.

F
rom the southbound lanes of I-85 just a couple of miles south of downtown and Turner Field, the airport was a glowing smear in the distant, jet-streaked sky. Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport is a mammoth, bustling municipality all its own, a borough without community or heart, a city of unnamed passersby, and an excellent place to blend in.

Hartsfield-Jackson overwhelms. The very place we are told to be most vigilant these days is the place that also makes it nearly impossible. From the moment the sliding glass doors open into the enormous terminals, one is confronted with announcements, posted instructions, recorded messages, moving sidewalks, bars and lounges, escalators, video screens, security checks, shops, food, underground trains, the roar of forty-three thousand employees, soldiers, cops, bomb-sniffing dogs, and travelers. One of the world’s busiest international airports is sluggish in all the wrong places, and everywhere else it is a blizzard of information and sound and light. Unless one is there to observe, to watch while others are absorbed. The singular concerns of travelers render them only vaguely conscious of those around them, despite the new threats and heightened awareness. With some simple changes to the appearance—a pair of glasses, a baseball cap, plain clothes, unremarkable in design and color—one could pass a close acquaintance without detection or linger in the same newsstand without a glint of recognition.
In a place like this, people don’t really look at one another. They see in categories and stereotypes—a traveler, a customer, a cop, a businessperson. Being invisible in a public place is a very easy thing to do.

A couple of hundred yards away from the gate where I arrived with other passengers on the flight from Denver, Concourse B took an abrupt dive into steep escalators that led to the underground sidewalks and trains. From the top of the slow-moving metal steps, I surveyed the crowd of strangers. I was trained for this. I knew how to spot a sudden movement, the odd footfall, something off in the crowd, someone paying too much attention. I was wearing Levi’s and a sleeveless pullover and still my body temperature had hit about two hundred, it felt, on the plane, and had not yet normalized. My black leather computer case hung from one shoulder. The scrolling digital signs overhead read one minute until the next train. I could feel it coming under the slate floors in the transportation lobby, a barely perceptible vibration accompanied by a low rumble a moment before it rolled into the dock and the glass doors hissed open.

I quickly slipped through the crowd to make the train before the doors sucked shut again, and grabbed on to one of the poles in the center for balance. My eyes swept the compartment. It wasn’t hard to suppose an egoist, a voyeur, a violent sociopath like the one we sought might like to see me when I returned. Might want to check my face for fear, for stress. The whole game—and it was a game—was really about changing and maiming the lives of others. Now this killer had both Rauser and me in his communication loop. He’d want to play cat and mouse for a while. Was I really feeling someone watching me or was this merely a reaction to the email I’d received? I had read it over and over on the plane and it was enough to raise the hair on my arms.
My DNA can do only one thing for you: give you some reference for the next one.… Isn’t it so like the media to take something out of context without telling the whole story? What will they leap at next? W
.

It made for a long walk through the airport and across the long-term parking decks, which even during the day are shadowy and uninviting, but just after midnight when air traffic is down and there is only the occasional ghostly whine of a jet engine to interrupt the sound of my suitcase rolling and bumping over concrete, the feeling was … sinister, like someone was about to jump out of the bushes. Okay, so I realize there
are no bushes at Hartsfield-Jackson. The point is, I no longer seemed capable of distinguishing between real and imagined danger.

Was I next?
I kept thinking. No. I didn’t fit the victim profile at all, but then, what really fit with this offender? How was
he
profiling his victims? We had one connection with some of the victims but not all, not enough to understand the selection process. I willed myself to move casually at a normal pace, not to turn around. Just get safely to my car. Occasionally I’d hear a door slam shut or an engine growl to life. Every sound seemed to be amplified. Perhaps he didn’t want me at all. He’d already passed up an opportunity, or so he bragged, at the LaBrecque scene. Was this about watching? Watching was fuel.