The Stranger You Seek (19 page)

Watching was power.

I imagined eyes burning into my shoulder blades as I neared my old Impala. It took everything I had inside me not to just dump my suitcase on the concrete and run like hell. With this killer, a line had been crossed. In my experience working on all types of serial offender cases with the Bureau, profiling serial murderers, child molesters, rapists, I’d never been pulled in personally. There was always a barrier between the offenders and the criminologists. Emotionally, my work had taken its toll. I’d taken it home with me and into the bed I shared with my husband. Night sweats, a drink to settle my nerves, to put in perspective the horrific acts I’d spent the day reconstructing in excruciating detail. A drink before work to numb the exhaustion, the depression. A drink to kill the hangover. Anyone capable of empathy, I am convinced, is marked by the ability to comprehend victim suffering. Some of us handle it better than others, that’s all. But that dark existence had never physically knocked on my door as it did now.

I unlocked the car, slung my suitcase across the seat, and hopped in with my heart slamming. Thank God my father had taken the beat-up Impala I’d driven in high school—V-8 with four hundred and twenty-seven horses—redipped it in chrome and completely restored it for me just before I went off to college. So it certainly had what I needed to ditch a tail. Even now with the bullet hole in the windshield, my old Impala gave me a thrill. It rumbled like an underground train and I loved the sound when the top was down. After all, I’d come of age in Georgia, surrounded by muscle cars and guys in tight jeans. Mother packed picnic baskets for the drag races at Yellow River on Saturday afternoons when Jimmy and I were kids. We ate cucumbers with black pepper and white
vinegar, potato salad out of plastic containers, and little black hamburgers that my father charred the shit out of on a portable charcoal grill. We came with a card table and a checkered tablecloth, which were meant, I think, to add class to our operation. The smell of exhaust and burning rubber was part of the meal. And the sound was absolutely deafening. But Saturdays at Yellow River Drag Strip, my father was a happy man. It was about the only time he wanted to leave our garage, where he tinkered constantly, and the only time he could not hear my mother’s voice.

I was eleven when he decided I should learn to drive. He stuck me in our beat-up Chevy pickup truck on a dirt road and nearly peed his pants laughing when I tore down part of a cornfield before I found the brake. Later, as teenagers, my brother and I would take long, silent drives with him. We’d stop for boiled peanuts and fresh peaches at roadside stands, then climb back into the truck and keep going, just me, my lily-white father, and my black brother, while the locals stared after us. Sometimes for me even now, tires humming against a paved road sound like the ocean. I can drive and drive, forget everything.

I found my phone and called Rauser. He was notoriously grouchy about wake-up calls. Cops at the station usually flipped a coin to see who had to wake him. It was after midnight now and I had the honors.

“This better be good,” he answered.

“It’s me,” I said as I paid the cashier and eased my old ragtop toward the airport exit. “I opened an email on the plane, a Wishbone letter addressed to you. A new one. Then I had the feeling I was being watched, but I’d already had this crazy dream, so I was totally creeped out. By the time I got to the parking deck, it was like he was all over the place. I felt him, Rauser. I think Wishbone was waiting for my flight. I don’t know why. I just felt it—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. There’s another letter?”

I paused at the exit and looked in my rearview. Three cars were coming out of different parking decks and approaching the cashier lanes. One pulled out behind me; the driver leaned on his horn when I didn’t move. Reluctantly, I pulled out into the stream of airport traffic and moved toward the ramp to I-75/85 North.

“Talk to me while I get dressed,” Rauser ordered. “And slow down. A letter came to you from Wishbone? Hmmm. This could be good news. We can trace that.”

I explained in detail and with a bit more calm the email I’d found in my mailbox, the letter Rauser hadn’t read yet, which included the promise of more killing.

The vibration in his voice told me he was walking fast while he listened. I imagined him locking his front door and heading down the sidewalk to the Crown Vic. “You think you’re being followed now?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t really make sense, I guess. Lot of cameras here. He would know we’d look at surveillance.”

“Well, I’m not taking any chances. Take your time getting out, give us a few minutes if you can. You’re coming 75/85 North, right? In the Impala?”

“Getting on the ramp now.”

I heard Rauser on his radio calling for backup. “Okay, Keye, go to the Capitol Avenue exit, hang a left on Pollard, and curve around past the ballpark. You’ll hit some traffic lights. Stay alert. Lock your doors, for Christ’s sake. We’ve got units close by. I’m working on getting the exits covered. Hopefully, I can get someone to pick up your tail before Langford Parkway.” He paused. “You sure you’re not just paranoid?”

“I think he wants to see if the letter’s spooked me. He needs to know that he’s gotten under our skin. There’s control in that, like moving the game pieces around.” I checked my mirror again. Nothing.

“Don’t stop for anything, Street. I don’t give a shit if Tonya fucking Harding skates out in the middle of the road and shakes her ass. You don’t stop.”

I knew what Rauser was worried about. We both knew too much about the ways killers acquire their victims. My mind automatically began a risk assessment. Almost no traffic on a Tuesday after midnight. It takes mere seconds to shatter a car window, disable the driver. And I had no weapon. It didn’t matter that I was licensed in fugitive recovery and had a permit to carry. Unless I had a fugitive in custody, I couldn’t have a weapon on an airplane, and even then it took some doing since 9/11.

“Would the fat guy with the bat be there too?” I asked Rauser. “Or are we just talking Tonya skating out by herself?”

I make jokes when I’m nervous. It was one of the things my ex-husband hated. Dan believed that I used humor as a way to cut off any real dialogue, anything that might lead to a deeper understanding of my core issues.
Jesus
. Dan doesn’t have the depth to recognize a core issue.
Rauser doesn’t always appreciate the timing or flavor of my jokes either. He didn’t laugh this time.

“What if the fat guy shook it for me?” I asked. “Do I stop for that?”

Rauser chuckled finally. “There’s something really wrong with you, Street, you know that, right? I’ll call you back in a couple minutes,” Rauser told me, and disconnected.

In my rearview mirror, headlights looked back at me like cat eyes in the dark. Every car behind me, every car that passed, sent my heart racing. What was it, this feeling, this terrible feeling? God, how I wanted to floor it, get away from this menace, this thing I felt at the back of my neck, burning my skin. I didn’t want to be this close. But maybe that was a lie. Maybe the life I had lived, the thoughts I’d let occupy my mind, the things I’d read and studied and talked about and talked about and talked about, had created some kind of magnetic field that drew it to me—violence, the thing that frightens me so profoundly it sets my teeth on edge and intrigues me so deeply I cannot run from it.

I considered taking the next exit, killing my lights, making a quick turn into the first side street, and trying to figure if I was really being followed. But I stuck with Rauser’s plan. The benefits of teamwork had been drilled into me at the Bureau, and for good reason. Any individual action might risk an offender avoiding apprehension, and when the offender was killing people, risky rogue behaviors were unpardonable.

A couple of miles ahead, the downtown skyline looked like a jagged checkerboard turned upright. Another hot August evening, the stink of jet fuel still fresh in my nostrils. On a normal evening, I would have lowered the top, cranked up 102.5, but this wasn’t a normal—

A sound as hollow and unmistakable as a rifle shot ripped through the quiet night and interrupted that thought, sliced up my nerves and spit them out again. The front end of my car swerved toward the pavement. I fought to keep control. I saw my tire and wheel bouncing off the road without me. I was skidding at sixty miles an hour on three wheels and a fender. My telephone started to ring as I screeched across white lines, bumped hard on and off the shoulder.

I remember sliding sideways toward the metal bridge railing ahead, remember not being able to get control of the wheel, remember the headlights behind me creeping ever nearer.

I don’t remember hitting the windshield.

I
t may or may not surprise you to know that I am a very good patient. I’m not one of those people who complain about lying still and gripe about wanting to get right back to work. Nope. Not me. I have absolutely zero problem with sleeping, watching TV, and eating dinner off a tray. I would have appreciated a side order of Demerol in one of those little paper shot glasses, but apparently they don’t give drugs for concussions. Oh no. They like to keep you up. A couple days of immobility and someone peering into your pupils every half hour or so, that’s what you get. When Rauser told me how lucky I was because the patient in the room next door had twenty broken bones from a car accident and had to take heavy painkillers, I fantasized about lifting a few Dilaudids off her bed table while she slept. It seemed like such a waste to be here and not get at least a little messed up. It’s the hospital. It’s guilt-free drug use.

Neil, who had spent most of his adult life testing mood-altering substances on himself, took my complaints so seriously that he disappeared for most of the day and returned with a batch of his homemade hash brownies and some green and white capsules that he swore would make my eyes roll back in my head. I tossed the unidentified pills into the garbage when he wasn’t looking and put the brownies aside.

I was in Piedmont Hospital in Midtown with no memory of the trip here. I had been out cold for four hours before I opened my eyes to a
throbbing headache and the men in my life staring down at me—Rauser, Neil, and my dad, all three needing a comb and a fresh shirt and reeking of tobacco smoke. I was quite surprised to be here, to be anywhere, really. I remembered seeing the railing coming at me and in a moment of terrifying clarity thinking I’d been wrong, that it was about more than just watching, the whole thing was a setup, that this person was behind me and wanted to kill me, disable my vehicle, acquire and toy with me, torture me and God only knows what else. In those spinning-out-of-control seconds, I think I flashed on every crime scene and bloody photograph I’d ever seen.

“Am I in heaven?” I whispered weakly, really playing it up.

Rauser rolled his eyes. “She’s normal.”

My father, an earnest man who never really got my sense of humor, kissed my forehead and touched my face with his rough hands. “No, baby, you’re in the hospital.” He said it slowly and very loudly, as if I had been brain-damaged.

Thanks, Dad
.

“Your mother’s gone for some coffee. She’ll be right back. Diane’s with her.”

“You let Mother have coffee? Oh, good. That should help my headache.”

“I shoulda had some decent seat belts put in that old car,” my dad went on. “I didn’t even think about it. Those old lap belts just don’t do the job.”

After almost forty years with my mother, my father had learned to accept responsibility for everything. If it went wrong, Dad was to blame. There were rarely exceptions. Guilt was just part of life with Mother.

“This isn’t your fault.” I held his hand—it hurt to move—and looked into his pale, watery blue eyes. “Teaching me to drive like a redneck, now
that’s
your fault. How’s my car?”

“Beat up bad as you are,” he said, and tilted his head toward Rauser. “Aaron had it towed over to the police station until we send it somewhere for fixin’. Sure is a good thing he saw you on the road.”

Rauser gave me a wink and I realized he had lied to my parents about what had happened out there on the interstate. But what exactly had happened out there? An accident? Or had the Impala been tampered with? Had I been followed? Had they captured a stalker? Was it Wishbone?
I wouldn’t get the answers until I had some time alone with Rauser. And that wasn’t going to happen as long as my parents were hanging around. Might as well settle in and let everyone fall all over themselves to care for me.

A muffled ring came from Rauser’s pocket. He pulled out his phone and answered, listened, said “Give me a half hour,” and snapped the phone shut.

He leaned over me and brushed my cheek with his fingertips. “Chief wants to see me,” he said, and rolled his eyes again. Rauser never liked being invited to Chief Connor’s office. He said it was never good news. He respected Connor but their paths had split years ago. Jefferson Connor understood the politics of success, knew instinctively when and where to insert himself. Rauser had done quite the opposite thing, butting his head up against rank and policy a little too often. Connor not only enjoyed the privileges of position, the guy clearly loved the responsibilities of a bureaucracy. Rauser had resisted anything that might prevent him from working a case hands-on. When he had finally accepted the promotion and the responsibility of the Homicide unit, he’d made the chief agree that he wouldn’t be chained to the establishment. Connor had reluctantly agreed. Jeff Connor had not finished his climb, Rauser said. Connor intended to be attorney general one day and Rauser believed he’d get there.

“I’ll check on you later,” Rauser told me. “Howard, you make sure she stays in bed, okay?”

“You bet,” my dad answered as the door opened and my mother walked in balancing coffee cups. Behind her, Diane had a stack of vending-machine doughnuts in cellophane. Rauser grabbed one out of her hands on his way out.

“Oh, you poor darling. You look just awful!” Mother exclaimed. She had a beaming round cherub face, Debbie Reynolds on prednisone. She set the coffee down and patted my hand. “Bless your little heart.”