The Stranger You Seek (34 page)

“It’s pretty up there,” Quinn continued. “Be cooler. We’ll get you a nice little cabin. You available?”

“What’s the job?”

“Well, it’s sort of a missing persons,” he said, and I heard someone in the background start to snicker.

“Uh
-huh.
”

“Actually, it’s a missing cow,” Quinn said. Giggles erupted from somewhere in his office.

Oh boy
.

“It’s a cow case,” he added, and unsuppressed laughter broke out.

This got Neil’s attention. He grinned at me and wandered into my office.

“Just one cow?” I asked, and winked at Neil. “Or a whole herd of cows?”

This plunged them into hysterics. “I’m sorry, Keye,” Larry said. “It’s our first cow case. Give me a minute.” Unrestrained laughter now complete with snorting sounds.

I looked at Neil and rolled my eyes.

Quinn said, “Okay, sorry about that. A client in Ellijay owns some property and the family cow disappeared. The client asked us to find someone to find the cow, and you’re our go-to girl.”

“I’m flattered,” I said. “The cow’s a pet?”

“Yep,” Quinn managed between sniffles and moans. I thought he might have actually been crying. “Sadie the pet cow,” he said, and in the background his office came completely unhinged.

My cell phone played Rauser’s ringtone. “Larry, can I think about this for a minute and call you back?”

“Déjà moo,” Quinn said, and Neil finally lost it.

“Looks like we got another one,” Rauser told me. His voice was worn thin and weary. “Housekeeper found her in the basement when she went down to do the laundry.”

“Oh, Rauser,” I said.

“Signature’s there, scene staging, stabbing, wire, bite marks. As soon as we ran her name through the system, it came up that she had a lawsuit at Fulton. Discrimination, sexual harassment. Hefty settlement from an employer. Her name’s Melissa Dumas. She had been restrained in a chair, stabbed repeatedly on the front of the body, moved to the floor and stabbed postmortem another dozen times on the back of the body. No weapons at the scene. ME thinks the injuries to the front of the body were sustained twelve to fifteen hours before she died.”

I let that fresh horror sink in. “He really took some time with her,” I said, more to myself than to Rauser. “Jesus.”

“Her wounds were sustained at different times. I think he came and went a couple times. Sadistic bastard let her suffer. I just keep thinking how scared she must have been down there in that basement waiting for him to come back. People next door couldn’t remember anything about
this girl except that they’d seen her jogging. They didn’t even know her name. Keye, she’d lived there four years and they didn’t fucking know her name.”

“Any evidence of sexual activity? Was there penetration? Or sexual mutilation?” I thought about Anne Chambers, about the crime scene photos I’d pored over of her bloodied dorm room. I thought about Jacob Dobbs, castrated in an automobile. “Do we know where Charlie was when she died?”

“Charlie gave my guys the slip twice. I’m betting timeframes are consistent with what the ME’s laid out. Did I tell you there was a cat in the house? Extra food and water bowls put out for it.”

“He wanted to make sure the cat was okay until somebody got there.” I sucked in air. I remembered Charlie bringing into my office a tiny orange kitten he’d found wandering. He’d held it close to his chest and waited for my mother to pick it up and take it to a foster home.

“Chief’s talking about inviting the FBI in to help.”

Local cops hate federal interference. Rauser’s department had a certain rhythm. They knew and loved the community. It was their investigation. This wasn’t just another murder, for Rauser. I knew him. It was another murder
he
hadn’t been able to prevent, another failure, another family torn apart. And now more shrieking headlines, more calls for the police to solve these murders. I wondered how many calls had bombarded APD after Charlie’s mug shot was released, adding to the load this task force was carrying and Rauser’s stress.

“I can be there in ten minutes,” I told him.

“I don’t want you at the crime scene, Street. He’s targeted you already. He could do it again.”

“I’m sorry, Rauser,” I said uselessly. I didn’t know how to help him. My involvement seemed to only up the pressure on him. He was in trouble with his superiors and with the community and public opinion. And he was worried about my safety with Charlie still on the loose.

That cabin in Ellijay was sounding really good.

G
eorgia is a study in climate and backdrops, from the damp Low Country at the southeastern tip to the northern mountains reaching high enough to catch the winter snows before they turn to rain on the way south to Atlanta. Central Georgia is lush with kudzu and tall pine forests. I-75 runs for 355 miles from the swampy south and fresh seafood, past produce stands and cotton fields, country-cooking restaurants with homemade peach cobbler, truck stops and Waffle Houses, through Perry and Macon, until it merges briefly with I-85 and evolves into the Downtown Connector, Atlanta’s main artery, then splits off again and weaves through the textile-mill mountain towns of North Georgia toward Dalton, the carpet capital of the world.

I exited I-75 just north of Marietta and headed toward Ellijay and Blairsville in the Neon, knowing I’d have to cut off the air conditioner if I wanted enough power to climb the hills that were coming. My Impala had been moved from the crime lab to a repair shop but still wasn’t ready. Dad had taken charge of the body-shop details and I had a feeling he was armor-plating it.

It was Friday and warm, and it suddenly occurred to me I’d forgotten to cancel dinner tomorrow night with my parents. I picked up my phone and took a deep breath.

“What do you mean you can’t come?” my mother wanted to know. “You’re not off on another wild-goose chase, are you?”

I hesitated and Mother, righteous as ever, leapt in. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, is this
dangerous
?”

I sighed. “I’m looking for a cow, Mom. Unless she’s packing, I think I’ll be okay.”

“A cow! My Lord, Keye, that’s not what we sent you to school for.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I made banana cheesecake with a special pecan crust.” Mother was a ruthless negotiator.

“Will you go by and check on White Trash this weekend?” I thought of Melissa Dumas’s cat and the killer who’d left food out for it.

“Snowflake should just come and live with me and your father. Poor little thing—”

I crinkled the wrapper from the powdered doughnut gems I’d had for lunch into the phone. “Mom? Mom? We’re breaking up. I’ll talk to you later.”

My first afternoon on the cow trail was uneventful, something that may or may not be a good thing when searching for farm animals. I did have an opportunity to meet Jim Penland, the man with the missing cow, and he seemed perfectly normal, a big friendly guy with a good crop of hair, brown eyes, and Wranglers. He owned about a bazillion acres of land and the largest apple orchards in the region. Gilmer County was some kind of apple-growing capital, something the folks up here take seriously, and first thing, Big Jim took me over to one of his retail locations, a tourist trap set up on the four-lane, which is what they call the highway up here, and treated me to homemade fried pies with two scoops of cinnamon ice cream.

“My
God
,” I said after my first bite. My toes might have curled up a little.

“Good, ain’t they?” Big Jim was smiling at me. “Almost nothing like a pie made right in front of you with good fresh apples and homemade ice cream.”

“It’s unreal.” One of these every day and I’d never need sex again … ever.

Big Jim had already finished his first fried pie and was working on the second. Steam was still coming off it and the ice cream was turning into sugary goo. We were sitting at a picnic table on the porch of Big Jim’s log-cabin-style store. Tourists came in and left with hot pies in oil-stained brown paper bags and jars of homemade jam.

“So, what’s your plan?”

Plan
? I looked at him blankly for a moment. “Oh, to find the cow, you mean.”

“Sadie,” he said.

“Right. Sadie. Well, I thought I’d just start by asking around, you know? Neighbors, employees, anyone known to be in the area when Sadie disappeared. Anything you can tell me that might help?”

“Sadie’s a real sweet girl. We’ve had her four years. One day she just come out of the pasture and started hanging around outside the house. Couldn’t keep her in a gate. She can open about anything. Came home one day and found her in the kitchen eatin’ spaghetti napkins out of the trash. Nuzzled my little girl’s face and that was it. We built her a small place nearer the house and she’d just trail around behind us all the time like a dog. Best dog we ever had, really.”

“So you just came home one day and she was gone or what?” I started on my second pie.

Big Jim nodded. “Pretty much. I’d been up at the orchards most of the day. My daughter was off with a friend, and my wife, she was up here helping out at the counter when somebody didn’t show up for work. Drove up and Sadie didn’t come out to meet the truck. Knew right then something wasn’t right.”

“And how long ago was that?”

“Last Tuesday. We done all the things you do when you lose a pet. Put up flyers, ran an ad in the paper, offered a reward. Truth is, we’re all just broken up about it.”

“Does Sadie have a history of roaming at all?”

“Once we stopped trying to lock her in the pasture, she stuck like glue. She never liked being fenced in. After that, she never left the yard unless she was following one of us.”

“Any enemies?” I asked, and took the last bite of my second pie.

“Nope. Everyone liked Sadie,” Big Jim said, and grinned at me. “Course
I
got enemies. I’m the richest sonofabitch in the county.”

“You make a list of them for me?”

“Ones I know about, I will,” Big Jim agreed cheerfully.

I spent the rest of the afternoon talking to Big Jim’s wife, Selma, Big Jim’s daughter, Kathie, and a few of Big Jim’s employees. They all seemed to love Sadie the cow, but few had vivid recollections of when
and where they had last seen her. One of them told me they had all searched the property and the woods while Kathie was gone in case Sadie had gotten sick and wandered off to die, but found nothing.

I drove a couple of miles up Blackberry Mountain Road and found the cabin Larry Quinn’s office had arranged for me. I was sleepy and full of bad pie carbs and I didn’t know what else to do until Big Jim finished his enemy list. A nap sounded good, I decided. Can’t do that at home. Not ever. There’s always something pulling at me, something that needs my attention.

There were three cabins on the property. The owners came out of the largest cabin and met me in a gravel patch next to the barn where an SUV and a Harley-Davidson were parked. “Howdy. I’m Pat Smelly and this is Chris. You must be Keye.”

The Smellys? Really
? I didn’t say anything, but I wanted to. Chris was in pastel short shorts; the kind really large women should not wear and always seem to. Pat was in jeans with her hands dug deep in her pockets, skinny and butch with shoulders like a coat hanger and a handshake that nearly brought me to my knees.

“Should be everything you need in the cabin,” Pat told me. Her accent was anything but southern. The twang was distinctive, with that odd, almost Canadian rhythm. I guessed her for Minnesota. “You’re in that little one-bedroom loft over there. It’s small but it’s got a nice deck over the pond. Coffee beans are in the freezer and there’s a grinder on the counter. You need anything else just let us know. Chris made some apple bread this afternoon and put it over there for you, and we just got Dish, so you can watch movies if you want.”

“Wow, thanks.”
Mmm, apple bread
.

“Need help with your bags?”

I shook my head. “I’m good, thanks. All I need is the key and a phone.”

“Door’s unlocked. Key’s on the table. Don’t have phones up here. Sorry,” Pat said, and took Chris’s hand.

No phones?

I watched them disappear back into their cabin.
Lesbians in rural Georgia? Who knew?

An hour later I was balancing carefully on the deck railing, leaning as far forward as possible, the flat of one hand using the tin overhang on
the tiny deck of my cabin as a brace, the other hand holding my cell phone toward the sky. I was trying not to look down. It was a thirty-foot drop to a slimy pond.

“Keye?”

I wobbled and nearly lost my footing. Pat and Chris Smelly were standing behind me with concerned looks on their faces.

“
Jesus
, wear a bell or something. You scared me.”

Pat gave an aw shucks shrug. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be up there like that. I don’t think that’s safe.” Chris nodded her agreement.

“I can’t get a signal anywhere else. Do you always just walk in?”

“We knocked, but you couldn’t hear us.” They looked at each other. Chris giggled, then covered her mouth. Pat held out a hand. “We saw you from our place and thought maybe you were in some trouble up here. You can get a signal from our roof. And we got some lawn furniture up there.”

“Really?” I took her hand and climbed off the railing.

“We made it flat so we could enjoy the view of the mountains.”

“It’s like having an extra room.” It was the first time Chris had formed a complete sentence in my presence, and it was deeply southern. “It’s our little terrace in the pines.”

“I don’t want to be a lot of trouble,” I said as we walked through the cabin and toward the front door. “Apple bread is really good,” I told Chris. I was embarrassed that I’d eaten half of it already. It was on the kitchen table, and since the cabin consisted only of two rooms downstairs, we had to walk right past it. I wondered if they had noticed.

“Bread’s my specialty,” Chris said, which came as no great surprise to me given the size of her ass.

The cabin I’d been assigned was furnished with gnarled-up raw wood chairs, an ancient futon, and lots of folksy chicken art. But the Smelly cabin had slate floors and a vaulted ceiling, stark modern furniture in a bright wide-open space, linen and leather, a towering A-frame glass wall that looked out at the Blue Ridge Mountains—
Architectural Digest
in the sticks. A basset hound and a tuxedo cat lay in front of the glass on a zebra rug. They paid me no attention at all.