The Stranger You Seek (36 page)

“I don’t. Clyde worked for me but only indirectly. I got lots of people working in the orchards. I don’t know much about their personal lives unless there’s a problem.”

“What was the problem with Clyde? Why did you fire him?”

“Came in drunk.”

“Can you get me directions to his mother’s house?”

“Yeah, hang on. She’s probably in the book. You talk to Ida May Culpepper?”

“Uh-huh. At the restaurant. Then I came to her house to check it out. Why didn’t you warn me the cows would come after me?”

Big Jim chuckled. “
Warn
you? Cows ain’t aggressive animals, Keye. I wouldn’t worry about them.”

“Right, well, I was in the field with those apples you gave me and they just about ran me down.”

Big Jim’s booming laugh came through so loud I had to hold the phone away from my ear. “Well, they are goddamn
good
apples,” he said, and laughed again.

Forest Mountain Road, where Clyde Clower’s mother lived, was tough for the Neon, a steady, winding incline into the North Georgia mountains. I couldn’t get any speed up at all. In the rearview, I realized, a Chevy pickup was very close, too close to my bumper. I heard the roar of the engine and the gravel under the tires and tried to work my way to the right a little, but the road was narrow and I had no place to go. The truck swerved around me, zoomed by like I was tied to a stump. A horse trailer was hitched to the back. It fishtailed and nearly knocked my car into the ditch. Gravel flew all over the place.

“Asshole!”
I yelled, and saw a hand came out of the driver’s side window in front of me with the middle finger raised. The truck left me picking my way through a cloud of thick red dust to Mrs. Clower’s house.

I pulled over and walked toward the white frame house. It sat on an unfenced piece of land with a flower garden near the front windows and a vegetable garden next to the house. Backed up to a barn, I saw the truck with the trailer that had nearly wrecked my car.

“I know you’re in there, Clyde. Might as well come on out with Big Jim’s cow. I’m calling Big Jim right now.”

“Go fuck yourself!” he yelled from inside the barn.

I opened my phone and realized that I had no reception.
Crap
. A Gilmer County sheriff’s car spun into the dirt drive. The sheriff and a deputy got out. Big Jim must have taken my suspicions seriously and called them. I waved my arms and pointed at the barn.

“I think he’s got Jim Penland’s cow in there,” I told the two men as they approached. “I tailed him up here.”

Okay, so I only technically tailed him up here since he blew by and left me in the dust, but it was a detail they didn’t need.

I reached for my PI license, which was clipped to my back pocket, and they drew on me.

“Whoa, take it easy, guys. I’m a private detective working for Jim Penland to find his cow.” I was annoyed to hear a wobbly little laugh come out of me.

Clyde Clower came out of the barn at that moment with a lead on Sadie the cow. He saw the cops with their weapons drawn. He dropped the lead and raised his hands above his head. “It was just a joke,” he said, then spread out flat on the ground. This was clearly not his first arrest. His words were muffled from the dirt in his face. “I just wanted to shake him up a little. I was just coming to get her and take her back home. I didn’t mean nothing by it. Tell ’em, Kate. This here’s my girlfriend, Kate Johnson.” He was looking at me.

“Would you mind taking your guns off me? My name is Keye Street and I am
not
his girlfriend. I told you, I work for Jim Penland.”

The deputy patted me down and cuffed me. “Like Big Jim would hire a detective to find a damn cow.”

“I love you, Kate,” Clower shouted, and grinned at me.

“Check my ID,” I insisted, but the deputy pressed his palm against the top of my head until I folded into the backseat of the sheriff’s car.

“Now sit back there and keep your mouth shut.”

The other door opened and the sheriff unceremoniously pushed Clyde into the backseat with me. Clyde smelled bad. He looked at me and smiled. His teeth looked like a picket fence. “Whatcha in for?” he asked, and snickered.
“Kate.”

“You smell like poop,” I said.

The sheriff shot me a look in the rearview mirror. “Not a peep,” he warned us, and we sank back into the seat, me and Clyde Clower, shoulder to shoulder, in the back of a Gilmer County sheriff’s car.

They did eventually look at my identification and Big Jim did convince them over waves of laughter that he really had hired a private detective from Atlanta to find Sadie the pet cow. I missed the reunion entirely, but Big Jim hugged me so hard he nearly crushed me before I started the drive back to Atlanta.

I’d made it as far as Canton, about an hour outside of town, when Rauser’s ringtone went off.

“The women I told you about, it all checked out, Street. Rape kits handled right. We’ll have DNA comparisons soon, and the composites after the attack look like our boy. And get this—one of the women said he used wire.” I knew how big this was. Ligature marks on the Wishbone victims always indicated he’d used wire, never fabric or rope. “So we were able to get a warrant for the wire. Never found it, but we found the knife under the mattress. Human blood on it is consistent with Melissa Dumas and Dobbs. Knife fits the wound patterns on the other Atlanta victims too. And if that’s not enough, we finally got the vehicle Charlie’s been driving. A Jeep Wrangler. Carpet fiber’s consistent with the fiber on Dobbs. He had it stashed in the garage at a rental house we found out he owns. Case is locked up pretty tight.”

I remembered the times Charlie had visited our office, about his little gifts, about watching him plant pansies in the planter outside our door. I couldn’t think of anyone who wouldn’t have opened the door for this man.

“But you’d already searched his place, Rauser. And you brought him in twice. He knew he was being watched. I don’t get why you wouldn’t have found this stuff the first time. Why would he keep the knife there? And where are his trophies—photographs, video, the stuff he’s pilfering from the scenes? And these are rape cases, not murder. Why would he leave living victims?”

“Both these women used the same tactic. They were completely submissive, offered to comply, pretended they enjoyed it. Then they prayed for an opportunity to get away.”

“I don’t get it,” I insisted. “It doesn’t fit.”

“Oh, come on, Keye. We got the knife and now we’re going to have his DNA and we’re going to pull that DNA evidence we collected at the Brooks hotel scene and connect him to that one too. Look, you knew something was up with him or you wouldn’t have been out there on his street that night. Your gut told you it wasn’t just Charlie forgetting his meds, and your gut was right. When are you coming home so we can go out for some grape juice? I’ll be a big man after the next press conference.
Very
in demand. I’m afraid you’ll have to call ahead.”

M
y days were once again consumed by nanny background checks and subpoenas and Tyrone’s Quikbail, long surveillance hours on Larry Quinn’s personal injury cases—all the things I’d once complained about. Getting so close to the violence again, to a violent serial offender, to something as sinister as the Wishbone murders, had put life in perspective for me. I knew now that I didn’t want to go back into the darkness.

But I still had the feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop. A sponsor of mine at AA once told me that that was a normal state for an addict. We learn to carry that foreboding when we live in the shadows, always hiding our interior life, our addictions and cravings and demons.

Charlie Ramsey was in jail and awaiting trial. I felt sure he would never again see Atlanta’s streets. Two more women had come forward to identify him as their rapist. Charlie’s list of crimes spanned almost two decades, and the blood and knife evidence found in his home had finally shut him down and sealed his fate. The DA was confident of a conviction in the rapes and at least two of the Wishbone killings—Dobbs and Melissa Dumas—where physical evidence had been found on the knife. The carpet fiber that matched to Charlie’s hidden Wrangler wasn’t much by itself, but it would add to the growing evidence, another nail hammered in. Most important, and I suppose most telling, the killing had stopped. The letters, the emails, the roses had stopped too, of
course. I wondered what Charlie had had planned for me in his fraudulent and damaged brain. Had I been destined to become another photograph on the War Room bulletin board? He went for Dobbs not because he fit into his selection process but because Dobbs was high profile. Charlie was expanding. He’d begun killing for the headlines and for the pure satisfaction of outmaneuvering law enforcement. It was not an unusual pattern for a serial murderer, but it was a terrifying one.

I had been so wrong about Charlie. My profile, in retrospect, had been shockingly uninformed. There was nothing in Charlie’s background that pointed to abuse. I was so sure that Anne Chambers and David Brooks had been symbolic of parental figures. So sure. There were other characteristics that did fit, however. His achievements as a star in football and in the complicated field of biomedical engineering. My advice had been to look for an overachiever, a star in his field. I never imagined someone who had excelled to that degree would then settle for the kind of goofy social veneer that Charlie had settled on. But what choice did he have, really? The accident had left him incapable of a normal life. We had learned that after the accident, Charlie, who had early in life exhibited volatility and sexual aggression, had even more anger. Because of his brain injury and the way it had manifested in a cognitive deficit, Charlie experienced more impulsiveness and had trouble socially processing. He had chronic pain, head and neck aches, depression, trouble concentrating. After surgery and some rehab, he had tried to return to work but had become verbally abusive, even resorted to violent threats in heated moments with coworkers. The poisonous pattern that had trailed him through life deepened. I myself had experienced it. It explained a lot about Charlie and who he had become. Still, my analysis had been so terribly wrong in so many areas. Was it a sign? The universe has a way of telling you when to let go of something. Maybe I wasn’t as great at my job as I thought I was. The universe has a way of telling us that too, doesn’t it?

The days had grown shorter and cooler at last. Autumn was here and the trees had turned fluorescent. Brown paper bags bulging with yard clippings lined the curbs in Winnona Park, where my parents lived. The crisp air was perfumed with fireplace wood.

My brother, Jimmy, who had for years resolutely resisted my mother’s urgings to come home, had flown in from Seattle for Thanksgiving.
He did not bring his partner Paul with him, which was to me a disappointment. I loved Paul almost as much as Jimmy loved him. I scheduled a webcam date with Paul for later in the day.

Jimmy and Rauser had hit it off the very first time they met a few years back, just after I came out of rehab. Today the two of them had ended up in my parents’ oak-paneled den watching football with my dad—Cowboys fans all of them. Mother, who had been hovering and fussing over Rauser and Jimmy since we arrived, turned them loose with a platter of sausage balls and cold beer while she finished dinner preparations.

My cousin Miki had come for dinner too. Miki was a photojournalist, sandy-haired and blue-eyed, and like our faces, our lives were worlds apart. She was the daughter of my mother’s sister, Florence, and years ago when Miki began showing up for our holidays without her mother, we were told Aunt Florence had left for Europe. When we got older, we discovered that
Europe
was just code for the loony bin. Aunt Florence has been institutionalized since Miki was twelve. Once, before Aunt Florence left for “Europe,” I remember visiting their home. There was a houseboat in the backyard. No one offered any explanation for this or acted as if it was unusual, but I remember seeing Aunt Florence walking down the ramp of the grounded houseboat to greet us as if she lived there. Jimmy sneaked on the boat when no one was watching and later swore it was lined with full clothing racks and cosmetics and coffee cans brimming with coins. My beautiful and talented cousin had scars on her arms from wrists to elbows. She had begun the war against her own flesh at fourteen. Cutting, overdoses, institutions, drugs, eating disorders, and years of misdiagnoses followed. She was now thirty-five and I knew nothing at all about her life, but I’m very glad that the poison in her veins is not the same blood that pumps through mine. I have enough crazy of my own. Thankfully, I seem to lack either the depth or the attention span for long-term depression.

Late Thanksgiving afternoon, we gathered in the dining room that hadn’t changed since my childhood—high ceiling and arched doorways and plaster walls that had been dented and patched a million times over the years. The room was a very pale yellow, with an oak table and chintz-cushioned chairs and an antique china cabinet in the corner. My mother’s taste ran to the traditional. She had packed the table with
food; a leaf had been extended on each end. We joined hands for the blessing, as was the tradition in my Southern Baptist family. My father began, “We’re grateful to you, Lord, for all this good food and, well, for Miki and Keye being here, since they both damn near killed themselves with drugs and alcohol.”

My eyes popped open. My dad’s head was bowed and his eyes squeezed tightly shut. Jimmy cleared his throat to cover a laugh. Miki’s eyes met mine. She was grinning.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Howard,” my mother said, hotly.

“And thank you, Lord,” Dad went on, “for my wife still being pretty and for my queer son.”

We all raised our heads on that one.

“Well, amen,” Rauser boomed firmly, and sat down at the table.

“Amen,” we all followed enthusiastically, and took our seats too.

“That was interesting,” my mother said, and shot Dad a look. “Potatoes, anyone?”

An enormous bowl of garlic mashed potatoes sat on the table along with a green bean casserole, chipotle sweet potato cakes covered with mango and cilantro and fresh chopped jalapeños, breaded baked goat cheese rounds on salad greens with fennel and bing cherries, and a stuffed Cornish game hen for each of us. For dessert, Mother had made Jimmy’s favorite, deep-dish blackberry cobbler with berries she’d picked and frozen in summer, and the pumpkin cheesecake with maple glaze and toasted pecans I wait for all year long.