The Stranger You Seek (40 page)

Sweet Jesus, could it be? A flood of thoughts, corrosive and incohesive, rushed through my tired brain. I stared at the photograph and thought about the campus, the dogwoods and palms and live oaks. Somewhere here Anne Chambers had met the person who would later beat her with a brass desk lamp until her face was unrecognizable, then slice away her clitoris and nipples. All along I had suspected it began there, the nurturing and feeding of a monster. The rage Anne Chambers was shown during their final interaction felt personal. Removing her nipples was a way to say “I hate you, Mommy.” Anne symbolized a mother who for some reason was reviled. My mind was flying now, remembering things; fragments were adding up and beginning to solidify. Something with density and shape was being born at last, something more than theory.

I typed the name into my search engine and began to read, quickly following every link until I found background. The strange obsession with civil law, with turning plaintiffs into victims; it was all there. My throat had gone dry. Wishbone had been hiding in plain sight all along.

Florida Man Convicted in Brutal Killing of Wife
. I searched for details of the crime scene. There were none apart from a brief description in the newspaper article, which stated in bold words that the victim had been stabbed several times with a fishing knife. Wishbone’s father had killed his wife? Was Wishbone following an example set by a murdering daddy, copycatting? Or had Daddy simply taken the fall to protect a child who had discovered a passion for killing? Was I right? Had all this begun with a mother? Was that the kill described in the blog, the one that at sixteen never even caused a wobble in the killer’s grade-point average? I’d been wrong about one thing. Anne Chambers was not Wishbone’s first victim. We might never know how many had come before her. Wishbone’s father had died in Florida’s smoking-hot and overused electric chair after years on death row.

There was an article about the woman he’d killed. She had been a kind of celebrity in the southern art scene.
Local Artist Gives Back to
Community
, the headline read, and I followed it until I found her picture. The resemblance to Anne Chambers, the student and artist, took my breath away. Now I could see it. Anne Chambers emerging one day from the Fine Arts building, young and vital and so naïve, an artist just like the murdered mother. Bearing a likeness to her so uncanny it must have set off a firestorm in the brain of the fledgling killer.

My eyes took in every detail of the group photograph in the yearbook.
Wishbone
. A terrible burning grew inside me, like drinking lava. It rushed through my bloodstream and made my face hot. It was counterinsurgent and infused with an utterly complete and vile hatred, this feeling. I thought about Rauser, about that night in the park, about his arms around me, and I was angrier and more helpless than I’d ever been in my life, even those days when I’d been too drunk to get out of my pajamas. This monster had taken too much from me. Too much from Rauser.

I reached for my phone and called.

“Keye, listen.” Brit Williams’s voice was gentle. “We all want to find out who did this to the lieutenant, but trying to reopen Wishbone—well, we really need to move forward now. If you want to help, help us do that.”

“You’ve got the wrong guy in jail, Brit.”

“See, here’s the thing, since Charlie Ramsey’s incarceration, we haven’t had another murder with that MO and signature. So it’s going to take more than a text message to move this forward. You’re always all about physical evidence, Keye. Give me some physical evidence and I’ll see what I can do. But I got to have more than my dick in my hand when I see the chief.”

Frustrated, I stuffed the urge to unload on him.

“I know you love him,” Brit added, and to my great irritation, I felt my eyes filling.

“And you love him too,” I said. “He
trusts
me, Brit. He always trusted my instincts—you know that. I need you to trust me too. Look, even if you think I’ve gone completely crazy, just please humor me because Rauser would have. Get me the crime scene reports from this scene in Florida. I need the details. That’s all I’m asking. I can get Neil to do this, but it’s going to be faster and more complete if you’ll contact the police down there. This would have been in Tallahassee PD’s jurisdiction.”

Another silence, and then, “What the hell. I don’t have anything else to do, right?”

I went upstairs and checked on Rauser again, then waited on a bench in the hospital garden with my coat up close to my ears, blowing clouds of steam off my coffee in the cold morning. Fallen leaves from a Flame Maple clung to the dewy ground.

Nine-thirty
A.M
. I checked my phone for the third time. Power on. Volume up. No missed calls. Finally, when I thought I’d throw it on the ground and stomp on it, it rang.

“You have any idea how hard it is to get an archived case file from Florida?” Williams demanded. “Can you meet me at twelve-thirty?”

We met at La Fonda Latina on Ponce de Leon, about five minutes from Brit’s cube at the station. The place was packed. We sat on the patio upstairs. It was chilly up there but a place where we could talk. Only a few people had braved it. He ordered paella with squid and a waiter delivered chips and salsa to our table. I ordered coffee and, shivering, folded my arms over my chest.

Williams loaded a chip with salsa, crammed it into his mouth. “You need to eat,” he said. “You look like shit and it ain’t that cold up here.” He pushed a letter-size manila envelope across the table.

“It’s all there,” he said. “Everything you asked for. Maybe some shit you didn’t ask for.” He ate more chips and washed them down with Modelo while I opened the envelope. He watched me as I went through the crime scene photos. “Look familiar?” he asked. “By the way, I emailed photos of the husband and his clothing to the spatter guys. Husband’s the one who called nine-one-one. Bloodstains on his clothes were not consistent with the kind of spatter a murder like that would have created. In fact, a lot of the physical evidence didn’t support the DA’s case.”

I looked up at him. “This man went to the chair for
murder
. How’d they get a conviction?”

“Confession, for one. And get this—teenager testified to finding the father leaning over the mother with the bloody fishing knife. That testimony and his confession—well, it would be pretty hard to argue against. And twenty-three years ago, they weren’t reconstructing like we do now.”

“So many similarities to what we’ve been seeing at Wishbone scenes.” I was studying the photos. “But less organized. Lots of emotion. Fury.”

“I didn’t think a kid could do something like that.”

“It happens,” I told him, “in some kids when they fail to develop affectional bonds.” I looked back at the crime scene photos. I’d studied child psychopathy in my career. It can be lethal for the parent of a fledgling psychopath. They can become the first victims of a deadly emotional cocktail—the child’s lack of abstract reasoning combined with a driving desire for immediate gratification. The scenes are often terrifyingly violent and the children weirdly unaffected by their crime.

My grades never dipped a point
.

Williams waited while the paella was delivered in a cast-iron pan. Picking up his fork, he shook his head. “Chief’s not going to reopen the Wishbone investigation based on this. We gotta build the case.” Then he grinned. “Showed a picture of your suspect around the restaurant where David Brooks ate before he was killed and bingo. Immediate recognition by the manager. Still not enough, but it’s a start.” He shoved some yellow rice into his mouth. “You realize how fucking big a tiger you’re poking at? Your suspect jogs with the mayor. You know that? APD can’t rattle that cage.”

“But I can.”

“Yes, you can,” Williams agreed, surprising me. “After seeing this stuff, me and Balaki and a couple detectives, we’re willing to do what we can to help. On our own time.” He pushed his plate away and looked up at me. His brown eyes were serious and soft. “Until this is under control, is there somewhere you can go? Rauser was right, whether you want to hear it or not. You need protection.”

I already knew the Wishbone blades were sharp. I’d felt them slicing deep into me as my car skidded off the road, as Rauser fell next to me.

“I have protection, Brit. And I won’t think twice about using it.”

M
argaret Haze stood when I entered her office, nodded pleasantly, and offered me one of the chairs at her desk. She was wearing Helmut Lang, black, tailored, militant as hell, and so far out of my range that I couldn’t even guess the price tag. She took her seat. I didn’t. My nerves were sizzling. “How can I help you, Keye?” She didn’t seem at all surprised to see me.

“It would help if you’d stop killing people.” I wanted to slap cuffs on her right there, make sure she never got to see Atlanta’s sapphire skies again. I wanted to make her suffer. Maybe then the bitch could experience empathy.
Do you feel anything?

“You’ve lost me.” She was calm and, from my perspective, entirely unreadable.

“Can we cut the bullshit and have an honest conversation? No more games. I came here so you’d feel comfortable. I know you’ve had your office swept for bugs. And I’m not wired, Margaret.”

“My clients expect and deserve privacy in their attorney’s office. By the way, I hope you don’t mind that I’ve decided to no longer use your company for that service. We just don’t seem to be a good fit anymore.” Her expression hadn’t changed and neither had her tone. She was utterly confident. I heard the telephone ringing in the outer office and saw a light blink green on Margaret’s phone. She ignored it. “Diane didn’t come in today. She hasn’t missed a day in three years.”

“I called her. I told her not to come. I told her everything. She was devastated, Margaret. You’ve been a hero to her.”

“You never really know anyone below the surface, Keye. I would have thought you of all people had learned that lesson.”

“We need to talk, Margaret.” I held my arms out. “Pat me down, if you’d like. See for yourself. No wire.”

Margaret laughed lightly. “That’s absurd.”

I ignored her. Instead, I stepped out of my shoes, removed my jacket, and began to unbutton my blouse. I removed one piece of clothing at a time and turned it inside out, shook it out for her to see, then dropped it on the desk. She was silent while I stripped, and I was intensely aware of her eyes on me, on my body, amused, arrogant eyes, openly appraising me. I knew what her victims must have seen, someone emotionless and far removed from anything with a beating heart.

Completely nude, I made a circle. She gestured to my earrings without speaking. I removed them, dropped them onto her desk. Margaret scooped them up in her palm, looked them over, then handed them back.

“Get dressed, Keye. What will people say?” She watched while I got back into my clothes. “Are you here alone?”

I sat down. “Lieutenant Williams and Detective Balaki are waiting outside.”

She leaned back, arms relaxed on the armrests of her high-backed desk chair. “Do you really think I’m a danger to you? Is that why you brought them?”

I wanted to tell her all the ways she’d hurt me already, all the deep wounds, but I refused to give her that power. “Honestly, I don’t think I’m your type. But you do seem to be branching out.…”

A smile played over her glossy lips. “Exactly what type is that?”

I picked up the framed photograph on her desk, little Margaret with her parents, standing on the deck of a sailboat. “The type that reminds you of him or his clients or your mother. That’s it, isn’t it? He gave them more than he gave you? Was he sleeping with them too?”

Margaret swiveled toward the window away from me. “You know, if there was evidence—which there is not—they wouldn’t be waiting outside. They would be in here with a warrant.” She said it without scorn or fear or anger. It was as if my response genuinely intrigued her.

“How did you see them?” I asked. “As parasites? All their petty needs, petty problems, petty, greedy lawsuits.”

She was completely still. Through the windowed wall behind her, I could see miles of twisting highway, but not even a faint hum of the city reached her high glass office. The room was utterly silent.

“Who keeps a photograph on their desk of the man who murdered their mother? You did it, didn’t you? You killed her. And then you let him die for it. Was that therapeutic, her paying for stealing his affections, and then him paying for what he did to you? He betrayed you, didn’t he, Margaret? First he loved you. Then he left you for your mother.”

Her eyes seemed to be very bright green in the afternoon light when she turned back to me. “Is this the part where I’m supposed to come undone?”

“That would be nice.”

She laughed quietly, stood and crossed to the bar, poured herself cognac and handed me a small bottle of club soda, unopened, and a dry glass. “If I am the person you think I am, then I’d be a complete sociopath. You’re the expert. You know that. I would be incapable of remorse. I would be able to tell you that I have never missed either of them. Their … passing, as violent and ugly as it was, would have been just another event. Nothing extraordinary. Don’t you find that to be true about life, Keye? That it’s just a thing that happens to us. Life doesn’t really touch us. I think you get that. I think it’s why you drank, it’s why you’ve made the spectacularly stupid choices you’ve made. I think deep down, you’re just as numb as I am.”

“I was,” I said. I could barely contain the hatred I felt for her. I thought about Rauser, about his arms wrapping around me, about feeling for the first time in so long that flesh-and-blood desire didn’t have to exclude love and trust.

She sipped her cognac; her eyes never lifted from mine, never a quiver. “It’s amazing, really. With your education, you could have done so well. And yet you chose the
FBI
? Trying to make it right, are we? It must have been hard seeing your grandparents killed like that right in front of you. Still chasing down the bad guys?”