The Stranger You Seek (6 page)

I leaned my head back and closed my eyes, took a deep breath. I wanted a drink.

Rauser slammed his case closed, grabbed it by the handle. “Congratulations, by the way. You’re in full agreement with your former employer. Bureau says he’s coming alive again too and that this cooling-off phase will be very brief. You know as well as I do what that means.”

It wasn’t really a cooling off, I thought. It was a gradual ramping up. And even though APD wasn’t turning up bodies at the moment, the killer was out there, and he was fantasizing, reliving his kills, very carefully planning for a later reenactment, and perhaps already stalking his next victim.

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He had not noticed me. He had a tiny phone to his ear and he was telling someone too loudly that his work keeps him
so
busy. “I see the wife and kids for five minutes at breakfast,” he said into his stupid phone, and laughed. It was eight this morning and we were jammed into an elevator. Every asshole in town with a briefcase was pressed up against me, and he was showing off for the crowd. I saw him sneak a glance around the elevator, his theater. This was where he thrived. I recognized the pathology. It sickened me. It felt like a heavy, wet blanket just dropped down on me, and it had. Its name was David. What a little prick, a fucking little bragger. Mr. Up-and-Coming. No time for the family, but plenty of time for his dick. He had not changed a bit.

He snapped his phone shut and glanced around again. He wanted to make sure he had made an impression. So desperate for approval.
Pathetic
.

He lit up when he saw my face. He remembered. A mutual friend, an invitation to a backyard barbeque. I met his wife and fucked him twenty minutes later behind his own pool house. And now this, a chance meeting. What luck!

The elevator door opened and I stepped out onto the fifth floor with him. He wagged a finger at me. “You never called.”

We walked in our business suits down tiled halls and carpeted corridors, stopped by a concession stand the size of a closet, and ordered black coffee that came with cardboard sleeves. He was blathering about a promotion. He uses his hands when he talks, slim, manicured hands with a thick gold wedding band on the left ring finger, and he glanced at me to make sure I was listening. He wanted to know I was interested. I was.
Very
. He smiled. He liked the way I was looking at him. My cold aspirations validated and flattered him. I know the type. He too pays a lot of attention to what he wears. The pair of black John Lobbs on his feet must have cost twelve hundred dollars, a Fioravanti power suit in navy blue was probably another twelve grand. He also pays a dominatrix four hundred a month to text him degrading messages, step on his balls, and assault him with a dildo now and then.

We made a date. Dinner. I think I will fuck him for a while before the point of my steel parts his flesh. How deep will it go before shallow David bleeds? I will keep you posted.
B
l
adeDr
i
ver
.

S
unsets are dazzling in Atlanta and utterly counterfeit. Nearly five million people and their idling automobiles help stain the city air dusty-yellow on still summer days when ozone smog is so far out of federal compliance that even a big-money bank exec might raise an eyebrow, but at night when the late summer sun catches the chemical air just right, it turns the downtown sky to fire. Each evening, from my loft window on the tenth floor of the Georgian Terrace Hotel, I am treated to the show along with a million or so commuters stuck on the Downtown Connector, ribbons of rolling reds and whites from my perspective, miles of them.

It was raining the first time I looked through this window. It was December and Peachtree Street was dressed up for the holidays. Lights from the Fox Theatre danced off glistening streets as the concert crowd left cafés with frozen breath and long coats to gather under the pale yellow lights of the big red marquee. I love my Peachtree Street neighborhood, where restaurants leave the back doors open to let out the heat and the delicious scents greet me each day, where fried chicken livers and pecan pie appear on the same menu with lobster risotto and fig brandy soufflé, where street vendors and street people take their
chances among the polished shoes of the rich, and windshield washers wait on corners with half-empty spray bottles.

But Atlanta can be a hard city in summer, when the days are long and the unblinking sun sends temperatures soaring. Tempers flare. Steam billows from overheated engines, and stepping onto the street feels like stepping in front of a heat blower. Atlanta broils in its own anger. And now, because of what Rauser had told me, I knew another killer was roaming the streets.

I heard a sound in the hall outside my loft and thought about Dan. Even now, a smell, a sound, the turning of a lock, can launch me back into what it felt like to share a life with someone, a home, the prosaic burdens of the everyday, waiting to see his blue eyes in the evening, hear his voice in my ear. It’s not like that with us anymore. Not even close. It’s work. It’s barely civil. It’s utterly fractured.

White Trash, the cat I had rescued off Peachtree Street two years ago, came from the bedroom stretching and yawning and rammed her head into my ankle. I call her White Trash because she’s white and because I found her having dinner in a pile of trash. I don’t know what she calls me. I stroked her a few times and turned back to Peachtree Street feeling pouty and unloved, and I hadn’t eaten in hours.

My phone went off. Rauser’s ringtone. I didn’t want to talk to him or to anyone, but I’m not always good at saying what I need. “Hey,” I answered without any enthusiasm. I felt a little angry with him for coming down so hard on me yesterday simply because I wasn’t giving him what he wanted.

“Well, that doesn’t sound good,” Rauser said. I recognized the background noise, phones and voices at Atlanta Police Department, and pictured Rauser in his cube. We hadn’t talked since he’d stormed out of my office.

“Not a great day,” I dodged.

“Have lunch with Dan?” Rauser asked, and I could hear him moving, then the elevator dinging. “That was today, wasn’t it? You guys talk?”

“I’m so up to my ass in talk,” I snapped.

“Hey, really great attitude, Street.”

“He’s in therapy,” I said. “So am I. Give me a break.”

“Bitter, party of one,” Rauser said.

“Yes, I am bitter. He thinks he’s a goddamn analyst now because he’s in therapy. And he’s
so
righteous. It’s painful.”

“And what was Dr. Dan’s diagnosis?”

“That I can’t be serious. That I have intimacy issues.”

Rauser chuckled. “How’d you take it?”

I sighed. “I told him, ‘I got your issues right
here
,’ and I grabbed my crotch and walked out.”

“Smart,” Rauser said. “And grown-up too.” The elevator dinged again, then footsteps on old tiled floors. The wind hit his phone suddenly and I knew he’d stepped outside the building. I wondered where he was going, to what emergency. An urgent need for a cigarette or another crime scene? I thought for the millionth time about those photos he’d tossed on my desk.

We’d had these discussions before, Rauser and I. We understood things about the other no one else but a lover might. My romantic life till now had been a series of tiny wars. The last one, a five-year marriage, left me feeling raw and a little bloodied. Rauser was ten years divorced. Two grown kids. Both in DC. They never visited Atlanta. He saw them when he could. He said he still loved his wife. I knew he’d called her a few times over the years and hung up when she answered. He knew I’d slept with Dan, even mad as hell at him, and each time it had whittled away at my self-worth. Rauser and I were both woefully unqualified for a lasting romantic relationship. We were moody, appallingly self-indulgent and self-absorbed. Our kinship, we had decided over doughnuts and coffee at Krispy Kreme, was in our defects.

“Dan’s a jerk,” he said, and exhaled. I imagined a cloud of cigarette smoke around him. “A namby-pamby pain-in-the-ass jerk. I’ve been meaning to tell you that.”

I considered that for a moment. Dan was small-boned with the fluid movements of a dancer, dark hair he always wore below the collar, and just handsome enough in an artsy, rakish way as not to be perceived as effeminate. I thought about the way he had always managed to twist his fine features into a perpetually bored expression whenever I introduced him to someone.

“He really is a jerk,” I agreed.

“So what’s the attraction?”

“He has an enormous cock.”

Rauser laughed. “Listen, Keye. I’m sorry about yesterday. I just … I don’t know. I don’t mean to take it out on you, okay?”

It was in these moments, these small gestures, that Rauser revealed himself. When he showed up with takeout or called for nothing else than to find out what I was doing and suffered quietly through a complete explanation of my day while in the midst of a high-pressure investigation. He was a very sweet man and I was glad he had called after all.

“Shit,” he said suddenly. “Gotta go, Street.”

I
wasn’t sure how long I’d been asleep when my cell phone sounded. White Trash was lying on my chest. I generally didn’t mind, but lately she’d taken to pointing herself in the wrong direction, so that when I woke, I had the distinct pleasure of looking directly at her butt. Aerosmith’s “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)” blasted out of my phone, the ringtone I’d assigned to Rauser. I wasn’t sure he would fully appreciate the humor in this, so I kept it to myself.

“You okay?” I asked, looking at my bedside clock. Three a.m.

“I got another letter. Guy’s a total whack job, Keye.”

I was silent.

“Keye? You back asleep?”

“Yes,” I lied. I honestly was not sure if I wanted to rush in to help or slam down the phone. I had tried in the past and without much success to establish boundaries around his work and my life and where it’s okay and not okay that the two meet, but I’d given mixed signals, I knew. Cop work pulled at me like a drug, like warm lemon vodka, and I had both loved and hated this thing I’d spent my life learning.

“I’m faxing it to you, okay? Just please look at it. I won’t ask you again, but I need your brain tonight. He gave us a timeline. Three days until he kills again.”

I let that fresh horror sink in for a second, then sat up in my bed and thought back to the murder scene photos, to Lei Koto on her kitchen
floor, and Bob Shelby and Elicia Richardson, and Anne Chambers brutalized in a dorm room. I thought again about their blood, their final horror. I’d sensed it when I looked at those pictures.
Three days
.

In an old pair of Dan’s boxer shorts and a T-shirt, I made my way to the kitchen. My blood sugar was about ankle high. I found a bottle of grape juice and thought about those first days in rehab while they were detoxing me. They supplied plenty of replacements, phenobarb and grape juice to name just two. A nurse told me grape juice would slam into my system the way the cognac used to and trick me. She was right. On day four they started removing the crutches. The phenobarbital was first. Day five, they came for my grape juice. I’m still kind of pissed about that. My first trip to the market when I was released, I stocked up. Rauser pours three fingers of it in a whiskey glass for me when I go to his house, and fills his own with cheap bourbon, and we clink our glasses together and pile up in front of the TV in summer to watch the Braves.

I thought about Rauser and sighed, leaned against the kitchen counter with my grape juice, felt the guilt seeping into me. Guilt, another gift from my days as a practicing drunk. Was I really being that selfish? Rauser had available to him great investigative minds if he would just tap them, but he wouldn’t trust easily. He hadn’t been exactly thrilled with the psychological sketch he had received from the Bureau. He’d be protective of his territory, reluctant to open the door any further to an outside agency, and the truth is, local cops solve local problems better than anyone else.

From the living room, I heard the whine of my fax machine. White Trash bumped my ankles, waiting for the splash of half-and-half she’d grown accustomed to in the morning. That we were up four hours early seemed to make no difference at all to her begging schedule and her relentless pursuit of dairy. I put a little cream into a saucer for her and walked into the living room.

What was I so afraid of? I asked myself. Was I afraid I couldn’t do it without drinking? That I couldn’t let my mind run in that savage terrain without it? Had alcohol made me a better profiler? I was certainly more attuned to unleashed destructive power back then, but unfortunately a lot of that destructive power was my own. Perhaps it was learning that dark craft in the first place that had pushed me into something my genes had been poised and eager to receive already. Might it push me
there again? I never wanted to go back there. Not ever.
And
I wanted a drink every day, which is the torment of addiction, the constant tug, tug, tugging of rival desires. It was pulling at me now as I took two neatly typed, double-spaced pages from the fax machine. I felt the familiar quickening in my pulse, a ticking in my temple. No, this wasn’t dread or fear, this was something else—exhilaration.