The Stranger You Seek (9 page)

I was sure APD had already checked all shared services—electric, gas, mail, cable, anything that might connect the victims in some way. Rauser had pulled teams of detectives off everything that wasn’t a priority. Had they also checked photography supply houses, camera and electronic stores? If the killer’s taking pictures, he’s probably using a digital, something small and high res. Is he printing out hard copies? Yes, of course he is. He’d need the freedom of hard copies.
Photo-quality printers, electronic and photography stores
. He’s probably arranging stills in some sequence that is meaningful, masturbating, reliving, but why settle for stills when all he needs is a decent camera phone for video? It was a small thing, but one of those head-slapping moments nonetheless. I knew I’d just moved a tiny bit closer to understanding something about the interior life of this killer. And a phone would be so easy. On the train, in the office. I thought about this. I didn’t like it. It gave the killer the ability to keep the fantasy charged up. He could
watch anywhere, anytime, without special equipment. No one would look twice at a guy staring at his phone. Half of Atlanta never looks up from their BlackBerry even to cross the street.

Anne Chambers had been killed in Tallahassee and Bob Shelby murdered in the Jacksonville area. Double-checking those dates with airline and rental car records made sense. Also, if the killer had relocated from Florida, there would be records.
Check Motor Vehicles, Postal Service, IRS
.

Breaking a neck is an unusual choice, especially for a serial. To break someone’s neck required some expertise as well.
Martial arts studios, military service, med students … doctors?

And why are they opening the door? A repairman? A delivery person? Had APD checked uniform rentals and costume rental receipts in the days leading up to the killings? Were there any neighborhood disputes, local elections, anything that might have petitioners knocking on doors?
Zoning board, real estate records. Read detective interviews with neighbors
.

I leaned back in my desk chair and closed my eyes. What the hell was I doing? This carried too much risk. In some ways I felt I needed to relearn my years at the Bureau, redo them sober. It wasn’t remembering my craft that was the problem, it was knee-jerk issues, like someone who can’t talk on the phone without lighting a cigarette. I’d spent my years at the Bureau as an active but functioning alcoholic. I wasn’t even sure how to think about this, what to do with the emotions surrounding it, without a drink waiting at the end of the day. And yet here I was on the fringes of this investigation and I realized suddenly that I would know and discuss in detail with Rauser every scene this killer left behind. My heart would both ache and delight at each new discovery. I rolled my neck a few times, but the cables weren’t letting go. Just one drink would fix that. Just one. I was back in it, sucked back into the violence again.
Damn you, Rauser
.

I needed to move, physically move. “Hey, Neil,” I said from my office. I could see him at his desk in the main room. He didn’t budge. “Want to go to Southern Sweets?” No answer.

Southern Sweets, a tiny bakery in Avondale Estates, had things in their display cases you’d have to be made of iron to resist. “I’ll buy you
cake. Come on, Neil. We’ll both feel better. Jump on DeKalb Avenue and we can be there in fifteen.”

Neil was one of my very favorite people to eat with besides Rauser. He was enthusiastic about food. Very. He smoked a lot of pot.

I saw him stir in his chair. “Cherry pie?”

“You got it,” I said, and grabbed my keys. “I was thinking old-fashioned chocolate or sweet potato cheesecake.”

Neil frowned. “Cheesecake is wasted on sweet potatoes. Might as well just smear some peanut butter on it. Cheesecake deserves something more sophisticated.”

“Riiight,” I said. I’d seen him standing at the refrigerator just last week dipping raw hot dogs into yellow mustard but decided not to bring it up.

T
he War Room was makeshift but organized. It had been thrown together quickly when FBI databases linked the four killings. Wound patterns, tool marks, scene staging all added up to the same signature, same killer, same knife. This one wasn’t an opportunist like Gary Hilton or someone who worked within strictly defined parameters like Wayne Williams—an ethnic group, an age group—and therefore likely targets could be protected. This one was different. Atlanta had never seen anything like it.

I stood at the door, unnoticed except for a nod here and there from familiar faces. Rauser was on the telephone, his back to me. The long table in front of him was littered with papers. Crime scene and autopsy photographs, numbered and dated, covered an enormous bulletin board. Pushpins marked the murders on maps of Georgia and Florida. Another board was devoted to leads, witnesses, interviews, detectives’ reports. Yet another was for the victims—candid shots of them in life. Elicia Richardson standing at an outdoor grill with a metal spatula in her hand, smiling shyly at the camera. Bob Shelby with his feet on a coffee table and a beer in his hand, shorts, shirtless and sunburned. Lei Koto with her son, Tim. The boy was holding a swimming trophy in his hands. Here they all were, laughing, playing, breathing. We’d put up family photos at the Bureau too. It was meant to remind everyone that these people hadn’t always been victims, that they were real people
who’d left behind them daughters and friends and grieving parents and lovers and stunned husbands and gardens half planted, papers half written, groceries still in the bag, dinners on the stove, and full lives. Rauser had told me he’d practically been living in this room. He wanted to surround himself with the information. Maybe it would make sense after a while, sink into him by osmosis.

The department today had the atmosphere of being under siege. Pressure was crashing down from offices high in our local government. Detectives with already knee-buckling caseloads pushed by me and hustled in and out of the War Room, drinking from Styrofoam cups, posting reports, tapping at keyboards, kicking around ideas. One posted a sign over the bulletin boards that read
WISHBONE MURDERS
, and for a moment everyone in the room fell silent. Harsh reality had suddenly slammed into an odd and disconcerting sense of history in the making, of a terrible bloody legend still forming.

“Christ,” Rauser muttered.

I pulled a chair from the conference table and sat down beside him.

“Let’s get to work, huh?” I said.

Rauser stared at me. Then he pushed back his chair and stood up. “Attention, people,” he said, and movement ceased. A couple of detectives left their cubes to stick their heads in. “For those of you who don’t know, this is Keye Street. She’s an experienced criminalist trained in interpreting physical evidence. Keye’s coming on as a consultant to our task force, so play nice, full transparency, please, and share your doughnuts, people.”

With that, he sat back down and we went to work. I spent the afternoon in Rauser’s War Room, and my notes quickly filled a couple of spiral notebooks—pages jammed with bad artwork and fat question marks and nearly indecipherable stream-of-consciousness stuff. It was the way I had always worked. I’d take it apart later. The important thing was not to edit. Not yet. Just keep it going, lay the foundation for a coherent assessment. Instinct and training, an instructor at Quantico once told me, you couldn’t trust one without the other.

“I’m looking for the interviews with the first officer or the EMTs,” I said to Rauser, shuffling through mountains of paper at the messy War Room conference table. I was starting to hurt from a shortage of sleep. I couldn’t imagine how Rauser was functioning at all.

“I handed you their reports. Jacksonville didn’t do interviews.”

I pointed to one of the crime scene photos pinned to the board. A coffee table was flipped on its side next to the body. Bob Shelby. I glanced up at the board and studied him in life, beer, baseball cap, same couch, same coffee table that was at the death scene, only pushed several feet away from the sofa. The room was in disarray. Furniture out of place, according to the impressions left on the carpet. The remains of a fast-food dinner were spilled on the floor; bloody footprints led from the area where the victim lay facedown near a pool of blood to the front door and then toward the back of the house. The victim was completely naked. Bruising stained the top and inside of his upper arms. Sharp force and incised wounds on the pale white skin of his lower back and buttocks, thighs. And bite marks.

“If you had to reconstruct this scene, what would you say?” I asked.

“Guy liked Taco Bell?”

“Funny.”

Rauser didn’t have to think about it long. He’d looked at these pictures a thousand times, read the files again and again, and clearly formed his own conclusions. “Bob Shelby,” he said. “Sixty-four. Not many defensive wounds. Contusion on the back of the skull. Some food and furniture got turned over, control bruising on the top of the arms. Ligature marks around the wrists. Pooling on the floor. Cast-off on the furniture and carpet. Killer beat him senseless, stabbed him about twenty times while he was still breathing and another thirty-three times after he was dead, slit his throat, then tracked the blood out and left us a size-ten impression.”

“Was the first officer male?” I asked, and Rauser nodded. “Do you know what he did on arrival?”

“He followed first-officer protocol, notified dispatchers, secured the scene.”

“Did he step in the blood? Do you know what size shoes he wore and what type? Do you know if the EMTs moved the furniture and knocked over the food?” I used my pen to point out details in one of the photographs. “Body’s over here near the sofa. So did the med techs push this table out of the way to get to him or is this the way the killer left it? Do you know what size shoes
they
wore and what type? Also, that could be
therapeutic bruising on the arms. There can be some postmortem bruising. You need to get clear on this with the ME.”

Rauser said, “What’s bugging you?”

“Well, if the offender gained control using a blitz, and from the blunt-force trauma here it looks that way, there wouldn’t have been a struggle. Shelby was down, unable to fight back. It doesn’t make sense. So without interviews, we don’t know if we’re reconstructing victim and offender interactions or if we’re actually just analyzing the first officer’s and med techs’ effect on the crime scene,
and
because of this, we don’t have an ice cube’s chance in hell of being certain the killer’s in a size ten.”

Rauser sighed and made a note. “This wasn’t our case,” he reminded me.

“So where are the interviews on the cases in Atlanta? I haven’t seen anything but written reports from first responders, which are bare bones. You know that. These people won’t take the time unless you force them.”

“We’ll follow up with the officers and the med techs on the Koto and Richardson scenes here.”

“Remember Locard,” I told him. Locard’s Exchange Principle states that everyone entering a crime scene both takes something of the scene with them and leaves something behind. It was one of the founding principles in crime scene investigation. “I hate to say it, but the offender more fully understands Locard than the Atlanta Police Department. He’s highly skilled, Rauser. The scenes have to be processed with that in mind. Your people have to know what kind of evidence to collect, and part of that is a detailed interview from
everyone
who steps into your crime scene.”

Rauser nodded. “I’m onboard,” he said with that restless, nearly kinetic energy of his that was both contagious and a little disconcerting. He stayed revved up during cases like this, barely slept, had a flood of ideas. But he paid for his manic episodes. In the next few days or weeks or whenever this project no longer needed him, he’d bottom out, hit a low so debilitating that just getting out of bed was overwhelming. He called it “the flu” and I had seen those moods knock his feet out from under him. I called it hypomania, but he wasn’t interested in my opinions regarding his mental health.

I called Neil from the station with information about the victims—date of birth, Socials, full names. Neil had laserlike focus when it came to anything that remotely resembled spying. We needed to examine the lives of each of these four people in a more intimate way, profile each as thoroughly as the offender, and complete an in-depth risk assessment. If we understand the victim, we understand the killer. He gets something from them. What? What need is he fulfilling? What does his behavior say about motive? What is he acting out and how does that behavior work in relation to the physical elements of his crimes? At what point were these victims first at risk? Just answering that question alone would solve a hundred others about what the killer’s willing to do to acquire his victims, about location and triggers and motive.

Movement caught my eye. Jefferson Connor, Atlanta’s twenty-fourth police chief, was walking heavily down the hallway toward the War Room. Connor was in uniform, which he always wore for press conferences. I wondered if that accounted for the sour expression on his face. Perhaps it was the two-hundred-million-dollar budget or the twenty-four hundred employees he managed. Perhaps it was a serial offender at work under his watch. I had never met him personally, but I’d seen him calmly fielding questions on everything from homicide investigations to corruption inside the department, and Rauser had talked a lot about him. They had been friends and partners in DC as uniformed cops. Both had twenty-plus years in law enforcement. Connor had wanted to climb through the ranks. Rauser, on the other hand, had refused promotions in order to do the work he still loved. Rauser came to Atlanta, while Connor went to LA, where he rose to chief, created positions for community liaisons, began a Public Integrity Division and, through partnerships with the community, drastically reduced homicides under his watch. The hype that surrounded the chief’s coming to Atlanta was memorable—the press surrounding him like he was a rock star when he passed through the gate at Hartsfield-Jackson, the mayor beaming at their first press conference together.