The Stranger You Seek

T
he sun had not even burned dew off the grass under the live oaks, but the air was thick and soupy already, air you could swim around in, and it was dead-summer hot.

Inside the car she had not yet noticed parked on her street, a patient hunter dabbed at a trickle of perspiration and watched as Westmore Drive began a sleepy jog toward midweek.

The white-trimmed windows in the small brick house were flung open around seven, and she first appeared as a faint image behind the kitchen window, nearly abstract behind glass and screen, but no less an object of desire. The smell of cooking food drifted from her screened windows—frying bacon and toast and coffee—and Lei Koto’s killer felt the first stab of hunger this placid summer morning.

A little before ten the street was silent. The last neighbor had left for work, 9:50 on the dot as always. The smells from Lei Koto’s kitchen had shifted from breakfast to something else, something green and cabbagy and rank.

The car door opened, then footsteps on the concrete walk, a briefcase, good shoes, a white smile, a business card.

They always open the door
.

M
y name is Keye Street. First name from my Asian grandfather; my adoptive parents awarded me the second. By trade I am a detective, private, that is, a process server and bail recovery agent. In life, I am a dry alcoholic, a passionate believer in Krystal cheeseburgers and Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and a former behavioral analyst for the FBI. How I ended up here in the South, where I have the distinction of looking like what they still call a damn foreigner in most parts of Georgia and sounding like a hick everywhere else in the world, is a mystery Emily and Howard Street have never fully unraveled for me. I know they had wanted a child so badly they adopted a scrawny Chinese American with questionable genes from an orphanage. My grandparents and guardians had been murdered and my biological parents consisted of two drug addicts and one exotic dancer. I have no memory of them. They took flight shortly after my birth. I can only manage a word or two in Chinese, but my mother, Emily Street, who is as proficient in innuendo as anyone I’ve ever known, taught me a lot about the subtle and passive-aggressive language of southern women. They had tried for a cute little white kid, but something in my father’s past, something they have for my entire life flat-out refused to share with me, got them rejected. It didn’t take me long to understand that southerners are deeply secretive.

I embraced the South as a child, loved it passionately and love it still.
You learn to forgive it for its narrow mind and growing pains because it has a huge heart. You forgive the stifling summers because spring is lush and pastel sprinkled, because November is astonishing in flame and crimson and gold, because winter is merciful and brief, because corn bread and sweet tea and fried chicken are every bit as vital to a Sunday as getting dressed up for church, and because any southerner worth their salt says please and thank you. It’s soft air and summer vines, pine woods and fat homegrown tomatoes. It’s pulling the fruit right off a peach tree and letting the juice run down your chin. It’s a closeted and profound appreciation for our neighbors in Alabama who bear the brunt of the Bubba jokes. The South gets in your blood and nose and skin bone-deep. I am less a part of the South than it is a part of me. It’s a romantic notion, being overcome by geography. But we are all a little starry-eyed down here. We’re Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara and Rosa Parks all at once.

My African American brother, Jimmy, whom my parents adopted two years after I moved in, had a different experience entirely. Not being white, we were both subjected to ignorance and stereotyping, but even that seemed to work in my favor and against Jimmy. People were often surprised that I spoke English and charmed that I spoke it with a southern accent. They also assumed my Asian heritage made me above average. I was expected and encouraged to excel. The same people would have crossed the street at night to avoid sharing a sidewalk with my brother, assuming that being both black and male he was also dangerous. He’d picked up our mother’s coastal Carolina accent, the type usually reserved for southern whites in a primarily white neighborhood at a time when diversity was not necessarily something to be celebrated. He couldn’t seem to find a comfortable slot for himself in any community, and he spent high school applying to West Coast universities and carefully plotting his escape. Jimmy’s a planner. And careful with everything. Never screwed up his credit, never got fired, never had addiction issues, and never rode down Fifth Avenue in New York City after a few too many with his head sticking through the sunroof of a limo yelling “Hey, y’all” like I did. Jimmy’s the well-behaved child. He now lives in Seattle with his lover, Paul, and not even the promise of Mother’s blackberry cobbler is an attractive enough offer to bring him home to Georgia.

How I came to be here this night, edging my way along an old frame porch, double-clutching my 10mm Glock, body pressed flat against the house, peeling paint sticking to the back of my black T-shirt and drifting onto cracked wood, is another story entirely.

I had once been called Special Agent Street. It has a nice ring, doesn’t it? I was superbly trained for this kind of work, had done my time in the field before transferring to the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) at Quantico as a criminal investigative analyst, a profiler. A few years later, the FBI took away my security pass and my gun, and handed me a separation notice.

“You have the brains and the talent, Dr. Street. You merely lack focus.”

I remember thinking at that moment that the only thing I really lacked was a drink, which was, of course, part of the problem.

I was escorted that day to the FBI garage, where my old convertible, a ’69 Impala, white-on-white and about half a mile long, was parked at an angle over the line between two spaces. Fire one Special Agent, get back two parking spots. Sweet deal.

Now, four years later, I passed under the curtained front window and congratulated myself on accomplishing this soundlessly. Then the rotting porch creaked. The strobe from a television danced across the windows, volume so low I could barely make it out. I waited, still, listening for any movement inside, then stuck my head round and tried to peek between the curtains. I could see the outline of a man.
Whoa!
A big outline.

Jobs like this can be tricky. Bail jumpers move fast. You’ve got to go in when you can and take your chances. No time to learn the neighborhood, the routines, the visitors. I was here without the benefit of surveillance, without backup, going in cold with my heart thundering against my chest and adrenaline surging like water through a fire hose. I could taste it.
Almonds and saccharin
. I was scared shitless and I liked it.

T
he streetlamps were out, the night draped in billowy white clouds that cast a faint light across the overgrown yard and locked in the heat like a blanket. Atlanta in summer—suffocating and damp. Nerves and humidity sent sweat trickling from my hairline and over my darkened cheekbones. I was grease-painted and dressed for night work, crouching near the front door, searching my black canvas backpack for Tom. Anyway I called it Tom, as in
Peeping
Tom, a thirty-six-inch fiber optic tube with a miniature screen attached to one end, an electronic eye to the other. Tom takes a lot of the guesswork out of jobs like this. As I twisted and turned the tiny tube under the door, I got a pretty good look at the front room.

The subject, Antonio Johnson, was a repeat violent offender. He’d been out of prison for two months when he robbed a convenience store. I had traced him to Canada three weeks ago and lost him. But his ex-wife was in Atlanta and Johnson had a history of stalking her. She’d been getting hang-ups again. A trace of the calls, with the help of a friend at APD, led to a pay phone in a sleazy motel in Atlanta’s crack-infested West End. I found people there who knew Johnson. One of them ratted him out for thirty dollars. He was staying at a place off Jonesboro Road near Boulevard and the federal penitentiary. There even locals check their car doors at stoplights and commuters take the long way around after dark.

I could see him on the three-inch viewer, sitting on a ragged couch, feet on the edge of a wooden utility spool coffee table. He appeared to be alone, a beer in his right hand, his left hand in his lap and partially hidden from view.
You hiding something under there, big guy?

Hovering in the damp air around the front porch, just above the sweet, sick scent of trash and empty beer cans, was the aroma of something synthetic like superglue and Styrofoam.