The Stranger You Seek (11 page)

“Hey, girl,” she said, and handed me a couple of folders from her desk that some of the attorneys had dropped off for me.

Diane Paulaskas had been my friend since grade school, and she’d kept me up on the office politics at 303 Peachtree. She was a relentless gossip and the reason I now had work from a firm like Guzman, Smith, Aldridge & Haze. She had slipped my business card into every file and office on the top five floors, and when an attorney asked for a PI, Diane gave them my name as if I was the gold standard. She could down two gin and tonics for every one of my club sodas, and she didn’t pull her punches either. Diane Paulaskas was one of those people who would actually give you the truth when you asked for it.

“So, you get any lately?” she asked.

I rolled my eyes as if I was above that sort of thing.

The door opened to Margaret’s office. Diane and I both drew breaths. People seemed to dissolve like gelatin in hot water when Margaret Haze
entered a room, and we were no exception. She was over six feet in heels, hair cascading below her shoulders, red highlights, looked like a goddamn L’Oréal commercial. And she was, well, gorgeous.

“Please come in, Keye,” she said warmly, and shook my hand. She always shook my hand and she had always insisted on speaking to me personally. The other lawyers were content with scribbling out some instructions and leaving a folder for me at Diane’s desk. Not Margaret.

“Thank you, by the way, for the excellent work you did on the Stoubart case,” she said, and ushered me to a chair in the sitting area of her enormous office. “You gave me so much to use against the prosecution’s witnesses, it’s not even going to trial. I sent a little something to your office.”

“You didn’t have to do that, but thank you. It’s a beautiful basket. We’re enjoying it very much,” I lied. I’d already given the fruit to Charlie.

She smiled, took a chair next to me, and crossed mile-long legs. “I see you were able to file the paperwork on LaBrecque. Was he a problem to serve?”

I shrugged. “It would have been worse had we not been in church.”

Margaret nodded. “I was afraid of that.”

“He’s not a nice man.”

“Was he aggressive?”

I showed her my bruised wrist. “I’ll feel it for a day or two.”

Her nostrils flared ever so slightly. “This man’s wife is a friend of a friend and she asked me for help,” Margaret explained. It was not the kind of case she would normally take on. At this point in her career, she could pick and choose from a long waiting list. Her windowed office atop this gleaming office tower in downtown was a testament to her success. “He has been abusing his wife and child for some time. The restraining order is just the first step. I’ve handed it to one of our attorneys here. The wife will hopefully follow through and file divorce papers. I’m sorry he hurt you.” She rose and moved to her desk. “I think I remember it’s Diet Pepsi you like, right?” She pressed the intercom button on her phone. “Diane, would you please find Keye a Diet Pepsi.”

“Sure thing,” I heard Diane say cheerfully.

I read for a few minutes, then looked up from the papers she’d handed me. “You’ve taken a client who shot his boss twenty-three times?”

Margaret nodded. “We’re going for self-defense.”

“Uh-huh.”

“His boss was a frightening brute and my client feared for his life. The whole company is a bunch of thugs. Most of them carry weapons. Towing company. Very tough guys.”

There was a tap on the office door, then Diane came in smiling and handed me a drink on ice. She saw the papers in my hand. “Oh, you’re working on the tow truck driver case? It’s going to be tough to find an impartial jury on that one. Everybody in the city hates the tow guys—”

“Thank you, Diane,” Margaret interrupted, straightening a stack of papers on her desk, then handing the papers to Diane. “That will be all.”

“Of course,” Diane said with a smile.

I watched her leave, then looked back at Margaret. “So he shot him twenty-three times with a Glock nine? He had to reload. That implies calm and purpose. Not terror.”

A thin smile. “This is why I use you, Keye. You understand the challenges we face. Now go find some scary stuff on my client’s boss. We’ve got about three months to prepare. I’d like something from you within the next four weeks.”

I stood, took a sip of the Diet Pepsi and set it on the glass table next to my chair, then walked to Margaret’s desk. “You want me to keep this information?”

“Yes. That’s your copy.”

I picked up a framed picture from her desk and studied it absently. It was of a couple in swimsuits. The man was holding a little girl who had Margaret’s eyes. They were on the deck of a boat, both of them good-looking and very tan. The woman looked especially familiar.

“You and your parents?” I asked.

“Those were the days,” Margaret said, and smiled. “I didn’t have to have a day job.”

“Great-looking family.” I put the photograph back and tried to position it exactly as it had been. Margaret had already moved on to a thick stack of papers on her blotter.

“We’ll talk in a couple of weeks, okay?” she said without looking up.

Diane stopped me on the way out. She was leaving work to meet Neil and Charlie at my office to watch something on the big screen and wanted to know when I’d join them. My office had been a gathering
place for us all, especially during baseball season—me, Rauser, Diane, Neil, Charlie. I thought about the television my designers had installed lowering itself by remote control from the rafters on a silent silver pulley system like a seventy-two-inch flat-panel love slave.

“I can’t,” I told her. I wanted to find Rauser. I wanted to go back to the War Room. New reports from follow-up interviews on Wishbone scenes would be in, and the tip lines had started ringing. It was day two on the search for David, two days since the threatening letter had promised to murder him, and Rauser and his detectives had become so desperate they were searching Motor Vehicles and telephone records for anyone named David and attempting to contact them, a biblical name in the southern Bible belt and a metro area of nearly five million.
Three days, Lieutenant
. Tick-tock. We had twenty-four hours left if the letter was true. There wasn’t much room for optimism.

“I’m seeing someone,” Diane told me. “It’s serious.”

“Hey, that’s great,” I said, but what I was thinking was that it was always serious with Diane, who fell hard and fast and was too clingy and too willing too quickly and generally got her heart trampled for her trouble. I checked my watch. “I’ll call you in a couple days. I promise. I want to hear all about it.”

I
t was nearly two in the morning. Rauser had his lights flashing but no siren, no need to wake the natives. We took Peachtree into Buckhead and cut over to Piedmont Road, silent on our way to the scene of another murder—a male victim, facedown, visible bite marks, stab wounds. The Crown Vic’s windows were lowered, warm air blowing our hair, the squawking police scanner making for strange background music. Rauser’s severe profile in the flashing blue light looked like something out of
Dick Tracy
. Nothing seemed real. A crime scene when it’s new is an invaluable tool. Seeing it just the way the killer left it, smelling it, feeling it, listening to its story. Crime scene photographs don’t always slap you in the face with first impressions and subliminal connections like a fresh scene. And they never give you a sense of angle and distance and space. But there’s never much time. Once discovered, the landscape of a scene begins to change forever. Lights are switched on, evidence is bagged, the air begins to circulate, the body is disturbed. Trace evidence is collected, some drifts away.

I glanced at the speedometer. Rauser was doing seventy-five down Peachtree and barely slowing at the lights, but it wasn’t fast enough to suit me. I just wanted to get there. Like Rauser, I was thinking only of the prospect of new evidence, the seconds ticking away on a perfectly preserved scene. I wasn’t contemplating the loss of life or the shame and sin and horror in that. That part comes later. One learns to compartmentalize
emotionally for the sake of efficiency. Unfortunately, that particular talent doesn’t translate well in personal lives. The divorce rate is high for people like us.

We had been in the War Room with detectives and interviews and coffee mugs and cold takeout cartons, and the victims, all four of them up there on the bulletin boards, reminding us constantly what could happen to David, when the call came. I watched Rauser’s face change. The War Room had emptied out in seconds as Rauser shouted out instructions. He was already on his cell with a bloodstain analyst as we skipped the elevators jammed with detectives and ran down the stairs. Minutes later, his Crown Vic screeched through the parking garage at City Hall East.

“I want to process the shit out of this scene,” Rauser told me. “No mistakes this time. First officer secured the scene. No one gets in. I got CSI techs waiting for us and our spatter analyst on the way. We need anyone else there?”

“No. But you’ll want a good forensic odontologist at the morgue for the bite marks.”

Rauser was quiet for a few blocks. “I wanted to find David, Keye, find him alive, save his life.”

“Lots of people end up dead on their stomachs, Rauser,” I answered, and turned toward the window in time to see the huge fins on Symphony Tower glowing like something from
Star Wars
. “Lots of folks get stabbed and bitten. Doesn’t make it a Wishbone scene. Doesn’t mean it’s David.”

Minutes later, Rauser whipped the Crown Vic into the parking lot of an upscale extended-stay hotel off Piedmont in Buckhead. Immediately ahead we saw a tangle of police and emergency vehicles, lights in blue and red, officers stringing crime scene tape, dealing with arriving news crews and a gathering crowd. Unmarked vehicles, Crown Vics in different shades and in different states of disrepair, were pulling in—task force members. Rauser handed me a pair of surgical gloves from the scene case on his backseat, and I followed him across the parking lot past half a dozen police cruisers with blaring scanners. I watched him say a few words to some of the officers outside. Rauser had the heart of a beat cop. In his memories and in his stories, he was happiest back then. He missed feeling the grit in his shoes and still thought of himself
as climbing into “civilian clothes” each morning even though he’d been in Homicide twelve years.

We passed a crowd at the roped-off entrance. “Someone filming?” I asked.

Rauser nodded. “Williams and Balaki were in the area when the call came, so they got things moving. Let’s hope this one likes to hang around. Lots of ’em do.”

A chill suddenly lifted the hair on my arms. I looked back at the crowd. Something out there looked back. I felt it, and tried not to let my hopes sink. The signature elements and the physical evidence, tool marks, wound patterns—that would tell us if this was another Wishbone murder.

Guests had gathered in the lobby. The night shift manager was doing her best to keep some order amidst a storm of rumors. In the background there was a constant, faint ringing of the switchboard while the clerk stood idle and gaping at the front desk. Detective Brit Williams was standing next to her with an open notepad in his hand, but she wasn’t talking, wasn’t looking at him. Her face was gray, expressionless. I’d seen the look. She’d found the body, I realized, and she’ll never be quite the same, never push open a darkened door without remembering. I thought about Tim Koto finding his mother stabbed and beaten next to the stove where she had cooked for him. Who was taking care of him now? The night shift manager had started to sob. Murder disrupts everyone in its path forever.

More than thirty years ago, I sat on an old tiled floor watching as my grandparents’ blood drained from them and pooled up around me. I don’t really remember them or anything much before that moment. It’s like being born into a crime scene at five years old. I had been playing behind the counter when I heard the door open, heard angry voices.
Where’s the money, old man? Give us the fucking money
. Grandfather had pressed his palm firmly against the top of my head that day and held me down so I wouldn’t pop up and get it blown off. When he fell next to me, and when another shot collapsed my grandmother too, I didn’t make a sound. In obedient silence, I watched the blood soak through my clothes and the pale pink shoes I wore.

Now, lights from television crews lit up the street and reporters spoke
into cameras with the hotel and the crime scene tape as their backdrop. Uniformed officers kept them as far from the scene as possible. Already there were whispers about it being another Wishbone murder, and it seemed that everyone outside the ropes had a phone to their ear.

“It’s that freak who wrote to the newspapers,” someone said into their BlackBerry, and Rauser and I exchanged a quick glance. He was chewing on his lip.

We followed one of the officers through the parking lot and walked past a few buildings. Uniformed officers and plainclothes cops fell silent as we passed them on our way to Building G, Suite 351.

Rauser had strict instructions that no one should notify the ME’s office until the scene had been properly processed. All hell would break loose over that, I knew. He’d had disputes before with the medical examiner over jurisdiction and procedure, but preserving the scene and whatever evidence was left on the body was crucial before it was released.

We stood outside the doorway while the first officer briefed us. He had followed Rauser’s instructions to the letter. No one, not even an annoyed crime scene investigator, had been allowed inside. Everyone who had come in contact with the scene had been detained and was now unhappily waiting to give a detailed interview.

“Victim’s name is David Brooks,” the officer told us.

Rauser glanced at me. The muscle in his jaw was busy. He gave the officer a pat on the shoulder and said quietly, “Good work.”

I spoke briefly at Rauser’s request with Ken Lang, the specialist from the crime lab. I told him a bloodstain analyst was on the way and that no samples or scrapings or any kind of blood evidence should be collected unless there was pooling. In that case wet and pooled blood could be swabbed without jeopardizing other spatter evidence. I let him know Rauser wanted it processed thoroughly and as if it were a Wishbone scene. Lang promised if there was a fiber, any DNA, a fingerprint, any trace at all, he would find it. I wasn’t so confident.