The Stranger You Seek (13 page)

“Hey, Lieutenant,” Detective Brit Williams called out. He held up a newspaper. “Early morning edition,
AJC.
”

Rauser jerked the newspaper out of his hand, looked at it, and thrust it at me. “At least they had the decency to black some of it out this time.”

The headlines read:
Do You Know David? New Letter Vows More Killing
.

I
t was daylight when I left crime scene techs and investigators at the scene of David Brooks’s murder. I heard Rauser complaining loudly to the ME about the way his people were handling the body and their effect on his crime scene. Lieutenant Aaron Rauser was going to have another long day, I knew. Day three and David Brooks was dead. Day three and the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
had the second letter.
Tick-tock, Lieutenant
.

I caught a cab back to the Georgian. The news about the murder and the second letter were all over the car radio. The driver wanted to talk about it too. He feared for his own safety. He’d gotten good, he claimed, at judging a fare, at knowing whom to pick up and whom to leave standing, who might rob him, who might tip. Now he didn’t know what to look for. The news was telling him the killer might be the guy next door, the cashier at the grocery store, the man standing at the ATM behind you.

The cabbie dropped me in front of the Georgian. I wandered into the café off the lobby, exhausted.

The story of Brooks’s murder was on the television in the coffee shop, and I waited for my double-shot latte, transfixed like everyone else in the line. That these brutal killings appeared random, that the killer’s motive was unknown and therefore unpredictable and not something one could protect against, seemed to plant a seed of terror in everyone.

Foreboding choked the air we were all breathing. A thirty-second spot on the local news with a criminologist from Georgia Southern told us that no one knew who was next, but that it would happen again and soon. A contact number was displayed for runners who wanted to form groups rather than exercising alone. It was suggested that parents wait at bus stops with their children, and there were warnings about how vulnerable scooter and bicycle operators were after dark. MARTA stations had added security, we were told.

Atlanta had a long history of spree and serial murders—the Black Butcher in the early 1900s; the Atlanta child murders in the seventies and eighties, twenty-one children and teenagers killed; Brian Nichols’s rampage, which began at the Fulton County Courthouse and branched out into the burbs; day trader Mark Barton taking out his family and Buckhead coworkers. All of us had grown up with or read the stories of Atlanta’s violent past, but this was different. This killer was writing to
us
, describing the ways he was torturing his victims. He was telling us that he talks to them, that he asks them,
How does it feel?
This insight into his interaction with the victims and this latest letter ratcheted the city’s anxiety up to another level.

And if we weren’t near enough panic,
Good Morning America
opened with “The
serial murderer in Atlanta known as the Wishbone Killer has struck again after letters taunting the Atlanta police and to the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
detailing his plan. Was it politics that prevented Atlanta police from using their best resource, the public, to prevent this latest brutal murder? This morning nationally known criminal profiler Jacob Dobbs weighs in on the investigation and the menace known as Wishbone.…
”

I sank into a cushioned chair and glared at the television. I had worked with Jacob Dobbs at the Bureau. Dobbs was a full-on sonofabitch, in my opinion, unfit to weigh in on any aspect of the investigation, since he had no insider knowledge of the investigation and “weigh in” really just meant “speculate.” I wondered if the killer was watching. The story had gone viral now. It must have been heady stuff for someone who had allowed the media to name him.

KNIFEPLAY.COM

Your Online Adult Edge Fetish & Knife Play Community blogs > beyond the EDGE, a fantasy by BladeDriver blog title > Sweet Sixteen

There is so much work left to do and so much pressure. They say they want it to stop, but do they really? No. They cannot wait to read about the next one.

Want to know a secret? I was sixteen the first time. Sixteen years old and my grades never dipped a point. I wasn’t like other children.

I
showered, shared some breakfast with White Trash, who loved scrambled eggs with chives and cream cheese, then called Neil. I still had a mortgage and a business to run, calls to return, promises to honor, money that had to be made in order to keep my head above water regardless of what else was happening in the world, and I needed his help this morning. It was after eleven before we got started.

I took Piedmont Avenue through Midtown while Neil took long hits off a joint in the passenger’s seat, held them in, and coughed them out. It was hot already and humid, and I was tired from the long night. Neil was tired too. He had been working with a couple of detectives from Rauser’s task force to develop a complete picture of the victims’ lifestyles, anything that might help unravel Wishbone’s selection process. The top was down and the air felt good on my face. I’d pulled my hair back and put on a white button-down tucked into khakis, with the logo of a nonexistent courier company embroidered over the left pocket, and a pair of Tod’s that had set me back four hundred bucks, but if you’re forced to wear khaki
and
loafers, it’s only fair.

I glanced at Neil, then back at the road. “How do you inhale that stuff all day? Are you going to be able to drive?”

He blew smoke at me. “Hell, yes, I can drive.”

We were coming up on Tenth Avenue—Outwrite Books’ patio packed with coffee and raspberry scones and cute guys, the Flying Biscuit on the right, Red Tomato and Nickiemoto’s and Caribou on the left. Brunch was in full swing and the lunch hour just beginning. The street
smelled like melon and baking dough and frying bacon, and I had a moment when I remembered exactly what a Bloody Mary tasted like at this time of day.

Neil opened the background folder on the person I was to serve with a witness subpoena. We had her home address, work address, vehicle description and tag number, a passport-size photo, a copy of her driver’s license, a brief summary of the attorney’s experience with her thus far, copies of court documents that told us why she was being served, and copies of the sheriff’s report.

“Oh, I remember running her for alternate addresses,” Neil commented after he’d studied it for a while. “Sheriff tried to serve her three times.”

There are a lot of reasons people duck subpoenas. Nine times out of ten it’s about convenience. Who wants to take the time to show up for a long deposition or sit in court and wait for hours to testify? There are exceptions, of course. Sometimes witnesses are frightened. Sometimes they’re being paid to stay quiet. Sometimes they’re thugs and criminals themselves.

“To be honest, I don’t think it’ll be much of a challenge.”

Neil grinned at me. “Really? What do you know that the sheriff doesn’t?”

I smiled and winked as we passed Piedmont Park, hung a left on Monroe, then turned into an apartment complex across from Ansley Mall.

Several of the law firms I worked with used me for hard-to-serve subpoenas when the sheriff’s office had failed. I wasn’t under any restrictions at all as far as method or, well, ethics, so I could get creative when I needed to. Plus, I had the time. They don’t. They have too much on their plates already. Last Christmas I’d stuffed a subpoena inside a fruitcake, and not long ago when Rauser and I ordered pizza, I talked one of their drivers out of his cap. With that cap and a pizza box, I was able to serve a man who had dodged the sheriff’s office for three months. I mean, who doesn’t open the door for pizza? Today the subpoena I intended to serve was folded inside a coffee cup that was inside a gift box that I’d wrapped in brown postal paper. A bright foil sticker read
SWEEPSTAKES AWARD HEADQUARTERS
and listed a fake address in Illinois, thanks to some help from a very resourceful guy at Kinko’s.

Helen Graybeal and her husband lived in C-6, ground level. I parked one building over, got out my clipboard, and stuck a pen in my shirt pocket.

“Careful,” Neil said. “Place is kinda nasty.” He put his head back against the seat and closed his eyes.

The door opened after the first ring. “I have a delivery for Helen Graybeal.”

“I’ll take it.” The man was wearing red plaid shorts and a T-shirt. He had a cigarette between his fingers, thick forearms, and a suntan. Not the kind you get from tanning salons or sandy beaches. The kind you get from working outside.

I pretended to read delivery instructions on the clipboard while tilting the box so he could see it. “Sorry,” I said. “Gotta have her signature. Just have her come down to the warehouse tomorrow and pick it up.”

Mr. Graybeal seemed to be wrestling with what to do. He looked at me uneasily, then back at the box. “Helen, it’s one of your sweepstakes,” he called over his shoulder. “You gotta sign.”

In the background, I saw a quick-moving shadow, and then it was gone.
Bingo!
Her head came around the corner, then a foot, and finally she came to the door. She was thin and tough-looking, leather-skinned from too many cigarettes, with lines that webbed out around her top lip. She paused long enough to give her husband a hate look, then handed him her full coffee cup. She took the box and scribbled her signature on my fake courier log.

I quick-stepped it back to the car as soon as the door closed. One thing you don’t want to do when someone has been dodging a subpoena for a long time is hang around while they discover what just happened. All that cocky you’ve-been-served stuff can bounce like a football if you’re not careful. You never know which way it’ll go.

Neil had turned the car around and was waiting in the driver’s seat with the engine running.

“I got her,” I told him, and climbed into the passenger’s seat. “Husband totally folded when he saw the return address. She’s into sweepstakes, buys lottery tickets, stuff like that.”

“And you knew that how?”

“Hey, you’re not the only one capable of doing a little research. I am a detective, after all.”

“Which means you poked through her trash?”

“Exactly.”

We were waiting for a break in traffic to pull out of the complex and onto Monroe Drive when I heard shouting behind us. I checked the visor mirror and saw Helen Graybeal barreling toward us. She was waving the coffee cup I’d just seen in one hand and the subpoena in the other, describing the ways in which she was going to shove both up my ass. Her husband came running up behind her and attempted to restrain her without success.

“Jesus, let’s go,” I told Neil.

Then
thump
. The coffee cup she’d been holding sailed over my old convertible and clipped the back of my head near my left ear. For a couple of seconds the world was nothing but little gold specks. “Fucking
go
,” I yelled. “Bitch has an arm.”

Neil was laughing. “I can’t just pull out in traffic—”

Then
pop, zing
. A perfectly round hole appeared in the windshield. A bullet had passed between our heads and gone through the windshield. We exchanged a quick glance, then Neil punched the gas hard, spun out onto Monroe Drive, shot across four lanes of traffic, and burst into the Ansley Mall parking lot amidst honking horns and screeching tires and middle fingers in the air. He bounced over six speed bumps, got us onto Piedmont, and then pulled over a few blocks down on Fourteenth near the park.

I think we were silent for a full minute, both of us staring, stupefied, as the hole spiderwebbed out across my windshield.

“God
damn
,” Neil whispered finally.

I ran a hand over the growing lump on the back of my head. “That was a brand-new windshield.”

My phone rang. Tyrone’s Quikbail number showed up on the display.

“What up?” Tyrone asked.