The Stranger You Seek (27 page)

“Ten-fifty-four-D-B, possible one-eighty-seven,”
the scanner reported, and got Rauser’s attention.
“Juniper and Eighth.”

“Two-thirty-three responding. ETA two minutes,” he said into his radio, and glanced at me. “Possible dead body, possible homicide. It’s just around the corner. I gotta take it.”

He flipped on his lights and siren and the cars in front of us began a paranoid migration into different lanes. Rauser barreled up another block and turned off Ponce. Moments later we were pulling up on Eighth Avenue near Juniper. I saw two women standing in the front yard of a Victorian with baby-blue shutters. They were big-eyed, both of them, with their arms folded across their chests. A cruiser pulled up and then another unmarked Crown Vic. A silver Lincoln was parked on the street.

Rauser used his radio. “Two-thirty-three, Dispatch. I’m ten-ninety-seven,” he said. “I’ll get you home as soon as I see what we got here, Street. Wait, okay? I don’t want you walking.”

I could have walked home in less than ten minutes, but I said, “I’ll wait.”

Rauser’s car was like a furnace. I got out, leaned against the door. It wasn’t much help. A whiff of a breeze rustled a leaf from a pecan tree, then died. I watched Rauser approach the two women, speak to them a moment. Then he talked to the uniformed officer and two detectives. They all walked toward the silver Lincoln. Rauser unsnapped the holster that was almost always at his ribs and opened a door. For a split second, I thought I saw him react physically to whatever was in that car. It was almost imperceptible, a slight stiffening, something with his shoulders. Whatever it was, I saw it, and I didn’t like it.

Rauser pulled away from the car and walked to the back, looked at the tag. He was on his phone. The crime scene unit showed up, then a station wagon from the medical examiner’s office. Frank Loutz, Fulton County’s ME, got out.

I watched Rauser take a few steps away and wipe his forehead. He had never fully adjusted to Atlanta’s long, smoldering summers. Another crime scene van pulled up, followed by Jo Phillips in a gold Ford Taurus. Oh great, Jo the flirty spatter analyst. Rauser didn’t seem to notice. He turned and looked at me, then turned away, frowning.

The ME approached him and they spoke, then Rauser walked toward me.

“It’s Dobbs,” he said.

“What?”

“He’s dead.”

Fifty yards away, two of the uniforms started sealing off the area around the silver Lincoln with yellow crime scene tape. In the distance, car horns and brakes told me the afternoon rush hour was picking up. The officers worked quickly to secure the scene. They needed to establish boundaries that would keep out the cameras and onlookers who would swoop down on it as soon as word got out.

“Liver temp indicates he’s been here ten, twelve hours, and there’s rigor in the limbs,” Rauser told me. “That’s a couple hours before we picked Charlie up this morning. There’s multiple stab wounds.”

Evidence techs and detectives were still pulling up, getting out of their cars. I remembered the way I’d treated Dobbs the last time I saw him, leaving him asleep at my office. I thought about the brownies.
God
. Had
that broken down his defenses enough to make him vulnerable to an attack? I slid down the Crown Vic and sat on the curb, feeling suddenly gutted.

Rauser’s hand was on my shoulder. He wanted to drive me home.

I looked up at him. “I want to see Jacob.”

He looked annoyed. “So now it’s
Jacob
? Because usually it’s just Dobbs. Why do you have to romance everything? He was a sonofabitch, Street. And just in case you’re taking the blame, Dobbs wasn’t stumbling into walls and shit because he had a little THC in his system. He slept it off. I’m sure he woke up on your sofa his clearheaded bastardly self.”

“Well, that’s a shitty thing to say, Rauser, given what’s happened.” I scrambled to my feet. “I need to see the scene.”

I didn’t wait for Rauser. I stalked toward the Lincoln—the disposal site. A casket on wheels.

Rauser caught up and handed me a pair of surgical gloves. “Okay, sure. Have at it. And if the press and the chief see you down there at
my
crime scene and the fallout interferes with
my
job, no big deal, right? As long as you get what you need.”

“Screw you.”

“Fuck the investigation.” He was walking fast next to me. “Fuck my job. Fuck me. Keye needs closure. It’s always about you, Keye, isn’t it? Or maybe you just want to supervise. Is that it? You can do it better than everyone else, right?”

I stopped. “Goddamnit, Rauser. You’re the one that asked for my help.”

“Yeah, so tell me that wasn’t a mistake, because right now I’m asking you to fucking stop.”

I slapped the gloves he’d given me into his palm. “Fine. I’ll walk home.”

I
didn’t answer the phone for hours. I heard Rauser’s ringtone a couple of times, but I ignored it. I wasn’t mad at him anymore. I was just furious at how right he’d been. About everything. It wasn’t the first time he had accused me of romanticizing the shitty things in my life, especially my
relationship with Dan. I get all gooey when I’m lonely and forget what life with Dan was really like. I don’t think the human psyche has the capacity to fully recollect pain. There are pros and cons to this, of course.

Sometime around midnight, I decided that swallowing a little pride and calling Rauser back was the right thing to do.

There was exhaustion in his ragged voice. “I called Dobbs’s wife. A couple of local cops were there so she wouldn’t be alone when I told her. She seemed really weirdly calm, Keye, and then there was a noise like she dropped the phone. Officer told me she’d fainted.”

I thought about what that must have been like for Rauser. I thought about the pain Dobbs’s wife must be feeling knowing how brutal and squalid her husband’s death must have been. I didn’t know Jacob’s wife personally. I knew only that she ran the sociology department at a Virginia university and that they had been married for many years.

“I’m sorry,” I told Rauser, and I meant it.

“I fucking hate this job sometimes.” I heard Rauser’s shoes against a hard floor, squeaky hinges, and a heavy door closing.

“Where are you?”

“Pryor Street,” he answered, which meant he was at the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Center, the morgue, one of his least favorite places to hang out, I knew.

“Was the Lincoln a rental?”

“Yep. It’s at the crime lab. Spatter says he was killed in it.”

“I don’t get it. What was Dobbs doing in that neighborhood in the middle of the night? Did he pick someone up? Was he forced to drive there? Was he meeting someone?”

“We’re working on it. We have a witness says he was alone at the hotel valet station a few minutes after midnight when he asked for his car. We know he’d consumed enough alcohol to be impaired. Here’s what I think. He slept half the day away on your sofa, so by late last night he’s wide awake. Strange city, he’s alone so he goes out to cat around a little, drinks too much, and lets his guard down. We’ve canvassed the street. Nobody knew Dobbs except from the news and no one remembers exactly when the Lincoln showed up. I think the location was random. The street was quiet. Killer forced him to drive to the site. So we’ve got three, maybe four hours we haven’t accounted for yet between Dobbs leaving his hotel and the DB call.”

I closed my eyes. It was still hard to wrap my mind around a dead body call for Jacob Dobbs.

Rauser said, “Fatal wound in about the same place as Brooks, the substernal notch. Angle tells us the killer was in the passenger seat and reached across the car. Had to be right-handed to get enough power to sink the blade.”

“He’s upping the ante,” I told Rauser. “The pictures he says he’s taking, the letter writing, using the Internet to copy me on emails, tampering with my car, dealing with a florist, and now a high-profile target like Dobbs. His need to fuel his evolving fantasies is escalating. It’s trumping his instinct for self-protection. He’s taking risks. His illness is progressing.”

“Which means he’s not being as careful. Loutz got fiber evidence. He thinks it’s a carpet fiber. I went to Dobbs’s hotel and got a carpet sample. It didn’t match. I’m trying to get a warrant to get samples from Charlie’s place. Fiber evidence may be all we got by the time we get in there. I got a feeling he dumped the knife and the pictures and anything else the little freak likes to hold on to even before we arrested him this morning. That’s what I woulda done if I’d just stuck a knife into a big shot a few dozen times.”

I thought about Charlie’s town house and remembered seeing a fireplace downstairs, an easy place to destroy pictures. Erasing them off a phone or digital camera would be easy too. And it wouldn’t be hard for a bike courier to ditch a knife. APD could not possibly cover every step Charlie took. He was in and out of office buildings, commercial centers, and public restrooms all day. Rauser was probably right about the evidence disappearing.

“What else do you know about Dobbs?”

“Wound patterns are consistent with the knife from the other scenes. But get this: no bite marks. None.”

“Not enough time for the rituals.” I was thinking aloud. “Residential neighborhood, foot traffic.”

“Keye, there’s something I haven’t told you yet. It was a pretty bad mess, what happened in that vehicle.”

I remembered watching as Rauser leaned into the car at the crime scene and his physical reaction. Mentally, I braced for what was coming.

“Dobbs’s pants were down,” he said. “And, well … his dick was gone.”

I
t had been determined that the black fiber the Fulton County medical examiner had pulled from inside one of Dobbs’s wounds was from automotive carpeting. My theory, Rauser told me, agreed exactly with his—the killer probably had the knife on the floorboard of his own vehicle before attacking Dobbs. Fibers clung to the knife, and when it had been plunged into Dobbs’s chest and pulled back out, a wisp of carpet fiber had attached to wound tissue. The ME’s office had entered the microscopic characteristics of the recovered fiber into the FBI’s automotive fiber database, which has over seven hundred samples from new and used cars. The origin of the fiber had been narrowed to fifteen models. Unfortunately, the database didn’t have enough searchable samples on file to nail down a year. It might have been a Jeep Wrangler, a Chrysler LeBaron, a Dodge Challenger, a Toyota Camry, or any one of eleven other models. The field was still too wide, but it was the first bit of fiber evidence ever recovered from a Wishbone scene. And Frank Loutz had gone from zero to hero in Rauser’s book overnight.

The bad news for Rauser was that the DMV didn’t have a vehicle listed in the name of Charlie Ramsey, his prime suspect. Charlie also had no driver’s license, which he would need in order to rent a car. Rauser’s gut was telling him Charlie was right for these murders, and he wasn’t going to stop until he proved it. If Charlie didn’t have a car of his own stashed somewhere, then he had probably stolen one, Rauser thought.
Detectives were going over all the stolen vehicle reports and comparing them to the list of models with carpeting that matched the fiber.

Rauser asked me to stay with my parents until he had Wishbone in custody. He was worried that the next contact I had with Wishbone might be more than an email or a wrestling match in my office or a wheel on the highway. He wanted me to stay out of sight for a whole host of reasons. I had considered for all of two seconds staying with my parents. Wishbone was inching closer: Dobbs’s death was a message for everyone involved in this investigation. I didn’t want to expose my parents to that. And I’d become homicidal myself if I had to spend that much time with my dear, sweet mother. Bless her heart.

Whatever Wishbone’s motive, I knew it was a good bet that Rauser and his detectives could become targets too. Wishbone had veered out of one lane and into another. It wasn’t just civil suit plaintiffs that set him off now. Rauser was the biggest threat to the killer’s freedom. He was the head of Homicide, of the task force, and the adversary with whom the killer had already established a cat-and-mouse relationship through letter writing. And it was no secret that Rauser and I were close. Wishbone’s letters had suggested Rauser’s relationship with me was sexual, just as Charlie had suggested it in my office the day he attacked me.

Rauser promised me he was looking over his shoulder.

I met a locksmith early at my office and called Neil to ask him to come meet me for the new keys. I told him we were going to have to change the way we did things. He couldn’t work with the door propped open anymore. The door was to stay closed and locked.

The locksmith followed me back to the Georgian, and by eight-thirty my locks had been rekeyed at home too. I made coffee and cleaned out White Trash’s litter box, gave her fresh food and water, then flipped on the television.

Dobbs’s murder was all over the news. The networks were running the juicy interviews with him they had on file. It was excruciating even for someone who had disliked the man as I had. I thought about Dobbs’s wife and children watching while newscasters described the gory details of his murder and sexual mutilation. I couldn’t even guess at what they must be feeling.