The Stranger You Seek (39 page)

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

It really is not much fun. In fact, it’s a bit of a letdown once you get past the challenge of taking aim. It happens too fast, a quick
pop,
and it’s over. Not like a blade. Not like seeing everything, every cut, every fluid that leaks out of the dying, the way pain pulls the skin tight and every expression line is exaggerated, painted on
. Pop, pop.
It’s so … impersonal. I saw his knees buckle. I saw her misery. Her pain was something anyway. However brief, her suffering is a memory to savor
.

Soon that will be what I have, just memories. Videos will be deleted and all my beautiful photos, all those triumphant moments will soon be gone too. I hate to see them go, really. But it is time. And I know each picture by heart, cherish each moment with them, each sound, each smell. Tonight I will toss my pictures into the fire and watch them yellow, watch the corners turn up, watch the centers blacken and ignite. It’s nice, actually. Never let it slip away—the first fire of the year, the turning leaves, the first snowflake—small pleasures. Life slips by so quickly
.

Q
uicker than you think, you sonofabitch, I thought, and searched for a way to comment on this blog, read some details from the website. I had to sign up in order to comment. I left this message at the bottom of BladeDriver’s last entry:
I won’t rest until I find you. KS
.

I was worried for anyone close to me—Neil, my parents, my brother,
even Diane. I hoped issuing that kind of challenge would keep his focus on me. There had been too much collateral damage. I sent Lieutenant Brit Williams’s BlackBerry the link with an email, explaining.
Neil found this blog, Brit. It’s Wishbone, I’m sure of it. Check out the dates. At least one entry was
after
Charlie’s arrest
.

I walked out of Rauser’s house and locked the door, remembered the million times I’d left this house with him, us laughing or arguing. We’d been good friends so long it seemed we were always doing one or the other. I climbed in the Impala and pointed it down Peachtree toward Piedmont Hospital. I wanted a drink so bad I could feel the stampede of cravings all the way to my back molars.

I kept thinking about the knife at Charlie’s place, the one the police had found under his mattress. The first search had turned up nothing, but the second netted them a bloody knife? Something was wrong. God, why didn’t I listen to my instincts? Wishbone knew Charlie was our prime suspect. APD had gone out of their way to make that public. They’d even organized a leak of his mug shot. Had Wishbone seized advantage of this, framed Charlie, to keep the heat off? Charlie was a thug anyway. Send him off to jail and get some breathing room, rest and plan, kill again. I wondered if Wishbone had gone to the trouble of planting the serrated fishing knife that had ravaged so many lives. Or had he simply left it where Charlie was bound to pick it up?

The game was everything for this kind of killer, even more tantalizing now than the basic compulsions of a violent serial offender. Toying, evading, taunting those who were trying to stop him. That was the hook. That was the whole reason for killing Dobbs, for shooting Rauser. Entertainment. And it didn’t matter who was in the way. The killer no longer needed a specific type of victim, someone who symbolized something. He could have stayed hidden. Charlie Ramsey had been set up beautifully. Wishbone didn’t have to resurface and try to kill Rauser. And yet here he was, so driven by rapacious ego that he couldn’t stay down.

My phone rang at the light at Fourteenth and Peachtree. “Are you all right, Keye?” It was Diane. “Are you taking care of yourself? What can I do?”

“I’m okay. Really. I’m heading back to the hospital. Rauser’s getting better, I think.”

“The doctors are taking care of Rauser. You have to take care of yourself too,” she insisted, quietly but firmly.

I was silent.

“We all miss seeing you around here. Maybe getting away from the hospital would be good, you know? Take your mind off things. Margaret says we have a lot of work we could give you. And I miss you.”

I heard the chimes on my phone letting me know I had unread email. “Hey, I gotta go. Don’t worry, Diane. I’m fine. Really. I’ll call you if I need you, okay? Love ya.”

I went through the light and pulled over in the passenger drop-off area in front of Colony Square. Brit Williams had sent an email saying the police department had contacted the fetish site publishing the BladeDriver blog. They’d requested all the details it stored on this user, including user name and passwords, addresses, phone numbers, but it would take a subpoena to get the records released and that would take time. Williams agreed that the blog was about the Wishbone killings but disagreed there was evidence Wishbone had written it. Anyone who was closely following the investigation could write fiction around the details and publish it. That the style and cadence were practically identical to the Wishbone correspondence Rauser and I had received was not something Brit was ready to accept as evidence. After all, the letters had been published for anyone to copycat. He had made the chief aware of a blog that had an entry the night Rauser was shot that was suspicious enough to warrant investigating. But there was nothing at all, Williams told me, in the vague ramblings of this blogger to link the attempted murder of Aaron Rauser to Wishbone. In his opinion, Wishbone was in custody and neutralized. The shooting in the park was about a thug who had a personal vendetta against Rauser or perhaps against anyone prominent in law enforcement.

I drew in a breath. I realized I was shaking. The air was crisp but still too warm to have stripped us winter bare; the leaves were hanging on and probably would through Christmas. A line of Japanese maples had turned cherry red up on Fifteenth. Colony Square and the High Museum were decked out head to toe for the holidays. NPR was playing the president’s address on health care reform. There was a group of people waiting to get into a restaurant next door, laughing. Life ticked by, unstoppable
despite heartache or tragedy. I felt removed from it all. Pain does that. It’s utterly self-absorbed.

I was pissed at Williams. He’d let me down. I answered his email.
Bullshit, Brit. What would Rauser do if it was you in that hospital bed? Anything it took regardless of what the chief said, that’s what he’d do
.

My phone went off a couple of seconds after I’d hit Send—a text alert, an unknown address.
Good to hear from you, Keye. Please do rest, my dear girl. What fun would life be without someone to challenge me? W
.

The message I had posted on the BladeDriver blog had obviously been delivered.

I sat there for a minute trying to collect myself before I went back to the hospital. I missed Rauser. I wanted to talk to him again about this. I wanted to hear his voice teasing me about getting so obsessed.
I won’t rest until I find you
.

I put my nose to the aftershave I’d found in his bathroom, musky and quiet, not too sweet. The scent took me back to moments when he’d climbed in my car or I’d climbed in his, when he’d come for dinner and television smelling like that. I’d brought his razor and shaving cream too.

I stopped at the nurses’ station to say hello. Another hello to the uniformed cop outside Rauser’s door. APD guarded his room 24/7. I had gotten into the habit of coming late, trying not to intrude when his kids were there. His ex-wife came for a day and we had no idea what to say to each other.

Rauser was in the bed just as he had been the night before and the night before and all the nights before that, two weeks now. Eyes closed. Fresh bandages around his head, blue hospital blanket pulled up to his chin. His breathing sounded strong to me tonight, and that had not always been true. Those first couple of days it had been so thin, like winter air.

I found a kidney-shaped bowl and filled it with hot water, used the water to soften his beard, then rubbed shaving cream over his thick stubble. Very carefully, I ran the razor over his imperfect face. I was tired of seeing him look so ratty, like a vagrant, I told him, and whispered that I was frightened as I wiped shaving cream off his face with a warm towel, frightened and so, so angry.
Come back to me
.

I
woke around four to find a nurse in the room. She smiled gently and apologized for waking me, but she needed Rauser’s vitals and to check the amino acids and glucose and electrolytes that flowed through a catheter and directly into one of the fat subclavian veins that twisted through a complicated maze of muscle and vein and helped deliver enough nutrition to keep him alive. I had been sleeping next to him when she woke me, squeezed into the bed on one side, my head against his chest, an arm thrown over his stomach. I listened for his breathing before I got up.

I nodded and said good morning to the officer on duty outside the door, then wandered to the elevator and downstairs, where I could find fresh air, even if it was on a bench under the harsh fluorescent light outside the emergency entrance.

Christmas music was playing as I walked through the main lobby. Happy holidays, I thought.
Happy fucking holidays
.

What had I been doing when Neil rang earlier? I’d been getting close to something before the blog had derailed me. What was it? WFSU, the criminology building and its proximity to the Fine Arts Annex. The first victim. Was Anne really the first victim? I was beginning to think not. If the killer was sixteen the first time he’d killed, as his blog had boasted, where had they met? I checked the pocket of my jeans to make sure I had my car keys. That whole pile of stuff on the Chambers murder was
still in the car. Might as well get some decent coffee and go over it again. There was a Starbucks counter in the hospital. Fivebucks, I thought again, and smiled, though it hurt to remember his jokes and his laugh and to remember him teasing me, grumpy and scowling over the Wishbone paperwork.

The hospital café was nearly empty. It was not even five
A.M
. I took my double-shot, skim milk latte to a table, where I spread out Anne Chambers’s photo albums, letters to home, yearbooks, everything her mother and Mary Dailey at WFSU had given me. I bent over the campus map and wondered again if the campus was where Anne Chambers had first met her killer. I’d been through the yearbook so many times and nothing had jumped out at me. Maybe it was time to begin running every name on that campus during Anne’s last year. I imagined Anne coming out of the Fine Arts building and being spotted by her killer. What was it about her that had set him off? Had he stalked her? Did they meet, become friends? I thought again about Old Emma telling me Anne was seeing someone. Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe instead she had spurned his advances. A student? A professor? Maybe he was neither. I felt a spike of frustration.

An intern shuffled into the café in pale green scrubs and booties, looking as if he hadn’t slept in a month. He paid the cashier for a muffin and coffee, then bolted when his pager went off, leaving his uneaten breakfast on the table.

I sent Neil an email and asked if he could get access to the university’s enrollment information, then went back to the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice yearbook. This time I wrote down the names on each page, one by one. It forced me to focus on each individual instead of the group pictures and goofy gag shots and clubs, and it prevented me from missing anyone.

At almost six-thirty, when first light was beginning to seep through the windows and my second latte was gnawing at my empty stomach, my thoughts began to drift to Rauser upstairs in his bed. I could conjure him up, I realized, just by closing my eyes: every line in that rugged face, every way that his mouth moved, and his hands, his smells and sounds, food he loved and despised. I’d memorized him over the years. But all my will couldn’t make him recover. I went back to making my list of names.

Then one of them leapt off the page and slapped me in the face. I studied the photograph. It was a group picture of twelve doctoral students who, according to the caption, had partnered with faculty members and won recognition for research in the field of criminal justice and behavior. The study was entitled “The Biosocial Origins of Antisocial Behaviors.”