Miki took the phone in her hands and sat back hard. “So that’s supposed to be him? Just some faceless monster? The stranger in the room grabbing at me.”
Miki’s penchant for fully and publicly indulging her darkness always undid me a little. Emily Street had drilled it into us that we should not show it when something was wrong. And we certainly did not talk about it. In my mother’s world, that’s dirty laundry.
“He wants to ruin it,” Miki said.
“Ruin what?” I asked her.
“Everything. My house, because I love it. My life, because it’s good now.” Tears spilled from one blue eye, then another. Miki wiped them away hastily. But she was so fair that any emotion instantly reddened her buttermilk complexion. She looked at me with red eyes and nose, and I remembered a moment from our childhood when I’d come upon her sitting, alone, on the edge of the little creek behind the park, hugging her knees. She’d looked up at me the same way, and I’d known she’d been crying. I thought about the strangled boy and his sobbing mother. Not for the first time. Something about it was eating at me just like it was at Rauser. And neither one of us could put our finger on it.
“This guy isn’t some indestructible phantom from your nightmares, Miki. He’s not the bogeyman. He’s a plain old criminal. Don’t give him any more power in your life. Thursday night when you saw him in your house after you went out for dinner, was that dinner planned for a while?”
Miki shook her head. “Last-minute.”
“Remember where you were when you made the plans?”
“Home.”
“How about the restaurant that night? Notice anything off? You said it felt like you were being watched at the gym. Anywhere else?”
“No. I’m sorry.” She yawned. Mother’s magic toddy was working.
“You’ve got a penlight on your keychain. You used it that night, right?”
Miki thought for a minute. “I did. I heard a noise just as I was going to put the key in the lock. I recognized the sound of the floorboards inside. It scared me. I went down the porch really quietly and pressed the light against the window. I saw the couch and some stuff I’d left on the table and then the light just kind of blacked out and I realized someone had stepped in front of it.”
“How did you know it was a man? What did you see?”
“I don’t know. His stomach, maybe, and his height. He was wearing black. No buttons. Some kind of pullover. He wasn’t fat, but he wasn’t buff either. His belly filled the shirt out.”
I thought about Cash Tilison in those jeans. Definitely buff. “And then he pointed at you like this? Thumb and forefinger?”
She shook her head again. “He didn’t just point. He pointed, then squeezed the trigger. Like a gun. Or like gotcha. He had on gloves. The kind germophobes get in the box at the pharmacy. They seemed really white compared to his clothes.”
“And then you looked up, right? You told me he stood there looking at you. Was the penlight still in your hand?”
“I dropped it and then I ran off the porch.” She stared down into her drink. “I threw up.”
I nodded. I’d seen the reports tonight at the station. The officers had found her keychain under the window. Poor Miki. I wanted to reach out to her now. Why is it so goddamn awkward for me? Why the hell didn’t my mother teach me this stuff? I brooded over that for a moment. My mother, the feral cat rescuer. Any kind of animal, really, but the wilder the better. For as long as I could remember, my mother had humanely trapped, vetted, and released back into our neighborhood some very confused cats with missing private parts. The free-roaming, mostly untouchable colony had become a fixture in Winnona Park. The numbers had dwindled over the years. New cats wandered in occasionally, and mother began her voodoo-like seduction with chicken livers and mackerel before the trapdoor slammed and they found themselves at the high-volume spay/neuter clinic up the street. To this day, my mother had wild cats on her porch waiting for breakfast each morning, standing back four feet until she cleared out. They returned to the sound of her voice and clinking bowls each evening. She kept track of them and worried over them, these creatures she could never lay hands on or hold.
A thought hit me for the first time—a full-on head-slapper. I made a mental note to share this with Dr. Shetty. My mother wanted to rescue things without having to get too close—love without intimacy. It’s what she’d done with Jimmy and me—her feral children. She read to us and made us read to her after school when we’d pile up on the king-size bed she shared with my father, taking turns reading our way through her favorite books. She had snacks waiting when we came in from school. She treated our scrapes with peroxide and made sure we were educated and well dressed. She tucked us in and captivated us with stories of growing up on the pungent marsh-scented shores of the Albemarle Sound. I had forged a connection to water, to the low country, before I had ever seen sound or sea or salt marsh. Her stories and her rich voice had mesmerized and altered me. But I could not remember Emily Street throwing her arms around me in a spontaneous display of affection. Not ever. It’s a special kind of restraint one learns at the hands of a southern woman.
I thought about my brother, Jimmy, and me lying on our backs as kids in pajamas staring at the glow-in-the-dark solar system on the ceiling and saying what we wanted to be. Jimmy thought if I was going to be a superhero, I’d have been born one, so I settled on being a cop. Every night when the lights went out, I could hear Jimmy’s little voice say “Wow” as the stars lit up on our ceiling as if he were seeing them for the first time. He’d leave his twin bed and climb into mine, and we’d whisper ourselves to sleep. Jimmy wanted to be a dancer. I wondered how he got from that to becoming an adman. Since he’d left years ago, our relationship had been reduced to holiday visits, quick phone calls, and emails. There was so much I didn’t know about his interior life now. I missed my brother. Reaching for him was second nature. I’d never had to work at it. So why was it so hard with everyone else in my life? Why was I struggling now with my fragile, tormented cousin? I blamed my mother and her detachment. I blamed alcohol and all the ways addiction changes you. Addicts are natural saboteurs.
“Miki, listen, I … I’m sorry. I didn’t get it. I didn’t get how real this was.”
“I understand. I haven’t been the most stable person in your life.”
“You remember when you first started hearing noises in your house?”
“What do you mean?”
“Was it when you started making nine-one-one calls?”
Her expression hardened. “So the cops are looking at my records?”
“They were aware of the nine-one-one calls, Miki, of course. Records are kept. You cut yourself around that time, didn’t you?”
“It was before I met Cash. That’s when I moved my bedroom upstairs. I was afraid there was someone at the window. I had all the trees cut back so the branches wouldn’t touch the house. I still heard noises. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. Everyone kept telling me nothing was going on. No one was in my house. No one was outside my house. Take your meds, take your meds, take your meds. That’s all I heard. I didn’t want to live like that anymore.”
“What happened then?”
“Another month of my life lost to the hospital. What a fucking waste. Magazine gave me a couple easy features to shoot until they knew I was okay. That’s how I met Cash. Then, when I wasn’t traveling, Cash was at the house. When he was gone, there was Jake, Greg, Ben. You get the picture.”
I patted her hand, got up. “Go get some rest, okay? We’ll talk tomorrow.”
Miki got a glass of water, and I watched her head upstairs. She looked especially frail to me tonight. I found my parents sitting side by side on the back deck, talking quietly, nightcaps under the stars.
“Come sit with us,” my dad said. “It’s a clear night.”
“You were brave tonight, Keye,” Mother said—lavish praise from Emily Street. “I felt safe because of that.”
I pulled a deck chair
close to them. We sat there in silence. “I want to ask y’all something. It’s about my adoption,” I said, and Mom nearly toppled her drink.
“Where on earth did that come from, Keye?” she exclaimed.
“What’s the big deal?”
“We’ve told you everything we know about your parents and your grandparents already,” she said.
“Why do you hate talking about this, Mother?”
“Honey, you know we wanted children,” my dad said.
“But why did you pick me?”
“I fell in love with you the instant I saw you,” my father answered.
“I heard you arguing when I was little,” I told them. I looked at Mother. “About how life with a white kid, a kid that wasn’t damaged, would have been better.”
“It would have been easier,” my mother agreed. “But not better. You were a broken little girl. Some days my heart ached for you. And some days, Keye, I didn’t know how to get through to you. And the community. So much gossip! This neighborhood was stark-white at that time. But everyone who met you put away their stupid notions and loved you just like we did.”
“I heard you say that day that it was Dad’s fault.”
Mother took my father’s hand. “Sometimes I just need to yell at Howard. It usually just means I’m overwhelmed.”
“I remember that children’s home. And I remember the first time I saw you.”
“You were so beautiful,” Dad told me.
“The white children were getting homes,” Mother said. “We wanted a child who needed us as much as we needed you. It wouldn’t have mattered if you were purple.”
We sat for a few minutes, leaning back in our chairs, looking at the stars.
“Remember those blue herons at the pond?” I asked Mother.
“Of course.”
“I haven’t been down there in years,” I said wistfully. “I used to love those walks with you and Jimmy.”
My mother’s voice was soft when she answered. “I did too, darling. Let’s take a picnic down there soon.”
I got up and bent to kiss them both. “I’ll call and check on things in the morning.”
“He never left her, Keye.” Mother’s voice stopped me as I reached for the kitchen door off the deck. I turned and saw her lean into my dad. “That male heron. They got old together down there at that pond.”
13
I saw him when I came off the elevator. He was talking to one of the housekeepers we’d gotten to know at the hotel pool party. Her name was Bogdana, forty-five, thick accent, a big cart loaded with housekeeping supplies, and a whole lot of junk in her trunk. He saw me and smiled. He was wearing ash-colored pants, a charcoal blazer with a white dress shirt, stiff collar, no tie. I could see his Adam’s apple and a hint of chest hair at the top button. I tiptoed to kiss him and smelled his aftershave. He put his arms around me.
“Did you get any sleep?” I’d managed to get in bed by three.
“Is it showing?” he asked. “I knew I should have put on my makeup this morning.”
We walked through the lobby. “So how is it I get breakfast with the busiest guy in town?”
We passed through the gleaming polished doors at the Georgian and the eighty percent humidity slapped us in the face. Rauser’s Crown Vic was parked in the valet area. Cop privileges. Barely nine in the morning and the sun was cooking already. Steam rose up off the pavement on Peachtree. Rauser opened the car door for me. I saw a fast-food cardboard cup holder with two full coffees and some breakfast sandwiches in yellow paper.
“I should have known,” I said. “Where are we really going?”
Rauser got behind the wheel. “Thought we could hang out for a while before the day gets nuts.” He peeled the wrapper away from a biscuit and bit into flat eggs and fake cheese.
I found a wad of napkins in his glove compartment and handed him one. “You’re a bad liar, Aaron Rauser.”
“Okay, so I thought maybe we could poke around a couple of crime scenes.”
I smiled, lifted the plastic lid on one of the coffees. “Sweet talker.”
Rauser did this sometimes, when he had a case that was really bugging him. He’d return to the scene again and again, try to make sense of it. I’d accompanied him many times. He liked having another set of eyes. He liked talking it out.
The scanner was turned down to a mumble. Rauser was a classic-rock guy. Hendrix was on, “Hey Joe.” We took Tenth Avenue past Piedmont Park. The windows were down. The Crown Vic sputtered at the light at Monroe; Rauser gunned it to keep it running.
“I miss you when things get busy like this, Street,” he said, and grabbed another biscuit. I reached across with a napkin and got a crumb from the corner of his mouth. I wanted to kiss him. Okay, to be honest, I had the urge to climb all over him. I didn’t, of course, but only because he was working and we were on our way to a crime scene.
We twisted through Orme Park toward Amsterdam. Blotches of warm sunlight landed on the car between the maples and oaks. Rauser’s cop’s eyes took in the neighborhood. At King’s Court, he pulled over in front of an empty lot skirted by a vinyl mesh construction barrier, bright orange. House numbers ran in the nine-hundreds. Behind the orange mesh, a major renovation was under way at the bottom of a slope, nothing left but a foundation. Judging from the weeds and vines and ivy and kudzu that had taken over, it had been like this for a while. A piece of heavy equipment sat at the bottom of the hill with huge, mud-caked tires. Not an unusual sight in Atlanta right now. The housing market that went up in flames a couple of years ago still had not staged a comeback. Projects like this had slowed to a crawl.
Rauser took a stack of photographs from the inside breast pocket of his jacket, then got out and tossed the jacket on the seat. He came around the car, rolling up his shirtsleeves, the long muscles in his forearms flexing. Pheromones were leaping out of him and tap dancing my way.
We followed the sidewalk past the tear-down. The smell of gardenias hit me. The flowers are as delicate as rose petals, but the smell is layered and complex—almond cookies with a touch of vanilla and brown butter and that first whiff of rain when it hits the concrete. A long row of them bordered the next property. I realized where we were. I’d seen it on television from another perspective—the medical examiner’s gurney coming out of the shrubs that night with a little boy’s body, a mother shrieking. She’d never feel the same way about a gardenia. I knew that. Smells and trauma are a bad combination. I still can’t get near cranberry anything without my stomach doing a full twist, though it has been many years since that jug of juice shattered on a grocery-store floor where my grandparents lay dying.
Rauser stood with his hands in his pockets, looking at the shrubbery. The yellow tape had been removed, and all the markers the techs put down for photographs. There was nothing at all that said this had been the scene of a violent murder except that in this one small area all the trash and debris had been collected. One perfectly clean area where a thirteen-year-old boy had been strangled.
Rauser handed over the crime scene photographs—my best chance to see the scene as the killer had left it. I looked at them in a new way. I’d thought about this scene many times since Rauser had plopped the photos on the bed while I drank my coffee. I’d thought about it again last night after walking into Miki’s and finding an elderly man hanging in the doorway.
I looked at the chalk circle on the sidewalk, found the corresponding photograph. Rauser watched me. “Dog treats,” he explained. “The kid was walking the dog. Young dog. No protection.”
I went through each photograph—the dog treats, a vague impression in pine straw on the other side of the vinyl mesh, drag marks in the dirt, the boy facedown, the ligature, the rope used as a garrote left on his neck, trash and debris. “The dog walk routine?”
Rauser nodded. “Every night. And get this. The kid’s mother said their mail had been opened a couple of times in the last few weeks. So I asked if any of the mail was related to the boy. She says yeah.
A letter from his baseball coach saying he thought Troy had mad talent. Coach recommended some famous trainer. Apparently, every sport this kid got near he turned to gold. He was set to try out for the Junior Olympics. Their trash was dumped out a couple times too. Mrs. Delgado thought it was a raccoon or something, but the neighbor’s trash, neighbor’s mail, all fine. Parents cooperated, by the way, sailed through polygraphs yesterday.”
I stood there for a minute, looking at the scene. I closed my eyes and breathed in the gardenia, imagined that night, the boy coming down the sidewalk with his dog. “He hid over here,” I told Rauser, and he followed me from the line of evergreens back toward the construction lot. “Where you found the impressions. It’s dry, so there’s not much detail. He knows this. He’s not worried. He just waits. He’s been watching them. And he’s riffled through their mail and their trash. He knows their routines, where they shop, buy gas, use ATMs. Receipts have date and time stamps. He knows the dog walk is going to happen. He knows the route. And he knows that child will be alone.”
“That’s pretty much how I see it too,” Rauser said.
We stood facing the vinyl mesh. “He drove the neighborhood and preselected this spot,” I said. “It provided cover, but he’d have a good line of sight through the mesh. It’s private enough to do what he wants to do, but not so private that the body wouldn’t be discovered. That’s important. He could have pulled the boy back there in the lot and left him hidden. But he wanted his body discovered.” I stood there for a moment, thinking about that.
“So he’s not just a mean asshole,” Rauser said. “He’s a fruitcake too.”
“Pretty much.” I nodded and looked back at the crime scene photographs. “The motivation could be a hundred things. Maybe he doesn’t want the boy’s body left in a bunch of construction trash. This could point to a relationship. Maybe he just wants him discovered because that’s part of the thrill. He doesn’t want to wait too long for the news to hit. Maybe he was just in a hurry.”
Stranger in the Room Page 11
