Stranger in the Room

by Amanda Kyle Williams

“You can see it in several of the crime scene photos. The investigators didn’t focus a lot of attention on it,” she said.

  “What kind of weapon we talking about?” Rauser asked Bevins.

  “Nine-millimeter, Lieutenant.”

  Rauser rubbed his hands together like he was standing over a campfire. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Have ’em email their tool-marks reports to our examiners pronto.” He picked up a landline and dialed an internal code. “Lang, we got a ballistics report coming in from Stone Mountain PD. I need a tool-marks examiner to compare it to the slug you dug out of the Honda where Kelly was shot. Pronto, okay?” Rauser put the phone down. “Won’t take long,” he said. “It’s not like DNA. We won’t be in walkers before it gets here.”

  I went back to the War Room and the box of items taken from Donald Kelly’s apartment. I picked up the manuscript. It’s about baseball and hot chicks, Rauser had told me. Baseball was Troy Delgado’s game, wasn’t it? Or one of them. His parents said during their heartbreaking interview that their son had excelled at most sports. I read a few pages before Rauser stuck his head in.

  “You wanna come out here, Street? Tool marks line up on the overlaps. Probability is the bullet that went into Donald Kelly and Jane Doe were fired from the same weapon.” We stepped into Homicide and he briefed his detectives. “Williams, get a police courier out to Stone Mountain. And tell ’em we’re coming. They have any issues, let them know we’ll keep them apprised of anything that affects their case. Keye, you got any thoughts?”

  “Three disposal sites now,” I said. I was willing to bet everyone in this room had considered that already. There was still a lot of argument about standard definitions of serial killing, but the basic accepted criterion is three victims with a cooling-off period between murders. No one in law enforcement wants to hit that magic number three. The press goes ape shit. “And every scene was meant to be found. The scenes were staged. He had to manipulate a body into a gazebo in the center of town, in and out of a car and into a home in Inman Park. And Troy Delgado’s body was found just a few yards off the street. The offender has to have some understanding of the neighborhoods, the routines of the community. And of local police. Offenders hunt within their comfort zone. Why is he intimately familiar with both areas? I think he moved from Stone Mountain to Midtown since Jane Doe was killed. Or his profession requires him to frequent both areas.”

  “If he moved,” Balaki said, and started tapping at his keyboard, “we can look at DMV, voter’s reg, real estate records.”

  “What do both areas have in common?” I asked.

  “Restaurants, for one,” Williams answered. “And we already have a witness who thought our perp was a waiter. Stone Mountain Village has that little strip with a half dozen restaurants right there.”

  “Good,” Rauser said. “Follow that.”

  “The fact that he’s leaving some kind of party favor at the scenes is interesting. It might have to do with some obsession with parties. Or maybe birthdays. Kelly died on his birthday. But it could also be a behavior that developed over time,” I said.

  “You’re saying he was killing people before he was decorating them.” Bevins was frowning. “Or leaving party favors.”

  “I’m saying it’s possible.”

  “Street people and hookers.” Balaki shook his head. “That’s usually where it starts. Easy targets.”

  I nodded. “Prostitutes are more likely to experience exploratory wounds. And their disappearance is slow to get reported, if it’s reported at all. Fewer intimate relationships. Predators count on this.”

  “Be nice to know about the fluids, wouldn’t it?” Williams said. “I was in the morgue. I saw that stuff all over the kid. Working without DNA is like being hurled into the goddamn dark ages.”

  “Listen to me, people,” Rauser snapped. His fuse had frayed a little. “All that DNA shit, it’s gonna be great in court. But it’s good old-fashioned police work that closes cases. Don’t ever forget that. The district attorney can use it to convict. It’s not our problem. Our job is to act like detectives and bring in suspects.”

  “My bet’s on urine,” Bevins said quietly. We all looked at her. “The fluid, I mean.”

  “We have a fluid pool?” Balaki asked. Cops are competitive by nature. They’ll bet against one another on just about anything. “I’ll take semen for ten bucks.”

  “Stone Mountain ever get an ID on Jane Doe?” Rauser wanted to know.

  Bevins looked back at her computer, tapped a few keys, then nodded. “Her name actually is Doe. Fatu Doe. Twenty-one years old. She was a prostitute.”

  25

  Rauser knocked the volume back on the blaring police scanner and pushed a piece of nicotine gum through the foiled back of the package. “This stuff tasted like crap at first. But now when it starts to get peppery and release that shit, and I’m like, oh yeah, baby.” He looked behind him, swung out of the parking spot in his Crown Vic. We were about two inches from one of the huge support columns. His car was banged all to hell already. Rauser drove like somebody who had spent his life rushing. On a straightaway, I loved it. I’d grown up with redneck boys in muscle cars, after all. I have a chemical reaction to hot guys in fast cars. But in the garage at City Hall East, not so much. I squeezed my eyes shut.

  He turned right onto Ponce de Leon Avenue and hit the first red light. Deep fryers from the Mexican restaurants that dotted Ponce cranked out tortilla chips for the lunch crowds and oily air mixed with exhaust fumes—Atlanta’s summer scent. I had my elbow propped on the lowered window. Rauser’s fan was out in his car again. I could feel the heat coming up from the pavement on my arm. The sun was hammering us. The motorcycle shop on our left was buzzing with perspective buyers. Georgia’s hot summers trick us into thinking this is a good idea. We long for wind in our hair. Lot of bikes on the road this time of year, scooters are all over the city streets. We ditch our gas guzzlers. We suddenly care very much for the environment. I know. I was once seduced by a little red Vespa. And then the blistering sun cooks you inside your helmet at stoplights. Or you run over your own toe. Or winter moves in. Folks with real winters and heavy snows think it’s funny that we complain about winter down here, but let me tell you, when the windchill hits you on a little scooter doing thirty-five in a business suit in January, your friggin’ lips will freeze to your teeth. I lost five pounds just by shivering. My concern with America’s dependency on foreign oil stopped there.

  Ponce de Leon Avenue bustles and quivers and mutters through Midtown Atlanta—theater, art, shopping centers, strip malls, liquor stores, street people, men’s bars—then crosses North Highland and meanders through the historic district lined with southern mansions and landscaped parks. It veers into downtown Decatur and great restaurants, passes MARTA stations and farmers markets before it narrows into a two-lane that runs along weedy railroad tracks past little frame houses and brick apartment buildings. We followed it ten miles into the heart of Clarkston.

  I had spent the morning going over Troy Delgado, Donald Kelly, and Fatu Doe’s death investigations, learning the details of their last moments. Pin drag and other distinctive marks on the 9mm bullet that had stopped short of Fatu Doe’s skull wall and lodged in the cranium cavity matched tool marks on the slug that had ripped through an old man’s kidney and ended up inside the volunteer’s 2010 Honda Element. A twenty-one-year-old hooker and a man who didn’t want to celebrate his birthday. Why had the killer chosen them? I didn’t think it was random. But I still didn’t know why they’d been selected.

  The trajectory told the ME the killer had been standing behind Fatu Doe. The exterior entry wound was relatively small, between the temple and right ear. The muzzle was pushed against skin and bone, which made a clean entry. But when the bullet was blown in, all those gases exploded inside the wall of her skull and tore a lacerated path through the brain in a millisecond. A rape kit had been done. No ejaculate had been detected. There was blood in the lining of the uterus that was not m
enstrual in origin and a sizable laceration in the vagina. Medical examiners and coroners avoid legal terms like rape, but there was little doubt Fatu Doe had been sexually assaulted before her death. She had blunt-force contusions and abrasions on her arms and face. Deep color in the wounds. She was alive when she was raped and beaten. Her parents had told the detectives that Fatu had been in a rehab facility for a meth habit and was no longer using drugs or hooking. Toxicology had shown trace amounts of THC in her bloodstream. Marijuana hangs around a long time. It’s not an unusual find in someone who has been drug-free only a few weeks. Doe’s parents had told investigators their daughter had an on-again-off-again relationship with someone they’d never met, someone she called Mister and sometimes Mister R. Still, the Stone Mountain PD had uncovered no suspects. The initial was a lead that led nowhere.

  Rauser glanced at me as we crossed the tracks. He turned left on Church Street in Clarkston, a community vibrant with immigrants and refugees. It’s the original home of the Fugees Family, an organization dedicated to child survivors of war, an estimated half the population here.

  We drove east a few blocks, then turned right on a side street that looped in a circle, punctuated by potholes and For Sale signs in yards where home owners had forgotten to keep up the landscaping in a down market. Half the houses in the neighborhood were vacant. Lanky, dark-skinned boys kicked a soccer ball around in an empty lot. They stopped and stared at us as we passed. Rauser’s Crown Vic was unmarked, but it was obviously a cop car.

  We parked in front of a mint-green house. Shingles had peeled away from the roof, exposing black patches of tarpaper underneath, an unrepaired reminder, I guessed, from one of the big storms that had roared through this year. The house was a decade past due for pressure washing and priming and painting, but somebody loved it. The window boxes were bulging with petunias that had lifted their velvety heads to the hot midday sun. Ferns hung from hooks under porch shade, and containers with red geraniums stood on each end of the wooden steps leading to the screen door. A white oak towered over the front lawn and shaded one end of the house. The windows were open. Everyone tries to save those cooling dollars. By the end of July the heat is so heavy and thick, you don’t have a choice but to close the windows and strain the budget for an extra couple hundred a month through September.

  Before Rauser had folded up his knuckles to knock, a figure appeared in the doorway. Wearing a long skirt in washed-out orange and yellow, she had rich brown skin and eyes, high apple cheeks, hair cut close to her head, a white linen shirt. She was tall. She looked at Rauser, then at me, but said nothing. “Good afternoon, ma’am,” Rauser said. “I’m Lieutenant Aaron Rauser from the Atlanta Police Department, and this is Keye Street. Are you Mrs. Doe?”

  Her eyebrows pulled together almost imperceptibly. “I am Tomah Doe. This concerns Fatu?” she asked in the Liberian English that is both rhythmic and beautiful and requires concentration. The words this and concern sounded like dis and cone-sir.

  “May we come in and speak to you?” Rauser’s years as a cop had programmed him to answer questions with questions. “I tried to call, but there was no answer.” He pulled out his identification and held it up to the screen.

  She ignored the ID but stepped outside and let the door bang shut behind her. “We’ve been outside. My husband is still in back,” she told us. We followed her down the wooden steps and around the house. Clothesline cord was stretched out from one corner of the house to a small freestanding building that had probably once been a one-car garage. Wooden birdhouses and feeders hung from the line, handmade, hand painted, beautifully fashioned. Dolo Doe was bent over a sawhorse in the center of the garage he’d obviously converted to a workshop. He was working with a tool, a small chisel. His hands looked too big for such delicate work. The floor was covered in wood shavings that smelled sappy and clean. He lifted his eyes, looked at Rauser and me, put the chisel down on the thick plywood table.

  “Tomah?” he asked, simply, but his eyes hadn’t left us. He was a tall man, taller than Rauser, who was six-two.

  “Police,” she told him. “About Fatu.”

  He brushed his hands off on dark blue jeans. Sweat was glistening on his face. “Come in out of the heat.” He motioned for us to follow him up cement steps into the back of the house. In the small kitchen, the appliances looked old, but they were scrubbed spotless. So was the floor and the sink. The room smelled like banana bread, which my mother bakes, and when I said so, Tomah’s cheekbones rose in a polite but reserved smile.

  We sat down at a square kitchen table with four chairs. Dolo washed his hands at the sink and dried them on a blue towel. I found myself thinking about their daughter on that stainless-steel table. I could see in her mother the features nearly lost behind the bruises on Fatu’s face. Dolo’s arms were long and muscled—working arms. He joined us and waited silently while Tomah took a pitcher from the refrigerator and filled drinking glasses without ice. She then removed cloth from a loaf of bread and sliced four thick pieces and placed them on white plates. She put them in front of us with cloth napkins.

  “Rice bread and juice,” Dolo told us, and took a long drink. A trickle of sweat ran down his temple. He had a wide forehead and nose, with prominent ridges over his eyes.

  The juice was pulpy and icy cold—pineapple, mango, orange. The bread was moist and dense with mashed bananas and nuts. We broke it off with our fingers. Rauser complimented them. We were patient.

  “You have discovered her killer?” Dolo Doe asked finally. Tomah was sitting straight, muscular arms on the table, hands clasped.

  “We think we’re close,” Rauser replied. “When your daughter was killed, she had a piece of ribbon around her ankle. Do you know why?”

  Mr. Doe shook his head. “Our daughter’s life was largely a mystery.”

  “Had you seen it before?” Rauser asked.

  “No,” Dolo answered.

  Mrs. Doe sat to my right. A tear came to the corner of her eye, balanced there, then cut a streak down her cheek. She didn’t try to wipe it away. She did not lift her eyes from the tabletop. “Fatu had just come from the addiction center. She was just beginning life again.” Her heartache was palpable. Some wounds never heal.

  “What was the name of the facility?” I asked.

  “It is Peachtree-Ford. Fatu was in the aftercare program. She returned each morning for two-hour meetings.” Peachtree-Ford Hospital was one of the institutions where Miki had spent quite a lot of time. “Our Fatu loved going there. Many kinds of people.” She smiled faintly.

  “In the statements you gave police, you mentioned a man your daughter had been seeing. Can you tell us about him?” I asked.

  Mrs. Doe shook her head. “We never knew this man. Fatu had ended this relationship before she came back home to us. This man said she belonged to him. ‘I am the only one who cares for you out here in this world,’ he told her.” She lifted her eyes. “He told the truth. No one cares for a black-skinned girl. She is only a prostitute to you. Only a drug addict. But she is also our daughter.…” She choked on her final words.

  “Tomah,” Dolo scolded her. “They are here to help.”

  But Tomah Doe wasn’t finished. I imagined how many times she’d longed to express her anger in words. “The police will tell you how many times your daughter is arrested for prostitution and for drug possession,” she told us. “They will tell you prostitutes put themselves in harm’s way.” Tears flooded her eyes. Her chair scraped the linoleum floor as she tried to push away from the table. Dolo’s fingers caught her wrist.

  “Fatu was lost for so long to the streets,” he told us. “One day she was a small child and the next she was lost.” He released Tomah’s wrist, patted his wife’s hand. “When our daughter was murdered, she had only been home two weeks.”

  “I have children,” Rauser said, surprising me. He wasn’t the kind of guy that shared. “They’re grown up now, but it would just about kill me if I had to go through what you’ve been through.
I give you my word that I’ll use every resource I have to find the person who murdered your daughter. Anything you remember might help. Anything. You can call me night or day.” He pushed his card to the center of the table.

  “This man, he did not wish to go away,” Tomah said, quietly, the silk in her voice restored. “He called many times. Fatu refused to take his calls. Or she would hang up.”

  “Did she have feelings for him?”

  “No. He promised her things. This was the attraction. But it was a lie. He had nothing, this man. He was a bother to her.”

  “You know what kind of work he was in?” Rauser asked.

  “No. My daughter never said.”

  “Do you know how they met?” Rauser persisted.

  “We were careful what we asked. We were often afraid of the answers.” Dolo said it quietly.

  “Can you tell us about the last time you saw your daughter?”

  “She was walking fast up our street with her phone against her ear,” Dolo replied. “We wanted her to stay home and get well. But she was young. She wanted to go out and see people. We were afraid it meant trouble again, and drugs.” He shook his head. “So many times with Fatu, we begin talking and end up shouting.”

  “There was no record of a phone recovered,” Rauser told them. “We didn’t find any telephone records either.”

  “Mr. R gave her the phone,” Tomah answered. “Another thing we argued over. It was a way to hold on to her. But she wanted things that we could not give her.”

  “You have the phone?”

  “We never saw the phone again,” Mr. Doe told us.

  Rauser and I exchanged a glance. It was a good indication that Mr. R was her killer. He would have taken the phone and destroyed it, knowing its records could lead to him.

  “When she was on the streets,” Rauser said carefully, “do you know where?”

  “She called us to pick her up only once,” Dolo said. “When she was ready to accept help. We went to the Majestic Diner. She met us there. She was so thin. And her eye was swollen. Someone had struck her.”