The Majestic in Midtown, I thought. Midtown again. The common thread. His comfort zone. “Was your daughter celebrating anything special when she died? An anniversary or birthday?”
“On the day she died,” Tomah told us, “they had given her at the meeting just that very morning a special orange key tag to commemorate being drug-free for thirty days.”
“Is her bedroom intact?”
They shared an uneasy glance. “We waited for some time,” Dolo said after a moment. “We had to grieve Fatu’s life. And then we had to recover ours. We cleaned out the room in order to do that.”
“I understand,” Rauser said. “Was there anything of Fatu’s you decided to keep?”
“We have a box,” Tomah said. “That’s all we have left. Just a box.”
26
We left Clarkston with a photograph of Fatu Doe, which had been entrusted to Rauser by a reluctant, heartbroken mother. She was smiling in the picture, brown eyes lit by laughter. I saw the high cheekbones she must have inherited from her mother, masked in the crime scene photos by the brutal beating. I didn’t know how Rauser dealt with the grief of suvivors day in and day out. The Bureau and my position in the Behavior Analysis Unit had mostly shielded me from dealing with families. I typically worked with other law enforcement agencies. I’d seen my share of crime scenes. I’d met my share of monsters and learned all about their terrifying interaction with their victims. But I didn’t want to look at the wounds of the living with the zoom lens used by local law enforcement. I was intimately familiar with that kind of wreckage.
Visiting the Does and sitting in their kitchen, waiting for their story, we had learned much about their daughter. She was impulsive, stubborn. She wanted nice things. She had a prior relationship with a man who had stalked her, possibly beaten her, who refused to let her go. And she was willing to maintain some contact with her stalker. I thought about Tomah Doe talking about her daughter’s attraction to the trappings. Fatu wanted to start over. She’d received help from an addiction center, fought a meth addiction. But there’s a lot of shame in addiction. It tears away at your self-esteem. She’d sold her body to support it. Getting clean or getting sober doesn’t take away that feeling that you’re pretending. Because that’s how addicts live. We pretend we’re present, that we’re clean or sober, that we’re okay when we’re so far from okay on most days. We hide. We lie. Addiction sticks with you even after you’ve crawled back from it. A smart predator could take advantage of this.
Fatu’s parents had put a box in front of us, sealed with red duct tape. Rauser was careful when he looked through her things, respectful. The world wouldn’t have seen much value in the contents, but the Does had kept what was meaningful to them. A couple of handmade leather and beaded bracelets, a pair of silver earrings. A to-do list—driver’s license, open bank account—and an unfinished job application for The Home Depot, some poetry scribbled on an envelope, a piece of recovery literature from Peachtree-Ford.
We drove toward Stone Mountain Village, only a few miles from the house in Clarkston, discussing scenarios. Her killer knew Fatu was an addict. Perhaps he’d even been a john. It was easy for him to devalue her, given her choices. He’d tried to emotionally isolate her, I told Rauser. I’m the only one who loves you. When he could no longer control her and when he discovered her only interest in him had been for material gain, his rage simmered. Perhaps she’d called him that day after she’d argued with her parents. He’d lured her back in, then beat, raped, and shot her. Perhaps the ribbon, whatever it had meant to him previously, was some symbol of his triumph over rejection. In death, he owned her.
“Probably planned to kill her all along,” Rauser said. “If she got outta line. I mean, like you said, he tried to isolate her. She didn’t have friends except the new ones at the addiction center. And we’re all over that.” He fished around for his nicotine gum. “So what if this guy’s in one of these institutions where your cousin happens to be, he gets a thing for her, feels rejected by her? Later, he meets Fatu. Maybe she somehow reminds him of Miki. The scars on her arms? Then something about the kid and the old man set him off. He’s got an appetite for killing by then. He’s bolder.”
“Dime-store psychology, Lieutenant,” I said. I looked out my open window so Rauser wouldn’t see my smile. We crossed the railroad tracks and passed the German restaurant I remembered from my childhood.
“You’re just jealous, Street. You’re jealous ’cause I can figure this shit out without a bunch of degrees.”
“It was Donald Kelly’s birthday,” I said. “Fatu Doe’s thirty-day orange key tag. Troy Delgado was on the cusp of something too, wasn’t he? A huge career, an expensive private coach, qualifying for the Junior Olympics. And Miki. What is it about Miki?” I wondered aloud. “Is she connected somehow? She cut herself, just like Fatu did, but she hasn’t been in a hospital in two years. Her career is surging again. She was short-listed for a Pulitzer and actually won other major photography awards. She’s received tons of recognition for her work. She’s also landed in the tabloids for relationships with famous singers.”
“Maybe it’s success that freaks him out,” Rauser suggested.
“Maybe,” I said. “Or transitions. Moving on. Maybe he was unable to move on from something significant in his life.”
We passed shops with canvases from local artists on sidewalk easels, cupcake makers, gift shops, cafés and restaurants, antiques stores, and a pub with tables and chairs on its roof. Rauser found parking near an old Charleston-style home turned restaurant. It was called the Sycamore Grill because for years a huge sycamore tree had overhung the veranda. It had served as a hospital during the Civil War. We didn’t have a lot of those old places standing. Sherman’s torches had lit up everything in sight.
“Something about each of his victims set off their killer. That motivation’s what we need to figure out.”
“That’s what you need to figure out,” Rauser said. “Me, I’m just a cop. I deal in whens and wheres. Not whys.”
We stepped out of Rauser’s fanless oven and felt a breeze. The gazebo where Fatu’s body had been left was fifty yards to our left. The Sycamore Grill and several other businesses sat on a slight incline above railroad tracks that split the village in two. There was parking on both sides of the tracks, which made the gazebo more accessible than either of us remembered. We discussed this. The offender could have easily come into the village without using the main drag and parked above, rather than below, the tracks. No one had seen him. Again, this indicated familiarity with the area—where to enter, where to park, the routines of local cops and business owners. It was important to him to leave her in a public place. Why? A final act of dominance over her? He’d pulled her skirt up to her waist before he walked away from her. He wanted to degrade her. He’d raped and beaten and murdered her elsewhere but dragged her here and pulled up her skirt—he wanted her humiliated, even after death.
As we crossed the park, I told Rauser about having seen the gazebo full of microphone stands and musical instruments when the city of Stone Mountain was having events and the lawn was covered with blankets and coolers and folding chairs and kids running wild. This seemed too innocent a place to be a disposal site. I tried to imagine what the atmosphere in this quaint little village must have been when Fatu Doe’s body was discovered and the word of her murder spread from doorway to doorway, shop to shop. Fatu’s body was found by a startled shopkeeper who had her coffee in the gazebo on nice mornings before opening.
We wanted to come here to get a feel for the location. The toughest thing about crime scene photographs is understanding context—how and where the scene falls within its environment and where the victim is within the scene. Neither of us expected to find new physical evidence at this late date, but there was still a lot of information to be gathered regarding offender behavior. In order to satisfy his needs regarding placement of the bodies, he had taken risks by operating in public. Calculated risks, however. The killer had
used the cover of darkness to stage the scene; he’d worn gloves as always; he was careful about being quiet, where he parked. But he wasn’t careful enough. We knew he carried a 9mm, and Rauser’s specialists had concluded it was an S&W. We had fluid samples, which hopefully would hold enough skin cells for DNA typing. The twine found around Troy Delgado’s neck matched the twine that helped hang Donald Kelly. We weren’t dealing with a mastermind or someone well schooled in evidence collection like the Wishbone killer, who had taunted police last year and terrorized the city. But this killer was careful enough, intelligent and erratic enough to be dangerous.
Rauser’s phone went off. Mine followed as he was answering. I didn’t recognize the number. Miki. “Hey, this is my new number. Log it in. I’m at the gate at Hartsfield. So weird walking through the airport with a cop.”
“Are you okay?” I asked, and wondered how she was handling the fear. I wondered if she was clean and sober.
“Really fucking glad to be leaving Atlanta,” she said. “I’d appreciate you and your boyfriend solving this shit while I’m gone. Hey, they’re boarding my plane now, gotta go. Really I just wanted to say thanks for everything and tell you Aunt Emily totally rocked her audition. I mean, we were just shaking our heads. She is the most uninhibited person I’ve ever seen in front of a camera. They’re going to love her. She’s a natural actress.”
“This explains why she and my ex-husband are so crazy about one another.”
“I think she really is going to be the next Paula Deen,” Miki said.
“Only prettier,” we said at the same time.
“Be safe, Miki. Tornadoes don’t care if you’ve got a camera.”
“No kidding,” she said, laughing, and she was gone. I looked at Rauser. “That was Miki. She’s getting on the plane.”
“I just got the same report. And your mom is home safe. How’d Emily’s thing go?”
“She blew them away.”
“Of course she did.”
We crossed the manicured center of town and headed back to Rauser’s car. His hands were dug into his pockets and he was watching his feet as he walked. “I gotta powwow with Major Hicks when I get back. See how the new boss handles all this in his first week in Homicide. Nobody’s gonna like it. Multiple homicides without a viable suspect. Might as well be walking on hot coals.”
Atlanta has a long and violent history. And the pain is fresh. Only a year ago a killer had tormented and murdered, then vanished. It was inevitable there would be rumors that Wishbone had returned. Police Chief Jefferson Connor had nearly been tarred and feathered last year for his mishandling of the Wishbone cases. While Rauser and I were convalescing, we’d watched the chief skewered daily in the media with utter, unremorseful joy.
“I don’t mean to make this all about me, but I went through hell with Chief Connor last year over the Wishbone investigation. I don’t want to go through it again,” I said. “You sure Hicks is okay about my being on board?”
“Connor learned his lesson about meddling. He stays quiet now unless there’s a press conference and he can grab the credit for something. And Hicks won’t bother you. He has no reason not to trust my judgment. I’ve got a good record. And he knows they offered me his job first.”
Rauser stopped and looked at me. He has a way of showing emotion without doing anything at all. It starts with a tiny crinkling at the corner of his eyes that makes you think he’s going to smile. I stepped in closer. His big hands touched my waist just above my hipbones. “Why don’t we sneak away for dinner tonight? Williams can handle whatever comes up.”
I leaned in to him. “I want you first. Then dinner.” He kissed me and I felt his hands move up my back. I felt them all the way south to the Everglades.
On the way to the station, we stopped in the Majestic Diner, where Dolo Doe told us they had picked up their daughter one evening. Rauser showed Fatu’s picture to the manager and cooks and anyone else who would look at it. No bells went off. Rauser’s detectives and the uniforms would have copies of her photograph too, in case someone on the street recognized her and remembered her boyfriend. But a year is a long time in the hazy, transient world of Atlanta’s streets.
We tossed out theories on the drive, Rauser’s favorite being this man Fatu called Mister was actually her pimp. Her parents knew this, that it was the real reason they’d argued that night when Fatu took off up the street with the phone against her ear. We also discussed the possibility he was a john or in some other position of power—counselor, sponsor.
We returned to the station. Rauser got me the box of personal possessions from Donald Kelly’s room in the assisted-living facility, and I hauled it to the cubicle they’d loaned me. It’s astonishing what our lives get boiled down to in the end. I thought about the box we’d picked through so carefully at the Does’ house.
I opened a black leather billfold and saw credit cards, a state identification card, a debit card, insurance card, forty-seven dollars, a yellowed, dog-eared folded note: Honey, don’t forget your lunch. There was a fading photo-booth picture of a couple. I looked at the inventory sheet, which described the photograph of Kelly and his wife. She had been dead for over ten years. I found a school picture of a little boy grinning at the camera, tooth missing just right of center, lots of dark hair, eight or nine years old. And another one with the same dreamy-blue school background and the same boy, slightly older. Great-grandson Levi Sobol, the sheet told me.
Williams was sitting in the cube in front of me. “No other family pictures in Kelly’s apartment?” I asked.
“Just in his wallet. Wife and grandkid.”
“This must be the boy Kelly had talked about to the driver. You know if this picture is current?”
“The last one is two years old.”
“That would put the great-grandson at about the same age as Troy Delgado, wouldn’t it?”
Williams nodded. “Different schools, though, different neighborhood.”
“How about the summer baseball leagues? Delgado played in one. I think we should take a closer look at the grandson. Maybe there’s a league roster or something. Social media might be the fastest way to check out sports and other extracurricular activities.”
“So you’re thinking our perp sees Kelly’s great-grandson while he’s watching the Delgado kid and that somehow led him to Kelly? How do you figure?”
“I don’t figure.” I sighed. “I’m just looking for a way to put your victims in the same location at the same time. Kelly didn’t have many pictures. Just his dead wife and this boy. Both obviously meant a great deal to him. And he was a baseball fan. The novel he’d written was about baseball. He told the driver how much he cared for the kid. He’d want to see him play.”
I needed to know how and where he met his victims. All four victims, one living, three murdered, had been celebrating something, at some turning point. Even Miki had stopped cutting herself. It said something about his psychology, but what did it tell me about where he’d seen them, met them, selected them? Fatu worked on the streets. He could have easily picked her up in Midtown. Perhaps they’d met at the hospital where both she and Miki had once been patients. Was he part of the hospital staff? Or a patient? Could he have met Miki there too? Or had he formed his attachment to my cousin through tabloid stories or her photos in magazines? Maybe he’d simply spotted her somewhere and latched on. The hospital was one of the largest mood disorder and addiction centers in the Southeast, with several clinics. It was a good bet that most of the addicts in the area who needed inpatient rehab had been in the Peachtree-Ford system at some point. That Miki and Fatu had been in the system was not necessarily the smoking gun I was looking for. And where would that leave Donald Kelly and Troy Delgado? Neither was in recovery. Nor had either suffered from mental illnesses, as far as we knew.
Williams turned back to his computer. I continued looking through a dead man’s things. I thought about him hanging there in Miki’s house, chalky and cold.
“Check this ou
t,” Williams said. “Levi Sobol’s Facebook page. No privacy controls. Somebody should teach these kids how to do this safely.”
I got up to look at his monitor. There was the nice-looking boy from the wallet photos. But he was wearing a red baseball cap, and white uniform with red stripes. Cardinals, it said in thick red screen-printed letters. Williams started clicking through Sobol’s Facebook photo albums. He found a team picture—three tiers of boys in uniform, the bottom row sitting cross-legged, steadying a sign that said Atlanta Summer League Association.
On the far wall next to the enormous combination dry-erase and corkboard that listed open cases and relevant details added by the investigators, photographs were posted of victims before they were victims, when they’d simply been student or mother or baseball player or dog lover. I walked to it and looked at Troy Delgado standing on the pitcher’s mound, glove on, hands at his sides, goofy kid smile that said he was indulging a parent and couldn’t wait for the photo shoot to be over. Blue script on his uniform said Blue Jays. I remembered the letter from the coach that had been opened. The one that said Troy had extraordinary talent.
Rauser appeared and stood watching me. “Which teams are in that league?” I asked. “If they have Blue Jays, can we get a list of players?”
“Both teams are in the same league,” Williams reported a minute later, and our first connection was born.
“Let’s see if we can put them on the same field the same day.” Rauser was chewing his bottom lip, which meant his nerves were popping. You could feel the energy coming off him. “Balaki, call that driver. See what he knows.”
“Schedule’s online,” Williams said. “And look at this. Delgado’s team played Levi Sobol’s team twice already this season.”
“Lieutenant,” Balaki said, and covered the mouthpiece on the APD landline. “Mr. Balasco says he took the old man to the field a couple times to watch the kid play. He thinks one of the other drivers did too. He’s gone to get his schedule.” Balaki scribbled on his notepad. “Thank you, Mr. Balasco. Yes, sir. Have a good day, sir.” He hung up. “May twenty-first and June third Mr. Kelly was driven to the ballpark.”
Stranger in the Room Page 22
