Stranger in the Room

by Amanda Kyle Williams

  The woman who opened the door wore dark pink pants, sneakers, and a polo shirt. Her hair was silver and thick, tucked behind her ears. We knew she was seventy-two and her husband was three years older. But she didn’t look it. Not even close.

  “Mrs. Etheridge, I’m Lieutenant Aaron Rauser with the Atlanta Police Department, and this is Keye Street. May we come in?”

  Alert green eyes went from Rauser to me. “Of course, Lieutenant, Ms. Street. Please come in. May I offer you a glass of iced tea?”

  “No, ma’am. Thank you.”

  She led us through a tidy house to where a white-haired man was sitting at a table, gluing back together a model airplane that looked like it had some age on it. He didn’t lift his head when we entered the kitchen. She touched his shoulder and spoke loudly. Behind him, outside the window, the Candler Park Golf Course stretched out. “Fred, these people are from the police department. They want to speak with us.” I saw the hearing aid in his ear when he raised his head.

  “Well, pull up a chair,” he told us. “Did my wife offer you something?”

  “Yes sir, she did,” Rauser answered. Melinda Etheridge sat down with us.

  “You here about Owen?” Fred Etheridge asked. “Can’t be good news or a phone call would have been sufficient.”

  “He doesn’t go by Jesse?” Rauser asked.

  “His mother called him Jesse,” Mrs. Etheridge told us. “She was killed when Owen was seven and we were awarded custody. He wouldn’t let anyone call him Jesse after that.”

  “We’d like to speak with your grandson. Is he here now?” Rauser asked. I thought again about the stakeout on the street and the wide open green of the golf course. I imagined a door being flung open and Richards running. It didn’t happen.

  “Why, no.” Mrs. Etheridge looked shocked.

  “Where can we find him?”

  Mr. Etheridge frowned. “I assumed you were here to tell us where he is.”

  “No, sir. We’re trying to locate your grandson. It’s very important.”

  “We’re not even sure Owen is alive,” Mrs. Etheridge said. “He disappeared about three years ago. We filed a report.” Irritation crept into her voice.

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m aware of the report,” Rauser said. “We believe your grandson is very much alive and in the Atlanta area.”

  Melinda Etheridge reached out, squeezed her husband’s hand on the table. “Before he disappeared, Owen had moved back in with us. He couldn’t seem to hold a job,” she told us. “And he could be very difficult to deal with. It started in high school. The moods and gloominess could turn violent when things didn’t go his way. He’d break things, yell and scream. He gave up the things he loved, put on a lot of weight. He was so angry. It would break your heart to see how angry he was.”

  “What did he love?” I asked.

  “Baseball, for one,” Mr. Etheridge answered. “And he was good at it. He liked girls, though he wasn’t good with them. Our daughter, Owen’s mother, and his father were killed right in front of him. He never seemed to be able to get over it.”

  “So you haven’t seen him in three years? Not even a note or a phone call?” Rauser asked.

  “No,” Mrs. Etheridge answered.

  “Did he have any friends?” I asked. “Anyone he spent time with or trusted?”

  “Owen had trouble keeping friends,” Fred Etheridge said. “He was too unpredictable. He’d blow up at them. But there was the guy with the landscaping crew who picked him up for work. They went out a few times and seemed to stay friendly. You remember his name, honey?”

  Mrs. Etheridge shook her head.

  “Please, anything you can think of, Mrs. Etheridge,” Rauser pressed.

  “I don’t mean to appear rude, Lieutenant,” she replied, evenly, “but you’ve asked a lot of questions. You’ve come into our home and told us our grandson is alive and that you’re looking for him. But you haven’t bothered to offer an explanation. And you seem completely oblivious as to how this might affect us.”

  Rauser calmly removed his phone from his pocket. Too calmly. He wasn’t in the mood to be polite. He touched the screen a couple of times, then slid it across the table. Mrs. Etheridge’s hands came up to her face. But her eyes stayed locked on the pictures on Rauser’s phone. He’d framed them all on one screen—Fatu Doe brutalized in the gazebo, Troy Delgado facedown in the dirt, Donald Kelly hanging.

  “God in heaven,” Mr. Etheridge said.

  Rauser pointed at the photo of Kelly. “This man was abducted, shot, and then hung like this in the house of a woman your grandson spent time with at Peachtree-Ford Hospital. He was also an inpatient at a facility for mood disorders at the same time she was a patient. We believe he’s been stalking her for at least two years. There was a piece of wrapping paper in this man’s pocket.” He pointed to Fatu Doe’s picture. “She had a ribbon tied like a bow around her ankle.” He pointed at Troy Delgado’s body. “This little boy right here. He loved baseball too. Body fluid on this little boy and on the old man, it matches semen found inside this young woman. She was beaten and raped before he killed her. Now, I realize this may come as a shock, and I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t have time to sugarcoat it, but we believe your grandson did these terrible things. And we think he wants to do the same thing to the woman he’s been stalking. Dr. Street here has profiled the killer and all roads led to your grandson. If you withhold information from us, it’s blood on your hands. Do you understand?”

  “Is the woman being stalked blonde, and is her name Miki?” Mr. Etheridge asked.

  I fought a shiver.

  “I’d love to know how you know that,” Rauser said evenly.

  “Last two times he was in the hospital we visited him.… They were long stays, weeks. He’d checked himself in both times. He talked about a young woman. He said they’d met and fallen in love. He talked about how pretty she was, how smart she was. He said she understood his darkness,” Mr. Etheridge said. “When he came out and moved back in with us, he wouldn’t talk about her. Not in a way we approved anyway. He made disparaging remarks each time we raised the subject. He’d had these infatuations before. His response to rejection was always anger. He got that from his father. We didn’t want our daughter to marry that man. When he was violent with her even when she was expecting, we begged her to leave him. She finally did when Owen was about five. But he wouldn’t leave her alone.…”

  Mr. Etheridge was veering off track. His wife took over gently. “After Owen disappeared, we went through his things. We’d hoped maybe he’d left a note. He’d hurt himself before. Cut himself. It was always our fear. That we’d get a call or we’d find him dead. So we went through everything. We found dolls. Barbie-type dolls. Male and female. They were hanging from clothes hangers in his closet. They all had strings tied around their necks. And they were all naked,” she added venomously.

  “We found letters,” Mr. Etheridge added. “Letters about what he was going to do to someone. A woman. He didn’t name her. Sexual things. Violent things. It was too horrible to read. We burned them in our fireplace.”

  Rauser sat back in his chair and looked at them. “Everything? You destroyed the dolls too?” The Etheridges nodded mutely. Outside, thin white clouds passed over a pale blue sky. Inside, Rauser’s nostrils had flared and his jawbone was busy. “Did it occur to you that you might be destroying evidence? You knew he was violent and dangerous, didn’t you? You were afraid of him, weren’t you? And you stayed silent?” Again, the elderly couple didn’t answer. “How about pictures of your grandson just before he disappeared?”

  “He stopped letting us photograph him years ago. He could not bear seeing himself.”

  “Do you remember how many dolls you found in the closet?” I asked.

  “I’ll never forget it,” Mrs. Etheridge told me. “Four male and four female.”

  “Can you describe how they were positioned? Were they all hung alike?”

  “Three male dolls and three female doll
s were hanging by their necks. Each one of them on an individual hanger,” Mr. Etheridge told us. “The other two were attached to one another by the arms, facing one another on the same clothes hanger.”

  I let that sink in. Rauser asked, “Did Owen use a computer?”

  “Oh yes,” Mrs. Etheridge answered. “He was very good with them.”

  “I’d like to see it,” Rauser said.

  “We never found it. It disappeared when Owen disappeared.”

  “You mind if we have a look around his room?”

  “It hasn’t been his room for two years. We got rid of everything. There was too much darkness in this house for too long.” Melinda Etheridge sounded indignant.

  “If Owen was close to this friend who picked him up for work, maybe he’s been in touch,” I suggested to her. “Can you try to remember his name?”

  “I don’t remember the man’s name. He was about Owen’s age. The work was good for Owen. He started losing a lot of weight. Owen didn’t talk much about his day at work or what he did when he went out. And he didn’t like to be questioned. We felt we’d walked a tightrope with him his whole life. His threats were always hanging over us. That’s what he’d do the moment something went wrong. Threats. He would rage and scream, and then he would threaten to kill himself. It was manipulative. We knew that. He controlled us with those threats. But we were still terrified he’d follow through one day. And he knew we couldn’t bear the thought of that.”

  “You remember the name of the landscaping company?” Rauser asked.

  She shook her head. “It was an architectural landscape service. They designed and maintained golf courses and parks, places like that. It had ‘commercial’ in the title. Maybe Commercial Landscape and Design?”

  Rauser jotted the name down on a tablet he pulled from his pocket, then put his card on the table. “Thank you for your time.”

  “What’ll happen when you find him?” Mr. Etheridge wanted to know.

  “I can tell you this,” Rauser answered. “The longer this goes on, the worse it’s gonna be. He gets in touch, you tell him to turn himself in to me now. It’s the only way I can guarantee his safety.”

  “One last question,” I said. “Did you ever celebrate his birthday after his mother died?”

  “She was our daughter!” Mrs. Etheridge exclaimed. “How could we celebrate the day that monster took her from us?”

  We walked together to the car, leaving the Etheridges silent and ashen-faced at their table. “Fucking great,” Rauser grouched. “Little strung-up dolls and destroyed manifestos and some friend with a landscape company nobody remembers the name of. You buy any of it?”

  “Jury’s still out,” I said, and opened the passenger’s door, got in. “They were weird about his room. Something felt off. But they looked genuinely shocked by the photos. Of course, that doesn’t mean they don’t know where he is. The description of his manipulations, the threats without regard to the effect on them, lack of empathy, violence, anger, rage, blowing up when he doesn’t get what he wants or expects, his inability to connect—it’s all part of a cluster of psychopathetic behaviors. I believe they were sincere in how helpless they felt. You were hard on them.”

  Rauser threw his battered Crown Vic into gear. It lurched forward away from the Etheridge home, sputtered. “They knew the sonofabitch was dangerous. He was under their roof with all these weird behaviors while he was playing Fatu Doe, saying he would get her an apartment or whatever and planning how he was gonna kill her. I mean, what the fuck? They’re either hopelessly clueless, in deep denial, or they’re liars. We’ll see what they do now. I can show cause for a listen on their phones.”

  “Three years and he hasn’t been in the workforce,” I said. “But he has to have food and shelter. He has a dog. He’s not begging on the streets. He’s working or he’s getting support. Can you get their financials too?”

  “Hell yeah we can. Statute in Georgia allows us access as long as it’s a criminal investigation.”

  Rauser stopped at the traffic signal at Ponce and Clifton. The afternoon rush was revving up. We were jammed in bumper to bumper.

  “He could be living under an assumed name,” I said.

  “Three, four years ago, it wasn’t that hard to do. If you know the social’s available, you’re pretty much home free. Next stop, the DMV.”

  “Especially if you make sure the social is available,” I said.

  “So maybe he offs somebody,” Rauser said, and continued playing with that idea. “The guy he worked with, you think? I mean, Richards is a real manipulative sonofabitch, right? So he buddies up with this guy, gets his sympathy or whatever. Let’s say he’s about the right size and type physically. Owen gets the right haircut, claims he lost his license, shows his social. Piece of cake. Old licenses don’t have the thumbprint either. If he gets his print on that new driver’s license, he’s good to go. New life. I like it, Street.”

  The car behind us laid on the horn. Rauser ignored it and got on his phone. “Williams, we need the bank records for Melinda and Fred Etheridge. We’re looking for regular payments going to an individual. And we need somebody going over all the missing-persons cases starting about the time Jesse Owen Richards dropped off the grid. Start with local cases and branch out. We wanna make sure Richards didn’t swipe somebody’s identity, okay? Narrow it to males at least six-two or -three. Hair and eye color can be changed, but let’s start with brown. Also, he worked for a landscaping or landscape design company that didn’t come up when we looked at him. Something like Atlanta Commercial Landscape. Let’s see what they have to say.” Rauser finished catching Sergeant Williams up on the Etheridge visit and got the ball rolling on the warrant for the phone tap. He looked at me. “That scenario fit the cluster-fuck of behaviors for psychopathy?”

  I smiled. “Your vocabulary has improved since you’ve been hanging out with me.”

  “Uh-oh,” Rauser muttered. The engine had started to knock. Loudly. The car shimmed.

  “You know these things use oil?” I asked, and got a sideways glare. “Sounds like you’re about to throw a rod.” Growing up with a fix-it guy like Howard Street, both Jimmy and I had learned how to keep a car running. Rauser knew how to start them, drive the hell out of them, and bang them into things. And he’d been incredibly stubborn about accepting what anyone else in the department would have appreciated—a new car. He’d chain-smoked in this one for six years before he gave up smoking last November, and it permanently smelled like cigarettes. He didn’t even like the car. It was about resisting change, in my opinion. But Rauser wasn’t particularly interested in my opinions regarding his motivations.

  “Might as well hang on to it until it quits,” he said.

  “That should be any minute now.”

  “What do you have against my car?”

  “Let’s see. It stinks. Oh yeah, and it’s ugly.” I saw the skin at the corner of his eyes crinkle. “And it’s unreliable. What if you need to catch a bad guy? You ever think about that?”

  “You’re pretty fast, Street. I’ll just kick the door open and you can pursue on foot.”

  “And I’m low-maintenance. I run on Krispy Kremes.”

  “Yeah. Sure. Low-maintenance.” We drove for a minute. Rauser pulled into a gas station with a convenience store and went in for a couple of quarts of oil. He threw open the hood, took the cap off, and poured them in. Both of them. No checking the level with the dipstick. I watched this with amusement. He got back in but didn’t start the engine. “So you’re not talking about the dolls. That means you’re deciding how to translate the psychobabble shit, right? You asked about the number of dolls they found in this freak’s closet and the positioning. How come?”

  “Eight of them,” I said. “One for each year leading up to his eighth birthday, and that momentous day—the murder-suicide.” I thought about my grandparents, pushed the memory away. “Not that the day itself shaped him. But it sparks and continues to fuel what was there already. I th
ink the dolls represent victims. Or intended victims. The male and female doll tied together, it’s hard to interpret without being inside his head. But the obvious conclusion is they represent a couple.”

  “A double murder with that signature. No way it happened already. We’d have found it. We been running everything every which way.”

  “I’d focus investigators on couples who are transitioning somehow, on the threshold of something, some new life. I realize that in practical terms that’s difficult. But it’s all we have. A big event. Marriage, a first home, a first child. I think his thing is all about people on the crest of something, moving forward. Our boy’s stuck in his past.”

  “We could look at marriage licenses, home sales, births,” Rauser mused. “Narrow the search geographically, since Richards only hunts in a couple of areas.” He glanced at me. “That’s good work, Street.”

  I felt his energy surging. For the first time since I’d learned of Jesse Owen Richards’s obsession with my cousin, I had an opportunity to get a step ahead of him, to stop him before he pulled out his party favors.

  34

  I rummaged for Neil’s keys at my office. Rauser insisted on waiting, even though he was managing seventeen investigators, all their open cases, one very dangerous repeat offender, and a new boss. He paced around my office with one hand jammed in his pocket and the other holding a phone to his ear while I printed out a long-overdue report on the crematory for Larry Quinn, called a courier for a pickup, and taped it to my door. I didn’t want Rauser waiting. I’d tried to shoo him away. His restless energy in my office was not helpful. And I wanted to be able to be there. Alone. I wasn’t being reckless. I simply didn’t want to be spooked all the time. It’s no way to live. But Rauser didn’t want to hear it. He wasn’t interested in my feelings at the moment. He was thinking about his. That I had my Glock snug against the small of my back in a duty holster or that I’d spent four years in the field at the Bureau before moving into the BAU made no difference to him.