The cabbie dropped me in front of the Georgian. I wandered into the café off the lobby, exhausted.
The story of Brooks’s murder was on the television in the coffee shop, and I waited for my double-shot latte, transfixed like everyone else in the line. That these brutal killings appeared random, that the killer’s motive was unknown and therefore unpredictable and not something one could protect against, seemed to plant a seed of terror in everyone.
Foreboding choked the air we were all breathing. A thirty-second spot on the local news with a criminologist from Georgia Southern told us that no one knew who was next, but that it would happen again and soon. A contact number was displayed for runners who wanted to form groups rather than exercising alone. It was suggested that parents wait at bus stops with their children, and there were warnings about how vulnerable scooter and bicycle operators were after dark. MARTA stations had added security, we were told.
Atlanta had a long history of spree and serial murders—the Black Butcher in the early 1900s; the Atlanta child murders in the seventies and eighties, twenty-one children and teenagers killed; Brian Nichols’s rampage, which began at the Fulton County Courthouse and branched out into the burbs; day trader Mark Barton taking out his family and Buckhead coworkers. All of us had grown up with or read the stories of Atlanta’s violent past, but this was different. This killer was writing to us, describing the ways he was torturing his victims. He was telling us that he talks to them, that he asks them, How does it feel? This insight into his interaction with the victims and this latest letter ratcheted the city’s anxiety up to another level.
And if we weren’t near enough panic, Good Morning America opened with “The serial murderer in Atlanta known as the Wishbone Killer has struck again after letters taunting the Atlanta police and to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution detailing his plan. Was it politics that prevented Atlanta police from using their best resource, the public, to prevent this latest brutal murder? This morning nationally known criminal profiler Jacob Dobbs weighs in on the investigation and the menace known as Wishbone.…”
I sank into a cushioned chair and glared at the television. I had worked with Jacob Dobbs at the Bureau. Dobbs was a full-on sonofabitch, in my opinion, unfit to weigh in on any aspect of the investigation, since he had no insider knowledge of the investigation and “weigh in” really just meant “speculate.” I wondered if the killer was watching. The story had gone viral now. It must have been heady stuff for someone who had allowed the media to name him.
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Your Online Adult Edge Fetish & Knife Play Community blogs > beyond the EDGE, a fantasy by BladeDriver blog title > Sweet Sixteen
There is so much work left to do and so much pressure. They say they want it to stop, but do they really? No. They cannot wait to read about the next one.
Want to know a secret? I was sixteen the first time. Sixteen years old and my grades never dipped a point. I wasn’t like other children.
I showered, shared some breakfast with White Trash, who loved scrambled eggs with chives and cream cheese, then called Neil. I still had a mortgage and a business to run, calls to return, promises to honor, money that had to be made in order to keep my head above water regardless of what else was happening in the world, and I needed his help this morning. It was after eleven before we got started.
I took Piedmont Avenue through Midtown while Neil took long hits off a joint in the passenger’s seat, held them in, and coughed them out. It was hot already and humid, and I was tired from the long night. Neil was tired too. He had been working with a couple of detectives from Rauser’s task force to develop a complete picture of the victims’ lifestyles, anything that might help unravel Wishbone’s selection process. The top was down and the air felt good on my face. I’d pulled my hair back and put on a white button-down tucked into khakis, with the logo of a nonexistent courier company embroidered over the left pocket, and a pair of Tod’s that had set me back four hundred bucks, but if you’re forced to wear khaki and loafers, it’s only fair.
I glanced at Neil, then back at the road. “How do you inhale that stuff all day? Are you going to be able to drive?”
He blew smoke at me. “Hell, yes, I can drive.”
We were coming up on Tenth Avenue—Outwrite Books’ patio packed with coffee and raspberry scones and cute guys, the Flying Biscuit on the right, Red Tomato and Nickiemoto’s and Caribou on the left. Brunch was in full swing and the lunch hour just beginning. The street smelled like melon and baking dough and frying bacon, and I had a moment when I remembered exactly what a Bloody Mary tasted like at this time of day.
Neil opened the background folder on the person I was to serve with a witness subpoena. We had her home address, work address, vehicle description and tag number, a passport-size photo, a copy of her driver’s license, a brief summary of the attorney’s experience with her thus far, copies of court documents that told us why she was being served, and copies of the sheriff’s report.
“Oh, I remember running her for alternate addresses,” Neil commented after he’d studied it for a while. “Sheriff tried to serve her three times.”
There are a lot of reasons people duck subpoenas. Nine times out of ten it’s about convenience. Who wants to take the time to show up for a long deposition or sit in court and wait for hours to testify? There are exceptions, of course. Sometimes witnesses are frightened. Sometimes they’re being paid to stay quiet. Sometimes they’re thugs and criminals themselves.
“To be honest, I don’t think it’ll be much of a challenge.”
Neil grinned at me. “Really? What do you know that the sheriff doesn’t?”
I smiled and winked as we passed Piedmont Park, hung a left on Monroe, then turned into an apartment complex across from Ansley Mall.
Several of the law firms I worked with used me for hard-to-serve subpoenas when the sheriff’s office had failed. I wasn’t under any restrictions at all as far as method or, well, ethics, so I could get creative when I needed to. Plus, I had the time. They don’t. They have too much on their plates already. Last Christmas I’d stuffed a subpoena inside a fruitcake, and not long ago when Rauser and I ordered pizza, I talked one of their drivers out of his cap. With that cap and a pizza box, I was able to serve a man who had dodged the sheriff’s office for three months. I mean, who doesn’t open the door for pizza? Today the subpoena I intended to serve was folded inside a coffee cup that was inside a gift box that I’d wrapped in brown postal paper. A bright foil sticker read SWEEPSTAKES AWARD HEADQUARTERS and listed a fake address in Illinois, thanks to some help from a very resourceful guy at Kinko’s.
Helen Graybeal and her husband lived in C-6, ground level. I parked one building over, got out my clipboard, and stuck a pen in my shirt pocket.
“Careful,” Neil said. “Place is kinda nasty.” He put his head back against the seat and closed his eyes.
The door opened after the first ring. “I have a delivery for Helen Graybeal.”
“I’ll take it.” The man was wearing red plaid shorts and a T-shirt. He had a cigarette between his fingers, thick forearms, and a suntan. Not the kind you get from tanning salons or sandy beaches. The kind you get from working outside.
I pretended to read delivery instructions on the clipboard while tilting the box so he could see it. “Sorry,” I said. “Gotta have her signature. Just have her come down to the warehouse tomorrow and pick it up.”
Mr. Graybeal seemed to be wrestling with what to do. He looked at me uneasily, then back at the box. “Helen, it’s one of your sweepstakes,” he called over his shoulder. “You gotta sign.”
In the background, I saw a quick-moving shadow, and then it was gone. Bingo! Her head came around the corner, then a foot, and finally she came to the door. She was thin and tough-looking, leather-skinned from too many cigarettes, with lines that webbed out around her top lip. She paused long enough to give her husband a hate look, then handed him her full coffee cup. She took the box and scribbled her signat
ure on my fake courier log.
I quick-stepped it back to the car as soon as the door closed. One thing you don’t want to do when someone has been dodging a subpoena for a long time is hang around while they discover what just happened. All that cocky you’ve-been-served stuff can bounce like a football if you’re not careful. You never know which way it’ll go.
Neil had turned the car around and was waiting in the driver’s seat with the engine running.
“I got her,” I told him, and climbed into the passenger’s seat. “Husband totally folded when he saw the return address. She’s into sweepstakes, buys lottery tickets, stuff like that.”
“And you knew that how?”
“Hey, you’re not the only one capable of doing a little research. I am a detective, after all.”
“Which means you poked through her trash?”
“Exactly.”
We were waiting for a break in traffic to pull out of the complex and onto Monroe Drive when I heard shouting behind us. I checked the visor mirror and saw Helen Graybeal barreling toward us. She was waving the coffee cup I’d just seen in one hand and the subpoena in the other, describing the ways in which she was going to shove both up my ass. Her husband came running up behind her and attempted to restrain her without success.
“Jesus, let’s go,” I told Neil.
Then thump. The coffee cup she’d been holding sailed over my old convertible and clipped the back of my head near my left ear. For a couple of seconds the world was nothing but little gold specks. “Fucking go,” I yelled. “Bitch has an arm.”
Neil was laughing. “I can’t just pull out in traffic—”
Then pop, zing. A perfectly round hole appeared in the windshield. A bullet had passed between our heads and gone through the windshield. We exchanged a quick glance, then Neil punched the gas hard, spun out onto Monroe Drive, shot across four lanes of traffic, and burst into the Ansley Mall parking lot amidst honking horns and screeching tires and middle fingers in the air. He bounced over six speed bumps, got us onto Piedmont, and then pulled over a few blocks down on Fourteenth near the park.
I think we were silent for a full minute, both of us staring, stupefied, as the hole spiderwebbed out across my windshield.
“Goddamn,” Neil whispered finally.
I ran a hand over the growing lump on the back of my head. “That was a brand-new windshield.”
My phone rang. Tyrone’s Quikbail number showed up on the display.
“What up?” Tyrone asked.
“Well, I’m not sure you’d believe it if I told you.”
“Try me.”
“Okay. I just got nailed with a coffee cup. There’s a fresh bullet hole in my windshield, and Neil looks like he’s going to puke.”
“Riiight,” Tyrone said. “Okay, well, this will seem easy, then. Guy violated a restraining order, they picked him up, we bailed him out, and guess what? Weasel didn’t show for court. You need a few bucks?”
“Family or criminal court?”
Tyrone hesitated. Not a good sign. “Criminal.”
“So it wasn’t just an order violation. There was an assault?”
“Ex-wife,” Tyrone admitted. “Beat her bad. You get him, you make sure he accidentally bumps into some shit on the way to the station.”
“What’s his name?”
“Some faggy French-sounding shit,” Tyrone said.
“It isn’t LaBrecque, is it?” I asked, rubbing my head. “William LaBrecque?”
“Yeah, that’s the creep. Billy LaBrecque.”
14
Forty-eight hours ago David Brooks was found in a bloody hotel bed and the second letter to Rauser hit the news. It had been a week since the first letter about Lei Koto gave the killer a name the media loved, Wishbone. The threat was real. A killer roamed our streets. To ratchet up the city’s boiling point, Atlanta was baking at a hundred degrees for the second straight week. The assault rate was soaring as it always does when big cities and blazing hot summers collide, and the news was full of warnings. The owner of a downtown convenience store shot … Another case of road rage on Atlanta’s highways … Code-red smog alert.
No one felt safe. It seemed Atlanta’s streets would find a way to get you. The atmosphere was pure crisis.
At my office, things were piling up. My desk was a mess. I couldn’t find evidence that I’d paid the electric bill, a bank deposit had been waiting for days, and I hadn’t done any billing in three weeks. I hated billing. I do it only because I have to. The agency was growing and seemed determined to become a roaring success with or without me.
Truth is, I’d never really had my heart in the business. I hadn’t had my heart in anything since Dan and being fired and getting sober. Most of the messes I’d made as a practicing drunk had been cleaned up, but I realized during those hot, anxious weeks that there was a chunk of me missing still, a disturbing lack of emotion. Life seemed to blow right past me without leaving anything behind. When I shut down—why I shut down I don’t know exactly—but that night, driving to the Brooks scene with my heart slamming against my chest, and walking into that room where a killer had killed so recently that the body was warm and the wine hadn’t lost its chill, I was alert, alive again. I felt something. That it takes a dead body to bring me around is screwed up, I know. But then Dan lay under me like a corpse for five years and I still managed an orgasm most of the time. To be fair, he did offer the occasional pelvic thrust when duty called, but he’d long lost his appetite for anything that was readily available. My ex-husband was all about the hunt, which meant one day after the wedding ceremony he had absolutely no challenges.
I wanted to get as much done as possible at my office before the lab reports came in from the medical examiner and the crime labs on the Brooks murder. It would take some time to piece together all the information in an assessment that might help guide investigative strategy. The reports would take time too, I knew, but I wanted to be ready. The proper way the scene was processed, the ability to more fully understand victim/offender interaction, would give us all a greater understanding of motive. If we could pierce this killer’s motive, I was convinced, it might lead us to him.
I was planning the trip to Denver, going through my closet, thinking about what kind of clothes I would need. Neil had been right: The corporation that hired us to find their thieving accountant wanted me to deal with him personally, and I needed the money. Their former accountant was in for a big surprise when I showed up at his house. The plan was to fly in one night and fly back out the next. Easy, I hoped. The imprint of Helen Graybeal’s coffee cup on my head and the bruised wrist William LaBrecque had given me hurt enough to serve as reminders that these things do go wrong from time to time. And Larry Quinn’s laser-treatment-gone-wrong case and another date with William LaBrecque were still waiting for my attention. I wondered how agreeable LaBrecque would be to being hauled into APD for processing.
My phone warbled. “Sorry, I haven’t had a chance to call,” Rauser told me. I had sent him a text message before going to sleep last night and never heard back. It wasn’t like him. “Busier than a one-armed paper hanger,” he said. “ME’s report on stomach contents is in. Trout, crab, turnip greens, some kind of sweet potato dish, and a good amount of white wine. We’re showing Brooks’s picture around to all the local restaurants, especially in the Buckhead area where he was killed.”
“Turnip greens and sweet potatoes in Buckhead?” I asked.
“Probably one of those whoopee-shit fusion places that make little designs in sauce. And get this: There was evidence of a condom on the body, Keye, but it wasn’t in the suite. Also, soap residue all over the body and all over the sheets under him. Brooks was squeaky clean except for some of his own semen. No other DNA on his body. Fingernails trimmed and brushed out. We got a load of stuff from the room, though, but it’s going to take weeks to break it down. Probably got stuff from three years ago in the carpet. Soap on Brooks was consistent with the hotel brand, which is also missin
g from the room. Oh, and something else interesting. Housekeeping says they put three washcloths in the room. All missing. No condom, no washcloths, no open bar of soap, one missing glass.”
“A sponge bath,” I said. A clearer picture was emerging of this killer, who was capable of more than just a con to get a front door open, but also of a clever, manipulative seduction. “That would account for the seminal fluid and the soap residue on the sheets. Must have been part of their sex. It’s one more thing that separates Brooks from the other victims.”
David Brooks was spared hours of torture. His body was covered in a loving way. He meant something in the life of this murderer—real or symbolic, he was significant.
“Killer came from behind, right?” I asked.
“Exactly right. Reached around from behind and stuck the knife blade into the substernal notch. Wounds are consistent with the knife used at prior scenes.”
The others had known what kind of danger they were in, what kind of monster had entrapped them. They had experienced the terror that comes with that knowing and been left naked with their legs spread. Brooks was different. Brooks was special. The killer didn’t want him to see death coming. Why? I shared my thoughts with Rauser and we grew quiet.
“Lobby cameras show Brooks checking in alone,” Rauser said finally. “No other outside surveillance except at the lobby. The unit next door was empty, and since there are only two of those units per building, it’s isolated. Somebody shoves a knife blade into my chest, I’m gonna scream like hell. The hotel was a good choice.”
The Stranger You Seek Page 10
