The Stranger You Seek

by Amanda Kyle Williams

  “My Lord, Keye. You don’t have to be so rude, do you?”

  “Mother, why are you here?”

  “Why are you here?” she countered. “I’m taking care of White Kitty, remember?”

  “It’s White Trash. Not White Kitty or Whitey or White One or Snowflake or whatever you’re calling her today. It’s White Trash.”

  “I was going to stay here while you’re gone so she won’t get lonely,” Mother said, then shook her head. “And, well, it will give your dad some time alone.”

  Uh-oh. Mom and Dad having problems? Visions of Mother living with me danced through my head.

  “Are you and Dad okay?”

  “Howard’s very upset, Keye. I’m sorry to tell you that your grandfather Street was killed.”

  My father’s parents had always referred to me as “the little Chink,” so this news didn’t exactly rock my world. We had never been close, but I knew my father loved his father and must be hurting. “You left Dad alone?”

  “You know your father. He can be just inconsolable. And it doesn’t help his fool father got himself run over on his own lawn mower. Can you believe it?”

  “Somebody drove into Granddaddy’s yard and ran him over on the lawn mower?” I tried not to laugh, really I did. I knew in my heart of hearts that would be wrong. At the very least, Mother would consider it inappropriate.

  “No, no. He was on the road, the main road, going to see your grandmother.”

  “Going where to see Grandma?”

  Exasperated, my mother puffed out her cheeks, set her suitcase down, and took her covered dish to the refrigerator. “They split up after Granddaddy Street got that snake. Your grandmother wouldn’t live in the house with a snake and I don’t blame her. Idiot was half blind too. They took his driver’s license away a few years ago, so he started riding around town on that hideous green thing. Damned old fool. And your poor grandmother, Keye.” She shook her head again in disgust. “Just one humiliation after another.”

  “Granddaddy had a snake?” I struggled to keep up.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Keye. Don’t you know anything that goes on in this family?”

  27

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  I love watching her. She is so dedicated. We both are, but to different aims, of course. For her it’s all about a flat stomach and a hard ass to pull her little tights over. For me, I know when her neighbors are home, when her housekeeper comes. I know her cat. I have so come to enjoy these evening runs. She pretends not to know I’m there, wears her little headphones in her ears all the time, but I know she can feel me. She loves the attention. She wants my blade parting that cosmetic skin as badly as I do.

  I crank up my stereo. It’s our song, mine and Melissa’s. Only the lonely. Dum, dum, dum, dum-de-do-wah. Know the way I feel tonight. Only the lonely. Dum, dum, dum, dum-de-do-wah. Know this feeling ain’t right.

  I ease my car into gear and trail along behind her. I play it for her, for us. I sing it too. I can’t help myself. I’m so happy to see her.

  There goes my baby. There goes my heart … Oh, oh, oh, oh yeah …

  Tallahassee didn’t seem to know that summer was fading dully away in most of the country. The sun was blazing, the temperature around ninety-five, a hot breeze. In Atlanta, we’re deep enough into the South to have mild winters and long summers, and far enough north to get full color in autumn and a bright, budding spring. I had considered moving to Tallahassee and studying. WFSU has an excellent criminology program, but in the end I didn’t think I could live somewhere without the clear division of seasons to tame my moods and keep the depression away.

  I went to the WFSU Visitors’ Center, explained my presence as best I could, and was directed to Mary Dailey in Admissions.

  “I’m looking for information on a former student,” I told her. “Would have been a freshman sixteen years ago. Am I in the right place to get help with that?”

  Mary Dailey was, perhaps, fifty years old, hair brown except for a gray streak in the front, brown eyes showing just a little crinkle at the edges.

  “You said you’re a detective?”

  “Private.” I nodded. “I’m consulting on a case in Atlanta that—”

  “May I see some identification?”

  “Sure,” I said. “APD can verify also. Lieutenant Aaron Rauser in Homicide.”

  I scribbled Rauser’s cell number down for her. Since I was not here officially, I didn’t want her going through the police department switchboard.

  She took the number and studied my ID. “You want to know about Anne Chambers?”

  I nodded again. “Whatever records you have on her. Do you know anything about her friends, family, life off campus? I understand she was a sophomore when she was killed.”

  “Sixteen years is a long time, Ms. Street. I’ve only been here five.”

  “But you knew her name and why I’m here.”

  “Yes,” she replied. I could hear the regret in her tone. “We’ve been expecting this since her murder was connected to the ones in Atlanta. Honestly, no one here was looking forward to it. It’s not the sort of thing one wants publicized.”

  “I understand,” I said. “No one else has been here?”

  “A detective from Jacksonville was here maybe six weeks ago after they connected Anne’s murder to the ones in Atlanta and the one in Jacksonville. But with all the news from Atlanta now, we knew someone would come back.”

  “ ‘We’?”

  “The staff here. We talk about it, of course.” She hesitated. “I can point you to yearbooks from her years here, if that will help, and give you some general information, but our records are private.”

  “Uh-huh, well, a court order wouldn’t take long,” I said agreeably. “And right behind it comes a team of investigators who walk around campus looking very coplike. Or you could help me. I promise to be very unobtrusive and discreet.”

  The corners of her mouth twitched almost imperceptibly. “May I call you later? Where are you staying?”

  “I haven’t made arrangements. I drove straight here from Atlanta.” I wrote my cell number on the back of a business card and handed it over her desk.

  “I understand Anne lived on campus. Any chance I could see the dorms before I go?”

  Mary Dailey rose stiffly from her chair. “I’ll have to find out which hall she lived in. It’s a very large campus. Would you excuse me, Ms. Street?”

  I hurried around to her desk the second she stepped out. The Visitors’ Center had clearly called before I got here. There was a note on her desk pad with my name, Anne Chambers’s name, the years she’d attended the university, and the words murdered, Roberts Hall, W. Campus, which made me wonder why Mary Dailey had really stepped out of her office. I hustled back to the proper side of her desk and tried to look as innocent as possible.

  “Will you follow me, please, Ms. Street? I’ll show you to Ms. Chambers’s residence hall. We’ve done quite a lot of renovations since she was here, but I don’t suppose that matters to your investigation.”

  “General layout pretty much the same?”

  “I can get you a campus map from that time, but, yes, it hasn’t changed that much.”

  “So whoever you stepped out of your office to speak to told you—”

  “To cooperate. That’s right,” she interrupted evenly.

  “I’d love a map. Did Anne Chambers have a roommate?”

  “Roommates,” Mary Dailey said crisply, then gave me their names. “Ms. Street, no one here wants to get in the way of a murder investigation. We just want to be certain the investigation isn’t something that could affect us in a negative way. The general public had forgotten all about Anne Chambers. The focus is on Atlanta. We’d like it to stay that way.”

  We climbed in a golf cart and she drove us across the lush, tree-lined campus where a twenty-year-ol
d Anne Chambers had lived and died a savage death. I thought about her family, the people who had loved her. They hadn’t forgotten, Ms. Dailey. One never forgets. I kept my thoughts to myself, though.

  Mary Dailey led me to Anne Chambers’s old room and left me there alone. The walls were minty green. I wondered how many times they had been repainted in the last fifteen years and how many students had lived here. The two single beds and a bookcase were built-ins. There was a small desk, a tiny refrigerator, and a sink wedged into the twelve-by-fifteen-foot space. No bathroom. The room was littered with books and clothes and takeout cartons.

  In the photographs I’d seen, it had looked much the same when Chambers, a fine arts major, lived here. Fine arts. Who majors in fine arts? A dreamer, I thought, and grief slammed into my chest like a two-by-four.

  It was a ground-level room with two windows on the outside wall, flooded with light. I remembered studying the Ted Bundy murders when I had first been transferred to the Behavioral Analysis Unit at NCAVC. When Bundy was here in Florida stalking and killing more young women, terrified students at WFSU had piled leaves and crumpled paper outside their windows hoping to have advance warning of a prowler. Some planted cactus and nailed their windows shut. None of it helped. Bundy wasn’t the type to climb in windows. Good looks and charm and the sympathy con were his weapons. His victims came right to him. When Anne Chambers had been butchered here, had young women once again been terrified to cross campus alone or leave their rooms at night?

  The walls were thin. Even through closed doors, music and sound seeped out.

  The killing had taken place midday. The dorms would have been half empty, I guessed. Even then the killer was doing plenty of homework, knowing when to show up, when Anne’s roommates were absent, class schedules. There had been a serious blow to the victim’s head. It wasn’t cause of death. It was merely the controlling blow. For at least a few minutes, Anne Chambers would have been incapable of defending herself, making noise, and this would have provided plenty of time for restraints and gags.

  How did the killer get out without being seen? I looked up and down the hall. No way to get to one of the exits in the middle of the day without a resident noticing a person with blood all over his clothing. It was a violent scene. There was blood everywhere. A window maybe? No. The nearest parking lot was too far. The next building was too far. Someone on campus would have seen someone headed there. Perhaps the killer carries a bag or a briefcase with tools, a change of clothes. A bag would also solve the problem of what to do with the bloody clothes. No. Too much baggage. And then it hit me. The clothes come off. Of course. Being naked with the victim is part of the ritual.

  I didn’t want to be here anymore. I wanted to do what I had done in the past after imagining the unimaginable. I wanted to drink.

  Instead, I spent a day pawing through a dead woman’s life. I made lists of Anne Chambers’s classmates, roommates, professors, and started the process of tracking them down, calling them. It had been so long ago, it was difficult to find anyone who remembered very much about Anne apart from her murder. No one seemed to know anything at all about her relationships, her dreams. She’d had three different roommates at different times. All remembered her as shy, distant, maybe even a little secretive. Mary Dailey lent me a stack of yearbooks from different schools within the university system covering the couple of years Anne lived here, and I packed them into my car for later viewing.

  I had called Anne’s mother and arranged a visit for the next morning. The trip to Jekyll Island would only take a couple of hours, even in a little piece-of-shit Plymouth Neon. I hoped I’d have time to take a walk on Jekyll’s hard-packed sand. I loved it there, loved the smooth bleached-out driftwood that littered the beaches, the big gnarled live oaks bent like old men over the dunes from taking on the constant sea winds. At sunset the tangled black branches of those trees in silhouette is all at once so eerie and so beautiful it will raise the hair on your neck. Jekyll isn’t one of those hosed-down-fluffy-white-sand islands. The Atlantic is choppy and white-capped, and the afternoon thunderstorms will pound you into the sand. The locals were trying hard now to hold on to what they had left and fight back the developers, protect the wildlife and an island that had transformed itself into rolled-up shirtsleeves and artists and writers and shrimpers and fishing boats. Take any trail through the interior of the island and you are treated to deer and crabs and turtles, birds large and small, and alligators pretending to sleep in the shallow marsh. The feeling of belonging hits me there like no place else as if I sprang up barefoot from this earth and sand and weeds and made my way like a loggerhead to the sea. In my heart of hearts, I am a Low Country girl in a pickup truck and cutoffs, the sweet briny smell of the marsh filling my lungs. I did not look forward to meeting with Anne Chambers’s parents, but how I longed to put my bare feet on Jekyll’s dark sand.

  I was driving over the causeway bridge toward the Jekyll Island entrance when my phone went off.

  “This is Mirror Chang, Dr. Street. Jacob Dobbs was my husband.”

  I waited a second or two, but she didn’t say anything else. “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said awkwardly. It seemed an inadequate response and horribly unequal in empathy to what she must have felt in pain, but I didn’t know what else to say to her.

  “I know you worked with Jacob recently in Atlanta, and that you were a colleague of my husband’s at BAU.” Her voice was even and betrayed no emotion.

  “I was more of a student than a colleague.”

  “My husband is gone, Dr. Street. So I’d like to know the truth. I’ve heard so many things.” For the first time, I detected an edge of pain in her tone. “What is it in us that needs to know if we’ve been betrayed even after we lose someone?”

  “It’s a way to postpone grief,” I answered softly.

  A small, humorless laugh. “That’s something Jacob would have said. So tell me, Dr. Street—what happened between you and my husband?”

  “At the Behavioral Analysis Unit? I lodged a complaint. It wasn’t taken seriously—”

  “Because he had their loyalty and you were a drunk. Is that correct?”

  I swallowed. “That was my take on it, yes.”

  “I remember his anger at you during that time. Too much anger. I sensed there must have been great feeling between the two of you.”

  “I can assure you there was not, Ms. Chang. Not like that.”

  A few seconds ticked by. Then, “His personal effects were returned to me. Isn’t it interesting that one day your husband has clothes and things in his pockets and the next they’re just personal effects?” It must have been agonizing for her to share with a stranger the things that had to have been so deeply painful in private. “I found some of Jacob’s notes. Your name was there. The usage was … well, sexual in nature. Did you sleep with my husband, Dr. Street?”

  “No. Not ever.”

  “Some men aren’t capable of fidelity,” she said. “Jacob might have been one of them. My husband was not a perfect man, but something you may not realize is that he was a good father and a good companion to me for thirty years.”

  I thought about all the times I’d seen Dobbs take off his wedding ring and drop it in his pocket when he was flirting with someone—the new girl in the unit, a woman in the cafeteria, a contact when we were on assignment, someone in local law enforcement. He’d once slept with both a female deputy and the sheriff when we were on a serial case in Wyoming. I’d said something to him back then about a tan line on his finger, and he’d laughed at me. “Only a sociopath could be unfaithful to a devoted wife while wearing a thing like that, Keye. I don’t remove it to disguise my marital status. I remove it out of respect.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I told Mirror Chang. “What you’re feeling must be excruciating.”

  “You must have been very angry at him for costing you another job. In fact, you must have hated my husband.”

  I waited, stung by the venom in her voice.

  “Di
d you kill Jacob, Dr. Street? Were you the whore who murdered my husband?”

  I pulled over before I reached the guard shack where I would have to get a pass to enter the island. “Ms. Chang.” I hoped I could disguise the shock and offense in my voice. She must have been crazy with grief. “I have worked for my entire adult life to stop the people who inflict this kind of pain on others. It’s no secret your husband and I had a toxic history. Yes, I disliked Jacob. But he didn’t deserve what happened to him. And you and your children don’t deserve the misery you’re feeling now. If it helps at all, we have capital punishment in Georgia. And the Atlanta Police Department won’t stop until this bastard is on death row.”

  A red-tailed hawk was circling above the wax myrtle and white oleander on each side of the two-lane, surveying the marsh and mud flats for prey. I didn’t think I could have hated Dobbs any more than I had while he was alive. But I was wrong.

  “I had to know.” It was a broken whisper. I think she was crying. The line went dead.

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  Hello friends and fans and thank you for your comments. I am so glad you are enjoying my dark fantasies. I love reading yours too. Perhaps we can play together one day, compare techniques.

  Have you been reading the newspapers? They are listing the names of all my old partners. This has made me a bit nostalgic, I admit, remembering the early days when I was still sharpening my skills, the days before I could point my phone and take their sweet memory home with me. I want so to have these memories recorded and to share them with you.

  Her name was Anne and we were both young, she younger and greener than I. She had a sour expression when she opened the door that day, said something about me being late. It was eleven-thirty in the morning. Everyone was at class. She was so needy and so desperate, always wanting time when she could be the focus of my world. She wanted sex too. Neither one of us was in love with sex with the other. It was just what she did, how she filled up that black hole of need she carried around. It never stopped. She always wanted it, wanted something, want, want, want, me, me, me. And when she wasn’t painting her pictures or fucking, she was smoking pot or drinking or eating. Anne always wanted something going into her. Her requirements seemed endless, just vacuous, bottomless need. My mother behaved just like this with my father. I watched her suck the life out of him and everything else around her.