Pat was staring at me.
“I’m making it worse, aren’t I?”
“Enjoy your tea. Chris made it with mint from the garden.” She paused and seemed to choose her next words carefully. “Ever consider that if your friend’s sleeping with a lesbian, she may be a lesbian?”
I shook my head and smiled. “Absolutely not.”
34
I met Big Jim at Penland’s Fried Pies and Gifts. He plopped down coffee for us both in monogrammed mugs and fried apple pies with ice cream. There were a few small tables and chairs near a stone fireplace inside, and Big Jim straddled a chair and smiled at me.
“They’re best for breakfast,” he said. I had no problem with that. I’d been obsessing about the pie since I’d had my first two. “Here’s the list you wanted. Competitors mostly. And a few people I may have crossed lately.”
I took a bite of pie and ice cream, washed it down with some coffee, and picked up the paper he’d put between us. It was a long list. “I didn’t realize Ellijay was this big.”
“Well, I guess I have a particular way of offending folks round here.”
“You seem like a nice guy to me,” I said.
“Yeah, but you’re kind of a pushover. It’s all about the pie for you.”
I smiled. I liked Big Jim. “You bring a picture of Sadie too?”
He nodded and pulled a wallet-size photo out of his denim shirt pocket.
“Nice-looking cow,” I said as if I had a clue. Big Jim’s eyes got wet and he had to look away.
I started at the Cupboard Restaurant in downtown Ellijay. It was large and open, with vinyl booths and the look of a cafeteria. I was taken to a small booth to wait for Ida May Culpepper, the first person on Big Jim’s list.
Two waitresses worked the room, both middle-aged and friendly, both knew their customers by their first names. I glanced at the menu and saw chicken and dumplings, collard greens with pepper vinegar, fried chicken livers, and lots of apple products—apple pancakes, apple bread, apple pie, apple cake, fried apples, apple salads.
“Here ya go, hon,” one of the waitresses said to me. The thick white plate she set in front of me had a huge slice of apple pie. “Want some coffee with that?”
“Oh no, I couldn’t. I’m just waiting for Ida May.”
“Can’t nobody sit at the Cupboard and not eat. How would that look? Pie’s on the house. Ida May will be with you shortly.”
Ida May Culpepper was a tiny woman in her late fifties with smokers’ creases above her mouth and dyed black hair. She slid into the booth and beamed at me. “What can I do for you today, hon?”
“Ever seen this cow?” I asked it as seriously as one can ask a question like that.
“Oh my Lord.” Ida May laughed. “You have got to be kidding me. Is this about Jim Penland’s cow? Don’t tell me he hired a detective to find that ole thing.”
“Afraid so.”
She shook her head in disbelief. “I got four in my pasture and two of ’em look just like this if you want to come see. Maybe you can get a hoof-print or something.”
“Mr. Penland mentioned the two of you had a run-in recently.”
Ida May sat back and looked at me. “He tell you why? I got four home-cooking restaurants and one bakery in two counties up here and we use a lot of apples. We don’t use his no more, though. We go to another grower. It’s not personal. I got to make money and Jim won’t come down on his price come hell or high water. It don’t make a damn to him that I helped him out when he was just getting started.”
“Sounds personal to me,” I observed.
“Well, maybe it is a little, but I still wouldn’t give two cents for that damn ole cow.”
Just outside Ida May’s restaurant, I saw the stack of Atlanta papers in a wire rack near the front door with a handwritten sign putting the price for dailies at seventy-five cents and the Sunday paper at two and a quarter. The headlines screamed: Gruesome Murder in Morningside Home. Wishbone’s 8th.
I went back inside and paid the cashier, stepped out on the street and walked with the newspaper. I needed to walk. It was barely ten-thirty in the morning and already I’d unbuttoned the top of my pants under my shirt. If I didn’t get out of the apple capital soon, I’d have to hire a truck to get me home.
I spent the next three hours checking off the names on Big Jim’s enemy list, which included the Snell family, who owned the second-largest peach and apple orchards in Georgia, claimed to have a town named after them outside Atlanta, claimed to have no ill feelings for their largest competitor, and claimed to be “good God-fearing folks.” They happily gave me a tour of their orchards, their processing center, their home, and their horse ranch. They fed me pimento cheese sandwiches cut into little squares, what we call pamina cheese down South. They invited me to church with them, but I would have just as soon been beaten with a stick.
In the hills above East Ellijay, I discovered that Clyde Clower, the sixth name on Big Jim’s enemy list, was not going to be as forthcoming. He slammed the door so hard that the double-wide shook, leaving behind him only the faint smell of Budweiser and marijuana. Big Jim had fired him a couple of days before Sadie disappeared. I snooped around outside a little, didn’t find anything, but Clyde was the kind of guy who looked like he was perfectly capable of getting ripped and stealing a cow. I decided to come back later and keep an eye on him.
I was beginning to feel worried for Sadie. She trailed around behind Big Jim’s family because she preferred them to the other cows. She opened doors and walked into the house. That cow was the best dog they’d ever had, Big Jim had said. And she was totally socialized now to humans. I hated to think of her in a strange place scared and with separation anxiety.
I decided to drive over to Ida May Culpepper’s and have a look in her pasture. My Neon huffed and puffed up the hill to her ranch house and a split-rail fence, three posts high, a barn, and a few cows. I walked to the fence, took out the picture of Sadie. Looked at the cows, looked at the picture. Back at the cows, again to the picture. I had no idea. I called Sadie’s name a few times. They all ignored me. It was more of a snub, really. They raised their heads briefly, appraised me, then went back to grazing.
There was a basket of apples Big Jim had given me in my car. Thinking that apples might be attractive to a cow, I got a few of them, put them on the ground while I climbed over the fence, and made my way out into the pasture for a closer look.
“Sadie, come on, baby. Want an apple?”
The cows started off slow, meandering toward me, then I heard hoofs galloping in the distance. I turned. It was a bull running fast, red clay dust boiling up behind him. His head was low and he looked mad. A flock of crows that had been pecking around in the fields lifted up at once. This startled the cows. They picked up speed, became deliberate and fast until they were all coming at me full gallop.
I started to run, turning to lob a few apples at them. They kept coming. Believe it or not, cows are fast once they get going. I wasn’t getting paid nearly enough to get trampled in Ida May’s pasture. Hurling my last apple at them, I picked up speed and made a leap for the fence, squeezed through just as the bull got there. He was milling around, snorting at me and pawing the dirt. The cows were all fired up too. Good Lord. I reached for my phone.
“Tell me about Clyde Clower,” I said to Big Jim. I was out of breath, but I had cell reception on Ida May’s mountain and I didn’t want to waste it. I gave the cows the finger and walked back to my car, still short on wind after the run. “Does he have family up here?”
“His mama is a widow, I believe. Has a little place around here somewhere. You think Clyde took Sadie?”
“He’s a candidate, that’s for sure. Has a motive. But I know he can’t keep her at the trailer park. He’d have to hide her somewhere. You have any ideas where that would be?”
“I don’t. Clyde worked for me but only indirectly. I got lots of people working in the orchards. I don’t know much about their personal lives unless
there’s a problem.”
“What was the problem with Clyde? Why did you fire him?”
“Came in drunk.”
“Can you get me directions to his mother’s house?”
“Yeah, hang on. She’s probably in the book. You talk to Ida May Culpepper?”
“Uh-huh. At the restaurant. Then I came to her house to check it out. Why didn’t you warn me the cows would come after me?”
Big Jim chuckled. “Warn you? Cows ain’t aggressive animals, Keye. I wouldn’t worry about them.”
“Right, well, I was in the field with those apples you gave me and they just about ran me down.”
Big Jim’s booming laugh came through so loud I had to hold the phone away from my ear. “Well, they are goddamn good apples,” he said, and laughed again.
Forest Mountain Road, where Clyde Clower’s mother lived, was tough for the Neon, a steady, winding incline into the North Georgia mountains. I couldn’t get any speed up at all. In the rearview, I realized, a Chevy pickup was very close, too close to my bumper. I heard the roar of the engine and the gravel under the tires and tried to work my way to the right a little, but the road was narrow and I had no place to go. The truck swerved around me, zoomed by like I was tied to a stump. A horse trailer was hitched to the back. It fishtailed and nearly knocked my car into the ditch. Gravel flew all over the place.
“Asshole!” I yelled, and saw a hand came out of the driver’s side window in front of me with the middle finger raised. The truck left me picking my way through a cloud of thick red dust to Mrs. Clower’s house.
I pulled over and walked toward the white frame house. It sat on an unfenced piece of land with a flower garden near the front windows and a vegetable garden next to the house. Backed up to a barn, I saw the truck with the trailer that had nearly wrecked my car.
“I know you’re in there, Clyde. Might as well come on out with Big Jim’s cow. I’m calling Big Jim right now.”
“Go fuck yourself!” he yelled from inside the barn.
I opened my phone and realized that I had no reception. Crap. A Gilmer County sheriff’s car spun into the dirt drive. The sheriff and a deputy got out. Big Jim must have taken my suspicions seriously and called them. I waved my arms and pointed at the barn.
“I think he’s got Jim Penland’s cow in there,” I told the two men as they approached. “I tailed him up here.”
Okay, so I only technically tailed him up here since he blew by and left me in the dust, but it was a detail they didn’t need.
I reached for my PI license, which was clipped to my back pocket, and they drew on me.
“Whoa, take it easy, guys. I’m a private detective working for Jim Penland to find his cow.” I was annoyed to hear a wobbly little laugh come out of me.
Clyde Clower came out of the barn at that moment with a lead on Sadie the cow. He saw the cops with their weapons drawn. He dropped the lead and raised his hands above his head. “It was just a joke,” he said, then spread out flat on the ground. This was clearly not his first arrest. His words were muffled from the dirt in his face. “I just wanted to shake him up a little. I was just coming to get her and take her back home. I didn’t mean nothing by it. Tell ’em, Kate. This here’s my girlfriend, Kate Johnson.” He was looking at me.
“Would you mind taking your guns off me? My name is Keye Street and I am not his girlfriend. I told you, I work for Jim Penland.”
The deputy patted me down and cuffed me. “Like Big Jim would hire a detective to find a damn cow.”
“I love you, Kate,” Clower shouted, and grinned at me.
“Check my ID,” I insisted, but the deputy pressed his palm against the top of my head until I folded into the backseat of the sheriff’s car.
“Now sit back there and keep your mouth shut.”
The other door opened and the sheriff unceremoniously pushed Clyde into the backseat with me. Clyde smelled bad. He looked at me and smiled. His teeth looked like a picket fence. “Whatcha in for?” he asked, and snickered. “Kate.”
“You smell like poop,” I said.
The sheriff shot me a look in the rearview mirror. “Not a peep,” he warned us, and we sank back into the seat, me and Clyde Clower, shoulder to shoulder, in the back of a Gilmer County sheriff’s car.
They did eventually look at my identification and Big Jim did convince them over waves of laughter that he really had hired a private detective from Atlanta to find Sadie the pet cow. I missed the reunion entirely, but Big Jim hugged me so hard he nearly crushed me before I started the drive back to Atlanta.
I’d made it as far as Canton, about an hour outside of town, when Rauser’s ringtone went off.
“The women I told you about, it all checked out, Street. Rape kits handled right. We’ll have DNA comparisons soon, and the composites after the attack look like our boy. And get this—one of the women said he used wire.” I knew how big this was. Ligature marks on the Wishbone victims always indicated he’d used wire, never fabric or rope. “So we were able to get a warrant for the wire. Never found it, but we found the knife under the mattress. Human blood on it is consistent with Melissa Dumas and Dobbs. Knife fits the wound patterns on the other Atlanta victims too. And if that’s not enough, we finally got the vehicle Charlie’s been driving. A Jeep Wrangler. Carpet fiber’s consistent with the fiber on Dobbs. He had it stashed in the garage at a rental house we found out he owns. Case is locked up pretty tight.”
I remembered the times Charlie had visited our office, about his little gifts, about watching him plant pansies in the planter outside our door. I couldn’t think of anyone who wouldn’t have opened the door for this man.
“But you’d already searched his place, Rauser. And you brought him in twice. He knew he was being watched. I don’t get why you wouldn’t have found this stuff the first time. Why would he keep the knife there? And where are his trophies—photographs, video, the stuff he’s pilfering from the scenes? And these are rape cases, not murder. Why would he leave living victims?”
“Both these women used the same tactic. They were completely submissive, offered to comply, pretended they enjoyed it. Then they prayed for an opportunity to get away.”
“I don’t get it,” I insisted. “It doesn’t fit.”
“Oh, come on, Keye. We got the knife and now we’re going to have his DNA and we’re going to pull that DNA evidence we collected at the Brooks hotel scene and connect him to that one too. Look, you knew something was up with him or you wouldn’t have been out there on his street that night. Your gut told you it wasn’t just Charlie forgetting his meds, and your gut was right. When are you coming home so we can go out for some grape juice? I’ll be a big man after the next press conference. Very in demand. I’m afraid you’ll have to call ahead.”
35
My days were once again consumed by nanny background checks and subpoenas and Tyrone’s Quikbail, long surveillance hours on Larry Quinn’s personal injury cases—all the things I’d once complained about. Getting so close to the violence again, to a violent serial offender, to something as sinister as the Wishbone murders, had put life in perspective for me. I knew now that I didn’t want to go back into the darkness.
But I still had the feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop. A sponsor of mine at AA once told me that that was a normal state for an addict. We learn to carry that foreboding when we live in the shadows, always hiding our interior life, our addictions and cravings and demons.
Charlie Ramsey was in jail and awaiting trial. I felt sure he would never again see Atlanta’s streets. Two more women had come forward to identify him as their rapist. Charlie’s list of crimes spanned almost two decades, and the blood and knife evidence found in his home had finally shut him down and sealed his fate. The DA was confident of a conviction in the rapes and at least two of the Wishbone killings—Dobbs and Melissa Dumas—where physical evidence had been found on the knife. The carpet fiber that matched to Charlie’s hidden Wrangler wasn’t much by itself, but it
would add to the growing evidence, another nail hammered in. Most important, and I suppose most telling, the killing had stopped. The letters, the emails, the roses had stopped too, of course. I wondered what Charlie had had planned for me in his fraudulent and damaged brain. Had I been destined to become another photograph on the War Room bulletin board? He went for Dobbs not because he fit into his selection process but because Dobbs was high profile. Charlie was expanding. He’d begun killing for the headlines and for the pure satisfaction of outmaneuvering law enforcement. It was not an unusual pattern for a serial murderer, but it was a terrifying one.
I had been so wrong about Charlie. My profile, in retrospect, had been shockingly uninformed. There was nothing in Charlie’s background that pointed to abuse. I was so sure that Anne Chambers and David Brooks had been symbolic of parental figures. So sure. There were other characteristics that did fit, however. His achievements as a star in football and in the complicated field of biomedical engineering. My advice had been to look for an overachiever, a star in his field. I never imagined someone who had excelled to that degree would then settle for the kind of goofy social veneer that Charlie had settled on. But what choice did he have, really? The accident had left him incapable of a normal life. We had learned that after the accident, Charlie, who had early in life exhibited volatility and sexual aggression, had even more anger. Because of his brain injury and the way it had manifested in a cognitive deficit, Charlie experienced more impulsiveness and had trouble socially processing. He had chronic pain, head and neck aches, depression, trouble concentrating. After surgery and some rehab, he had tried to return to work but had become verbally abusive, even resorted to violent threats in heated moments with coworkers. The poisonous pattern that had trailed him through life deepened. I myself had experienced it. It explained a lot about Charlie and who he had become. Still, my analysis had been so terribly wrong in so many areas. Was it a sign? The universe has a way of telling you when to let go of something. Maybe I wasn’t as great at my job as I thought I was. The universe has a way of telling us that too, doesn’t it?
The Stranger You Seek Page 27
