Stranger in the Room: A Novel (13 page)

We climbed the stairs and went back through the length of the house.

“How long you think he’s been swinging?” Rauser asked, squinting up at the body.

“I’m guessing twelve to twenty-four,” I said.

“It’s cold in here,” Rauser observed. “Nobody keeps it this cold. That’ll affect it too, right?” He rubbed his face. “So we gotta take the leap this may be connected to Miki’s break-in.”

“I wasn’t sure I even believed her. I was sending her home. I was so mad at her. I feel terrible.”

“Well, consider the source,” Rauser said. “I looked at the report. She wasn’t just drinking. Responding officers reported dilated pupils. She was clearly using stimulants with the alcohol. They ran her name—history of mental illness, nine-one-one calls, people reporting suicide attempts, calls from Miki saying she heard someone breaking in. Never anybody here when the officers arrive. Never any evidence of a break-in. We get these calls all the time from users. They get paranoid. They get lonely. Who knows?”

“So let’s take another leap. What if those reports were real? What if she was hearing noises? I interviewed an old boyfriend of hers today—Cash Tilison—who admitted to stalking her.”

Rauser looked at me. “You’re gonna give me all that, right?”

“Of course.”

“You need hardware to hold that kind of weight,” Detective Angotti said. We all looked up at the wall above the door frame. “Those anchors up there had to be drilled in.” Angotti knelt, pointed to some white dust around the door frame. “Looks like plaster chips. That’s a new installation. This guy came with tools, Lieutenant.”

I agreed. “He had to engage in a lot of precautionary behaviors to pull this off. He’s thinking about Miki’s routines, when she’s away, the neighborhood, about tools and hardware, about getting the body inside, positioning, staging.”

“So we’ll say this guy at her window, he knows what he wants to do. He knows she’s away, like you said, and he comes over to check the place out. Maybe he installs the wall anchors then, sweeps up a little, so she’s not tipped when she comes home,” Rauser said.

“Then Miki comes here,” I added. “He wants to give her a good
scare so she’ll leave home again. Maybe he’s not finished. If he’s been watching her or gaslighting her, he knows she’ll run.”

“We know this guy hasn’t been dead forty-eight hours. So he was planning the murder when he was here,” Rauser said. “You think he preselected the old guy?”

“It would make sense he’d go for a frail elderly person or a child,” I answered. “He has to have a body he can manipulate.”

“House is secure. No signs of a struggle. No blood visible to the naked eye. All clear outside. No evidence of a break-in. So we got a good lock picker or somebody with a key,” Angotti said.

“Get someone to examine the locks,” Rauser ordered.

Ken Lang and a couple of scene techs trudged through the front door, burdened with aluminum cases and cameras, looking like aliens in booties and jumpsuits. Lang looked at the dead man dangling from the door frame through small, square wire-rimmed glasses. “Oh joy,” he said, and set his cases on the floor. “Just how I wanted to spend Saturday night. How much time before the ME fucks up my scene?”

“I can postpone the call for a few minutes,” Rauser said.

Lang looked around, sighed. “It’s going to take all night to process a scene this size.”

“ME doesn’t give a shit about your scene,” Rauser groused. “ME cares about the body. Get what you need off it and let ’em get in and out.” Rauser was a can-do guy. And that’s what he wanted from the people he worked with. A lot of can-dos. I’d seen him lose patience with Lang before. Ken always seemed to go into everything with a lot of reasons up front about how hard it was going to be.

We backed away and made room for the crime scene investigators to do their job. “You notice there’s no ligature marks around the neck. None on his wrists,” Rauser said.

And no spatter
, I thought. No reason to call in Jo Phillips, the bloodstain pattern analyst that Rauser used to sleep with—almost six feet of perfect nuts-and-berries complexion.

“Hey, Balaki,” Rauser said. “We got Keye’s cousin, who is also the home owner, and Keye’s mother outside with an officer. We need to interview them both. How about getting them escorted to the station. Make sure they’re treated real nice. And find the responding officers for a break-in reported here night before last.” Rauser chewed his
cheek. “So he hangs a dead body from a door frame inside Miki’s house. He clearly positioned the old guy’s head. And he might have also turned the air down to freezing so his stiff stayed good and stiff. What do you make of it?”

“He spent a lot of time thinking about how to up the creepy factor. And to send the message that he has full access to her life and to her home. That kind of power play isn’t unusual with stalkers. Killing to prove it, that is,” I said.

“Miki have any other boyfriends besides Tilison?”

“I have a list,” I said, and Rauser grinned down at me. Rauser’s over six feet tall. And me, well, I can hit five-four on my tiptoes. “Neil ran their backgrounds. We’ll send them over.”

“I saw Cash Tilison at the Tabernacle when he was just starting a couple of years back,” Rauser said. “He’s good.”

I wondered whether the singer’s celebrity might affect the interview process. I didn’t say it, of course. Cops are as human as anyone else. A little brush with fame can be a lot of fun. I imagined detectives volunteering to interview Cash. And they would interview him and everyone else in Miki’s world.

The scene techs were working on and around the body, carefully vacuuming and bagging hair and fiber evidence off the victim’s clothes and shoes. The floor around him was vacuumed clean. We stood in the center of Miki’s living room, where the big picture window looked out onto the wraparound porch and tree-lined Elizabeth Street. I saw police cars and the CSU van outside. A few neighbors had come out on the street to watch. I thought about how frightened Miki must be right now and felt another pang of guilt.

Ken Lang photographed the body from several angles. He then slipped bags over the victim’s hands and rubber-banded them on. He placed a sterile crime scene blanket on the floor.

One of the techs got up on a stool. “Toggle anchors and eye hooks,” she said, and tapped on the wall. “In a stud.” Her accent was southern. But not Georgia southern. Something twangier. Arkansas, maybe. She sliced carefully through twine that was positioned under the victim’s chin and ran up behind his head. His head bobbled a little but didn’t completely droop. I saw the deep ligature the twine had made in his skin. “Almost no discoloration,” she said. “This guy
wasn’t breathing when he was hung up here.” She placed the twine in an evidence bag and handed it down. “Okay, y’all. Timber.” She sliced through the rope that held the body. The CSU team maneuvered the body onto the blanket.

Detective Linda Bevins came in. She had worked the strangled-boy scene. I remembered seeing her holding back the grieving mother on television. “We have an ID on the victim.” Her blondish hair was pulled back. She was in jeans and an APD T-shirt, looked fit. “Name’s Donald Kelly. Yesterday was his birthday. He was ninety.”

“Well, that would explain this,” Ken Lang said. He’d pulled a crumpled piece of wrapping paper from the victim’s pant pocket. He bagged it.

“Jeez,” Rauser said. “That’s depressing.”

Ken Lang began speaking into a tiny digital recorder clipped to his collar. “Gunshot wound,” he said. He cut open the victim’s shirt and it fell to each side of the body. We were treated to a view of the old man’s chest and stomach. No muscle. Just skin and ribs and bone sprinkled with sparse silver hair. Lang took some pictures. Clipped some fabric and bagged it.

“Nine-one-one call came in at six-fifteen last night,” Bevins said. “Mr. Kelly was being chauffeured to his birthday party on Fifteenth Street next to Colony Square. A volunteer with Dignified Elder Transport.” Bevins paused and looked at her notepad. “Driver’s name is Abraam Balasco. He picked him up at Sunrise Oaks Assisted Living. They went into the lobby of this condo building. There’s a guy reading the paper. Balasco doesn’t see his face, but he thinks he may be a waiter or something because he’s got black shoes with thick soles and black pants. He notices the cut is inexpensive. Not dressy. Says his father was a tailor so he notices things like this. He’s not sure but he thinks he was wearing a white shirt. He says the guy looks big even sitting down. They had been discussing Mr. Kelly’s reluctance to go to his birthday party. The old man told Balasco his daughter was a bitch and the family was waiting for him to die. That’s a quote. Balasco says the elevator opened and he was nailed from behind. Kelly never made it upstairs, and the volunteer’s Honda Element is still missing.”

“See if we can get a copy of the will, and check out the family. Honda’s probably the primary crime scene,” Rauser said.

“I’d agree with that,” Ken Lang said. “Angle looks right for a bullet coming from the driver’s side. And we don’t have blood here consistent with a gunshot wound. Distance looks about right too.”

“Mr. Balasco is on his way to the station,” Bevins said.

“Yeah, it would be nice if my detectives would jump on interviewing the only goddamn witness.” The level of irritation in Rauser’s tone caused me to look up at him. It was nothing new for his detectives. Respected as he was for his investigative skills, Rauser was equally known for a tendency toward aggravation.

“He was interviewed at the hospital, where he’s been under observation for a concussion, but that’s when it was a missing persons,” Bevins answered patiently.

“This guy Balasco, he the one that reported old man Kelly missing?” Rauser wanted to know.

“Family members,” Angotti answered. “Nine-one-one call. When Mr. Kelly didn’t come up on the elevator, some of them went downstairs and found the volunteer, Mr. Balasco, had been injured. Kelly was gone.”

“Balasco unconscious when the family found him?” Rauser asked.

“Yes, sir.”

Rauser scratched the back of his head, a quick, irritated movement. “And then Kelly ends up here. Hanging. In Miki Ashton’s house.”

The male technician opened up his aluminum case. A CrimeScope that looked like a black box nested in gray foam along with a row of colored filters and forensic goggles. In the back of the case, Scene-Scopes, pocket-size, like small flashlights, each made to project a certain light on the spectrum. Investigators used them according to their needs—body fluids, latent prints, fibers, drugs.

“Somebody wanna give me some mood lighting?” Lang asked.

Rauser went to the switch at the front door. Bevins headed for the kitchen light. I took the lamp and pulled tall vertical blinds across the wide window. The room went dark. Blue spotlights from a high-intensity UV moved evenly inch by inch over the door frame, the floor.
We stood there in the dark, watching as smudges appeared under the black light. Lang’s techs scraped samples and tweezed them into vials.

“Angotti, start talking to the neighbors,” Rauser said. “Probably looking at a guy who’s been hanging around. Run with Balasco’s description until we get something better. Maybe somebody remembers him. And Bevins, get Kelly’s daughter and the rest of the family down to the station in the morning. We’ll see how bitchy she is. Family and profit. Sounds like a good place to start.”

“A family member wouldn’t hang him up like that,” I said. “And how would that connect back to Miki?”

“It’s not hard to hire somebody that’s happy to hang up a family member,” Rauser said. “Maybe he happens to have a thing for your cousin.”

He was grasping at straws. But theory generation was just part of getting to something that made sense in the face of unreasonable violence. I didn’t say anything. I felt his hand on my shoulder. “Need you to come to the station too, Street. We get everybody’s statement all laid out, this’ll be a lot easier.”

Lang ran light over the body. Small spots and large smudges lit up on the victim’s face and clothing. “Whadda we got?” Rauser asked. “Some kind of body fluid?”

“Pretty good bet we know what the big one is down there. Guy pissed himself. Most guys do,” Lang said. I thought about the strangled boy, the unidentified fluid on his back and shoulders. And Lang’s words.
Most guys do
. A reminder of what a messy business murder is. And about all the ways the body betrays both killer and victim.

“What about the small spots?” Rauser wanted to know.

Lang shrugged. “Semen, salvia, urine, vaginal fluids, they can all fluoresce just like blood. Lot of variables, though. Humidity, temperature, equipment. May fluoresce one time and not another. No such thing as scientific certainty, Lieutenant. But generally if it comes from the body, it’s gonna give us a light show. Under the right conditions, anyway.”

“Any other fluids that might fluoresce like that?” Rauser asked.

“What did you have in mind?”

“Fuck if I know,” Rauser said. “What’s left?”

  
12

A
lmost midnight on a Saturday and Midtown was humming when I pulled out of the parking garage at 675 Ponce de Leon Avenue at City Hall East—two million square feet of pollutant-faded brick and coughing ventilation. Atlanta’s police department used the building, along with some other city services and businesses. The inefficient giant had been sold to developers a few months back. Word was the tenants who hadn’t already moved out had been told to pack their desks. It was a good bet Midtown would drop dead from exposure to lead paint and asbestos when they renovated the obsolete hulk. The department had long petitioned for improvements. No one liked the building. But at least it was a devil they knew. Rauser resisted this kind of upheaval. Change is change. Even when it’s good it’s inconvenient. Adding to his anxiety, the Homicide Unit still hadn’t been told where they would set up shop next.