Stranger in the Room: A Novel (16 page)

“It all adds up. Kid was wearing reflective shoes. Porch light was on over there, and the streetlights work. We tested it. If the jogger looked that way when he was running, he could have easily spotted the kid’s shoes. Also, he’d been home all night. Cooked dinner for a neighbor and his wife.”

“Something about this boy really set him off,” I told Rauser. “The super-athlete thing?”

“He saw a letter from the coach saying this little boy was going to be a big star, talking about his career and shit. Perp’s a big zero, so the thought of some thirteen-year-old star probably does really piss him off.”

I nodded. “He knew Troy. He’d seen him play. You know how sporting
events are. No one questions grown-ups hanging around. It’s a pedophile picnic.”

Rauser glanced over at me as we walked back to the car. “That’s how you see kids and sports?”

“You know me. Ray of sunshine.”

“Uh-huh,” Rauser said, and drew it out. We got in. He threw the car into gear. “And maybe Oprah will give me a network. The Aaron Rauser Network. I like it. Or maybe just
Aaron
.” He made quotation marks with one hand when he said “Aaron.”

“Or just A.” I smiled and looked out the window. “For ass.”

“How ’bout just the Ass Network? Be even better.”

“Pretty sure they have one of those.”

Rauser pressed numbers into his phone. “Mrs. Delgado, it’s Lieutenant Rauser. I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’am. I wanted to let you know I’ll be outside your home with another investigator. Didn’t want to startle you. We don’t need to come inside and bother you.” He waited. “Yes, ma’am. Thank you.” He disconnected and looked at me. “This kid, he was their pride and joy. They’re pretty broken up.”

T
he Crown Vic pulled alongside the curb in front of a bungalow on Amsterdam. There were a lot of them in neighborhoods around Atlanta—American Craftsman style, built in the early nineteen hundreds, when the middle class was thumbing its nose at the extravagances of the Victorian era. The Delgado bungalow was pale yellow, with an above-ground basement and an overhang roof covering a wide front porch. All the houses on this side of the street were elevated, with driveways on a steep incline. Across the street, a six-foot-high granite retaining wall, a sidewalk in front of it, a stretch of trees behind it. It was one of the nice things about Atlanta neighborhoods. We love our trees here. Though the vibrant heart of Midtown was only a couple of minutes away by car, I had the sense of being miles from the city.

I stood next to Rauser’s car, looking at the street, taking in the neighborhood, the quiet. A couple walked their dog in front of the granite-slab wall. I closed my eyes.

“Where’d you go?” Rauser asked.

“Imagining coming here, coming here the way he came here.”

“What do you do first?”

“Drive by a few times,” I answered. “I notice when their cars are here, when their neighbors are home. The driveways are long. Almost no one parks on the street, so it’s not safe here. But I want to get closer. I need time to watch them. I need to be on foot.”

“So maybe he parks on the next block,” Rauser said. I opened my eyes and we both looked at the nearest cross street. “It would put him out in the open, but he’s a cocky guy, you know? Maybe he comes down the sidewalk real casual-like, crosses the street, tosses their mail. Maybe he’s wearing a meter reader T-shirt or something so nobody pays attention. ’Cause he has to get the mail before they come home. So he’s had to be here in daylight. We’ve talked to most of the neighbors on the block. You’re right. He didn’t park here.”

We were quiet for a minute. “I think he’d want to get closer.” I glanced at the Delgado house. “You can’t see anything from here. What’s behind the house?”

“Little strip of woods, more backyards. I think it’s San Antonio Drive. Their family room looks out onto the backyard.”

“Okay if I walk around?” I asked Rauser.

He gestured for me to lead the way. We walked up the Delgado driveway and alongside the house. The backyard was flat, with a steady downward slope. We moved along a chain-link fence the length of the yard. We then passed through the tree line, and another backyard, walked to the street. A
For Sale
sign was hanging shingle-style on a white post in the front yard—new construction, infill housing dropped into the lot. It was oddly out of place on the block, a big square house with olive siding in a neighborhood built mostly in the 1920s.

“These people have been living with contractors and strangers,” I said. “They’ve grown accustomed to traffic and noise and vehicles. He’d have relative freedom. He could park here without raising questions.”

We walked back to the strip of trees that separated one backyard from another, gazed up at the back of the bungalow, at wide uncovered windows that looked out over the property. A woman stood staring out at us from inside, arms folded over her chest.

“Mrs. Delgado,” Rauser confirmed.

In daylight, I couldn’t make out her features at this distance. But at night with the lights on, different story. “In the dark with binoculars, he’s practically in their living room,” I told Rauser. “There’s a lot of power in that. Watching. It’s sexually charged.”

“Why don’t people cover their damn windows?”

A pine tree had fallen. It looked like it had been down for a while. Georgia woods are full of fallen pines with shallow roots. It was lying parallel to the fence. I sat down on it and looked up at the house. Rauser sat beside me, kicked at some dirt. I felt something against my ankle, leaned over and saw a red cardboard box about the dimensions of a paperback novel. It was faded and dirt-covered. There was a picture of some kind of shaggy white terrier on the front. Dog treats. I touched Rauser’s arm and he followed my eyes, pulled gloves from his pocket, picked it up.

“Well, look at that,” he said. “Those little pigs-in-a-blanket-shaped things. Same kind we found had been used to bait the dog.”

“I’m betting this is where the dog developed a taste for them.”

A noise like a flap swinging got our attention. I looked up to see a dog door swinging and a sable-colored sheltie blasting down the back steps and through the yard toward us. Barking, panting, tail wagging.

“Hey, there,” I said, and stuck fingers through the chain link. The dog turned some circles and barked the way shelties do, pressed his face into my hand, sniffed. He was still a puppy. I got hold of the tag on his collar and turned it so I could read. He pressed his nose through the chain link and tried to kiss me.
Joey
, the tag said, with a phone number and address. I thought about Troy Delgado going out to walk his dog, about how easy it would be for a stranger to stop and make a big deal over the dog while flipping that tag around, memorizing the address, the dog’s name. “Hi, Joey, you had a buddy back here, didn’t you?”

Rauser ordered an evidence tech, and we waited for the techs to arrive while walking around with our eyes to the ground, hoping to find something else. Joey stayed at the fence, tail wagging. Rauser had hoped for prints on the dog-treat box, but it had been rained on and half buried in the dirt and leaves.

“He probably wasn’t wearing gloves when he shoved his hand in that box. That means skin cells,” I told a quiet, brooding Rauser on the way back to the car. He wanted something easy. Just once. He wanted a print. He wanted results now. The prospect of waiting for a jammed system to analyze the evidence infuriated him.

He took Monroe to Piedmont, then turned right onto Westminster, and curved past Winn Park to a private lot next to a condo building on Fifteenth. It was posted with tow signs for residents and authorized guests only. We got out in the shadow of a Colony Square. Here on the shady concrete the air was ten degrees cooler.

“I appreciate you doing this with me.” Rauser didn’t trust those outside his own unit easily. It was easier with me. We’d built professional confidence on previous cases, and we felt personally safe with each other, which meant that the theory-generation phase of an investigation was comfortable and productive. Without judgment, we could let ideas fly. I liked it. I missed the work that challenged me. It was why I’d spent eight years at the Bureau. And it had pressed every button I had. Something happens inside you, or it did in me, when you perform psychological autopsies on murderers, something gritty and compulsive that really feeds my dark stuff. I tell myself I grew up dreaming about the FBI’s Behavioral Science Units because a pair of killers touched me at such a young age, that I wanted to help families who had suffered that kind of fracture to find closure and justice. That may be true too. But I’m realistic. It’s also permission to obsess. It feeds my addict, which means I get to be a hero and a victim—perfect for a southern woman.

We crossed the lot toward the building where Donald Kelly had been abducted, and later murdered and hung up in my cousin’s house. I was talking about the phone she’d lost, the food order she hadn’t remembered, White Trash escaping. “What if the food, the phone disappearing, the noises she reported to police—what if it’s all connected? The sounds stopped when her boyfriends were around. I didn’t even really believe she’d seen someone in her house. I feel terrible about that.”

“Why are you taking on guilt over this? You answered her distress call, you opened your home to her, and she thanks you by losing your damn cat. I’m thinking that’s about the best she can do when she’s
not slicing herself up or jet-setting and star-fucking or sticking something up her nose.”

“Seriously, Mr. Sensitive?” We stopped at the lobby door.

“I’m just pissed off she came back into your life with a shitload of baggage.
Dangerous
baggage. This doesn’t even qualify as baggage, Street. It’s more like a Hummer.”

“I shouldn’t have to remind you that Miki is a victim. And she will always be in my life, Rauser. Always.”

“Well, at least she’s out of your house.”

Rauser’s a good man. Most days I’m not offended when he’s protective. But today I had to swallow down the urge to yell at him. Preconception taints investigations. It had already prevented me from fully comprehending the danger Miki was in. And Rauser was just as human as anyone else.

“If this guy has been staging events to psychologically sabotage her, he’s been stalking her for a long time. The noises were first reported over two years ago, right? Miki has been in three or four hospitals in the metro area over the years. Maybe they met there. He might have a history of mental illness. He clearly has a healthy dose of narcissism,” I said.

“We can subpoena records, cross-check her inpatient dates against other patients and staff. In the meantime, we’ll check her phone. If it’s still on, we can GPS it. If not, the provider will have a last location.”

He typed a four-digit code into the panel outside. The door buzzed, and we heard the scraping sound of metal swiping as the latch withdrew. The heavy wooden door popped open an inch and we stepped into a small unattended lobby. I looked around at a staircase, elevators, real estate pamphlets on one of the antiqued walnut tables, marble floors, a couple of nice armchairs.

“According to the volunteer, he and Mr. Kelly come into the lobby,” Rauser told me. “The guy’s sitting in that chair. We know he’s our perp. He’s the only one here, and the volunteer didn’t hear the door opening.” Rauser pointed to a wing-backed armchair. “Guy has a newspaper, barely lowers it when they come in, so this volunteer driver doesn’t really catch his face, except he’s white. Guy took it with him, by the way. The newspaper. The driver notices his shoes. Black
with thick soles. It registers somewhere he might be a waiter and the clothes are inexpensive. He knows he was wearing black pants. The shirt might have been white, but he’s not positive on that point.”

“A waiter, a chauffeur, hotel staff,” I said, and wondered if the driver’s recollection was accurate. Memory is not a recording device. It’s corrupted by our own bias. We want to fit the pieces together. So we do. And then we convince ourselves it’s true.

“Figured he walked here or took MARTA, probably planned to steal a vehicle. One of the cameras at Colony Square catches a good section of the bus stop on that corner. We’ll review the tapes and interview everyone we can that might have a view of this building. He would have had to conceal the weapon he used to hit the driver. Probably a steel pipe of some kind. Tire iron, most likely.”

“So he hid the weapon at a more convenient time,” I suggested. “He came over and planted it out front somewhere. He’d obviously surveyed the building, had the entry code. He would have known there was no video. He didn’t want to use the gun inside and attract attention.”

“He’s careful,” Rauser said. “He took the newspaper with him.” We stared at the chair where a killer had sat as if we were waiting to hear its side of the story. Rauser sat down, reached for a newspaper on a marble-top side table between the Louis XV chairs. The newspaper had a label on it with the name of the condo, identifying it as a complimentary lobby copy. The killer had taken the paper with him. He was wearing gloves at Miki’s. He thinks about evidence transfer. I wondered if he’d actually been reading the paper, relaxing, waiting. It could happen. Some offenders don’t even experience elevated blood pressure during the commission of a crime. Was this the kind of monster that had fixated on Miki? He’d killed to shock her, terrify her; perhaps he fantasized it would also subdue her or bring her around. I wasn’t sure yet what motivated him.

I stepped outside and came back through the door, glanced at Rauser in the chair, walked toward the elevators, turned back to look at him. The paper was up.

“What do you see?” Rauser asked.

“Clothes, forehead, hair. Caught the side of your face, but who’s to say the killer hadn’t turned away.”

Rauser refolded the newspaper, dropped it back on the table, and walked around the lobby, glanced out one of the windows. “You can see the parking area from here. He could have seen them coming. Then he goes to the chair and waits. Kelly’s old and the driver’s in bad shape, sixties, overweight. Pretty easy to take ’em.”

“Need to establish some context. When and how was Kelly first exposed to the offender? Was there a prior relationship?”