Stranger in the Room: A Novel (38 page)

“We found letters,” Mr. Etheridge added. “Letters about what he was going to do to someone. A woman. He didn’t name her. Sexual things. Violent things. It was too horrible to read. We burned them in our fireplace.”

Rauser sat back in his chair and looked at them. “Everything? You destroyed the dolls too?” The Etheridges nodded mutely. Outside,
thin white clouds passed over a pale blue sky. Inside, Rauser’s nostrils had flared and his jawbone was busy. “Did it occur to you that you might be destroying evidence? You knew he was violent and dangerous, didn’t you? You were afraid of him, weren’t you? And you stayed silent?” Again, the elderly couple didn’t answer. “How about pictures of your grandson just before he disappeared?”

“He stopped letting us photograph him years ago. He could not bear seeing himself.”

“Do you remember how many dolls you found in the closet?” I asked.

“I’ll never forget it,” Mrs. Etheridge told me. “Four male and four female.”

“Can you describe how they were positioned? Were they all hung alike?”

“Three male dolls and three female dolls were hanging by their necks. Each one of them on an individual hanger,” Mr. Etheridge told us. “The other two were attached to one another by the arms, facing one another on the same clothes hanger.”

I let that sink in. Rauser asked, “Did Owen use a computer?”

“Oh yes,” Mrs. Etheridge answered. “He was very good with them.”

“I’d like to see it,” Rauser said.

“We never found it. It disappeared when Owen disappeared.”

“You mind if we have a look around his room?”

“It hasn’t been his room for two years. We got rid of everything. There was too much darkness in this house for too long.” Melinda Etheridge sounded indignant.

“If Owen was close to this friend who picked him up for work, maybe he’s been in touch,” I suggested to her. “Can you try to remember his name?”

“I don’t remember the man’s name. He was about Owen’s age. The work was good for Owen. He started losing a lot of weight. Owen didn’t talk much about his day at work or what he did when he went out. And he didn’t like to be questioned. We felt we’d walked a tightrope with him his whole life. His threats were always hanging over us. That’s what he’d do the moment something went wrong. Threats. He would rage and scream, and then he would threaten to kill himself. It was manipulative. We knew that. He controlled us with those
threats. But we were still terrified he’d follow through one day. And he knew we couldn’t bear the thought of that.”

“You remember the name of the landscaping company?” Rauser asked.

She shook her head. “It was an architectural landscape service. They designed and maintained golf courses and parks, places like that. It had ‘commercial’ in the title. Maybe Commercial Landscape and Design?”

Rauser jotted the name down on a tablet he pulled from his pocket, then put his card on the table. “Thank you for your time.”

“What’ll happen when you find him?” Mr. Etheridge wanted to know.

“I can tell you this,” Rauser answered. “The longer this goes on, the worse it’s gonna be. He gets in touch, you tell him to turn himself in to me now. It’s the only way I can guarantee his safety.”

“One last question,” I said. “Did you ever celebrate his birthday after his mother died?”

“She was our daughter!” Mrs. Etheridge exclaimed. “How could we celebrate the day that monster took her from us?”

W
e walked together to the car, leaving the Etheridges silent and ashen-faced at their table. “Fucking great,” Rauser grouched. “Little strung-up dolls and destroyed manifestos and some friend with a landscape company nobody remembers the name of. You buy any of it?”

“Jury’s still out,” I said, and opened the passenger’s door, got in. “They were weird about his room. Something felt off. But they looked genuinely shocked by the photos. Of course, that doesn’t mean they don’t know where he is. The description of his manipulations, the threats without regard to the effect on them, lack of empathy, violence, anger, rage, blowing up when he doesn’t get what he wants or expects, his inability to connect—it’s all part of a cluster of psychopathetic behaviors. I believe they were sincere in how helpless they felt. You were hard on them.”

Rauser threw his battered Crown Vic into gear. It lurched forward
away from the Etheridge home, sputtered. “They knew the sonofabitch was dangerous. He was under their roof with all these weird behaviors while he was playing Fatu Doe, saying he would get her an apartment or whatever and planning how he was gonna kill her. I mean, what the fuck? They’re either hopelessly clueless, in deep denial, or they’re liars. We’ll see what they do now. I can show cause for a listen on their phones.”

“Three years and he hasn’t been in the workforce,” I said. “But he has to have food and shelter. He has a dog. He’s not begging on the streets. He’s working or he’s getting support. Can you get their financials too?”

“Hell yeah we can. Statute in Georgia allows us access as long as it’s a criminal investigation.”

Rauser stopped at the traffic signal at Ponce and Clifton. The afternoon rush was revving up. We were jammed in bumper to bumper.

“He could be living under an assumed name,” I said.

“Three, four years ago, it wasn’t that hard to do. If you know the social’s available, you’re pretty much home free. Next stop, the DMV.”

“Especially if you
make sure
the social is available,” I said.

“So maybe he offs somebody,” Rauser said, and continued playing with that idea. “The guy he worked with, you think? I mean, Richards is a real manipulative sonofabitch, right? So he buddies up with this guy, gets his sympathy or whatever. Let’s say he’s about the right size and type physically. Owen gets the right haircut, claims he lost his license, shows his social. Piece of cake. Old licenses don’t have the thumbprint either. If he gets his print on that new driver’s license, he’s good to go. New life. I like it, Street.”

The car behind us laid on the horn. Rauser ignored it and got on his phone. “Williams, we need the bank records for Melinda and Fred Etheridge. We’re looking for regular payments going to an individual. And we need somebody going over all the missing-persons cases starting about the time Jesse Owen Richards dropped off the grid. Start with local cases and branch out. We wanna make sure Richards didn’t swipe somebody’s identity, okay? Narrow it to males at least six-two or -three. Hair and eye color can be changed, but let’s start with brown. Also, he worked for a landscaping or landscape design company that didn’t come up when we looked at him. Something like
Atlanta Commercial Landscape. Let’s see what they have to say.” Rauser finished catching Sergeant Williams up on the Etheridge visit and got the ball rolling on the warrant for the phone tap. He looked at me. “That scenario fit the cluster-fuck of behaviors for psychopathy?”

I smiled. “Your vocabulary has improved since you’ve been hanging out with me.”

“Uh-oh,” Rauser muttered. The engine had started to knock. Loudly. The car shimmed.

“You know these things use oil?” I asked, and got a sideways glare. “Sounds like you’re about to throw a rod.” Growing up with a fix-it guy like Howard Street, both Jimmy and I had learned how to keep a car running. Rauser knew how to start them, drive the hell out of them, and bang them into things. And he’d been incredibly stubborn about accepting what anyone else in the department would have appreciated—a new car. He’d chain-smoked in this one for six years before he gave up smoking last November, and it permanently smelled like cigarettes. He didn’t even like the car. It was about resisting change, in my opinion. But Rauser wasn’t particularly interested in my opinions regarding his motivations.

“Might as well hang on to it until it quits,” he said.

“That should be any minute now.”

“What do you have against my car?”

“Let’s see. It stinks. Oh yeah, and it’s ugly.” I saw the skin at the corner of his eyes crinkle. “And it’s unreliable. What if you need to catch a bad guy? You ever think about that?”

“You’re pretty fast, Street. I’ll just kick the door open and you can pursue on foot.”

“And I’m low-maintenance. I run on Krispy Kremes.”

“Yeah. Sure. Low-maintenance.” We drove for a minute. Rauser pulled into a gas station with a convenience store and went in for a couple of quarts of oil. He threw open the hood, took the cap off, and poured them in. Both of them. No checking the level with the dipstick. I watched this with amusement. He got back in but didn’t start the engine. “So you’re not talking about the dolls. That means you’re deciding how to translate the psychobabble shit, right? You asked about the number of dolls they found in this freak’s closet and the positioning. How come?”

“Eight of them,” I said. “One for each year leading up to his eighth birthday, and that momentous day—the murder-suicide.” I thought about my grandparents, pushed the memory away. “Not that the day itself shaped him. But it sparks and continues to fuel what was there already. I think the dolls represent victims. Or intended victims. The male and female doll tied together, it’s hard to interpret without being inside his head. But the obvious conclusion is they represent a couple.”

“A double murder with that signature. No way it happened already. We’d have found it. We been running everything every which way.”

“I’d focus investigators on couples who are transitioning somehow, on the threshold of something, some new life. I realize that in practical terms that’s difficult. But it’s all we have. A big event. Marriage, a first home, a first child. I think his thing is all about people on the crest of something, moving forward. Our boy’s stuck in his past.”

“We could look at marriage licenses, home sales, births,” Rauser mused. “Narrow the search geographically, since Richards only hunts in a couple of areas.” He glanced at me. “That’s good work, Street.”

I felt his energy surging. For the first time since I’d learned of Jesse Owen Richards’s obsession with my cousin, I had an opportunity to get a step ahead of him, to stop him before he pulled out his party favors.

  
34

I
rummaged for Neil’s keys at my office. Rauser insisted on waiting, even though he was managing seventeen investigators, all their open cases, one very dangerous repeat offender, and a new boss. He paced around my office with one hand jammed in his pocket and the other holding a phone to his ear while I printed out a long-overdue report on the crematory for Larry Quinn, called a courier for a pickup, and taped it to my door. I didn’t want Rauser waiting. I’d tried to shoo him away. His restless energy in my office was not helpful. And I wanted to be able to be there. Alone. I wasn’t being reckless. I simply didn’t want to be spooked all the time. It’s no way to live. But Rauser didn’t want to hear it. He wasn’t interested in my feelings at the moment. He was thinking about his. That I had my Glock snug against the small of my back in a duty holster or that I’d spent four years in the field at the Bureau before moving into the BAU made no difference to him.

We left the office together, and I snaked through downtown in Neil’s Smart Car. Sunlight streaming between skyscrapers dappled the streets. It was almost five, and the traffic was getting worse. Neil’s little blue bump was like melting in a butter dish at stoplights. I passed Underground Atlanta and saw Rauser peel off a few cars back, heading to City Hall East. He had stayed long enough to be sure I wasn’t being tailed. We were both keenly aware that blocking his
path to Miki, that my story, my life, had all the elements to trigger Richards’s rage. My name was in the news again. This time in a favorable way because of the crematory scandal. And he had proved he was perfectly willing to train his sights on me if he couldn’t get to my cousin.

I rang my parents and told them about Miki’s broken leg and that Miki was going to stay at Rauser’s. Mother immediately declared she would prepare meals for Rauser’s refrigerator that we’d be able to heat for Miki. She surprised me by saying she’d actually enjoyed having cops hang around her house. She liked the company. My dad wasn’t a big talker. And she was using the detail assigned to keep them safe as guinea pigs for new recipes.

I turned onto Mitchell Street a block from Tyrone’s office. I had to take the time to make up with Tyrone. I didn’t want the gap to widen. His business was an important part of my monthly income. And I liked the guy. That wasn’t true for a few others I’d met in his line of work. I’d regretted the tone of our last conversation. I wanted to set it straight. It was one stressor I did not need tugging at me. And one I could actually make go away.

No thugs were waiting for me this time. They had taken Tyrone’s warning seriously and cleared out. I smiled. A big Glock didn’t hurt either. I finally found an empty meter and walked half a block to Tyrone’s dingy yellow stucco building. Color was chipping off the building so the tips of the stucco peaks were white. The glass doors looked too new for the rest of the place. A hallway with closed doors and dirty carpet went off to the right, a staircase to the left, elevator dead center. I don’t use the elevator in this building. It shudders and bumps, and I don’t like touching the filthy buttons. But the staircase reeks. By level three I’d actually adjusted to the smell of urine. My thighs had started to burn, though, another reminder to get back to running. And to pick up those free weights collecting dust on my living-room floor. I’m told it makes an amazing difference in your level of fitness if you actually lift them off the ground and move them up and down a few times a week. Go figure. I stopped at the top landing and caught my breath. I couldn’t walk into Tyrone’s office red-faced and panting.