The Stranger You Seek (17 page)

My mind was clicking along. Civil suits and civil attorneys. What did they have in common? Judges, clerks, process servers, stenographers, a courthouse. And then it hit me.
The courthouse
. Is that the elevator mentioned in Wishbone’s second letter? Is that where the killer saw David Brooks? Was Atlanta’s Fulton County Courthouse the hunting ground for a serial murderer?

N
o one else had ever answered Rauser’s phone when I called. Not ever. Her voice seemed vaguely familiar, but I was too dumbfounded to place it right away.

“Aaron, it’s for you,” she had called out.

Aaron?
I heard the rustling of fabric, a receiver dropped and retrieved, muffled laughter. “Who calls you that?” I asked when he finally answered.

“A friend,” he said mysteriously. His voice had a gravelly sound I’d heard a million times, too much whiskey and too many cigarettes.

“You know what’s wrong with that, Rauser? You don’t have any friends,” I joked, but I felt like screaming at him, balling up my fists and pounding on his chest. Jesus, it felt like he was cheating on me. He hadn’t even told me he was seeing anyone.

“It’s Jo,” he whispered, and I recognized the locker-room tone. He was bragging, actually
bragging
to
me
about his conquest, and whispering so she wouldn’t hear.

Jo? Who the hell was Jo?
Mystified, I ransacked my shaken memory until the connection was made.
The blood-spatter analyst! That’s who calls him Aaron. Jo Phillips, the big tall Amazon fucking bloodstain analyst!
So that’s why they were so chummy that night at the scene. They probably had a history. Rauser cheerful and joking around at a murder scene. They were flirting, actually flirting, while David Brooks lay growing
cold on a bloody bed. And I thought she was hitting on
me. I’m an idiot
. Then I remembered texting Rauser a couple of nights ago and not getting an answer. I collapsed onto the hotel couch. Over the phone line, I heard ice rattle in a glass. Rauser loved iced tea. He could drink gallons of it, sweet southern iced tea with mountains of sugar. I pictured him wandering into his backyard with the phone on his shoulder, sitting on the deck he’d built himself, with the sun on his back and a glass in his hand. He liked wearing wife-beaters, the cheap ones that come three in a package at Target. I didn’t want to think about her there with him.

I told him what Neil had discovered and that the courthouse might be the common ground, the place where the offender hunted for his victims, and where David Brooks and the others with lawsuits in Fulton might have met their killer.

“He’s probably getting transcripts from the file room. Do they keep a log of who checks out which files?”

“I’ll sure as hell find out,” Rauser said excitedly. “Maybe we got a courier. Couriers go there to pick up court records. And anyone with a case number, a date, and three bucks can get transcripts. Sweet Jesus, Keye, this is big. I owe you guys. Man oh man. I’ll get the security company that handles Fulton to get the tapes to us. Lot of cameras there. We’ll have a presence on duty there in ten minutes. Deputies covering the metal detectors will help. They know who goes in and out. Hang on, would ya? I gotta tell Jo bye.”

I felt the blood rushing to my head. My eyes might have bulged out a little. I heard muffled voices, laughter.
Oh, please
. Then, after leaving me on hold too long, the ungrateful ass returned to the phone and said, “Sorry, Jo had someplace to be.”

“New episode of
Xena
?” I asked without even trying to hide my resentment.

Mr. Sensitive laughed, and made hissing and yowling sounds, the kind that mean catfight to men everywhere.

I paced around my room after we hung up, obsessing about Jo and Rauser, about me delivering that kind of news to him, news that would redirect the entire investigation, and he had the nerve to put me on hold to say good-bye to her. I was livid, and I wasn’t even sure why. I had no right to be. I knew it, but knowing it did nothing to help. I ended up in the café downstairs eating two slices of lemon pound cake, which was
better than sitting in the bar across the lobby drinking lemon vodka, and yet it was still something Dr. Shetty would have disapproved of, I was sure. I realized that somewhere in the back of my mind, I’d been saving Rauser for myself. He was my backup. It never occurred to me that someone might come along and threaten that. If I could have, I would have lifted my leg and peed on him right then and there. I ordered a third slice of cake.

I didn’t sleep well, and I wasn’t in the mood to cut deals with accountants this morning. For that matter, I wasn’t in the mood for anything. I felt upended and I had never been the kind to bury myself in work when something troubled me. I was far more likely to close the blinds, crawl into bed, and eat a bunch of Twinkies. I wasn’t drinking anymore, but in many ways, I still cycled through the behaviors I’d learned back then, isolating and self-indulgence being at the top of the list.

Denver was sunny and sixty-five degrees when I left my hotel and climbed into a rented Jeep Liberty. It was Saturday, a day when the chances were better of finding the man who had ripped off my client at home.

And I got lost. Somehow my brain never seemed to register direction like the rest of the world. I had real trouble with maps. This, combined with the natural tendency to wander, resulted in me doing quite a bit of unintended sightseeing whenever I traveled. Today was no exception. A half-hour drive had turned into three times that, and I was distracted, my mind anywhere but on the case I was working and the agreement I needed to make for my client this morning. I’d been obsessing about Rauser and Amazon Jo and I didn’t want to be this far from the War Room. It would be an exciting time in the investigation and it pulled at me. Was I drawn to this investigation because I really deeply cared? Or was it tugging at me because it filled the gaps in me, because it was another thing an obsessive mind and a bend toward addiction needed to grab on to?

By the time I turned the rented Jeep into Roy Echeverria’s driveway, I wasn’t in a good place. I did not give a damn about some sleazy little accountant who got caught with his fingers in the corporate cookie jar, no matter how fat and succulent those cookies were. This man had used the money he took from my client to buy himself a new identity and put
a sizable down payment on a home in the Westridge section of Highlands Ranch, twelve miles south of Denver, a sprawling master-planned community with golf courses, open space, and the eighty-five-hundred-acre Wildcat Mountain Reserve. Not bad for a junior-level accountant.

Echeverria was on his knees spreading wood chips around the shrubbery under his front windows. He was wearing gardening gloves and blue jeans and rubber-soled gardening shoes without heels, half loafer, half sandal. He was olive-skinned with large dark eyes and black hair and couldn’t have been more than thirty. Attractive enough in a dark, brooding way and thinner than he’d been in the file copy of the photo on his employee badge.

“Mr. Echeverria,” I said as I approached. “My name is Keye Street. I’d like to talk with you about some property in your possession belonging to your former employer.”

He rose slowly to full height, slipped the gardening gloves off and let them fall to the ground, dusted his hands off on his jeans.

“You are mistaken,” he said calmly and with an even smile. His accent was thick. I knew from his file that he’d come from Basque country in Spain. “My name—”

I held up the copy of his employee badge. “Your name is Echeverria. Can we just cut the crap? Do you want to talk here or should we go inside?”

“
You
cut the crap!” he yelled to my utter astonishment, and very aggressively stepped toward me, shoved me hard with both hands, and shrieked
“No!!!”
the way they teach you to scream it in self-defense classes. I went down on my backside in his front yard and he took off. The heelless gardening shoes slapped the ground like flip-flops and Echeverria had to raise his knees very high to keep from tripping over them. He looked like some kind of demented waterfowl, a seabird gone berserk.

Me, I’m little, but I’m fast. Two lawns down, I caught up enough to make a dive for his ankles. He tried to kick free and lost a shoe. I held on until he hit the ground chest-first with a grunt. The air rushed out of him and I climbed onto his back, tried to hold him down, reached around for my cuffs while he flopped around like a fish in a rowboat. He shook me off and got himself turned over. I wrapped my arms around his head and we rolled several times until he bit my shoulder so hard I yelped and
had to let go. Then he ran toward the golf course and hijacked one of the carts. He gave me the finger as he disappeared over the green.

“Shit!”
I climbed to my feet and brushed myself off.

Standing on a porch a few yards away, I noticed a woman with two young children staring at me, slack-jawed. The children crowded up close to her legs when I took a step forward, as if I might cook them and eat them.

“We’re family, Roy and me,” I offered by way of explanation, and smiled. “It’s just a thing we do.”

All three of them kept staring.

I moved the Jeep out of sight a block away, then returned to Roy Echeverria’s house. The door was unlocked. He obviously had not expected to wrestle a girl and run off in a golf cart. I searched the upstairs bathroom for a first-aid kit, then, armed with peroxide, I stretched out the collar of my shirt and inspected the bite on my shoulder.

“Sonofabitch.”
The bite was ugly, already turning a nice rich purple around the broken skin, and it hurt. The peroxide’s sting brought tears to my eyes. “That’s it,” I grumbled, and headed for the bedroom, where, after a few minutes of searching, I found a 9mm and ammunition in a shoebox in the closet. I loaded the gun and headed downstairs.

There was a canister with coffee on the kitchen counter, so I made a pot and waited. The guy was wearing one shoe and driving a stolen golf cart. I didn’t think he’d stay away long, and I was right. It took only an hour for the front door to open very slowly. I heard him walking lightly through the house, heard closet doors opening, shower curtains jerked back. Then his big eyes peered round the corner at me sitting at his kitchen table. They dropped briefly to the gun, then to the coffee cup, the coffeemaker, and back to me.

I rested my hand on the 9mm. “Have a seat, Mr. Echeverria.”

He cursed softly, slumped into the kitchen shoeless, and plopped down at the table. “Nothing ever works out for me.”

“Oh, great, a whiner,” I said. “Could the day get any better?”

He would tell me later that he had tried to buy himself a normal life when he bought his house and his new name. But nothing had been normal since he fled. He was frightened all the time, always looking over his shoulder. He believed they might kill him one day for what he’d done.

The tapes were in a safety deposit box. First thing Monday morning,
he promised, he’d make a withdrawal, sign my agreement, swap me the tapes for the five-hundred-thousand-dollar cashier’s check I offered him. I invited myself for the weekend just in case he changed his mind. He objected weakly at first but soon settled into the idea when he realized I wasn’t leaving.

By Monday morning, I understood what he’d done and exactly how he’d justified doing it. I understood everything in excruciating detail. His entire life! I knew his sister’s name and that he’d had chicken pox at thirteen. I knew the birth date of his second girlfriend and his grades in high school. I knew the names of every cat he ever owned and their litter box habits. The sonofabitch was never quiet. I thought about killing him myself.

“The tapes will tell you,” he said for the thirtieth time over coffee in the breakfast nook that the money stolen from my client had paid for, “how they feel about anyone with different skin color or, God forbid, an accent. They told jokes in those meetings. Racial jokes. But it wasn’t just the jokes—it was what was happening at policy level to discriminate.” He stared at me. “They would laugh at you too. They would refuse to promote you or pay you an honest wage just because you are not white.”

In my face he’d seen the heritage that I myself knew nothing about. He was hoping to tap into some hidden rage inside me. He was out of luck. There wasn’t any rage. I was numb by then to him and to the sound of his voice. If he’d said he planned on whacking off in a giant vat of peanut butter, I would have nodded and said, “That’s nice.”

I didn’t listen to the tapes once I had them in my hands. I didn’t want to know. My job wasn’t about saving the world from assholes. I just wanted to bill out the two thousand bucks I had coming and walk away from Ray Echeverria without a lump in my throat. I stuffed the tapes inside my suitcase, locked it, and carried them onto the plane with me. I’d done my job. I was comfortable with that.

By dusk on Monday evening, I was watching the sun sink behind the western slopes through the smudged window of a 767 about to take off for Atlanta. I was tired from sleeping with one eye open on a couch at Echeverria’s house, and it wasn’t long after the plane shot into Colorado’s wide, flat sky that I drifted off to sleep.

I dreamt I was in a little diner, the kind that serves salad on thick white plates with cherry tomatoes and little packages of saltines. Sitting
at the lunch counter next to my plate was a pistol on a paper napkin and a martini glass with a wishbone inside. In my dream, I understood the wishbone was significant, that it had been left as a warning, and I felt suddenly afraid.

I woke to a flight attendant asking if I wanted dinner. Her name was Barbra, according to a brass plate pinned to her navy blue blazer, and Barbra had gone a little heavy on the lipstick. Big, scary red lips are not what you want to see when your heart’s already doing a hundred and fifty.

“Decaf,” I answered, and flipped open my laptop. Dr. Shetty had a blast dissecting dreams. She’d spent days on the last one. I’d been riding a Twinkie into a brick wall. I decided to shoot her an email. It would make her day.