The Stranger You Seek (23 page)

“Oh, come now, Keye, let’s not be so modest.” Dobbs shook his head. “Toss them out. Perhaps they will lead us somewhere.”

“Okay, well, as you said, this kind of rage is usually about some personal connection. Because of the way Anne Chambers was killed, because her nipples were removed, which is all about Mommy, and she was sexually mutilated, I believe she’s representative of the mother figure in the offender’s life, of a very interruptive and intensely competitive relationship with the mother figure. David Brooks might represent a loved
and desired father, or even an incestuous relationship with the father. Only Brooks was allowed to die without suffering. With the others, victim suffering was the turn-on. That says something vital about the killer’s pathology. Suffering’s all about anger excitation or sadism. Victim needs and desires aren’t important to him. Killing the victim is just another precautionary act. He’s just tidying up, really, and acting out his fantasies.”

“And what’s the fantasy again?” Rauser asked.

“The fantasy is undoubtedly complicated,” Dobbs answered, then used the index finger on each hand to rub his eyes. They were red when he was done. “The phrase ‘multi-determined’ was used in one of the letters and that’s very accurate. It’s about a lot of things—sex, revenge, eluding law enforcement, needing validation, involving journalists. Seeing his letters in the newspapers, hearing about what he’s done—that must feel almost as good as returning to the scene of his crime. And communicating with you both must really be a thrill. It feeds our man’s delusion that he’s on the inside, in the power structure, keeping you two in his intimate little circle. The circle must widen now that I’m here,” Dobbs added. “Wonder how that’s sitting with our killer.”

“You’re extremely visible,” I reminded Dobbs. “I would expect him to include you now in his communications.”

Dobbs bristled. “I remind you that I am visible because I am
paid
to be visible.”

Oh sure. No one would ever accuse you of showboating
.

“So where does LaBrecque fit?” Rauser wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “The selection processes we’ve identified, like the link to civil law, just doesn’t fit with LaBrecque. Whatever the link is to him is too personal to identify at this point.”

Rauser said, “Our tech guy ran down the address of the computer where the email was generated. An Internet café with a stationary computer in Midtown. No cameras. We’ll have surveillance there by the end of the day.”

Dobbs sank back comfortably into the puffy chaise. “Yes, well,” he muttered, and didn’t finish his sentence.

Rauser pulled his ringing phone from his pocket, answered, and left Dobbs and me alone while he took his call.

Dobbs tucked his hands behind his head. “Well done, Dr. Street.” He smiled at me. “You’ve worked hard on this and it shows. I couldn’t have painted a better picture of our unsub myself.”

“I had some time on my hands in the hospital.”

“How are you feeling, by the way?”

“I’m fine,” I answered. His concern made me uneasy.

“I am sorry, Keye, about all that happened between us at BAU.”

I was silent. I didn’t believe he felt remorse and I certainly was not ready to let him off the hook. I’d had some problems my last few months at the Bureau. I was struggling. I was under review. Jacob Dobbs had written quite a scathing report about me in which he recommended I be dismissed. If I’d slept with him, he would have recommended a paid furlough rather than dismissal. He had been quite clear and unapologetic about that. I had needed rehab, a hand up, not a kick in the head. He had made my time there nearly unbearable with his constant comments and advances, and then he had turned his back on me completely.

Rauser rejoined us. “We got the restaurant where Brooks ate the night he was killed. A waitress recognized his photo. She seated him and took a wine order because the shift was just changing and the waiter wasn’t on yet. She said the reservation was for two, in the name of John Smith. Original, huh? Said Brooks drove her nuts picking out the right wine like someone on a date. Waiter showed, so she left. Never saw his dinner partner. We have the waiter’s name and address. Balaki and Williams are on the way there now. We weren’t able to locate a credit card receipt. Brooks was paying cash for everything—dinner, drinks, the hotel. Married, obviously didn’t want a paper trail.”

“Anything from the courthouse?” I asked.

“Our people are still going over the surveillance tapes. Brooks is the only vic to show up on the courthouse tapes, but we’ve only gone back sixty days so far. Brooks was in the courthouse almost every day. Unfortunately, there’s no surveillance on the elevators themselves, but all the elevator lobbies are crawling with cameras. We’re running checks on any nonemployee who appears more than twice. It’s going to take time to look at it all.”

The door opened. “Well, that was totally weird,” Neil said, and walked past us into the kitchen. He opened the fridge, then looked at Rauser. “I had to take Charlie home.” If he wondered what I’d told
Rauser about Charlie’s attack, his face didn’t show it. Instead, his eyes settled on Dobbs.

“Neil Donovan, this is Jacob Dobbs,” I said.

“Ah, Dobbs.” Neil clearly recognized the name. “Big man on campus, right? Nice to meet you.” He gave Dobbs a nod and turned back to the refrigerator.

“Speaking of Charlie,” Rauser said. “He’s on courthouse video a lot, must be in there several times a week. Detectives brought it to my attention.”

I went cold. Today Charlie had just reminded me that you never know about someone’s interior life. Charlie had a mean streak. I’d seen that. Charlie the courier. Charlie who was in the Fulton County Courthouse frequently.

Rauser nodded. “Gotta check everyone. No exceptions.”

Neil laughed and popped open a soda can. “Total waste of resources. Come on, Charlie can barely remember to bathe. Anyway, he’s there all the time because the courier company he works for does real estate deed searches and a lot of simple filings for attorneys. I know this because I actually bother to talk to him about his life.” He looked at Rauser. “Keye tell you she put some Bruce Lee on his ass today? I had to pull over and let him throw up on the way home. It was brutal. I’m just sayin’.”

“Who’s Charlie?” Dobbs asked.

“A friend,” I said.

“What happened?” Rauser was frowning, picking up vibes the way he always does.

“He got a little out of line, that’s all,” I told him.

“Out of line how?”

I rolled my eyes. “Settle down there, cowboy. I handled it.”

“You know he lives down off DeKalb Avenue in some pretty nice condos?” Neil asked. “I thought the guy was in public housing or something.”

“Because you know so much about his life?” Rauser asked.

Neil was rummaging around for food. “You guys decided to eat some brownies after all?” He grinned. “Dang, there’s only a couple left.”

We all looked at Dobbs. He had fallen asleep, just drifted off with his hands behind his head, mouth open.

Rauser looked at me as if my head had just done a three-sixty and I’d
spit up pea soup. “Tell me you did not give him the stoner brownies! I hope you realize that raises about a trillion ethical issues for me.”

“Oh, please,” I said. “You were on your feet two minutes ago ready to smack him. That didn’t bring up any issues?”

“That was just good clean fun,” Rauser retorted.

I studied Dobbs. “He’s such an angel when he’s snoring and drooling, isn’t he?”

“He wakes up stoned and figures out you gave him spiked brownies, he’s gonna be a real pain in the ass.” Rauser was still indignant.

“Or not,” I said. “He could wake up bright and sunny and eager to help.”

“Uh-huh, and maybe Madonna will come in here and shake her ass for us too.”

I considered that. “The Madonna or just Madonna?”

Rauser shrugged. “Which one would you want?”

“To come in here and shake her ass?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Definitely not
the
Madonna.”

We gathered keys and things to leave, both of us heading in separate directions. “Hey,” Neil called. “What am I supposed to do with Sleeping Beauty?”

“Give him some strong coffee and call him a cab when he wakes up,” I said. “Oh, and Neil—don’t mention the brownies, okay?”

H
ow I came to own two thousand square feet on the tenth floor of Atlanta’s Georgian Terrace Hotel is a testament to, well, blind luck. I had done a job for the property owner that required some diplomacy and discretion during a divorce. He had a mistress, a wife, a child, a boyfriend, and lots of property. Fortunately for him, I discovered the wife also had a mistress
and
a boyfriend. He paid me to negotiate her down privately without the attorneys squabbling over his massive assets. Miraculously, I pulled it off without a hitch. In the course of doing business with him, I discovered his intent to return the private space he kept for himself in the hotel back into hotel suites. The building had been converted to luxury apartments in the eighties, and when my client bought the property, he turned all but one apartment into hotel space. I had fallen in love on my first visit with the white-bricked walls, the hand-carved crown molding, the marble bathrooms, the twelve-foot ceilings, the glistening wood floors, the rows of Palladian windows with their view of Peachtree Street. I offered to waive my fee, all future fees, and promised to surrender to him my firstborn just to have the chance to make a bid. I had some cash at the time. An insurance company had just paid me a percentage of what I’d recovered on an art fraud case. Still, swinging a down payment on a place like this took every penny I had, every penny I could get out of my parents, and nearly everything I owned that could be converted to cash. I mortgaged myself up to my ears and spent the next
three years in chaos, knocking down walls, living with carpenters and sawdust and tools. The experience had permanently marked White Trash, but it also turned the apartment into the rambling loft I now call home. It hasn’t been decorated. That’ll happen when I am flush again, maybe in fifty years or so. In the meantime, a bed, a dresser, an enormous couch, a Moroccan-tiled table that I found irresistibly attractive in Piedmont Park during the Dogwood Festival, a television, a CD player, a computer, three rugs, one scraggly white cat, and me. It’s enough for now.

I am the only permanent resident to inhabit the hotel, and I know most of the people employed here by name. I eat dinner downstairs at Livingston Restaurant quite often and sit on the restaurant’s terrace on Peachtree whenever possible, breakfast and dinner a few times a week. I have none of the privileges of a guest, however. Not during the day anyway. The hotel manager seems to resent my presence here. He makes sure the weight room, the media room, and the pool are off-limits to me. The months of workmen stomping in and out of the Georgian’s pristine lobby might have something to do with the manager’s hostility. But the second- and third-shift managers let me have the run of the place. Rauser and I have a midnight dip in the pool now and then, and sit on the roof hugging our knees and talking with a view of the downtown skyline that takes your breath away at night when the city is lit up. The Georgian provides a soft landing on those days when I’ve been attacked from several directions and retaliated by slamming a knee into a mentally challenged man’s forehead and feeding stoner brownies to the public face of APD’s Wishbone task force. Good Lord, what was I thinking? Charlie had earned a smackdown, but the brownies … well, that was a shameful lapse in judgment and in ethics. And I’d been so judgmental and righteous about Dobbs.

It must be the pressure, I thought. Only three days ago I’d received the Wishbone email and wrecked my Impala. Yesterday two dozen very expensive white roses had sent a distinctly chilling message.
I’m the reason your tire came off. I’m the reason your dirty laundry landed in the hands of a reporter. And I know where you are right now
. It was a lot to take in. And then handing my notes over to Dobbs, the victim sketches I’d worked hard on, hearing his disdain for my preliminary profile. What a dick! Suddenly I wasn’t feeling so bad about the brownies.

Oh, for an Absolut martini, dirty. Or a Dewar’s and soda with a twist.
Either would do the job after a long day. Just one. What’s the big deal? Is it true what they tell you about never being able to handle just one? Not ever? I didn’t want to believe it. At least at that moment I chose to not believe it, to believe that I could have this again in my life and control it. My deceptive addict’s brain was searching for loopholes. I decided to call Diane, who had been an unwavering support for me while I was getting sober. Diane was a devotee of Al-Anon. She had liked the meetings. Too much. She began twelve-stepping her way right through Debtors Anonymous, Shopaholics Anonymous, and Sex Addicts Anonymous. I actually began to seriously worry about her the day she asked if I could go to a CoDA (Co-Dependents Anonymous) meeting with her because she hated going alone.

I reached for the phone to call her.

I told her about the cravings and that the desire to drink again had intensified. I told her I really wanted to go downstairs and sit at the bar, that I wanted to laugh and feel free again. She reminded me gently but in vivid detail what that kind of freedom had to offer, about how I had been chained to a bottle. Then, in case I had missed the point, she went on to cover some of my more disgraceful behaviors—scenes that included toilets and bathroom floors and hanging out car windows and crying and passing out and making scenes. She finished up with the Serenity Prayer. Suddenly a drink didn’t seem like that great an idea. I thanked her and we made a lunch date for next week. I’d forgotten again to ask her about the new person in her life. I was a crappy friend, I decided. It was always all about me.

My phone rang and Neil didn’t even wait to say hello. Instead, he began with “I was thinking about something. Charlie came in one day, said his computer wasn’t working and he likes to email his folks, so he wanted to use ours. Doesn’t take skill to email, right? So I didn’t think anything about it. You know he can type? Uses all his fingers. I guess the brain is pretty specialized. Anyway, when he was finished, I figured I’d check out what he did on the Internet, you know? Just for fun look at what a guy like Charlie does. But it took some time. You know why? Because Internet history, browsing history, cookies—all of it was cleaned out.”