The Stranger You Seek (31 page)

“What you wont?” She slurred a little—a backwoods Ozzy Osbourne. She had startled me, but I tried hard not to show it.

“I only see about twenty cats,” I said, and smiled. “I heard you had at least a hundred and fifty.”

A stained backwater grin glimmered faintly through the screen. “You comin’ for a readin’ or you wanna stand out there countin’ cats?”

“Oh, so you’re a psychic?”

The screen door was pushed open. Emma, I noticed at once, looked something like the bad witch after she’d started to melt. She was perhaps five feet tall, but you got the feeling she hadn’t started out that small. She gave me the once-over, pale eyes sharp and narrow and opportunistic, sized me up for what I was worth, from my shoes to my earrings and the watch on my wrist. She was curious about how much she could get out of me. I knew the look. I’d seen it in the city on people who
live by their wits on the street. She sighed, disappointed, and stepped back inside. The screen slammed behind her.

I stood there on the other side for a few moments, unsure of what to do, then raised my voice a little. “Excuse me?”

“Come on,” she said. It sounded like
Cah-moan
.

I found her sitting at a round table covered by a heavy red tablecloth with gold piping and tassels. She had a deck of tarot cards in front of her. The inside of the house was as crowded as the yard and not as clean. Emma was obviously a trash picker from way back.

“Mix these up for me.”

I took the cards and shuffled them a little. “Actually, I just came to ask you some questions about Anne Chambers.”

“You don’t want no readin’, I won’t give you one. Fifteen dollars either way.”

“Her mother said Anne used to come here.”

Emma was silent.

“The girl who used to live down the beach,” I pressed on.

“I know who,” she grouched.

I set the cards across the table in front of her and withdrew my arm before she took a bite of it. I wasn’t sure Emma had had her breakfast either.

“Did Anne keep in touch with you after she left for college?”

No answer.

“Do you know if she was seeing anyone?”

She put the cards out and studied them for a long while. Somewhere in the back of my head the music to
Jeopardy!
began to play.

“I saw it. I saw it coming,” Old Emma said finally. “I warned her when she came for a visit that she was in danger. She didn’t believe me, said she was happy. Said they was in love.” She said it with a pinched smile, clasped her gnarled hands in front of her heart, and twisted her upper body back and forth as if she were hugging something mockingly. She drew it out too, the word
love
, so it sounded like
la-ooove
.

“So you’re saying it was serious?”

“I suppose you could call getting kilt pretty serious, don’t you?” She laughed. It was a wet, crackly laugh, and I was pretty sure she was now openly making fun of me. Her face split into a mass of deep sun wrinkles.

“Her mother didn’t mention it,” I said.

“Nuh-uh. She wouldn’t.”

I waited, but it didn’t appear more was forthcoming, so I stood and dug around in the pocket of my jeans until I found a twenty. “Do you know the name of the person Anne was seeing? She show you a picture of him or anything?”

“Nuh-uh,” Emma said. “But you been real close lately too.” Her voice was gravel.

“Close to what?”

Her eyes narrowed again. “Same one got Anne.”

A gypsy’s cackle tumbled out of her and turned into a cough so deep and damp it startled me. I dropped the twenty on the table and headed for the door. It was half off its hinges like everything else I’d seen of Emma’s world. I looked back at the filthy ashtray, the tarot cards on the table in front of her, the long curtain she used as a backdrop, the cheap claret rug. She was looking right at me when my eyes reached her sun-worn face.

“You eat pussy too?” she asked, and the dry lips split into a stained smile.

Eeewww! Okay, Emma’s crazy. I slipped through the screen door, went back outside where there was air and yard art and junk and cats. I was trembling, I realized, and annoyed that I’d let the half-packed old duffel bag get to me.

Emma pushed the door open behind me, flicked a cigarette into the sand, where it lay smoldering. Smoke, heavy in the wet air, burned my sinuses. She held up a card. It was the Hanged Man reversed.

“Your Mr. Fancy Pants, he don’t love you. He can’t love nobody but himself. But the po-lice man do. He love you,” she said, and having given me my twenty dollars’ worth, disappeared behind the screen.

C
oming home with little more than you left with is never a good feeling for an investigator. Two days and what did I know? Anne Chambers was shy and reserved, according to her former roommates. Didn’t make friends easily, according to her mother. In a relationship, according to a crazy old card reader. Studied hard, according to her records. Had some talent as an artist. Nothing there to help develop a clearer picture of her habits and routines, hangouts, lovers. No one seemed to have known the girl. No visible links to the other victims and no evidence yet that she’d ever crossed paths with Charlie Ramsey. But it was there somewhere. I knew it was. The first murder was always a road map to the others. This had all started with Anne. We’d find out why.

I thought about the hack job that had been done on Dobbs in a rental car in Midtown Atlanta. Sexually mutilated. What did it mean? To our knowledge, Wishbone had not performed his terrible sexual surgery on a victim since Anne Chambers. And why would he use a vehicle on a residential street? Extremely high-risk. He’d left fiber evidence for the first time. No bite marks. Part of Wishbone’s delight in killing was taking time with them.
How does it feel?
So why dispatch Dobbs so efficiently? The shock value, perhaps. High-profile murder. Add sexual mutilation and the media goes nuts. Was it that simple? Had I so deeply misunderstood
the needs of this violent predator? At times it felt as if there were two Wishbones.

I wanted to beat my head against something. A bottle of vodka would have been nice.

I pulled the Neon into a service station in Brunswick. My directions told me to take US 82 or Seventh Street East or Georgia 520 West or Corridor Z, which was also South Georgia Parkway.
Huh?

I needed a way to Atlanta without I-75, which would put me in Macon for the afternoon rush. No thanks. Macon’s highways hadn’t caught up with Macon’s population.

“Afternoon, ma’am.” The patch over his shirt pocket told me his name was Grady. The grease on his hands told me he was the mechanic, a meat-and-potatoes man with his sleeves rolled up and wavy brick-colored hair. He looked like a lot of the guys I’d known in high school.

He smiled, rested his forearms on my door, leaned in through my open window. I liked his eyes, soft and dark coffee brown with little gold flecks. “Like me to fill it up for you?”

Would I ever.

“Check under the hood? Never seen you around here. Just passing through?”

“You taking a survey?” I asked.

“Yes, ma’am. In fact I am.” His tone was swampy and rich, the accent Coastal Georgia. “However, in order to complete said survey, I’ll need your address and phone number and a few hours of your time this evening.”

I leaned closer to him and smiled. “Grady, honey, I’m at least ten years older than you are.”

His teeth were straight and very white, but the smile veered off to the left a little, imperfect and utterly adorable. “Well, that may or may not be true, ma’am, but I assure you I’m plenty grown up.” He pulled away from the car. “I’ll give you a minute to think it over.”

He made sure I got a good look at his butt in tight, grease-stained jeans on his way to lift the hood. I didn’t really need the oil checked, but it was an opportunity to further objectify Grady and, well, how often does that happen?

I stepped out of the car and showed Grady the driving directions I’d
used. He got a kick out of this and told me he could keep me out of Macon and save me forty miles.

“Hey, I haven’t eaten any lunch. How ’bout you join me?” We were leaning against my car. “I mean, since you did end up here and all. Who knows? Maybe the universe is sending you a message.” His leg touched mine a couple of times and I felt it all the way south back to Florida. “I can’t leave until closing time, but I got MoonPies and RC Cola right here.”

RC and MoonPies? It had been years. Two disks made of graham cracker crumbs pressed together like cake with marshmallow wedged in between like a sandwich, and a thin shell of icing. God! I’m only human. And I needed a distraction. “Vanilla or chocolate?”

Grady grinned. He knew he had me. “Both.”

There was a picnic table on the side of the station in a little patch of grass. Some shrubs had been planted next to a trellis so loaded with flowering jasmine you could barely see it. We unwrapped cellophane-covered MoonPies and bit into them, chased it with ice-cold bottles of RC Cola that Grady had pulled out of an old red Coca-Cola cooler, the kind that stands about waist high and is packed with ice. He popped open the tops with the opener on the front, and in the heat of that day, I don’t think anything has ever tasted as cold or as sweet. It was hands down the most fun I’d had in a while. Grady told me he’d lived here all his life and only traveled as far as the Lowcountry in South Carolina, and I was beginning to see how this might happen. He loved his mama’s fried chicken, had two sisters who beat the hell out of him growing up, talked about walking home from church knowing there would be homemade banana cream pie, a staple to this day, he said, at his parents’ table on Sunday. He liked to dance, and if I’d stay, he promised to show me how much. He liked to kiss too, he told me, and wanted to know how I liked it. His gold-flecked brown eyes were steady on me. I liked his mouth too. And then he did it. He leaned over the table and pressed his lips to mine just as my cell phone played Rauser’s ringtone.

Rats!

“Goddamn Buckhead waiter that served Brooks that night never showed,” Rauser said.

I looked at Grady and he looked back, a long, knowing look. He might be a small-town boy, but he was clearly aware of his own charm. And in
the most unpretentious way. His hair in the midday sun was like fire. He folded his arms over his chest and I saw his shirtsleeves tighten against his biceps. Good
Lord
!

“Guy’s illegal. Took off,” Rauser said. “I think his employer knows where he is. I let him know we’re not interested in the guy’s green card or what the restaurant reports. I’m looking for a goddamn murderer here, for Christ’s sake. Thinking about a public plea in case someone else saw Brooks out that night. What if he was out with some woman and the killer got to him later, after she left the hotel? Then she’s still out there, the last person to see him alive, and she might know something. But there’s family involved here, you know? I mean, his wife and kids, they’re suffering already. I don’t want to humiliate them. It’s just gotta be a last resort. Hello? Street? Are you there?”

I glanced at Grady. His grin widened. “I’m listening.”

“News channels are trying to help by running pictures of the rental car Dobbs was killed in, plate number, pictures of Dobbs. We’re just hoping someone will step up and say they saw him somewhere. Doesn’t anybody look up from their fucking BlackBerrys anymore? Where are you? I got stuff to tell you.”

“I’m on the way back. I wish I had more for you.” I looked at Grady. “Rauser, let me call you back.”

“Somehow I’m getting the feeling I won’t be able to complete that survey tonight,” Grady said. “Shame too. You could have had all this.” He gestured like Vanna White to the service station and the parking lot, that big smile never fading.

“Rain check?” I asked. “Reality just called.”

Grady walked me back to the car, opened the door for me, and gave me a formal bow. “Real nice meetin’ you, ma’am,” he said, and waved as I drove away.

I punched in Rauser’s number. “You okay?”

“Uh-huh, sure,” Rauser answered. “Four homicides linked to Wishbone in this city. I’m doing just fine. And it’s not like the other shit stops just ’cause we got a serial, you know? Had a guy walk into an equipment company this morning and shoot three people. We been showing Charlie’s picture around and guess what? He looks familiar to everyone. Bastard rides around the city all day every day. He’s so visible we can’t make an ID stick, but I can connect Charlie to three of the victims
now—Dobbs, Brooks, and Richardson—so we’re slowly building our case.”

“Wow, that’s huge, Rauser.”

“When will you be back? Can we just sit down and talk through some of this stuff?” I opened my mouth to answer, but Rauser said, “Oh shit. Hang on, okay?”

I turned on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and followed Grady’s directions toward the four-lane. I thought about Grady’s lips.

“Keye, I got something to tell you.” Rauser sounded calm now. Bad sign. He could get real still when things turned nasty. “There was a bomb scare two hours ago at the Georgian. Plain package came in. No return address. No postage, nothing. Looked suspicious. Bomb squad took the call, got the package out of the hotel, secured it, and it didn’t detonate. It wasn’t a bomb. But it was addressed to you, Keye. And, well, there was a severed penis inside.”

I had to pull over.

I
arrived at my office the next morning and spent several hours putting together a file for Guzman, Smith, Aldridge & Haze, something Margaret Haze had asked me to prepare for her. Neil had helped gather the intelligence. He was a natural snoop.

Diane was sitting at her enormous kidney-shaped desk in the reception area outside Haze’s office. Her short blonde hair was perfectly highlighted and a little spiky, as always, and her makeup was impeccable. Diane was one of those people who could be experiencing a private storm in her life without anyone ever knowing it.

I, on the other hand, am not as good at disguising my problems.

“Okay, you’re tired and something’s wrong,” she said the moment she saw me.

I told her about the package that arrived at the Georgian and its terrible contents. I told her about Mirror Chang’s heartbreaking telephone call to me. I told her about Charlie attacking me in my office, and then it all spilled out of me. How I’d trusted and even cared for him, how violent he’d been, the strange and deceptive life he led, his past, the clippings I’d found. The police interrogation. How Rauser had apparently linked him to three victims now. How I felt I’d failed by not sensing, not seeing something sick and devious about Charlie. Diane disagreed. She knew Charlie too and she could hardly believe it.