The Stranger You Seek (42 page)

The bar was high-glossed cherry and reflected the glittering wall of liquor bottles and glasses behind the bartender. I parked myself in one of the cushion-backed stools and scanned the restaurant until I spotted her.
Wishbone
. Our eyes met and she smiled, gave a little finger wave.

The bartender came for my order. I could smell the Dewar’s he’d just filled with soda from the tap in front of me. I ordered a drink and saw Larry Quinn walk in the door. He was alone. He always looked dressed for court. He glanced around and broke out his famous smile when he saw me.

“Keye! I been meaning to call you. Big Jim was so pleased everything turned out. I told him up front we didn’t usually do missing cows.”

I glanced at Margaret. She was nursing a martini. “Are you meeting someone, Larry?”

“Date. Wish me luck.” He shook my hand. “It was nice to see you, Keye. Hey, there she is now.”

To my horror, he walked straight to Margaret’s table. They embraced. I couldn’t let Larry have a date with Margaret Haze! I knew far too well how her dates turned out. And Larry was famous for his television advertising and personal injury suits—too close a connection to Margaret’s headline-greedy attorney father. I thought she had been trying to finally extinguish her father’s memory when she’d murdered Brooks. I didn’t want her working out her issues on Quinn too.

I whipped out my phone and found Larry’s number. I heard it ringing from my end but not in the restaurant. Was he carrying his phone or was it simply silenced? Then he pulled it from a pocket, glanced at the display, and put it down.
Damn
. I didn’t want to make a scene in the restaurant, but I would if I had to. Quinn wasn’t leaving with her. I quickly typed out a text message.
Do not leave with that woman. Murder investigation. Danger
.

A few seconds later, Quinn picked up his phone. If he’d read my message, it didn’t show. He returned the phone to the table next to his plate.
A waiter appeared and they ordered. Quinn had one drink before he got up. He didn’t look at me on his way out but my phone vibrated almost as soon as he’d stepped onto the street.

“What the hell, Keye? You know how long it’s been since I had a date?”

I watched Margaret gathering her things to leave. “You’ll thank me one day, Larry.”

He cursed. I snapped my phone shut.

Haze stopped by the bar and touched my arm, squeezed it affectionately as if we were old friends. “Might as well go home, Keye,” she whispered. “Looks like I’ll be working late. Seems my date had an emergency.” She glanced at the glass in front of me. Her green eyes lit up. “Don’t go back there, Keye. Drunks are no challenge.”

I lifted the fluted whiskey glass to my lips. It was heavy and felt right in my palm. More right than anything had in a while. I left it on the bar. The ice was beginning to melt into the remains of my Diet Pepsi.

I
n the evening, the elevators at 303 Peachtree, SunTrust Plaza, require a key card. The elevators and elevator lobbies on all floors are equipped with security cameras. Getting to the elevators requires signing in or out at the guard station on the main lobby level. Margaret was accustomed to this routine, as were most of the occupants—investment bankers and attorneys whose jobs necessitate long hours. She knew most of the guards by name, was always careful to be pleasant, to take a moment to speak, to remember them on holidays.

Behind the desk at the guard station, a row of monitors displayed shots of the elevator lobbies from all fifty-three floors. Usually, one guard watched the monitors while another handled the sign-in sheets and traffic. Margaret had studied their routines carefully, had asked about the building’s security systems and how they worked, where the cameras were located. All in the interest of safety, of course, since she was a woman who, on many occasions, worked long after others had gone home to their families. She had quietly picked the guards’ brains over the last couple of years, and they had taken her concerns seriously, happily answering questions to make her feel more comfortable. Margaret
Haze was, after all, one of the most famous criminal attorneys in the city and also one of the best tippers. Each and every security guard and cleaning person had received an envelope from her last Christmas.

Margaret had taken a break, enjoyed a drink, then greeted the guards downstairs with small talk upon her return. She wanted them to remember her tonight. She carefully signed back in at 8:52 before taking the elevators to her fifty-third-floor office.

It was a weekday evening and the fifty-third floor was empty. The lower floors, occupied by the hundreds of young lawyers and legal assistants, would still be humming, but tonight she had fifty-three all to herself.

In about an hour, she knew, the cleaning crew would begin to arrive, having entered through the loading docks and parked in the basement. One person would sign in for the entire crew, then they’d all come into the building via the freight elevators, which were located away from the main elevator lobbies in a hallway on each floor. Their routines, uniforms, and the tools they used had all been of great interest to her.

The freight elevators’ location on the main floors had made it easy to slip out of her office wearing the blue scrubs of the crew, flat shoes, head down, no makeup, hair pulled into a bun and hidden under a bandanna. Many of the cleaning women wore them that way to keep their hair out of their faces while they worked. She could come and go using the loading docks while still signed in at the guard station in the main lobby. Later, when she was finished with her work on the outside, with the thing that drew her, called her out into the city, she could return. She could change back into her corporate clothes and leave through the main lobby. She’d done it many times.

Two nights ago she had walked right past Detective Velazquez and he hadn’t even looked twice. Just another cleaning person. Nobody special.
Idiot
.

M
y phone rang and I saw Balaki’s number on the screen. I thought about Rauser. I missed his calls. I’d never told him that I chose Aerosmith’s “Dude” for him or that it made me laugh every time he called.

“Keye, go home and get some rest. Me and Williams got this. And Bevins is at the hospital with the lieutenant, so everything’s handled.”

I looked at the dashboard clock. Ten-thirty-six. “Andy, I don’t how to tell you guys how much I appreciate what you’re doing—”

“Listen here, girl,” Andy Balaki interrupted in his South Georgia drawl. “He’s our family too.”

I didn’t argue with him. I wanted to go home, needed to rest. I hadn’t been there since early that morning, just a quick visit to feed the cat, scoop the box, change clothes, and shower. Diane had made a midday visit to White Trash to help relieve my guilt.

Traffic was at a trickle. Lamp-post wreaths lit up Midtown and reminded me again that Christmas was coming. I flipped on the gas in the brick fireplace in my bedroom, turned out the lights, and curled up with White Trash and
Dexter
on Showtime. It took me no time at all to fall asleep. This was normal. The problem usually came in
staying
asleep.

It was White Trash who first alerted me. With a strange low growl deep in her throat, she scurried over my head and leapt off the bed, nudging me awake.

Then a darting prism of reflection. The streetlights filtering through my cracked curtains had caught something, and when I realized what it was, when I understood that the light had reflected off a knife blade, when it hit me that Margaret Haze must be standing over me, she struck me hard, with something heavy. My whole world went abruptly cobalt blue. Pain tentacled out of every nerve.
Hurt. I hurt
. I fought to keep from losing consciousness.

She slid gracefully onto my bed, straddled me between her knees, leaning so near my face that I smelled her coffee breath. What was she doing? I struggled to get my vision, my senses back. What the hell had she hit me with? She was on top of me, bending over me. My body hurt. It was the lamp. She’d hit me with my bedside lamp.

Then raking pain—a cold, thin wire digging into my wrist. I needed to get my bearings, needed to get free.
Wire
, my fuzzy brain kept warning me. Wire, struggling, ligature abrasions, the victims, Rauser telling me they all had the abrasions. I was going to die. This silent killer was wrapping wire around my wrist and fastening me to the slats under my bed.

Too late, I started twisting and bucking, desperate to get her off my body, desperate to find some strength. I hit at her with my one free hand.

Margaret pressed down on me. She was watching me as the reality fought its way past the blow she’d delivered, watching as each thought, each realization, each new terror crossed my face. She knelt over me, studying me as if I were a laboratory experiment. Nothing I could say now would touch her, would alter her plan in any way. I wasn’t human to her anymore. Not real. Just a thing to be toyed with.

Then she leaned over me and reached for the wrist she had already wired to my bed, and in one precise stroke, she sliced it with her knife. Jagged pain like a saw splitting my skin cut a headlong path to my nerve endings. Blood poured from my wrist and spattered off my fingertips.

“Can you feel her power now, Keye? And mine?”

I was beginning to shiver. My lips were tingling. I knew what it meant. I was losing calcium and blood too quickly. How quickly, I couldn’t be sure. It’s impossible to keep that kind of time.

She hit me hard again, and the room spun. I thought I was going to vomit in terror. “You never took me seriously,” she said, and I saw her pick up a spool of wire and with great efficiency slice off a section with her knife.

“You?”
I gasped.

I had changed my locks to protect myself, then given her a key.
Jesus
.

She leaned forward to pull my arm up and get her wire around that wrist too, and I struck her with every bit of force I had left inside me. She tumbled off me and hit the bedroom floor.

“Diane, why?” My voice was a mutilated whisper. “Why would you do this?” Blood and saliva gushed out of my mouth.

She was on her feet, screaming at me.
“Because you fucking won’t stop, will you? Not until you ruin everything!”

She launched herself at me.

I squeezed the trigger.

In the darkened room, it looked like black oil exploding out of her neck. Blood and tissue sprayed my face and filled my mouth and nostrils. It was rusty and warm. She made a sound like a straw at the bottom of an empty cup, and dropped.

The last thing I remember is my gun, the one I’d pulled from beneath my pillow, hitting the floor.

I
t was the second time I had spent my days with the excellent nursing staff at Piedmont Hospital, courtesy of Margaret Haze. Yes, I blamed her for this and for what had happened to Diane. I knew Haze had manipulated and changed my sweet friend. I felt in my heart that Diane had been a victim too, though I would never have the facts. I’d killed my childhood friend. This wasn’t fully sinking in.
It’s no accident you’re alive
, Margaret had told me that day in her office. Indeed. I’d fought to live. And why? There were moments now that the emptiness just seemed to sweep me downstream. Diane was dead. Charlie was gone. Rauser was in some terrible purgatory.

I don’t remember that second emergency trip to the hospital, nor do I remember much about my first days here. I’d lost a lot of blood, they tell me. I slept. The great escape.

The scar on my right wrist would be with me forever. There would be no escaping the constant reminder that a killer had come to me in the night with a serrated knife blade and in one merciless, furious movement sliced me open.

Do you feel her power?
Yes, I feel it still. But I didn’t think Margaret had ever wanted me dead. She told me in her office that day that she had protected me. She warned me too when I mentioned Diane, but I didn’t get it.
You never really know anyone below the surface, Keye. I would
have thought you of all people had learned that lesson
. I’ve learned it now, Margaret, and learned it well.