Stranger in the Room

by Amanda Kyle Williams

  “ME doesn’t give a shit about your scene,” Rauser groused. “ME cares about the body. Get what you need off it and let ’em get in and out.” Rauser was a can-do guy. And that’s what he wanted from the people he worked with. A lot of can-dos. I’d seen him lose patience with Lang before. Ken always seemed to go into everything with a lot of reasons up front about how hard it was going to be.

  We backed away and made room for the crime scene investigators to do their job. “You notice there’s no ligature marks around the neck. None on his wrists,” Rauser said.

  And no spatter, I thought. No reason to call in Jo Phillips, the bloodstain pattern analyst that Rauser used to sleep with—almost six feet of perfect nuts-and-berries complexion.

  “Hey, Balaki,” Rauser said. “We got Keye’s cousin, who is also the home owner, and Keye’s mother outside with an officer. We need to interview them both. How about getting them escorted to the station. Make sure they’re treated real nice. And find the responding officers for a break-in reported here night before last.” Rauser chewed his cheek. “So he hangs a dead body from a door frame inside Miki’s house. He clearly positioned the old guy’s head. And he might have also turned the air down to freezing so his stiff stayed good and stiff. What do you make of it?”

  “He spent a lot of time thinking about how to up the creepy factor. And to send the message that he has full access to her life and to her home. That kind of power play isn’t unusual with stalkers. Killing to prove it, that is,” I said.

  “Miki have any other boyfriends besides Tilison?”

  “I have a list,” I said, and Rauser grinned down at me. Rauser’s over six feet tall. And me, well, I can hit five-four on my tiptoes. “Neil ran their backgrounds. We’ll send them over.”

  “I saw Cash Tilison at the Tabernacle when he was just starting a couple of years back,” Rauser said. “He’s good.”

  I wondered whether the singer’s celebrity might affect the interview process. I didn’t say it, of course. Cops are as human as anyone else. A little brush with fame can be a lot of fun. I imagined detectives volunteering to interview Cash. And they would interview him and everyone else in Miki’s world.

  The scene techs were working on and around the body, carefully vacuuming and bagging hair and fiber evidence off the victim’s clothes and shoes. The floor around him was vacuumed clean. We stood in the center of Miki’s living room, where the big picture window looked out onto the wraparound porch and tree-lined Elizabeth Street. I saw police cars and the CSU van outside. A few neighbors had come out on the street to watch. I thought about how frightened Miki must be right now and felt another pang of guilt.

  Ken Lang photographed the body from several angles. He then slipped bags over the victim’s hands and rubber-banded them on. He placed a sterile crime scene blanket on the floor.

  One of the techs got up on a stool. “Toggle anchors and eye hooks,” she said, and tapped on the wall. “In a stud.” Her accent was southern. But not Georgia southern. Something twangier. Arkansas, maybe. She sliced carefully through twine that was positioned under the victim’s chin and ran up behind his head. His head bobbled a little but didn’t completely droop. I saw the deep ligature the twine had made in his skin. “Almost no discoloration,” she said. “This guy wasn’t breathing when he was hung up here.” She placed the twine in an evidence bag and handed it down. “Okay, y’all. Timber.” She sliced through the rope that held the body. The CSU team maneuvered the body onto the blanket.

  Detective Linda Bevins came in. She had worked the strangled-boy scene. I remembered seeing her holding back the grieving mother on television. “We have an ID on the victim.” Her blondish hair was pulled back. She was in jeans and an APD T-shirt, looked fit. “Name’s Donald Kelly. Yesterday was his birthday. He was ninety.”

  “Well, that would explain this,” Ken Lang said. He’d pulled a crumpled piece of wrapping paper from the victim’s pant pocket. He bagged it.

  “Jeez,” Rauser said. “That’s depressing.”

  Ken Lang began speaking into a tiny digital recorder clipped to his collar. “Gunshot wound,” he said. He cut open the victim’s shirt and it fell to each side of the body. We were treated to a view of the old man’s chest and stomach. No muscle. Just skin and ribs and bone sprinkled with sparse silver hair. Lang took some pictures. Clipped some fabric and bagged it.

  “Nine-one-one call came in at six-fifteen last night,” Bevins said. “Mr. Kelly was being chauffeured to his birthday party on Fifteenth Street next to Colony Square. A volunteer with Dignified Elder Transport.” Bevins paused and looked at her notepad. “Driver’s name is Abraam Balasco. He picked him up at Sunrise Oaks Assisted Living. They went into the lobby of this condo building. There’s a guy reading the paper. Balasco doesn’t see his face, but he thinks he may be a waiter or something because he’s got black shoes with thick soles and black pants. He notices the cut is inexpensive. Not dressy. Says his father was a tailor so he notices things like this. He’s not sure but he thinks he was wearing a white shirt. He says the guy looks big even sitting down. They had been discussing Mr. Kelly’s reluctance to go to his birthday party. The old man told Balasco his daughter was a bitch and the family was waiting for him to die. That’s a quote. Balasco says the elevator opened and he was nailed from behind. Kelly never made it upstairs, and the volunteer’s Honda Element is still missing.”

  “See if we can get a copy of the will, and check out the family. Honda’s probably the primary crime scene,” Rauser said.

  “I’d agree with that,” Ken Lang said. “Angle looks right for a bullet coming from the driver’s side. And we don’t have blood here consistent with a gunshot wound. Distance looks about right too.”

  “Mr. Balasco is on his way to the station,” Bevins said.

  “Yeah, it would be nice if my detectives would jump on interviewing the only goddamn witness.” The level of irritation in Rauser’s tone caused me to look up at him. It was nothing new for his detectives. Respected as he was for his investigative skills, Rauser was equally known for a tendency toward aggravation.

  “He was interviewed at the hospital, where he’s been under observation for a concussion, but that’s when it was a missing persons,” Bevins answered patiently.

  “This guy Balasco, he the one that reported old man Kelly missing?” Rauser wanted to know.

  “Family members,” Angotti answered. “Nine-one-one call. When Mr. Kelly didn’t come up on the elevator, some of them went downstairs and found the volunteer, Mr. Balasco, had been injured. Kelly was gone.”

  “Balasco unconscious when the family found him?” Rauser asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Rauser scratched the back of his head, a quick, irritated movement. “And then Kelly ends up here. Hanging. In Miki Ashton’s house.”

  The male technician opened up his aluminum case. A CrimeScope that looked like a black box nested in gray foam along with a row of colored filters and forensic goggles. In the back of the case, Scene-Scopes, pocket-size, like small flashlights, each made to project a certain light on the spectrum. Investigators used them according to their needs—body fluids, latent prints, fibers, drugs.

  “Somebody wanna give me some mood lighting?” Lang asked.

  Rauser went to the switch at the front door. Bevins headed for the kitchen light. I took the lamp and pulled tall vertical blinds across the wide window. The room went dark. Blue spotlights from a high-intensity UV moved evenly inch by inch over the door frame, the floor. We stood there in the dark, watching as smudges appeared under the black light. Lang’s techs scraped samples and tweezed them into vials.

  “Angotti, start talking to the neighbors,” Rauser said. “Probably looking at a guy who’s been hanging around. Run with Balasco’s description until we get something better. Maybe somebody remembers him. And Bevins, get Kelly’s daughter and the rest of the family down to the station in the morning. We’ll see how bitchy she is. Family and profit. Sounds like a good place t
o start.”

  “A family member wouldn’t hang him up like that,” I said. “And how would that connect back to Miki?”

  “It’s not hard to hire somebody that’s happy to hang up a family member,” Rauser said. “Maybe he happens to have a thing for your cousin.”

  He was grasping at straws. But theory generation was just part of getting to something that made sense in the face of unreasonable violence. I didn’t say anything. I felt his hand on my shoulder. “Need you to come to the station too, Street. We get everybody’s statement all laid out, this’ll be a lot easier.”

  Lang ran light over the body. Small spots and large smudges lit up on the victim’s face and clothing. “Whadda we got?” Rauser asked. “Some kind of body fluid?”

  “Pretty good bet we know what the big one is down there. Guy pissed himself. Most guys do,” Lang said. I thought about the strangled boy, the unidentified fluid on his back and shoulders. And Lang’s words. Most guys do. A reminder of what a messy business murder is. And about all the ways the body betrays both killer and victim.

  “What about the small spots?” Rauser wanted to know.

  Lang shrugged. “Semen, salvia, urine, vaginal fluids, they can all fluoresce just like blood. Lot of variables, though. Humidity, temperature, equipment. May fluoresce one time and not another. No such thing as scientific certainty, Lieutenant. But generally if it comes from the body, it’s gonna give us a light show. Under the right conditions, anyway.”

  “Any other fluids that might fluoresce like that?” Rauser asked.

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “Fuck if I know,” Rauser said. “What’s left?”

  12

  Almost midnight on a Saturday and Midtown was humming when I pulled out of the parking garage at 675 Ponce de Leon Avenue at City Hall East—two million square feet of pollutant-faded brick and coughing ventilation. Atlanta’s police department used the building, along with some other city services and businesses. The inefficient giant had been sold to developers a few months back. Word was the tenants who hadn’t already moved out had been told to pack their desks. It was a good bet Midtown would drop dead from exposure to lead paint and asbestos when they renovated the obsolete hulk. The department had long petitioned for improvements. No one liked the building. But at least it was a devil they knew. Rauser resisted this kind of upheaval. Change is change. Even when it’s good it’s inconvenient. Adding to his anxiety, the Homicide Unit still hadn’t been told where they would set up shop next.

  In my rearview mirror, I saw my father in the driver’s seat of his Ford Taurus. Miki was in front with him. Mother was in the backseat. It had been a long night for everyone. Dad had showed up at the station, big-eyed and drawn with worry, after Mother had called him crying. He was determined to take Miki home with them after the interviews. I thought it was a terrible idea. No one had a handle on what was going on. We didn’t know who this person stalking my cousin was. All we knew was that he had probably carried out the murder and ritually displayed a body in her house. I’d argued with my father that my hotel has surveillance cameras, security, ten floors to get to my loft. But even as the words were coming out of my mouth, I was thinking about that terrible night last winter when I woke to a killer standing over me. It occurred to me for the first time that the scar from that night didn’t look so different from the scars up and down my cousin’s arms.

  My father balked at the idea he couldn’t defend his castle. Rauser had finally convinced me it was a good idea. The Winnona Park neighborhood where my parents lived in Decatur was close-knit and quiet. Rauser figured the neighbors would notice someone out of place on the street, unlike the in-town neighborhoods or the hotel, which was full of new faces. Decatur Police Department had promised increased patrols. But I didn’t want them going home alone. And I hadn’t had a minute alone with Miki since we’d pushed open her front door and seen the corpse.

  I called Neil as I drove down Ponce toward Decatur. I’d practically shoved him out of the car at the Big Knob Resort & Spa after White Trash had been spotted wandering my hotel. He sounded groggy. Briefly, I explained what had happened at Miki’s house.

  “So you’re just leaving me in Hicksville? Alone?”

  “At a resort and spa. I’m a monster.”

  “I have one brick of coffee, two joints, and a Baggie with somebody’s ashes.”

  “It’s not ashes,” I said. “It’s pulverized bone fragments.”

  “By the way, it’s a holiday weekend. The lab Billy and Brenda Wade used is closed until Tuesday.”

  “Shit.” Of course it was closed. It was nearly the Fourth of July. Ponce veered right, and I drove into downtown Decatur. Wreaths with red, white, and blue ribbon decorated the lampposts lining the street to remind me. I thought again about the weekend Rauser and I had planned and the fireworks on the square, something my parents had done each year for as long as I could remember. We’d pack up folding chairs and picnic baskets and wine for the adults. Jimmy and I sat cross-legged on blankets and listened to bands play in the gazebo until the fireworks exploded off the top of the courthouse.

  “See if you can get back in touch with somebody from that lab,” I told Neil. “A bribe never hurts. Larry’s dime.”

  “I’ve got some ideas.”

  “What kind of ideas?”

  “About the ashes. Don’t worry about it. Get some rest.”

  I turned off South Columbia into Winnona Park and pulled up behind my dad’s car as he parked on the hilly driveway on Derrydown Way. We all walked to the front door. Two cats from Mother’s feral colony lounged on the porch in doughnut-shaped beds, each with one open eye on our every move. I’d been treated to this kind of suspicion from animals all my life, thanks to my mother’s attraction to wild things. But her love of nature and the desire to rescue the things it abandoned was, to her children, a glorious excursion into a heart she could not always freely share. My brother and I grew up with dew-covered grass slapping our ankles as we trailed behind our mother on early-morning treks through the rolling acreage behind the Methodist Children’s Home just a few blocks from our house. We followed her down the hill to the pond, where a pair of blue herons became so still at our arrival that we mistook them for driftwood at the water’s edge. But we always looked for them. Blue herons never fall out of love, Mother had told us. We tossed bread crumbs to the ducks and geese, and watched the fog lift up out of the reeds, then burn off the lake in the early-morning sun. Jimmy and I know the songs of mockingbirds and the sudden stillness of a meadow at the shrill warning of a red-tailed hawk. Our mother, a child of the Albemarle Sound and pulsing marshes and tundra swans and striped bass, had searched for and found the secluded marshes and private seascapes in her city life. And because we had been witness to this delicate beauty in her humanity, it was all the more confusing when her touch turned arctic and her tongue caustic.

  I glanced at a huge metal vase in the opposite corner of the porch behind the porch swing. Tall metal flowers, some rust-covered, some polished steel, rustic and beautiful, bloomed out of it. Dad followed my eyes. “I’m getting better, aren’t I?”

  “They’re gorgeous, Dad. Will you make something for my office?”

  “You bet, kiddo,” my dad said, and wrapped a long arm around my shoulders as we walked into the home where Jimmy and I had grown up and where Miki had spent most of her time as a child. My father had practically lived in the garage back then, tinkering with engines and anything else with moving parts. Howard Street’s natural talent for understanding the mechanics of a thing had put two kids through college and supported my mother’s rather expensive taste in antiques, cookware, stand mixers, food processors, and knives. And to think that all those years he’d welded and oiled and pieced back together whatever the community towed in or carried in boxes, his secret artist’s eye was mentally sizing up the shapes a gallery would later commission him to craft. I loved the idea that my parents were finding something that made them happy. And I found
it all surprisingly unsettling. It wasn’t that they had found their passion, but that they had a passion, that their interior life had been hidden and completely unseen by their children. Or at least by me. Jimmy might have been privy to the dreams of adults. Jimmy had always been more plugged in.

  Mother put a kettle on the stove. Hot tea for me. For everyone else she prepared her special toddy—hot milk, cognac, and honey, guaranteed to take the edge off. I waited at the kitchen table for my parents to leave, then looked at Miki. “You okay?”

  “Some freak is hurting people and stringing them up in my house. So no. Not so much.” Her shoulders were scrunched up like she was cold on this hot July night.

  “I want to help,” I said. “Look, I was pretty pissed about White Trash. And I was scared, Miki. I didn’t know what had happened. I couldn’t get in touch with you.”

  Miki nodded, her face pale.

  “Can we talk about what happened today with your phone?”

  “I went to the store. I had my phone in the pocket of that little boyfriend jacket. I know it was there. I used it on the way. I felt it when I walked into the grocery store. When I got back to your loft, it was just gone.”

  “You drive your Spitfire to the store?”

  “Of course,” Miki said. “Oh shit. My car. I’ll have to get it tomorrow.”

  “Don’t,” I said. “Leave it in the garage at my place. Classic cars are too easy to spot.”

  Miki sipped her toddy and shivered. “You think he’s going to try something else?”

  “It’s a reasonable assumption.” My phone pinged to let me know a text had arrived. I saw Rauser’s name with a note. He’d sent a composite operator’s rendering of the man seen by the volunteer driver. APD and many other departments had begun using computers for composites rather than old-fashioned police sketches. The software allowed the victim to sit with an operator, choose from and tweak head shapes and facial features. It also allowed for quick access to facial-recognition systems and automatic comparisons to the databases. I clicked on the attachment. It wasn’t much—a head, shoulders, hairline, no details on the face except an eyebrow and ridgeline. The driver had apparently seen only a split second of profile as he walked by. I slid my phone across the table. “Anyone familiar?”