“You’re so fucking smart, Miss Ex-FBI. You tell me.”
“I can tell you that I know how it feels to be in love with something that hurts you,” I said, and meant it. I thought about that drink I wanted and talked myself out of every day. I thought about my ex-husband, Dan, in all his impossibly sexy, toxic glory. I thought, too, about how many times I’d been warned never to let the bad guy see your soft spots. But I needed him to keep talking. “What happened with Miki? How did she hurt you?”
No answer. Just creepy, mechanized breathing.
“I want you to know something,” I told him. “Miki’s not malicious. She’s just a little clueless. She wouldn’t have tried to hurt you. She’s not like Fatu.”
“No, she’s not.” His voice boomed like a lion’s roar through the device. “She’s a different kind of whore. You’re late for the party, Dr. Street. And you’re a whore too.”
The car window exploded. The sound came a millisecond later. Pop, pop, pop, pop. I dove down in the front seat as gunfire danced across my dashboard.
I scrambled to the passenger’s door, opened it, fell out, crouched behind it. Where was he? He had to be up on the street somewhere, looking down, a clear advantage. Was he on the street? Or in one of the buildings? North Highland Avenue was wall-to-wall restaurants and pedestrians. I couldn’t even attempt to return fire.
I edged toward the front of my car. The five-foot cement wall that had once served the loading docks was at my back.
Pop, pop, pop. Bullets chewed up warm asphalt, pinged around my car.
I needed better cover. He could move. I couldn’t. I didn’t want to be pinned here. I glanced right. The metal steps were fifteen feet away. They might as well be a mile away. I’d never make it.
Pop.
My office door swung open. I jerked my head around. “Neil. No!”
Two more pops. I saw Neil spin, saw his body hit the ground. Seventeen rounds in that S&W 9mm, I was thinking. How many had the shooter used? Shit.
Neil was half inside, half outside the building. His head and shoulders were exposed. I had to get to him.
I kicked my shoes off, put a bare foot on the front fender, and used it to hike myself up on the concrete ledge, then took off, zigzagging over the concrete landing, a strange, terrifying ballet to the staccato burst of a semiautomatic.
Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.
I launched myself at the half-open doorway like I was trying to beat an outfielder’s arm to home base, grabbed Neil’s arms and pulled him inside, slammed and locked the door. My heart was pumping so fast I sounded like I was the one in the Darth Vader mask. Eight months since Rauser had been hit, since a bullet exploded into him while he was in my arms. Thirty years since my grandparents were killed. Give me the money, old man. Time was the great narcotic, I’d been told. But it had never numbed the memories.
I dialed 911, misdialing twice. My hands were shaking. There was blood at my front door. Neil’s blood. And drag marks where I’d pulled him inside. I dropped to my knees and checked his head and neck, calling his name. I found the wound on his upper thigh. He was bleeding like crazy. I grabbed his belt, tore it off, and strapped it above the wound.
A recorded message came into my ear, telling me to hold or call the emergency center back. You have got to be kidding. Atlanta’s lackadaisical response to 911 calls had been criticized so publicly that the call center’s director and several operators had been fired recently. I cursed.
“Neil.” I touched his face. “You’re going to be okay.” His eyelids lifted weakly, revealing pale, watery eyes. I hit redial. “You’re okay. Can you hear me?”
A steady male voice answered my call. “Nine-one-one, what is the nature and location of your emergency?”
I gave him the street address. “There’s been a shooting. One victim with a gunshot wound. I think the shooter was in the three-hundred block of North Highland. He shot at me in my car. We’re inside a building now.”
Blood was seeping into Neil’s pants. He was as white as an onion.
“Are you carrying a weapon?” the operator wanted to know.
“Yes. Ten-millimeter Glock model twenty, registered.”
“Have you discharged your weapon today?”
“If you mean did I discharge my weapon into my friend who’s lying here fucking bleeding, no. You dispatched the ambulance, right?”
“Help is on the way, ma’am. What type of vehicle are you driving?”
“Sixty-nine Impala, white.” I gave him my plate number.
“Do you know the person with the gun?”
“He’s a suspect in a homicide case. He just called me at this number. I had him on the phone for a couple of minutes. I’m working with Lieutenant Aaron Rauser at APD Homicide.”
“Can you see the shooter from your position?”
“No. We’re locked inside now.”
“Please stay on the line with me until the officers arrive.”
“Sorry, pal.” I disconnected. I had better things to do. I’d given him what he needed. I knew cruisers were on the way. And the ambulance. I wanted to call Rauser. I wanted them to locate the number that had dialed my phone and location-track it. I wanted them to find the freak who’d done this and put him away.
Neil’s eyes fluttered. “You’re okay,” I promised him. I hoped it was true.
“What?”
“You were shot. And you hit your head pretty hard.”
He tried to move his wounded leg. “It burns.”
“I know. Stay still. Help’s on the way. I told them to hurry. I left a very expensive pair of shoes in the parking lot.”
He gave me a crooked smile and said, “Fuck you. I quit.”
28
I was sitting in the waiting room at Emory University Hospital in Midtown with a spiral notebook I’d found in the hospital gift shop when Rauser walked in carrying the shoes I’d left in the parking lot. I had ridden in the ambulance with Neil, shoeless. I slipped them on. Rauser glanced at the notebook.
“Making good use of your time, I see.”
“I need to organize it a little and get it in the computer, but it’s the most complete psychological sketch I can give you considering the evidence we have. And don’t have.”
He took the notebook and looked it over. “Dog owner, huh?”
“He’d want that kind of adoration. He’s unable to maintain human relationships.”
“No dog hair in the Honda. No dog hair on the victims or in Miki’s house where the techs vacuumed up,” Rauser said. “Usually, if we have an offender with a dog—”
“Then he has a dog that doesn’t shed,” I interrupted. Stress bled into my tone. “Trust me on this. There’s a big pet store right next to the building supply, where he probably bought supplies to hang Kelly. It’s also the same shopping center where Miki’s phone was lifted. He’s sticking to the area he’s most familiar with.”
“They make dogs like that?” Rauser asked, lightly. “Nice.”
“He’s probably totally obsessed with the dog. Buys lots of toys and treats, clothes, photographs the dog, makes videos. He may post them on social-media sites or on YouTube. And he’s a reader. He needs to escape into something during long stretches of alone time. Everything he needs is in that center—the pet store, the bookstore, the building supply, the grocery store.”
“Can I run with this?”
I nodded. “I feel good about it.”
“I put a detail on your parents until we figure out where this is going. I don’t want to take any chances. And I talked to the doc. They wanna keep Neil a couple of days to make sure there’s no infection. He’ll be sore as shit. But he’ll be okay.”
“Thank God.”
He held up a plastic bag. “Here’s what came out of him. Nine-millimeter. It’s mangled. Entry point was an up angle, and there’s wound damage reduction, which means it ricocheted off the concrete. Bad timing he opened the door, but he’s lucky it wasn’t a direct hit.”
“
I have a feeling Neil’s not feeling lucky right now.”
“How are you doing?”
I was rattled. I was angry. And I didn’t want to talk about it. “How’s my car?”
“Three broken windows. Messed up the dashboard pretty good. And the inside of the passenger’s door.”
“Shit.”
“We’ve been following up on the ballpark connections all day too, narrowing down the list. Several hundred people when you factor in fund-raising booths, umps, coaches, vendors, and parents. What time can you be ready?”
“Are you serious? I want to stay here and see Neil.”
“Doc says he’ll be sleeping awhile. They’ll let us in later.”
I was silent. Walking around in the open at a ballpark wasn’t really my fantasy at the moment.
“You gotta get right back in the saddle, Street. You know that. You get scared and this guy wins. And we might turn up something that will nail the sonofabitch tonight. That’ll cheer you up.”
“Good point,” I said.
“And there’s junk food,” Rauser added.
An hour later we snaked through a Midtown neighborhood two blocks from Piedmont Park. It dead-ended at a dirt parking lot. Beyond it, a ballpark with two fields, bleachers, covered dugouts, a sprawling wooden canopy. The lot was packed with vehicles. Whoever was in charge of fund-raising for the league was clearly on it.
Rauser was driving my Neon, knees spread so they didn’t hit the steering wheel. We’d gone to my place to change. We left Rauser’s cop car in the garage. My Impala was a mess. Again. I dreaded telling my father. He’d had my car completely restored a couple of times already.
We had slipped into shorts, our usual uniform for baseball in or out, and Rauser had jammed a Braves cap on his head. He had good legs and he knew it. He’d worked out his entire life as a way to fight the stress of cop life. It had paid off.
“I had no idea this ballpark was here,” I said.
“Saw it on the map.” I had half his attention. He was cruising the crowded lot for a parking spot. “Never had a reason to drive back here.”
“And why would you? Unless you’re a parent or a coach or a vendor.”
“Yep. Bet our perp fits into one of those categories.” He gunned it toward an empty space, but an SUV coming from the other end of the parking lot got there first. Rauser cursed. He wasn’t accustomed to searching for parking in his own jurisdiction. It’s one of the perks he fully exploited. He could park on the sidewalk if he felt like it. But tonight he didn’t want to look like a cop. “By the way, there’s no criminal background checks in Georgia on coaches and umps. And the people working out here pretty much run the gamut as far as day jobs. Musicians, a broker, insurance salesman, couple of teachers, techies, route drivers, business owners.” He finally found a spot he liked, whipped the Neon in, jerked the emergency brake up, and we got out.
“That means vendors don’t have any special requirements either?”
“Licenses and permit is all they need. Stupid. You don’t know who you’re turning loose with your kids.”
Rauser and I crossed the dirt lot to the ballpark. We stood there for a moment, taking it in. Rauser squinted at the fields to see where Kelly’s grandson’s team was playing. He needed glasses but so far had resisted the idea. I don’t argue. He thinks I’m gorgeous, so I’m okay with his blurred vision.
Vendors with T-shirts and mugs, and bottled water and soft drinks in metal ice tubs, sat behind card tables with metal cash boxes under a wooden canopy with a raised concrete floor. Outside, a mobile food vendor in a silver trailer had a long line of customers dressed for summer baseball, a busy grill, and a sign up top that said Burger Dog Bob’s Flaming Grill.
“I never could resist a hot dog at the ballpark,” Rauser told me. That might have been true, but I knew he wanted to check out the vendor inside the trailer. We lined up, took a step at a time, until he was forking out eight dollars to the guy inside with the brown eyes, a cap that showed brown hair at the temples, late twenties, early thirties, wide shoulders.
We squeezed mustard and dill relish on fat hot dogs. Me, I’m not really a hot dog fan, but some food is about the experience. Like popcorn at movies. Rauser said what I was thinking. “He fits the body type and the coloring. And he’s parked right here where two vics frequented.” He got on his phone. “Anything come up today on a food vendor called Burger Dog Bob?” He waited. “Okay, double-check his event permits for the Stone Mountain/Clarkston area. And send me a picture. I want to know if the guy that made my hot dog owns the business.” He disconnected.
We balanced food and drinks, headed toward the bleachers at the field where the Cardinals were about to take on the Midtown Bulldogs. “No felony record on the owner. I’ll know in a sec if that’s him on the grill. He’s registered a thirty-eight. No nine.”
“What’s his name?”
“Robert Crammer.”
“Robert? Fatu’s Mr. R?”
“Let’s hope.” He looked around. “It’s organized out here. Takes a lot of people to pull this off. Kept us busy all afternoon.”
We found space at the end of the fifth row and sat down. “Have you noticed almost everybody’s white?” I whispered.
“I don’t look at race, Keye.” He stuffed about a third of a hot dog in his mouth, then proved he had no problem talking with his mouth full. “I’ve evolved past that.”
“I can see that.” I smiled. Why his bad manners were attractive to me can be explained only by a flood of pheromones. Or a chemical imbalance.
He washed his hot dog down with iced tea from a red plastic cup with a Coca-Cola logo. He rattled the ice in the cup, then elbowed me. “Kelly’s granddaughter’s down there with her husband.”
I recognized them from the interview tapes. They were two rows below us. They’d both been there that day waiting for Donald Kelly to arrive for his ninetieth-birthday party. They said the volunteer driver, Abraam Balasco, had rung up to say he was in the lobby with Kelly. They’d waited in the hall for the elevator with everyone else, fifteen or twenty people with plastered-on smiles prepared to sing happy birthday as soon as the doors split open. But the elevator never came. Finally, Phil Sobol, who is married to Kelly’s granddaughter, had gone down to the lobby. He’d found Balasco unconscious and his wife’s grandfather missing.
Boys in clean uniforms and baseball mitts sprinted onto the field. The coaches shook hands, then went back to their caged-in wooden benches. I gave Rauser the rest of my hot dog and we sat for a while just taking it in—the vendors, the parents, the coaches, the kids. Was this where a killer had first noticed Troy Delgado and Donald Kelly? What was the attraction? Troy Delgado’s exceptional talent? But what about Kelly? And how did they connect with Fatu Doe? And my cousin, whom he had chosen not to kill? Sometimes it’s just more fun to watch her kill herself. How long had he watched Miki coming apart, then piecing it back together? The fact that she was out searching for twisters spoke directly to her suicidal tendencies, in my opinion. I’d been caught in a tornado once on the highway. I had made it to an overpass, parked underneath, got out of my car, and climbed up a concrete incline to a covered ledge. Two more cars stopped, and I found myself waiting on that ledge with four strangers—a man and his young daughter and a sixtysomething couple that looked like they’d just left the buffet at Shoney’s. We’d all seen the funnel cloud barreling toward the interstate, gaining width, swirling debris. And then hail the size of walnuts spattered the ground. My ears started to pop a moment before it sounded like a seven-sixty-seven was sitting down on top of us. The air turned black. I couldn’t catch my breath. The man next to me was fighting to keep his little girl from being sucked out of his arms. Sixty seconds of terror and uncontrolled chaos reminded us all how small we were, how fleeting our time. Come to think of it, that was the first time my father had to put my car back together, but it would not be the last.
We moved down to an empty space next to Levi Sobol’s parents. The welcome m
at didn’t exactly roll out. “Lieutenant. What are you doing here?” Phil Sobol asked. Neither of them smiled. A follow-up visit from a cop after crime and violence rocks your family must feel like the other shoe dropping. The Sobols had that look on their faces.
Rauser feigned disinterest, said he was here on another matter, just wanted to say hello. He introduced me casually, no explanation.
“Is it about that boy on the Blue Jays?” Virginia Sobol wanted to know. “It’s horrible. You think someone out here did it?”
Rauser was looking out at the game, tapping crushed ice into his mouth from the cup. Mr. Casual. He side-glanced Virginia Sobol. “You knew him?”
“Everyone did,” she answered. She was brown-eyed and a little plump, dark hair tucked behind her ears, and wore a Cardinals cap. “He was the major threat out here. There wasn’t a batter in the league that wasn’t terrified of him.”
“The kid was a machine,” Phil Sobol told us. “Thirteen years old and he’s consistently throwing at eighty miles an hour. Everybody that wasn’t a Blue Jay fan hated that kid.” His astonished wife slapped his leg.
“It gets a little competitive out here. Parents don’t like seeing their kids lose,” she explained defensively.
Phil Sobol clapped his hands. “Show ’em what you got, Levi,” he bellowed.
“It can get heated from time to time,” Mrs. Sobol told us. “But I don’t know one person who would have laid a hand on that child or any other child.”
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