Rauser checked his watch, pressed some numbers into his phone, and waited. “Where the hell is our new superstar? Bastard’s not even answering his phone. Williams, you come with me. We’re not waiting.” He tucked in his shirttail and grinned. “How do I look?”
“Real purdy, Lieutenant,” Balaki said, and they all chuckled. Cop humor. I didn’t always get it.
I watched Williams stroll into the interrogation room, then Rauser. The room was stark, just a table, four chairs, a couple of old HVAC registers on the walls. No windows. Rauser took a chair across from Ricky Stickler and Charlie and dropped a manila folder on the table. Williams sat at the end of the table.
“Sorry about the heat, guys. Old buildings, you know? How ’bout some water or something?” Rauser waited for the answer, which came from Stickler and was “No, thank you,” then looked at Charlie for a moment, gave a gentle smile. I saw the lines gathering at the corners of his eyes. “Charlie, my man, what the heck happened? You fall off your bike or something? You’re beat up pretty bad, buddy.”
“I know you’re mad,” Charlie told Rauser. The familiar slur was back. Very subtle, like someone with a glass of wine too many in them. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I love her. I didn’t mean it.”
Rauser picked up the folder and appeared to read it. “Says here you’ve done something like this three times before, Charlie. Did you mean it then?”
“Lieutenant,” Stickler piped up. He was a nice-looking guy, thirties, strawberry-blond hair. “My client has already been evaluated numerous times. We have brain scans showing the damage from way back. He takes about twenty anti-psych drugs. He went off his meds. He’s not an aggressive guy. Are you, Charlie?”
Charlie shook his head. “Nope. I’m a nice guy.”
“You get real mad sometimes, Charlie? Just want to rip something up, really tear into somebody?” Rauser pressed.
“Don’t answer that,” Stickler ordered.
“Yeah,” Charlie said, really drawing the word out—Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. “I do get real mad.”
“Shit,” Balaki muttered. He had taken the chair next to me that Williams vacated. “He’s not showing any defensiveness at all. I do get real mad. Be hard to make a jury believe he’s okay to stand trial.”
“You ever kill anybody, Charlie?” Rauser asked.
“No, sir, Mr. Man.” Charlie shook his head violently.
“Oh, so you’re sayin’ you’re just into rape?”
Stickler held up a hand, raised his voice. “Don’t answer that. Lieutenant—”
Williams interrupted, speaking for the first time. “Your client is a person of interest in a homicide investigation, Counselor, and we had an agreement. You should advise him to answer or we will just pick him up again tomorrow and the next day and the next day until we have clarification. You get it?”
“Let’s talk about some dates,” Rauser said to Stickler. “If your client has a credible alibi, well, then we got no problem.”
Stickler’s color crawled all the way up his neck and flushed his cheeks. Wet patches were showing under his arms. “You have got to be kidding! Charlie? Charlie wouldn’t recognize his own ass if you handed it to him. Of course he doesn’t have an alibi. He can’t remember what he had for breakfast, can you, Charlie?”
“I didn’t get any breakfast,” Charlie said. “I’m hungry.”
Rauser looked down at his notes. “Charlie, you kind of made everyone believe you were living off the church, didn’t you? You implied they were supplying housing for you, then I find out you’re living in a fancy condo up by Inman Park.”
“It’s not against the law to be protective of a fortune,” Stickler said. “Charlie inherited quite a lot of money when his parents were killed. He has to be cautious. We’ve lectured him on this. Our firm handles the trust.”
“So how about this sob story about the wife and kids leaving you and all that?” Rauser shook his head. “Not true. You filed for divorce, Charlie. I’ve got the papers right here. And you had to be hunted down and served by the court before you would pay support. See why I’m wondering about you, Charlie? Sometimes you act like a dumb shit and other times you’re just a mean bastard.”
“Well, since I can’t find a question in there, I think we’re done here,” Stickler said, and looked at Charlie. “Come on, Charlie. It’s too hot in here anyway.”
“Yeah, it’s hot as a damn fuck in here,” Charlie said, and let loose the laugh we’d all come to know. “Neil likes it when I say fuck. I like Neil. Do you like Neil, Mr. Man?” He started to rise.
Rauser’s arm shot across the table and he grabbed Charlie’s wrist. “All that money and you’re pedaling around town in a courier uniform.”
“Work is an essential aspect of his ongoing recovery,” the attorney said. “These people have to have some sense of self-worth, Lieutenant.”
“Save it,” Rauser told Stickler. He hadn’t let go of Charlie. He was staring into his eyes. “That gets you in, doesn’t it, Charlie? That why Elicia Richardson and Lei Koto and the others opened the door for you? You delivering a package? You looking hot like you need some water?”
“I don’t know those people,” Charlie answered. He tried to withdraw his arm, but Rauser’s grip must have been like a vise.
“Poor Charlie at the door with a package, looks so hot and thirsty.”
“Lieutenant Rauser, release my client.”
Rauser stood. He leaned across the table, very close to Charlie’s face. “I hear you’re pretty good with a knife, Charlie. I need to see your knife.”
“Can you put him at the scene?” Stickler demanded. “That’s what I thought.” He pulled his jacket off the back of the chair and put his card on the table. “You have more questions, you call me, Lieutenant. Let’s go, Charlie.”
“That went well,” I muttered.
Balaki said, “Lieu just wanted to rattle his cage a little and see what he does next.”
But Rauser wasn’t done yet. As Stickler and Charlie prepared to leave the interrogation room, Rauser stepped in front of Charlie. He said very calmly, “I’m gonna get a warrant for that fancy town house and we’re taking it apart down to the pipes. I dare you to dump some evidence. You’re done, Ramsey. Just a matter of time.”
Then he stalked out of the interrogation room.
“No confession?” Balaki said with a grin when Rauser and Williams joined us.
“Uh-unh,” Rauser growled. “Be more likely Nancy Pelosi will come in here and give us a lap dance.”
“Yeah, baby,” Balaki said, and pumped his neck. “Now we talking.”
We all looked at him. A moment of awkward silence followed, then Rauser said, “We gotta cover this guy twenty-four/seven and we gotta do it in two shifts. Pull Velazquez and Bevins in.”
Groans came from the two detectives. It meant twelve-hour shifts doing excruciatingly boring work. They were used to long hours. It’s the sitting and the waiting that makes cops nuts.
“We’ll take the first shift at dusk, okay?” Balaki said. “Give us time to kiss our wives and get a thermos of coffee.”
Rauser reached for the observation room door, then turned and looked at me. “What the hell happened to Dobbs anyway? Where is he?”
“Count your blessings,” I said.
25
We had taken the elevator to garage level, where Rauser’s Crown Vic was parked. As we reached the car, I heard heels against the concrete and spun around.
“Oh shit,” Rauser said.
She was coming at us fast across the parking garage. A heavyset guy was huffing behind her with a camera on his shoulder, and she was holding a microphone out in front of her like it was an Olympic torch.
“Wait, Lieutenant, wait, please,” she was yelling. “Lieutenant, is it true you have a suspect in custody in the Wishbone case?”
Her name was Monica Roberts and she liked following cops and city workers around to make sure they were doing their jobs. I’d watched her repo
rts and rooted for her. Not so much at the moment, however. My mind was clicking. Rauser’s must have been too. Here we were together again on camera. When Chief Connor got wind of this, I imagined a giant black cloud spinning with debris like a twister over City Hall East.
“No comment.” Rauser had been well warned that only officials much higher up than he were to speak to the press regarding the Wishbone investigation.
“But you’ve interrogated a suspect.” It was not a question.
“Press briefings are at noon every day,” Rauser said. “You know that, Monica.”
“Can you explain why the profiler hired by the Atlanta PD, Dr. Jacob Dobbs, was not present for the interview?” Monica looked at me and the camera followed. I eased the car door open and sank quietly into the passenger seat.
“No comment,” Rauser repeated.
“Okay, then can you explain why the profiler who was sacked from the case was present at the suspect’s interrogation?”
Rauser climbed in and threw the old Ford into gear. “Christ,” he groused, slamming his door. “Where’s she getting her intelligence? If she knows that much, she already has Charlie’s name.” He seemed to think about that for a minute. “Actually, more pressure on Charlie boy may not be a bad thing.”
He pulled left out of the garage onto Ponce de Leon and headed toward Peachtree. It was that odd time of day when the city seems buttoned up. Lunch was over and it was still a couple of hours before quitting time, when the office buildings would empty out and jam our streets. The afternoon was so still and cloudless it might have seemed entirely without weather but for the stinging heat. The tires on Rauser’s Crown Vic were a steady crackling against the city streets. The windows were down. Rauser had had bad luck with air conditioners lately, he said. The police scanner was chattering in the background. We were silent. I was tired and maybe even a little depressed. I thought Rauser must be too.
“Ten-fifty-four-D-B, possible one-eighty-seven,” the scanner reported, and got Rauser’s attention. “Juniper and Eighth.”
“Two-thirty-three responding. ETA two minutes,” he said into his radio, and glanced at me. “Possible dead body, possible homicide. It’s just around the corner. I gotta take it.”
He flipped on his lights and siren and the cars in front of us began a paranoid migration into different lanes. Rauser barreled up another block and turned off Ponce. Moments later we were pulling up on Eighth Avenue near Juniper. I saw two women standing in the front yard of a Victorian with baby-blue shutters. They were big-eyed, both of them, with their arms folded across their chests. A cruiser pulled up and then another unmarked Crown Vic. A silver Lincoln was parked on the street.
Rauser used his radio. “Two-thirty-three, Dispatch. I’m ten-ninety-seven,” he said. “I’ll get you home as soon as I see what we got here, Street. Wait, okay? I don’t want you walking.”
I could have walked home in less than ten minutes, but I said, “I’ll wait.”
Rauser’s car was like a furnace. I got out, leaned against the door. It wasn’t much help. A whiff of a breeze rustled a leaf from a pecan tree, then died. I watched Rauser approach the two women, speak to them a moment. Then he talked to the uniformed officer and two detectives. They all walked toward the silver Lincoln. Rauser unsnapped the holster that was almost always at his ribs and opened a door. For a split second, I thought I saw him react physically to whatever was in that car. It was almost imperceptible, a slight stiffening, something with his shoulders. Whatever it was, I saw it, and I didn’t like it.
Rauser pulled away from the car and walked to the back, looked at the tag. He was on his phone. The crime scene unit showed up, then a station wagon from the medical examiner’s office. Frank Loutz, Fulton County’s ME, got out.
I watched Rauser take a few steps away and wipe his forehead. He had never fully adjusted to Atlanta’s long, smoldering summers. Another crime scene van pulled up, followed by Jo Phillips in a gold Ford Taurus. Oh great, Jo the flirty spatter analyst. Rauser didn’t seem to notice. He turned and looked at me, then turned away, frowning.
The ME approached him and they spoke, then Rauser walked toward me.
“It’s Dobbs,” he said.
“What?”
“He’s dead.”
Fifty yards away, two of the uniforms started sealing off the area around the silver Lincoln with yellow crime scene tape. In the distance, car horns and brakes told me the afternoon rush hour was picking up. The officers worked quickly to secure the scene. They needed to establish boundaries that would keep out the cameras and onlookers who would swoop down on it as soon as word got out.
“Liver temp indicates he’s been here ten, twelve hours, and there’s rigor in the limbs,” Rauser told me. “That’s a couple hours before we picked Charlie up this morning. There’s multiple stab wounds.”
Evidence techs and detectives were still pulling up, getting out of their cars. I remembered the way I’d treated Dobbs the last time I saw him, leaving him asleep at my office. I thought about the brownies. God. Had that broken down his defenses enough to make him vulnerable to an attack? I slid down the Crown Vic and sat on the curb, feeling suddenly gutted.
Rauser’s hand was on my shoulder. He wanted to drive me home.
I looked up at him. “I want to see Jacob.”
He looked annoyed. “So now it’s Jacob? Because usually it’s just Dobbs. Why do you have to romance everything? He was a sonofabitch, Street. And just in case you’re taking the blame, Dobbs wasn’t stumbling into walls and shit because he had a little THC in his system. He slept it off. I’m sure he woke up on your sofa his clearheaded bastardly self.”
“Well, that’s a shitty thing to say, Rauser, given what’s happened.” I scrambled to my feet. “I need to see the scene.”
I didn’t wait for Rauser. I stalked toward the Lincoln—the disposal site. A casket on wheels.
Rauser caught up and handed me a pair of surgical gloves. “Okay, sure. Have at it. And if the press and the chief see you down there at my crime scene and the fallout interferes with my job, no big deal, right? As long as you get what you need.”
“Screw you.”
“Fuck the investigation.” He was walking fast next to me. “Fuck my job. Fuck me. Keye needs closure. It’s always about you, Keye, isn’t it? Or maybe you just want to supervise. Is that it? You can do it better than everyone else, right?”
I stopped. “Goddamnit, Rauser. You’re the one that asked for my help.”
“Yeah, so tell me that wasn’t a mistake, because right now I’m asking you to fucking stop.”
I slapped the gloves he’d given me into his palm. “Fine. I’ll walk home.”
I didn’t answer the phone for hours. I heard Rauser’s ringtone a couple of times, but I ignored it. I wasn’t mad at him anymore. I was just furious at how right he’d been. About everything. It wasn’t the first time he had accused me of romanticizing the shitty things in my life, especially my relationship with Dan. I get all gooey when I’m lonely and forget what life with Dan was really like. I don’t think the human psyche has the capacity to fully recollect pain. There are pros and cons to this, of course.
Sometime around midnight, I decided that swallowing a little pride and calling Rauser back was the right thing to do.
There was exhaustion in his ragged voice. “I called Dobbs’s wife. A couple of local cops were there so she wouldn’t be alone when I told her. She seemed really weirdly calm, Keye, and then there was a noise like she dropped the phone. Officer told me she’d fainted.”
I thought about what that must have been like for Rauser. I thought about the pain Dobbs’s wife must be feeling knowing how brutal and squalid her husband’s death must have been. I didn’t know Jacob’s wife personally. I knew only that she ran the sociology department at a Virginia university and that they had been married for many years.
“I’m sorry,” I told Rauser, and I meant it.
“I fucking hate this job sometimes.” I heard Ra
user’s shoes against a hard floor, squeaky hinges, and a heavy door closing.
“Where are you?”
“Pryor Street,” he answered, which meant he was at the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Center, the morgue, one of his least favorite places to hang out, I knew.
“Was the Lincoln a rental?”
“Yep. It’s at the crime lab. Spatter says he was killed in it.”
“I don’t get it. What was Dobbs doing in that neighborhood in the middle of the night? Did he pick someone up? Was he forced to drive there? Was he meeting someone?”
“We’re working on it. We have a witness says he was alone at the hotel valet station a few minutes after midnight when he asked for his car. We know he’d consumed enough alcohol to be impaired. Here’s what I think. He slept half the day away on your sofa, so by late last night he’s wide awake. Strange city, he’s alone so he goes out to cat around a little, drinks too much, and lets his guard down. We’ve canvassed the street. Nobody knew Dobbs except from the news and no one remembers exactly when the Lincoln showed up. I think the location was random. The street was quiet. Killer forced him to drive to the site. So we’ve got three, maybe four hours we haven’t accounted for yet between Dobbs leaving his hotel and the DB call.”
I closed my eyes. It was still hard to wrap my mind around a dead body call for Jacob Dobbs.
Rauser said, “Fatal wound in about the same place as Brooks, the substernal notch. Angle tells us the killer was in the passenger seat and reached across the car. Had to be right-handed to get enough power to sink the blade.”
“He’s upping the ante,” I told Rauser. “The pictures he says he’s taking, the letter writing, using the Internet to copy me on emails, tampering with my car, dealing with a florist, and now a high-profile target like Dobbs. His need to fuel his evolving fantasies is escalating. It’s trumping his instinct for self-protection. He’s taking risks. His illness is progressing.”
The Stranger You Seek Page 20