The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,10
playing foosball on a table Neil and I had ordered and then paid someone else to assemble. Two fights had broken out regarding competing ideas for assembly before we realized we were not equipped for the project. Damn thing must have been in five hundred pieces.
Rauser walked toward us, blowing steam off his coffee and watching us from under arched brows. Neil and I were joking around about something silly and that seemed to irritate him.
“Ah,” he said, loud enough to interrupt. “The intellectual stimulation here, it’s what I come for.”
“Why do you come?” Neil asked with a smirk.
Rauser came back with “To see if you suck dick as good as you make coffee.”
“You wish,” Neil said without looking at Rauser. He was fixed on his computer screen, which was a jumble of shifting letters and symbols and numbers. For all I knew, he was hacking into the CIA. He’d done it before, changed their logo by replacing the word Intelligence with one he liked better.
He swung his chair around, folded his arms over his chest, and studied Rauser. “By the way, I put a mild hallucinogen in the coffee this morning.”
Neil and Rauser seemed to always be in some kind of competition. My presence made it worse, I decided, so I turned for my office before this escalated into scratching and spitting. I had work to do, but Rauser was hot on my heels.
He followed me into the far left corner of the warehouse that is my office. No glass or walls for privacy. Oh no, that would have been too simple. Instead, the design firm simply erected a huge wire fence. It’s something like an enlarged version of barbed wire and about ten feet high—barbed wire on steroids, and backlit in deep blue, sort of an artsy East-Berlin-during-the-Cold-War thing. Really different and, I have to admit, beautiful, in a moody anti-corporate corporate way.
Rauser plopped his ancient leather case on the outside edge of my desk and, after wrestling briefly with one of the brass latches, opened it. I was grinning at him and his old scarred-up case. The bottom corners were worn white and the intricate leatherwork on the outside was too faded to know what the original artist might have had in mind. It tickled me. That was the kind of guy Rauser was. The department had offered him a new car, but he liked his old Crown Vic. “Rauser,” I’d said, “this car has an eight-track. What are you thinking?” He had shrugged and mumbled something about dreading cleaning out the glove box and the window pockets and everywhere else he’d stuffed notes and maps and papers and cigarettes and junk.
He withdrew a stack of photographs from his case and dropped them in front of me. They hit with a loud smack. No warning. Crime scene photographs just tossed at me. Death on my desk. My smile and my good mood faded fast.
“A stay-at-home mom,” Rauser said as I took a photo into my hand and drew in a quiet breath. “Nobody special. Know what I mean?” He lowered himself into the chair across from me. My stomach felt suddenly like it was full of granite.
I turned over the top photo, read the date and the name, her age at death, ethnicity. Lei Koto, Asian female, thirty-three years old, stomach-down on a bloody kitchen floor. You could see the edge of an oven in the upper right-hand corner. Her legs were spread, buttocks and inner thighs naked and bloodied, plenty of stab and bite marks. She looked so small and so alone lying there, I thought, and I was struck, as I always am, at what a solitary business death is, and at how stark, surreal, distorted and telling all at once violent-murder-scene photographs are—the wounds and bruises eerily illuminated by the bright lights used by scene techs, the blood and matted hair, the unnatural positions, the screaming absence of life. Even at a glance, before detail emerges, you know it’s a death scene. One never forgets.
“Who found her?” I asked.
“Ten-year-old kid,” Rauser answered. I looked up from the photographs, and he added, “Her son. His name is Tim.”
This would change him, I thought, change the way he sees the world, sees a stranger, a spot of blood, an empty house. It would change this little boy as it had changed me. We are all of us disfigured in some way by the grief that murder always leaves in its wake. I didn’t want to think