The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,11

about this child or what he felt or what he will feel. Interest in this sort of thing invites darkness to bleed into your life. And even knowing this, I ached for him. A part of me wanted to help piece him back together somehow, warn him of the nightmares, warn him of the shuffling around that would come. No one really knows what to do with a child who has been made homeless by violence. Will relatives take him? the police would wonder aloud, thoughtlessly and with the best intentions. Adults would whisper and worry and shoot concerned glances his way, increasing his terror tenfold. A stranger from social services would come to sit with him while they searched for next of kin. But no reassurances, no kindness can mend that kind of terrible rip in the infrastructure. It would take years.

The crime scene photographs trembled in my fingers.

“Why are you showing me this?”

Rauser handed me a letter addressed to him at the Homicide Division, neatly printed and without a signature. I looked at him for a moment before I began to read. His eyes were steady on me.

Dearest Lieutenant,

Do you want to know how I did it? No—your forensic experts have determined that much by now. Did you find the details troubling? I have such vivid memories of standing on her front steps smelling her small kitchen. She smiled as she pushed open the door for me.

I know where your mind must be going, Lieutenant, but you will not find a trace of me in her life. I was no part of her inner circle. She died not knowing who I was. She died asking WHY? They all want some peace in the midst of chaos. Their chaos, not mine. I do not tell them. I am not there to comfort them.

The papers have called me a monster. I think you know better. What have your profilers told you? That I am intelligent, able to blend into the outer world, and sexually functioning? A pity their methods do not offer you a better yardstick with which to measure mine.

You have withheld certain information about the crime scenes from the newspapers. Did you know their constant and incorrect speculation would compel me to respond? And what does your experience tell you about this letter, this new tool for your investigation? You have either concluded that I am a braggart as well as a sadist or that I have a deep and driving need to be caught and punished. And you must certainly be wondering if I am, in fact, the stranger you seek. Shall I convince you?

The day was hot by ten that morning and the air inside that kitchen was heavy and damp from a pot of boiling cabbage. I felt a breeze from the open window as I stood at the table looking down at her on the floor. She was quiet by then and still and seemed so tiny when I turned her over to make my marks.

The last sound she heard above her own whimper was the click of my shutter and the tiny crack of her neck, like a wishbone snapped in half.

6

He broke her neck,” I said quietly, and sank back in my chair. I held the photo in my hand of Lei Koto twisted up and bloody on her own kitchen floor, her head bent too far left to be natural.

“Cause of death,” Rauser answered. “The wishbone reference. What do you make of it?”

I pushed through a jumble of emotion. I pushed through it as I always had and I found my trained self, my detached self, and I answered, “Power, domination, manipulating the victim, the victim’s body.”

“Letter’s accurate right down to the cabbage on the stove. We never released cause of death or any scene details to the press. Original’s in the lab. Hopefully, he left a print or licked an envelope or something. We don’t have much so far.”

“You have a letter from a killer. You don’t get handed this kind of behavioral evidence every day.”

Rauser nodded. “It’s a different kind of case, Keye. Motive isn’t understood. The scene isn’t understood. Physical evidence is practically nonexistent. I get that the way we find this guy is to understand what he’s playing out at these scenes.”

A tiny alarm was sounding somewhere deep inside me. I felt that familiar tug to unravel the pathology, to contemplate the violent acts of violent offenders until I got one step ahead. Yes, this one is