The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,122

it looked like a haul, but I thought about the campus. It was accessible, not as spread out as some rambling campuses could be. Still, it was a reach. How would a college sophomore and a serial killer have crossed paths? Where? If not in class, some other group or club, a rec center?

I opened a desk drawer for a pen and found instead a pack of unopened cigarettes and Rauser’s tarnished Zippo. I remembered the smell of lighter fluid in the air each time he lit it. I’d noticed on Thanksgiving that he had never gone outside for a smoke break. He was trying to quit. I’d been pushing him to do this for years. And he’d broken it off with Jo. All during the Wishbone killings, I realized, Rauser was methodically preparing his life for me, and I had to push back tears.

I opened the album from the year that Anne Chambers was killed and just started going over it again a page at a time. I wanted to look again at every goofy candid shot, the teams and clubs and social groups, the individual class pictures, the group pictures, the faculty, all of it.

I went back to the map and it suddenly hit me. A few doors down Smith Street from the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice was the Fine Arts Annex, the Fine Arts building. Anne was a visual artist. The two buildings were practically next-door neighbors. If their schedules jibed, the killer could have easily seen her in passing, insinuated himself into her life.

I felt my heartbeat quicken hopefully. Was I looking for a student? A faculty member? I thought about Old Emma saying she’d warned Anne. I thought about Mrs. Chambers saying Anne had bounced from romance to romance. I was getting close now. I could almost smell it. I’m going to get you, you bastard.

37

I was in Rauser’s office with his Zippo in my hand, the tarnished silver tight in my palm. My phone warbled. “So,” Neil began. “I was thinking about this blog thing again. What was front and center about the Wishbone killings?”

“Stabbing?”

“Exactly,” Neil said. “And that’s about what?”

“Power, penetration, control—”

“Dumb it down, Keye. Think nuts and bolts.”

“Um …”

“Sex and cutting, right?”

“Okay.”

“Look, I found these fetish websites where you can brag about all your freaky porn shit without getting kicked off some website or getting hauled off to jail. You can write about doing anything to anybody as long as you call it a fantasy.”

APD’s detectives and Neil had looked long and hard for the blog I always knew existed but had never been able to locate. Maybe we hadn’t asked the right questions.

“We weren’t looking at hard-core porn and fetish groups. A search engine can only do what you ask it to do.” Neil had read my mind. “Keye, I found all these online communities that call themselves edge fetish and knife play fans. Post after post from people turned on by blood and knives and shit.”

“You found the Wishbone blog?” I felt my pulse and my hopes climbing.

“I’m sending you the link. A website called Knifeplay. Look for a blogger called BladeDriver. Brace yourself. It’s pretty hard to stomach.”

At Rauser’s computer, I began to read the blog by BladeDriver at Knifeplay.com. It advertised itself as the place for the adult online edge fetish and knife play community, where sexual fact and fiction was posted without restraint. As Neil had warned, the specifics shocked and sickened me. The blog had about sixty entries over a period of three years. Twisted ramblings, some of it. Complaints about weak, needy people, about traffic, about greed. Some of the entries were chilling in their detail. I recognized descriptions of Lei Koto, David Brooks, Melissa Dumas, Anne Chambers, all of them written about as if they had sexually desired the kind of mutilation they’d had to endure as their lives ended. I read about him stalking Melissa as she took her evening run, and imagined Roy Orbison playing on the car stereo, him watching her, masturbating, thinking about driving his knife into her skin, and then boasting online and calling it sexual fantasy. It was revolting. Why hadn’t this raised a red flag anywhere? I was reading details that had never been made public until the letters began hitting the newspapers. The Lei Koto blog was posted well before the first letter was published, and all of the entries offered details that would only later have been discovered at the crime scenes, details