The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,125

and television smelling like that. I’d brought his razor and shaving cream too.

I stopped at the nurses’ station to say hello. Another hello to the uniformed cop outside Rauser’s door. APD guarded his room 24/7. I had gotten into the habit of coming late, trying not to intrude when his kids were there. His ex-wife came for a day and we had no idea what to say to each other.

Rauser was in the bed just as he had been the night before and the night before and all the nights before that, two weeks now. Eyes closed. Fresh bandages around his head, blue hospital blanket pulled up to his chin. His breathing sounded strong to me tonight, and that had not always been true. Those first couple of days it had been so thin, like winter air.

I found a kidney-shaped bowl and filled it with hot water, used the water to soften his beard, then rubbed shaving cream over his thick stubble. Very carefully, I ran the razor over his imperfect face. I was tired of seeing him look so ratty, like a vagrant, I told him, and whispered that I was frightened as I wiped shaving cream off his face with a warm towel, frightened and so, so angry. Come back to me.

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I woke around four to find a nurse in the room. She smiled gently and apologized for waking me, but she needed Rauser’s vitals and to check the amino acids and glucose and electrolytes that flowed through a catheter and directly into one of the fat subclavian veins that twisted through a complicated maze of muscle and vein and helped deliver enough nutrition to keep him alive. I had been sleeping next to him when she woke me, squeezed into the bed on one side, my head against his chest, an arm thrown over his stomach. I listened for his breathing before I got up.

I nodded and said good morning to the officer on duty outside the door, then wandered to the elevator and downstairs, where I could find fresh air, even if it was on a bench under the harsh fluorescent light outside the emergency entrance.

Christmas music was playing as I walked through the main lobby. Happy holidays, I thought. Happy fucking holidays.

What had I been doing when Neil rang earlier? I’d been getting close to something before the blog had derailed me. What was it? WFSU, the criminology building and its proximity to the Fine Arts Annex. The first victim. Was Anne really the first victim? I was beginning to think not. If the killer was sixteen the first time he’d killed, as his blog had boasted, where had they met? I checked the pocket of my jeans to make sure I had my car keys. That whole pile of stuff on the Chambers murder was still in the car. Might as well get some decent coffee and go over it again. There was a Starbucks counter in the hospital. Fivebucks, I thought again, and smiled, though it hurt to remember his jokes and his laugh and to remember him teasing me, grumpy and scowling over the Wishbone paperwork.

The hospital café was nearly empty. It was not even five A.M. I took my double-shot, skim milk latte to a table, where I spread out Anne Chambers’s photo albums, letters to home, yearbooks, everything her mother and Mary Dailey at WFSU had given me. I bent over the campus map and wondered again if the campus was where Anne Chambers had first met her killer. I’d been through the yearbook so many times and nothing had jumped out at me. Maybe it was time to begin running every name on that campus during Anne’s last year. I imagined Anne coming out of the Fine Arts building and being spotted by her killer. What was it about her that had set him off? Had he stalked her? Did they meet, become friends? I thought again about Old Emma telling me Anne was seeing someone. Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe instead she had spurned his advances. A student? A professor? Maybe he was neither. I felt a spike of frustration.

An intern shuffled into the café in pale green scrubs and booties, looking as if he hadn’t slept in a month. He paid the cashier for a muffin and coffee, then bolted when his pager went off, leaving his uneaten breakfast on the table.

I sent Neil an email and asked if he could get access to the university’s enrollment