The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,126
information, then went back to the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice yearbook. This time I wrote down the names on each page, one by one. It forced me to focus on each individual instead of the group pictures and goofy gag shots and clubs, and it prevented me from missing anyone.
At almost six-thirty, when first light was beginning to seep through the windows and my second latte was gnawing at my empty stomach, my thoughts began to drift to Rauser upstairs in his bed. I could conjure him up, I realized, just by closing my eyes: every line in that rugged face, every way that his mouth moved, and his hands, his smells and sounds, food he loved and despised. I’d memorized him over the years. But all my will couldn’t make him recover. I went back to making my list of names.
Then one of them leapt off the page and slapped me in the face. I studied the photograph. It was a group picture of twelve doctoral students who, according to the caption, had partnered with faculty members and won recognition for research in the field of criminal justice and behavior. The study was entitled “The Biosocial Origins of Antisocial Behaviors.”
Sweet Jesus, could it be? A flood of thoughts, corrosive and incohesive, rushed through my tired brain. I stared at the photograph and thought about the campus, the dogwoods and palms and live oaks. Somewhere here Anne Chambers had met the person who would later beat her with a brass desk lamp until her face was unrecognizable, then slice away her clitoris and nipples. All along I had suspected it began there, the nurturing and feeding of a monster. The rage Anne Chambers was shown during their final interaction felt personal. Removing her nipples was a way to say “I hate you, Mommy.” Anne symbolized a mother who for some reason was reviled. My mind was flying now, remembering things; fragments were adding up and beginning to solidify. Something with density and shape was being born at last, something more than theory.
I typed the name into my search engine and began to read, quickly following every link until I found background. The strange obsession with civil law, with turning plaintiffs into victims; it was all there. My throat had gone dry. Wishbone had been hiding in plain sight all along.
Florida Man Convicted in Brutal Killing of Wife. I searched for details of the crime scene. There were none apart from a brief description in the newspaper article, which stated in bold words that the victim had been stabbed several times with a fishing knife. Wishbone’s father had killed his wife? Was Wishbone following an example set by a murdering daddy, copycatting? Or had Daddy simply taken the fall to protect a child who had discovered a passion for killing? Was I right? Had all this begun with a mother? Was that the kill described in the blog, the one that at sixteen never even caused a wobble in the killer’s grade-point average? I’d been wrong about one thing. Anne Chambers was not Wishbone’s first victim. We might never know how many had come before her. Wishbone’s father had died in Florida’s smoking-hot and overused electric chair after years on death row.
There was an article about the woman he’d killed. She had been a kind of celebrity in the southern art scene. Local Artist Gives Back to Community, the headline read, and I followed it until I found her picture. The resemblance to Anne Chambers, the student and artist, took my breath away. Now I could see it. Anne Chambers emerging one day from the Fine Arts building, young and vital and so naïve, an artist just like the murdered mother. Bearing a likeness to her so uncanny it must have set off a firestorm in the brain of the fledgling killer.
My eyes took in every detail of the group photograph in the yearbook. Wishbone. A terrible burning grew inside me, like drinking lava. It rushed through my bloodstream and made my face hot. It was counterinsurgent and infused with an utterly complete and vile hatred, this feeling. I thought about Rauser, about that night in the park, about his arms around me, and I was angrier and more helpless than I’d ever been in my life, even those days when I’d been too drunk to get out of my pajamas. This monster had taken too much from me. Too much from Rauser.