The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,13

pooled on the kitchen floor, then arterial spray and spatter from her wounds, cast off from a bloodied weapon, dotted the stove, the refrigerator. Walls and floor in the hallway were smeared. I understood what this meant. The initial attack came from behind while Lei was still and unprepared, and then she started to move and it continued and continued and continued. The blood spatter proved that she had somehow broken free at one point and tried to get away. Perhaps she’d been allowed that one brief hope of fleeing, just for entertainment’s sake, just so the killer would have something to chase. Already I was learning something about the offender. A patient sadist, to be sure. And a disciplined one. The attack had gone on, according to the pathologist, for more than two hours. It went all the way through the house. He had then dragged Lei Koto back into her kitchen, leaving bloody drag marks across the living-room floor and down the hallway.

Why? Why did it need to end in the kitchen where it began? I thought back to the letter, to the cabbage on the stove. I looked at the inventory sheets. Ground beef in the fridge in an open bowl. She was making dinner early before the summer sun heated up the house, I realized. That’s why there was cabbage on the stove at ten in the morning and why there was an uncovered bowl of hamburger in the fridge. Dinner for the two of them, her son and herself. A wave of nausea washed over me. He not only wanted the boy to find his mother, he wanted to leave her right there where she was making dinner for him.

I closed my eyes and imagined him coming home. The smell of scorched food would have led him straight to the kitchen. Mom? Mom? You here? The killer would have considered all this, of course. The planning, the fantasizing, the act, the time with the victim—all that was only part of it. The attention that comes later is thrilling, validating. What are they saying about me? What are they thinking? His imprint on this child’s life, that he’d marked someone in an undeniable way, was a huge bonus, invigorating.

I looked again at the autopsy results for each of the four victims they’d linked. A finely serrated knife had done most of the damage, weakened each. But never, not at any of the scenes attributed to this killer, was the knife the actual cause of death. The knife was just a tool, I decided, just part of the fantasy reenactment.

Rauser was digging through his old leather case for his notes. He liked to do this sometimes, just bounce things off me. “The African American female, Elicia Richardson, she was a lawyer, successful, lived in one of those big Alpharetta neighborhoods north of town, killed in her home. Just like Lei Koto, who was widowed and lived with her son. And the two cases in Florida—Bob Shelby lived on disability and was also killed in his home, and the female student at WFSU, the first vic we know of, killed in her dorm room. All during daylight hours.” He leaned forward, arms on my desk. “So we know how he kills them and how he leaves them. But we haven’t figured out what connected them in life. Maybe it’s random. Maybe he sees them somewhere and the crazy sonofabitch just goes ape-shit.”

“I don’t think it’s random,” I said.

“Victimology tells us victims’ lifestyles, ethnicity, neighborhoods, income levels, ages, friends, restaurants, takeout joints, dry cleaners, routes to work, and childhood experiences are too varied to make a connection. I thought the deal with serials is that they choose a type, a race, a gender, an age range, something. These cross all the lines. I can’t find the thread, you know? That one thing that draws him to them. There’s no forced entry at any of the scenes. So they each opened the door for the creepy sonofabitch. Last victim, Lei Koto, even made him tea.” He pointed at one of the photographs from the kitchen. There were two glasses, nearly full, on the table. “No prints. No saliva. He never touched it. He never touches anything. The scenes are freakishly clean. Ligature abrasions are from wire at all the scenes, wrists, in some cases the neck.”

“So they’re conscious and struggling while he’s torturing them,” I said.

Rauser nodded his agreement and we were silent, just letting our minds grasp that, trying