The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,17

so up to my ass in talk,” I snapped.

“Hey, really great attitude, Street.”

“He’s in therapy,” I said. “So am I. Give me a break.”

“Bitter, party of one,” Rauser said.

“Yes, I am bitter. He thinks he’s a goddamn analyst now because he’s in therapy. And he’s so righteous. It’s painful.”

“And what was Dr. Dan’s diagnosis?”

“That I can’t be serious. That I have intimacy issues.”

Rauser chuckled. “How’d you take it?”

I sighed. “I told him, ‘I got your issues right here,’ and I grabbed my crotch and walked out.”

“Smart,” Rauser said. “And grown-up too.” The elevator dinged again, then footsteps on old tiled floors. The wind hit his phone suddenly and I knew he’d stepped outside the building. I wondered where he was going, to what emergency. An urgent need for a cigarette or another crime scene? I thought for the millionth time about those photos he’d tossed on my desk.

We’d had these discussions before, Rauser and I. We understood things about the other no one else but a lover might. My romantic life till now had been a series of tiny wars. The last one, a five-year marriage, left me feeling raw and a little bloodied. Rauser was ten years divorced. Two grown kids. Both in DC. They never visited Atlanta. He saw them when he could. He said he still loved his wife. I knew he’d called her a few times over the years and hung up when she answered. He knew I’d slept with Dan, even mad as hell at him, and each time it had whittled away at my self-worth. Rauser and I were both woefully unqualified for a lasting romantic relationship. We were moody, appallingly self-indulgent and self-absorbed. Our kinship, we had decided over doughnuts and coffee at Krispy Kreme, was in our defects.

“Dan’s a jerk,” he said, and exhaled. I imagined a cloud of cigarette smoke around him. “A namby-pamby pain-in-the-ass jerk. I’ve been meaning to tell you that.”

I considered that for a moment. Dan was small-boned with the fluid movements of a dancer, dark hair he always wore below the collar, and just handsome enough in an artsy, rakish way as not to be perceived as effeminate. I thought about the way he had always managed to twist his fine features into a perpetually bored expression whenever I introduced him to someone.

“He really is a jerk,” I agreed.

“So what’s the attraction?”

“He has an enormous cock.”

Rauser laughed. “Listen, Keye. I’m sorry about yesterday. I just … I don’t know. I don’t mean to take it out on you, okay?”

It was in these moments, these small gestures, that Rauser revealed himself. When he showed up with takeout or called for nothing else than to find out what I was doing and suffered quietly through a complete explanation of my day while in the midst of a high-pressure investigation. He was a very sweet man and I was glad he had called after all.

“Shit,” he said suddenly. “Gotta go, Street.”

8

I wasn’t sure how long I’d been asleep when my cell phone sounded. White Trash was lying on my chest. I generally didn’t mind, but lately she’d taken to pointing herself in the wrong direction, so that when I woke, I had the distinct pleasure of looking directly at her butt. Aerosmith’s “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)” blasted out of my phone, the ringtone I’d assigned to Rauser. I wasn’t sure he would fully appreciate the humor in this, so I kept it to myself.

“You okay?” I asked, looking at my bedside clock. Three a.m.

“I got another letter. Guy’s a total whack job, Keye.”

I was silent.

“Keye? You back asleep?”

“Yes,” I lied. I honestly was not sure if I wanted to rush in to help or slam down the phone. I had tried in the past and without much success to establish boundaries around his work and my life and where it’s okay and not okay that the two meet, but I’d given mixed signals, I knew. Cop work pulled at me like a drug, like warm lemon vodka, and I had both loved and hated this thing I’d spent my life learning.

“I’m faxing it to you, okay? Just please look at it. I won’t ask you again, but I need your brain tonight. He gave us a timeline. Three days until he kills again.”

I let that fresh horror sink in for a second, then sat up in my bed and thought back to the murder scene photos, to Lei Koto on her kitchen floor, and Bob Shelby and Elicia Richardson,