The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,18

and Anne Chambers brutalized in a dorm room. I thought again about their blood, their final horror. I’d sensed it when I looked at those pictures. Three days.

In an old pair of Dan’s boxer shorts and a T-shirt, I made my way to the kitchen. My blood sugar was about ankle high. I found a bottle of grape juice and thought about those first days in rehab while they were detoxing me. They supplied plenty of replacements, phenobarb and grape juice to name just two. A nurse told me grape juice would slam into my system the way the cognac used to and trick me. She was right. On day four they started removing the crutches. The phenobarbital was first. Day five, they came for my grape juice. I’m still kind of pissed about that. My first trip to the market when I was released, I stocked up. Rauser pours three fingers of it in a whiskey glass for me when I go to his house, and fills his own with cheap bourbon, and we clink our glasses together and pile up in front of the TV in summer to watch the Braves.

I thought about Rauser and sighed, leaned against the kitchen counter with my grape juice, felt the guilt seeping into me. Guilt, another gift from my days as a practicing drunk. Was I really being that selfish? Rauser had available to him great investigative minds if he would just tap them, but he wouldn’t trust easily. He hadn’t been exactly thrilled with the psychological sketch he had received from the Bureau. He’d be protective of his territory, reluctant to open the door any further to an outside agency, and the truth is, local cops solve local problems better than anyone else.

From the living room, I heard the whine of my fax machine. White Trash bumped my ankles, waiting for the splash of half-and-half she’d grown accustomed to in the morning. That we were up four hours early seemed to make no difference at all to her begging schedule and her relentless pursuit of dairy. I put a little cream into a saucer for her and walked into the living room.

What was I so afraid of? I asked myself. Was I afraid I couldn’t do it without drinking? That I couldn’t let my mind run in that savage terrain without it? Had alcohol made me a better profiler? I was certainly more attuned to unleashed destructive power back then, but unfortunately a lot of that destructive power was my own. Perhaps it was learning that dark craft in the first place that had pushed me into something my genes had been poised and eager to receive already. Might it push me there again? I never wanted to go back there. Not ever. And I wanted a drink every day, which is the torment of addiction, the constant tug, tug, tugging of rival desires. It was pulling at me now as I took two neatly typed, double-spaced pages from the fax machine. I felt the familiar quickening in my pulse, a ticking in my temple. No, this wasn’t dread or fear, this was something else—exhilaration.

I switched on a floor lamp and sank onto my couch with the letter.

Lieutenant Aaron Rauser

Atlanta Police Department

Homicide Unit, City Hall East

It wasn’t planned. I wasn’t there for him. Providence intervened. You want to understand, don’t you, Lieutenant? You want me to explain the selection process.

“What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it …?” Melville wanted to know, just as you do now. The WHY of all this must drive you mad.

It was an elevator, an innocent encounter, him smoothing his black hair, performing, and me so close I could smell his aftershave. His self-importance made me want to laugh, and then it made me physically ill. His need was suffocating.

I watched him and I listened. I know the type. There’s a stack of bodies buried under the ladder he’s climbed. Eighty hours a week at the office and he still finds time to cheat on his wife. He has to have it, that extramarital thrill. He uses sex to fill in the vacancies. And there are so many vacancies. He says he loves his wife and children, but he hasn’t the capacity. He’s pretending, just as I am. What are the profilers calling it these days? A successful social veneer? Smiling, exchanging small talk with coworkers and neighbors, resting a chummy hand on their shoulder. Would it surprise you to know I have