The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,26
left behind them daughters and friends and grieving parents and lovers and stunned husbands and gardens half planted, papers half written, groceries still in the bag, dinners on the stove, and full lives. Rauser had told me he’d practically been living in this room. He wanted to surround himself with the information. Maybe it would make sense after a while, sink into him by osmosis.
The department today had the atmosphere of being under siege. Pressure was crashing down from offices high in our local government. Detectives with already knee-buckling caseloads pushed by me and hustled in and out of the War Room, drinking from Styrofoam cups, posting reports, tapping at keyboards, kicking around ideas. One posted a sign over the bulletin boards that read WISHBONE MURDERS, and for a moment everyone in the room fell silent. Harsh reality had suddenly slammed into an odd and disconcerting sense of history in the making, of a terrible bloody legend still forming.
“Christ,” Rauser muttered.
I pulled a chair from the conference table and sat down beside him.
“Let’s get to work, huh?” I said.
Rauser stared at me. Then he pushed back his chair and stood up. “Attention, people,” he said, and movement ceased. A couple of detectives left their cubes to stick their heads in. “For those of you who don’t know, this is Keye Street. She’s an experienced criminalist trained in interpreting physical evidence. Keye’s coming on as a consultant to our task force, so play nice, full transparency, please, and share your doughnuts, people.”
With that, he sat back down and we went to work. I spent the afternoon in Rauser’s War Room, and my notes quickly filled a couple of spiral notebooks—pages jammed with bad artwork and fat question marks and nearly indecipherable stream-of-consciousness stuff. It was the way I had always worked. I’d take it apart later. The important thing was not to edit. Not yet. Just keep it going, lay the foundation for a coherent assessment. Instinct and training, an instructor at Quantico once told me, you couldn’t trust one without the other.
“I’m looking for the interviews with the first officer or the EMTs,” I said to Rauser, shuffling through mountains of paper at the messy War Room conference table. I was starting to hurt from a shortage of sleep. I couldn’t imagine how Rauser was functioning at all.
“I handed you their reports. Jacksonville didn’t do interviews.”
I pointed to one of the crime scene photos pinned to the board. A coffee table was flipped on its side next to the body. Bob Shelby. I glanced up at the board and studied him in life, beer, baseball cap, same couch, same coffee table that was at the death scene, only pushed several feet away from the sofa. The room was in disarray. Furniture out of place, according to the impressions left on the carpet. The remains of a fast-food dinner were spilled on the floor; bloody footprints led from the area where the victim lay facedown near a pool of blood to the front door and then toward the back of the house. The victim was completely naked. Bruising stained the top and inside of his upper arms. Sharp force and incised wounds on the pale white skin of his lower back and buttocks, thighs. And bite marks.
“If you had to reconstruct this scene, what would you say?” I asked.
“Guy liked Taco Bell?”
“Funny.”
Rauser didn’t have to think about it long. He’d looked at these pictures a thousand times, read the files again and again, and clearly formed his own conclusions. “Bob Shelby,” he said. “Sixty-four. Not many defensive wounds. Contusion on the back of the skull. Some food and furniture got turned over, control bruising on the top of the arms. Ligature marks around the wrists. Pooling on the floor. Cast-off on the furniture and carpet. Killer beat him senseless, stabbed him about twenty times while he was still breathing and another thirty-three times after he was dead, slit his throat, then tracked the blood out and left us a size-ten impression.”
“Was the first officer male?” I asked, and Rauser nodded. “Do you know what he did on arrival?”
“He followed first-officer protocol, notified dispatchers, secured the scene.”
“Did he step in the blood? Do you know what size shoes he wore and what type? Do you know if the EMTs moved the furniture and knocked over the food?” I used my pen to point out details in one of the photographs. “Body’s over here near the sofa. So did the med techs push