The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,27
this table out of the way to get to him or is this the way the killer left it? Do you know what size shoes they wore and what type? Also, that could be therapeutic bruising on the arms. There can be some postmortem bruising. You need to get clear on this with the ME.”
Rauser said, “What’s bugging you?”
“Well, if the offender gained control using a blitz, and from the blunt-force trauma here it looks that way, there wouldn’t have been a struggle. Shelby was down, unable to fight back. It doesn’t make sense. So without interviews, we don’t know if we’re reconstructing victim and offender interactions or if we’re actually just analyzing the first officer’s and med techs’ effect on the crime scene, and because of this, we don’t have an ice cube’s chance in hell of being certain the killer’s in a size ten.”
Rauser sighed and made a note. “This wasn’t our case,” he reminded me.
“So where are the interviews on the cases in Atlanta? I haven’t seen anything but written reports from first responders, which are bare bones. You know that. These people won’t take the time unless you force them.”
“We’ll follow up with the officers and the med techs on the Koto and Richardson scenes here.”
“Remember Locard,” I told him. Locard’s Exchange Principle states that everyone entering a crime scene both takes something of the scene with them and leaves something behind. It was one of the founding principles in crime scene investigation. “I hate to say it, but the offender more fully understands Locard than the Atlanta Police Department. He’s highly skilled, Rauser. The scenes have to be processed with that in mind. Your people have to know what kind of evidence to collect, and part of that is a detailed interview from everyone who steps into your crime scene.”
Rauser nodded. “I’m onboard,” he said with that restless, nearly kinetic energy of his that was both contagious and a little disconcerting. He stayed revved up during cases like this, barely slept, had a flood of ideas. But he paid for his manic episodes. In the next few days or weeks or whenever this project no longer needed him, he’d bottom out, hit a low so debilitating that just getting out of bed was overwhelming. He called it “the flu” and I had seen those moods knock his feet out from under him. I called it hypomania, but he wasn’t interested in my opinions regarding his mental health.
I called Neil from the station with information about the victims—date of birth, Socials, full names. Neil had laserlike focus when it came to anything that remotely resembled spying. We needed to examine the lives of each of these four people in a more intimate way, profile each as thoroughly as the offender, and complete an in-depth risk assessment. If we understand the victim, we understand the killer. He gets something from them. What? What need is he fulfilling? What does his behavior say about motive? What is he acting out and how does that behavior work in relation to the physical elements of his crimes? At what point were these victims first at risk? Just answering that question alone would solve a hundred others about what the killer’s willing to do to acquire his victims, about location and triggers and motive.
Movement caught my eye. Jefferson Connor, Atlanta’s twenty-fourth police chief, was walking heavily down the hallway toward the War Room. Connor was in uniform, which he always wore for press conferences. I wondered if that accounted for the sour expression on his face. Perhaps it was the two-hundred-million-dollar budget or the twenty-four hundred employees he managed. Perhaps it was a serial offender at work under his watch. I had never met him personally, but I’d seen him calmly fielding questions on everything from homicide investigations to corruption inside the department, and Rauser had talked a lot about him. They had been friends and partners in DC as uniformed cops. Both had twenty-plus years in law enforcement. Connor had wanted to climb through the ranks. Rauser, on the other hand, had refused promotions in order to do the work he still loved. Rauser came to Atlanta, while Connor went to LA, where he rose to chief, created positions for community liaisons, began a Public Integrity Division and, through partnerships with the community, drastically reduced homicides under his watch. The hype that surrounded the chief’s coming to Atlanta was memorable—the press surrounding him like he was a rock star when