The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,35
the other, a digital Nikon hanging around his neck. He’d already slipped into a paper cap, booties, and a lab coat designed especially to reduce the transfer of fiber evidence.
“Thanks for waiting,” Rauser told him. “We’ll suit up and be right behind you.”
A woman carrying a scene case in each hand was speaking to a couple of the uniforms. She was wearing jeans, tennis shoes, and a worn Army T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and the bottom shortened.
“That’s our blood-splatter guy,” Rauser said, and grinned at me.
He shook her hand, then wrapped an arm around her. She was pretty with a strong jaw, five-tenish or more with the lean V-shape of a swimmer, short wavy hair, creamy skin, looked like she ate nuts and berries. Probably had soy milk in her fridge, and absolutely never touched a Krystal cheeseburger.
Rauser walked her back to me and introduced us. “Keye, I want you to meet Jo Phillips. Jo, this is Keye Street, our friendly neighborhood profiler. Jo here used to make an honorable living. Now she’s just one of the ghouls.”
“I was a cop. It was seven years ago,” Jo Phillips said, and smiled at me. We all pulled paper booties over our shoes and slipped into coats. Jo stretched examination gloves over long fingers, then elbowed Rauser and added, “But you know how old men are. Always trying to relive the past.”
Her voice was husky and soft all at once, southern smoky. Kind of Lauren Bacall. I hated her already. Let me count the ways. Who comes to a crime scene in the middle of the night with their belly button showing? And what’s Jo short for anyway? I hoped it was Joseph. And the familiar elbowing thing she did with Rauser, hated that. And the way she used his first name. They were just way too chummy for my comfort.
Rauser pushed open the door to the suite and Ken Lang went in first with video, maneuvering around carefully. Trace evidence is a delicate matter. Just the breeze created by someone crossing a room can dislodge trace.
The rooms looked expensive. They were clearly designed for upscale business travelers, two levels with fireplaces and full kitchen, a bar, a wireless office, a conference table in the dining area. Was this rendezvous site the killer’s idea? Or the victim’s? Which one of them was familiar enough with these hotels to make this choice? No—the location would not have been left to chance. Not with this careful and precise offender. The killer chose this place deliberately. We were looking for a professional, someone with enough successes and enough of an expense account to accommodate this type of hotel, I told Rauser.
The room was chilled, a dramatic contrast to the eighty-seven-degree soup we’d just waded through outside. Humid Georgia nights dampen your clothes, bead up around your hairline, sit heavy on your chest. Walking into a room air-conditioned to sixty degrees gets your immediate attention. A gas fire was burning in the fireplace. I thought about that for a moment, remembered going away with Dan for a romantic weekend and doing the same thing with the air-conditioning. Nothing inspires a romantic evening like a fireplace. I wondered if the killer enjoyed the fire before or after the murder.
It was an odd feeling, standing here and knowing this space was something very different before it became a crime scene. How did it begin? I wondered. Was it gentle with a kiss? Or violent and instantly intense? So far there was no sign of a struggle. A two-story suite like this would take ten, twelve hours to process. Only then the story would come to light and we would understand what happened here. Lang would handle collecting the bulk of the physical evidence apart from bloodstain; he was in for a long night.
Standing at the bedroom door while Lang made the first video of the room that appeared to be the primary murder scene, I let my eyes skip over the bedroom. The body was facedown on the queen-size bed. A large bloodstain had seeped deeply into the sheets and mattress around his neck and chest and was turning the color of old brick. One sheet was pulled up to the waist, tucked around his open legs to outline the lower body. The fabric was peppered with blood. Somewhere in the suite, music played softly.
I saw a sweaty bottle of fifty-dollar Chardonnay and two moisture rings on the bed table near the phone. I didn’t see