faster at knowing it was the first time we’d found any commonality regarding selection. Was this it, the link that would finally blow the case wide open?
“Hey, Lieutenant,” Detective Brit Williams called out. He held up a newspaper. “Early morning edition, AJC.”
Rauser jerked the newspaper out of his hand, looked at it, and thrust it at me. “At least they had the decency to black some of it out this time.”
The headlines read: Do You Know David? New Letter Vows More Killing.
13
It was daylight when I left crime scene techs and investigators at the scene of David Brooks’s murder. I heard Rauser complaining loudly to the ME about the way his people were handling the body and their effect on his crime scene. Lieutenant Aaron Rauser was going to have another long day, I knew. Day three and David Brooks was dead. Day three and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had the second letter. Tick-tock, Lieutenant.
I caught a cab back to the Georgian. The news about the murder and the second letter were all over the car radio. The driver wanted to talk about it too. He feared for his own safety. He’d gotten good, he claimed, at judging a fare, at knowing whom to pick up and whom to leave standing, who might rob him, who might tip. Now he didn’t know what to look for. The news was telling him the killer might be the guy next door, the cashier at the grocery store, the man standing at the ATM behind you.
The cabbie dropped me in front of the Georgian. I wandered into the café off the lobby, exhausted.
The story of Brooks’s murder was on the television in the coffee shop, and I waited for my double-shot latte, transfixed like everyone else in the line. That these brutal killings appeared random, that the killer’s motive was unknown and therefore unpredictable and not something one could protect against, seemed to plant a seed of terror in everyone.
Foreboding choked the air we were all breathing. A thirty-second spot on the local news with a criminologist from Georgia Southern told us that no one knew who was next, but that it would happen again and soon. A contact number was displayed for runners who wanted to form groups rather than exercising alone. It was suggested that parents wait at bus stops with their children, and there were warnings about how vulnerable scooter and bicycle operators were after dark. MARTA stations had added security, we were told.
Atlanta had a long history of spree and serial murders—the Black Butcher in the early 1900s; the Atlanta child murders in the seventies and eighties, twenty-one children and teenagers killed; Brian Nichols’s rampage, which began at the Fulton County Courthouse and branched out into the burbs; day trader Mark Barton taking out his family and Buckhead coworkers. All of us had grown up with or read the stories of Atlanta’s violent past, but this was different. This killer was writing to us, describing the ways he was torturing his victims. He was telling us that he talks to them, that he asks them, How does it feel? This insight into his interaction with the victims and this latest letter ratcheted the city’s anxiety up to another level.
And if we weren’t near enough panic, Good Morning America opened with “The serial murderer in Atlanta known as the Wishbone Killer has struck again after letters taunting the Atlanta police and to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution detailing his plan. Was it politics that prevented Atlanta police from using their best resource, the public, to prevent this latest brutal murder? This morning nationally known criminal profiler Jacob Dobbs weighs in on the investigation and the menace known as Wishbone.…”
I sank into a cushioned chair and glared at the television. I had worked with Jacob Dobbs at the Bureau. Dobbs was a full-on sonofabitch, in my opinion, unfit to weigh in on any aspect of the investigation, since he had no insider knowledge of the investigation and “weigh in” really just meant “speculate.” I wondered if the killer was watching. The story had gone viral now. It must have been heady stuff for someone who had allowed the media to name him.
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Your Online Adult Edge Fetish & Knife Play Community blogs > beyond the EDGE, a fantasy by BladeDriver blog title > Sweet Sixteen
There is so much work left to do and so much pressure. They say they want it to stop, but do they really? No. They cannot wait to read about the