The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,4

worked with as a contractor at Tyrone’s Quikbail, and let him know I’d nabbed Johnson, the rascal started acting up.

Cops, trickling in at the end of their shifts, laughed at the commotion. “Hey, Keye,” one of the uniforms snickered. “You don’t look so good. You let Fat Boy kick your ass?”

I rolled my eyes and handed Johnson over for printing and then waited for the receipt I’d need to collect my money from Tyrone. When I ducked into Rauser’s glass office in Homicide, detectives sitting in their open cubes made kissing sounds. Rauser’s relationship with me was an endless source of amusement at the station. I suppose we seemed an unlikely pair. Rauser is white and twelve years my senior. We had come from different worlds and there were whispers around the station that we were lovers. Not true. But he is my best friend.

“Good morning.” I was trying to be cheerful even though my head was pounding. I hadn’t had time to wash up and I was still picking glass out of my forearms and wiping away dried blood.

Rauser looked terrible too. He gestured to the desk where they were fingerprinting Antonio Johnson. “Why you have to take shit work like that?”

“Money,” I said, but he wasn’t buying it. The smile dropped off my face. It was his tone. Sometimes that’s all it took for Rauser to do that to me, and I didn’t like it. He had that look in his eye. He always picked on me when something wasn’t right in his world.

“Keye, for Christ’s sake. You got degrees and corporate accounts. You don’t have to do that crap. I don’t get the choices you make sometimes.”

I was playing with the pencil cup on his desk and refusing eye contact, which, in his mind, was dismissive and I knew it, but I wasn’t in the mood for all his Daddy stuff.

I briefly ran a mental list of the corporate accounts he was talking about. The retainers were fat. I’d paid down some of the mortgage on my loft with them. But the work was mind-numbing—employment service application checks, nanny backgrounds, lawsuit histories on contractors, workers’ comp cases, unfaithful spouses, service of process. The odd subpoena offered a bit of challenge from time to time, but for the most part it was all excruciatingly boring.

I’d been a licensed Bail Recovery Agent since leaving the Bureau. It bought the groceries while I built my private investigating business, and it still supplemented my income nicely. My shrink, Dr. Shetty, says it’s a power thing, that I have a brutal case of penis envy. What can I say? I like strapping on a big Glock now and then.

And the degrees: criminology from Georgia Southern, doctoral studies at Georgia State in developmental psychology. And none of it, even with eight years at the Bureau, would earn me a real position with a law enforcement agency in this country. Not now. Drinking had changed all that. It entered my records as it tore away at my life and discredited me professionally forever. I couldn’t even jump on the expert witness gravy train. Expert testimony requires an expert who can’t be discredited on the stand. That’s so not me. My closet is full of bones.

I was fifteen when I first heard about the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, and I could think of nothing else after that. I tailored my studies and my life around getting there, and a few years later, there I was. And then I blew it.

Sometimes you only get one chance at something. Sometimes that’s a good thing too. When that door slams shut on the thing you couldn’t live without, what happens next is when the real education begins. You have to figure out how to make some peace with it all, how to have an interior life you can live with. Digging down deep is never really a bad thing in the end, but it will flat-out kick your ass while it’s happening.

“Keep screwing around with bonding-company trash and you’re gonna get hurt,” Rauser grumbled, then muttered something that sounded like “sick fucks.”

I lowered myself gingerly into a chair across from his desk. There were two of them, thin black vinyl cushions with metal armrests. I was sore from the tumble I’d taken earlier and it was just beginning to sink in.

“What’s wrong?” I demanded.

Rauser slipped a cigarette from his shirt pocket, stuck it in the corner of his