The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,46

on anyone behind the door. No one there. I checked the closet and bath, then came back to LaBrecque, touched his neck with two fingers, held his wrist for a moment. No heartbeat, but his skin was still warm. I thought about this. He was a big guy, the cabin was hot, so even naked and with no blood pumping through him, his body would stay warm awhile. I thought again about the ruts I’d seen in the road.

I stooped to see his face. I was careful to disturb as little evidence as possible while remaining alert to any sound, shadow, movement in the cabin. Sometimes I think there’s a block of ice inside me, perhaps in the heart of every investigator, something ghoulish and coldly voyeuristic.

LaBrecque had been beaten viciously with some kind of weapon. His face was battered and bloodied, unrecognizable. A fist couldn’t have done this kind of damage. I studied the spatter in the room. Cast-off on the walls and ceiling and floors, medium-velocity spatter all over, the result of blunt trauma, an intense external force. It was consistent with the pool that had formed under his head.

I used two fingers to lift his chin off the floor. There it was. Blunt-force trauma, a cave-in just above the temple that must have fractured his skull. Why the rage? I thought about Darya. Was that the connection? Had the other victims been abusers of some kind? Only one other victim, the first that we knew about, the student at West Florida State University, had had a lot of facial bruising. What was it about LaBrecque and the first victim that had enraged the killer so?

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and pressed Rauser’s numbers, then noticed a bloody rolling pin on the floor a few feet away. Another connection to that first killing in Florida. When he’d killed Anne Chambers fifteen years ago, the killer had used something at the scene as a weapon. Perhaps it was just for efficiency. A rolling pin here, a lamp there. Not like you can carry those things around in your pocket. I got to my feet. There was something else that intrigued me about this scene. It was contained. It seemed to have begun and ended here in this one room. The rest of the cabin was free of spatter, undisturbed, furniture in place. Had the killer found LaBrecque asleep here in the bedroom, drunk in the middle of the day, let go the controlling blow before he could come to? Or had it been another seduction like Brooks? LaBrecque didn’t seem the type, but what was the type, really?

Rauser was on his way. He was calling Gwinnett County Homicide. I stayed there memorizing the crime scene as long as I could. When I heard the sirens, I took a shallow breath, stuck my Glock in my waistband and my hands behind my head. Then I headed out to greet the Gwinnett County cops, who didn’t know me from Ted Bundy.

16

I was exhausted. I’d spent hours at the LaBrecque scene, being questioned hard by detectives who wanted to know how it was that I happened to be consulting on the Wishbone cases while tracking a bail jumper who, it certainly appeared, happened to be the newest Wishbone victim. None of this was explainable, but I did my best until Rauser arrived at the scene and saved me, followed by Ken Lang and the CSI van. There was no small amount of tension. The Gwinnett County cops didn’t like having APD on the scene and Rauser wasn’t at all happy about someone else processing it. They finally reached some agreements but until then it was a full-on pissing contest.

It was very late in the afternoon before I got away. Rauser hadn’t wanted me to leave the scene, but there was nothing I could do there, and I still had a business to keep afloat and work I hadn’t even begun. I was also starving.

I called Neil. “Want some breakfast?”

“It’s after five,” he answered.

“Tell me about it.” Happy hour was tapping at my shoulder once more. It rarely passed unnoticed. And how I wanted one today.

“Rough day?” Neil asked.

“Not at Waffle House,” I said in a singsong way to tempt him, knowing full well it was one of his weaknesses. If there’s one thing you can count on down South, it’s Waffle House. The grill is cranking 24/7—eggs, bacon, waffles, and hash browns scattered, smoothed, and covered, crispy outside, soft