The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,50

two and Shelby would have been able to afford some stuff. Now here’s the interesting thing: Lei Koto won a wrongful death suit against the electric company her husband worked for when he was killed on the job. The litigation took almost six years.”

I tried to wrap my mind around this. “So there’s no connection to the domestic abuse thing at all. But you’re telling me there’s a link to civil lawsuits or civil law in general?”

“Looks like it. Weird, huh?”

“Very. Maybe the killer sees civil cases as being about greed, as being frivolous. Really sets him off, he sees the plaintiff as the problem. Interesting.”

“Maybe he got a raw deal, got screwed over by the system, or some judge or jury found against him. Maybe it trashed his business or livelihood. Whoa! Just got a big idea. Maybe that’s how our guy gets them to open the door, he goes with this injury thing, and pretends to be disabled. Who wouldn’t open the door for someone in a chair, right?”

It was something to consider. We were quiet thinking about it. “Where were the suits filed?”

“Shelby’s was in Florida, but Koto’s was in Fulton. And it looks like the bulk of the cases filed by Brooks and Richardson went through Fulton as well.”

“What about LaBrecque? And the first vic in Florida, Anne Chambers?”

“No connection with LaBrecque and, well, it’s not all that easy to find anything on Anne.” He paused, and his voice had softened a little when he spoke again. “She was just a kid, you know? Why would someone do that to her?”

If you think about it, really allow yourself to contemplate the violence and terror in murder, to feel any of the fear and confusion the victim might have felt or consider what they left behind, all that collateral damage, the shock and loss and lives derailed, it will break your heart. Neil had never been this close to it. I was quiet while he collected himself.

“Find out where Anne Chambers’s family is now, would you, Neil? I want to speak with them. I’m going to call Rauser and let him know what you found. He’s going to be bouncing off the walls. This is huge. You did good, Neil. Really.”

I set my phone down for a moment and thought about this. Had David Brooks and Elicia Richardson been murdered because they practiced civil law? How many more victims were out there that hadn’t been logged into a database or didn’t fit the MO and signature? We knew now that this killer was adaptable. Did Lei Koto’s young son find her butchered on the kitchen floor because his mother had decided to sue an electric company over her husband’s death? I remembered the pot of cabbage left burning on the stove, scorched and stinking, as the boy called 911, and then waited alone with her body for the police to arrive at the scene. I can still envision my murdered grandparents when I close my eyes, smell the nervous sweat of their killers, the blood, the piercing sourness of a shattered jar of cranberry juice that had fallen from a grocery shelf. To this day, I can’t get near cranberry anything without my stomach doing flip-flops. Murder marks and orphans children, and it rips families apart. I wanted this killer off the streets.

My mind was clicking along. Civil suits and civil attorneys. What did they have in common? Judges, clerks, process servers, stenographers, a courthouse. And then it hit me. The courthouse. Is that the elevator mentioned in Wishbone’s second letter? Is that where the killer saw David Brooks? Was Atlanta’s Fulton County Courthouse the hunting ground for a serial murderer?

17

No one else had ever answered Rauser’s phone when I called. Not ever. Her voice seemed vaguely familiar, but I was too dumbfounded to place it right away.

“Aaron, it’s for you,” she had called out.

Aaron? I heard the rustling of fabric, a receiver dropped and retrieved, muffled laughter. “Who calls you that?” I asked when he finally answered.

“A friend,” he said mysteriously. His voice had a gravelly sound I’d heard a million times, too much whiskey and too many cigarettes.

“You know what’s wrong with that, Rauser? You don’t have any friends,” I joked, but I felt like screaming at him, balling up my fists and pounding on his chest. Jesus, it felt like he was cheating on me. He hadn’t even told me he was seeing anyone.

“It’s Jo,” he whispered, and I recognized the locker-room tone. He