The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,51

was bragging, actually bragging to me about his conquest, and whispering so she wouldn’t hear.

Jo? Who the hell was Jo? Mystified, I ransacked my shaken memory until the connection was made. The blood-spatter analyst! That’s who calls him Aaron. Jo Phillips, the big tall Amazon fucking bloodstain analyst! So that’s why they were so chummy that night at the scene. They probably had a history. Rauser cheerful and joking around at a murder scene. They were flirting, actually flirting, while David Brooks lay growing cold on a bloody bed. And I thought she was hitting on me. I’m an idiot. Then I remembered texting Rauser a couple of nights ago and not getting an answer. I collapsed onto the hotel couch. Over the phone line, I heard ice rattle in a glass. Rauser loved iced tea. He could drink gallons of it, sweet southern iced tea with mountains of sugar. I pictured him wandering into his backyard with the phone on his shoulder, sitting on the deck he’d built himself, with the sun on his back and a glass in his hand. He liked wearing wife-beaters, the cheap ones that come three in a package at Target. I didn’t want to think about her there with him.

I told him what Neil had discovered and that the courthouse might be the common ground, the place where the offender hunted for his victims, and where David Brooks and the others with lawsuits in Fulton might have met their killer.

“He’s probably getting transcripts from the file room. Do they keep a log of who checks out which files?”

“I’ll sure as hell find out,” Rauser said excitedly. “Maybe we got a courier. Couriers go there to pick up court records. And anyone with a case number, a date, and three bucks can get transcripts. Sweet Jesus, Keye, this is big. I owe you guys. Man oh man. I’ll get the security company that handles Fulton to get the tapes to us. Lot of cameras there. We’ll have a presence on duty there in ten minutes. Deputies covering the metal detectors will help. They know who goes in and out. Hang on, would ya? I gotta tell Jo bye.”

I felt the blood rushing to my head. My eyes might have bulged out a little. I heard muffled voices, laughter. Oh, please. Then, after leaving me on hold too long, the ungrateful ass returned to the phone and said, “Sorry, Jo had someplace to be.”

“New episode of Xena?” I asked without even trying to hide my resentment.

Mr. Sensitive laughed, and made hissing and yowling sounds, the kind that mean catfight to men everywhere.

I paced around my room after we hung up, obsessing about Jo and Rauser, about me delivering that kind of news to him, news that would redirect the entire investigation, and he had the nerve to put me on hold to say good-bye to her. I was livid, and I wasn’t even sure why. I had no right to be. I knew it, but knowing it did nothing to help. I ended up in the café downstairs eating two slices of lemon pound cake, which was better than sitting in the bar across the lobby drinking lemon vodka, and yet it was still something Dr. Shetty would have disapproved of, I was sure. I realized that somewhere in the back of my mind, I’d been saving Rauser for myself. He was my backup. It never occurred to me that someone might come along and threaten that. If I could have, I would have lifted my leg and peed on him right then and there. I ordered a third slice of cake.

I didn’t sleep well, and I wasn’t in the mood to cut deals with accountants this morning. For that matter, I wasn’t in the mood for anything. I felt upended and I had never been the kind to bury myself in work when something troubled me. I was far more likely to close the blinds, crawl into bed, and eat a bunch of Twinkies. I wasn’t drinking anymore, but in many ways, I still cycled through the behaviors I’d learned back then, isolating and self-indulgence being at the top of the list.

Denver was sunny and sixty-five degrees when I left my hotel and climbed into a rented Jeep Liberty. It was Saturday, a day when the chances were better of finding the man who had ripped off my client at home.

And I got lost. Somehow my brain never seemed to register direction like the