The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,57

the plane, and had not yet normalized. My black leather computer case hung from one shoulder. The scrolling digital signs overhead read one minute until the next train. I could feel it coming under the slate floors in the transportation lobby, a barely perceptible vibration accompanied by a low rumble a moment before it rolled into the dock and the glass doors hissed open.

I quickly slipped through the crowd to make the train before the doors sucked shut again, and grabbed on to one of the poles in the center for balance. My eyes swept the compartment. It wasn’t hard to suppose an egoist, a voyeur, a violent sociopath like the one we sought might like to see me when I returned. Might want to check my face for fear, for stress. The whole game—and it was a game—was really about changing and maiming the lives of others. Now this killer had both Rauser and me in his communication loop. He’d want to play cat and mouse for a while. Was I really feeling someone watching me or was this merely a reaction to the email I’d received? I had read it over and over on the plane and it was enough to raise the hair on my arms. My DNA can do only one thing for you: give you some reference for the next one.… Isn’t it so like the media to take something out of context without telling the whole story? What will they leap at next? W.

It made for a long walk through the airport and across the long-term parking decks, which even during the day are shadowy and uninviting, but just after midnight when air traffic is down and there is only the occasional ghostly whine of a jet engine to interrupt the sound of my suitcase rolling and bumping over concrete, the feeling was … sinister, like someone was about to jump out of the bushes. Okay, so I realize there are no bushes at Hartsfield-Jackson. The point is, I no longer seemed capable of distinguishing between real and imagined danger.

Was I next? I kept thinking. No. I didn’t fit the victim profile at all, but then, what really fit with this offender? How was he profiling his victims? We had one connection with some of the victims but not all, not enough to understand the selection process. I willed myself to move casually at a normal pace, not to turn around. Just get safely to my car. Occasionally I’d hear a door slam shut or an engine growl to life. Every sound seemed to be amplified. Perhaps he didn’t want me at all. He’d already passed up an opportunity, or so he bragged, at the LaBrecque scene. Was this about watching? Watching was fuel.

Watching was power.

I imagined eyes burning into my shoulder blades as I neared my old Impala. It took everything I had inside me not to just dump my suitcase on the concrete and run like hell. With this killer, a line had been crossed. In my experience working on all types of serial offender cases with the Bureau, profiling serial murderers, child molesters, rapists, I’d never been pulled in personally. There was always a barrier between the offenders and the criminologists. Emotionally, my work had taken its toll. I’d taken it home with me and into the bed I shared with my husband. Night sweats, a drink to settle my nerves, to put in perspective the horrific acts I’d spent the day reconstructing in excruciating detail. A drink before work to numb the exhaustion, the depression. A drink to kill the hangover. Anyone capable of empathy, I am convinced, is marked by the ability to comprehend victim suffering. Some of us handle it better than others, that’s all. But that dark existence had never physically knocked on my door as it did now.

I unlocked the car, slung my suitcase across the seat, and hopped in with my heart slamming. Thank God my father had taken the beat-up Impala I’d driven in high school—V-8 with four hundred and twenty-seven horses—redipped it in chrome and completely restored it for me just before I went off to college. So it certainly had what I needed to ditch a tail. Even now with the bullet hole in the windshield, my old Impala gave me a thrill. It rumbled like an underground train and I loved the sound when the top was down. After all, I’d come of age in Georgia, surrounded by muscle cars and