wasn’t the first time he had accused me of romanticizing the shitty things in my life, especially my relationship with Dan. I get all gooey when I’m lonely and forget what life with Dan was really like. I don’t think the human psyche has the capacity to fully recollect pain. There are pros and cons to this, of course.
Sometime around midnight, I decided that swallowing a little pride and calling Rauser back was the right thing to do.
There was exhaustion in his ragged voice. “I called Dobbs’s wife. A couple of local cops were there so she wouldn’t be alone when I told her. She seemed really weirdly calm, Keye, and then there was a noise like she dropped the phone. Officer told me she’d fainted.”
I thought about what that must have been like for Rauser. I thought about the pain Dobbs’s wife must be feeling knowing how brutal and squalid her husband’s death must have been. I didn’t know Jacob’s wife personally. I knew only that she ran the sociology department at a Virginia university and that they had been married for many years.
“I’m sorry,” I told Rauser, and I meant it.
“I fucking hate this job sometimes.” I heard Rauser’s shoes against a hard floor, squeaky hinges, and a heavy door closing.
“Where are you?”
“Pryor Street,” he answered, which meant he was at the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Center, the morgue, one of his least favorite places to hang out, I knew.
“Was the Lincoln a rental?”
“Yep. It’s at the crime lab. Spatter says he was killed in it.”
“I don’t get it. What was Dobbs doing in that neighborhood in the middle of the night? Did he pick someone up? Was he forced to drive there? Was he meeting someone?”
“We’re working on it. We have a witness says he was alone at the hotel valet station a few minutes after midnight when he asked for his car. We know he’d consumed enough alcohol to be impaired. Here’s what I think. He slept half the day away on your sofa, so by late last night he’s wide awake. Strange city, he’s alone so he goes out to cat around a little, drinks too much, and lets his guard down. We’ve canvassed the street. Nobody knew Dobbs except from the news and no one remembers exactly when the Lincoln showed up. I think the location was random. The street was quiet. Killer forced him to drive to the site. So we’ve got three, maybe four hours we haven’t accounted for yet between Dobbs leaving his hotel and the DB call.”
I closed my eyes. It was still hard to wrap my mind around a dead body call for Jacob Dobbs.
Rauser said, “Fatal wound in about the same place as Brooks, the substernal notch. Angle tells us the killer was in the passenger seat and reached across the car. Had to be right-handed to get enough power to sink the blade.”
“He’s upping the ante,” I told Rauser. “The pictures he says he’s taking, the letter writing, using the Internet to copy me on emails, tampering with my car, dealing with a florist, and now a high-profile target like Dobbs. His need to fuel his evolving fantasies is escalating. It’s trumping his instinct for self-protection. He’s taking risks. His illness is progressing.”
“Which means he’s not being as careful. Loutz got fiber evidence. He thinks it’s a carpet fiber. I went to Dobbs’s hotel and got a carpet sample. It didn’t match. I’m trying to get a warrant to get samples from Charlie’s place. Fiber evidence may be all we got by the time we get in there. I got a feeling he dumped the knife and the pictures and anything else the little freak likes to hold on to even before we arrested him this morning. That’s what I woulda done if I’d just stuck a knife into a big shot a few dozen times.”
I thought about Charlie’s town house and remembered seeing a fireplace downstairs, an easy place to destroy pictures. Erasing them off a phone or digital camera would be easy too. And it wouldn’t be hard for a bike courier to ditch a knife. APD could not possibly cover every step Charlie took. He was in and out of office buildings, commercial centers, and public restrooms all day. Rauser was probably right about the evidence disappearing.
“What else do you know about Dobbs?”
“Wound patterns are consistent with the knife from the other scenes. But get this: no bite marks. None.”
“Not enough time for the