The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,98

yet that she’d ever crossed paths with Charlie Ramsey. But it was there somewhere. I knew it was. The first murder was always a road map to the others. This had all started with Anne. We’d find out why.

I thought about the hack job that had been done on Dobbs in a rental car in Midtown Atlanta. Sexually mutilated. What did it mean? To our knowledge, Wishbone had not performed his terrible sexual surgery on a victim since Anne Chambers. And why would he use a vehicle on a residential street? Extremely high-risk. He’d left fiber evidence for the first time. No bite marks. Part of Wishbone’s delight in killing was taking time with them. How does it feel? So why dispatch Dobbs so efficiently? The shock value, perhaps. High-profile murder. Add sexual mutilation and the media goes nuts. Was it that simple? Had I so deeply misunderstood the needs of this violent predator? At times it felt as if there were two Wishbones.

I wanted to beat my head against something. A bottle of vodka would have been nice.

I pulled the Neon into a service station in Brunswick. My directions told me to take US 82 or Seventh Street East or Georgia 520 West or Corridor Z, which was also South Georgia Parkway. Huh?

I needed a way to Atlanta without I-75, which would put me in Macon for the afternoon rush. No thanks. Macon’s highways hadn’t caught up with Macon’s population.

“Afternoon, ma’am.” The patch over his shirt pocket told me his name was Grady. The grease on his hands told me he was the mechanic, a meat-and-potatoes man with his sleeves rolled up and wavy brick-colored hair. He looked like a lot of the guys I’d known in high school.

He smiled, rested his forearms on my door, leaned in through my open window. I liked his eyes, soft and dark coffee brown with little gold flecks. “Like me to fill it up for you?”

Would I ever.

“Check under the hood? Never seen you around here. Just passing through?”

“You taking a survey?” I asked.

“Yes, ma’am. In fact I am.” His tone was swampy and rich, the accent Coastal Georgia. “However, in order to complete said survey, I’ll need your address and phone number and a few hours of your time this evening.”

I leaned closer to him and smiled. “Grady, honey, I’m at least ten years older than you are.”

His teeth were straight and very white, but the smile veered off to the left a little, imperfect and utterly adorable. “Well, that may or may not be true, ma’am, but I assure you I’m plenty grown up.” He pulled away from the car. “I’ll give you a minute to think it over.”

He made sure I got a good look at his butt in tight, grease-stained jeans on his way to lift the hood. I didn’t really need the oil checked, but it was an opportunity to further objectify Grady and, well, how often does that happen?

I stepped out of the car and showed Grady the driving directions I’d used. He got a kick out of this and told me he could keep me out of Macon and save me forty miles.

“Hey, I haven’t eaten any lunch. How ’bout you join me?” We were leaning against my car. “I mean, since you did end up here and all. Who knows? Maybe the universe is sending you a message.” His leg touched mine a couple of times and I felt it all the way south back to Florida. “I can’t leave until closing time, but I got MoonPies and RC Cola right here.”

RC and MoonPies? It had been years. Two disks made of graham cracker crumbs pressed together like cake with marshmallow wedged in between like a sandwich, and a thin shell of icing. God! I’m only human. And I needed a distraction. “Vanilla or chocolate?”

Grady grinned. He knew he had me. “Both.”

There was a picnic table on the side of the station in a little patch of grass. Some shrubs had been planted next to a trellis so loaded with flowering jasmine you could barely see it. We unwrapped cellophane-covered MoonPies and bit into them, chased it with ice-cold bottles of RC Cola that Grady had pulled out of an old red Coca-Cola cooler, the kind that stands about waist high and is packed with ice. He popped open the tops with the opener on the front, and in the heat of that day, I don’t think anything has ever tasted as cold or