The Stranger You Seek

33





Georgia is a study in climate and backdrops, from the damp Low Country at the southeastern tip to the northern mountains reaching high enough to catch the winter snows before they turn to rain on the way south to Atlanta. Central Georgia is lush with kudzu and tall pine forests. I-75 runs for 355 miles from the swampy south and fresh seafood, past produce stands and cotton fields, country-cooking restaurants with homemade peach cobbler, truck stops and Waffle Houses, through Perry and Macon, until it merges briefly with I-85 and evolves into the Downtown Connector, Atlanta’s main artery, then splits off again and weaves through the textile-mill mountain towns of North Georgia toward Dalton, the carpet capital of the world.

I exited I-75 just north of Marietta and headed toward Ellijay and Blairsville in the Neon, knowing I’d have to cut off the air conditioner if I wanted enough power to climb the hills that were coming. My Impala had been moved from the crime lab to a repair shop but still wasn’t ready. Dad had taken charge of the body-shop details and I had a feeling he was armor-plating it.

It was Friday and warm, and it suddenly occurred to me I’d forgotten to cancel dinner tomorrow night with my parents. I picked up my phone and took a deep breath.

“What do you mean you can’t come?” my mother wanted to know. “You’re not off on another wild-goose chase, are you?”

I hesitated and Mother, righteous as ever, leapt in. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, is this dangerous?”

I sighed. “I’m looking for a cow, Mom. Unless she’s packing, I think I’ll be okay.”

“A cow! My Lord, Keye, that’s not what we sent you to school for.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I made banana cheesecake with a special pecan crust.” Mother was a ruthless negotiator.

“Will you go by and check on White Trash this weekend?” I thought of Melissa Dumas’s cat and the killer who’d left food out for it.

“Snowflake should just come and live with me and your father. Poor little thing—”

I crinkled the wrapper from the powdered doughnut gems I’d had for lunch into the phone. “Mom? Mom? We’re breaking up. I’ll talk to you later.”

My first afternoon on the cow trail was uneventful, something that may or may not be a good thing when searching for farm animals. I did have an opportunity to meet Jim Penland, the man with the missing cow, and he seemed perfectly normal, a big friendly guy with a good crop of hair, brown eyes, and Wranglers. He owned about a bazillion acres of land and the largest apple orchards in the region. Gilmer County was some kind of apple-growing capital, something the folks up here take seriously, and first thing, Big Jim took me over to one of his retail locations, a tourist trap set up on the four-lane, which is what they call the highway up here, and treated me to homemade fried pies with two scoops of cinnamon ice cream.

“My God,” I said after my first bite. My toes might have curled up a little.

“Good, ain’t they?” Big Jim was smiling at me. “Almost nothing like a pie made right in front of you with good fresh apples and homemade ice cream.”

“It’s unreal.” One of these every day and I’d never need sex again … ever.

Big Jim had already finished his first fried pie and was working on the second. Steam was still coming off it and the ice cream was turning into sugary goo. We were sitting at a picnic table on the porch of Big Jim’s log-cabin-style store. Tourists came in and left with hot pies in oil-stained brown paper bags and jars of homemade jam.

“So, what’s your plan?”

Plan? I looked at him blankly for a moment. “Oh, to find the cow, you mean.”

“Sadie,” he said.

“Right. Sadie. Well, I thought I’d just start by asking around, you know? Neighbors, employees, anyone known to be in the area when Sadie disappeared. Anything you can tell me that might help?”

“Sadie’s a real sweet girl. We’ve had her four years. One day she just come out of the pasture and started hanging around outside the house. Couldn’t keep her in a gate. She can open about anything. Came home one day and found her in the kitchen eatin’ spaghetti napkins out of the trash. Nuzzled my little girl’s face and that was it. We built her a small place nearer the house and she’d just trail around behind us all the time like a dog. Best dog we ever had, really.”

“So you just came home one day and she was gone or what?” I started on my second pie.

Big Jim nodded. “Pretty much. I’d been up at the orchards most of the day. My daughter was off with a friend, and my wife, she was up here helping out at the counter when somebody didn’t show up for work. Drove up and Sadie didn’t come out to meet the truck. Knew right then something wasn’t right.”

“And how long ago was that?”

“Last Tuesday. We done all the things you do when you lose a pet. Put up flyers, ran an ad in the paper, offered a reward. Truth is, we’re all just broken up about it.”

“Does Sadie have a history of roaming at all?”

“Once we stopped trying to lock her in the pasture, she stuck like glue. She never liked being fenced in. After that, she never left the yard unless she was following one of us.”

“Any enemies?” I asked, and took the last bite of my second pie.

“Nope. Everyone liked Sadie,” Big Jim said, and grinned at me. “Course I got enemies. I’m the richest sonofabitch in the county.”

“You make a list of them for me?”

“Ones I know about, I will,” Big Jim agreed cheerfully.

I spent the rest of the afternoon talking to Big Jim’s wife, Selma, Big Jim’s daughter, Kathie, and a few of Big Jim’s employees. They all seemed to love Sadie the cow, but few had vivid recollections of when and where they had last seen her. One of them told me they had all searched the property and the woods while Kathie was gone in case Sadie had gotten sick and wandered off to die, but found nothing.

I drove a couple of miles up Blackberry Mountain Road and found the cabin Larry Quinn’s office had arranged for me. I was sleepy and full of bad pie carbs and I didn’t know what else to do until Big Jim finished his enemy list. A nap sounded good, I decided. Can’t do that at home. Not ever. There’s always something pulling at me, something that needs my attention.

There were three cabins on the property. The owners came out of the largest cabin and met me in a gravel patch next to the barn where an SUV and a Harley-Davidson were parked. “Howdy. I’m Pat Smelly and this is Chris. You must be Keye.”

The Smellys? Really? I didn’t say anything, but I wanted to. Chris was in pastel short shorts; the kind really large women should not wear and always seem to. Pat was in jeans with her hands dug deep in her pockets, skinny and butch with shoulders like a coat hanger and a handshake that nearly brought me to my knees.

“Should be everything you need in the cabin,” Pat told me. Her accent was anything but southern. The twang was distinctive, with that odd, almost Canadian rhythm. I guessed her for Minnesota. “You’re in that little one-bedroom loft over there. It’s small but it’s got a nice deck over the pond. Coffee beans are in the freezer and there’s a grinder on the counter. You need anything else just let us know. Chris made some apple bread this afternoon and put it over there for you, and we just got Dish, so you can watch movies if you want.”

“Wow, thanks.” Mmm, apple bread.

“Need help with your bags?”

I shook my head. “I’m good, thanks. All I need is the key and a phone.”

“Door’s unlocked. Key’s on the table. Don’t have phones up here. Sorry,” Pat said, and took Chris’s hand.

No phones?

I watched them disappear back into their cabin. Lesbians in rural Georgia? Who knew?

An hour later I was balancing carefully on the deck railing, leaning as far forward as possible, the flat of one hand using the tin overhang on the tiny deck of my cabin as a brace, the other hand holding my cell phone toward the sky. I was trying not to look down. It was a thirty-foot drop to a slimy pond.

“Keye?”

I wobbled and nearly lost my footing. Pat and Chris Smelly were standing behind me with concerned looks on their faces.

“Jesus, wear a bell or something. You scared me.”

Pat gave an aw shucks shrug. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be up there like that. I don’t think that’s safe.” Chris nodded her agreement.

“I can’t get a signal anywhere else. Do you always just walk in?”

“We knocked, but you couldn’t hear us.” They looked at each other. Chris giggled, then covered her mouth. Pat held out a hand. “We saw you from our place and thought maybe you were in some trouble up here. You can get a signal from our roof. And we got some lawn furniture up there.”

“Really?” I took her hand and climbed off the railing.

“We made it flat so we could enjoy the view of the mountains.”

“It’s like having an extra room.” It was the first time Chris had formed a complete sentence in my presence, and it was deeply southern. “It’s our little terrace in the pines.”

“I don’t want to be a lot of trouble,” I said as we walked through the cabin and toward the front door. “Apple bread is really good,” I told Chris. I was embarrassed that I’d eaten half of it already. It was on the kitchen table, and since the cabin consisted only of two rooms downstairs, we had to walk right past it. I wondered if they had noticed.

“Bread’s my specialty,” Chris said, which came as no great surprise to me given the size of her ass.

The cabin I’d been assigned was furnished with gnarled-up raw wood chairs, an ancient futon, and lots of folksy chicken art. But the Smelly cabin had slate floors and a vaulted ceiling, stark modern furniture in a bright wide-open space, linen and leather, a towering A-frame glass wall that looked out at the Blue Ridge Mountains—Architectural Digest in the sticks. A basset hound and a tuxedo cat lay in front of the glass on a zebra rug. They paid me no attention at all.

“We did all the work ourselves. Bought the land about ten years ago, when you could still get it for a song,” Pat told me. “Pretty much pays for itself now and we just hang out.”

She opened a door and we climbed a narrow pine staircase, then went through another door that opened onto a rooftop crammed with plants and a gas grill, Japanese lanterns and two chaise longues, an outdoor daybed, all in a deep espresso. Somebody has a West Elm catalog, I thought.

“We’ll give you some privacy,” Chris said, and they left me standing on their roof with my cell phone.

Rauser answered on the second ring. “Hey, you. Get my message?”

“No. I can’t get a signal up here.”

“Where’s up here?”

“Ellijay. Um. A missing-cow case,” I said, and laughed. “My first, by the way. My mother is so proud. I’m on the Smellys’ roof right now, which might take some explaining.”

“You know, I really want to ask,” Rauser said with a grin in his voice.

“I’ll fill you in when I get home. How’s it going?” I almost didn’t want to know. Atlanta, the murders, at least for this one afternoon, seemed far away.

“The mayor’s screaming. The press is screaming, and Charlie Ramsey’s one slippery bastard. I told you he lost my teams a couple times. And my detectives are no dumbasses. The timeframes fit with when he started f*cking with Melissa Dumas twelve to fifteen hours before he actually killed her. And if the ME’s right on time of death for Dobbs, it’s consistent too. We thought Charlie was inside sleeping before we picked him up the first time, but he must have slipped out.”

I thought about that day we’d left the station after Charlie’s first interview with Rauser and the possible dead body call that came over Rauser’s radio. Charlie must have known while he was sitting there being his goofy innocent self in the interrogation room that the call was going to come in any minute, that Dobbs’s dead, mutilated body was baking in a hot, bloody car on Eighth Avenue. I closed my eyes. The killing no longer seemed so distant.

“You figure out how Charlie’s losing you?”

“Uh-huh,” Rauser said. “It was that self-storage warehouse. We set a honey trap for him, got the unit next to his and wired Bevins, put her in a wife beater and short shorts and an old car filled up with thrift-store crap.” Detective Linda Bevins was blonde and curvy, a little wide-eyed, the kind of woman guys really go for, the kind of woman guys usually underestimate. “Charlie pedaled by a couple times on his bike, then went for it. Offered her help unloading. Bevins put some of the bait out, mentioned she was in a legal thing with a boss that had fired her. She played it, didn’t push, waited for Charlie to ask the questions. I told her to say she had another load, so he’d know she was coming back and he could make his move. He was getting pretty comfortable, then he spotted a goddamn Salvation Army price tag on a lamp, and he put it together pretty fast. Threw the lamp down and rode off.” I heard Rauser hit his cigarette. “Here’s the good news: We finally got someone that recognized Charlie’s mug on TV. Says he raped her. She had a rape kit done after the event, but no one was able to pull in a viable suspect. And Balaki’s following up on another call. Same deal. Six weeks ago. This woman claims her attacker had a knife. If it pans out, I’ll have him in custody by morning, and he’ll have to submit to DNA testing for the rapes. Then I can get his ass off the streets while we build the Wishbone case.”

“That’s huge!” I said, and thought about the day Charlie had grabbed me, the language he had used, sexual and angry. I’d worked serial rapist cases at the Bureau. Some of them started as peepers, then escalated as they began to fully realize their violent fantasies. “Can you put him in Florida?”

“No. Not yet.”

“You’re a good cop, Rauser. I wouldn’t want to be the bad guy.”

Rauser’s strategy with compliments was to deflect rather than accept. “Tell me about the Smellys,” he said.

“They own the cabins where Quinn booked me. Nice. Well, their cabin is nice, anyway. Mine has a lot of embroidered framed roosters. Why do people do this to cabins? I mean, what is it about a chicken that makes you think cabin-in-the-woods? I just don’t get it.”

“Yeah,” Rauser said. “I think antlers and shit like that more than chickens.”

I laughed. “Well, they’re very nice people. They’re letting me use their roof to talk to you because this wall of mountains is blocking my reception.”

“Straight couple?”

“Gay women. Why?”

“Have you noticed the lesbian thing is a continuing theme in your life?”

“In your life,” I told him. “It’s all you think about. What is it exactly with the two-women fantasy thing and guys? I don’t get that either. It’s not like that with women. Just so you know. We don’t fantasize about men doing it.” I sank down into one of the Smellys’ espresso-colored lounge chairs. It was just after sundown, and the stars seemed so close here in the mountains, away from the city lights. “Okay, I take that back. We do think about it, but only if they’re underage and you can bounce a quarter off their rear ends.”

“So are these real lesbians or just women you think are hitting on you?”

“They live together and hold hands and everything. And I’m sure they would hit on me. They’re just obviously in love.”

“And we’re monogamous,” Pat said from behind me. She had a cup of something hot in her hand. Steam was rising off it.

“And they’re monogamous,” I repeated, and smiled at her, trying not to look as embarrassed as I felt.

“And what about the cow?”

I took the steaming mug from Pat. It smelled like herbal tea, minty and sweet. “Long story.”

Rauser chuckled. “I’ll call you tomorrow, Street. Try to stay out of trouble until then.”

I closed my phone and looked up at Pat. “I know how that must have sounded, but it’s just this friend of mine who teases me because he thinks that I think women always want me, when, in fact, I don’t think that at all, really. Just this waitress at Hooters and the forensic scientist he’s sleeping with. Most women don’t even like me, actually. And I don’t really know any lesbians, although my best friend is sleeping with one, and Atlanta has about a million. And Decatur. Oh my God. Have you ever been to Decatur? It’s, like, dyke central, perfect little short haircuts and athletic shoes.”

Pat was staring at me.

“I’m making it worse, aren’t I?”

“Enjoy your tea. Chris made it with mint from the garden.” She paused and seemed to choose her next words carefully. “Ever consider that if your friend’s sleeping with a lesbian, she may be a lesbian?”

I shook my head and smiled. “Absolutely not.”