Stranger in the Room: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

turn.”
    “You look hot this morning.”
    I was wearing a light heather blazer and skirt with a chocolate tank, a simple brown pump. Okay, so a simple pump from Louboutin meant a week’s salary. But they were gorgeous. I kind of wanted to lick them. I kissed the top of Neil’s head. “Flattery will not get me to the grocery store.”
    “A pox upon you.” He said it with a wave of his arm like a Shakespearean actor. “And your trashy little cat too.”
    His eyes drifted up to the television. Something in the way his expression changed made me follow them. I saw Rauser on the screen in the jeans I’d watched him peel off in my bedroom a few hours ago. Crime scene tape flickered in the foreground. Lights from police cruisers reflected off cars and dark streets. They were replaying a live shot from Rauser’s crime scene last night.
News trucks are here. I love ya, Street
. Med techs with a gurney from the ME’s office backed awkwardly out of a row of shrubs. Frank Loutz, the Fulton County medical examiner, followed the techs and the gurney out of the shrubbery. Loutz leaned in close to speak to Rauser, covered his mouth with his clipboard like an NFL coach on Sunday hiding his plays from the lip-readers. The reporter informed us grimly that a child had been found dead by a jogger. Cause of death had not been made official, but circumstances were suspicious. We were shown the moment the child’s mother stumbled on the scene—her screaming, breaking through scene tape, barreling toward the ME techs, running with a mother’s certainty that it was her son on the gurney. I lowered myself onto one of the leather sectionals scattered around the office and stared up at the television as the horror unfolded.
    Homicide Detective Linda Bevins leapt in front of the shrieking woman like a professional goalie. I knew Bevins. She was a good cop. The woman was crying, arguing, hands flailing. Bevins held hershoulders, said something. The woman seemed too heartsick to keep standing. She dissolved into the pavement.
    I thought about what the next few days would be like for her. This grieving woman, the family, friends, schoolmates, the detectives and techs, the unnamed jogger who stumbled over the lifeless body of a murdered child—they all would be altered in a hundred different ways, large and small, irrevocably.
    Raised voices and loud noises had been my trigger.
Where’s the money, old man? Give us the fucking money
. Then gunshots. Me shivering behind the counter. As a child, I carried the scars to new parents, who found themselves with a brooding, remote little girl. An intricate kind of dominoing takes place in one’s life after murder’s big net tangles you up. It goes on for years.
    The gurney was pushed into the back of the ME’s van. There would be a counselor on the scene soon to help deal with the collateral damage—traumatic stress, the depression and disbelief that would tear apart everyone who loved the boy. The parents would have a blur of questions coming at them, questions that would anger and bewilder them. The detectives would be chomping at the bit to exclude them as suspects as quickly as possible. The grief counselors would show up and do their best. But nothing would ever return to the kind of normal it had once been for that boy’s family.
    The camera moved to Rauser. I felt Neil’s hand on my shoulder. We watched Rauser help Detective Bevins pull the mother up off the ground and get her into a vehicle, away from the pitiless television lights. He tried to move past the cameras, but the reporter intercepted him. “Lieutenant Rauser, can you tell us anything about the murdered child?”
    Microphones stabbed up in his face. His square jaw flexed under a stubbly charcoal shadow, gray eyes passed over the camera. If anyone had seen or heard anything suspicious in the vicinity of Kings Court and Amsterdam, he asked that they call. He gave out the main number at APD, then ducked back under the scene