The Stranger You Seek Read Online Free PDF

it. I was grinning at him and his old scarred-up case. The bottom corners were worn white and the intricate leatherwork on the outside was too faded to know what the original artist might have had in mind. It tickled me. That was the kind of guy Rauser was. The department had offered him a new car, but he liked his old Crown Vic. “Rauser,” I’d said, “this car has an eight-track. What are you thinking?” He had shrugged and mumbled something about dreading cleaning out the glove box andthe window pockets and everywhere else he’d stuffed notes and maps and papers and cigarettes and junk.
    He withdrew a stack of photographs from his case and dropped them in front of me. They hit with a loud smack. No warning. Crime scene photographs just tossed at me. Death on my desk. My smile and my good mood faded fast.
    “A stay-at-home mom,” Rauser said as I took a photo into my hand and drew in a quiet breath. “Nobody special. Know what I mean?” He lowered himself into the chair across from me. My stomach felt suddenly like it was full of granite.
    I turned over the top photo, read the date and the name, her age at death, ethnicity. Lei Koto, Asian female, thirty-three years old, stomach-down on a bloody kitchen floor. You could see the edge of an oven in the upper right-hand corner. Her legs were spread, buttocks and inner thighs naked and bloodied, plenty of stab and bite marks. She looked so small and so alone lying there, I thought, and I was struck, as I always am, at what a solitary business death is, and at how stark, surreal, distorted and telling all at once violent-murder-scene photographs are—the wounds and bruises eerily illuminated by the bright lights used by scene techs, the blood and matted hair, the unnatural positions, the screaming absence of life. Even at a glance, before detail emerges, you know it’s a death scene. One never forgets.
    “Who found her?” I asked.
    “Ten-year-old kid,” Rauser answered. I looked up from the photographs, and he added, “Her son. His name is Tim.”
    This would change him, I thought, change the way he sees the world, sees a stranger, a spot of blood, an empty house. It would change this little boy as it had changed me. We are all of us disfigured in some way by the grief that murder always leaves in its wake. I didn’t want to think about this child or what he felt or what he will feel. Interest in this sort of thing invites darkness to bleed into your life. And even knowing this, I ached for him. A part of me wanted to help piece him back together somehow, warn him of the nightmares, warn him of the shuffling around that would come. No one really knows what to do with a child who has been made homeless by violence. Will relatives take him? the police would wonder aloud, thoughtlessly and with the best intentions.Adults would whisper and worry and shoot concerned glances his way, increasing his terror tenfold. A stranger from social services would come to sit with him while they searched for next of kin. But no reassurances, no kindness can mend that kind of terrible rip in the infrastructure. It would take years.
    The crime scene photographs trembled in my fingers.
    “Why are you showing me this?”
    Rauser handed me a letter addressed to him at the Homicide Division, neatly printed and without a signature. I looked at him for a moment before I began to read. His eyes were steady on me.
    Dearest Lieutenant
,
    Do you want to know how I did it? No—your forensic experts have determined that much by now. Did you find the details troubling? I have such vivid memories of standing on her front steps smelling her small kitchen. She smiled as she pushed open the door for me
.
    I know where your mind must be going, Lieutenant, but you will not find a trace of me in her life. I was no part of her inner circle. She died not knowing who I was. She died asking W HY? They all want some peace in the midst of chaos. Their chaos, not mine. I do not tell them. I am not there to