No Place Safe

by Kim Reid

  “These probably aren’t the best shoes for police work, but I know you gotta be cute. And look how muddy they are.” My efforts to take her mind away from the crime scene with some teasing didn’t work.

  “We were in the woods. My heels kept sinking into the ground.” She kneaded her feet with gloved hands. I didn’t hear the usual strength in my mother’s voice, which once calmed my worries with a few words. “He was only wearing his underwear, but like all the other boys, there wasn’t any sign he’d been messed with. But they don’t know for sure. There’s not much for the medical examiner to go on by the time we find some of them.”

  “I got dinner warm for you.”

  “Let me wash up first.”

  Ma came back to the kitchen table, but the minute I pulled the plate from the oven, she had to run for the bathroom. She closed her door, but I waited outside until the retching sounds ended. She was in there a long time before she told me to go to bed.

  “I’ll wait until you feel better.”

  “No, it’s after midnight and you have school tomorrow. I’m all right.”

  I didn’t believe her, but I left my post at the bathroom door anyway.

  *

  I grew up with superstitions taught to me by the women in my family, mostly from my grandmother and aunts because Ma said she didn’t have time for that foolishness. I learned to burn my hair lest birds make a nest with it and bring all types of bad luck on me. I never put my purse on a floor unless I wanted to lose all my money. And I was careful not to swipe anyone’s feet with the broom while sweeping because I didn’t want to be the reason for any catastrophe that might befall them.

  My greatest fear was Friday the 13th because since I’d turned ten, I’d had some mishap on every Friday the 13th: slipped in the garage and fractured my arm (didn’t matter that I was wearing flip-flops and hosing down the slick concrete floor); riding my bike down a hill, I crashed into a just-opened car door and went flying (didn’t matter that I was riding on the wrong side of the street); electrocuted while plugging in the sewing machine (this turned out to be bad wiring in the apartment we lived in at the time). Each accident put me into the emergency room, but I’d survived them all.

  So I waited for whatever was coming on Friday the 13th, February 1981. It turned out the bad thing wasn’t meant for me this time. Two more bodies were found. One was the body of Patrick Baltazar, who had gone missing a week earlier from Piedmont Avenue in downtown Atlanta. The eleven-year-old, who had enough confidence and maturity to hold down a job as a restaurant busboy, had boasted to his friends that the killer would never get him. He was found in a ditch behind the Corporate Square office park just inside Dekalb County in north Atlanta. It had rained heavily on the Tuesday and Wednesday of that week, and the police could tell from his waterlogged clothes that he’d been in the ditch since at least Tuesday. He’d disappeared the Friday before.

  I thought of this boy often when, a few years later as a college freshman, I got a job working in the same office park, in the same building near where he was found. I’d forgotten many of the details of the investigation by then, but this case came back to me the first time I walked past the ditch, and each time after. The memory wasn’t vivid, it was just a fleeting realization that there had been a cool February day when a dead boy had lain nearby, that his killer had been there, and that Ma had been there, too, working the crime scene, slightly distracted, wondering whether I’d gotten home safely that day.

  On the same day the boy was found in the ditch, Ma and the rest of the Task Force searched an expanded area of where other victims had been found, now considered one of the killer’s dumping grounds, in some woods off Suber Road. That’s where they found the skeletal remains of Jefferey Mathis, the ten-year-old boy who’d gone missing from the West End, just two blocks from my old school, in March of 1980. It was believed he’d been lying out in those woods for nearly a year. It took the medical examiner a week to identify the remains. His mother didn’t believe, or maybe didn’t want to believe, that it was her child they’d found, said it couldn’t be her boy. But that must have been her heart and her hope talking, because there was nothing left of him that even a mother could identify with only her eyes. The boy’s medical records were enough confirmation for the medical examiner and the cops, even if not for the boy’s mother.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The third week of February was a busy one for the Task Force and the killer. The city announced that it was making some headway in the investigation, that there were fibers found on Patrick Baltazar, the twentieth victim, that matched fibers found on five others. This meant that at least six of the victims had been in the same place, possibly the killer’s car or home. It also confirmed that at least six of the victims were linked. This may have seemed like obvious information to most people, but to the cops, it was something they could finally go on. If they could find the source of the fibers, they might possibly find the killer, or at least one of them.

  This news that the police were getting closer didn’t scare the killer at all. Two days later, thirteen-year-old Curtis Walker, who was last seen on Bankhead Highway trying to scare up an odd job or two at a gun shop, had gone missing. The last time people at the gun shop saw him was around five o’clock in the evening, past the curfew and already well into dusk. On the same day, the Task Force officially added Aaron Wyche to the list, the boy police originally said had fallen from a bridge over a railroad track.

  In January of 1981, a witness had come forward and said he’d seen Aaron get into a car with a black male, and gave a description of the driver similar to descriptions given by other witnesses in some of the other victims’ cases. As a result of the tip, Dekalb County police reopened the case to investigate it as a homicide themselves, and didn’t turn the case over to the Task Force until nearly the end of February and after the twenty-first victim went missing from Bankhead Highway. This was just one example of the difficulties the massive and sprawling Task Force investigation had. The sheer geographic size of Atlanta and its suburbs, the fact the killer or killers were operating in multiple jurisdictions when abducting the children and disposing of their bodies, made the case difficult for even the best cops in town to manage.

  *

  Ma was still tracking down information on the man who claimed he’d only taken Alfred Evans to the bus stop and nothing more, convinced he was the closest thing she had to a viable suspect in the second victim’s murder. I found a transcript of an interview Ma and her partner Sid had with that suspect whose name seemed to be spoken in our house with regularity now, on phone calls, Motorola radio transmissions, and visits from other detectives working the case. Whenever I read the interviews, I had to imagine Ma taking on her cop persona to hear the words as she must have said them during the interview. I’d noticed a trend in the transcripts. When the person interviewed was a woman, especially a victim’s mother, Ma’s words sounded gentle, reassuring, like she was trying to be the woman’s friend and confidante. The male partner in the interview, oftentimes Sid, played the impatient and insensitive cop looking for a confession. When they interviewed a man, it went the other way—Ma played the bad cop to Sid’s good. I guess cops actually do that.

  The dialogue may have sounded like some kind of hack TV cop show, if you weren’t a person living in Atlanta and living with the reality of the murders every day.

  Sid: You take him out?

  Suspect: I wouldn’t do something like that.

  Sid: Somebody did.

  Suspect: Yeah, somebody. I hope y’all hurry up and find that somebody, too.

  Sid: We want to resolve this matter. This whole thing has the city in an uproar.

  Suspect: Not only the city, the people.

  Sid: I meant the city, the people. Somehow, we’ve got to do something about this thing.

  (Sid later leaves the room on some pretense, allowing Ma to interview the suspect alone.)

  Ma: It’s looking bad for you, real bad. I was hoping you would
help us. You are still not being truthful with me.

  This last line is not a stretch for me to imagine, because it sounds similar to the interrogations I’d get from Ma when I missed curfew, or got into some other trouble.

  Suspect: Yes I am.

  Ma: Just think about all the times you’ve changed your story.

  Suspect: All you got to do is talk to _____, and she can tell you how screwed up my memory is.

  Ma: She could tell you that, but I don’t think that would help you in court.

  Suspect: What do you mean, help me in court?

  Ma: That’s about where you’re going, on your way to court.

  Suspect: Yeah?

  Ma: That’s the way it looks. You haven’t been charged with anything, I’ve tried to give you several opportunities to tell me the truth. But you know what? The more I work to prove. Really, I’ve been working to find your stories true. So I can eliminate you can’t eliminate you. The more I work to prove you’re telling me the truth, the more I find you are lying.

  Suspect: No, I am not lying. Don’t accuse me again.

  Ma: Okay. What you want me to call it?

  Suspect: I told you, I got a bad memory.

  Ma: Okay. The more I find that you have a bad memory.

  Ma wasn’t buying his story, but a bad memory wasn’t enough to build a case on.

  *

  The pressure only grew as the country finally turned its attention on Atlanta. At the end of February, Phil Donahue did a special show on the investigation. National morning news shows began carrying the story, updating viewers around the country with the growing death count. President Reagan gave one and a half million dollars in aid to the city. Vice President Bush sent his special aide to town to speak to the mayor personally and to find out what more Washington could do to help Atlanta. And Ma and Sid were chosen to go on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour to discuss the Task Force investigation.

  I’d seen Ma on TV before, but only on the evening news for just a few seconds while the cameras watched her make an arrest, or as she walked behind a reporter who was giving an update from a crime scene. This time she was going to be interviewed and the tape shown all around the country, although I remember wishing it wasn’t being shown on PBS, a station I believed had only two demographics—preschoolers and old people. I figured not many of my friends would catch the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.

  Bridgette, Ma, and I sat on Ma’s bed, our evening TV viewing spot despite having the garage turned into a rec room. We made a bowl of popcorn like we were in front of a movie, and watched the opening credits, excited about our brief moment of celebrity.

  “When will they show you, Ma?”

  “Hush, we’ll miss something.”

  Then Ma appeared on screen with Sid, looking like herself and not whatever I’d imagined. I blamed my slight feeling of disappointment on too many fantasies of Ma as Christy Love, Coffy, and Foxy Brown. She looked regular, like any businesswoman, except she was trying to explain what the Task Force was doing and why they hadn’t figured out who was killing Atlanta’s children. Ma, Sid, and their bosses hoped to get two things from the national public, one spoken, the other not: help in solving the cases and sympathy for the maligned Task Force.

  Charlayne Hunter-Gault appeared neutral, almost sympathetic I thought, to Ma and Sid during the interview. She didn’t attack them the way I expected most journalists would if given the chance. But she was still an Atlantan and like every other person who called Atlanta home, she wanted to know what was being done to stop the killer. So she asked questions that Ma and Sid couldn’t always fully answer although they gave it their best shot, partly because doing so would compromise the investigation, but also because they just didn’t have the answer. Especially to the questions about whether the murders were racially motivated.

  But she asked questions I knew no one in town could fully answer. If they could, I’d have been watching Perry Mason reruns instead of PBS. I’d go to bed that night without fear that there’d be another child found dead in the morning. Bridgette would be sleeping in her own bed instead of mine, which she’d taken to doing on the nights Ma spent working some crime scene. And I wouldn’t have been wondering whether the despair I saw in Ma’s eyes on the TV screen was something I’d imagined, a trick played by television cameras, or something real.

  *

  Bridgette and Ma weren’t home even though it was after seven and I’d already cooked dinner, cleaned the dishes and checked the phone twice to see if maybe it was off the hook. Just as I was about to call the Task Force to see if anyone knew where my mother was, I heard a car door slam shut. It was an unmarked police car and I felt a little better until I saw Bridgette get out of the passenger seat and right away noticed she’d been crying. I wondered if this was the Moment, but no, the detective was smiling. Even Bridgette was smiling, holding on to a fast-food restaurant bag. This isn’t the moment, I told my stomach, and it tried to settle down.

  “I’m Detective Hurst,” he said to me. Right away, I noticed and appreciated that he spoke to me like an adult, though I’m not sure why he did or why I appreciated it. “No worries, your mom’s okay.” He was also a mind reader, or had family at home who also prayed the Moment never came, but were always prepared, or thought they were, if it did.

  “Where is she?”

  “She got caught up on a scene, so she asked if I could see to your sister getting home.”

  “Thanks for bringing her home, Detective Hurst. For the dinner, too.”

  “No problem. You girls gonna be all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your mom says she might not be home for a while yet.”

  “We’ll be okay.” I was immediately angry at Ma for not calling to say she’d be late, or to say a cop I’d never met would be bringing Bridgette home, or to tell me how long “a while yet” would be this time.

  When the detective pulled out of the driveway, I noticed how cold the evening had grown. February was like that in Atlanta, the warm days could fool you into thinking spring had arrived, and the nights reminded you that no such thing had happened.

  “Why were you crying?” I asked Bridgette as I hustled her inside.

  “When?”

  “Before. I can still see the streaks on your face from where you were crying. And your eyes are still red.”

  “I wasn’t crying. I was mad. Ma was so late. It was closing time and the afterschool people were trying to find her. I thought she’d forgotten about me. Then the cop came, and he scared me.”

  “Why did he scare you?”

  “Anybody she ever had pick me up has been someone I already knew, some good friend of hers. I didn’t know what to do ’cause I didn’t know him and ’cause he’s white, and Ma doesn’t have any close white cop friends that I know about. And you know how they’re saying it’s a white man killing the kids.”

  “But he showed you his badge, right? And the afterschool teacher saw his badge, right? And you know what an unmarked car looks like.” Even though it was over and Bridgette was safe at home, it made me afraid thinking about what might have happened. I wanted to make sure she knew the right things to do next time, because I was certain there’d be a next time.

  “That doesn’t matter anymore. You know what the mayor said.”

  “About what?”

  “That until they catch the killer, everybody’s a suspect. And one of the parents of the dead kids was on TV talking about how it could be a cop, for all she knew. For all I know, too.”

  “So what made you go with him?”

  “He knew the code.”

  I’d long forgotten the code, mostly because I didn’t have much need for it anymore. For a few years now I’d been responsible for getting myself home; it had been a long time since a patrol car came to pick me up from school because Ma couldn’t get away from some crime scene. But back in those days when she couldn’t always rely on a friend or family to pick me up, Ma had given me a codeword. We had decided on Mannix, the
name of my first dog and the cop show she loved to watch, never suspecting she would be running down bad guys herself a few years later. I could only get into the car of someone who new the codeword, no matter whether he was a cop or not, in uniform or not. Back then I thought it was cool, a secret that made me, in a small way, part of the Blue circle. Now, it only made me angry.

  *

  When Ma got home, the first orange in the sky was just beginning to show. I’d already missed the bus that would get me to school on time, but I couldn’t leave Bridgette home alone.

  “God I’m tired,” she said as she hung her coat in the hall closet. “My feet are killing me.”

  I didn’t say anything at all, just watched her from the kitchen table while she pulled off her boots, which I noticed were caked in mud again.

  “What are you pouting for now?”

  “You didn’t call.”

  “I was in the woods on an investigation. I couldn’t even get decent radio reception, much less get to a phone. I had to send a uniform into radio zone so he could call the captain and make sure someone could get Bridgette. I told them, ‘I have to get my child. Either get someone to pick up my child or I have to leave this crime scene right now.’ Didn’t Hurst tell you I’d be late?”

  “Yeah, but he didn’t say tomorrow.”

  “I got a mother.” Ma’s tone told me that I needed to back down, but I was ready to fight until I noticed the expression in her face change from tough cop to someone I’d never seen before. Her eyes were wet and it scared me. I filed through every memory I had and realized that I’d never seen my mother cry. I thought I’d heard her cry late at night through the double layers of bedroom doors. But I’d never seen it. Never, not once. I was afraid of what might come next and tried to leave the table before it did.