We visit for a while and then stay with Sam while Daniel goes to get food and a few things he needs.
I am so glad Sam is here at Shands—and not just because of the quality of care, but because the young Banks boy I shot is in the hospital down near Tampa where they first took her. And though Leslie Marie Boning, the girl Bobby Lee had in his truck, is too, and I’d really like to check in on her, I’d find it very difficult to be that close to the boy again—or chance running into his family.
When Daniel comes back, Reggie and Merrick are with him.
“Look who I found loitering out in the hallway,” Daniel says.
“Didn’t know y’all were coming,” I say. “We could’ve ridden down together.”
“I should’ve checked with you,” Reggie says. “But I knew you were taking Johanna to meet her mother so . . . I didn’t figure you were coming down here too.”
“Couldn’t not,” I say.
“That really means a lot,” Daniel says. “Really. You have no idea.”
“We all love Sam,” Anna says.
“And though we don’t want to rush you,” Reggie says to Sam, “we are anxious for you to come back to work.”
At that, tears begin streaming down Daniel’s cheeks.
Merrick, who is closest to him, puts his arm around him.
“She’s got to get better,” Daniel says. “Got to. I can’t . . .”
We are all quiet a moment, and I reach down and take Sam’s hand and begin to pray for her.
“Did she ever tell y’all how we met?” Daniel says. “She suspected me of being a serial killer.”
“There’s a statewide task force for finding Bobby Lee Banks’s victims,” Reggie is saying.
We are standing out in the hospital hallway not from Sam’s room.
It’s just the two of us. Anna, Merrick, and Daniel are still inside with Sam.
“They’re dragging large bodies of water in towns where the carnival is known to have gone. Our own search and rescue will be helping. Found two more so far. One in Pompano Beach. One in Sarasota.”
I nod.
“We’re hoping DNA from the truck will give us some indication on how many victims we’re looking for, but for now we’re looking at missing girls who match the profile from the places the carnival traveled to.”
“He didn’t just start when he got that truck and turned it into . . . what he turned it into.”
“No. You’re right. It’s just a place to start. Some of the Banks foster kids are cooperating. Willard and his wife are pretending to be, but . . . they couldn’t have been as oblivious as they claim. Ironically, it seems what they most wanted from the kids they took in was free labor. The real damage was done to Bobby Lee long before they adopted him. Couple of pretty sick foster monsters really did a number on him. Had a little sister die back then, which is why he was taken away from them. Now it looks like he may have been involved in killing her.”
“Any update on Leslie Marie and the Banks kid?”
“The girl went home this morning,” she says. “Y’all got to her before he had done much. She’s traumatized, still in shock, but she’s gonna be great again—and she has you to thank for that. You and Sam.” She frowns as she glances back toward Sam’s room. “The kid’s gonna live. And I’m only glad about that for your sake. Bobby Lee used to force different young foster boys to go with him. Always armed. Always waiting in the front of the truck as a lookout. We’ve found two men so far we’re pretty sure they shot—a fisherman near Bristol and a homeless man in Deerfield Beach. The kid you shot is a hardened, fucked-up little monster in the making who had just killed a cop, and don’t you forget it.”
“Killed?” I say.
She nods. “From what I understand, Sam’s not going to even wake up again and if she did, she’d be so brain damaged she could barely function.”
59
Two days later, at his request, I am in the Gulf County Jail visiting Cody.
“I’ve got information,” he says. “Can you get me a deal?”
“What do you have? Information about what?”
“Something you need to know before you rule Shane’s death an accident.”
“We’re not about to rule Shane’s death an accident.”
“Can you help me or not?”
“Until I know what you have, I have no idea.”
“If what I tell you is good,” he says. “If it’s helpful—whether it leads to an arrest or not, will you put in a word for me with the DA?”
I nod.
“Want to hear you say it,” he says.
“I will. I will let them know of your cooperation throughout the investigation and if whatever you have now is relevant I’ll let them know.”
He nods. “Okay. I’m trusting you. Swolle and Shane were really jawing at each other. I mean really going at it. Almost came to blows.”
“About?”
“A girl. Swolle kept calling him a punk-ass bitch, said he wasn’t doing her right.”
“Megan?”
“No. He was sayin’ he should have been done with Megan a long time ago. He’s talkin’ ’bout this other girl. Said he was dissin’ her. Was he hidin’ her? Ashamed of her? Was he the racist asshole he’d always thought he was? Why wouldn’t he bring her to town? Shit like that.”
“Did you see Swolle do anything to Shane?”
“No, not exactly, but I’s exhausted from the race and wasn’t watching what was going on down there after I got out.”
I nod.
So far he hasn’t told me anything we didn’t already know or suspect.
“Think about this shit,” he says. “Shane’s dead. Megan’s dead. I’m locked up. Matt’s locked up. The only one scot-fucking-free is Swolle’s big black ass. Ask yourself why.”
“I will. Thanks.”
“Wait. I ain’t even got to the part where I tell you what will get me some consideration.”
“Okay.”
“Shane had this thing for black girls. Liked young, thick, big-booty black girls. They was his thing, you know?”
“Yeah, we heard something like that.”
“Well, he’s got one—had one—a big-booty black girl up in Columbus, and she’s pregnant with his baby.”
I nod.
“Oh,” he says. “You already knew that. Well, did you know that Swolle introduced them? Did you know she’s his cousin?”
Later that afternoon, as I’m getting into my car to go home for the day, I get a courtesy call from the medical examiner and everything falls into place.
I know it’s a courtesy call because he tells me so. Though he’s actually returning my calls.
“Drownings are difficult,” he says. “But I can say with relative certainty that the victim did drown. He was on his back long enough for lividity to become fixed there. There is bruising around his neck consistent with him being choked or held beneath the water.”
“So it’s homicide?”
“If it had been a gator I’d expect to see punctures in the skin, teeth or bite marks. Nothing like that is present.”
“How about time of death?” I ask.
“Impossible to be very accurate,” he says. “Best guess would be twenty-four to forty-eight hours before the body was recovered.”
So Shane had only died a day or two before he was found. So where was he during those other five or six days? What was he doing? Who was he with? And who killed him five days after he was supposed to already be dead?
“We found no alcohol or drugs in his bloodstream,” he says. “And his last meal, which hadn’t fully digested yet, was hamburger steak, mashed potatoes, creamed corn, and collard greens.”
I think of Sweet Willy’s Soul Food Station.
“Final thing of consequence,” he says. “We found chlorine in the water in his lungs and none of the river debris normally in victims who drown in a river. Finally, we found traces of Melia azedarach and its fruit in his lungs. The fruit is poisonous but there wasn’t enou
gh in him to hurt him, let alone kill him. It’s only notable because they don’t grow around the area where the victim was said to have gone missing or where the body was discovered.”
“Melia azedarach?” I ask.
“Chinaberry tree.”
When I don’t respond, he says, “John? You there?”
I think of the sexy Kayden and her long, caramel legs and the filthy pool she had put them in, the pool surrounded by chinaberry trees and full of their residue and fruit, and I know where Shane was killed.
60
What I want to know is if you went there to kill him or if it was more of an impulsive act?” I say.
No response.
“Shane decides to fake his own death and vanish,” I say. “You figured that out too, right? He had a pregnant girlfriend and they could live off the insurance money she would receive. Was that his only motivation or did it also have something to do with Carl’s death? The Ranger who died in the Airborne accident? Probably both and maybe several things we’ll never know. But he decided to do it and it sealed his fate.”
Deadpan. Despondent. Implacable. Unreadable.
“When I talked to Kayden she wasn’t even upset,” I say. “But when the Muscogee County sheriff’s investigator interviewed her she was so distraught she could hardly talk. I think because when I was there, Shane was too. He was alive. He was inside her trailer—which is why she acted like she was going out to get in that nasty pool when I walked up. But when the Muscogee County sheriff’s investigator interviewed her, he was gone—that’s all she knew. You had killed him, but all she knew was that he was gone—unless there was some evidence of a struggle. You put him in the trunk of your car and hauled him all the way back down here and put him in the river. He rode on his back the whole way and the lividity was fixed. We know he was drowned in Kayden’s pool. There was chlorine and traces of chinaberry tree in his lungs. The bruises on his face and around his neck . . . You held him under.”
He still doesn’t say anything, but his face communicates plenty. The slight upturn of his eyebrows and the downturn of his mouth. Eyes averted downward, brow beginning to furrow. His facade beginning to crack. I’m getting through to him.
“I want to know why you did it,” I say.
“I . . . I didn’t intend to,” Tommy says, tears filling his weary eyes. “I didn’t even mean to. I just . . . You’ve got to know I wouldn’t . . . I mean . . . I didn’t . . . I wasn’t going to do it until I was doing it.”
We are in his office at the church, his Bible and notes for Shane’s funeral on the desk in front of him.
“I just went to get him and bring him back and make him . . . I—”
“When you saw that Kayden was the beneficiary of his life insurance, you put it together, didn’t you?”
“I had already been thinking maybe he swam over and broke into the houseboat, then when it turned dark climbed the hill and left. And that’s what he did. He told me he had scuba gear tied up under the dock. Went under when no one was looking, got it, swam over to the other side, and . . .”
“So you drove up there to her trailer park . . .”
“He was out there alone, laying out by that disgusting pool,” he says. “Kayden was at work. Good, hardworking people were in the river looking for him right then. Megan was dead. Michelle and I were in pain like we’ve never known. And he’s working on his . . . damned tan.”
He shakes his head, narrows his eyes, looks into the distance, winces at what he sees.
“I couldn’t believe it,” he continues. “I just thought . . . who is this, this kid I raised to be . . . what had he turned into, what . . . We started arguing. I told him what I thought of him. The confrontation grew heated. He bowed up at me like the little badass Army Ranger he thought he was, but . . . I was so . . . mad. I mean . . . insanely angry . . . like pure rage . . . and I had this strength . . .”
“Why’d you kill him?”
“Am I talking to you as a chaplain or a cop?”
“I’m always both,” I say, thinking of the small digital recorder in my pocket recording our conversation.
He frowns and sighs, but says, “I didn’t do it because he was a coward. You’re right about Carl affecting him. But it wasn’t that he was scared of dying himself, though he was. The biggest part of it was him packing other soldiers’ parachutes and them dying. That was going to be his job—a parachute packer or whatever they call it. That’s what he couldn’t handle. I didn’t do it because he abandoned his country or went AWOL on his fellow soldiers. I didn’t even do it because he broke the oath he made to our father, an honorable man who served his country with dignity and distinction and wanted nothing more than for his sons to do the same. I did it because . . . I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t go there to do it, but when I did it, when I crossed the line I couldn’t come back from . . . I did it for that poor girl and the hell he and our town put her through.”
“Megan,” I say.
“Seeing her shoot herself like that did something to me. It . . . I couldn’t . . . And he was so unrepentant about it. So . . . It’s like he . . . He was so casual about that Kayden girl, like . . . he’d done all this—had caused so much pain and . . . and Megan’s death . . . and he was so casual about it, about the new girl and . . . having a baby. I have always wanted to have a baby . . . to have children . . . of my own . . . and he gets to and . . . he’s so indifferent about it. I . . . I couldn’t believe it.”
He breaks down and begins to sob.
Leaning forward, he rests both elbows on the desk and drops his head into his hands.
“What have I done?” he says, his voice muffled from his crying and being spoken into his hands.
What so many do. Hurt those you love the most, those you expect the most from.
“Oh, God, I’m so sorry,” he says. “Please forgive me. Please.”
Grief is palpably present in the small room with us. I feel such sorrow—for him, for Shane, for Megan. It’s overwhelming. Our frailties. Our failures. Our rage. Our outrageous actions and their severe and irrevocable consequences.
“What will my youth group think?” he says. “What have I done to them?” He lifts his head and looks at me, his eyes searching for something I can’t give him. “They’re the only reason I tried to cover it up. Only reason I haven’t confessed yet. I just . . . I . . . I’m supposed to be their example, their . . . Everything I’ve told them, tried to teach them is a lie.”
His actions don’t change a single truth he’s ever uttered, but I know what he means and don’t argue the point.
He closes the Bible before him and pushes it away some.
“My plan was to do his funeral, wait a short while, resign, give it a little more time, let the church find another youth pastor and let the kids begin to build a relationship with him, then come forward and confess. I swear I was, I . . . would have.”
I shake my head. “I don’t doubt that.”
“I . . . I still can’t believe I did it,” he says. “I keep thinking it didn’t really happen . . . or that someone else did it. It’s like . . . I keep trying to wake myself up from this nightmare I’m having, but I can’t. I can’t wake up.”
He looks down at his notes and Bible again. Gathering his notes, his tears smearing the ink, he folds them, places them in his Bible, then pushes his Bible even farther away.
“Can I ask a favor?” he says.
“What’s that?”
“Will you let me write a letter to the church and call Michelle and tell her before you take me in? Will you ask Anna to go over and be with her when I do?”
61
Shock. Disbelief. Denial. Eventually begrudging acknowledgement.
The entire town is heartbroken.
Tommy had touched so very many people over the years—members of both the community and his church.
Kids in his current youth group, their parents who were in previous ones. Each in their own way express their love and support for Tommy. An
d also for Shane, Megan, and Amber—though these last three seem almost like afterthoughts to many.
Tommy’s letter to his church is published in Merrick’s paper.
The entire town mourns.
Funerals in quick succession—first Amber’s, then Megan’s, then finally Shane’s.
The entire state mourns as more and more victims of Bobby Lee Banks are discovered.
Willard’s free-labor foster kids program comes to an abrupt end when they are taken away from him.
As yet there is no evidence he or anyone else in the family were directly involved in what Bobby Lee was doing, but charges could still be filed for their role in aiding and abetting him—maybe even as accessories after the fact, but it’s doubtful.
Time passes. People heal. Or forget. Or compartmentalize.
“I shouldn’t be surprised or so bothered by it,” Anna says, “but . . .”
“What?” I say.
It is evening and we are walking down Main Street, pushing Taylor in her stroller at a pace that is enjoyable but could also be considered exercise.
“Just that Tommy gets so much more compassion and understanding and forgiveness than Megan,” she says. “People—some of whom contributed to her death—believe she is burning in hell right now while Tommy is a saint who just made a momentary mistake.”
“Conditional love,” I say, “fed through dogma and indoctrination. Try just suggesting compassion or understanding for Bobby Lee Banks.”
“Hell, even I have trouble with that,” she says.
Memorial Day has just passed and American flags are still flying from every light pole, flapping in the early summer evening breeze.
“It’s so beautiful here,” she says.
“More so since you moved to town.”
“Have I ever told you how much I appreciate you taking every opportunity you get to say sweet things to and about me?”
I smile.
Back at our home on Lake Julia, steaks are marinating in anticipation of the arrival of Merrill and Dad, Merrick and Reggie, Michelle, and maybe even Megan’s mom, though she was noncommittal when we called to invite her.
Blood Cries; Blood Oath; Blood Work Page 40
