Blood Cries; Blood Oath; Blood Work

by Michael Lister

  “’Course now with Dad needin’ me, I ain’t really got time to work no way, but I need to. You know? A man needs to work in this world. He does. I do. You got two jobs . . . I ain’t even got one.”

  “What does Dad need you for?” I ask. “You helpin’ him with his investigation?”

  “Oh, that. No. Not that bullshit. That’s some foolish-ass shit. He ain’t gonna solve that case after all this time. He’s only tryin’ ’cause he ain’t got nothin’ better to do and he’s thinking about legacy and shit. If he was gonna solve it, he would have solved it back then. Not thirty-something years later. You know? That girl’s gone. Gone baby gone. She ain’t never gonna be found. What would they find anyway? A bunch of old bones? Who needs that?”

  Her mother, I think. Our father. And countless other people who carry her vanishing around with them like their own stalking specter.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe I should help him. Hell, I ain’t got anything else to do. ’Cept drink. Do too much of that I might end up like Mom. Do you miss her? I don’t really miss her, John. Not really. Am I a bad person? Am I? I just . . . We were never close, you know? And God, I thought she was so weak, so . . . I don’t know. I just—”

  A deer grazing on the side of the road darts out of the hot, dark dampness and I slam on the brakes.

  I hadn’t seen it until we were already upon it. There was little time to react.

  The car skids, sliding on the damp pavement, the driver’s side above the headlight and the front quarter panel striking the poor creature.

  “Oh fuck,” Jake says. “What was that? What did you hit?”

  “A deer. You okay?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I guess. Just startled the piss out of me. Shit man. I didn’t know what was . . . Is it dead?”

  “I’m gonna check. Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

  I shove the car into Park, pull up the emergency brake, turn on my flashers and my emergency lights, and get out.

  The sheer level of its volume always startling, the cacophony of nocturnal noises coming from the river swamp on both sides of the road is as discordant as it is deafening.

  We’re between two curves in a dangerous spot, even with my lights splashing across the moisture-laden tree branches and dark pavement.

  I’ve got to hurry.

  Across the opposite lane and about five feet into the ditch, the animal lies unmoving except for labored breaths and moans of pain.

  A good-sized doe, the gentle, beautiful creature is not long for this world. All I can do is shorten her suffering.

  Squatting down beside her, I withdraw my weapon.

  “I’m sorry about this, girl,” I say. “All of it.”

  I then press the barrel to her forehead and squeeze the trigger.

  The rapport is deafening, reverberating around me, bouncing off the thick forests on both sides of the road, momentarily silencing the crickets and frogs and other nocturnal noisemakers.

  Standing, I reholster my weapon, check for traffic in both directions, and rush back over to the car, withdrawing my phone as I do.

  Inside the car, I call a local farm family with several children who could really use the meat from the deer that will otherwise go to waste.

  Jake starts talking again, but I ask him to give me just a second.

  When Stevie answers his phone I say, “It’s John Jordan. Sorry to call this late. I’ve just hit a deer on Lake Grove Road and had to put it down. I hate for the meat to go to waste but I can’t do anything with it. Thought you might want it.”

  The moment I pause, Jake starts trying to talk again, but I hold up my hand.

  I laugh as Stevie asks me if this is part of some sort of sting operation I’m running with the game wardens.

  “I swear to you it’s not,” I say. “It’d be entrapment if it were, but it’s not. You want it or should I call somebody else?”

  When he tells me he wants it, I let him know where it is and disconnect the call.

  “Damn, John,” Jake says. “Why didn’t you let me or one of my friends get it? You know I ain’t got no job right now. I could’ve eaten venison steaks and stew for a month or more.”

  Trying to change the subject, I say, “What does Dad need you for if not the investigation?”

  “Whatta you mean? Just stuff. Taking care of him. Helping him do the stuff he’s too weak or tired or whatever to do.”

  “Like what?” I ask. “What’s he too weak to do?”

  “Huh? Not much now, but soon it’ll be lots of stuff.”

  “I don’t understand. Because he’s getting older?”

  “What? No. Because he’s sick. He ain’t told you? That’s why he’s tryin’ to solve this damn case so hard. Wants to do it before he dies.”

  5

  I find Dad asleep in an old recliner I’d swear he had when I was a child—the one I’d climb up in with him to watch Columbo or McMillan & Wife, the sweet smell of his pipe swirling around us.

  Trying not to wake him, I ease past him, quietly half carrying Jake down the short hallway to the spare bedroom.

  Jake, in a stupor now, is no longer talking, but his breathing, moans, and awkward movements are loud and I figure it’s only a matter of moments until he wakes up Dad.

  Glancing back over my shoulder, I can see Dad has yet to even stir.

  The cabin is small, rustic and creaky, and looks and smells like only men live here.

  Very much a camp, a temporary getaway, this crude, tiny shack is not suited to serve as a permanent residence, but that’s exactly what it has become for these two men on extended retreat from their lives.

  When we reach the spare bedroom and I click on the large, old light switch, I’m surprised but not shocked by what I see.

  All the furniture, including the bed, has been removed, and the space has been converted into a homicide investigation war room.

  The walls are covered with maps and pictures and notes and suspects and images of evidence—all from the Janet Leigh Lester case.

  In the center of the room, a single folding chair sits at a single folding table with the murder book and various papers and file folders atop it. Directly next to the murder book on the right side is an open composition book with a blue pen on it, Dad’s small, neat handwriting partially filling the page beneath the pen.

  Jake opens his eyes and lifts his head slightly long enough to utter a single-syllable word. “Couch.”

  I help him back down the hallway and onto the old slip-covered couch not far from where Dad is asleep in his chair.

  Standing upright again, I look down at the two hurting and lost men—one at the middle of his life, the other nearing the end—and consider their plight. Neither has a job or relationship. Their lives are largely devoid of structure, purpose, and meaning—Jake’s perhaps more than Dad’s, especially if Dad’s thrown himself into the Janet Leigh Lester case to the extent it looks like he has—and both men in different and similar ways are adrift.

  Dad lets out a small snore, coughs, turns his head a little, and readjusts his body in the chair.

  Is he really sick? Dying?

  It hasn’t been long since we lost our mother. Are we about to lose our father too?

  I have never been as close to my dad as I would have liked. He’s a decent man with lots of friends and the respect of many, but all of his friends are social, casual, of the shallow acquaintance type.

  I have far fewer friends, but our connection is much more intimate, personal, deeper.

  As good and stable and mostly supportive as Dad has been, he’s always kept me, like everyone in his life as far as I know, a certain distance away. At our closest, we have never been truly close. In those most intimate of moments over the course of our lifetime as father and son, I still felt like they weren’t nearly as intimate as they might have been.

  My relationship with my dad has always felt like we were on different sides of the glass partition of a penitentiary visiting booth, a barely visible barrier
between us, communicating through plastic telephone receivers. Nothing direct. Nothing too personal.

  Like so many men I know, and not an insubstantial number of women, my father seems completely uncomfortable with vulnerability—his own or anyone else’s. This leads to a certain opaqueness and impenetrability of character that makes relating difficult and true intimacy impossible.

  Every time I think of this, I’m reminded of what Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic said. The wound is the place where the light enters you.

  Without wound, without openness, without vulnerability there is no place for exchange—of light or anything else.

  For much of my life, I tried to change the nature of our relating and communicating, something that kept me continually frustrated. Later in life, I found peace through letting go of what I wanted and accepting what is.

  Am I about to lose even that?

  Deciding not to wake him, I make my way over to the door, feeling excitement and gratitude at being able to crawl into bed next to Anna when I get home.

  Easing open the door, I step through it and quietly close it behind me.

  I head down the wooden stairs and into the front yard toward my car, but I don’t get very far.

  Pulling out my phone, I call Anna.

  Still readjusting to marriage and family life, I try to remember to let Anna know where I am and what I’m doing as often as I can, especially given the deception and violation she was subjected to in her previous relationship.

  “Hey,” she says, her voice soft and sleepy.

  I tell her everything that’s happened and what Jake said about Dad dying.

  “Oh John, I’m so sorry. Do you think there’s something to it or was it just drunken Jake-isms?”

  “Not sure.”

  “Do you need to stay and talk to him?”

  “You know that case he’s been asking for my help with?”

  “Bundy?”

  “I feel like I need to stay and look over it. Do you mind?”

  “I’d rather have you here in bed with me,” she says.

  Anna is so strong and resilient, I have to remind myself how much she has been through lately. Following the disintegration of her marriage to Chris and learning about all the ways in which he had betrayed her, which were staggering in both breadth and depth, she had experienced extreme physical and psychological trauma while pregnant. She is still healing, still recovering, and I need to be mindful of that at all times.

  “And that’s where I’d rather be, but if Dad is dying I feel bad for telling him no.”

  “I understand, and if he was awake and you were spending time with him it’d be different, but . . . Do what you need to, I just really rather you not be tired tomorrow,” she says.

  Tomorrow we are meant to be meeting her folks at a rented cottage on Mexico Beach for our first vacation as a family and my first vacation in—well, maybe my first ever as an adult.

  “Thought the whole point of going on vacation was to rest and relax.”

  “Okay. But . . . I’m just really lookin’ forward to this, to getting away together.”

  “I know you are,” I say.

  “And I know you’re not,” she says. “I just keep thinking somethin’s gonna come up and you’re gonna back out.”

  I’m not good at getting away, at vacations, and she knows it. It’s not that I don’t like, enjoy, and need downtime or family time or time alone with Anna. I do. I adore those things. And my approach is to incorporate them into our lives—day in and day out, integrating relaxation and celebration into our ordinary lives, not just during a one-week getaway each year. But I also know it’s important and helpful to actually go to a different location occasionally, and even more important than that, I know how much it means to her, so I’m not going to back out on her tomorrow—no matter what.

  “I won’t let it,” I say. “I promise.”

  “Thank you.”

  “If you really don’t want me staying and taking a look at the book, I’ll—”

  “No, it’s okay.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Now go get to work.”

  “I’ll be in bed beside you before you know it.”

  6

  What is it about cold cases?

  No matter how old or cold they are. People are still obsessed with solving the Jack the Ripper, the Black Dahlia, and the Zodiac cases. Two decades later, when little JonBenét Ramsey would be an adult woman in her midtwenties, millions of people are still fascinated, intrigued, even obsessed by her case.

  But that’s nothing compared to the utter obsession experienced by the cops who worked the case that went cold.

  Why do we become so utterly obsessed with unsolveds?

  I’m still actively working both the Atlanta Child Murders and the Stone Cold Killer cases. Decades later and I’m still haunted by them, plagued with solving them.

  Unsolved homicides are like demons that can only be exorcised in one way by the cops who worked them. You can solve them and be free, or fail to and remain possessed by them for the rest of your days.

  I think of the cold case files on my desk right now. One, the Remington James case, involving the death of several men and one young woman in the river swamp near the other end of Cutoff Island. The other, a series of cops killed with their own guns, one of whom was our current sheriff and my boss Reggie Summer’s predecessor.

  I don’t know how many cases haunt my dad—maybe it’s just the ones related to Bundy’s time in the Panhandle or maybe there are others I know nothing of—but now that he’s nearing the end of his life, I understand why he wants to put to rest these ghosts. How much more so, how much more urgent, if he’s sick or dying?

  On Valentine’s Day in 1978, while I was obsessed with getting Anna to dance with me at our school’s Valentine’s Day ball, my dad, Jack Jordan, was obsessed with finding Ted Bundy.

  Of course, he didn’t know it was Ted Bundy at the time. He didn’t even know he was looking for the same killer in both instances. He only knew he was working two particularly brutal and bloody cases—the Chi Omega Killer in Tallahassee and the Broken Heart Butcher in Marianna.

  Valentine’s Day that year was supposed to be the day when Kimberly Diane Leach got to wear her new blue dress to a Valentine’s Day dance of her own in Lakeland, Florida, but on February 9th, the day her parents were going to take her to buy her that blue dress, she went missing from her school in Lake City.

  This was a full two years before I would become obsessed with another serial killer, the Atlanta Child Murderer, and I never realized it until now but I learned obsession from my dad.

  My obsession with Wayne Williams and the Atlanta Child Murders was in a way a shadow, an investigative echo of my dad’s obsession with Ted Bundy and with the Janet Leigh Lester case.

  Pulling the big blue binder of the murder book toward me and flipping to the first page, I look up at the walls covered in case notes. I remember a similar room from a much earlier time.

  I still recall Dad coming to my room to talk to me about my grades and how he and Mom thought I should come to live with him for a while, and the look on his face when he saw that my room was covered, much the way this one is, with all the witness statements and police reports and pictures of evidence and crime scene photographs I could get my hands on.

  Removing the pen from the blue college-ruled Yoobi composition book, I turn the pages back to the front.

  Before I even begin, I do two things—do a quick and cursory review of Ted Bundy on my phone, and make a list of questions I want answered.

  One of the most organized, efficient, and sophisticated serial killers to ever operate in the United States, Ted Bundy was a predator unlike any our nation has ever known.

  Considered charismatic and handsome by many of his young victims, when Ted Bundy was operating at his horrific best, he would approach young women in public places, eit
her pretending to have an injury or disability or impersonating a law enforcement officer or other authority figure, later overpowering them in or near his car and taking them to a preplanned secluded location for assaults that included rape, sodomy, bludgeoning, strangling, and sometimes even decapitation and necrophilia.

  Theodore Robert Bundy was actually born Theodore Robert Cowell. He was born to Eleanor Louise Cowell at Elizabeth Lund Home for unwed mothers in Burlington, Vermont, on November 24, 1946. Though an air force veteran named Lloyd Marshall is listed as the father on Bundy’s birth certificate, the actual identity of his biological father has always been in question. At some point later in life, Ted’s mother claimed that she had been seduced by a sailor named Jack Worthington, but no records of anyone with that name in either the navy or merchant marines has ever been found.

  There are those in Bundy’s family who believed that Louise Cowell’s own father Samuel Cowell, a violent, abusive man, may have actually been Bundy’s biological father.

  For the first few years of Bundy’s life, he lived with his maternal grandparents, Samuel and Eleanor Cowell, and actually believed they were his parents and that his mother, Louise, was his sister.

  In 1951, Louise met Johnny Culpepper Bundy, a cook, at an adult singles night at the First Methodist Church in Tacoma, Washington. When they married later that year, he adopted Ted.

  Though Bundy often lied about his early life, he confessed to more than one interviewer and biographer that as a young person he roamed his neighborhood, searching through trash cans and dumpsters for pictures of naked women and detective magazines, crime novels, and any lurid material involving sexual violence, especially ones that involved pictures. Consuming large quantities of alcohol, he also stalked young women, peaking through draped windows to observe them undressing and engaged in other private personal activities.

  After graduating high school in 1965, Bundy attended the University of Puget Sound for one year before transferring to the University of Washington. In 1967, he met and became romantically involved with one of his classmates, Stephanie Brooks (not her real name), who later broke things off with Ted and returned to California, fed up with what she described as Bundy’s lack of ambition and immaturity. A critical turning point in his demented development, Bundy was devastated. There is little doubt that Brooks served as a type for Bundy’s victims, who were by and large white females from middle-class backgrounds between ages fifteen and twenty-five, mostly college students who had long dark hair parted in the center. He evidently didn’t approach anyone he’d ever met before. Eventually Ted would reunite with Stephanie Brooks and later become engaged to her for the express purpose of rejecting her the way she had him.