Pleassance’s eyes widened. “Acting! It was my theater troupe, that was the icing on the cake, huh? Y’all figured, okay, only an actor could pull off passing as either a white or a black. That makes me a suspect.”
I shrugged. “It crossed our minds, that’s all.”
“Only an actor would know about makeup and wigs and shoe lifts and, I don’t know, accents . . . Whatever would be required to seem like a different person every time.”
“Like I say, it crossed our minds.”
“But you’ve got no probable cause, do you? So you came down here to conduct, what, an illegal search, see if you could turn up anything to say I was really your guy?”
“Not exactly. Well, sort of. I got lost. I didn’t mean to get on your property at all.”
“Well, you got the wrong guy.”
“I told you. I believe you.”
“Why?”
“I’m a good judge of character.”
Vale Pleassance laughed loudly. “Don’t give me that.”
“I’m serious.” We locked eyes for a while. “Look, we all have our methods. You’ve got the scalpel and the microscope, I’ve got . . . Well, I don’t know exactly how to say it. I’ve got a nose for people, that’s all.”
He still didn’t seem to buy it.
“I don’t know how else to say it. The evidence of my heart tells me it’s not you, Dr. Pleassance. It seemed possible till I saw you look at those files. I don’t believe even an actor could fake your reaction to those files.”
“Huh.” Pleassance looked thoughtful. “You’re really that confident? Based on, what, my demeanor? My face?”
I nodded. “Something like that.”
He shrugged. “All right. So now you’re here. You want to look around? Search for hidden rooms, caches of snapshots of little children?”
I took a deep breath. “You willing to give me permission to do that?”
We locked eyes again. “Absolutely.”
I thought about it. If he was really the mysterious stranger, then he was bluffing. But if he wasn’t, then I was liable to piss him off. And assuming that he wasn’t our guy, then he was going to be a necessary ally. So I decided to take a chance. “No.” I shook my head. “I don’t need to do that.”
“If I were you, I would do it.”
“But you’re not.” We sat silently for a moment. Then I said, “But while I’m here—”
“What?”
“Let’s brainstorm a little, huh? See, what your thoughts are.”
“Okay, what about DNA? You have any DNA evidence?”
“Some.”
“And?”
“As you know, a bunch of the cases are pre-DNA. There’s still evidence, but pulling samples off old evidence can be problematic. Anyway, the lab is working that angle right now, but we don’t have results yet.” I didn’t really want to get into that just yet.
“You don’t have any DNA at all?”
“Sure, on the newer cases.”
“And?”
“Let’s just say it doesn’t point conclusively to one single perp.”
Pleassance looked thoughtful. “Then how did you find all these cases? How did you make the connection between them?”
“I didn’t. Lt. Gooch did.”
“Yeah, but how? Most of these aren’t even in your jurisdiction.”
I shrugged.
“No, I’m serious, Mechelle. What was his methodology? What were his parameters? How did he do this?”
“That’s what I’m saying. I don’t know. I’ve only been in the Cold Case unit for a few weeks.”
Vale looked slightly irritated. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“He didn’t tell me.”
The ME looked dubious. “And you didn’t think to ask?”
“Have you ever asked Lt. Gooch a question?”
“I’m sure I have.”
“And did you get a straight answer?”
Vale smiled thinly. “Hm. Good point.”
We talked for a few more minutes, then Vale said, “I sure would like to know what the universe was.”
“What do you mean?”
“What universe did he draw these cases from? Did he hunt through the newspapers for missing kids, what? What years did he look at? Did he look only in Georgia? Only in the Southeast? Has he run it through VICAP yet? I mean who’s to say the Columbus case is the first one, you know? Without knowing the universe, you can’t know if you’re missing any.”
“I see what you’re saying.”
“I mean, think about it. Everybody knows that the best way to find a serial killer is to find their first kill. It’s almost always close to home.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I sure would like to know whether you’ve got all the kills or not.”
“You know what?” I said. “I’d like to know the answer to that myself.”
THIRTY-TWO
I was going to go ahead and drive home, but I knew that when I got there I wouldn’t be able to sleep, that I’d just lie there in bed thinking about the case. And the longer I’d lay in bed, the more I’d start thinking about getting a drink. Or worse, thinking about calling up one of the many jerks I’d scored crank from somewhere along the way. Drinking, that would be a mistake. But crank? Baby, that would be a flat-out disaster.
So as I was driving home I called 411, ID-ed myself as a police officer, told them I needed an address.
The address I’d asked for turned out to be in an old run-down brick apartment complex off of Ponce de Leon Ave. Ponce is a strange area: there are still a couple of old SRO hotels, plus several homeless shelters and halfway houses that keep the area well supplied with drunks and panhandlers and crazies, but there are also plenty of yuppies and Georgia Tech frat boys who come down for the restaurants and nightclubs, and a decent collection of the nipple-ring-and-tattoo set who live in some of the cheaper apartments around. It’s the kind of place where a single woman is well advised to be careful at night.
I pulled in to the parking lot of the apartment complex and looked up at the apartment number I’d gotten from the telephone operator. Apartment D2 was on the top floor of the two-story building, up a flight of rickety wooden steps. The lights were on, so I knocked loudly with my fist.
Nobody answered, so I pounded harder. “Come on, open up.”
Still, nobody answered. I tried the handle. As I expected, it was locked. The front window was open about two inches.
“Lieutenant?” I put my mouth up to the gap in the window. “You home?”
No answer. I could see through the gap. The living room of the apartment was brightly lit, almost dead empty. A cheap stereo sat on the floor, surrounded by CD cases. A La-Z-Boy lounger sat in front of a TV. Over in the kitchenette there was a card table with some dishes on it, and one folding chair.
Otherwise the room was stone empty. “Lieutenant? We need to talk.”
Still no answer. I pulled on the window, and it slid upward about eight inches, then stopped. I stuck my head all the way inside. “Lieutenant? Hello.”
Next thing I knew I was halfway into the room, my feet kicking in the air, my torso wriggling. Why I do things like this, I don’t know. Part of what made me a good street cop is that I’m impulsive. It’s also part of what gets me in trouble. But by the time I decided my initial impulse had been a stupid one, I was already inside the room.
Since the living room was empty, I walked into the short hallway coming off the kitchen. “Hello, hello!” I called. “Don’t shoot, ha ha ha.” There was a bathroom at the end of the hall flanked on each side by a closed door.
I opened one door. The room was dark, so I flipped on the light. The room was entirely bare of furniture, but the walls were covered with racks made of wooden strips with small wooden pegs sticking out of them. On the racks were curved swords, more of them than I could count. I don’t know anything about swords, but my guess was they were Japanese. Some were short, some were long. Most of them were
in scabbards, but a few were bare steel blades with no scabbards or handles, just curved arcs of gleaming steel. There must have been close to a hundred swords in the room. A stack of books lay in one corner of the room. I walked over and picked one up, looked inside. There were black and white pictures inside, pictures of sword after sword. I couldn’t read the text, though, because it was all written in Japanese.
I turned off the light, walked into the last room.
There was no furniture in the room other than a bookshelf full of paperbacks and a small desk made out of a wooden door stacked on top of a couple of cheap double-drawer filing cabinets. There was a bed, I noticed, just a rolled-up Army sleeping bag and a thin foam mat over against the window. But the creepy thing about the room was that every surface of the walls was covered with newspaper articles and pictures of children. Most of the kids I recognized—Marquavious Roberts, Evie Marie Prowter, Ronnie Gillis, Jenny Dial—but some of them I didn’t. Some of the articles were new, but most were yellowed and faded. And everywhere I could see little notes scribbled on the paper, some of it new, but some of it so old that the ink had faded almost into invisibility.
I had stood there looking around the room until it hit me. Most of these articles had been cut out of newspapers a long, long time ago. Most of these photographs were old, too, the edges curling up. And the tape holding many of them to the walls was yellowed with age. All of which added up to this: Lt. Gooch had obviously been obsessed with these murders for a long, long, long time. Damn sure, he’d been working the cases a lot longer than the eight months that the Cold Case Unit had been in operation.
I felt cold, like someone had blown on my neck, goosebumps running across my skin.
He’d known all along. Gooch had known and he’d manipulated me from the very beginning, manipulated me into finding that first case, Marquavious Roberts, eased me into it step by step, knowing all along where this thing was heading, never giving me a straight answer to a question, not since the first minute I walked into our dark office over at City Hall East. It had only been a few weeks now, but it felt like forever, like I’d been buried in that dark basement for years with this man.
So was this it? Was this all there was to know about the case? Had I reached the final place he wanted me to get to? Or was there more hidden inside this case, more hidden inside Gooch’s head?
What would make a man obsess over a case like this?
I stood there looking around the room at all the photographs. Most of them, as I said, were kids I already recognized. But there were others I didn’t. A little blond girl in pigtails sitting over the desk, for instance. There were a couple of pictures of her, and several news articles. I was going to read the articles when a terrible feeling washed over me.
Suddenly I felt boxed in, like I was closed up in a space with no air. My breath came raggedly, like I was suffocating. I went over to the window, yanked it open, put my head out into the air. It had finally started to cool a little—as cool as Atlanta gets in July, anyway. I was looking out the back window of the apartment building, looking out into a stand of pine trees that led into a residential neighborhood.
Then I heard a sound. Footsteps coming up the stairs out front of the apartment. Him. Gooch. My heart began beating hard. For a moment I was paralyzed. One thing I was suddenly sure of, as sure of as anything I’ve ever felt, I didn’t want that man finding me nosing around his shrine to all those dead kids. And so, without giving it any thought at all, I put my leg over the sill, climbed out, feeling the brick lip of the sill tearing a hole in my hose. I held onto the sill with my fingers, then let go, and fell down into darkness.
THIRTY-THREE
When I got home, I sat around for a few minutes itching for something I couldn’t have. Finally I gave in and logged onto the Internet, tried to find my little boy, but the page with his pictures on it was still gone.
As I logged off, the phone rang. It was Vale Pleassance.
“Mechelle,” he said. “After you left I sat down with those files again.”
“And?”
“I kept thinking about these calluses on their necks and shoulders? Originally I was thinking it was related to some kind of restraint. Or that they were tortured somehow, dragged or—”
“Tortured? Jesus.”
“Yeah, but that’s not it.”
“You figured it out?”
“Oh, yeah. I figured it out.” His voice was weary.
“Okay. What is it?”
“A box,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, a box. I mean this bastard is putting them in a box. Three or four feet square. They’re all balled up inside a little box.” I heard a scraping, like he was moving around. “Reach behind your neck, feel that little bump of spine where your neck hits your back. That’s C7, the seventh cervical vertebra. In these kid’s cases, C7 has been rubbing against a wall for a long time. And so they get a callus. The abrasions and bruises on their shoulders are from banging and twisting around in the box, maybe trying to get out, but probably just trying to get comfortable. To get a callus like that, these kids were in that box for a long time.”
I felt sick.
“Just thought you’d want to know,” the medical examiner said.
“Thanks.”
I hung up the phone and went into the kitchen, got my bag of Chicken Voila! out of the freezer, nuked a bowl of the stuff, ate it in front of the TV. I was so mad I couldn’t even concentrate on what I was watching, some fool sitcom about a bunch of shiftless but amusing black folks, the minstrel shows all over again, the laugh track going off every five seconds.
Finally I turned off the TV, went back in my bedroom, and logged on to the Net again. As I stared at the screen, two things kept bugging me. The first thing was, I wanted to know what Lt. Gooch was up to.
And the second thing was the question that Dr. Pleassance had posed to me: what was the universe that Gooch had drawn his list of victims from? It was obvious he’d been working the cases for a long time. Why had he started tracking these kids when he had? What if he hadn’t started in the right place? Maybe he hadn’t gone back far enough. Maybe he hadn’t started in the right state.
Or maybe there were other victims, children who for some reason he hadn’t yet told me about. With all the things he hadn’t bothered to tell me, with all the ways he’d already misled me, there was no reason to think he wasn’t hiding a couple more victims. Though why that might be, I couldn’t figure.
There’s an online service called Nexis that lets you search newspaper articles. They’ve been doing it since way before the Web was created, and if you’re trying to search news articles, Nexis still works a lot better than running some messy search using a generic engine like Yahoo! or Google. The other great thing about Nexis is that the full text of the stories are there, not just digests, and they go back way before all the newspapers started putting articles on the Web. Nexis has special arrangements with law enforcement, so I had been given a Nexis password back when I was in Narcotics. I wondered if it was still an active password. I hunted around in my drawer and found the password written on the back of a business card.
I tried logging on to the Nexis Web site, and to my surprise the password worked. I tried a search using the key words MISSING and CHILD and GEORGIA. That search brought over a thousand stories. I tried refining the search a little, messing with the key words—DEAD, BODY, DISCOVER, AUTOPSY—changing the order of the words and so on. I also specified stories appearing in 1987 or later.
Eventually I had a list down to about two hundred stories. Maybe one story in five on my final list referred to a child that I already knew was missing. Most of the rest involved cases of child abuse by parents and boyfriends and grandmothers and so on, or cases where there had been an immediate arrest, or cases of kids abducted by a parent in the course of custody disputes. It took me several hours to go through every article, and eventually I came up dry.
I got up and made a pot of cof
fee, came back, and searched using the same set of key words, but also including South Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama. Three cups of coffee later, it was close to one o’clock in the morning, and I was still coming up dry.
Then something else occurred to me. Why was I limiting the search to cases occurring during or after 1987? I had been working under the assumption that Gerald Bokus, the boy in Columbus, was the first case. But why? Maybe there were some earlier cases.
It’s generally accepted that serial killers refine their technique over time. In part, this means that they become bolder and more set in the patterns of their killing. Also it tends to result in the killer widening the geographic range where they find their victims to make it more difficult for law enforcement to figure out where they live. But as Vale Pleassance had already reminded me, the first victim—sometimes even the first several victims—are usually drawn from a geographic region very close to the killer’s home or work. Often it’s somebody the killer works with, someone in his neighborhood, maybe even a friend or family member.
So maybe there was an earlier killing, one that Lt. Gooch had missed, one that preceded the beginning of his creepy obsession. Maybe he had missed it because it didn’t quite fit the pattern. Or maybe there were earlier killings he knew about but for some reason hadn’t seen fit to tell me about just yet.
Whatever the case, it seemed obvious that I ought to go back a few years earlier than Gerald Bokus, see what turned up.
I tried the same set of key words, but limited the search to the period of 1980 to 1987. It brought up 167 stories. I began going through them in chronological order, starting in 1980.
It all seemed like more of the same. Custody kidnappings or blatant child abuse. But this time I felt like I had to look closer, particularly at cases that didn’t result in convictions.
The Body Box Page 18
