“‘We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.’”
“Thank you, Jerry,” Lonnie said.
The readings were dry and stilted, the coffee lukewarm and bad, and I didn’t want to be here—I didn’t know if I was an alcoholic, but I did know I didn’t want to stop drinking—yet there was something affecting about the paltry gathering, something true and transformative about the words being so badly read, and when we said the Serenity prayer I felt a faint stirring of something curative at my core.
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Chapter Fourteen
That night our nameless group met at Ada Baker’s apartment.
To my surprise it was in the same complex as mine.
Like the victims and suspects of the Atlanta Child Murders, members of our group had far more connections, geographic and otherwise, than any of us had realized. Preston Mailer, the squat retired cop, lived in the apartment complex across the street. Melvin Pryor, the retired mail carrier, who was back despite quitting the group the last time we met, lived in a small house less than a mile away. But most surprising of all was the fact that the reporter and new member of the group, Mickey Davis, was seeing Kenny Pollard’s mom Camille, my neighbor who owned the consignment shop next to Scarlett’s, and had walked over from her apartment.
Our connections made a certain sense. Scarlett’s became my bar because of its proximity to where I lived. Camille lived close to her shop. Ada used to walk to Scarlett’s, and her missing son Cedric Porter, who we were here to meet about, used to walk to his uncle’s video store.
There was nothing surprising in any of it, though I found Mickey Davis’s involvement with Camille Pollard suspicious.
Everyone in our lives is connected by an unseen web of geography, interests, and relationships. So why didn’t the task force search for the connections between Atlanta’s missing and murdered children and the suspects surrounding them?
Ada Baker’s apartment was clean and tidy, but everything in it, what little there was, was worn, faded, and frayed.
She was, like her brother Lonnie, slender and soft spoken with an essential sadness at her center.
“Sorry I got nothin’ to offer y’all,” she said, “but . . .”
“We didn’t come here to eat or socialize,” Ida said. “We’re here to help if we can. We just appreciate you havin’ us.”
“Cedric ain’t called in a while,” she said. “He’a do that. Call every week for a while, then a few’a pass ’fore I hear from his again.”
We were all sitting around the small living room, Melvin, Mailer, and Rose Lee on the couch, Ada in the recliner by the phone, Ida in the one opposite her, and the rest of us—me, Summer, Mickey, and Annie Bowers, the woman from the Free Wayne Williams Project—in wooden chairs pulled in from the dining table.
“Do you mind if we ask you some questions?” I said.
She shook her head. “Thought that why you here.”
“Just wanted to make sure,” I said.
“Rather than all us firing questions at you,” Ida said, “I asked John to ask the questions.”
Ada nodded.
“How certain are you that it’s Cedric calling you?” I asked.
“Hundred percent. I know my boy, even with his voice changing, even with him growing into a man.”
“How soon after he disappeared did the calls start?”
“Not long. Day or two. He knew I’d be worried the killer got him so he call soon as he could.”
“Has he ever said why he ran away, where he went, why he calls but won’t come back?”
“Say he wasn’t safe no more. That he had to. He sorry but he had to. I tol’ him his safety all I care about. Say he’a come home when he can.”
I nodded.
“Would you mind taking us back through what happened the day he disappeared?” I asked.
Before she could respond, there was a knock at the door.
It was followed by Lonnie letting himself in carrying two brown paper bags of groceries.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I got soda and snacks.”
“They’s just asking about the day Cedric disappeared,” Ada said.
He nodded, sat the groceries down on the dining table, grabbed the remaining chair, and slid it over to join us.
“Cedric wanted to watch a video,” she said. “I told him he could go straight up there and straight back.”
Lonnie winced a bit, but she didn’t see it.
Our eyes met and he gave me a small frown and the slightest shake of his head.
How could a mother let her eleven-year-old son walk anywhere alone when a serial killer was killing boys who looked just like him?
“I knew he’d be okay,” she said. “He was smart as a tack and wise to the streets. It just a short walk through them woods. Knew Miss Margaret and Miss Pollard keep an eye on him, not let anybody bother him. Knew his uncle look out for him once he got there, but he never did. He’d done it so many times before, but . . . he didn’t make it this one time.”
One time is all it takes.
“And nobody saw nothin’,” she said.
Somebody did, I thought.
“I was worried at first. Seen some strange ones at Miss Margaret’s place, but then he called and let me know he was okay.”
“Were you at Scarlett’s when it happened?” I asked.
“I was gonna go, went a little later, but he couldn’t wait. Wanted to get his movie and get back and watch it. So I let him go on ahead. I wasn’t too far behind him.”
“And you never saw him?” I asked Lonnie.
He shook his head. “Never came in. It was close to closing time. I could’ve already been gone or in the process of locking up, but . . . I never saw him.”
I opened the file Frank Morgan had given me and glanced inside.
“I was at home when the police called me,” Lonnie said. “I came back to the store. We searched all over—all the businesses inside and out, all around the building, in the woods, in the apartment complex. Ada and I were both given polygraphs. Cedric’s dad refused to take one.”
There was one witness statement in the file. A college kid outside behind the bar said he saw Cedric running back toward the apartments, not toward the video store.
“I see there was a witness who claimed to see him,” I said.
Lonnie nodded. “Ronald Nolan. Never gave a good reason for being behind the bar, but said he saw Cedric running back toward the apartments. At first, I thought he tried my door but it was locked so he went home. But if he had he would have run into Ada on her way to Scarlett’s.”
Unless he was lying and didn’t see him, or Ada was lying and wasn’t where she said she was.
“There’s something suspicious about the guy—Ronald,” Lonnie said. “Something not quite right. I don’t trust him. And his story kept changing. Said he was on his way to his car, but that wouldn
’t have taken him to the back of the building. Then he said he was smoking, but he was doing that inside. Why go outside to do it? Then he said he wanted some fresh air. None of it added up.”
“But it don’t matter ’cause Cedric’s okay,” Ada said. “That’s all that matters.”
Chapter Fifteen
After the meeting, Summer and I walked to Scarlett’s, taking the same route Cedric had.
By car, Memorial Manor was several blocks and minutes away from the little shopping center that held Scarlett’s, but by foot it was maybe a two-minute walk.
Only a small wooded area separated the back of Memorial Manor from the back of the building that housed Lonnie’s Video, Peachtree Pizza, Second Chances, and Scarlett’s.
It was a dark night and we walked slowly along the narrow but deeply hewn path.
“What’d you think?” I asked.
“It’s so sad,” she said. “Just a little supervision and . . .”
“Did you pick up anything?” I asked.
“Probably no more than you,” she said. “It’s obvious she’s lying.”
“About?”
“She wasn’t just a little behind him. I don’t know where she was or what she was doing or why she doesn’t want to say, but . . . she wasn’t on this path just a little behind Cedric.”
I nodded. “Anything else?”
“That’s the only deception I picked up on during the entire meeting. Everything else she said and everything else everyone else said was told truthfully.”
“Does that mean she is getting calls from her son?”
“Means she genuinely believes she is.”
I thought about it.
“Did being there help you pick up on anything else?”
She stopped walking and nodded.
I stopped and looked down at her.
“I’ve gotten shock, terror, fear, and safety. I think wherever he is, he’s safe but worried.”
“You believe he’s alive?” I asked in surprise.
“I sense that he is.”
“Really?”
She nodded and started to say something, but before she could, a dark figure stepped out of the trees to our left.
“Hey man, you spare some change so I can get somethin’ to eat?”
He was an old black man with bloodshot eyes and a nappy gray beard. He wore rags and smelled so bad it burned my eyes and made them water.
“Sure,” I said, taking Summer by the hand and pulling her in the direction of Scarlett’s.
When we were a few steps away and I could see he was by himself, I said, “I’ll be back with some food in a few minutes. You like pizza?”
“’Bout all I gets ’round here.”
“What kind you like?”
“Cheese. Just cheese. And God bless you, brother.”
We walked faster, me pulling Summer by the hand, glancing all around us as I did.
“See how easily someone could’ve stepped out of the woods and snatched Cedric?” she said.
“Or his dad could’ve been waiting there or . . .”
“So many scenarios,” she said.
After tucking Summer safely away in Scarlett’s, I walked next door to Peachtree Pizza and ordered a medium cheese.
“Just cheese?” Rand Nola, the owner, asked. He glanced up at me with icy aqua eyes from the pizza he was preparing and gave me a quick smile of large, impossibly white teeth. “No sausage, bacon, pepperoni?”
“Not tonight.”
He nodded as he worked, which made what he was doing look almost like dancing.
“This for Reuben Jefferson Jackson the third?”
“Who?”
“Smelly old black guy in the woods.”
“Yeah.”
“His is already ready,” he said. “I just haven’t had a break to take it to him. Figured he’d be banging on my door any minute. ’Course, he’d have to be very hungry to do so. He doesn’t like coming out of those woods. If you don’t mind taking it to him, you can just go through my back door, walk about fifteen feet into the woods and yell for him. He’ll come running.”
Later, back at Scarlett’s, Summer and I sat a table in the back corner drinking and talking. I was attempting moderation with vodka cranberries. She was sipping on a dry white wine.
“You seem to be open to my gift,” she said.
I didn’t understand what she meant and gave her an expression that told her so.
“I’ve met very few people that are, and your lot usually alternate between burning me at the stake and trying to save my damned soul.”
“My lot?”
“Religious. Christians. Ministers. I don’t know.”
“I don’t either,” I said.
She looked confused.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Don’t know much of anything. Don’t know enough to be . . . Don’t have many answers, don’t have a corner on the market on truth. Try to remain open.”
“The irony is I’m a Christian,” she said. “I just have a gift. Like my grandmother did. It’s a gift from God. I don’t do anything to benefit from it, don’t use it in any way except to help when I can, when I’m allowed to.”
I started to say something, but Margaret walked up, pulled out a chair, and joined us at the table.
“Susan, who’s jealous as hell, by the way, said you wanted to talk to me. Now a good time?”
“Sure. Thanks.”
Tonight, for no apparent reason, she was wearing her Rhett Butler tuxedo outfit.
“What’s up?” she said.
“Wanted to ask you about the night Cedric Porter went missing.”
“Figured that might be it. Don’t know how much I can tell you.”
“Do you remember what time Ada came in?” I said.
She shook her head. “But it was late. It was sometime after ten. It was after the video store was closed—quite a while after. Pretty sure he closes at nine. Anyway, I ain’t tryin’ to tell tales out of school, but—and I ain’t tellin’ you anything I didn’t tell the cop who interviewed me—but she was in a state. Upset, distraught like. You know? And high as hell. I’m not sayin’ she did anything to her kid. Hell, I don’t think she did. But I know for a fact she wasn’t where she said she was when he went missing.”
“Anybody strange or creepy hanging out here that night? Anybody leave around the time Cedric was supposed to be outside?”
“Something like this happens and you look back and begin to get suspicious of everyone. You know? The most harmless things cause you to question and suspect and . . . Something like this changes everything and everybody. All you got to do is look at Lonnie.”
“Whatta you mean?”
“He was my best customer until that night. Hasn’t had a drink since then. Shit like this either drives you to drink or sobers you up. Did it to everyone involved. Made most of us drink more. Anyway, there were two guys. Again, I ain’t tryin’ to point the finger at anyone, and I ain’t saying they did anything. Just telling you what I told the cop at the time. They felt wrong. Never seen ’em before. Never saw them again. Don’t know their names or anything about them. Don’t know if they were together or . . . hell, I can’t even remember what they looked like. But at least one of them, and I think both, left around the time Cedric was supposed to be out there. You want more than that, I’ll have to dig out the notes I wrote down that night.”
“Would you please?”
“Sure.”
“What about the college kid who said he saw Cedric out back? What was his name? Ronald Nolan?”
“Why don’t you go ask him?”
“I’d like to.”
“Out that door, hang a right, one door down.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Peachtree Pizza,” she said.
“He work there?”
“Used to,” she said. “Now he owns it. He changed his name a little. A religious thing I think. Now he goes by Rand Nola.”
Chapter Sixteen
&nbs
p; “He ask you for another?” Rand Nola said.
I was in Peachtree Pizza. I had come alone. Summer was still nursing her wine, waiting for me at Scarlett’s.
“Huh? Oh. Reuben? No.”
“He reminded you how good they are and you have to have one for yourself?”
“Yep.”
“What can I get ya?”
“Medium sausage and bacon,” I said.
I hadn’t planned on ordering a pizza, but knew it couldn’t hurt. I loved pizza and his were passible.
“It’ll be my last pie of the night.”
As Rand busied himself preparing my pie, I took a closer look at him. He was tall and athletic looking, with baby-fine blond hair, bright white teeth he flashed often, and aqua eyes I associated with suffering for some reason. He wore straight-legged light-colored blue jeans, leather sandals, and a pink Peachtree Pizza T-shirt.
BLOOD CRIES: a John Jordan Mystery (Book 10) (John Jordan Mysteries) Page 6
