“Will you call me if you need anything?” he asked. “Anything at all?”
“I will. And thanks again.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
Though Susan had offered to come back and watch a movie with me, I went home alone.
I was upset by the news Frank had given me, but was I also hoping Summer would come over at some point.
Perhaps. But that was only part of it. I wanted to work my walls, compile the information I had received so far, to look over things in the light of the new details I now had.
I intended to go straight in and get to work.
What I did instead was collapse onto my bed and fall fast asleep.
Soon I was dreaming.
Summer and I were standing in the woods between Memorial Manor and Scarlett’s, talking about Cedric and the other still-missing boys when they began to rise out of the ground around us.
Digging, scratching, scooping, they clawed their way out of their shallow graves, their faces, hair, and clothes caked with dirt and mud, twigs and bugs sticking to their hair, dried blood clinging to their soiled and tattered clothes.
I was saying something when I woke up but had no idea what.
When I went back to sleep, Mickey Davis was demonstrating how easy it would be to snatch a kid. One moment we were riding in his car on I-20 toward downtown, the next he was pulling up to a street corner where a barefooted, shirtless young black boy in only cutoffs was walking home with a can of snuff.
“Get in,” Mickey said.
The kid did as he was told.
“See?” he said to me.
“Yeah, see?” the kid said. “Nothing to it.”
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“Nothing,” they said in unison. “Nothing means nothing.”
The next morning, during a discussion in my New Testament class, I was struck by how different I was from the other students, how different my experience was from theirs.
It wasn’t just that their paradigm and approach to religion and the Bible was far more concrete and literal than mine, it was that this classroom, the school, the church, the practice of their faith was all consuming. I was sure they must, but it didn’t seem like they had a life outside of the school and the church.
Maybe it wasn’t that they didn’t have one, but the way being part of the school and being a member of the church defined, dictated, and determined their lives entire.
There had been a special service at the church the night before. I was the only one not in attendance.
When I offered a dissenting opinion, a different way of seeing the same dynamic—namely God’s work in the world—I was told that I just didn’t get it. I would have if I had attended the service, heard the bishop’s message, a message they referred to as the rest of the revelation.
“God’s only work in the world is through his church,” one student said. “It’s only those aligned with his purpose, his set-aside and chosen people, who can come into agreement with him to bring about his kingdom on this planet.”
It must have been obvious that I didn’t agree.
“You disagree?” he said to me.
“I do.”
When I didn’t elaborate, he said, “Why?”
“Your supposition is rooted in tribalism,” I said. “It’s the old us-and-them formulation. I don’t see it that way. I think grace flows through whoever allows it to. To label a group of people as special, as the only ones used by God isn’t just imperceptive, it’s dangerous. It’s the same kind of thinking that says there’s no truth outside of a particular sacred text, or a specific spokesperson for God. It’s limiting to the point of absurdity. If there’s a God, a creative, loving force that transcends being itself, she can’t be limited to a single religion, book, prophet, or—”
“Pronoun, evidently,” another student said.
“Exactly. It’s like Paul Tillich said—‘God isn’t a being, but the ground of all being.’”
“Tillich also said ‘the first duty of love is to listen,’” Dan Rhodes, the professor, said. “We need to make sure we’re all doing that, all listening to one another.”
What if Martin’s mother’s lawsuit causes all this to go away? What if it damages it beyond repair? What if I’m responsible for that?
It felt funny to keep calling her Martin’s mother, but I had never met the woman, didn’t know anything about her—including her name.
I nodded. “Sorry if I didn’t listen like I should.”
“I’m not saying you didn’t,” he said. “Just reminding us all that we need to. Let’s listen to John some more. Share with us what you’re feeling, what you’re hearing, what you’d like to say.”
“Thank you. I don’t have answers, only questions. I believe the religious experience can be approached as a way of having all the answers or as a way of having none, of only having profound questioning. Back to Tillich—this will be the last time I quote him today, I promise. He said something to the effect that being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even when they hurt. For me . . . I just feel . . . like maybe our conversations and explorations are sometimes too confining, too reductive for the topics we’re discussing. I’m sure it’s just me, though. Thanks for letting me share that.”
He nodded. “You make a good point. We believe we’ve been created in the image of God. We must be careful not to return the favor.”
“I don’t understand,” another student said.
“We have to make sure we’re not making God over into our image, that we’re not making an idol out of ourselves—our own beliefs and preferences and limitations and superstitions.”
“Which I know I’m guilty of,” I said.
“We all are. First step is to recognize it. Can’t deal with it until we do.”
That made me think of AA and Lonnie’s small, sincere group, and I committed to going later in the day.
Thinking of Lonnie led me to Cedric and gave me an idea. It would require yet another favor from Frank Morgan—something I had to be getting close to exhausting but had yet to.
Thinking of Frank in the context of this class and conversation made me think of how much good he did in the world, how much the force of God worked through him, though he would never see it that way. He was not a member of any church, wasn’t religious in any way but the ways that mattered.
“Sorry again for waking you up last night,” I said.
“No problem,” he said.
I was in Randy Renfroe’s office after class, calling Saint Frank.
“Not so sorry to keep me from asking for another favor or two, though.”
He laughed.
“It’s just a thought I had,” I said. “Remember me tellin’ you that Ada Baker claims her son Cedric calls her from time to time?”
“Yeah?”
“Could we put a trace on her phone so we can track down whoever it is doing the calling—if there is someone?”
“It’s a great idea,” he said. “I just don’t know logistically if it’s something I can get done. What’s the other?”
“Trying to find a guy named Daryl Lee Gibbons.”
“What’s his story?” he asked.
I told him.
“Tell you what,” he said. “You commit to going home for the holidays and really make an effort to patch things up with your dad, and I’ll see what I can do about both. Deal?”
I thought about it for a moment. Thanksgiving was a few weeks away, and I had pretty much decided to stay up here that weekend, but . . .
“Deal,” I said. “Thanks, Frank.”
“Oh, I almost forgot. That hit-and-run you asked about.”
“Yeah?”
“No evidence that it was anything but,” he said. “In fact, cop on the scene theorized that maybe the driver didn’t even know he’d done it. There were no skid marks. Looks like he never even braked.”
“Which is exactly how it would look if it wasn
’t an accident.”
When I ended my call with Frank, I walked across the hall to the chapel.
Classes completed, students gone for the day, most of the small staff at lunch, the chapel was empty, quiet, and dark, just the way I liked it.
For a while I just walked around the chapel, thinking, praying, wrestling with my mind.
I was missing Summer, agitated that I hadn’t heard from her. I was anxious about the cases, the lawsuit, my conflict with my fellow students and my estrangement from my dad, and many other things I needed to let go of.
Which was what I was here for.
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” I said aloud into the silence of the sacred space, “the courage the change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
After a while of saying it, I began to practice it, and eventually I began to feel somewhat centered again.
Chapter Twenty-nine
That afternoon I went to the AA meeting in Lonnie’s storage room.
I was sitting across from a partially visible poster of Dressed to Kill, the Brian De Palma Hitchcockian erotic thriller with Michael Caine and Angie Dickinson. The top of the poster read “Brian De Palma, the master of the macabre, invites you to a special showing of the latest fashion . . . in murder.”
It peeked out from behind a shelf of cat food and cases of Coke—the latter Lonnie both sold and consumed.
As we said the Serenity Prayer and went over the Twelve Steps, I realized I had been using them to deal with Summer’s disappearance from my life, the lawsuit, the case. Rather than remaining upset or so out of sorts I wasn’t good for much of anything else, I had practiced accepting what I couldn’t change and changed what I could.
The process and practice of AA didn’t just work for alcohol addiction.
“I want to talk about something today that we can all fall victim to,” Lonnie said. “Being dry drunks—something that happens when we stop drinking but don’t change our mentalities, don’t change our stinking thinking.”
The two other men nodded as if they knew what he was talking about.
“Sobriety isn’t just stopping the consumption of alcohol,” he said. “It’s a way of life, of being. It’s a complete change in our way of thinking, behaving, living. It can only happen when we deal with our defects of character.”
“Drinking is a symptom not the disease,” one of the other men added.
“Exactly.”
“Drinking is our way of dealing with the disease,” the other man said. “The worst way.”
Lonnie nodded. “We have to be so careful,” he said. “We can so easily fool ourselves. We can replace drink with another obsession and think we’re sober when we’re not, when we haven’t changed a thing.”
That’s when I realized all this was for my benefit. He had saved this particular discussion for when I was present.
He thought I had traded alcohol for the investigation into his nephew’s disappearance and that of the Atlanta Child Murders. And he was right.
I was a dry drunk and needed to hear what he had to say, but that didn’t mean I wanted or was going to.
Later that afternoon, Mickey and I located Jamal Jackson’s biological father and began following him.
Our plan was to follow all the fathers to see if any of them had their sons as the cops had theorized. Of course, some of the kids would be my age by now, and could be out on their own. If they were between ten and fourteen when they were taken, they would be between fifteen and nineteen now.
We started with Jamal’s father because we had to start somewhere and he was the first we found.
The first afternoon, we followed him together. From then on we alternated, changing out when we could, covering as much of the day as we could while still meeting our other obligations. Mickey had more flexible time than I did and took more shifts.
Gerry Jackson, Jamal’s father, worked at night as a cook at the Waffle House on Panola Road. When he was at work, we mostly watched his house. When he wasn’t, we mostly watched him, searching for any sign of Jamal.
After three days, two of which were on a weekend, we had found no sign of Jamal.
On the fourth day, we showed up at Gerry’s place of work, took a booth and ordered breakfast like any other customers.
It was the middle of the night, and the place was mostly empty. When Gerry finished his final order and had a break, we asked if we could talk to him.
“Somethin’ wrong with your food?” he asked.
“No, it’s perfect,” I said. “Very good. Please, sit down with us for just a minute.”
He slowly, warily sat down, studying us as he did. “What’s this about?”
“Jamal,” I said.
“Y’all have him?” he said, sitting up, ready to fight.
“Nothing like that,” I said. “We’re looking for him.”
“Whatcha mean?”
“We’re part of a group looking for missing children,” I said. “He’s a reporter. I’m a student. We’re all volunteers trying to do something the police didn’t or couldn’t.”
“Man, don’t get me started on the fuckin’ cops,” he said. “Didn’t do shit but blame me. Convinced my ex I took Jamal from her. She still think I did. She stalk me. Sue me. Say all kind of shit about me, but I didn’t take my boy. Could have if I wanted to. After all, he’s my son, just as much as hers. But I didn’t.”
“Any idea who might have?” I asked.
As usual, Mickey wasn’t saying much, just taking notes and taking it all in. He had told me this was his preferred way to work. By letting me ask the questions, he could focus on the person we were talking to and his writing.
He shook his head. “Not really. Well, is this off the record?”
“Yes, sir,” Mickey said.
“Everybody else got theories,” he said. “I’ll give you mine. Either Wayne Williams got him and he was either never found or misidentified . . . or . . . my crazy-ass ex did something to him and is tryin’ to cover it up. She keep attacking me so nobody suspect her.”
They were interesting theories. He was a smart guy—and articulate. Why was he working as a short-order cook in the middle of the night?
“Tell you one thing,” he said. “Whoever was behind it—her or someone else—did a damn good job of making the cops think it was me.”
“How so?”
“Planted shit of his—clothes, toys and shit—in my car, my house. Convinced the cops he had been there, that I had him or had had him. Hell, if they hadn’t been stretched so thin with the murders and if Vera had been a better mother, they wouldn’t’ve left me alone.”
The door opened and a trucker with an orange vest and brown baseball cap came in.
“I’ve got to get back to work,” he said. “I appreciate y’all looking for my boy. Y’all find him, you let me know. Food’s on the house tonight. Take care now.”
As he moved away, back behind the counter, back to his cooking station, I shook my head and looked at Mickey.
“What?” he said, meeting my eyes momentarily. “Your eyes are bulging out of your head. What is it?”
“What if the killer planted evidence on the dads to make the authorities think they had them to get them to stop looking?”
“Oh wow,” he said. “That would be . . . wicked as fuck.”
“We’ll have to check with the others to confirm, and we still need to find the mothers, but if that’s what it is . . .”
“It’s ingenious,” he said. “And it helped him get away with murder.”
Chapter Thirty
Over the next few days, we tracked down as many of the fathers as we could—four of the six in all.
Interestingly, finding the mothers was proving far more difficult, but the fathers we found all told us the same story.
They didn’t kidnap their sons and at some point someone placed something of their sons’—articles of clothing or other personal belongings—in their homes
and vehicles.
Of the four dads we spoke with—Cedric’s, Jamal’s, Duke’s, and Quentin’s—all but Cedric’s had the same exact experience.
“You know what this means?” Mickey said.
We were on 285 in heavy traffic, headed back toward Memorial Drive.
“What’s that?”
“We’re dealing with a serial killer. Wayne Williams or someone else—but that’s what this is. Not fathers or other family members. Not runaways or kidnappings.”
I didn’t say anything, just thought about it.
“I’ve studied this type of killer a lot while working on my book,” he said. “There’s no motive—least none that we can ever understand. There are patterns. There are certain psychological signatures they leave, but . . . it’s all fantasy driven for them. They’re acting out some sick, horrific fantasy that involves sex and death.”
I nodded.
“Scariest thing is how normal they can seem,” he added. “I could be the killer, and you’d never know it.”
“You don’t seem that normal,” I said.
He laughed.
I thought about the mask of humanity and sanity our killer might be wearing, and wondered what it might look like. Just how normal did he appear to be? How convincing was his disguise? How deeply buried was his surreal secret? Had we encountered him? Was he dead or in prison or in a psych ward somewhere? Was that why the murders stopped? Or had he just relocated? Were other people somewhere else unknowingly glancing at that mask, gazing day in and day out into an abyss that was gazing back, without even realizing that’s what was happening?
“But seriously . . . we’re not dealing with a human being here.”
He was right, and I knew the things he was saying were true in themselves, but I questioned whether he was sensationalizing them for the sake of the story he was already crafting in his head.
“They have these extreme fantasies of sexual violence—starting in childhood or adolescence. Their isolation, compulsive behaviors, daydreaming, and increased acting out on animals and shit fuel their fantasies and eventually it all leads to murder—but not just one. A series. That’s what we’re dealing with here.”
BLOOD CRIES: a John Jordan Mystery (Book 10) (John Jordan Mysteries) Page 11
