“So if the dads don’t have them . . .” Rose Lee said.
“If they’re still alive it would go a long way toward proving Wayne’s innocence,” Annie Bowers said.
No one responded to that.
“I had an idea,” I said. “Wondered if you thought Ada Baker would go for it.”
“What’s that?” Ida asked.
“Tapping her phone and tracing the next call she gets from Cedric or whoever’s calling her.”
Ida shook her head.
“That was mentioned initially, but she said she feared for Cedric’s safety, that he had to have a good reason for running and hiding and she didn’t want him found until he wanted to be.”
I thought about that.
“Calling her like that is such torture,” Summer said. “Wonder who’s doing it and why?”
They were the most words she had spoken in any of the groups.
“You don’t think it’s Cedric?” I asked.
She shrugged. “It’s torture either way.”
“We should ask her again,” Mickey said. “If we can trace the call . . . we can find out what the hell is goin’ on.”
“I’ll talk to her again,” Ida said. “But don’t expect much. Don’t think she’s likely to change her mind.”
“How are you?” I asked.
Summer and I were standing beneath the covered walkway, lingering to speak to one another as the others were leaving.
“Better,” she said.
“Good.”
“Sorry again,” she said. “For my baggage. Can’t be helped. Would if it could. That Serenity Prayer thing you mentioned, I practice it too. I’m changing everything I can, everything I’m capable of.”
I nodded. “Don’t doubt that for a second.”
Be kind. I thought of the quote most often attributed to Plato. Everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
“Sorry again for the hard line of the boundaries I have to set right now,” I said. “I wouldn’t if they weren’t necessary.”
“I know. Believe me, I get it.”
“Hey,” Miss Ida called to us. “You two feel like taking a ride?”
She was walking back toward us from the parking lot.
We began moving toward her.
“I’m goin’ to talk to Ada now,” she said. “Y’all want to go?”
I nodded and looked at Summer.
She shrugged. “Is it okay?”
“Sure, honey,” Ida said, “I wouldn’t’ve—oh. You meant with . . .”
“Of course,” I said.
“No way,” Ada said. “No way I do that to my boy. Done enough to him already.”
“But it would help us find him,” Ida said.
“He don’t want to be found,” she said. “I got to honor that. He’a come home when he ready.”
“What if he can’t?” I said. “What if he’s being held hostage? What if they let him call as a way of controlling him, but he can’t tell you what he really wants to?”
She thought about that as if it hadn’t occurred to her before.
After a while, she slowly began shaking her head. “Just can’t. Don’t trust the po-lice to . . . Too much can go wrong.”
A thought occurred to me.
“What if we hired a private firm to do it?” I said. “What if they only told you and one other person you trust? Miss Ida. Lonnie. It’d be up to you. You could then do with the information what you wanted.”
“Hmm. Let me think about that one,” she said.
“It’s a real chance of finding him, Ada,” Ida said. “It was me, I’d take it.”
“What if it the wrong thing, Miss Ida? What if it harm him somehow? I’d rather him be safe without me than . . . anything happen to him ’cause I tryin’ to get him back.”
“I didn’t sense any deception in anything she said,” Summer said.
She, Ida, and I were standing out in the parking lot in front of Ada’s building.
The night was cold and windy, and we wouldn’t be standing here long.
“Not like I did the last time I was here,” she added.
“Whatcha mean, girl?” Ida said.
“She wasn’t being totally truthful about where she was between the time Cedric left the apartment and when she arrived at Scarlett’s.”
“Oh, yeah, that,” Ida said. “Always assumed she was turning a trick or scoring some dope—probably both, the one for the other. Wouldn’t mean she had anything to do with what happened to Cedric.”
“Except because of neglect,” Summer said.
“You probably right,” Ida said, “but take it from a mother who was overprotective of her boy, you only have to turn your back for a second and . . .”
LaMarcus playing in his backyard, just a few feet away from the watchful eyes of his mother and sister. There one minute, gone the next, his body found in a large culvert in a drainage ditch later that night. He had looked like he was sleeping. That sleep of death and what dreams may come that followed it had flung his mother into a wakeful nightmare of the cruelest kind.
When I walked into the apartment, my phone was ringing.
It was Frank Morgan.
“Approval came through, he said. “Everything’s set. You see him tomorrow.”
Nothing else need be said. I knew who the he was. I would spend the rest of the sleepless night thinking about my second encounter with the man who obsessed my waking hours, the monster who had haunted my dreams.
Chapter Thirty-four
“What’re you hoping to get out of this?” Frank asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
What I did know was that I wasn’t ready, wasn’t prepared, and I didn’t know how to be.
We were sitting in a hallway outside the conference room in the Admin building, waiting on Wayne Williams to arrive.
“Is there something in particular you want to ask him?” he said.
I shook my head. “Just want to look into his eyes.”
“Well, now’s your chance,” he said. “Here he comes.”
Two correctional officers escorted Wayne Williams into the building. He was neither cuffed nor shackled, and he looked to be out on a casual stroll.
We stood.
When he reached us, he extended his hand and we each shook it and spoke to him.
“Thank you for agreeing to do this, Mr. Williams,” Frank said. “The GBI really appreciates it.”
“No problem,” he said. “Happy to help if I can.”
“Right in here,” one of the COs said, motioning us toward the Admin conference room.
“I’ll be here if you need me,” Frank said. “Just yell.”
He then sat back down on the sofa, and Williams and I walked into the conference room.
I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this—not something as innocuous as a conference room. I had pictured either a small, empty room with two metal chairs and a metal table, Williams’s cuffs and shackles chained to a hook in the concrete floor. Or a visiting booth with a plexiglass partition, each of us communicating through a telephone receiver.
A conversation in a conference room between two guys—neither of whom were cuffed or armed—was just so . . . pedestrian.
The COs remained outside with Frank. The door closed, and I was alone with Wayne Williams.
I wanted to look into his eyes, and I did. I locked onto them and didn’t avert my gaze—even when I wanted to.
The eyes I looked into were hooded and blinked a lot behind large glasses.
He was smaller than I remembered, had lost some of the soft roundness in his face and pudginess around his midsection. He no longer had an afro, and his close-cropped hair appeared to be beginning to recede a bit.
Could this really be the monster who had left such a wide wake of devastation behind him, haunted my childhood, changed the course of my life?
“Do you remember me?” I asked.
He canted his head slightly and narrowed his eyes
. Lifting his hand, partially pointing a finger at me as if it was coming to him. “I might . . .” he said. “You look familiar. Help me out.”
“I was twelve. You were twenty-two. We met in the arcade at the Omni. You were passin’ out flyers.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I do remember. I knew you looked familiar.”
He didn’t recognize or remember me. He was a compulsive and accomplished liar. I knew that already.
I was now eighteen and he was twenty-eight, the six years between our first encounter and this one compressing the age difference separating us down to a point of nearly nonexistence. We were both adults now.
“Agent Morgan mentioned you’re a theology student,” he said.
I nodded.
“And you also have an interest in criminal investigation?”
“I do.”
“You ever thought of working in a place like this?” he said. “Prison chaplain can do a lot of good.”
I shook my head. “That’s interesting. No, I never have.”
“You should consider it,” he said. “You could minister to the spiritual needs of the inmate population and reexamine the cases of those who claim to be innocent.”
“You still maintain your innocence, don’t you?” I said.
“I don’t just maintain my innocence. I am innocent. Nobody will tell you they saw Wayne Williams kill another person, hit another person, stab another person, shoot another person, choke another person, or hurt another person in any way.”
I knew that to be true. Not a single eyewitness ever came forward to say they had seen him hurt or kill anyone. There were witnesses who placed him with some of the victims, but that was it.
“Why do you think you were convicted?” I asked.
“Honestly? Let me tell you. The city of Atlanta was ready to explode. They had to have a scapegoat and he had to be black. That was me. Now look, yes, I was my own worst enemy—goin’ off on the stand like that. I did a lot of stupid stuff. I was just a buzz-headed kid, but that doesn’t make me a killer, does it?”
I shook my head. “No, it doesn’t.”
We were quiet a moment.
I tried to get a sense of the man sitting across from me. He was really difficult to read. But there was something about him, more an absence of something than a presence. I was having a hard time determining exactly what it was.
“If it wasn’t you, do you have any ideas on who the murderer was?” I asked.
“Well, look, yes, I have some theories, but that’s all they are. I don’t have any knowledge of anything. I wasn’t a witness to anything. I will say this—it wasn’t just one killer. Some may’ve been the Klan, some parents or relatives, some some kind of sex ring—older men messin’ around with some drop shot kids gettin’ paid for sex acts.”
“You know a lot about your case,” I said. “I’m sure you’ve studied a lot of others like it, probably know far more than most about these kinds of things.”
“Unfortunately, I guess I do.”
“If there were a series of similar murders—young boys like so many of the victims in the missing and murdered children case—but no bodies were ever found, why do you think that would be?”
“How many we talking?”
“Not sure. Say six or more.”
“Well, now, no body no murder,” he said. “No evidence. Missing kids cases don’t get much attention, but a murdered kid . . .”
I nodded. “But how could the killer keep the bodies from being discovered?”
“Think about the clown killer from Chicago,” he said. “Gacy. Hid the bodies right in his house. Serves another purpose too. Keeps them close. Don’t have to give them up when you’re . . .”
I thought about it.
“Or he could just be buryin’ them in a place no one has looked yet,” he said. “Woods. Foundation at a construction site. Graveyard. Crematorium. What if there’s nothing left of them because he used acid or something like that?”
“Can you explain why you failed a polygraph?” I said.
Actually, he had failed three.
“Well, now, yes, I think . . . I believe I can. Some people . . . those tests aren’t a certain science, not one hundred percent accurate. Some people can pass ’em and others fail ’em no matter what. Just one of those things.”
Just one of those things.
“What about Cheryl Johnson?” I asked.
She was the woman he claimed he was supposed to meet the morning after his arrest. Said he was out looking for her address the night he was stopped on the bridge. All this time and she had never come forward. One of the biggest, most high profile cases in history and she didn’t hear about it, didn’t know everyone was looking for her? None of her friends or family members stepped forward and even asked if it could be her?
He gave me a half frown with a small smile peeking out behind it. “I have no answer for that. She probably just didn’t want to get involved. Maybe it was a prank from the beginning. Maybe somebody was trying to set me up—and it worked.”
There were so many things I wanted to ask him and we were running out of time.
What do I ask? What can I say to get him to reveal something new, something that would help with the case? Think. Come on. You don’t have long.
“There were reports that you and your dad burned all kinds of items—documents, pictures, clothing, things like that—after you became a suspect. What did you burn and why?”
“It was just trash,” he said. “Nothing more. Nothing sinister. I can see how it would look, but at the time . . . I just didn’t think about it.”
You’re lying.
“How do you explain all the trace evidence connecting you to so many of the victims?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Look, I was set up. I don’t know by who or what all they did, but they did enough to make it happen, right? Fake a phone call from somebody claiming to be Cheryl Johnson. Manufacture evidence. Hide evidence of other suspects. Hide evidence that contradicts the story they’re weaving. I don’t know. I just know Wayne Williams is innocent and no eyewitness says otherwise.”
Chapter Thirty-five
“Well?” Frank asked.
He had waited until we were back in his car, a GBI-issued boxy navy-blue Ford LTD, to say anything.
It was raining when we walked out of Georgia State Prison near Reidsville, a cold, hard rain that turned the late afternoon gunmetal gray and pelted us as we ran toward the vehicle.
The same hard rain was now pelting the car as we drove up I-16 toward Macon.
I shrugged.
“Not ready to talk about it?” he said.
“I’m not sure what I think,” I said. “Or feel. It was very interesting—and I got to do what I wanted to do. I looked into his eyes.”
“Did you see his soul?”
“I didn’t.”
“That’s because he doesn’t have one,” he said.
Though on high, the wipers couldn’t keep up with the water sluicing down the windshield, but traffic was light and Frank drove like he was ready to be home.
“I just feel like I . . . like it was a missed opportunity,” I said.
He let out a little burst of laughter.
“’Cause you didn’t get him to confess?” he said.
I smiled. “Yeah maybe. I don’t know. I just . . .”
“It’s all about expectation,” he said. “You went in there thinkin’ you were actually goin’ to get him to confess or prove to you his innocence.”
“I’m not so sure it was like that, but I did want to gain something, learn something new, something to justify the time and effort you put into making it happen.”
“You probably got far more out of it than you know,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if things he said didn’t keep coming to you for a while. I get you––”
His pager vibrated at the same time dispatch called for him on his radio.
He radioed in and was informed that a last known address had b
een located for Daryl Lee Gibbons. It was on Old Conyers Road near Stockbridge. Daryl Lee and his mother were believed to be renting a basement apartment from an elderly couple.
“I’ll try to swing by and pay a visit to ol’ Daryl Lee tomorrow,” he said.
“Or,” I said, “we could swing by tonight. We’ll be coming in on 75. It’d only be ten minutes or so out of our way.”
“Do you know what you see when you look up the word relentless in the dictionary?” he said.
“A picture of me?”
“No, the definition of relentless. And do you know what it says after that?”
“No, what?”
“See also John Jordan.”
“Is that a no?” I asked.
“No, it’s not a no.”
The house was a split-level ranch–style built on a hill—one story showing in the front, two in the back. It was made of beige brick and had a swimming pool behind it.
Though it was around eight in the evening when we arrived, the house was completely dark and there were no signs anyone was home.
The sweep of Frank’s headlights as we pulled in to the circular drive showed a once nice home now in disrepair, a yard in need of maintenance, and a car with two flat tires that looked abandoned.
“Doesn’t look like anyone’s home,” Frank said.
“Or that anyone lives here any longer,” I said.
“It was just a last known,” he said. “They could’ve moved on long ago. But we’re here, so let’s knock on the door.”
We did.
Then we banged.
Eventually we heard movement inside.
And a while after that, an obese middle-aged woman with very bad teeth appeared in the darkness through the partially opened door.
Frank flashed his badge.
“Georgia Bureau of Investigation,” he said. “You are?”
“Mrs. Tilda Gibbons.”
“We need to speak to your son, Mrs. Gibbons.”
“He ain’t here.”
“Then we’ll speak to you,” he said. “Turn on some lights and let us in.”
“Lights been shut off,” she said. “Come back tomorrow.”
Frank pulled out a small flashlight that looked like a thick writing pen and shone it in the woman’s face.
BLOOD CRIES: a John Jordan Mystery (Book 10) (John Jordan Mysteries) Page 13
