A quick text to Miyake revealed the address of Sal Busby, the delivery guy for Ted’s. The detective was smart enough to avoid asking why I needed it. Thankfully, the man wasn’t territorial. He’d take new information from any good source.
My GPS led me to Brookdale, Sal Busby’s south-side residence—a low-income, government-subsidized high-rise in desperate need of repair. Most of the section 8 housing I’d seen in the past had been well-maintained, but this building looked to be a holdout from another era. Faded, chipped bricks covered the exterior surface. A rusty fire escape sprang from unkempt shrubbery and snaked askew along the building’s southern side. Dozens of windows had been smashed out, and obscene graffiti appeared everywhere. Why this place wasn’t already condemned was a mystery.
One battle at a time. Moving inside, I picked my way over garbage and torn carpets and found myself outside unit 402. I rapped on the paint-chipped door and waited.
“Who is it?” came a matronly voice from within.
“My name’s Decimus Farr.” Announcing that I was a cop inside this hallway didn’t feel like a good idea. “I was wondering…could I come in for a minute?”
The door cracked, and a pair of eyes scrutinized me top to bottom. “You don’t live here, do you?”
“No, m’am.”
“What ‘chew want?”
“I was actually hoping to talk with Sal Busby.”
“You with the police?” She put the accent on the first syllable—PO-lice.
“Yes, m’am. There’s a few follow-up questions I’d like to cover with him.”
“He ain’t here right now.” She glanced at her Timex, then sized me up again. “His shift’s about over, so he’ll be back soon. You want to come in?”
“Thanks,” I said with a nod while stepping inside. “You’re Evelyn Busby, Sal’s mother?”
“Yep.” The large woman ushered me in and locked the door. She waddled into a small den and tipped herself backwards into a battered recliner.
I took a seat on a couch. The apartment’s walls were covered with photos of the woman and a boy who became progressively older as one followed the pictures from the front door to the kitchen in the back. A green knitted shawl rested over the back of a creaky wooden chair.
“Sal ain’t in no trouble, is he? The PO-lice earlier said he weren’t.”
“No, no trouble. To be honest, we’re a little stuck. I’m actually hoping he can help us with the case.”
She furrowed her eyebrows. “How?”
“Now, to be clear, I’m not accusing him. We know he was working on the basketball tourney when the murders took place. But the funny thing is that he made deliveries to all three victims. So I thought he could tell me if someone had asked him about his customers—what they were like…did they live alone…that sort of thing. Someone might be using him to case his delivery houses, and he doesn’t even realize it.”
She chewed her lip. “I guess that could be. You’ll have to ask him.”
“Sounds good. And thanks for talking to me. I get the feeling not everyone here rolls out the red carpet for cops.”
Evelyn laugh-snorted. “You got that right.” She eyed my Levis and rumpled polo. “You don’t look like no regular cop. You partners with that guy who come earlier?”
“Sort of. He works for the Atlanta police department. I’m an FBI profiler.”
“A what?”
I smiled. “I try to figure out what kind of person commits the crimes we investigate. The more we know about a criminal’s personality, the better our chances of finding him. Three woman have been murdered, and we’re trying to track down the killer before he finds any more victims.”
“I seen it in the news. It’s terrible.” She shook her head and clucked. “Mmm, mmm. Takin’ people’s eyes out, Sal said. Lawd, I don’t know what this world’s coming to. First Grace’s pigeons, and now this.”
An alarm sounded in my mind. “What about Grace’s pigeons?”
“Someone went and killed ‘em. And for no good reason, neither. They was in cages. It’s not like they was hurting anyone.”
“Can you show me?”
“Grace can. I’m not going near dem birds. She get mad when folks mess with ‘em.”
“Fair enough. Can you introduce me? Since Sal isn’t back yet, I’ll take care of that now and come back when I’m through.”
“Yeah, I’ll take you to Grace’s. But why you care about her pigeons? I thought you was here for the murders.”
“As crazy as it sounds, those birds might help.”
She scrutinized me with a raised eyebrow that said you’re off your rocker. But she kept her word and led me out the door and up a flight of stairs.
It’s no secret in profiling circles that serial killers often start with killing animals before they move on to human victims. Maybe the death of the birds had no connection to the murders, but it certainly bore investigating.
Evelyn introduced me to Grace Mabry with a few words about pigeons, then shuffled away.
Grace, a snow-haired, frail woman who couldn’t have topped four foot ten, ushered me inside.
The aroma of brewed tea filled the simple apartment. A bookshelf overflowing with dust-covered mementos and photos from a local high school bore witness to an earlier career as a custodian there.
“Say, you gonna find out who killed my birds?”
“Maybe.”
She cocked her head. “Why you care?”
“You know about the recent murders in this part of town, right?”
She nodded.
“Sometimes serial killers start with animals,” I continued. “Knowing more about what happened to your birds might help me track down the murderer.”
“So you don’t really care about my birds. You jus’ want to figure out who killed them people.”
“Yeah. Don’t you?”
She chuckled. “You’re honest. I like that. Well, son, there ain’t much to tell. A couple of months ago, I went up to my babies as usual, and someone had picked the lock and took out old Hank.”
“Wait…they’re not here?” I glanced around the room.
She threw back her head and laughed. “Lord, no. I can’t keep all them birds in my place! It’d be nothing but noise and smell in here. Besides, they wouldn’t like it inside. They like being out in the weather.”
“I see. So where do you keep them?”
“The roof. Ain’t no other place to keep ‘em.”
Jesus. This side trip just got more interesting than I’d bargained for. Hadn’t figured on scaling any heights today. “Um…okay. Can you take me there?”
We lingered outside the elevator shaft for a good five minutes before its doors finally creaked open. No wonder Evelyn took the stairs earlier.
The elevator opened at floor twenty-one, the top. From there, Grace and I passed through a door marked “authorized personnel only” and ascended a flight of rickety stairs.
We emerged on the roof. To most people, the view of Atlanta’s tree canopy from this height would probably be delightful. I wouldn’t know. I kept my gaze fixed on the roof’s asphalt surface, fighting a rising sense of panic. Damn this vertigo.
“You all right, son?”
“Yep. Just a little sick to my stomach. Something I had for breakfast…”
“Uh-huh.” No need to look at her. The skepticism came through loud and clear in her voice.
We arrived at a trio of large, wire cages occupied by at least twenty pigeons. The food and water containers were amply supplied, and newspapers on the bottom looked recently changed.
“These birds mean a lot to you, huh?”
“If you lived in the middle of everything that goes down around here, they’d mean a lot to you, too.”
She had a point. There weren’t many ways to escape the high-rise’s nonstop crime and drugs. Tending to a clutch of rooftop birds seemed as reasonable a way as any. And it really was peaceful up here, if you didn’t mind the height.
“Can y
ou tell me about what happened to old Hank?”
Her eyes glistened. “I don’t know why people has to go and do something mean like that. He was such a good bird, too. I know that ain’t what you asked me, but it upsets me to think about it.”
“I understand.”
“Anyways, he was missing. So I wondered how can that be. I always make sure the cage is shut tight. Then I found him over here, behind this last cage. Someone had gone and twisted his neck, poor thing. And…” She drew in a long sniff.
“Yes?”
“And they cut out his eyes. Weren’t neither of them left.”
Bingo! This had to be our offender. “Do you have one of the bodies? Or a picture?”
“Naw, I never took no pictures. And it didn’t make no sense to keep the bodies, so I threw ‘em away.”
“That’s okay. What you told me should be enough. When’s the last time one of your pigeons was killed?”
“Let me see now…I believe it was about two…no, wait…three months ago. The killings was pretty regular for a while, then they just…stopped.”
Yes, stopped—right around the time the first human victim was discovered. As I mentioned, killing animals is a classic early behavior of serial killers. Once that wasn’t enough to get him off, our offender turned to human victims.
“Thanks, Mrs. Mabry. This has been really helpful. Can I walk you back to your apartment?”
While waiting for the elevator, I turned over the case in my mind. All the signs pointed to the murderer living is this immediate vicinity if not in the building itself—the animal mutilations and killings…Sal’s visits to all three victims within days of their murders. Yet if the killer wasn’t Sal, who was it? A friend? Someone shadowing him without his knowledge? Time to return to Evelyn’s unit and question the youth.
CHAPTER 27
I dropped off Grace Mabry and returned to Evelyn and Sal Busby’s apartment. Sal certainly didn’t look the part of a serial killer—atop his below-average build, thick-rimmed glasses framed a gentle face.
The Busbys’ eyes grew wide as I explained the significance of the mutilation and murder of Grace’s flock.
“I swear, I didn’t do it!” said Sal. He turned to his mother as if for confirmation.
“I know you didn’t, Sal,” I replied. Even ignoring his iron-clad alibi, the lad’s body language screamed his innocence. “But someone is using you to find their victims. You said no friend has asked you about your routes or customers?”
“No, not at all.”
“Could someone have followed your car?”
“I don’t take my car.” He must have noticed my surprise, for he hastened to add, “I took Mom’s car for the first year I worked at Ted’s. But it needs some major repairs, so I’ve been using Michael’s car the last few months.”
“Michael, huh? He hasn’t asked you were you go?”
“He didn’t need to. He said his mom wanted to make sure I don’t go joy-riding in it, so she makes Michael come with me.”
I had to fight to maintain a calm appearance in the face of this revelation. “Does he go inside the customers’ homes with you?”
“Not usually. And sometimes he doesn’t even ride with me at all. When that happens he just tells his mom he did.”
“But he does go in the houses sometimes?” I asked.
“Yeah, when he gets bored. Maybe two or three times a night.”
I nodded. “You said Michael, right? What’s his last name?”
“Ballinger.”
“And does he live in this building?”
“Yeah—on the ninth floor.”
An hour later, Miyake brought six of his patrol officers along to make the introductions to Michael Ballinger. Word has it the dude was playing video games when they busted in—with his left hand controlling the joystick.
Of course, Ballinger denied any involvement. But when Miyake’s team found a stash of latex gloves and two of the dead pigeons in his room, Ballinger decided to make a plea deal: a confession in exchange for life with no possibility of parole.
In a clinical way, this guy’s confession was fascinating, offering an unparalleled look into a serial killer’s disturbed mind. Although I must say it bothered me that the fucker smiled when describing the violent parts. But what could we do? He’d already copped a deal.
The twenty-year-old had always lived under the thumb of his overbearing mother. She domineered him, controlling every aspect of his life—friends, activities, even the food he ate for breakfast. Normally, I’d applaud this kind of close monitoring, given the lawless environment of his subsidized housing. But the approach proved to be too claustrophobic for Michael. If he so much as looked at his mother during one of her lectures, she would interpret his stare as rebelliousness and beat him, glaring at him all the while. So he learned to keep his gaze averted from eyes that, to him, symbolized the smothering power that controlled his life.
On the surface, he cowered under his mother’s commands. But inside, he grew increasingly frustrated with his helplessness. He yearned to lash out, but how?
A few months earlier, he had learned of the pigeons on his building’s roof and wasted no time checking them out. It was true. Old Lady Mabry kept cages of them up there—helpless creatures, depending on others for everything…including their lives.
The first pigeon looked at Michael. His anger boiled, and he snatched it out of the cage, gouging out the eyes with his pocket knife. The blood felt good…felt like power, he said. But the bird was making too much noise, so he snapped its neck.
The experience was a rush, better than any hit he’d bought from the dealers on the second floor. He lived in a state of exhilaration for a couple of days. Even his mother’s constant badgering couldn’t phase him.
Like all highs, though, the euphoria of killing the first pigeon began to wear off. Within days, he felt no better than he had before.
But the cages contained dozens of birds, right? Plenty of new victims to provide the next hit. And so the bird killings continued for three months, until a darker chapter ensued. Michael had already started to wonder what it would feel like to kill a person when a stroke of luck hit. His friend Sal told him that his car was having troubles. Sal was worried about having to quit his job delivering for Ted’s Deli.
Michael told his mother about Sal’s dilemma and positioned the situation as a way to make a little money off her car, since Sal had offered to pay to use it. It turned out Michael’s mother had indeed ordered him to ride in the car to ensure it was used only for deliveries.
And so Michael began to ride shotgun as Sal made his deliveries. He began to examine the low-income houses to which his friend delivered. Not just any victim would do. It had to be someone who looked like the person who made his life a living hell—his mother. Someone who would scream out in pain when he punched her face and carved her eyeballs out.
Michael was careful. He didn’t appear too anxious to attend the rides or even go into every customer’s house. If a gaggle of faces peered out a customer’s windows, he knew there was no use leaving the car. Only when the prospect of a potential victim cropped up did he accompany Sal to the house’s front door, even then being careful to avoid touching anything.
Sal liked to make small talk with the customers, many of whom were regulars. He said it made them willing to order in the future and kept his job secure. In the course of these doorstep conversations, Michael learned that Gladys Joyce lived alone.
After spending a week or so planning the murder, Michael finally carried it out when his mother left for her weekly Thursday-night Bunco at the rec center. Gladys became his first victim. He had purchased clothes and work gloves specifically for the occasion. After wearing them to commit the crime, he disposed of them in a plastic trash bag dropped into one of the huge dumpsters behind his tenement.
The high of committing this crime, according to Michael, was indescribable—a hundred times better than the birds. Every cry for mercy from the victim felt
as though his mother was uttering it, stoking his bloodlust even further.
But he found the cycle of hills and valleys in his euphoria applied to his human victims, too. Before long, all his focus revolved around trying to hold onto the pleasure of his latest kill while planning the next one.
As much as he wanted to, Michael was smart enough to avoid murdering his own mother. He said he knew that would draw too much attention to him. But did his sense of powerlessness in her presence also hold him back? When I asked the question, Ballinger’s brow furrowed into angry rows, but he refused to answer.
Unfortunately, Michael’s lingering fear of his actual mother didn’t stop him from pursuing other victims. Using the same technique as the one he’d perfected at Gladys’ house, he planned and carried out two more murders. And sure enough, he had already prospected a fourth house and was merely waiting for Thursday night to arrive.
Miyake arrested him on a Wednesday.
Like I’ve said before, every criminal has a blind spot. Ballinger’s was thinking police would never find out how he tracked down his victims. He was nearly right, but nearly doesn’t cut it when you’re trying to get away with murder. Only perfection will do, and he didn’t achieve it.
After his confession, Ballinger was ordered to serve his life sentence at the U.S. penitentiary here in Atlanta. A little more than a year into his sentence, he died when trying to rape a new inmate in the shower, a small guy who kept to himself. The newbie choked out Ballinger from behind. Best to learn if your intended victim is a former MMA athlete with anger-management issues before trying to stick your Johnson up his butt. Like his victims, Ballinger died fighting off an attacker he was helpless to resist. As an ex-agent, I shouldn’t say it, but I took more pleasure from Ballinger’s death than I should. Guess that’s my dark side peeking through.
The beeping horn of the Uber driver breaks my recall of Ballinger’s case details.
“You’ll need to run for it, young man,” says my host. “Alan could come out any minute.”
“Yeah,” I reply. “And hey, thanks for the hospitality.”
The Extraction Page 10
