A small contingent of uniformed APD officers flanked her sides and back as she crossed the street and navigated the short concrete walkway leading up to the main doors of Historic Ebenezer, the newer, larger church built in the late 1990s. A horde of reporters and photographers packing zoom lenses, still stationed behind A-frame police barricades, captured her every step. News choppers hovered above.
Even in her grief, Victoria held on to her bearings. She clasped her hands behind her as she strode past the clock tower and stepped inside the vestibule. An agent from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation met her at the framed glass double doors.
“Mayor Dobbs, I’m Agent Jason Clearwater, GBI,” he announced, extending his hand.
She gave him a firm, brief handshake and nodded.
“We don’t have much to go on,” he advised her. “We’ve got techs combing the rooftop, but it’s clean as far as we can tell. The van was reported stolen three days ago from an E-Z Rental lot up in Dahlonega and—”
“It’s my understanding that Congressman Hawkins is still in the sanctuary,” she said, cutting him off.
“Yes, ma’am. There are four bodies. If I can ask you to have a seat here, my agent-in-charge is on the third floor, in the pastor’s study,” he said, waving his open hand over a foldout chair. “I will let him know that you’re here.”
“I need to see them,” the mayor said abruptly and still standing. “I need to see the bodies.”
“Ma’am, I’m afraid we cannot allow that. I’m sorry, but I have to remind you that the GBI has jurisdiction now. This is our crime scene at least until the feds arrive. Homeland Security—”
“I don’t really care who has jurisdiction,” she said, clenching her teeth. “Not today, not tomorrow, not the day after that.”
Pelosi placed his hand on her shoulder. She immediately cooled. There was a better way, Victoria admitted to herself.
“Give us a moment,” she said, waving Pelosi away. “What was your name again? Clearwater, right?”
“Yes, ma’am. Agent Jason Clearwater,” he responded formally. “I work out of the field office in Conyers.”
Victoria studied his buzz-shaven ginger-red hair and emerald-green eyes. She silently noted the absence of a telling accent. Wherever the bookish-looking agent was from, it certainly wasn’t Georgia or anywhere in the South, for that matter, and given his stone-faced demeanor, he likely had not been around long enough to appreciate how the political winds blew inside of I-285.
“Agent Clearwater, I mean no disrespect, but the congressman was like a father to me,” the mayor said, looking up again, her caramel-brown eyes baking with sincerity. “I was sitting next to him this morning.”
“Ma’am, I am truly sorry for your loss,” Clearwater said, eyeing her bloodied dress and the open cut on her arm. “My section commander would have my head. I’d be fired before sundown.”
She stepped in closer, leaning in toward his ear. “I employ two thousand sworn officers and investigators,” she said, glancing back at Pelosi. “I can guarantee you that you’ll always have a paycheck. If this costs you your job, you’ll always have one with me.”
Clearwater radioed his section chief, and the sanctuary was ordered cleared. A crime scene technician dutifully covered her Prada sling-back flats with mesh booties and helped her snap on a pair of latex gloves. The mayor was then escorted inside.
Stepping over debris, flakes of broken glass and bits of broken plaster, Victoria fixed her eyes on the wooden cross that was suspended above the regal altar.
“We don’t think he expected a firefight,” Agent Clearwater said over her shoulder. “Although it really wasn’t much of one.”
“He? One shooter did all of this?”
“Yes, ma’am, we believe so. A deacon described a man, olive complexion, average height with a slender build. He was disguised as a repairman. The first shot came from that center-front skylight,” Clearwater said, pointing toward the ceiling.
“The shooter was packing enough firepower to pin down an entire Army squadron. I can’t say for sure, and you didn’t hear it from me, but every indication says this was a professional hit. This was an assassination, ma’am. We found a safety harness dangling from the rear of the building. Otherwise, he made a clean getaway.”
The mayor nodded her head and said, “Indeed.”
A hired security guard and an off-duty Fulton County deputy returned fire, Clearwater went on explaining. Both men were a part of the pastor’s security detail. The deputy was cut down almost immediately, according to preliminary witness statements. His 9 mm SIG Sauer pistol was now tagged and bagged. Metal shell casings littered the powder-blue carpeting. The shooter used military-grade armor-piercing rounds with a hardened steel core, Clearwater said. By the time the first SWAT unit arrived, the damage was done and the suspect was long gone.
“How is that possible? He disappeared in broad daylight?”
“Yes, ma’am. Three more parishioners and two church staffers, including Deacon Garvin, were triaged and sent by ambulance to Grady Memorial and Atlanta Medical Center,” Clearwater went on. “We believe Mr. Garvin may have led the shooter to the roof and unwittingly unlocked the door. We’ve got agents stationed outside his hospital room in case he pulls through.”
“Deacon Garvin never met a stranger in his life. In his mind, everybody he meets is a child of God.”
“There was nothing godly about what happened here, ma’am. Mr. Garvin may be the only person who can make a positive identification.”
“Are you a praying man, Agent Clearwater?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then pray that Deacon Garvin sees another tomorrow,” Victoria said, looking down at the heap of plastic on the floor.
“His name is Claude Robinson,” the agent said.
Victoria stepped to the dark plastic covering, stooped down, and pulled back the sheath. She took in his lifeless face, pushing down the overwhelming sadness bubbling up in her chest.
Without looking up, the mayor said, “Mr. Robinson was a dear friend of my parents. I’ve known him my entire life.”
Her eyes sketched his freshly trimmed, salt-and-pepper mustache, his clean-shaven, hard-squared jaw, and the deep cleft in his chin.
“He was a phone bank volunteer on my campaign,” she said, growing tearful. “Retired Marine. Pulled three tours in Vietnam. He never had a lot of money, but he put everything he had into every one of my campaigns. If I could thank him a thousand times a day for a thousand years, it would never be enough.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Promise me something?” she said. “Promise me that you won’t stop until you find the man who did this.”
“We won’t stop.”
The air inside the main hall was thick and smelled of warm blood and metal. The standing fans had been shut off to preserve the crime scene, and Victoria began sweating as she moved closer to the pulpit. The deputy was laid out on the right side of the altar. A darkened pool of blood collected around the top end of the plastic sheath.
“I’m afraid there isn’t a lot left to see. Deputy Finlaysen took a direct hit.”
Clem Finlaysen? God, no.
Her legs locked up again, but she kept moving, one footfall at a time, until she was standing under the wooden cross dangling from the ceiling. She now had a clear view of the black sheeting in the center of the pulpit.
Hawkins had been her political godfather. Through the years, they joked that the only way he would give up his congressional seat was faceup in a pine box. He had earned his place in the sun, she assured him while staving off her own ambitions. Certainly other members had served in the House longer, and with less distinction in her mind, although Hawkins was getting up in age, and health issues had begun to mount. She’d rushed out to Saint Joseph’s Hospital twice in the last month alone to see about him, only to find him giggling with the nurses while he dined on Jell-O Pudding Pops.
Victoria was in no hurry to join the partisan c
atfight going on inside the Beltway, and she was already spending too many Sundays on national news talk shows. Her press secretary regularly fielded calls from producers with Meet the Press, Fox News Sunday, and State of the Union. She was a national figure, to be sure, with a direct line to the White House and the Democratic National Committee. But getting the Atlanta City Council to vote for their own pay raise or renaming streets in honor of political patrons was about all they could muster. She and Hawkins used to muse about the legislative “nod squads” that her predecessors enjoyed during their terms. But the sitting council president was eyeing the mayor’s office and couldn’t be counted on to vote her way.
Hawkins was supposed to die peacefully in his sleep, she’d decided long ago, maybe from years of eating open-faced, fried-catfish sandwiches, mini tubs of mustard potato salad, and fistfuls of collard greens over at Paschal’s, where he had a regular table. Victoria managed a slight grin at the thought of how he always ate belly-to-the-table, his elbows planted on the Formica countertop, while listening to Aretha Franklin wail on the jukebox.
Clearwater pulled back the covering, just enough so that she could see his face.
The mayor paused for a moment and said, “Please, I need to see all of him.”
“Ma’am…”
“Please,” she whispered.
His blood-soaked dress shirt had been cut open by a church medic in a pointless attempt to revive him. She was transfixed by the gaping hole in the left-center of his chest.
“Can I touch him?”
Clearwater gave her the go-ahead. Victoria leaned in, stroking his meaty scalp. His chocolate smooth-as-cake-batter skin now looked ashen. Another wave of tears fell. She felt her body quaking. She took hold of the Bible lying at his side.
“Ma’am, please don’t touch that. It’s evidence.”
“It’s mine,” she lied.
“Even so.”
“Please, it’s our family Bible,” she said, spilling another lie.
The coming days would bring lengthy elegies and memorials in his honor, she knew. Victoria would stand in this very pulpit to deliver her own public eulogy to thousands of mourners. Human rights leaders and heads of state from around the world would sit shoulder to shoulder alongside no-name grassroots activists and local elected officials in freshly polished pews. She wondered if she’d be able to do justice to his life, everything that he’d meant to her. The Bible was all she had left of him now.
“You said there were four.”
Clearwater looked down and away, unable to stifle his own tears.
“You said there were four,” she said again, gently pressing for an answer.
The agent pointed to the left aisle, just beyond where she had been sitting during the morning worship service. Victoria panicked when she saw the small brown leather shoe lying beside a plastic tarp.
She remembered the whipping sound then, and how Hawkins’s eyes had widened and locked as he fell. She’d scrambled beneath the pew, instinctively clasping her hands around her head. The horrifying screams filled her ears. Victoria balled herself up and whimpered as glass rained down over the sanctuary.
And then it was over. The sanctuary was suddenly and eerily still. The moans seemed to come from all around her. She’d spotted a small, coffee-brown face under a pew across the aisle and called out to him.
“Are you okay, sweetheart?”
He shook his head slowly, from left to right and back again. The boy was maybe seven or eight, no older than her daughters, and lying on his side. There was an unmistakable look of terror in his wide, nickel-sized dark eyes. Victoria saw the smooth tide of blood oozing beneath his shoulder.
She crawled toward him, on her hands and knees, carefully taking him into her arms, cradling his body as they lay together on the floor. She pressed her hands tightly against his clavicle, his shoulder blade pinched to her breast, in hopes of stanching the flow of blood.
“What’s your name?” Victoria asked, struggling to calm the child.
He parted his lips, but did not answer.
“Come on, stay with me,” she whispered gently. “You’re going to be okay. Stay with me.”
“Keenan,” he said softly. “My name is Keenan Bouleware.”
“Okay, Keenan. Stay awake.”
He nodded his head yes. Victoria rocked himb in her arms and started to sing the first song that came to mind.
This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.
This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.…
She could hear the sirens that shrieked over the distance. “Help is coming,” she said. “They’ll be here soon. Stay with me, son.”
Then finally, the sound of boots rumbling. She was relieved to hear the heavy voices and see the beams of white light as the SWAT unit flooded into the building and entered the sanctuary.
Thank you, Jesus.
A female officer, wearing a helmet and face shield, peered beneath the bench. “Mayor Dobbs?”
“I think he’s been shot,” Victoria said. “I don’t know…”
The last thing she remembered was someone sweeping the boy from her arms, maybe a medic, maybe an officer. Keenan’s eyes were closed, his mouth slightly open.
Staring at the shoe, Victoria realized what had become of him. She wept aloud now. Her wails echoed through the grand hall.
FOUR
Just after 3 P.M., the sky opened up and an unexpected rain began to fall. Despite the warm showers, the hastily called press briefing drew two dozen reporters to the church lawn. Her dampened mess of hair, now curling into ringlets, fell over her shoulders. She took a deep breath, another, and then another.
Pull yourself together, baby.
She clutched the Bible with both hands. Victoria squeezed the Bible, bound in cowhide, and noted its tattered gold-trimmed pages. A man in a dark suit and a black felt fedora took off his jacket and placed it about her shoulders. Maybe a church member, Victoria could not say for sure, as she’d never seen him before. She gave the stranger a pleasant nod and a pained grin.
“We’re here for you, my sister, whatever storms may blow,” he said kindly. “This is family.”
“Thank you,” the mayor said. “And, yes, this is family.”
There were no prepared remarks and no platoon of aides standing beside her. Pelosi and Clearwater positioned themselves a few paces away and watched intently as the mayor cleared her throat and stepped closer to the microphone. Camera operators jockeyed for position and reporters scribbled furiously as she spoke. At one point Victoria paused midsentence and gathered herself.
“Forgive me,” she whispered, stroking wisps of hair from her face.
Never had she felt so naked, so vulnerable. Her Sunday-go-to-meeting dress was splattered with hours-old blood. A small reddish-brown streak snaked along her jawline. Her elbow was still stinging and oozing through a bandage as she counted the casualties.
Four dead, five critically wounded.
“There can be no peace without love,” she said. “We will come together, even in our falling apart.”
She felt her chest tighten again, and again she drew a long sigh.
“I am certain that you have questions,” she said, more resolutely now. “As you might imagine, the investigation will be aggressive and thorough, but we cannot provide any further information at this time. My office will release the names of the victims once we have formally contacted their families.”
Tipping her head specifically in one reporter’s direction, she said, “I trust that all of you understand.”
Victoria noted his arched brow as she started to step away from the scrum, and caught the smirk he seemingly could not contain. Whatever Hampton Bridges thought of her, she thought even less of him. He had to know that he was at the bottom of her list, even on this day, and had been since he penned a four-part exposé on her brother’s rather extensive, albeit alleged, financial ties to a local drug dealer who was up on federal kingpin charges.
&nb
sp; The front-page story broke on the morning of the mayor’s inaugural gala last January and quickly picked up steam. Her communications staff spent weeks dealing with the fallout. There had been no indictment, let alone a conviction. Nevertheless, she had been forced to fire her own brother from his cushy job as a special assistant running the city’s contract procurement office. Doling out millions in sole source contracts to political patrons, Chip Dobbs was a prince in a pawn’s perch. To Victoria’s dismay, her brother spent his every waking moment trying to cash in on his name.
She ordered him fired. His office was boxed up and bolted shut.
A man chasing a penny will never see a dollar.
Bridges was a smaller man now, down at least thirty pounds since the accident, she guessed. His once neatly cropped, silver-gray hair was now long and stringy, tied back in a loose ponytail, and he emitted a sickly stench that even she couldn’t ignore. Valerie Norbreck-Haynes, the New York Times Southeast bureau chief, seemed genuinely embarrassed to be standing next to him.
“Will you run for Congress?” he yelled over the crowd.
The scrum went silent. Victoria addressed him, straight on.
“I am the mayor of Atlanta today, seven months into my second term, and I will be that tomorrow, Mr. Bridges,” she said soberly.
Victoria turned her attention back to the crowd.
“I should tell you that when my father, Dr. Park Dobbs, passed away, it was Ezra Hawkins who stood in the altar and held my hand in that little redbrick church behind you,” she added. “He convinced me to keep on loving this city, to love this state, even when it did not always love us back. He fought the good fight until the very end of his days. He loved this church like no other. We are all the more blessed because he came.”
Paper Gods Page 3
