No Place Safe (20 page)

“I didn’t know you were coming in today.”

“I hadn’t planned to, but I had to stay late in the library, and I-85 was a mess so the bus was late getting into town. Now it’s almost dark.”

The latest rule from Ma was that I couldn’t take the bus home if it meant I’d be walking the half mile from the bus stop in the dark. In the short days of the winter months, that meant I usually spent an evening a week hanging around the Task Force waiting for Ma, depending on what time I left school. Almost daily, there was a new rule meant to keep us safe, though we knew by then that staying safe was really just a matter of gender, luck, and timing.

“Well, it’ll be another hour at least; I’ve got an interview in a few minutes. I asked a detective working a lead up north to swing by and pick up Bridgette from latchkey. You can make sure she stays out of trouble if I’m still in the interview when she gets here.”

“All right,” I said, sounding put upon, but really I didn’t mind. Now I’d have someone to kill time with while Ma did the interview that would last at least an hour longer than she said it would.

“You hungry?”

“A little.”

“Well, go and ask Sid if he’ll pick something up for you. I heard him say he was going out for some dinner in a minute. And order something for Bridgette, too.”

“It’ll be cold by the time she gets here.”

“It’ll be food when she gets here. There’s no telling how long my interview will go. We might not get home until late.”

That I knew for sure, so I went looking for Sid to put in a food order after Ma gave me a ten-dollar bill. I was glad he was going to Church’s because cold chicken was just as tasty as hot, and that way I could wait and eat dinner with Bridgette. After talking to Sid, I returned to Ma’s desk and pulled out my copy of
Catcher in the Rye
, required reading that I would have read without being told. The sounds around me had become background noise—the clicking of reports being typed, Ma’s end of a telephone conversation, leather-soled and high-heeled footsteps, and last names spoken all around me because the cops rarely used first names.

A woman’s scream pulled me away from Holden Caulfield’s world with a shock, and the volume of the background noise was turned up loudly in my ears, but it seemed nothing else had changed in the building. Ma looked up, but continued on with her phone call. The detectives at nearby desks stayed in their seats. At the front of the building, I saw a couple of uniforms talking to a woman who, from my vantage point, looked insane: her arms flailing in some kind of fit, her unkempt hair going every which way, her voice shrieking nonsense. They sat her down in a chair, and a few minutes later, led her out of the building.

When Ma got off the phone, I asked, “Did you hear that woman scream?”

“Yeah, I heard it.” She was writing on a yellow legal pad, I assumed notes from her phone call.

“What do you think was wrong with her?”

“Who knows. We get all kinds of madness in here.”

“Is she a victim’s mother?”

“No. The families are sometimes the calmest of all the people who come in. I think they’ve made peace with their loss, even if they haven’t made peace with us.”

“They took her away.”

“Probably had to call the paddy wagon for her.” Ma looked up then, because she knew how I was. “Nothing to worry about. Wherever they took her is probably where she needs to be.”

A recruit appeared at the desk, telling Ma that her six o’clock was waiting. Ma said okay, and a few minutes later, I saw the recruit leading a woman toward the same conference room Ma had gone into. I wondered if she was a victim’s mother, and if I’d be sneaking a look at the transcripts of Ma’s interview with her weeks from now. Sid returned with the food, and when I told him Ma had gone into the conference room, he went in that direction. I wondered who would play the good cop, and hoped that if the woman was a mother, they’d be kind, whether they thought she was suspicious or not. But the woman could have been anyone—a suspect’s girlfriend, a landlady who had seen something shady, a victim’s math teacher.

When Bridgette showed up, I asked her the questions that Ma would have asked if she wasn’t in the interrogation room: How was school? Did your presentation on reptiles and mammals go okay? Are you hungry?

I left the desk for a minute to buy two cans of soda from the machine with change from Ma’s pencil cup—Sprite for Bridgette, Coke for me. I spread napkins out on Ma’s desk as placemats, found the paper plates she kept in her desk drawer, and began dishing out the food.

“I can fix my own plate.”

“You have to eat a piece of corn and a little coleslaw. You can’t make a meal of just chicken and biscuits. And slow down, the food isn’t going anywhere.”

After we’d taken the first bites of chicken and sips of soda, I became Bridgette’s sister again, and told her all about the screaming woman who had to be taken away in the paddy wagon.

*

The boy last seen selling the car deodorizer at the Stewart-Lakewood Shopping Center had been missing nearly a week. On the fifth day, the sheriff of Rockdale County—officially considered part of the metro area but what I considered the country, namely because I’d never been there before—got a call from an unidentified white man claiming responsibility for all the murders and giving a location on Sigman Road where the latest boy could be found. The man sounded believable enough for the Task Force to conduct a search, although at that point, the Task Force was following up on leads that sounded implausible too, no one wanting to be the detective that missed the lead that would turn out to be
the
lead. The amount of wasted time and work generated by tips provided by the well-meaning, the crazy, and the just plain evil were enough to make even a cop with the patience of Job a little upset.

Ma didn’t have anywhere near the patience of Job, so when she got the call to go on another search the following day, she said, “I don’t know how much longer I can do this —having hope, losing hope, looking for alive kids and finding them dead.” But she went anyway because she had no choice; no one did until the killer was found.

She told me that evening, after the day had worn her down and she’d come home to sleep it off, that the Task Force decided to concentrate its search in the area where the boy was last seen, and amassed a search team of nearly 275 patrol officers, detectives, and FBI agents. They were still feeling the sting of being called inept after the girl was found dead by a citizen search party, and the Task Force wanted to make certain there would be no repeat. Nearly everyone in town who wasn’t working the case, and therefore didn’t know any better, had an opinion on whether the Task Force knew what they were doing.

On a Friday morning that was a bit cooler than usual, and felt cooler still because the humidity always hangs in the Georgia air regardless of the temperature, an army of cops fanned out across the search area lined up like ants, backtracking one another’s paths so as not to miss a clue. Ma was one of them, her feet crunching over dry leaves and pine needles the color of brown paper bags, searching for something she hoped and hoped not to find.

After four hours of searching, they found the skeletal remains of a small child in a wooded area off Redwine Road. The search team then began a tighter search, combing the area for clues as to how and when the child was killed. They were surprised to find a second set of bones. Neither set was the child they were looking for, who had been missing only six days while the two bodies found had been out there a long time. Ma said the thing that stayed in her mind the most when she saw each of the bodies was how their size made it clear that they were only children. Everyone knew right away, and after they had their own private moment of grief like cops do sometimes, so quick the rest of us wouldn’t even notice it, they became hardened detectives again and got to work on the crime scene.

It was clear that a killer was using the area as a dumping ground, much like he had around Niskey Lake when the murders began. The area around Redwine Road where the latest two bodies had been found was also where the third victim was found back in November of 1979. The discovery of these bodies only cemented the belief that the seventeen murders committed to this point were for the most part committed by the same killer, or someone was copying the first killer’s MO, leaving bodies in places the original killer left bodies a year and a half earlier.

The following day, the search continued because the victim they’d set out to find had not been found. As of early January, there were five children on the list still considered missing, including the boy who was trying to make a little change selling car deodorizers. A week later, the medical examiner would identify the two bodies: one was Christopher Richardson, the first of three kids to go missing in June 1980; and the other was Earl Terrell, who had disappeared at the end of the following month.

Early on, the police had lost much of the community’s trust when they refused to acknowledge a serial killer was behind the first murders. It made them even less popular when they treated victims’ families like possible suspects, but Ma and Sid continued to watch, interview, and check the stories of the parents in the Wilson case. They were still convinced that the MO on the case was too dissimilar from the others. The night the girl disappeared, a neighbor corroborated the parents’ story, saying she’d seen a man come out of the window holding the limp and sleeping girl in his arms, accompanied by another man. Both men were black. But another neighbor said she’d seen the victim and her brothers and sister go in and out of the same window that night. The neighbor said the kids used the window as a door all the time, and that she’d spoken to the mother several times about it, but was ignored. According to the neighbor, the children were often left alone while the parents went out at night, and her son had told her he’d heard screams coming from the apartment in the early morning hours before the girl was reported missing. So the parents were still suspects.

Ma repeatedly read her notes from her interview with the parents of what happened that night, hoping to find some inconsistency: The parents and the girls spend the afternoon at the West End Mall. Get back home around 8:00 P.M. and have tuna sandwiches for dinner. Mother’s cousin had two of her boys for the day, and was surprised he hadn’t brought them home yet since it was now 8:30 P.M. Mother wants to go downtown to the Rialto to see a movie; father isn’t interested. Father drives mother to the MARTA station around 9:00 P.M., taking the girls along for the ride, and she gets on the train alone. She left the movie at 12:15 A.M.; husband meets her at the train station for a ride home. Oldest boy is outside playing—
why is a child outside playing at one in the morning?
—she checks on the other kids and finds the two younger boys and the two girls are asleep in their beds. Parents go to sleep about 1:30. Mother wakes up at 6:00 A.M. and finds the girl missing.
Somewhere in here I’m going to find inconsistencies.

In an interview taken five months after the girl disappeared, Ma asked the mother about the movies again, and why the husband didn’t go.

Mother
: What I had planned to do was get [my oldest son] to keep all the kids while [my husband] went to the movies with me. I don’t think he wanted to go to the movies anyway, because he was tired. He had worked all week, he was saying. I said I sure do want to go and see the movies. I just be wanting to get out of the house some. I don’t go to places very much. I don’t care for clubs. Only place that I go mostly is to the movies. If I do go to the club me and my husband go together.

Ma
: Wasn’t it your birthday? Did you just have a birthday?

Mother
: That Sunday when my daughter was missing it was my birthday.

Ma
: You wanted [your husband] to go with you to celebrate your birthday?

Mother
: Yes. That Sunday. We were going to go out that Sunday, my birthday wasn’t until that Sunday. I had been wanting to go out for a good little while and I said that Sunday he was going to take me out to get a drink. I don’t really drink. Just go out every once and a while to have a mixed drink. When I got up, she was missing. I didn’t even get a chance to celebrate my birthday.

Ma
: Hers was that Monday.

Mother
: Didn’t get a chance to celebrate hers either. I had planned to take her down to the Omni so that she could play in the game room, eat a ice cream cone, eat at McDonald’s and do different things. I was planning on taking them all to the Omni…

All Ma’s hard work, and the work of everyone on the Task Force, still didn’t keep the killer from killing. The third week of January saw the murder of a boy who was just a couple of months older than I. Last time anyone saw Terry Pue, he was getting off a bus on his way to watch a basketball game. His mother didn’t report him missing until she heard the description on the radio of a dead child who had been found the following day in Rockdale County off Sigman Road. The boy’s body lay just a mile from where the unidentified white male caller had told the sheriff where Lubie Geter could be found. Police didn’t find that boy when the first search was done, and didn’t find him when the latest discovery prompted another search of the area. But now the Task Force had good reason to believe the unidentified caller wasn’t just another crazy person claiming responsibility.

The boy’s mother must have wondered whether it was her child since he was found in a county that was nearly all white and twenty-five miles from where he lived. But when she heard the description of the dead child’s clothing, she knew it was her son. He was wearing a blue jacket with the word
KIM
on the back. Because I was Ma’s child and was forever looking for signs in everything, I wondered what
KIM
was—a designer, a girlfriend, an acronym—and whether it was an omen I should heed.