“You haven’t washed her?” Sara asked. The skin looked scrubbed. There was a faint odor of soap.
“No,” Pete answered.
“She looks clean,” Sara noted for the tape. “The pubic hair is shaved. No stubble on the legs.” She used her thumb to press the skin around the eyes. “Eyebrows tweezed into an arch. Fake eyelashes.”
Sara concentrated on the scalp. The roots were dark, the remaining strands a choppy yellow and white. “She has blonde hair extensions. They’re attached close to the scalp, so they must be new.” Sara used the fine-toothed comb as best she could, working around the weave to remove any particles from the hair. The white paper under the girl’s head showed dandruff and pieces of asphalt. Sara set the specimens aside for processing.
Next, she examined the hairline, checking for needle punctures and other marks that didn’t belong. She used an otoscope to examine the nostrils. “There’s some nasal corrosion. The membrane is torn, but not perforated.”
“Meth,” Pete guessed, which was probable, given the victim’s age. He raised his voice. Either the Dictaphone was old or he wasn’t used to using it. “The fingernails are professionally manicured. The nails are painted a bright red.” He suggested to Sara, “Dr. Linton, perhaps you can check your side?”
Sara picked up the woman’s hand. The body was in the early throes of rigor mortis. “Same on this hand. Manicured. Same polish.” She didn’t know why Pete was drawing such close attention to the fingernails. You couldn’t throw a rock in Atlanta without hitting a nail salon.
He said, “The pedicure color is different.”
Sara looked at the girl’s toes. The nails were painted black.
Pete asked, “Is it normal for the toes to be different from the nails?”
Sara shrugged, as did Faith and Amanda.
“Well,” Pete said, but the opening refrain from “Brick House” cut him off.
“Sorry.” Leo Donnelly took his phone out of his pocket. He read the caller ID. “It’s the patrolman I sent to the airport. Daddy Snyder’s probably outside.” He answered the phone as he walked out the door. “Donnelly.”
The room was quiet except for the hum of the motor on top of the walk-in refrigerator. Sara tried to get Will’s attention, but he just stared at the floor.
“Jesus Christ.” Faith wasn’t cursing Donnelly—she was looking at the victim’s face. “What the hell did he do to her?”
There was a click as Pete’s foot tapped off the Dictaphone. He spoke to Sara, as if she’d been the one to ask the question. “Her eyes and mouth were sewn shut.” Pete had to use both hands to hold open one of the torn eyelids. They were shredded in thick strips like the plastic curtain inside a butcher’s freezer. “You can see where the thread ripped through the skin.”
Sara asked, “How do you know this?”
Pete didn’t answer the question. “These lines along her torso, inside her arms and legs—a thicker thread was used to keep her from moving. I imagine an upholstery needle was used, probably a waxed thread or maybe a silk-blend yarn. We’ll probably find plenty of fibers to analyze.”
Pete handed Sara the magnifying glass. She studied the lacerations. As with the victim’s eyes and mouth, the skin was ripped apart, flesh hanging down in even intervals. She could see the red dots where the thread had gone in. Not once. Not a few times. The circles were like the holes in Sara’s earlobes where she’d gotten her ears pierced when she was a child.
Amanda said, “She must’ve ripped herself away from the mattress, or whatever she was sewn to, when he started beating her.”
Pete expounded on the hypothesis. “It would be an uncontrollable response. He punches her in the stomach, she curls up into a ball. Mouth opens. Eyes open. And then he punches her again and again.”
Sara shook her head. He was jumping to some pretty quick conclusions. “What am I missing?”
Pete tucked his hands into the empty pockets of his lab coat, silently watching Sara with the same careful intensity he used when he was teaching a new procedure.
Amanda supplied, “This isn’t our killer’s first victim.”
Sara still didn’t understand. She asked Pete, “How do you know?”
Will cleared his throat. Sara had almost forgotten he was in the room.
He said, “Because the same thing was done to my mother.”
seventeen
June 15, 1975
LUCY BENNETT
Father’s Day. It was all over the radio. Richway was having a special sale. Davis Brothers was offering an all-you-can-eat buffet. The disc jockeys were talking about their favorite gifts from years past. Shirts. Ties. Golf clubs.
Lucy’s dad was easy to buy for. They always got him a bottle of scotch. Then two weeks would pass and if there was anything left in the bottle, they’d all get a drink on the Fourth of July while they watched the fireworks explode over Lake Spivey.
Lucy’s dad.
She didn’t want to think about him. About anyone she used to know.
Patty Hearst was suddenly in the news again. Her trial was still a year off, but her defense had decided to leak details about the kidnapping. Lucy already knew what went down with that crazy chick. It happened back when Lucy was on the street. There was no one else to talk about it with back then. Except for Kitty, none of the girls even knew Hearst’s name. Or maybe Kitty was lying. She was good at lying, pretending she knew things when all it was in the end was an excuse to lure you in so she could stab you in the back like a sneaky little bitch.
After Hearst, there was a reporter with the Atlanta Constitution who’d been kidnapped. They demanded a million bucks for his release. They claimed to be from the SLA, too. What they were was idiots. They got snatched up by the cops. They didn’t spend a dime of that money.
A million dollars. What would Lucy do with that kind of dough?
The only bank in town who’d had the ransom cash on hand was C&S. Mills Lane was the bank president. His picture was in the paper a lot. He was the same guy who helped the mayor build the stadium. Not the black mayor, but the one who ran against Lester Maddox.
Lucy felt the gurgle of laughter in her throat.
The Pickrick. Maddox’s restaurant on West Peachtree. He kept axes on the wall. Rumor was he’d smash one through the head of any nigger who dared walk through the front door.
Lucy tried to imagine Juice going through the front door. An ax in his head. Brains spattered everywhere.
Washington-Rawson. The slum they’d torn down to build the Atlanta Stadium. Lucy’s dad told her the story. They were there for a baseball game. The Braves. Chief Noc-a-Homa with his crazy big face running around with an ax he could’ve stolen from Lester Maddox. Lucy’s dad said the stadium was supposed to revitalize the area. There were almost a million and a half residents in the city limits, most of them living on government vouchers. If Atlanta couldn’t strong-arm the nigras out of the city, then they’d just pave over them.
The SLA paved over Patty Hearst. They were a cult. They brainwashed her. Or so said a doctor on the radio. The shrink was a woman, so Lucy took her opinion with a grain of salt, but she claimed that it only took two weeks for a person to become brainwashed.
Two weeks.
Lucy had lasted at least two months. Even after the H had worn off. Even after she had stopped longing for the high. Even after she had learned not to move, not to breathe too deep or too long. Even after she had stopped caring that she had sores on her back and legs from laying for so long in her own piss and shit.
She’d glowed with hate whenever he came into the room. She’d flinched when he touched her. She’d made sounds in her throat, used words that even without moving her mouth, she knew he could understand.
Satan.
Devil.
I’ll kill you dead.
Motherfucker.
And then suddenly, he’d stopped coming. It had to be only a few days. You couldn’t live without water for more than two, three days, tops. So maybe he’d been go
ne three days. Maybe when he’d come through the door, she’d been crying. Maybe when he brushed back her hair, she didn’t flinch. Maybe when he washed her, she didn’t tense up. And maybe when he finally got on top of her, finally did the things that Lucy had expected him to do from day one, she’d felt herself responding.
And then maybe when he left again, she sobbed for him. Longed for him. Begged for him. Missed him.
Just like she’d done with Bobby, her first love. Just like she’d done with Fred, the guy who cleaned planes at the airport. Then Chuck, who managed the apartment complex. Then countless others who had raped her, beat her, fucked her, left her on the side of the road for dead.
Stockholm syndrome.
That’s what the woman doctor on CBS Radio called it. Walter Cronkite introduced her as a noted authority. She worked with victims of cults and mind-control experiments. She seemed to know what she was talking about, but maybe she was just making excuses, because what she was saying didn’t entirely track.
At least not to Lucy.
Not to the girl who slept in her own excrement. Not to the girl who couldn’t move her arms or legs. Not to the girl who couldn’t open her mouth unless it was cut open for her. Couldn’t blink without the razor sharp edge of his pocketknife slicing through the tiny stitches of thread.
The second Lucy saw an opening, the minute she saw even the sliver of a chance, she would escape. She would run to her freedom. She would crawl on her hands and knees back home. She would find her parents. She would find Henry. She would go to the cops. She would rip her body from this mattress and find a way to get home.
Patty Hearst was a stupid bitch. She was in a closet, but no one held her down. She had a chance. She had ample opportunity. She’d stood with a rifle in that bank, yelling SLA bullshit, when she could’ve just run out the door and asked for help.
If Lucy had a rifle, she’d use it to shoot the man in the head. She’d pound in his skull with the stock. She’d rape him with the long barrel. She’d laugh when the blood poured from his mouth and his eyeballs popped out.
And then she’d find that woman doctor from the radio and tell her that she was dead wrong. Patty Hearst wasn’t helpless. She could’ve gotten away. She could’ve bolted at any time.
But then the doctor might point out that Lucy had something Patty Hearst did not.
Lucy wasn’t alone anymore. She didn’t need Bobby or Fred or Juice or her father or even Henry ever again. She no longer marked time by the feel of warm sunlight rising or falling across her face or the seasonal change in temperature. She marked her passage not in days, but in weeks and months and the cresting swell of her belly.
It would happen any day now.
Lucy was going to have a baby.
eighteen
July 14, 1975
MONDAY
Captain Bubba Keller was one of Duke’s poker buddies, which meant that he likely had his white robe pressed at the dry cleaner where Deena Coolidge’s mother had died. Keller’s wife would be the one dropping off his laundry. He probably had no idea who cleaned it.
Amanda had never given much thought to her father’s Klan affiliation. The Klan still controlled the Atlanta Police Department when men like Duke Wagner and Bubba Keller joined. Membership was compulsory, the same as paying dues to the Fraternal Order of Police. Neither man had likely objected. They were both of German descent. They had both joined the Navy in hopes of being sent to the Pacific rather than having to fight in the European theater. They both wore their hair in tight military cuts. Their pants were always creased. Their ties were always straight. They took charge of things. They opened doors for ladies. They protected the innocent. They punished the guilty. They understood right and wrong.
That is to say, they were right and everyone else was wrong.
Back in the late sixties, Police Chief Herbert Jenkins had drummed the Klan out of the force, but most of the men with whom Duke played poker still honored the former affiliation. As far as Amanda could tell, membership consisted solely of sitting around and grousing about how much things had changed for the worse. All they could talk about was the good old days—how much better things had been before the coloreds ruined everything.
What they didn’t acknowledge was that the things that made it bad for them made it better for everyone else. Over the last few days, Amanda had found herself thinking that injustice was never more tragic than when you found it knocking at your own door.
She tried to keep this in perspective as she walked into the Atlanta Jail. Captain Bubba Keller took pride in his post, though the Decatur Street building was despicable, worse than anything you’d find in Attica. Bats hung from the ceiling. The roof had gaping holes. The concrete floor was crumbling. During the winter, prisoners were allowed to sleep in the hallways rather than risk freezing to death inside their cells. Last year, a man had been rushed to Grady after being attacked by a rat. The creature chewed off most of his nose before the guards managed to beat it off with a broom.
The most surprising part of that story was not that there was a broom at the jail, but that a guard had noticed something was amiss. Security was lax. Most of the men were already inebriated when they showed up for work. Escapes were routine, a problem compounded by the fact that the secretarial pool was adjacent to the cells. Amanda had heard horror stories from some of the typists about rapists and murderers running past their desks on their way out the front doors.
“Ma’am,” a patrolman said, tipping his hat to Amanda as she walked up the stairs. He took a deep breath of fresh air as he headed toward the street. Amanda imagined she’d do the same thing when she left this nasty place. The smell was almost as bad as the projects.
She smiled at Larry Pearse, who ran the property room from behind a caged door. He gave her a wink as he sipped from his flask. Amanda waited until she was on the stairs to look at her watch. It wasn’t yet ten in the morning. Half the jail was probably lit.
The whir of Selectrics got louder as Amanda headed toward the typing pool. This had been her dream job, but now she couldn’t imagine sitting behind a desk all day. Nor could she imagine working for Bubba Keller. He was lecherous and bombastic, two things he didn’t bother to hide from Amanda, despite being close friends with Duke.
She often wondered what would happen if she told her father that Keller had grabbed her breast on more than one occasion, or about the time he’d pushed her up against the wall and whispered filthy things in her ear. Amanda wanted to think that Duke would be angry. That he would end the friendship. That he would pop Keller in the nose. The possibility that he might not do any of these things was likely what kept her from telling him.
True to form, she could hear Keller’s raised voice over the hum of typewriters. His office faced the typing pool, which was large and open. Sixty women sat behind rows of desks, diligently typing, pretending that they couldn’t hear what was going on a few yards away. Holly Scott, Keller’s secretary, stood in his open doorway. She was wise not to go in. Keller’s face was bright red. He waved his arms in the air, then swooped down his hand and pushed all the papers onto the floor.
“You goddamn do that!” he yelled. Holly mumbled something back, and he picked up his telephone and threw it against the wall. The plaster cracked, sending down a rain of white powder. “Clean up this mess!” Keller ordered, grabbing his hat and stomping out of his office. He stopped when he saw Amanda. “What the hell are you doing here?”
The lie came without much thought. “Butch Bonnie asked me to check—”
“I don’t care,” he interrupted. “Just don’t be here when I get back.”
Amanda watched him push his way toward the exit. He was the very definition of a bull in a china shop. Desks were shoved out of the way. Stacks of paper were knocked onto the floor. There were sixty women seated at sixty desks, working on sixty typewriters and trying their darndest not to be singled out.
And then finally, there was an audible, collective sigh of relief as Keller left t
he room. The typewriters were momentarily silenced. Someone screamed back in the cells.
Holly said, “Good night, Irene.”
Titters of laughter went around the room. The typewriters whirred back into motion. Holly waved Amanda back into Keller’s office.
“Goodness,” Amanda said. “What was that about?”
Holly bent over, picking up a broken bottle of Old Grand-Dad bourbon. “I just lost it.”
Amanda knelt down to help her pick up the scattered papers. “Lost it how?”
“We’re all trying to get Reggie’s new handbook typed for the printer.” Holly tossed the broken glass into the trashcan. “We’re on deadline. The brass is breathing down our necks. Breathing down Keller’s.”
“And?”
“And so Keller thinks that’s the perfect time to call me into his office and tell me to show him my tits.”
Amanda sighed. She was familiar with the request. It was usually followed by a disturbing laugh and a groping hand. “And?”
“And, I told him I was going to file a complaint against him.”
Amanda picked up the telephone. The plastic was cracked, but it still had a dial tone. “Would you really do it?”
“Probably not,” Holly admitted. “My husband told me if he does it again, to just get my purse and leave.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Because that asshole’s one more tantrum away from a heart attack. I’m going to outlive him if it kills me.” She scooped up the last of the papers. There was a smile on her face. “What’re you doing here, anyway?”
“I need to talk to an inmate.”
“White or black?”
“Black.”
“Good. There’s an awful case of lice being passed around.” Everyone knew the coloreds didn’t get lice. “Keller’s going to have to set off a can of DDT back there. It’s the third time this year. The smell is just awful.” Holly took a pen off the desk and held it over a sheet of paper. “Who’s the girl?”
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