"I need to ask you one more thing," I said. "I've been meaning to and just haven't gotten to it yet."
"What is it, son?"
"Just something I'm not clear about. When LaMarcus went missing . . . why didn't you check his hideout? I would've thought that was the first place you'd look."
"I did. Well, I didn't. I was on the phone to the police, but it's the first place I sent Jordan. The very first."
47
“Are you okay?” Jordan asked. “You’re pale as a ghost.”
I nodded.
I had just helped Ida into the passenger side of the car and felt like I was going to fall over.
“You sure? You really don’t look good. All clammy and––”
“Just tired.”
“Come over when you finish here. We need you. We’ll take care of you too. Okay?”
I nodded and closed the door.
I could hear her saying “I love you” as the door closed.
After they were gone, I stepped over to Bobby Battle.
“You got Ralph’s keys?” I asked him.
“Yeah. Why? I was just about to head back over to his house.”
He tossed me a plastic evidence bag with the keys in them.
“I’ll catch up with you,” I said. “Wanna check something first.”
On unsteady legs I walked back up to the converted house, out to the garage, and tried Ralph’s cellar door key in the lock on the shelf next to where the bolt cutters had been.
It opened the lock.
Jordan had cut the lock and replaced it with another when she put Brandon’s body inside Ralph’s basement.
I collapsed to the cement floor and watched on the screen of my mind a very disturbed girl who made her little brother sick, who bribed him––probably with a Christmas gift she was wrapping––to hide in his hideout, who used her own sleeping medication on him, who moved the body and tried to make it look like he was a victim of the Atlanta Child Murderer––to garner even more sadness and sympathy, going as far as to stage strangulation and rape. A victim who married an abuser to get more sympathy. A deranged young woman who made her own child sick and then killed her. A murderer who went on to kill other children in her care, who mourned with their families and spoke at their funerals.
I thought about how eloquently she spoke about loss and grief to the support group, how at home she was in the center of the circle of concern and care for her, this poor, poor thing who had lost so much, who had so little left, who was so brave and strong, so good and kind.
I thought about how she had kept me away from Ida, asking to become the go-between, controlling the information, controlling everything. I wondered what secret Carlton had really told her, what else he had said that incriminated her.
Simple Larry never knew what hit him. He was her victim. Not the other way around. She had told him about Ray and Vince, not Bobby Battle.
And today she had set up Ralph, her readymade patsy, to take the fall. She had cut the lock, planted one of her victims to make another.
Pushing myself up, I went back inside the daycare and called Ida’s house.
There was no answer.
Wondering where they could’ve gone, I called the church and asked for Pastor George Clarke, the parental grief group facilitator.
Ten minutes later I was meeting with him in his office.
Before becoming a pastor, this tall, soft-spoken African-American gentleman was a psychologist with a large private practice in Decatur.
Without telling him any names or divulging any information I didn’t have to, I set up a hypothetical scenario and asked for his assessment.
“It’s MSBP,” he said. “Munchausen syndrome by proxy. A behavior pattern where a caregiver exaggerates, fabricates, or actually induces health problems––physical, psychological, behavioral, or mental––in someone under their care, most often a child. Munchausen syndrome is when someone does this to him or herself. By proxy is when it is done to someone in their power.”
“Can someone suffer from both?” I asked.
He nodded. “I would think so. They are very similar. The way the by proxy form of it works is an adult caregiver, most often the mother, makes a child appear sick or actually makes the child sick in order to gain the attention, affection, sympathy of others––family, friends, doctors, nurses, strangers. Sometimes it’s just fabrication and exaggeration, but others it actually involves purposely harming the child––often by poisoning, suffocation, or injection.”
He paused. I nodded. He continued.
“This is one of the more misunderstood forms of child abuse and the most difficult to determine and deal with. The person suffering from this condition is a master manipulator, skilled at duplicity––the entire thing is based on deception.”
48
When I left the church, I didn’t return to the crime scene, but instead drove straight to Ida’s.
Both Battle and Frank had paged me several times and continued to.
I didn’t care.
I knew I should take what little evidence I had to them.
I didn’t care.
I knew the best chance for a conviction was to get them involved now and wait for them to build a case.
I didn’t care.
She had let me fall in love with her. She had used me and manipulated me and made a fool of me.
I couldn’t wait to confront her. It had to be now. It had to be me looking into her eyes. Right now nothing else mattered. Nothing else in the world.
When I reached Ida’s, Larry’s Trans Am was in the driveway next to her car.
I didn’t care.
He and Ida could hear what I had to say together.
When I reached the front door, I found it ajar, the frame and molding around it splintered and broken.
Easing it open, I entered a bad situation and was about to make it worse.
Inside, I found the three of them in the living room, Larry with a weapon pointed at Jordan’s head, Ida nearby pleading with him.
“The fuck do you think you’re doin’?” Larry said when he saw me.
Ignoring him, I locked eyes with Jordan. “I know,” I said.
“You know what?” Larry said.
Jordan frowned and nodded, tears starting to stream down her cheeks.
“She’s leaving with me,” Larry said. “You can wave bye or stay there and die. Up to you.”
“How many kids have you killed?”
“I ain’t killed any kids, retard,” he said.
“Wasn’t talkin’ to you.”
“The fuck this nut talkin’ about?” he asked Jordan.
“She killed her little brother,” I said. “After makin’ him sick. She did the same to your child. And other children at Safe Haven, including Brandon Wright today.”
“John,” Ida said. “What’re you . . . Ralph’s the killer.”
“Ralph’s the fall guy,” I said. “For a very sick girl with Munchausen syndrome by proxy.”
“I’ve heard of that,” Larry said.
Ever the victim, Jordan had yet to do anything but stand there crestfallen and cry.
How could I have fallen in love with her? How was it possible to be so imperceptive? What kind of detective was I that I could be so deceived? What kind of minister was I that I could become so intimate with evil and not know it?
“John, you can’t think . . .” Ida began, but stopped, and seemed to look at Jordan as if for the first time, as if a not entirely unexpected dawning was taking place.
“It’s when you make your kid sick for attention,” Larry said. “You can’t think that of––”
“I don’t think it. I know it. And so do both of you,” I said.
Neither of them said anything. Both of them seemed to consider it.
“How could you possibly think that of this poor, sweet, precious girl?” Ida said.
I told her. In detail. Everything I knew, everything I thought, everything I guessed, Larry listening i
ntently as I did, eventually nodding as the unwitting witness to the truth.
“Think about it,” I added. “There’s no other way LaMarcus could’ve been taken from his own backyard with you watching him so closely. Had to be the other person who was supposed to be watching him, had to be a plan she came up with to make her brother an accomplice in his own murder.”
Without realizing what I was doing until I had done it, I turned and looked over at the partially wrapped Christmas presents, the Star Wars lunchbox and Star Trek Communicators and other wrapped packages, gifts never given, reminders of innocents who never made it to Christmas, who would never see another Christmas again.
Ida followed my gaze, turning from me, to the presents, then to Jordan. “Baby, please tell me this isn’t true. Please make it so I can’t possibly believe this.”
Jordan didn’t say anything.
“Tell me you didn’t torture and kill our little girl,” Larry said. “Tell me you’re not that kind of monster.”
“I . . .” Jordan began. “I . . . need . . . treatment. It’s . . . it’s not me. It’s . . . a disease. I don’t want to be like . . . like . . . I don’t want to have the affliction I have.”
“Affliction?” Larry said. “No. No. No. It can’t be. No. Please, God, no. Tell me you didn’t do it. TELL ME.”
Ida fell to the floor and began sobbing.
“Bitch, tell me you didn’t kill my little girl,” Larry demanded, jamming the barrel of his pistol into her forehead.
She didn’t flinch. Just stood there, eyes downcast.
Eventually, she looked up at me, her eyes once again finding and focusing on mine.
“I’m so sorry, John,” she said. “I really and truly fell in love with you. I so wanted us to be a family together.”
“Love?” Larry said.
“Oh my God,” Ida said. “Jordan, why did we go by John’s? Jordan. What did you do to that little boy?”
Everything stopped.
“What did you do?” I said.
“I wanted . . . us . . . to . . . share . . . this.”
“Jordan, no,” I said. “Not Martin. Please. Not Martin too.”
“You love him?” Larry said. “Look at me, you child-murdering faithless whore. Look at me.”
She never looked at him. Not when he yelled for her to. Not when he thumbed back the hammer. Not when he shot her in the head before doing the same to himself.
49
Martin was lying on my bed, his small body on its side in a fetal position.
So sweet, so innocent, so peaceful.
I made my way across the quiet room.
To be, or not to be, that is the question—
Was he sleeping, lost in the sweet dreams of the underworld or . . .
I strained to hear his breathing but could not.
To sleep––
I eased down on the bed beside him, sitting on the edge, not yet willing to know what once known I would never be able to unknow.
Perchance to Dream––
“Martin,” I whispered.
So still. So quiet.
Aye, there’s the rub––
“Martin?”
No response.
His weight on the bed was different somehow, as if the soul is something substantial, something palpable, something measurable.
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come––
“Martin,” I said again, this time a little louder.
The increased volume revealed a shaky, unsure quality in my voice. I sounded like a child in the darkness, filled with fear and dread, asking “Who’s there?”
“Martin?” I said again. “Are you asleep?”
To die, to sleep no more––
I reached for him, but stopped just shy of touching him, just shy of confirming what I had known since Ida’s pitiful, Oh my God. Jordan, why did we go by John’s? Jordan. What did you do to that little boy?
“Martin, please,” I said.
If it weren’t for me, if I hadn’t come into his life, if I hadn’t brought one of the real monsters of childhood into his little life . . .
And by a sleep, to say we end the heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to––
Finally, I summoned everything within me and closed the small distance between where my hand hung trembling to where the face of the sweet boy who called me Yon rested.
His flesh was cold.
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil––
If I hadn’t come into his life, if I hadn’t brought Jordan . . .
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “Martin, I’m so, so sorry.”
I had come to Atlanta to find and stop a child killer. Instead, I had become an accessory to one. I hadn’t just looked into Nietzsche’s abyss. I had dived into it. And I had pulled little Martin Fisher into it with me.
I would never get over this. Not ever. Maybe Shakespeare was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t death so much as regret and guilt and grief that was the real undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returned.
I would not return from this.
I would spend the rest of my life trying but never quite being able to fully return from this. I would try to help others return, try to prevent others from taking the journey at all, but there was no amount of good I could do, no amount of booze I could consume, no amount of justice I could administer to ever be enough to return from this dark country I was just beginning to discover.
50
A cold numbness invaded my core and stayed there.
I was as detached as I had ever been, experiencing everything as if from a great distance away, becoming disinterested observer rather than participant in my own life.
I wasn’t just depressed. I was devastated. Ironically, I didn’t drink. I was beyond depressed, beyond devastated, beyond drink.
I didn’t eat much of anything, but what I did had no taste whatsoever.
Frank Morgan and Bobby Battle both reached out to me, but I couldn’t face them. I couldn’t face anyone.
After several days of not leaving the apartment and of barely leaving my room, I ventured outside for the first time on a rainy Thursday morning.
The moment I stepped outside my door, my eyes, against my will, moved over to the basketball court. It was empty, but I could see Martin working on his shot, hear the echo of his small, singular voice.
I blinked back the tears threatening to join the misty raindrops swirling about my face.
I knew enough to know that it was probably temporary, but at the moment I honestly couldn’t imagine ever playing basketball again.
I stumbled to my car, which after sitting five days I wasn’t sure would crank, and drove out toward Ellenwood to Fairview Memorial Gardens.
Driving, like all my actions, felt foreign and odd, as if I was removed a certain distance from doing it.
During the drive out the day grew darker, but the reticent rain remained the same.
Jordan’s plot wasn’t far from a stone statue of Saint Mark, the bearded and robed apostle holding a tablet in his left hand, below him a lion lying at his feet.
As I approached the graveside, Ralph Alderman stepped away from where he was standing beside Ida and met me as I neared, blocking my entry to the modest memorial service taking place behind him.
He poked out his chest and expanded his elephantine girth and said, “You’re not welcome here.”
“Yes he is,” Ida said from behind him. “Let him through.”
He begrudgingly stepped aside and I walked past him. Ducking down beneath her umbrella, I hugged Ida.
There were only four people present––Pastor Don, Ida, Ralph, and myself. We stood around the small headstone with the bronze plate engraved with the name of the woman, the murderess, I had fallen in love with, who some part of me was still in love with.
We were standing in a sparse garden of fake flowers, dotted occasionally by a small tree or shrub.<
br />
I was the only one without an umbrella. It wasn’t raining hard. I wouldn’t have cared if it had been.
Pastor Don began with a prayer.
Ida wasn’t crying. No one was.
After reading a few passages of scripture and a poem, Pastor Don delivered an eloquent eulogy, prayed again, his words compassionate and comforting, then committed her soul to God and her body to the ground. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.
And then it was over.
Eventually, Ida and I were alone with Jordan.
In the silence between us I could hear all that couldn’t be said. In the distance, the low rumble of thunder barely registered. Not far from where we stood, an American flag on a tall pole snapped smartly in the whining wind, its rigging clanging loudly.
“Got nothin’ to say,” she said at last.
I nodded.
“Well . . . just . . . that I won’t ever get over this.”
“Me either,” I said.
It came out so softly, the wind taking it away so quickly, I wasn’t sure she heard it. I didn’t think it mattered either way.
“You loved her,” she said.
“I did. Part of me still does. Probably always will.”
We stood there for a few moments more, the rain and wind picking up a bit, large drops pelting my head with dull wet thumps I barely noticed. I was soon soaked through, hair dripping, clothes soggy.
“Nope,” she said, “got nothin’ else to say.”
“Me either,” I said. “Except . . . to say . . . I’m sorry.”
She nodded. “Me too.”
She turned to walk away. I stayed behind.
She had only taken a few steps when I turned to stop her.
“Sorry,” I said, “but I need to . . . have to ask . . . Do you wish I hadn’t . . . looked into . . . Would you rather I not have found out who . . . that it was her?”
She stood still for such a long moment I thought she wasn’t going to answer. “Always better to know. Always. No matter the . . . cost.”
True Crime Fiction Page 21