In a Spider’s Web (short story)
The Big Book of Noir
(Merrick McKnight / Reggie Summers Novels)
Thunder Beach
A Certain Retribution
Blood Oath
Blood Shot
(Remington James Novels)
Double Exposure
(includes intro by Michael Connelly)
Separation Anxiety
Blood Shot
(Sam Michaels / Daniel Davis Novels)
Burnt Offerings
Blood Oath
Cold Blood
Blood Shot
(Love Stories)
Carrie’s Gift
(Short Story Collections)
North Florida Noir
Florida Heat Wave
Delta Blues
Another Quiet Night in Desperation
(The Meaning Series)
Meaning Every Moment
The Meaning of Life in Movies
Sign up for Michael’s newsletter by clicking here or go to
www.MichaelLister.com and receive a free book.
158
I am on my way to resign when I get the call.
I’ve spent most of the afternoon in my office inside the chapel of Gulf Correctional Institution contemplating my decision following weeks of carefully considering what I should do.
My heart is hurting and I’m still not certain I’m doing the right thing.
I’ve talked to my closest and most trusted intimates—Anna, Merrill, Dad, Reggie, my sponsor. I’ve prayed and meditated, thought and talked, written and read, but nothing I’ve tried has given me clarity, certainty, or peace.
For the past several months I have been working two jobs—two demanding, full-time jobs—as a chaplain at Gulf Correctional Institution and as an investigator with the Gulf County Sheriff’s department. And though I love them both, I am unable to continue. I’ve reached a tipping point that involves the quality of my work, my health, what’s best for my family, and the reality of the very fixed number of hours allotted to each day.
I’m torn because I not only find great fulfillment in doing both jobs, but I actually feel as if I’ve been created to do both—see each as callings, vocations, not just work, not just means to a means.
And yet I can’t continue to do both—not mentally, physically, emotionally, or spiritually.
I want to. I just can’t.
It’s February, a month or so into a very tumultuous and surreal Donald Trump presidency. I had been wrong. I had believed there was no way our country would elect a man like him, but we did, and we’re just beginning to see what that really means.
For weeks now I’ve gone back and forth between resigning from the department of corrections or the sheriff’s department. At first I was going to remain a chaplain and just do freelance investigative work as needed—something I’ve done before. Then I decided to remain an investigator and just volunteer at the prison. Back and forth. Back and forth. Until I finally just picked one. And today, on the day I’m actually doing to do it, I’m going with continuing to be an investigator with the sheriff’s department and volunteering at the prison as I can.
In addition to all the other factors that impacted my final decision, the fact that my friend Daniel is still missing contributed mightily. As an investigator with the sheriff’s department I have access and resources I wouldn’t as a private citizen.
But then the call comes.
I’m actually closing my office door behind me when the phone on my desk begins ringing.
I almost don’t answer it.
At first I’m not going to. I close the door and take a few steps down the hallway before turning around and digging the chapel keys from my pocket.
There are far fewer certainties in this life than most of us like to think—far, far fewer—but one absolute, unalterable certainty is that when the phone on my desk rings it’s because somebody needs something. Someone has a crisis. Someone is in trouble. Someone is troubled. Someone somewhere is in need of counseling, consoling, or some other form of care-taking.
“Chaplain Jordan,” I say, wondering if this will be the last time I ever say it.
“Chaplain, there’s someone here to see you,” the control room sergeant says. “Well, not here, but in the admin building.”
“I’m on my way up to meet with the warden,” I say. “Do you know what they want?”
“Said she knows you and really needs to see you.”
“She give you her name?”
“Yeah, ah, Ida,” she says. “Ida Williams.”
I lean on my desk, a wave of painful memories and guilt washing over me.
“Chaplain? You there?”
Ida Williams knows loss like few people on the planet.
She had tasted the bitter, acidic bile of true tragedy—the kind there is no real recovery from. Her young son, Lamarcus, had been killed during the Atlanta Child Murders—and that wasn’t the first or final tragedy to wound this good, kind, incredibly strong woman.
But I’m not just aware of Miss Ida’s many afflictions. I share one with her.
When I was twelve years old, I had an encounter with Wayne Williams, the man eventually convicted of many of the Atlanta Child Murders. Six years later, obsessed with the case, I moved to Atlanta to attend college, take a closer look at the evidence, and see if I might be able to determine who killed the kids Wayne Williams hadn’t.
When I first met Miss Ida in 1986, she was operating a daycare called Safe Haven out of the same home her son had been abducted from.
Lamarcus Williams’ murder was the very first homicide investigation I ever conducted. I was young and inexperienced and it hadn’t ended well—not that very many murder cases do, no matter how old or experienced the investigator.
Miss Ida is a thick, elderly black woman, though thinner since I’d seen her last, with beautiful, smooth skin, big, sad, wise eyes, and brown lips only a shade or two lighter than the rest of her.
As if she’s still wearing the same uniform she always has, her hair is up in a colorful head wrap of indigo and brown and fuschia that matches her large, loose tunic dress.
I find her in the admin conference room with an attractive, athletic, stylishly dressed mid-thirties woman with short blond hair and green eyes.
The admin conference room is right off the warden’s office and is where most department head meetings take place. It’s also used for Employee of the Month ceremonies—the plaque for which hangs on the wall along with pictures of the president, governor, and secretary of the department. There’s little else in the room except for the large conference table surrounded by rolling office chairs, a random filing cabinet or two, a type of built-in sideboard table to hold food for the occasions when breakfast plays a role in morning meetings, and American and Florida flags that lean against each other in the front right corner.
Ida shakes her head slowly when she sees me, smiling with genuine warmth and pleasure, though the sadness in her eyes doesn’t leave.
I smile back and step over and hug her.
“How are you, boy?” she asks. “You look good. Even happy.”
She didn’t mean it as an accusation but I felt a pang of guilt deep inside some hidden recess beneath an unseen scar.
I nod. “I’m good. It’s . . . it’s so good to see you. How are you?”
“Better now,” she says. “It’s an answer to prayer to find you here.”
“I can’t believe you’re here.”
“Sorry,” she says, turning toward the young woman standing close to her, “this is my niece Kathryn Lewis. Kathryn this is John Jordan, the man I’ve told you about.”
Hearing her name reminds me of the novelist Kathryn Kennedy, who I had been involved with briefly while investigating the suspicious death of a young woman undergoing exorcism at St. Ann’s Abbey. I haven’t thought of her in quite a while, and I wonder how she’s doing.
I extend my hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“It’s an honor to meet you,” she says. “Ida’s told me so much about you.”
I look back at Ida. “Would you like to sit down?”
She nods and the three of us take a seat at one end of the large wooden admin conference table.
“How many innocent men you think is here?” Ida asks.
“Incarcerated here at GCI?” I say. “Not nearly as many as claim to be and far more than most people realize.”
You often hear people in the department of corrections and throughout the criminal justice system as a whole say that if an inmate isn’t guilty of what he’s charged with he’s guilty of something, but it’s simply not true. Our deeply flawed justice system, like everything else in the world, favors the wealthy and exploits the poor, and far, far too many actual innocent people, particularly minority men, have had their lives chewed up in the gears of the massive, grinding machine of the prison industrial complex.
She nods her head. “My nephew Qwon is one of them.”
“I didn’t know you had a nephew here,” I say.
“Acqwon Lewis,” Kathryn says.
“Kathryn’s stepbrother,” Ida says. “And he’s as innocent as I am.”
“We came to visit him today,” Kathryn says, “but they won’t let us see him. Aunt Ida came all the way from Atlanta.”
“Did they say why?” I ask.
“Say he in lockup or lockdown or somethin’ like that,” Ida says.
“Would you mind goin’ and checkin’ on him for us?” Kathryn asks.
“Check on him, hell,” Ida says. “Want you to do far more than that. I want you to solve his case like you did Lamarcus’s and get him outta this awful place.”
159
“With no evidence,” Kathryn says, “without even so much as a body, Qwon, who was eighteen at the time, was convicted of killing his seventeen-year-old girlfriend Angel Diaz.”
The name Angel Diaz sounds familiar, but I don’t immediately know why.
My expression must make me appear more dubious than I actually am.
“I know how it sounds,” she says.
“No matter how it sounds,” Ida says, “that’s how it is.”
“How many men you know get convicted of murder without the body of the alleged murder victim?”
“Not many,” I say.
“And not just at the time,” she says. “To this day.”
Ida adds, “Poor girl’s body never been found.”
“How can you have a murder without a body?” Kathryn says.
It’s possible, but I know what she means.
“They’s no evidence against him ’cause he didn’t kill her,” Ida says. “They’s no body ’cause whoever did it hid it so it’d never be found.”
“That or she’s not actually dead,” Kathryn says. “I’ve always thought she might have just run away.”
“I know you have, child, but . . .” Ida shakes her head and sighs. “Who knows. You may be right. All I know is whatever happened to that poor girl, Qwon didn’t have nothin’ to do with it.”
“Exactly,” Kathryn says. “Obviously, if she’s not dead, Qwon didn’t kill her, but even if she is, he still had nothing to do with whatever happened to her. Did you know he passed three different polygraphs at the time?”
“He did?”
“Three different polygraphs given by three different administrators at three different times,” Kathryn says.
“May not be admissible in court,” Ida says, “but . . . they gotta mean somethin’. State’s attorney just pretended like they didn’t even exist.”
“That’s because the investigation focused in on Qwon from the beginning,” Kathryn says. “They always look at the boyfriend first, but when he’s the black boyfriend of a white girl . . . They never looked at anyone else. They’ll tell you they did, but they didn’t. Not really.”
“If they had,” Ida says, “they’d’a realized her ex was the one who probably did it.”
“He was obsessed with her,” Kathryn says. “Lost it when she broke up with him. Why the police didn’t take all the threats he made seriously I’ll never know. Makes no sense that they didn’t look at him a lot harder for it.”
“Does too,” Ida says.
“Well . . . yeah, I guess it does. His dad was a cop.”
“Still is.”
Kathryn shakes her head. “But . . . it sure seemed like the detectives investigating the case didn’t like him and wouldn’t risk their jobs for him.”
“They had to make up evidence against Qwon,” Ida says, “and completely ignore all the evidence that . . .”
“Exonerated him,” Kathryn adds. “And that’s exactly what they did. Prosecutor’s fallacy.”
I’ve heard the phrase prosecutor’s fallacy before. It usually refers to the fallacy of statistical reasoning—assuming that the prior probability of a random match is equal to the probably of the defendant’s guilt. She may or may not mean it that way but I didn’t ask her. No reason to get into it now.
“Kathryn’s an attorney,” Ida says. “Sings like an . . . angel. Could’ve been a professional, but changed her plans when her brother was wrongfully convicted—went to law school so she could get justice for him.”
“Hasn’t worked out so well,” Kathryn says with a small frown and downcast demeanor. “And we’ve about exhausted all our options. Guess I should’ve spent all that time and money on finding him a better lawyer instead of trying to become one myself.”
“Problem’s not with you child,” Ida says. “It’s the injustice of the system.”
Kathryn shakes her head so slightly it’s almost imperceptible. “Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so.”
“Literate too,” I say. “A literate, singing, attorney.”
She smiles. It’s a great smile, with genuine warmth and pleasure, but as with Ida it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “Not really all that literate,” she says. “Just like that particular line from that particular book.”
I nod. “It’s a great line. From a great book.”
“It is,” she says. “Never cared much for Hemingway, but that book and that line . . .”
“So,” I say, “without any evidence and with no body, how’d they get a conviction?”
“A witness,” Ida says.
“A friend of his testified that Qwon came to him after he killed Angel, told him what he’d done, and asked for his help destroying evidence and disposing of the body. He was convincing—earnest, remorseful, not just willing but wanting to be punished for his part in it. Jury loved him—believed him, sympathized with him, thought this poor kid put in this terrible predicament couldn’t do anything for Angel at that point, but he could help his friend Acqwon and that’s what he did. That’s what he told them anyway. That’s what they believed. You’ll never believe what his name is,”
“What’s that?”
“Justice.”
Ida shakes her head and lets out a harsh, loud laugh. “Qwon never stood a chance.”
160
“Justice and I weren’t really friends,” Acqwon says. “Just more like . . . acquaintances, I guess. We were in the same grade, had some classes together, but we never hung out, never did anything together. Not that I can remember. I bought weed from him sometimes. Probably smoked with him on a few occasions, but . . .”
“Why do you think he did it?”
“I have absolutely no idea—and I’ve spent the last eighteen years thinking about it. That’s what was so shocking about it. Well, the fact that it happened, then the fact that anyone could think I could do it, but after that . . . that anyone would believe I’d go to Justice for help burying the body. I just couldn’t believe it. Imagine someone you barely know accusing you of killing someone and saying they helped you, actually became an accessory after the fact and was willing to go to prison for it. You’d be in shock, wouldn’t you? You’d wonder for the rest of your life what did I ever do to this guy that he would do something like this to me. Wouldn’t you? It
was the most surreal experience imaginable.”
Handsome and fit, Acqwon Lewis is surprisingly upbeat, energetic, and youthful. An African-American man in his mid-thirties, he looks and acts at least a decade younger. His eyes are clear and bright, his manner easy and relaxed, his smile, which he flashes often, genuine and infectious.
If he’s a cold killer, he’s the warmest I’ve ever encountered. If he’s an innocent man, he’s served nearly two decades of hard time and shows no signs of anger, bitterness, or frustration. Even in regards to Justice’s betrayal, if that’s what it is, he seems more baffled than anything else.
He’s inside the claustrophobic confinement cell in what is known as the box—a building of bare six by nine cinderblock cells used for disciplinary action. It’s like jail in prison. Inmates who break prison rules are removed from open population and sent to solitary confinement. With none of their property and no contact with anyone but staff and the inmate who delivers their food tray, they spend all day every day in what isn’t all that much larger than a coffin.
I’m out in the hallway outside Qwon’s cell, squatting down on the bare concrete floor talking to him through the open food slot in the massive metal door.
It says a lot for Qwon’s mental toughness and good natured optimism that he can remain upbeat in such a setting and situation.
“Do you think he killed her?” I ask.
“It’s hard to imagine. Really is. Maybe he did. Maybe that’s why he said I did it. Would explain a lot—why he did it, how he knew things about it, but to be honest with you, I just can’t see it. He really doesn’t seem like the type to me. And I can’t imagine he could ever get anywhere close enough to Angel to actually do it. She was tough and street smart and . . . like, real careful.”
“Someone got close enough to her to do it,” I say.
“Yeah, that’s true. I guess they did.”
“Could Justice be covering for someone else?” I ask.
True Crime Fiction Page 62