He was also the closest thing I had to a dad in Atlanta—maybe anywhere since my fractured relationship with my own father was still strained.
“How?” I asked, a jangle of electricity humming through me.
“Join the task force. You’d actually become an officer with one of the little towns around here—whoever has an opening. I’m still working out all the details. The job itself won’t be anything special. You’ll start out as a uniform, but you’d be on special assignment, working this case. You could stay in school, but you’d have to quit your job.”
My jobs—janitorial work at the college and delivering Domino’s pizza—were an embarrassment, and if he didn’t know what they were I wasn’t about to tell him.
“You’ve got a gift—think about how you connected the cases. We could really use it on this thing. Plus you’re in shape. You still running?”
I nodded. Since I had stopped playing basketball because of what happened to Martin, I had started running.
“If this thing comes down to a footrace maybe you could actually catch the bastard. I’m not sure anyone else on the task force could.”
“What happens when this thing ends?” I asked. “What if we catch him tomorrow?”
“You’d still be an officer with whichever PD we get you on with. Put in your time there and then you can transfer to Atlanta PD, one of the county sheriff’s departments, or join me at GBI. It’s all already arranged. All you have to say is yes.”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Hell yes.”
“You don’t need to talk to Susan first?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“When can you start?”
“How about now?”
Blood Stone Chapter 2
I let myself into Cheryl Carver’s apartment off of Wesley Chapel with the key Frank had given me, one of Frank’s .45s in a holster on my hip, a penlight in one hand, the case file in the other.
What I didn’t have was any kind of official ID, so I was hoping not to have any encounters with family, friends, nosy neighbors, or a zealous superintendent investigating suspicious activity in a missing woman’s apartment.
The small, dark dwelling smelled stale, as if the still air trapped inside it hadn’t been stirred in several days.
Beneath the staleness, the smells of everyone who had ever lived here lingered—layered, pungent, contradicting, steeped in the carpet, baked into the sheetrock, soaked into the linoleum.
Barely bigger than a studio, the tiny one-bedroom unit consisted of a small living room, a tiny kitchen and eating area, a prison-cell-sized bathroom, and a bedroom not large enough to accommodate even a queen-size bed.
And though there wasn’t room for much furniture in the sad, desperate little quarters, there was room for far more than she had.
A single, old couch with a bunched and gathered slipcover on it was the only object in the living room. No TV. No coffee table. No chairs. No end tables.
A single framed photograph hung on the wall—a dime store or church directory family portrait portraying Cheryl and her younger brother with her folks, all of them dressed up, each coordinating with the other.
According to the file, Cheryl was from a small farming community in South Georgia and had moved to Atlanta for school, her track scholarship providing just enough to cover her classes, textbooks, and this minuscule off-campus apartment. A part-time job at Burger King provided both food and money for food.
A small folding card table with a single folding chair at it was in the dining area that fronted the one-cook kitchen.
The hallway leading to the bathroom and bedroom was lined with running ribbons and medals—marathons, half-marathons, track and field competitions, 5Ks, 10Ks, 20Ks, gold, silver, and bronze medals, blue, red, and green ribbons, but mostly blue ribbons and gold medals.
Cheryl had been raised in poverty, but was running away from it as fast as her long legs would carry her.
The small bedroom at the end of the short hall held a little girl’s white pressboard twin bed with a juvenile pink bedspread, which I suspected had come from Cheryl’s childhood bedroom, probably packed in the back of her dad’s pickup truck and driven up from South Georgia with her mom’s promise to replace it just as soon as she could save up enough to do so.
A small matching dresser close by held her bras and panties and socks and t-shirts and pajamas, its bottom drawer reserved for newspaper clippings of her races, random pictures of family and friends, and various cards and letters—mostly from her mom.
Unlike the rest of the apartment, Cheryl’s bedroom still had the hint of fragrant flowers in it. Perhaps it was her perfume or body lotion lingering from where it wafted around her before she left, or the homemade lavender sachets in her closet and dresser drawers.
Very few clothes hung in the closet, mostly faded Sears and K-Mart shirts and well-worn off-brand blue jeans, jogging suits, and athletic attire, the floor beneath them littered with tennis shoes and track cleats that had traveled many, many miles.
I searched the room, looking beneath the bed, behind the dresser, under and around and in everything. There was nothing hidden. Cheryl Carver had nothing to hide.
From every indication she was living a Spartan existence, partly because she had no other choice, but partly because she was a disciplined dogged athlete, a dedicated and determined student.
Unbidden, thoughts of my own excesses floated to the surface of my still not completely sober mind.
Cheryl Carver had nearly all of her adult life ahead of her, and she was investing toward making it a good one.
And then she had encountered a madman.
A sadistic, heartless, heretic of humanity who derived pleasure from pain.
And for some reason she had not been able to outrun him. Was it because of the nature of his attack? Did he surprise her? Did he pounce before she even had the chance to run? Or, like her, did he too run like he was designed to?
I sat on the edge of Cheryl’s small bed and took in more of her room.
The small boombox beside her bed, the many cassettes and few CDs surrounding it. The stacks of textbooks on the floor, the smattering of romance novels mixed in. The Chariots of Fire one-sheet thumbtacked to an otherwise empty wall.
The sadness pressing down on me was overwhelming.
Why did the world have to be this way?
Why couldn’t a gifted student and athlete go for a run without running into brutality and depravity?
“Where are you?” I asked, my voice sounding small and out of place in the quiet, feminine apartment. “Are you still in the land of the living? Are you his prisoner? Or in what wound in the earth are you buried?”
No response.
“I will find you,” I said. “Either way. I promise you that. I’m gonna find the madman who did this to you too. I wish I could undo what he’s done . . . but . . . it won’t go . . . unpunished. You have my word.”
Blood Stone Chapter 3
Susan and I were living together in an old farmhouse off of Flakes Mill Road near Ellenwood.
Though most of the farm had been divided up and sold, the house still sat on ten acres and had a huge multi-car garage in the back, which the owner’s son had built and filled with various sport cars in differing stages of restoration when he had lived here.
The house was small and drafty and had neither central air conditioning nor heat, but the rent was cheap, the rural feel refreshing, and it was less than five miles from the college I attended.
When I pulled into the small semicircle gravel drive, I could see that the lights were off in our bedroom, which meant Susan had already gone to bed.
I could feel the familiar agitation rising inside me, the tension gathering in my shoulders.
Most days this time of night when we both got home was our first and often only opportunity to spend time together and make love and she knew it. She not only knew that but knew how important it was to me. I was growing frustrat
ed and more than a little angry at her take-it-or-leave-it, nonchalance approach to both our time alone together and lovemaking.
Instead of going to all four victim’s homes, I had only gone to one—the one that was the closest to our home—so I could get here around the time she did. And she knew it. I had told her what I was going to do and why, and still she had gone to bed.
And once she had gone to bed, that was it. She wouldn’t be getting up again. She wouldn’t welcome a visit from me into our room. She was sending a message.
I wanted her every night, but tonight, after experiencing the overwhelming sadness and loss of Cheryl Carver, I needed her, needed the warmth, affection, and connection of human interaction and intimacy, needed to feel her live heart beating beneath her bare breasts.
Immediately I began to try and work out how much vodka I had hidden in the house.
I would read the case files and work my way toward oblivion.
A makeshift office in an alcove of the second bedroom created by placing bookshelves across the opening served as my small study and library, and tonight, investigative war room.
Case notes, photographs, and newspaper clippings spread out across my folding table desk, vodka in a coffee cup, orange juice in a glass for cover, and radio playing softly in the background—at the moment Whitney Houston’s Where Do Broken Hearts Go.
The case file didn’t yet contain any information on Kathy Dady, the fourth young woman to go missing, only Cheryl Carver, Paula Nichols, and Shelly Hepola.
The pictures I had of the three women showed just how alike they were. All tall, lean, athletic, attractive without being classically pretty. They wore little to no makeup and had a certain purity and plainness about them.
“You have a type, don’t you?” I said aloud to the still faceless madman. “Why? Where does it come from? Do they all look like the same woman? Are you really doing this to her? Over and over again? Do you see her instead of them?”
As Whitney gave way to Richard Marx’s Hold On to the Nights, the cold October wind found its way through the varnished boards of the old farm house, and I slid my chair a little closer to the space heater on the floor.
Wondering where the women were crossing paths with their abductor, I checked to see if they were all from the same area or had the same profession or frequented the same places.
Cheryl was a student in Decatur. Paula was a secretary in Marietta. Shelly worked retail in Duluth. They didn’t go to the same gym or church or clubs. They didn’t attend the same high school or college.
From what was in the file there was no obvious crossing, no intersection where the women would have encountered each other or the inexplicable madness that snatched them from their lives.
Two of the three women were single, and seemed not to have a lot of friends. They appeared to be introverts leading quiet lives.
Shelly had a boyfriend and he would have to be looked at closer, but if this was what it appeared to be, it was more likely a stranger than an acquaintance of any of the women. Of course, likely is not definitely.
When I became aware of the radio again, Phil Collins was singing Groovy Kind Of Love.
As I sipped my way toward stupor I wondered where the women were. Were we dealing with a collector or a killer? Either way, where were they?
Did he have a hidden dumping ground or a basement filled with cells or cages?
I still couldn’t see his face, but if I knew which one he had, knew exactly what he was doing with his victims—rape? torture? murder?—I’d have a better sense of him. At least that was what I told myself.
The next morning I woke to the sound of a loud alarm blasting George Harrison’s I Got My Mind Set on You.
Which wasn’t a bad song to wake up to.
I was still sitting in the chair from the night before, my head lying on my arms on the folding table that served as my desk.
Susan, who had already left for her other job, had brought the alarm clock in and placed it on the tabletop beside my head, which meant she had to unplug it, move it, plug it back in, then reset both the time and the alarm—all early this morning while trying to get ready and leave for work on time.
As I sat up, I felt not only like I had had too much to drink the night before but that I had slept sitting up in an old desk chair, my head on my folded arms on a table. I was stiff and sore, my head ached, my arms asleep.
But George’s catchy, repetitive, remake compelled me to get up and get going.
Glancing around my small office space, I saw that Susan had straightened up some, returning the papers and photos to the case file, removing the cups and mostly empty vodka bottle, and picking up the various articles of clothing and shoes I had left on the floor.
Next to the case file were my textbooks and notebooks for class and a note that said she had made my lunch and left it in the fridge.
She was always doing things like this—things that provoked in me both guilt and gratitude.
I was flooded with shame and, not for the first time, wished I could skip ahead to be an older, wiser, better version of myself. I wanted to do better, to be better, and I knew I could, but I wasn’t yet and it frustrated and embarrassed me.
Reaching over and tapping the Snooze button on the clock and silencing the song that would echo in my head all day, I pushed myself up and stumbled out of my office and into my day.
After driving over and running at Panola Mountain State Park, I found myself as I had far too often lately, at Jordan Moore’s grave in Fairview Memorial Gardens, which happened to be less than a mile from my house.
The early morning sun had yet to burn the dew off the ground and the sweat on my body was quickly turning cold.
“I know I’ve got to stop coming,” I said. “And I will. I know I will. I just don’t know when yet.”
As I looked at her headstone while I talked to her, I realized what an odd thing it was to do. Perhaps something of her body still remained beneath the earth, but the headstone had nothing to do with her or her life. And I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d be better off going to some place we actually spent time together.
“Damn you for what you did,” I said. “Damn me for still being hung up on you.”
Miss Ida, Jordan’s stepmom, stepped out from behind the stone statue of Saint Mark and said, “Goddamn the whole mess. Every last bit of it.”
Ida Williams, a largish black woman perpetually in a traditional African print dashiki and head wrap, had a son who was murdered during the Atlanta Child Murders, and I had investigated it when I had first arrived in Atlanta back in ’86. I had actually solved the case and figured out exactly what happened to little LaMarcus, but at a price I was still paying.
“Didn’t realize you still came here,” she said.
I nodded. “Just live up the road.”
“Is she why?”
“Huh?” I asked, not following.
“Did you move out here to be close to her grave?”
I opened my mouth quickly, but nothing came out. I was unable to respond because I couldn’t admit the truth and I couldn’t lie to her.
“It ain’t my business,” she said. “I just care about you, boy.”
“I’m not doing too good right now,” I said. “But . . . I’m doing the best I can.”
She nodded. “Same here,” she said and paused a moment before adding, “All we can do.”
“I . . . feel . . . so weak . . . so . . . I’m pathetic.”
“You’re neither of those,” she said. “You’re just hurting, son. Grieving. Give it some time.”
“It’s been some time already.”
“Then give it some more. What else you gonna do? What the hell else any of us gonna do?”
Copyright © 2018 by Michael Lister
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, ex
cept for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Also available in audiobook, paperback, and hardcover.
Book Edited by Aaron Bearden
Book Design by Tim Flanagan of Novel Design Studio
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-947606-16-6
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