No Place Safe

by Kim Reid

  Other times, being at the Task Force made me feel like any other kid in the city, afraid and no more protected than they were. As a break from Algebra II formulas, I’d walk around the building, looking at the maps that someone with a steady hand had drawn symbols on showing where each child lived, went missing from, and was found dead. No matter where I started searching, my eyes would eventually stop at the red circle on my street. Red circle for found dead. In map space, it always appeared the circle had been drawn square on top of my house.

  *

  In the second week of November, the seventeenth child went missing. Taken just a month before his sixteenth birthday, Patrick Rogers, who loved Bruce Lee movies and planned on being a singer when he grew up, was the oldest child to make the official list so far. Patrick was last seen on Thomasville Road in Southeast, just two miles from my house. I hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in the week since the boy was found on my street, wondering how he died and whether I’d ever passed him in a grocery store aisle at the Big Star, or saw him playing Space Invaders in the video arcade on Jonesboro Road. When I did get to sleep, the boy was still able to sneak inside my dreams and eventually frighten me awake. Knowing the killer was still nearby didn’t help.

  Another child going missing right after the mayor kicked up the fuss with the FBI just increased the pressure on all the agencies working the case, local and federal, and it also instigated fighting among the agencies.

  “The FBI acts like they’re gonna save the day,” Ma said, her anger so easy to raise

  up now. “So far, all they’ve done is dredged up old theories about drugs and gangs.”

  Drugs and gangs was just the twentieth-century version of a centuries-old belief in this country, at least in the South—that any evil that befalls black folks, we must have brought it on ourselves, including slavery. Didn’t work hard enough, didn’t get enough education, waited for someone to help us instead of helping ourselves. All our problems were self-inflicted, no matter that slavery was a hundred years fresh, full access to voting and desegregated schools just fifteen years young. The part I didn’t understand was that the lead agent in the FBI’s Atlanta office, a black man, was also blaming drugs and gangs. Maybe he’d been in the FBI too long. Or as one of the victim’s mothers kept saying, the FBI had no business working the case in the first place because they didn’t know Atlanta, didn’t understand its people or its ways.

  The FBI didn’t help Ma’s second case by saying publicly that it was imminently solvable, basing this statement on what had turned up so far in the investigation—the possibility someone in Latonya’s family knew what happened to her.

  “Of course we’re looking at the family. You always start with family. I don’t appreciate them working off the same knowledge and theories that I am, and saying they’re about ready to solve the case if only they had more FBI agents to put on it.”

  The first thing that struck Ma about her second case was that the modus operandi was so completely different. With one exception, the other sixteen victims to date had been boys. All the other victims were taken off the street at least a few blocks from home, except for the only other girl, who was last seen near her home. Latonya’s parents said the girl had been taken from her bed while her family slept, that the abductor had climbed through her brothers’ bedroom window, which was found open the following morning. But once inside, the killer would have had to walk past the sleeping boys, into the hall, and past the sleeping parents, past a third brother sleeping on the living room sofa, lifted the girl from the bed she shared with her sister, then gone out the back door, undetected.

  From the beginning, Ma regretted the girl being added to the official list of Missing and Murdered Children because she didn’t believe the child’s case was related to the other abductions and murders. She didn’t believe the girl was a random victim. If there was any truth at all to the abduction-from-her-bed story, it had to be someone who knew her, someone who’d been in the house before and knew important details about her family, such as the layout of the apartment and who slept in which room. Because the kidnapper passed over the two boys in the first room, and the third brother sleeping on the sofa, Ma concluded it wasn’t the same person who’d killed or abducted the seven male victims up to that point.

  She didn’t like to question the parents of a victim. It was a hard thing to do but still had to be done. In the beginning of any investigation, no one wants to believe someone the child loved could have been the reason the child was dead. Sometimes when we had tested her very last nerve, Ma would threaten Bridgette and me with the line I brought you into this world, and I can take you out, but no one ever expects that a parent could lift a hand to do it, and yet it happens every day. Like other detectives on similar paths in their own cases, this didn’t do a thing for her popularity in a community where parents were mistrustful of the cops. Where parents were certain there was a conspiracy to deflect the city’s inability to catch the killer back onto the victims’ families, all wrapped in the now familiar cry of cover-up.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It had been a week since Thanksgiving and the last time we’d had a regular dinnertime, one where Ma got home early enough to cook and all three of us were sitting at the table. I was happy to have things back to normal, even if I knew it was probably just for the night. Ma was taking a meatloaf from the oven, Bridgette was adding sugar to the Kool-Aid, and I was slicing tomatoes for a salad when the phone rang. Ma answered, and I could tell from her side of the conversation that it was something about work that was going to delay our meal.

  “Tell him I’ll talk to him tomorrow. I’m just putting dinner on the table. My kids are waiting for me.”

  When she got off the phone, she said, “Okay, let’s eat,” in a too-cheerful way.

  “It’s almost seven thirty. Why they have to call you so late?” I asked, knowing the answer—that cops don’t work nine to five.

  “Another detective and I arrested a man yesterday on an outstanding warrant for a theft charge, but we think he might have something to do with my first case. He was the boy’s neighbor. We told him since he was the last person known to see the boy alive, he was at the top of our list of people who needed to be polygraphed. His mother tells me if her son has to take a polygraph, she knows a guy in Decatur who’ll do it, like she’s referring me to a hairdresser. I told her that suspects don’t get to make that choice, and she got all riled up. Then the suspect jumps bad and tries to fight us.”

  This was the part of Ma’s stories about her day I didn’t care to know, the violent parts, but I didn’t tell her that.

  “Good thing we’d called some uniforms to assist before we got there. Turned out we needed them. Now this man’s telling the deputy at the jail that he needs to talk to me. But I told him it’ll just have to wait until tomorrow.”

  “Remember you said we can pick up my viola this weekend,” Bridgette said. She was old enough now to understand how fragile Ma’s promises to us were becoming, and she saw in the phone call from the jail that her weekend plans might be slipping away. “Practice starts next Monday, and I’ll be the only one in class with no instrument.”

  “I might be too busy this weekend, we’ll have to see.”

  Bridgette looked at me and rolled her eyes, careful not to let Ma catch her.

  “Nadine’s mother took her to get her violin, and they already bought the outfit we’re supposed to get—black pants, white shirt. See?” Bridgette produced a piece of paper from her book bag.

  “Kim will have to take you over there on the bus. I’ll call in the morning and give them my charge card number, and you can pick it up Saturday.”

  Saturday morning I was planning on doing nothing but waking up late and watching cartoons because I still liked them and it had been forever since I’d seen any, then maybe shoot some hoops if it wasn’t too cold. Before I could tell her Saturday morning was my only free time on the weekend, that I had to work Saturday evening and all day Sunday, the
phone rang again.

  “All right, give me half an hour.”

  While she pulled on her coat and looked around for her keys, she told us she had to go. The man in jail was demanding to see her right away. The deputy said the man was going off, acting crazy, and wouldn’t shut up about having to talk to Ma. So she went down there, just like that, as if it was the Queen of Sheba requesting her audience instead of some repeat offender that had resisted arrest the day before.

  “Will Sid or somebody meet you down there?”

  “The man is in a jail cell, cuffed,” she said, on her way out the door. “I might be late, so don’t wait up.”

  *

  The next morning, as an apology or an excuse for leaving dinner, I wasn’t sure which, Ma said the suspect had given her some good information that she needed to follow up on. She didn’t look up from the stack of mail she was going through, mostly bills. She reached the bottom of the stack and then went through it again as if there would be fewer bills the second time.

  “I have to go out of town tomorrow and follow up some leads the suspect gave me.”

  “Where?”

  “A town three hours south, which means I’ll be staying overnight.”

  “Who’s gonna watch us?” Bridgette asked.

  “Kim will.”

  “But what about the killer and the boy they found down the street?”

  “You do what Kim says. She’ll be fifteen soon.” She ignored Bridgette’s question about the boy down the street, and she sounded like she was trying to convince herself that leaving us would be just fine as much as she was trying to convince Bridgette. “This came up too quickly for me to arrange for someone to come over. Maybe I can ask Mrs. Willis if she’d keep you.”

  Mrs. Willis was Cassandra’s mother, and still used Mrs. even though her divorce had been final a couple of years ago. Ma would say Mr. Willis was strange because one time she went over there to borrow something and he answered the door wearing only his underwear. I figured things like that probably had something to do with their breakup. Mrs. Willis and Ma were worlds apart in everything but being the single mothers of two girls, so they looked out for each other, though you wouldn’t exactly have called them friends.

  Even though Cassandra was my best friend from the neighborhood, and her sister was Bridgette’s best friend, we didn’t do sleepovers with them. We stayed over there once when Ma had to go out of town and there were roaches everywhere. I had to make up excuses why we couldn’t eat their food, and didn’t sleep the whole night for fear of a roach crawling over me.

  So I told Ma that I was old enough to stay home alone, old enough to look out for Bridgette. Normally this would have been the truth, but because I was thinking of the flimsy white cross planted in wet riverbank soil just up the road, I didn’t believe my own words. With the growing pressure from her boss to make an arrest in her cases, Ma had enough trouble without me giving her more. But I couldn’t help but wonder if she didn’t care more for the dead kids than she did Bridgette and me, considering she was willing to leave us alone overnight, and just a few hundred yards from where a body had been found, and where the killer had spent some time, even if only long enough to put his still running car into park, lift a dead boy from the backseat, and toss him off the bridge. Maybe Ma sensed what I was thinking, or maybe it was the guilt I hoped she felt, but she said she’d get Mrs. Willis to look in on us before bedtime, and that we should call her if being alone didn’t feel right. Mrs. Willis could be over in half a minute.

  *

  When I went to wake Bridgette for school the next morning, I found a letter on her nightstand. Despite all that was happening, and though she was about to turn eleven, Bridgette still believed in Santa Claus. I don’t think she stopped believing completely until she was well past the age that most kids give it up, thirteen maybe. I envied her ability to hold on to childish things since I never could.

  Santa was an early sacrifice for me, when I was six or seven and stayed up late one night handing Ma the parts to a Big Wheel she was putting together for Bridgette. Ma hadn’t intended for me to find out then, but I was a light sleeper and could hear her in the living room. She tried to come up with some story for why she was putting together the bike instead of Santa, but when I admitted I’d had my doubts for a couple of Christmases now, she told the truth, made hot chocolate for us, and asked me to help her while Bridgette slept, no doubt dreaming of reindeer on the roof.

  Maybe it was because I had to let go so early of so many things that Ma tried to help Bridgette hold on too long, to the point that her friends teased her. But teasing still wouldn’t shake her faith in childish things. Maybe that’s why I supported the charade same as Ma. I couldn’t hold on, but Bridgette could. That’s why it was like finding out there was no Santa Claus all over again when I found this letter she’d written.

  Dear St. Nick,

  How are you? Fine I hope. I sometimes think your not real but sometimes I do. How is your wife is she fine to? I must be wasting my time on this I might not. Well I guess your busy now. Thanks a lot.

  Merry Christmas

  Bridgette

  I took the letter from her nightstand (and still have it today, which is why I know every word) and when Bridgette asked about it, I told her I mailed it to Santa, that it was a good letter that needed to be mailed. I told her Santa understood that kids had their doubts, and wouldn’t mind that small and temporary breach of faith. Bridgette believed for at least two more Christmases after that—in the face of so many reasons not to.

  *

  It took longer than usual to get home because I had to take a bus to Bridgette’s latchkey program, pick her up, and then go to the music store to get the viola, which thankfully wasn’t far from her school and along the bus route home anyway.

  “Thanks for taking me,” Bridgette said on the ride home. I was wondering if people on the bus knew the value of a viola and might jump us for it, but no one seemed to notice the gray case propped between Bridgette’s knees.

  “That’s okay. You’ll owe me a favor now.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’ll let you know when I think of something.”

  “Not something too big. It’s not like it wasn’t on the way home.”

  Bridgette was no longer the kid who could be easily convinced the slightly taller, skinny glass of Coke was a better deal than the shorter, fat glass when Ma made us share a can.

  “I still need the white shirt and black pants,” Bridgette said, producing from her book bag the paper with details about her concert uniform.

  “It says here you don’t need that until your first concert, and that’s not for a couple of months.”

  “Nadine’s mother already bought her outfit.” She folded the paper carefully and put it in her knock-off Trapper-Keeper, as though she hadn’t already memorized everything on the sheet.

  “That’s because Nadine’s mother works at Neiman Marcus and all she had to do was take an escalator ride on her lunch break to get it.”

  “I bet Ma’ll make me get mine from the JC Penney outlet store.”

  This was true. One of my favorite things about having a job was no more shopping at the JC Penney outlet, where it was apparent that cost, not style, was the appeal.

  “Nadine’s mother has a store discount, that’s why she can buy her all those nice clothes,” I offered as an apology, but Bridgette was staring out the window and clearly didn’t want to hear any excuses—not for me playing proxy for the viola shopping trip, not for our inability to afford clothes from Neiman Marcus.

  As we headed downtown, I worried what I’d do if traffic was bad and we missed the last bus home, but I had a list of phone numbers of people I could call to come get us while we waited at the McDonald’s where I worked. We made the bus okay, but Bridgette was fussing the whole walk home from the bus to the house about it being so dark, and how we were out past the city curfew, and how the killer could be cruising the street. I told her to hush, but h
alfway home, she’d scared me enough that I suggested we run the rest of the way, her viola case slapping against my leg.

  “Are you scared?” Bridgette asked while we ate a dinner of Hamburger Helper.

  “No, why should I be?” I looked at the orange and yellow daisies on the wallpaper instead of Bridgette. Even if I was scared, she didn’t need to know about it. She stared at me for a second.

  “You are, too. But that’s okay, who wouldn’t be? Ma should be here.”

  I didn’t disagree.

  After I let the dog in for the night, grateful that he was the meanest dog around and fearless too, I double-checked all the locks. I knew where Ma kept her extra gun, which she left behind, only mentioning it like it was an afterthought when I knew that it wasn’t. Wasn’t this the reason she’d taught me to shoot? To respect what a gun could do, and to be willing and able to use it if I ever had to? I took the gun from her closet shelf, pulled it from its holster, and checked the chamber before putting it into my nightstand drawer. Once our neighbor called in her last check of the night, and Ma called to make sure we were okay, I got Bridgette out of her bed and told her to sleep in my room. I told myself that if something should happen, she should be close to me, but really, I was just being a chicken-shit. I tried not to wonder what I was dreaming the night the killer dropped a boy off the bridge not far from where I was trying to sleep tonight.

  *

  Ma called the next morning. “How did last night go?”

  “Okay.”

  “Good. Well, I’m getting some good interviews down here, got a few more to do.”