Blood Cries; Blood Oath; Blood Work

by Michael Lister

  “So why did y’all stop when Cedric ran by?”

  “We didn’t. She did. Frustrated the hell out of me, man. She was good. I mean real good.”

  He looked away and was lost in reverie for a moment.

  I waited for him to experience the sweetness of his memory.

  “So why did she stop?” I said.

  “She ran after him. Could tell he was upset. Knew something was wrong. She was such a decent person. Just took off after him. Left me there with my dick hanging out.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Nothin’. Just took off.”

  “No,” I said. “Later. Did she find him?”

  “We never spoke again. I was still pouting when she died.”

  “How’d she die?”

  “Dude, it was like so fuckin’ sad. She was such a Good Samaritan. On her way home one night—from the bar I think—she stopped to help someone who was broken down. She was helpin’ push the car the rest of the way onto the shoulder or something. Got hit by another car passing by. Hit-and-run, but they weren’t sure if the driver even knew he had hit her. It was dark and raining. Who knows? Just heartbreakin’ man. You know?”

  I shook my head and thought about the obvious question.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Do you think it had anything to do with what happened to Cedric?”

  “I never have thought about it,” he said.

  Maybe not such an obvious question after all.

  “He’s running—maybe for his life. She chases him. He disappears. She’s killed soon thereafter.”

  “Fuck,” he said.

  “Exactly.”

  I had two walls now—one centered on the task force’s list, Wayne Williams, and the original case, the other on Cedric and the boys who had vanished under similar circumstances. Jamal Jackson, Quentin Washington, Jaquez Anderson, Duke Ellis, and Vaughn Smith.

  To this second wall I was now adding the suspicious death of Laney Mitchell. I had shared with Frank Morgan what I had discovered about Laney’s actions the night of Cedric’s disappearance and asked him to take a closer look at the hit-and-run report from the night she was killed.

  I didn’t yet know if they were one case or two, but separating out Cedric and the other still-missing victims meant I could focus on them while still searching for patterns and connections with the others.

  I had made a commitment to rework the Wayne Williams case and I intended to keep it. I would continue to go back and forth between the two until I found a link between them.

  So, as I ate the sausage and bacon pizza and drank Dr. Pepper, I looked for patterns and connections.

  Which was what I was doing when I heard the knock at my door.

  22

  I started not to answer it since nearly no one knew I lived here and Rick my roommate was at work, but before I was fully conscious of what I was doing, I was opening the front door.

  When I saw who it was, I was glad I did.

  There in light blue jeans and a purple Prince T-shirt was Summer Grantham with a bright, sweet smile on her face. Her blond hair was down and splayed out beautifully on her purple shoulders. A single, slender braid hung on the left side near her face.

  Tonight her Keds were the same purple as her tee.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey.”

  “Hope you don’t mind. I went to Scarlett’s hoping to accidentally on purpose run into you, but you weren’t there.”

  “I wasn’t?”

  “You were here instead. So I came here.”

  “I’m glad you did. Come in.”

  When she stepped inside, we hugged, and when we released one another, and for the rest of the night, her perfume clung to my clothes.

  “Sorry to intrude. What am I interrupting?”

  “Come and see,” I said, leading her back to my room. “Excuse the place. Maid’s day off.”

  When she walked into my room, she looked around and said, “When’re you gonna unpack?”

  “I have.”

  “Oh. You spartan by choice or necessity?”

  “Uh huh,” I said.

  She smiled.

  When her eyes came to rest on the Wayne Williams wall, she grew silent, stepped over to it, and studied it for a long while.

  I waited, watching her, trying to read her reactions, attempting to see the information as if for the first time.

  “No wonder you’re here instead of the bar,” she said, then after a pause, adding as if an afterthought, “No wonder you leave here for the bar.”

  When she turned toward me, she touched me very tenderly on the side of my face. Our eyes locked for a moment, something kind and caring passing between us.

  Then the other wall caught her eye.

  “Cedric?” she asked, stepping over to it.

  I nodded and turned to follow her over to it.

  “So much pain in this room,” she said, reaching down and taking my hand.

  We gazed at the wall for a while, our fingers laced, our breathing the only sound.

  “So there are six similar cases including Cedric?” she said. “Six missing boys who never came home?”

  “Do you sense anything?” I asked.

  She nodded, but didn’t say anything, just continued studying the scant information.

  After a while, she stepped even closer and touched the wall, placed her hand on each report, every piece of paper and picture, gently caressing each one.

  “They’re the same in some ways, but not in others. They’re more dissimilar than similar, but they are connected. But not in the way we think, not the most obvious ways.”

  I thought about it, deciding I didn’t yet know enough about the cases for anything she was saying to resonate or be refuted.

  She turned back to me again.

  “I want to help you,” she said.

  “You have,” I said. “You are.”

  “I want to help heal you.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re so closed, so guarded, but you haven’t always been.”

  I nodded.

  She kissed me.

  I kissed her back.

  The kiss became passionate and we stuck with it.

  “I’d like to make love to you,” she said, “to love and heal you with every part of me. Would you like to make love?”

  “Is that a trick question?”

  “I’m old enough to be your mother. Are you sure you’d like to? I’m not . . . You don’t feel pressured, do you?”

  “You’re not. I want to.”

  “Have you had sex before? You’re not a virgin, are you?”

  She was so direct, so grown-up about all this that I felt completely comfortable.

  “I have,” I said. “Not a lot. Not enough. But I have.”

  Between the kissing and the frank talk about sex, I was completely aroused and ready to go.

  “Take off your clothes and lie back on the bed,” she said.

  I did.

  As I did I felt a pang of guilt and pictured Jordan watching me, but did my best to let it go.

  She unhurriedly undressed.

  Her body was both softer and paler than I had imagined, but beautiful and unexpectedly erotic.

  My bed consisted of a box spring and a mattress, no frame, no headboard, nothing else. As usual, it was unmade.

  Kneeling on the floor, she leaned up on my legs, and took me in her mouth.

  Her hand and mouth moved in concert to create one of the best sensations I had experienced in my eighteen years on earth, and I felt as though something not just sexual but spiritual was taking place.

  It wasn’t long before I was having to resist climaxing, and she must have been able to tell, because she stopped what she was doing and began kissing my body, working her way up to my mouth.

  It felt as if she were kissing every inch of me, the nipples of her large, low-slung breasts grazing my skin as she did. Eventually, she reached my lips and began kissing me wit
h her warm, wet mouth.

  Leaving my mouth, she kissed her way over to my ear.

  There she began whispering with the voice of God.

  “You are so loved, John. So loved. You are whole. Everything you need is in you already. You are adored, John. So adored. You are precious and valued and most of all loved. So very loved. Let go of everything within you blocking the love of God from flowing in you and through you. Let love in. Let pain and darkness out. Let go. Let be. Breathe love. Be love.”

  She then straddled me, took me in her hand, and slid me inside her.

  As we began moving slowly, rhythmically, she leaned down and I took her breasts in my hands. Cupping, caressing, loving.

  I then lifted my head, my mouth finding her erect nipples, and I experienced something equal parts erotic and nurturing, and for the first time in a long time I felt connected, felt alive, felt loved.

  23

  I woke up from the deepest, most restful sleep I had experienced in a very long time.

  The room was dark.

  Beside me, still naked, Summer slept soundly, her warmth and steady breathing reassuring and buoying somehow.

  I glanced at the GE clock with the green digital display on the stack of books beside my bed. It was a graduation present from a family friend and my kindergarten teacher. The Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary it sat on was a gift on the same occasion from my aunt and fourth grade teacher.

  It was a little after three in the morning.

  Easing out of the bed, I slipped into the bathroom, peed and washed my face.

  The bedroom was cold, the bathroom colder.

  Seeing my naked body in the mirror, knowing there was a naked woman I had made love to earlier in my warm bed, made me feel more mature, more like an adult, than anything in my life leading up to this moment, and I liked the way it felt.

  When I opened the door to walk back into the bedroom, a shaft of light fell across the Cedric Porter wall, illuminating what I had been about to study when Summer first knocked on my door.

  Leaving the door ajar, I stepped over to the wall and began to read the information on it.

  After a while, I walked over to the two bookshelves and the small table I used for a desk in the corner opposite my bed. Feeling around in the semi-dark, I located pen and paper, then returned to the wall.

  Following Chet Dettlinger’s lead, I made a map of the six victims on the wall. Because they had never been found, I could only mark the spots where they had lived and last been seen.

  It didn’t take long to perceive the pattern.

  Like the Atlanta Child Murder victims of Dettlinger’s map, at least five of the six on my map had a connection to Memorial Drive.

  Though it was the same Memorial Drive, it might as well not have been. It was the opposite end, as different as the intercity and the suburbs. The victims on Dettlinger’s map were inside the perimeter, downtown, on the mean streets of Moreland and MLK. The victims on my map were connected to the strip of Memorial outside the perimeter, between I-285 and Stone Mountain.

  The different worlds of the two sets of victims were worlds apart, and didn’t seem to be connected. There were plenty of connections within each group, but the two groups didn’t seem to be connected to each other in any way—at least not in any way I had discovered yet.

  “Bring that cute ass back to bed,” Summer said.

  I turned to see her looking up at me in a sleepy, sexy way that made me want to do just that.

  “Just a few more minutes,” I said.

  “You can turn on the light.”

  “It’s okay. Sorry I woke you.”

  “You found something, didn’t you?” she said.

  “Think so.”

  “Tell me.”

  I climbed back in bed, switched on the small lamp on the stack of books beside the clock, and showed her my map.

  “This is Memorial Drive,” I said, pointing to my inept sketch. “This is where we are, where Cedric lived. This is where he disappeared from. All these little houses are where the other boys lived. The stick figures are where they went missing from.”

  She yawned, rubbed her eyes, and studied the map. “They’re all right around here,” she said.

  “All but one.”

  “One actually lived in this same apartment complex?” she said.

  I nodded. “Jamal Jackson. He and Cedric played together some.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “These two, Quentin Washington and Jaquez Anderson, lived in an apartment complex on the other side of Memorial less than a block down. Duke Ellis lived in a house down off North Hairston. The only one who doesn’t fit is Vaughn Smith. He lived over off Wesley Chapel.”

  “You think maybe he shouldn’t be in this group?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I feel like he should,” she said. “I can’t explain it, but . . .”

  “Then he probably does,” I said. “We’ll keep searching until we find a connection.”

  “Speaking of connection,” she said. “How would you like to connect again before we go back to sleep?”

  24

  The next morning, I attended classes with a smile on my face.

  I felt more alive and alert and awake than I had in quite a while—and it showed. Several people, including LaDonna Paulk and Randy Renfroe, commented on it.

  After classes and a quick lunch, I whistled my way through my janitorial work at the college, cleaning the classrooms and bathrooms with extra vigor. As I did, my thoughts alternated between my experience with Summer and what I had uncovered on the cases so far.

  My limited sexual experience had not prepared me for my encounter with Summer. Prior to her there had only been two girls my age, both of whom were as inexperienced and inept as I was—and they both expected me to take the lead. With Summer, a mature, experienced woman, I was dealing with a skilled, generous lover who not only healed but taught, who not only led, but taught me how to.

  The classroom door opened and I turned.

  “Someone here to see you,” Randy said. “A police officer. Is everything okay?”

  I shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  I began walking toward the staircase with him.

  “Where were you just then?” he asked.

  “Huh?”

  “You were a million miles away with the textbook definition of contentment on your face.”

  “Was I?”

  “You were. It’s good to see.”

  “I’m having so many incredible experiences,” I said. “Learning so much. I’m so glad I came up here.”

  We reached the stairs and began walking up them.

  “You are?” he said.

  “I am.”

  “You haven’t seemed so for a while,” he said. “I thought with what happened with Safe Haven and all you were . . .”

  “I was. But then I . . . met someone . . . and had an entirely new experience of God.”

  “Well,” he said, a big, amused smile on his face. “How about that?”

  Upstairs, Randy returned to his office and I walked out the main entrance to find Bobby Battle and another detective I didn’t recognize waiting on me.

  Both men wore their shield on the left front side of their belt, their holstered .45 on their right. Both wore a suit, though Battle’s was much more stylish than the other man’s.

  “John Jordan, Detective Remy Boss.”

  We shook hands.

  “We were close by and decided to stop in and try to talk some sense into you before you do something stupid,” Battle said.

  “You arrived just in the nick of time,” I said.

  “Did I mention he’s a smart-ass?” Battle said to Boss.

  “Seemed an appropriate response to me,” he said.

  I smiled.

  “So what can I tell you?” Remy said.

  “You investigated the disappearances of Cedric Porter, Jamal Jackson, Quentin Washington, Jaquez Anderson, Duke Ellis, and Va
ughn Smith?”

  “No, just Porter, Jackson, and Anderson, but I’m familiar with all of them.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me anything you recall about the cases,” I said.

  “Sure, and by the way, I thought Larry Moore was a wife-beating asshole. Fuck brothers in blue when a man hits a woman.”

  I nodded.

  “Okay, the cases. Most of ’em happened during the missing and murdered kids case so we took them very seriously, conducted righteous investigations. All single moms, all streetwise, latchkey kids raising themselves, all better off with their dads or whichever family member decided to give them a real home.”

  “How certain are you that’s what happened?” I asked.

  “Fairly,” he said. “I mean, between you and me, I would’ve liked to be more so, but as I said it was the height of the serial killings and we were stretched pretty damn thin.”

  He seemed to have more to say so I waited.

  “You gotta remember how it was back then. In those days, you didn’t find a body, you knew the kid was alive, more than likely okay somewhere, you had to move on. Our theory was that the dads saw what was happening with the murders, how similar their kids were to the kids being killed, and decided to remove them from the very situations that made them targets. We weren’t about to take the kids and put them back in the most dangerous possible position they could be in.”

  “Did you ever see the boys with their dads?”

  “We would have, but we didn’t have that kind of time. It would’ve taken tailing the dads, staking out their pads. Best we could do was find evidence they had them.”

  “Such as?”

  “Toys, games, clothes, their schedules altered around school, change in routine. In Jamal’s case we found the outfit he was last seen in among his clothes and things at his dad’s. In every case the dads told us it was stuff their kids kept there from when they visited, but Jamal’s dad having the clothes he was last seen wearing proved it wasn’t just that.”

  I thought about it. Some of what he said made sense, but there were lots of holes in it too. I knew how bad things were back then, how a dead body turning up trumped a missing kid every time, but it didn’t make it right or justify sloppy, lazy, or incomplete police work.