Lonnie nodded. “We have to be so careful,” he said. “We can so easily fool ourselves. We can replace drink with another obsession and think we’re sober when we’re not, when we haven’t changed a thing.”
That’s when I realized all this was for my benefit. He had saved this particular discussion for when I was present.
He thought I had traded alcohol for the investigation into his nephew’s disappearance and that of the Atlanta Child Murders. And he was right.
I was a dry drunk and needed to hear what he had to say, but that didn’t mean I wanted or was going to.
Later that afternoon, Mickey and I located Jamal Jackson’s biological father and began following him.
Our plan was to follow all the fathers to see if any of them had their sons as the cops had theorized. Of course, some of the kids would be my age by now, and could be out on their own. If they were between ten and fourteen when they were taken, they would be between fifteen and nineteen now.
We started with Jamal’s father because we had to start somewhere and he was the first we found.
The first afternoon, we followed him together. From then on we alternated, changing out when we could, covering as much of the day as we could while still meeting our other obligations. Mickey had more flexible time than I did and took more shifts.
Gerry Jackson, Jamal’s father, worked at night as a cook at the Waffle House on Panola Road. When he was at work, we mostly watched his house. When he wasn’t, we mostly watched him, searching for any sign of Jamal.
After three days, two of which were on a weekend, we had found no sign of Jamal.
On the fourth day, we showed up at Gerry’s place of work, took a booth and ordered breakfast like any other customers.
It was the middle of the night, and the place was mostly empty. When Gerry finished his final order and had a break, we asked if we could talk to him.
“Somethin’ wrong with your food?” he asked.
“No, it’s perfect,” I said. “Very good. Please, sit down with us for just a minute.”
He slowly, warily sat down, studying us as he did. “What’s this about?”
“Jamal,” I said.
“Y’all have him?” he said, sitting up, ready to fight.
“Nothing like that,” I said. “We’re looking for him.”
“Whatcha mean?”
“We’re part of a group looking for missing children,” I said. “He’s a reporter. I’m a student. We’re all volunteers trying to do something the police didn’t or couldn’t.”
“Man, don’t get me started on the fuckin’ cops,” he said. “Didn’t do shit but blame me. Convinced my ex I took Jamal from her. She still think I did. She stalk me. Sue me. Say all kind of shit about me, but I didn’t take my boy. Could have if I wanted to. After all, he’s my son, just as much as hers. But I didn’t.”
“Any idea who might have?” I asked.
As usual, Mickey wasn’t saying much, just taking notes and taking it all in. He had told me this was his preferred way to work. By letting me ask the questions, he could focus on the person we were talking to and his writing.
He shook his head. “Not really. Well, is this off the record?”
“Yes, sir,” Mickey said.
“Everybody else got theories,” he said. “I’ll give you mine. Either Wayne Williams got him and he was either never found or misidentified . . . or . . . my crazy-ass ex did something to him and is tryin’ to cover it up. She keep attacking me so nobody suspect her.”
They were interesting theories. He was a smart guy—and articulate. Why was he working as a short-order cook in the middle of the night?
“Tell you one thing,” he said. “Whoever was behind it—her or someone else—did a damn good job of making the cops think it was me.”
“How so?”
“Planted shit of his—clothes, toys and shit—in my car, my house. Convinced the cops he had been there, that I had him or had had him. Hell, if they hadn’t been stretched so thin with the murders and if Vera had been a better mother, they wouldn’t’ve left me alone.”
The door opened and a trucker with an orange vest and brown baseball cap came in.
“I’ve got to get back to work,” he said. “I appreciate y’all looking for my boy. Y’all find him, you let me know. Food’s on the house tonight. Take care now.”
As he moved away, back behind the counter, back to his cooking station, I shook my head and looked at Mickey.
“What?” he said, meeting my eyes momentarily. “Your eyes are bulging out of your head. What is it?”
“What if the killer planted evidence on the dads to make the authorities think they had them to get them to stop looking?”
“Oh wow,” he said. “That would be . . . wicked as fuck.”
“We’ll have to check with the others to confirm, and we still need to find the mothers, but if that’s what it is . . .”
“It’s ingenious,” he said. “And it helped him get away with murder.”
30
Over the next few days, we tracked down as many of the fathers as we could—four of the six in all.
Interestingly, finding the mothers was proving far more difficult, but the fathers we found all told us the same story.
They didn’t kidnap their sons and at some point someone placed something of their sons’—articles of clothing or other personal belongings—in their homes and vehicles.
Of the four dads we spoke with—Cedric’s, Jamal’s, Duke’s, and Quentin’s—all but Cedric’s had the same exact experience.
“You know what this means?” Mickey said.
We were on 285 in heavy traffic, headed back toward Memorial Drive.
“What’s that?”
“We’re dealing with a serial killer. Wayne Williams or someone else—but that’s what this is. Not fathers or other family members. Not runaways or kidnappings.”
I didn’t say anything, just thought about it.
“I’ve studied this type of killer a lot while working on my book,” he said. “There’s no motive—least none that we can ever understand. There are patterns. There are certain psychological signatures they leave, but . . . it’s all fantasy driven for them. They’re acting out some sick, horrific fantasy that involves sex and death.”
I nodded.
“Scariest thing is how normal they can seem,” he added. “I could be the killer, and you’d never know it.”
“You don’t seem that normal,” I said.
He laughed.
I thought about the mask of humanity and sanity our killer might be wearing, and wondered what it might look like. Just how normal did he appear to be? How convincing was his disguise? How deeply buried was his surreal secret? Had we encountered him? Was he dead or in prison or in a psych ward somewhere? Was that why the murders stopped? Or had he just relocated? Were other people somewhere else unknowingly glancing at that mask, gazing day in and day out into an abyss that was gazing back, without even realizing that’s what was happening?
“But seriously . . . we’re not dealing with a human being here.”
He was right, and I knew the things he was saying were true in themselves, but I questioned whether he was sensationalizing them for the sake of the story he was already crafting in his head.
“They have these extreme fantasies of sexual violence—starting in childhood or adolescence. Their isolation, compulsive behaviors, daydreaming, and increased acting out on animals and shit fuel their fantasies and eventually it all leads to murder—but not just one. A series. That’s what we’re dealing with here.”
I nodded.
He waited a moment, then said, “You think it’s the same killer?”
“Same killer as—”
“The Atlanta Child Murderer,” he said. “The same one.”
I shook my head. “If for no other reason than that the other killer dumped the bodies of his victims so they could be found relatively quickly and easily. In this case there are no bodies
at all.”
We had yet to track down Jaquez’s and Vaughn’s dads, and we were still having difficulty finding the moms, but we felt like we had enough to take to the police.
Lonnie let us use his storage/meeting room.
Frank Morgan, Bobby Battle, and Remy Boss, the original investigator of most of the cases, attended, and listened attentively as Mickey and I made our case.
We told them about the geographical connections between the victims, the similarity in the disappearances, and the way the killer had planted clothes and toys belonging to the victims in the dads’ homes and vehicles.
When we finished, no one said anything at first.
I had expected hostility from Bobby Battle, but so far he had seemed quite sedate.
Eventually, Remy looked at Bobby and said, “Whatta you think?”
Bobby shrugged. “It was your case. You’d know better than any of us if there’s even a possibility of it being true, but . . . I don’t know . . . seems a little . . .”
Remy looked back at us. “I appreciate all the work you guys have done on this,” he said. “And I’m not sayin’ there’s not something to it, but . . . the two biggest questions are the breakdowns in your pattern. Why wasn’t anything planted on Cedric Porter’s dad and why is Vaughn Smith so far outside of your geographical area?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “And I know we’ve yet to speak to Vaughn’s or Jaquez’s dad, but . . . We could be wrong about all this, but we thought it was enough to bring to you.”
“It was,” Remy said. “It is. You did the right thing. We’ll look into it and see if we can find the other dads, make the other connections, answer the open questions.”
“You still have the problem of no bodies,” Battle said. “All this time and none of them have turned up. Argues against your serial killer theory. Williams dumped his in the woods and rivers and we found them pretty quick. If he did these, why haven’t we found them? If someone else did, same question. Where are the bodies?”
“Again, I have no idea,” I said. “I have far more questions than anything else—just felt like they were questions worth asking, ones y’all might want to try to answer.”
“And we will,” Remy said. “Thanks.”
And that was that.
I didn’t know exactly what I was expecting, but I felt an enormous letdown as we walked out of Lonnie’s meeting room and into his video store.
31
The four other men scattered quickly, each with pressing matters requiring their attention, and I was left standing there in the store that would soon be closed, looking around, but not seeing anything before me.
It wasn’t until I realized Shaft and Foxy Brown, Lonnie’s Bombay cats, were staring down at me from the top of the shelf I was standing in front of that I came back to the present time and place.
“You okay?” Lonnie asked.
I nodded. “Thanks for letting us use your room.”
“No problem. Happy to help. How’d it go?”
I told him.
“For what it’s worth, I think you’re right,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“I’m not just sayin’ that,” he said. “It makes a certain sense like nothin’ else ever has. If the cops drop the ball on this again . . . I’ll hire someone . . . private. Not going to my grave without knowing what happened to Cedric. I can’t.”
I nodded. “How are you doing?”
He shrugged. “Feeling weak . . . like . . . I . . . I’ve been tempted to start drinkin’ again.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Anything I can do to help?”
He shook his head. “Got a good sponsor. He’s helpin’. I’ll call him before I . . . do anything too stupid.”
“Do.”
“I will,” he said. “Will you do something for me?”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t stop looking for Cedric,” he said. “Don’t leave it up to them.”
I didn’t say anything, just thought about it.
“Think about how much time they’ve had,” he said. “And they wouldn’t have anything new now if it weren’t for you.”
I nodded. He was right.
“Thing is, I’ve got nothin’ left,” he said. “I’ll be losing my store soon. Have no idea what I’m gonna do next. But I’ll spend every last cent of my savings to find Cedric. And truth is . . . I’d like to get to whoever took him before the police do—not that they ever will.”
I thought about what he had done to Daryl Lee Gibbons and Cedric Porter, Sr., and knew exactly what he would do to the man who had taken his surrogate son.
When I stepped out of Lonnie’s shop, I saw Frank Morgan in his car out in the parking lot not far from the phone booth I had used to call him last week.
He motioned me over.
When I reached his car, I could see that he was on his radio so I waited, watching the traffic on Memorial, the activity on the sidewalks and shops.
The wind was more biting today, and I shoved my hands in my pants pockets.
When Frank finished, he climbed out of the car and closed the door.
“How well do you know Mickey?” he asked.
“Not well at all. Why?”
“His name rang a bell, and when you said he was a reporter I remembered something about a scandal he was involved in. I called a newsman friend of mine to make sure. He used to write under the name Michael Davis. Switched to Mickey after he got fired from the Journal. You need to be careful with him.”
“Okay,” I said. “I have been, but why?”
“He was fired for manufacturing a story, making up quotes from sources, in some cases making up the sources themselves. If he’ll do that for a newspaper story, imagine what he’ll do for his book.”
I nodded.
“Did anything we went over in there come only from him?” he asked.
I thought about it.
“No,” I said. “Best I can recall, the only thing that has come from him during the entire course of the investigation and our group meeting is that Daryl Lee Gibbons has a record.”
“Which is true. He does. Think I’m pretty close to finding him, by the way. We’ll see what he’s been up to and what he has to say about what happened back then.”
“Great. Thanks.”
“Just be careful, John. I don’t trust this Michael Mickey Davis character. I don’t think you should either. Think he’s got a very different motive than you do, has an agenda, and it’s selfish and sensational and can only hurt the investigation.”
32
When I pulled back the curtains and looked out, I saw Summer Grantham standing there, her blond hair up in a ponytail, her eyes looking far sadder than I had seen before.
I had been alone in my room studying the cases, hoping she might come by.
I nodded toward my front door, and met her at it to let her in.
“Sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
“Just showing up like this. Not calling or coming by before now. You name it, I’m sorry for it.”
“Come in. Are you okay?”
We embraced for a few moments, then I led her down the hallway to my room and closed the door behind us.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Where have you been? Why did you disappear? What’s wrong?”
She frowned and her eyes glistened. “Can we not talk about it right now?”
“I’d really like to,” I said, “but . . . if you can’t . . .”
“In a little while maybe,” she said. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
“How have you been?” she asked.
“Besides worried about you and wondering what the hell happened to you? Pretty fair. You?”
“Not so good. I’m sorry again.”
“Could I at least get your number and address so I can contact you? You’re not listed.”
She shook her head. “It’s under my husband’s name.”
“Your what?”
“I know. I’m sorry. I should’ve—”
“Let me walk you to the door,” I said.
“Wait. Sorry. I meant ex-husband. We’re not married anymore. I just never changed it over to my name.”
“So you’ll give me the number?” I said. “We can go there right now? We can go see your ex and he’ll tell me he’s in fact your ex?”
She nodded, then gave me her phone number and address though I had nothing to write them down on at the moment.
“All but the visit him part,” she said. “He’s in prison.”
“I’m not sure I believe you, Summer,” I said. “I’m not sure I believe anything you’re saying—or have said to me.”
She nodded, tears beginning to stream now.
“I don’t blame you,” she said, “but it is the truth. Everything I’ve ever told you is. The only thing I’ve done is not tell you one thing—a very big thing, but that’s it.”
“What’s the big thing?”
“I suffer from depression,” she said. “It goes along with the gift. My grandmother who also had the gift battled with the same dark demon. That’s where I’ve been. I haven’t gotten out of bed in nearly a week.”
I believed her.
To the best of my ability to discern deception, I sincerely believed she was telling me the truth.
Everything in me wanted to take care of her, to hug and reassure her, to help her fight the darkness she was dealing with.
“I believe you,” I said.
“You do?”
“I do. And I want to help you.”
“You do?”
“I do,” I said. “But I can’t.”
“What?”
“Are you on medication?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Are you taking it?”
She nodded again.
“Are you under a doctor’s or psychiatrist’s care?”
She nodded again.
“Do you have a family member or friend who can help you?”
She nodded. “My daughter. She’s . . . very good at helping me deal.”
“Does she know how you’re doing right now?”
She nodded again. “I’m actually much better now,” she said. “She knew how I was earlier in the week. She checked on me every day.”
Blood Cries; Blood Oath; Blood Work Page 12