“Good,” I said. “Then . . . since you have all that, I’ll walk you to the door. I’m sorry. I wish I could help you—I mean, I don’t even know if you wanted me to help—but I just can’t. I want to. You can’t imagine how much everything in me wants to. But I just did that with another woman—it’s sort of my thing, I guess—and it didn’t go well at all. So . . . I’m truly trying to accept the things I cannot change and change the things I can.”
“That’s good,” she said. “That’s very good.”
We walked back down the hallway in silence.
When we reached the front door, we stopped.
“I didn’t come here tonight looking for you to save me, John,” she said. “At least the best part of me didn’t. I just wanted to explain and to . . . I wanted to be close again, maybe have some of the healing that flowed through me to you, flow back through you to me, but . . . we knew what this was, what the other night was. I’m more than twice your age. My daughter is a good bit older than you. But here’s the thing . . . what it was was sacred. What it was was real. What we shared, this connection, this . . . Don’t lose that, don’t let your aversion to drama and messiness, which I understand and appreciate, cause you to close down again and miss out on what life has for you.”
I nodded.
She kissed me quickly, then turned to leave.
“Wait,” I said.
She stopped.
When she turned I saw hope and desire in her eyes, and regretted calling out to her.
“Sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t trying to . . . I just want to walk you to your car.”
I could be in bed with Summer right now.
Had I made the wrong decision? Was I being too cautious, too rigid, too—
I decided to occupy my mind with something else.
Thinking back to my conversation with Mickey earlier in the day, I turned my attention to the type of motiveless murderer we might be pursuing.
A compulsive or serial or ritual killer—I wasn’t completely sure I understood the difference—is a killer who kills two or more people for psychological gratification. The murders must take place over more than a month and include a cooling off period between them. Most often the murders involve a sexual component and are carried out in a similar manner on victims who have certain commonalities—such as age, race, body type, or sex.
Serial or compulsive killers are often psychopaths or display the psychopathic traits such as sensation seeking, lacking guilt or remorse, predatory actions, impulsivity, and the need to control. In contrast with people with other major mental disorders such as schizophrenia, psychopaths can seem normal and can often be quite charming.
These type killers are often the victims of childhood abuse—emotional, physical, or sexual—often by a family member. Because of this, serial killers typically programed as children to become murderers by progressively intensifying a dark loop of dangerous, violent fantasies—elaborate mental thoughts with great preoccupation anchored in the daydreaming process. These fantasies serve to relieve anxiety, stress, tension, and fear—transforming the normal fantasies of childhood into a dangerous, compulsive form of escapism to deal with their isolation, pain, fear, abuse, neglect, and trauma.
When these dark, violent fantasies are combined with compulsive masturbation, a sexual component is added to the cognitive or mental process.
Anger, isolation, and resentment fuel fantasies, which leads to further isolation, which leads to an even greater reliance on fantasy for pleasure and relief from anxiety.
By the time a serial killer claims his first victim, he has fantasized, planned, plotted, obsessed over every minute detail of it for years. At a certain point, fantasy is no longer enough, and the killer reaches a state where he actually wants to live out his dark, violent daydreams. At this stage his victim is reduced to a mere player in the serial killer’s mind movie of sex and murder.
After committing his first murder, the novice killer will obsess over his need to kill again. Having discovered the key to acting out his secret desires, some killers continue to murder in order to experience the fantasy again and again, while others grow bored and move to escalate their actions instead.
All this—all this horrific death and devastation born out of the daydreams of a weak, frightened, terrorized little child.
Could it be that a victimized child, now housed in the body of an adult, was making victims of other children?
33
I saw Summer the next day.
We were both back at Safe Haven for our next group meeting.
She seemed sad, but not overly so.
I came in a few minutes late and sat in the only seat left in the small circle, which put me directly across from her.
I nodded and gave her a small smile.
She returned it.
Over her shoulder, as if it were a month or so ago, as if he were still there, I caught a glimpse of Martin Fisher coloring at the small table—just like he had been the last night we were here together.
I blinked and he was gone, but I could still feel him, still sense his presence in the room that had held so many children over the years.
“I don’t think we’re doing enough for Wayne Williams,” Annie Bowers, the thin, black woman from the Free Wayne Williams initiative said. “I know that everything we do is important, but . . . it seems to me that . . . well, there’s only so much we can do for victims who are already deceased. But Wayne is still alive. What we do for him . . . can make a real difference.”
Miss Ida cleared her throat. “Our group has no agenda,” she said. “Not that one or any other. It can’t. We’re not here to free Wayne Williams. We’re here to share information and ideas and do a little investigating where we can. If that leads to Wayne Williams being released, so be it. If it proves his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, so be it. What we do here—not forgetting him, caring about him and his case, seeking some kind of imperfect justice, which is the only kind we get in this world—is a worthy endeavor, a noble cause. That helps me and it helps us. Sure, it won’t bring him back, but does make sure he’s not forgotten.”
It was the most eloquent I had ever heard Miss Ida be.
“I understand what you’re saying, I do,” Annie said. “I’m just saying . . . we could save an innocent man.”
“Lot of us don’t think he is innocent,” Melvin Pryor said. “Others aren’t sure. We’re here for the victims.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” she said. “He is a victim of this terrible tragedy, a living victim, spending every day of his life confined for something he didn’t do.”
“If that’s true,” Preston Mailer, the ex-cop said, “then maybe the work we do will help free him. Maybe it will.”
“Just be clear on why we’re here,” Ida said. “We don’t mind that you have an agenda, but our group does not and cannot.”
Annie nodded. “I understand. I don’t agree, but I understand.”
“John? Mickey?” Ida said. “Want to share with us what you’ve been doing?”
“Sure,” I said. “We’ve talked with Cedric’s father. Jamal’s too. We’ve looked into whether the missing kids on our new list are just with their dads, like the police believe, or if something else is going on. We think something else is going on.”
“Why?” Mailer asked.
I told them, with Mickey tossing in a detail or two along the way.
“So if the dads don’t have them . . .” Rose Lee said.
“If they’re still alive it would go a long way toward proving Wayne’s innocence,” Annie Bowers said.
No one responded to that.
“I had an idea,” I said. “Wondered if you thought Ada Baker would go for it.”
“What’s that?” Ida asked.
“Tapping her phone and tracing the next call she gets from Cedric or whoever’s calling her.”
Ida shook her head.
“That was mentioned initially, but she said she feared for Cedric’s safety, th
at he had to have a good reason for running and hiding and she didn’t want him found until he wanted to be.”
I thought about that.
“Calling her like that is such torture,” Summer said. “Wonder who’s doing it and why?”
They were the most words she had spoken in any of the groups.
“You don’t think it’s Cedric?” I asked.
She shrugged. “It’s torture either way.”
“We should ask her again,” Mickey said. “If we can trace the call . . . we can find out what the hell is goin’ on.”
“I’ll talk to her again,” Ida said. “But don’t expect much. Don’t think she’s likely to change her mind.”
“How are you?” I asked.
Summer and I were standing beneath the covered walkway, lingering to speak to one another as the others were leaving.
“Better,” she said.
“Good.”
“Sorry again,” she said. “For my baggage. Can’t be helped. Would if it could. That Serenity Prayer thing you mentioned, I practice it too. I’m changing everything I can, everything I’m capable of.”
I nodded. “Don’t doubt that for a second.”
Be kind. I thought of the quote most often attributed to Plato. Everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
“Sorry again for the hard line of the boundaries I have to set right now,” I said. “I wouldn’t if they weren’t necessary.”
“I know. Believe me, I get it.”
“Hey,” Miss Ida called to us. “You two feel like taking a ride?”
She was walking back toward us from the parking lot.
We began moving toward her.
“I’m goin’ to talk to Ada now,” she said. “Y’all want to go?”
I nodded and looked at Summer.
She shrugged. “Is it okay?”
“Sure, honey,” Ida said, “I wouldn’t’ve—oh. You meant with . . .”
“Of course,” I said.
“No way,” Ada said. “No way I do that to my boy. Done enough to him already.”
“But it would help us find him,” Ida said.
“He don’t want to be found,” she said. “I got to honor that. He’a come home when he ready.”
“What if he can’t?” I said. “What if he’s being held hostage? What if they let him call as a way of controlling him, but he can’t tell you what he really wants to?”
She thought about that as if it hadn’t occurred to her before.
After a while, she slowly began shaking her head. “Just can’t. Don’t trust the po-lice to . . . Too much can go wrong.”
A thought occurred to me.
“What if we hired a private firm to do it?” I said. “What if they only told you and one other person you trust? Miss Ida. Lonnie. It’d be up to you. You could then do with the information what you wanted.”
“Hmm. Let me think about that one,” she said.
“It’s a real chance of finding him, Ada,” Ida said. “It was me, I’d take it.”
“What if it the wrong thing, Miss Ida? What if it harm him somehow? I’d rather him be safe without me than . . . anything happen to him ’cause I tryin’ to get him back.”
“I didn’t sense any deception in anything she said,” Summer said.
She, Ida, and I were standing out in the parking lot in front of Ada’s building.
The night was cold and windy, and we wouldn’t be standing here long.
“Not like I did the last time I was here,” she added.
“Whatcha mean, girl?” Ida said.
“She wasn’t being totally truthful about where she was between the time Cedric left the apartment and when she arrived at Scarlett’s.”
“Oh, yeah, that,” Ida said. “Always assumed she was turning a trick or scoring some dope—probably both, the one for the other. Wouldn’t mean she had anything to do with what happened to Cedric.”
“Except because of neglect,” Summer said.
“You probably right,” Ida said, “but take it from a mother who was overprotective of her boy, you only have to turn your back for a second and . . .”
LaMarcus playing in his backyard, just a few feet away from the watchful eyes of his mother and sister. There one minute, gone the next, his body found in a large culvert in a drainage ditch later that night. He had looked like he was sleeping. That sleep of death and what dreams may come that followed it had flung his mother into a wakeful nightmare of the cruelest kind.
When I walked into the apartment, my phone was ringing.
It was Frank Morgan.
“Approval came through, he said. “Everything’s set. You see him tomorrow.”
Nothing else need be said. I knew who the he was. I would spend the rest of the sleepless night thinking about my second encounter with the man who obsessed my waking hours, the monster who had haunted my dreams.
34
What’re you hoping to get out of this?” Frank asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
What I did know was that I wasn’t ready, wasn’t prepared, and I didn’t know how to be.
We were sitting in a hallway outside the conference room in the Admin building, waiting on Wayne Williams to arrive.
“Is there something in particular you want to ask him?” he said.
I shook my head. “Just want to look into his eyes.”
“Well, now’s your chance,” he said. “Here he comes.”
Two correctional officers escorted Wayne Williams into the building. He was neither cuffed nor shackled, and he looked to be out on a casual stroll.
We stood.
When he reached us, he extended his hand and we each shook it and spoke to him.
“Thank you for agreeing to do this, Mr. Williams,” Frank said. “The GBI really appreciates it.”
“No problem,” he said. “Happy to help if I can.”
“Right in here,” one of the COs said, motioning us toward the Admin conference room.
“I’ll be here if you need me,” Frank said. “Just yell.”
He then sat back down on the sofa, and Williams and I walked into the conference room.
I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this—not something as innocuous as a conference room. I had pictured either a small, empty room with two metal chairs and a metal table, Williams’s cuffs and shackles chained to a hook in the concrete floor. Or a visiting booth with a plexiglass partition, each of us communicating through a telephone receiver.
A conversation in a conference room between two guys—neither of whom were cuffed or armed—was just so . . . pedestrian.
The COs remained outside with Frank. The door closed, and I was alone with Wayne Williams.
I wanted to look into his eyes, and I did. I locked onto them and didn’t avert my gaze—even when I wanted to.
The eyes I looked into were hooded and blinked a lot behind large glasses.
He was smaller than I remembered, had lost some of the soft roundness in his face and pudginess around his midsection. He no longer had an afro, and his close-cropped hair appeared to be beginning to recede a bit.
Could this really be the monster who had left such a wide wake of devastation behind him, haunted my childhood, changed the course of my life?
“Do you remember me?” I asked.
He canted his head slightly and narrowed his eyes. Lifting his hand, partially pointing a finger at me as if it was coming to him. “I might . . .” he said. “You look familiar. Help me out.”
“I was twelve. You were twenty-two. We met in the arcade at the Omni. You were passin’ out flyers.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I do remember. I knew you looked familiar.”
He didn’t recognize or remember me. He was a compulsive and accomplished liar. I knew that already.
I was now eighteen and he was twenty-eight, the six years between our first encounter and this one compressing the age difference separating us down to a point of nearly nonexisten
ce. We were both adults now.
“Agent Morgan mentioned you’re a theology student,” he said.
I nodded.
“And you also have an interest in criminal investigation?”
“I do.”
“You ever thought of working in a place like this?” he said. “Prison chaplain can do a lot of good.”
I shook my head. “That’s interesting. No, I never have.”
“You should consider it,” he said. “You could minister to the spiritual needs of the inmate population and reexamine the cases of those who claim to be innocent.”
“You still maintain your innocence, don’t you?” I said.
“I don’t just maintain my innocence. I am innocent. Nobody will tell you they saw Wayne Williams kill another person, hit another person, stab another person, shoot another person, choke another person, or hurt another person in any way.”
I knew that to be true. Not a single eyewitness ever came forward to say they had seen him hurt or kill anyone. There were witnesses who placed him with some of the victims, but that was it.
“Why do you think you were convicted?” I asked.
“Honestly? Let me tell you. The city of Atlanta was ready to explode. They had to have a scapegoat and he had to be black. That was me. Now look, yes, I was my own worst enemy—goin’ off on the stand like that. I did a lot of stupid stuff. I was just a buzz-headed kid, but that doesn’t make me a killer, does it?”
I shook my head. “No, it doesn’t.”
We were quiet a moment.
I tried to get a sense of the man sitting across from me. He was really difficult to read. But there was something about him, more an absence of something than a presence. I was having a hard time determining exactly what it was.
“If it wasn’t you, do you have any ideas on who the murderer was?” I asked.
“Well, look, yes, I have some theories, but that’s all they are. I don’t have any knowledge of anything. I wasn’t a witness to anything. I will say this—it wasn’t just one killer. Some may’ve been the Klan, some parents or relatives, some some kind of sex ring—older men messin’ around with some drop shot kids gettin’ paid for sex acts.”
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