The detective—a short, balding man in his late thirties named Guy Watson—allowed that there had been a man hanging around the family of the victim who had bothered them a little at the beginning of the investigation.
“Yeah, well, what it was,” Detective Watson said, “Becky Lynn’s stepdaddy claimed he’d been stopped by a state trooper. Speeding or blowing a stop sign, something like that. Said the state trooper kept looking funny at Becky Lynn. Said he didn’t think much about it, only the state trooper came around their house a couple times on some type of pretext. And all the time, he’s giving Becky Lynn the eye.”
“So did you pursue that angle?” I said. “There’s not much in the file about it.”
“Well, I asked the stepdaddy, Ferlin Joyner was his name, I asked Ferlin to show me the ticket that this alleged trooper had given him. Well, he changes his story: now it’s not a ticket, the trooper only gave him a warning. Okay, I can see where this is going. Do you remember this trooper’s name, Mr. Joyner? Ferlin says, sure. His name’s . . . Well, I forget what he told me. I imagine it’s in the file. So I called up Post Five, which is the state patrol zone we’re in, they never heard of this supposed state trooper.”
“Did you confront him with this?”
“That isn’t in the file?”
“What isn’t?”
“Well, see, we found the little girl near the trailer park where Ferlin Joyner used to live. I told Ferlin he was lying. He lawyered up. Two days later we go out to his apartment, turns out he’s hit the road. Just flat disappeared.”
“There’s nothing in the file about how this case was resolved,” I said.
The detective looked uncomfortable for a moment. “That was the same time we had those two big rape cases. That student from University of Georgia? Raped those two ladies over at the Wal-Mart parking lot? Y’all didn’t hear about that over in Atlanta?”
I hid a smile. Two rapes in a Wal-Mart parking lot would barely raise a ripple in Atlanta. “No, I believe we missed that one.”
“Point is, it was a whale of a big thing out here, two rapes in two weeks. We got all hot and heavy into working that rape case and . . . Well, since it looked like Ferlin had killed his daughter, we just kind of . . .” He shrugged. “I guess the paperwork got neglected. We put a national want out on him through the FBI, figured he’d turn up somewhere. But he never did.”
“What about forensic tests? The case file said there was possible DNA source, but then there’s nothing about any test results.”
Det. Watson squinted at me curiously. “Sure. That’s what nailed it. There was blood under the gal’s fingernails. We ran the DNA. Of course DNA tests always take a long time. So it didn’t get back until after we’d put that rapist in the pokey, that kid from UGA. But it came back a definite match.”
“You’re saying it was definitely Ferlin’s DNA was under her fingernails? Her stepfather’s DNA?”
“Sure.”
“That wasn’t in the file.”
Watson frowned. “Hell, it should have been.” Then he smiled ruefully. “I got to admit, paperwork’s never been my strong suit.” He poked the basket in the middle of the table with his fork. “Either of y’all want that last biscuit?”
“Hold on, hold on,” I said. “You’re saying this guy killed his daughter, and he’s still out there somewhere? Are you even looking for him anymore?”
The detective shrugged. “Like I say, I put his information into the system, swore out a warrant, whatnot. I run him through the computer every few months. Don’t get the impression I totally let this thing drop. But he’s just flat gone. If a fellow in America wants to get lost, it ain’t that hard to do. He keeps his head low, we probably ain’t gonna find him.”
As we drove back to Atlanta that night, I said, “I don’t know, Lieutenant. I’m still just not sure if there’s a pattern here. Yeah, Marquavious had that bone decalcification that we found in Evie Marie Prowter. But how do you explain Vernell’s being a DNA match to the semen found on Marquavious? This Ferlin Joyner guy was a DNA match to his stepdaughter. There just aren’t common perps here.”
“Look in the autopsy. All these kids, they’re missing for at least two months, then when they’re found, there’s significant bone decalcification. That’s no accident.”
“Yeah, but maybe there’s some explanation for this starvation thing, something that would take away the connection we thought we had.”
“I’ve searched every bit of the literature, believe me. There’s nothing about bone decalcification.”
“But maybe there’s not—”
“Then we’ve got the unexplained calluses on the necks and backs of about half of them.”
“And not on the other half.”
“Plus, almost all these cases, we got a suspicious stranger. In the Becky Lynn Trotter case, it’s this state trooper.”
“Who apparently didn’t exist.” I was feeling exhausted and depressed. We’d been going nonstop for days, and it seemed like we weren’t any closer than we’d been last week. I was beginning to feel like that stack of seventeen cases was probably a lot bigger than it should have been. I couldn’t help feeling like Jenny Dial was less and less likely to be alive with every minute we threw away on these old cases. “Maybe it’s nothing, Lieutenant. Maybe we’re wasting our time.”
Lt. Gooch didn’t answer.
“And how do you explain the DNA?” I said.
“I don’t,” he said. But there was something in his tone of voice, something I can’t identify, that made me think he knew more than he was telling me. Yet again. What are you hiding? I kept thinking.
It was almost midnight by the time I got home, but I wasn’t sleepy at all. I realized that I’d been feeling a growing sense of anger and resentment the whole time we’d been on the road, a bitter feeling that I was being mistreated, taken for granted, misled, disrespected, and quite possibly still being lied to. Feelings of resentment, that’s what they said in the program that you were supposed to especially guard against. But I couldn’t help it. The case was turning out to be messy and unsatisfactory—maybe not even a case at all, but just a bunch of unconnected tragedies, not a serial killer but a serial mirage.
And Hank Gooch was making it worse. With his superior attitude, looking at me with those cold blue eyes, snapping at me, withholding information. How much more stuff was he holding back? Was there information that he was still hiding from me for some reason, something that glued this case together more strongly than just the two puzzling details of the decalcification and the calluses, or this mysterious stranger who may or may not have even existed at all? He had specifically told me when I first started looking at cases to find one with DNA evidence. Now here we were with DNA evidence to burn, and none of it added up to squat. I lay down on my bed and tried to go to sleep, but all I could think about was how mad I was at Lt. Hank Gooch.
I got up and turned on the computer, tried to log onto the Web site where my little son’s pictures were—but it came up an Error 404 again, address not found. So they’d done it. That smug bastard David Drobysch, up in his pretty house, had decided it was too messy keeping me in the loop. Somehow he’d found out I was poking around in his server, that I’d probably figured out who he was. And now he was cutting me off.
I looked down at my hands. They were shaking with anger. In the program, they said that managing your anger was half the battle. They taught some little techniques—breathe in, breathe out, things like that. I breathed in and out four or five times until finally I felt like I was going to explode.
“Breathe in, breathe out?” I said. “Bullshit.”
I lay down in the bed, feeling the anger in my belly like a hot little fire. When in doubt, go to a meeting. That’s what they said in the program. I hadn’t been to a meeting in months.
Ten minutes later I was down at the Korean grocery on the corner of Memorial Drive. Just a little something to help me sleep, that was all I needed. Not anything hard. Just somet
hing to take the edge off. There was a picture of a big blue bull busting through a wall on the cooler behind the counter. Malt liquor, sure. The official beverage of no-account black folks everywhere. That would be just about the right thing.
I pointed at a forty-ounce bottle. “Yeah,” I said to the Korean guy behind his bulletproof glass shield. He was busy looking at a fat pornographic comic book, Korean letters popping out of the mouths of naked, busty women. “A yard of the Bull, s’il vous plait.”
The Korean guy looked up at me, annoyed. “What?”
“Schlitz malt liquor, goddammit.” I gave him a big fake-ass smile. “Please.”
TWENTY-ONE
I didn’t make it in to work until ten o’clock the next day. I don’t know what happened. I mean, yes, I got drunk that night. Yes, I fell asleep on the couch. But back in my drinking days, I had always managed to wake up on time. Hung over or not, I was at work on time, without fail.
Lt. Gooch was at his desk, reading. He didn’t look up when I came in.
“Hey, I’m sorry,” I said. “I had some car trouble, and then my cell phone battery was low and—”
Lt. Gooch looked up at me finally. “Are you going to meetings?” he said.
“What?” I tried to look all innocent.
“You heard me.”
“What’s this?” I said. “All of a sudden you’re taking a personal interest in me?”
“No. I’m taking an interest in you not blowing this case just because you’re feeling sorry for yourself. I’m taking an interest in you not getting drunk at night and coming in late looking like you just swallowed half the distillery. I’m taking an interest in how you spent six months in some high-dollar lady’s drunk tank up in Rochester, Minnesota, where I have no doubt they told you if you planned to stay sober, you better go to meetings after you get through with the goddamn program, and now you seem to be ignoring that advice. That’s what interest I’m taking.”
I stared at him. It was about the longest speech I’d heard him make the whole time I’d known him.
“For the third time, Detective. Are you or are you not going to meetings?”
“I hate those things,” I said. “Bunch of losers bitching about how crummy their lives are. It’s awful.”
“I take that to mean no.”
“No! No! No, I’m not going to meetings. And, yes, I’m doing fine. I’m just a little frazzled or whatever because my car wouldn’t start and my phone didn’t work, and now you’re giving me a bunch of bullshit about something you don’t know anything about.”
“Is it a bunch of bullshit?”
I glared at the lieutenant. “I’m fine.”
“You weren’t drinking last night? Putting something up your nose?”
“No! I already said!”
“Okay, fine. You know how to use a computer?”
“Yes.”
“How about a phone?”
I gave him my nastiest face.
“So take the file on this Ferlin Joyner character—the one who that moron in Walton County got a DNA match on. Get on the phone, get on the computer, and find him. Find out who his mama and daddy are, I bet he’s living ten minutes from their house.”
I made a face. But I did what I was told.
And, damned if it didn’t turn out he was right. I had to pull some fancy footwork on the computer, and then tell several ridiculous lies to various members of the Joyner family, a tight-knit clan up in Rabun County, in the foothills of Appalachia. But it only took me half a day to find out that Ferlin Joyner was living in a mobile home on the very same dead-end road as his father and mother, living under the name Farline Jeeter.
When I told Lt. Gooch what a miserable job of police work the Walton County detective had done, Gooch just shook his head.
The next day we got a warrant and drove up to Rabun County, where we met the local sheriff and Detective Watson, the friendly but ineffectual cop from Walton County who had blown the original case. The sheriff, who personally led his tactical unit in the bust, claimed to have solid intelligence that Ferlin Joyner was home.
But when we went in, the place was empty.
The chubby detective from Walton County stood in the middle of the living room looking around at the ancient Motley Crue posters on the wall and the Pabst Blue Ribbon cans on the floor and said, “I be durn. Ferlin’s flew the coop again. That old boy’s slicker than goose poop on glass.”
Lt. Gooch walked out the door, stretched, and said, “Man, this mountain air’s nice, ain’t it?”
“You don’t seem disappointed,” I said.
Gooch shrugged. “Now that there’s real police involved in this case, he’ll turn up. I ain’t worried.”
We spent the next two days on the road again, talking to small-town cops, eating chicken-fried steak in little towns all over Georgia, sometimes getting the brush-off, sometimes finding a helpful detail or two—but always there remained something elusive about the cases, a sense that something was hanging there, just out of reach.
At the end of the second day we got together with the sheriff of Bascoe County, a pitiful, jerkwater county in the sandhills of south Georgia, a part of the state that reminded you as much of Haiti as anything else.
The sheriff of Bascoe County was an earnest, gentlemanly sort of fellow, black as a piano key, with a missing incisor, a slight stutter, and an ingratiating manner. He was the first black sheriff since Reconstruction in a county where blacks outnumbered whites by a five-to-one margin. His name was John Higganbotham.
He took us out to the only restaurant in the county, a dark, ramshackle cinderblock building with several rooms and a steam table served by a big-breasted woman in a red head-rag. If it weren’t for the fact that the sour old white lady who ran the place grudgingly allowed me to eat inside, it could almost have been 1939 in there.
We got our food from the steam table—yams and fried chicken and bread pudding and green beans cooked nearly to death in fatback—and then the Sheriff pulled the chair out for me to sit down.
“See, Lieutenant,” I said. “Out here in the country the gentlemen know how to treat a lady.”
As usual, the Lieutenant didn’t bite. He just ate a couple forkfuls of candied yams, wiped his mouth, and said, “Sheriff, how ’bout you tell us about Ronald Gillis.”
“Yessir. Yessir,” Sheriff Higganbotham said. He frowned slightly, put his hands under his chin, palms together, as though praying. “I be the first to tell you I got no law enforcement experience. What it’s always been, the high sheriff around hereabouts is a politician, pure and simple. The high sheriff runs the show here. Used to be Mr. Randy Nix. Before Mr. Randy, it was Mr. Farley Nix, his daddy. Before that, Mr. Elrod Nix. The Nixes used to own half the county. After Mr. Randy retired, he sold off all his timber land to the Georgia Pacific Company, and the kids done moved up to Atlanta. That’s when the colored folks got together and elected one of our own. I was the first black man in the county to get him some college, and so it come up me to get elected. I got four deputies. Any time we get a serious crime, I just get on the phone, call up the GBI. My deputies ain’t got the training, nor do I. That’s a fact, mm-hm.”
The lieutenant gnawed impatiently on his chicken leg, not interested in history.
“At any rate,” the sheriff continued, “that little boy Ronald, his mama stay over on the other side of the county. Got her a nice trailer home up to Cutler Creek. She on disability due to she got sugar diabetes, high blood pressure, various other ailments and conditions. One Sunday her cousin Maurice Gillis carried her and the boy up to church, little AME church over on the other side of Childersville. During the service, some of the boys—you know how boys is, no time for getting religion—they slip out the back of the church, go out, play in the woods a little. Horsing around, nothing serious.
“After the service, all the boys come back. But not Ronald. Figure maybe he done fell in a hole, got lost in the woods, something. The whole congregation go beating the bushes, but the
boy don’t show up. I called up Mr. Jimmy Young, he got him a couple bloodhounds, used to track prisoners for the Department of Corrections? Mm-hm. He take them down to the woods, try to track the boy, and he say, nah, the boy ain’t in the woods. I’m axing, what you mean, sir, he ain’t in the woods? Mr. Jimmy say, naw, he must of done got in somebody car. Got in somebody car, done got took away.
“Anyway, couple months later, we finds the boy. Been strangled, it looks like. Out near the old railroad line. So I calls out the GBI, they studies the scene, takes the boy up to Atlanta for the autopsy, so on, so forth. They find some of that DNA on him. In the form of blood, I believe it was. A stain on that poor little boy’s shirt. The fellow from the GBI say to me, what you need to do, you need to get all the peoples been in contact with this young man, see if they give you they blood, free and voluntary. We test it, see if anybody match. Well, everybody pretty much willing to give up they blood, see if it’ll help. The GBI, they do them tests, lo and behold: that boy Maurice Gillis, the one carried the boy and his mama to the church, he end up matching the blood on that shirt.”
“And what happened to Maurice then?” I said.
Sheriff Higganbotham blinked. “He in the death house up at Jackson now, what you think?”
I glanced at Lt. Gooch. He was deep into his green beans and seemed unconcerned about this.
“Yes, ma’am, when that DNA come back from the lab, I went down to the jailhouse where we was keeping that boy, and I set down with him and I said to him, ‘Young man, time come for you to lay it all down.’ Well, he didn’t want to admit to nothing. But me and the GBI fellows, we worked him around a little, eventually he give up to us what happened.”
“He confessed?” Lt. Gooch said sharply, looking up from his food.
“Yessir. Mm-hm. He confessed.”
“When you say you ‘worked him around,’ ” I said. “What you mean by that, Sheriff?”
The Sheriff sat up straight, looking slightly offended. “It ain’t like that! Nah, we talked to him. That’s all. Time was, justice was whatever white folks said it was. No offense to you, Lieutenant, that’s just how it was around here. Wrong or right, didn’t matter. I may not be much of a sheriff, I be honest with you. I got my limitations, sure enough. But one thing I tell you, I ain’t going back to what it was before. Frailing on people till they say they done something they ain’t, like it was back when the Nixes run this county? No, ma’am. So all I done, I talked to that boy, prayed with him, tried to get past his natural mind, get down to his spiritual mind. See? And once I done that, the boy knew what he’d did was wrong and he confessed it all up. Broke down and cried, told me the whole thing. Free and voluntary.”
The Body Box Page 11