BLOOD CRIES: a John Jordan Mystery (Book 10) (John Jordan Mysteries)

by Michael Lister

  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 with 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.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  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?”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  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.
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  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 Vaughn 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.

  “Only exception was Cedric’s dad,” he said. “He was the least helpful in our investigation, and we didn’t turn up anything of Cedric’s at his place, in his car, nowhere.”

  “Okay?” Battle said. “That enough for you? Can we go back to fighting real crime now?”

  That afternoon, I drove out to Ellenwood, to Fairview Memorial Gardens, to Jordan’s plot near the stone statue of Saint Mark.

  It was a bright, clear day. I preferred the times it was raining when I visited.

  “Last time I was here I said I wasn’t coming back,” I said.

  Next to me, Saint Mark remained implacable, silent witness to my quandary and misery.

  “I thought I meant it, but . . . I’m having such a hard time letting go—of you, of what happened. I’m angry and embarrassed and . . . I just can’t . . . I haven’t been able to get over it all . . . over you . . . yet. And on top of everything else . . . that really bothers me. I should’ve been able to let go a long time ago, to . . . I don’t know.”

  I looked over at the bearded and robed apostle holding his tablet.

  “You ever seen anything like this? You’re not taking notes, are you?”

  Like Jordan, he didn’t respond.

  “Ever experience anything like this?” I asked him. “Ever have that stone heart of yours broken?”

  Still nothing.

  I looked back at Jordan’s headstone.

  “Eventually, I will stop doing this,” I said. “I’ll get better. I’ll heal. I’ll get over you. Just not today.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Annie Mae Dozier was a small, gray-haired black woman with thick glasses above freckled cheeks. She wore a simple cotton sheath dress over her thin, narrow frame, and sank so far into the worn sheet-covered couch, a good portion of her wasn’t visible. Like everything else in the place, the blue and white dress was old and faded and looked like something from the sixties to me.

  Her apartment was even more modestly furnished than mine.

  “He was such a good boy,” she said, blinking behind her big glasses. “Smart. Sweet. He was my little buddy.”

  “He came over here a lot?” I asked.

  She nodded her shrunken head. “Fair amount, that’s a fact. Every time his no-good mama go down to the bar or have mens over . . . I’d hear a little tapatap on my door. He say, ‘Aunt Annie, you got any of them little cookies like I likes?’ I always did. I’d feed him, let him watch a video—he always had a video and his uncle gave me a VCR so he could watch ’em over here. He do that or color or both. He loved movies and loved to color. And he loved his Aunt Annie. And I loved him. He the closest thing to a grandchild I’a ever have. Only got one daughter and she ain’t able to have no youngins.”

  “Did he ever confide in you?” I asked.

  “Certainly. He get upset, this the first place he come. I talk to him. Rub his back. Directly he calm down and be back to his happy little self.”

  “What kinds of things upset him?” I asked.

  “Ima notta gonna lie. His whole life was upsetting. Yes sir, it was.”

  “Was he worried about anything? Scared of anything? Anybody bothering him leading up to his disappearance?”

  “He always worried ’bout somethin’. Mama like that . . . he never know she gonna hug him or hit him. Never know when he gonna eat again. No food in the house. Never know when them mens she have over gonna try to mess with him.”

  “Sexually, you mean?”

  She frowned and nodded. “Some came just for him. No interest in that old drunk. She pass out and they mess with little Cedric. I call the police, but they ain’t do nothin’ ’bout it. Then on, she have a man over, Cedric stay over here. I fix him up his own little room—well a corner of my daughter’s room. She was finishin’ up her schoolin’. Hardly ever here. Didn’t mind at all, no sir. She like Cedric. Everybody did. She done grown up and moved out now. She a pharmacist down to McDonough. So proud of that girl. Directly, I be movin’ down there with her. Help out. She make good money, that’s a fact.”

  “Did he mention anyone messing with him or anything he was worried about in the weeks leading up to his disappearance?” I asked.

  It was the same question phrased in a slightly different way. She hadn’t really answered it the first time.

  “No, sir. No more than usual. Nothin’ that stands out.”

  I started to say something, but her tired, old eyes opened wide and she held her bony-fingered hand up.

  “Wait just a minute there now,” she said. “Almost forgots about . . . Creepy bothered with him a bit more than usual ’round that time, I do believe.”

  “Creepy?”

  “That what the kids called him,” she said. “Real name was Daryl Lee Gibbons or Gibsons. Somethin’ like that. Creepy fit him, yes sir it most certainly did that. He wasn’t quite right in the head, eyes crossed, always staring after the kids. Big, fat, slow-movin’ white boy. Always creepin’ up on you. One minute he just there. In the shadows, gazing, licking his lips.”

  “What did he do to Cedric?”

  “Nothin’ far as I know, just followed him around like the rest of the kids, starin’, gruntin’, talkin’ gibberish. But I seem to recall him bein’ ’round more ’round that time. Cedric mentionin’ him followin’ him even more.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Creepy? Moved right after Cedric disappeared. Good riddance. No idea where he be at now. Just not here, thank God.”

  “What do you think happened to Ce
dric?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Somebody snatch him. Grab him up, take him away, do things to him, kill him and bury him in some woods somewhere. That what was happenin’ back then. Boys just like him—no one lookin’ out for ’em. Snatched. Strangled. Dumped. Gone. Forever.”

  “Do you remember a guy who used to live in Memorial Manor the kids called Creepy?” I asked.

  I had stopped by Second Chances after leaving Annie Mae’s and on my way to return my movies to Lonnie’s.

  “Not just the kids,” Camille Pollard said. “We all called Daryl Lee Gibbons that.”

  She was just as stylishly dressed and looked just as tired as when Mickey had introduced me to her.

  “Do you think he could’ve taken Cedric or the other kids?”

  She shrugged. “I guess it crossed my mind, but . . . Daryl Lee just seemed too slow—mentally and physically, too simple. Seemed to me more like he wanted to be a kid, or thought he was, than wanted to hurt one. Either way, I always kept my kids away from him. They were younger, of course, but . . . The thing is . . . I’ve always thought the killer—or killers, if there are two—are black. And not just ’cause they’d have a better chance of going unnoticed, but because . . . You familiar with the concept of self-hatred?”

  I nodded, finding it a bit difficult to take her seriously with her asymmetrical bob bobbing about.

  “For some people it runs very deep. Minorities, the poor, the marginalized and disenfranchised are culturally conditioned by the majority, the power structure, to hate themselves. It’s so entrenched, so deeply ingrained most don’t even know they do it.”

  She spoke with conviction, but it sounded like something she had heard or had read—perhaps in a college class or special lecture on race and culture she had attended.

  “But you can’t be oppressed and tortured and told that it’s your fault and you’re worthless and it not have an effect on you,” she continued. “You can’t be poor and without possibilities when everyone else has plenty, and plenty more coming—all while they’re telling you the reason you don’t have more and don’t do better is because you’re slow and stupid and lazy and ignorant and criminal and—without it causing you to start to believe it yourself. Think about a kid in a family being told that he’s less than. He grows up believing it. If he’s also told that or made to feel that way by a teacher, he believes it even more. But what if everywhere you look, everything you hear, every single thread sewn into the fabric of your life, of life itself, was telling you that you and your family and your kin and kind are inferior, less than—not just a nigger, but a nigger for a reason. Women are told it. Jews are told it. So many are told it. But no one is told it like black people in America. I’ve always thought the killer was a self-hating black person.”