by Gary Sapp
into the latest crisis in a series of them since she’d arrived in this city. A local camerawoman using social media had texted that a barrage of reports had flooded her station’s office with something big having been discovered in the lower eastside of downtown. Sheridan couldn’t or wouldn’t elaborate further, but dispatched the old childhood friends to the heavily wooded area they were arriving at now.
Camerawoman huh…maybe…just maybe, Sheridan wasn’t quite the Boy Scout who was only married to his work after all. Angel thought.
Christopher had already unbuckled his seatbelt and was preparing to launch himself up out of the seat when she grabbed him by the elbow—
“Ask Sheridan to reassign you.” She said. “Please, do it while there is still time.”
Christopher’s hairless brows shot up on his dark face. “Reassign me? What in the hell are you talking about, Doc?”
Angel nudged her head at the door; he got her silent message and slammed it shut. Uniformed cops had already done their jobs and roped the area off, probably setting the perimeter further out from ground zero more than they needed to. That’s a wise move. Civilians, most of them People of Color, were already starting to line up along the boundaries trying to get a closer look at what was on the other side. Angel leaned into her friend. “You should ask to lead the investigations that will wrap up the 411 attacks…anything but this.” She looked out of the window towards whatever secrets were hidden beyond those boundaries. “You’re not going to want to see what’s in there. I don’t have to remind you of what happened to you all of those years ago. You’re not as prepared as you think you are to deal with what you may see over there.”
“Angel, we don’t know—“
“We do know, Christopher.” She squeezed his wrist harder than she had intended. “We know that Rapture is Serena’s attempt to go after the city’s Children of Color. She showed Thomas Pepper the yellow rose and we both know all the symbolism and history that goes with that. We also know that she has a major tool in the box in Louis Keaton to pull this off. He’s done this before.”
Chris nodded slowly. “In speaking of the roses, Sheridan had a forensic team run some test on them. They didn’t identify any contraband. Serena probably picked them at random somewhere on the route to Pepper’s townhome that day.” He gave her a hard look. “But you don’t really deal in the substantive do you, Doc? You live and work outside the box. This is about suggestion and inquiry for you?”
A part of her wished that he was being sarcastic, but that wasn’t Christopher’s nature. He was also dead on. “It’s just a theory for me in a roundabout way. I can’t prove any of it beyond a reasonable doubt and I know that is the world that you live and work in.”
Christopher smiled and it gave her a warm feeling that only the booze usually provided. “You’ve been on target with everything that’s happened so far. Let’s hear what you’ve got.”
“I don’t have to remind you about the Atlanta Child Murders.”
“No,” She heard him suck in a breath. “But I’m sure you’re going to remind me anyway.”
Angel raised her long index finger with a manicured nail at the end of it. “I’m only stressing the point about the yellow rose. The roses and the symbolism as you named it a few minutes ago.”
“Alright, Doc,” Christopher said patiently. “I was a little occupied at the time, but the city adopted a policy of raising a yellow rose, one for each of the missing victims…that included me.”
Angel shook her head and it surprised Christopher. “That’s not the whole of it, Christopher. The yellow rose evolved into a symbol of hope for a city that desperately needed it at the time.”
“Yea, alright, Doc, but hope against what exactly? We now know, all these years later, that there was more than one kidnapper and more than one motive going on at once. We still aren’t sure who followed whom.”
Angel acknowledged Christopher’s accurate assessment with a curt nod. Louis Keaton told her himself that the Caretaker and a very early rendition of Pandora had recruited him to kidnap and molest Black boys with the intent to incite a race war in the city that would likely spill over into the entire South, and perhaps the total country.
Simultaneous abductions were being perpetrated by Muhammad Clark. He was a troubled young man who was sexually assaulting, just as troubled older teens and young men, and was tried and convicted of killing scores of them and throwing their dead bodies in the Chattahoochee River. Clark was now on the fringes of old age and was still serving time in the Georgia Prison System.
But Angel knew that her theories and innuendoes could wait. Five minutes and twenty feet later, Dr. Angel Hicks Dupree and Special Agent Christopher Prince found out how odd this investigation was going to get.
Agent Willie Collier:
He was a dark haired man who looked to be around 35 years old. He looked as if he’d recently dropped a significant amount of weight and his skin had yet to adjust to his body’s new configuration.
A helicopter had taken to the sky. It was close enough for its blades reverberation to be an annoyance, but still far enough away not to disturb her hair. A new truck from the local CBS affiliate had pulled up behind where they had parked earlier. More APD police cars were arriving on the scene and Angel surmised that it was no coincidence that they got here right after the media did. There were going to be a lot of spectators here. Tensions were already high. An increased attendance by the APD may be needed to help curb the tide. Or their presence may make matters worse thanks to the results of Deliverance.
What Angel knew for a near certainty was whatever they found here was going to nearly impossible to hide from the public.
“What in the hell is this?” Christopher asked when he reached ground zero. “Is this some kind of prank?”
Agent Collier held up his hands defensively. “We haven’t disturbed a thing, Agent Prince. This is exactly how the two civilians who called this in to that camerawoman at the news station found it.”
It was the damned oddest thing that Angel had seen in all the times that she had consulted with the bureau in the past. And she had seen a hell of a lot.
For the lack of a better description, someone, Angel could only guess a single person, had wedged a black doll into the concrete hole in the floor of this particular structure. They’d even taken the painstaking time and effort to place the doll partially inside of it without crushing the toy. They also had troubled themselves into clothing the thing to protect it against the dirt that would strike it because of today’s smoky strong winds. Angel pulled at the cuffs of her trousers and then kneeled to get a closer look.
“It’s no joke, Christopher,” She said. It is more of an illusion though. “Take a closer look at this.”
Christopher assumed a Johnny Bench pose of his very own to catch a better glimpse at what she’d detected. He saw it right away too. There were cut marks around the doll’s throat and the head had been squeezed so much that the plastic had refused to pop back out into its normal given shape.
“Did you see this, Doc?”
That same someone had presumably left a full sized bullet inside the dolls head. That wasn’t all however. A full size rope was tied, without much success, around the doll’s tiny legs. Christopher stopped his examination long enough to look at her probably to gage if they were thinking along the same lines or not, which would save a lot of time.
“It’s nearly identical to the real early crime scenes the APD found in the fall of 1979,” Christopher made his voice of whisper. “This was some of the heavy evidence that the State used in its prosecution of Muhammad Clark.”
Agent Collier had heard Christopher after all. “The State…Muhammad Clark, what are you talking about?”
Angel used the explanation to Agent Collier as a tool to refresh herself on what she had studied some years earlier. “The corpse of the 16 year old boy was badly decomposed, but the Medical Examiner was still able to recognize that he had been strangled to death and then shot post mo
rtem.”
“Look at here,” Christopher had rubbed his thumb over the forehead and hair of the doll. “I believe this model hit the retail market about eight to ten years ago.”
“I think you’re right, Prince.” Agent Collier smiled with a pleasant recollection. “My boy must have been about four or five at the time. He carried that thing around with him everywhere. ‘Action Traction’ is what I thought the store people called it. I finally had to hide the thing to wean him off of it. He must have cried for days afterwards.” His smile soured. “Respectfully, sir, what is the significance of what model the doll is to all of this?”
“The significance,” Angel found herself saying evenly. “Is that these dolls went out of circulation two or more years ago. Am I right, Christopher?”
He nodded. “Yea…that means whoever did this has been holding on to this thing for a time or they troubled their selves with E-Bay or some other web site to order it specifically. You don’t find black male dolls everywhere. They wanted this scene to be a nearly flawless rendition of the real thing. They wouldn’t accept anything less than perfection.”
The chatter in the background had increased two fold in the background.
“It’s a Goddamn conspiracy.” One voice proclaimed.
“Hell yea,” A woman’s voice added her two cents worth. “We’ve seen the FBI’s handiwork