Jeremy Ballat had run away from home in Atlanta two weeks before he died. He’d hitchhiked to Macon and then to Savannah, where he had hung out with a pack of teenagers for eight days before continuing down the coast and crossing the Florida border to Jacksonville. At that point, he seemingly decided to play Huck Finn. Only a handful of barges work the St Johns River beyond the Buckman Bridge at the southern end of the city, but he talked his way on to one of them that was carrying used tires. He got into an argument with the barge captain and jumped into the river near the western bank about ten miles before the Palatka dock.
Investigators looked hard at the captain, but he’d arrived on time in Palatka and his schedule back downriver gave him no time for a side trip to the state forest. Nothing in his background suggested he might commit this kind of crime.
The report included two maps. A straight shot from the riverbank to the park measured about twenty miles through swamps and timberland south of Bostwick. The paths by road, or a mix of roads and hiking trails, would have taken the boy through Bostwick – or else the slightly smaller town of Bardin – where someone most likely would have seen him. Those paths measured over twenty-five miles. The Putnam investigators speculated that whoever killed the boy had picked him up or abducted him shortly after he came to shore from the barge and that the killer went to the park only to dump the body. The police never found the jeans, T-shirt, or gym shoes that the barge captain said the boy was wearing.
The note about the earlier killing that one of the investigators had added to the bottom of the report said a ten-year-old – a Mexican boy named Luis Gonzalez – was camping with his illegal immigrant parents and sister in woods behind the Mount Zion Baptist Church on the other side of the river from the point where Jeremy Ballat waded ashore. The area, called Federal Point, consisted mostly of large farms. The parents would come in winter to pick strawberries and return in early summer for the blueberry crop. One day, while they were working, their son disappeared. Fearing the cops, they didn’t report his absence. When, a week later, a fisherman found a body floating in shallow water just downriver and the police tracked the boy back to the encampment, the parents said their son often played on the riverbank. Everyone at first thought he’d gone swimming and drowned. But when his sister said a man had come to the camp and taken the boy, the medical examiner looked more closely at the decomposed corpse and found the bite marks and the twenty-two-caliber bullet lodged in the skull. Then the parents and daughter disappeared.
And, I thought, sometime in the months or years that followed, so did the bullet.
I read and reread the note and the report, looking for any details that linked the Mexican boy and the Atlanta runaway to the Bronson brothers.
Along with the matching wounds, they all were between ten and fifteen years old, all living at the edge of legal systems that should have protected them. Steven and Duane Bronson lived in Jacksonville, and Jeremy Ballat came through the city on his way south, but Luis Gonzalez seemingly had no reason to travel off the rural farm circuit that his parents worked.
I started again at the beginning of the report and reread it for anything I’d missed. Like the Bronson brothers but unlike Luis Gonzalez, Jeremy Ballat lived with a single mother. Again like the Bronsons but, as far as I knew, unlike the Mexican boy, he had a record of minor arrests – for truancy, stealing a bottle of vodka from a neighbor’s house, and attempting another burglary. As was the case with the Bronson brothers, although the investigators never tested the rape kit, they did bloodwork and other toxicology analysis on him. They found trace THC metabolites, which meant he’d smoked marijuana in the days or weeks before he died. Otherwise, the analysis came out normal – except for highly elevated mercury.
I felt another punch in the belly. I remembered my public defender stumbling through my first trial. Were the Bronson brothers high when they died? he asked. The prosecution expert answered, No, sir, no alcohol or drugs, though the boys did have elevated levels of mercury. Of course, the expert then said that any of a dozen common causes could have led to the high mercury, including eating tuna fish sandwiches.
Even if a lot of kids had high mercury, it linked these particular ones. I figured the medical examiner who overturned the finding of accidental drowning after Luis Gonzalez’s death would also have done blood and toxicology. I should see if I could get that report when I went back to my computer at the JNI office.
I paged through the rest of the report, glanced again at the maps of Jeremy Ballat’s possible routes from the St Johns River to Etoniah Creek State Forest, and reread the note about Luis Gonzalez.
When I finished, I felt I was still missing something – another link, a pattern of the kind that I trained myself to see while fighting to get off death row and out of prison. So I started at the beginning again, reading more slowly, pausing after each sentence, thinking about each word.
As I looked at Jeremy Ballat’s route maps, I saw what I’d missed. But the realization disappointed me more than it punched me with either pain or exhilaration. The link – the little town of Bostwick – didn’t connect Jeremy Ballat with any of the other three boys, and so it almost definitely didn’t matter. As the map showed, his routes would have taken him either through or just to the south of the town. And, on one of my first days at the JNI, after I sweated through a bus ride from my motel room, Jane, as a welcoming gift, gave me a report of complaints and commendations that Bill Higby had received at the Sheriff’s Office. Along with filing two of the complaints, the Skooner family also had commended him for returning Josh who, at age eleven, ran away to a plot of mill land, owned by his mother’s family, just east of Bostwick. But I saw no deeper connection to the murdered boys.
Still, when I went back to the JNI office in the morning, I would also see if I could get my hands on Josh Skooner’s toxicology report. It couldn’t hurt to check. Maybe he’d eaten a lot of tuna fish too.
For now, I called the Skooners’ house. The last time I’d called, returning a call from Andrew Skooner, he’d all but hung up on me, but I was glad when he answered. I asked, ‘Why did your brother run away?’
‘Huh?’
‘When he was eleven,’ I said. ‘And Higby brought him back.’
‘With my dad, you either perform or run away. Josh didn’t perform.’
‘Must be hard growing up the son of a judge.’
He said, ‘You can’t imagine.’
A little before ten p.m., a man came to build a new doorframe and put up a door. Bill Hopper walked over when the truck pulled up. As the man unloaded the door and his tools, Hopper told me, ‘This one’s got steel. No one’s coming through without a battering ram.’
‘Like the doors they used in solitary confinement,’ I said.
He looked uneasy. ‘But this time, keeping the animals out, right?’
After listening to the banging hammer and the rip of an electric saw for ten minutes, I went out to my car and pulled on to Philips Highway. I had time to answer a couple of questions before I picked up Cynthia.
I wondered, if Jeremy Ballat died fifty miles upriver of Jacksonville and Luis Gonzalez died just across the river from him, did Duane and Steven Bronson also spend time in that area? Their mother would know, but the last time I visited her in her dog-filled house was a disaster. Duane Bronson’s girlfriend Lynn Melsyn also might know, but she was still hiding eight years after his death.
So I drove back toward the mother’s house. The airport was directing planes right over the neighborhood, and every minute or so a roar tore through the air.
When I knocked, no dogs barked and no one came. I could break a window pane and go inside, but what would I find in the mess of dog dishes and the disintegrated life of grief?
I went back to my car. In an hour and a half, I would pick up Cynthia. Too little time, really, to drive to the Beach and talk with Lynn Melsyn’s brother Rick and his roommate Darrell Nesbit. But too much time to hang out in the Cineplex parking lot.
I s
hifted into gear and hit the accelerator.
A few minutes after eleven, I rode the elevator up to the seventh floor at the Sun Reach Apartments. The corridor was hot and smelled of cigarette smoke. Dubstep and techno music played behind three of the apartment doors. No noise came from Apartment 706, but the door stood open a crack.
I opened it further and called into the apartment. ‘Rick?’
I stepped inside and closed the door. The air smelled of salt and burned metal.
‘Rick?’ I said again – quietly, though I didn’t know who I would disturb. ‘Darrell?’
I went to the balcony door, opened it, and stepped out into the dark. The sound of the ocean washed around the sides of the building – unseen waves breaking – and somewhere close by, out in the dark or clinging to the side of the building, an electrical circuit hummed. In the distance, a siren moved through the night.
I went back inside and walked into the kitchen. An empty bottle of Absolut vodka, its cap off, stood on the counter next to a half-gallon carton of grapefruit juice. Dirty glasses were scattered on a kitchen table and in the sink.
I went back into the main room. Music came through the walls from other apartments. Waves crashed and washed from outside as if water was rising. The siren droned.
I went to one of the bedroom doors. It was closed tight. I tapped it. Then I turned the knob.
This time, the punch hit so low and hard that I doubled over, and before I could catch my breath, bile rose in my throat. I spat on the floor. When I stood, the sight punched me again.
Rick Melsyn lay naked on his bed, a gunshot wound in his forehead, blood splintering across his skin. I couldn’t go close. If he’d held the only key that would get me out of the apartment, I couldn’t. But from the doorway, I saw other wounds – bites, deep and bloody, on his neck and thighs. His left nipple had been ripped away, by teeth or another jagged instrument.
I backed from the doorway. Tears and sweat heaved from me. In my ears, I heard a rushing. I moved toward the hall door, to escape – but the other bedroom door remained, and against every nerve, against every pulsing and pounding of my heart, against the throbbing in my veins, I needed to know. I crossed the room, touched the doorknob, and shoved.
Darrell Nesbit – his black boots set side by side on the floor, his black jeans and black T-shirt folded and set next to the boots – lay naked too. A bullet wound in his forehead. Bites on his neck and thighs. His left nipple, ripped and bloody.
Darkness clouded my vision, and I knew I was going to pass out. But then Darrell Nesbit’s hand moved – I would swear it did. And, against every nerve and pulsing and pounding and throbbing – against my father’s dead voice murmuring that I was always picking up the phone when I didn’t know who was calling – I stepped into the room and went to the man and touched his bloody forehead to see if it remained warm and touched his bloody chest to see if his heart was beating and held my blood-wet fingers by his mouth to see if he was breathing.
He was dead.
My tears and sweat heaved. My insides wanted out.
I ran then. Out. Out of the bedroom. Out of the apartment. Slapping the seventh-floor elevator doors when the elevator didn’t come. Pasting the first-floor button when it did.
In the lobby, I knew what I looked like. What I had done again – picking up the phone when …
But who had heard my voice when I’d answered?
No one?
No one at the other end of the line?
But I’d signed my name in blood on the elevator doors and elevator button. I’d signed it in the apartment and – what else had I touched? I’d spat bile on the floor. Some things never come clean.
I looked back at the elevator. I looked at the door leading out to my car. I looked around the lobby. A video camera, mounted near the ceiling, stared back. I went to it and we stared at each other. A set of wires ran through a back wall to a remote recorder – in a separate room or maybe another building miles away.
I jumped and smashed the camera with my fist, then jumped again and pulled it from the mount. My act of destruction would do no good. Video of me coming and going was already elsewhere, ready for processing by crime technicians, ready for a prosecutor, ready for a judge and jury. I crushed the camera housing under my heel.
When I looked up from the pieces, two women were watching me from the lobby door. They saw my eyes, and they fled back outside. Ready to talk to the police, to a prosecutor, to a judge and jury.
The sirens would come, and cops would run through the lobby and ride the elevator to Apartment 706.
And then they would come for me.
And then the doors would shut on me the way they’d shut before – as if all of earth’s energy focused on shutting them, burying me behind them.
I drove from the Sun Reach Apartments, the dark pressing against the cones that stuck into the night from the headlights.
At the Cineplex, Cynthia would be waiting for me, a curious smile on her lips, her beautiful scarred legs ready for me.
But I should run. Into the woods. Into the ocean.
I barely felt the strength to keep my foot on the gas.
The darkness in the car darker than the darkness outside.
I inched along the beachfront road. The car engine ticking. A clock against time.
I turned inland. Past closed restaurants and surf shops. Over the Intracoastal Waterway, the ebb and tide that promised everything – a cleansing, a transforming – but changed nothing. Past wetlands and gated subdivisions.
One light beckoned.
Walgreens.
Church of pharmaceuticals.
White lab coats.
Plastic and chemical smells.
I parked in disabled, went inside, and brushed past all that goodness. In the Home and Tool aisle, I found a plastic-wrapped two-pack of box cutters. When the white-coated clerk rang me up, I tore off the cellophane and laid one of the box cutters on the counter.
‘I need only one,’ I said.
The white coat gave me an ugly smile. ‘Save the other for next time?’
‘What next time?’ I said.
A thousand cuts.
My naked pulsing body, lying on my bed at the Cardinal Motel.
My new steel door protecting me from the world, the world from me.
Starting at my toes – the softness between – the arch, the heel, the ankle bones, the stretch of skin rising to the knees. The knees – the caps and the softness behind.
Licking the blade clean. Salt of my salt. Self-communion. I could taste the boys’ blood. Copper. Blood of my blood.
Thighs. The tenderness that rises from the thighs to the hips. The belly. The underbelly. The belly crying tears of blood. The chest. Oh, that bone.
The neck. Careful around the carotid, the jugular – too quick. Nicks and notches. Chipping at the marble of life. The whole body crying. The bed sheet wet, clinging – and the joy of releasing myself from prison bars.
My face. Hardly necessary. The cheeks. The forehead. Splinters of wound.
And when the sirens came, I sang with them. French-horning the Star Wars theme song from deep in my bleeding throat. And when the emergency lights flashed outside, piercing the window shade, and voices spoke through megaphones as if from a farther mountain to a man who was no longer me – making demands I no longer understood, telling me the way the world worked though the world had stopped working – I blacked out.
TWENTY-TWO
In solitary confinement, the sounds in your head, echoing in your belly and coming up your throat and out of your mouth, are the sounds that you hear.
Even in general population, you have too much time to think.
Six weeks after my sideways-moving, lazy-lipped, go-with-the-flow friend Stuart collapsed in the exercise yard, he came back from the medical center. He came like a jug of water – half empty now. ‘They wanted to cut off my leg,’ he said. ‘The diabetes. They say I’m dying.’ He laughed. A huge, low rumble of a laugh. The l
augh you would expect from a volcano if a volcano could laugh.
‘What’s the joke?’ I asked.
‘I’m escaping this goddamned place,’ he said.
On good nights in prison, I dreamed I ran through the woods, on a beach, on a track. From myself. Toward myself.
‘Play the horn for me,’ Stuart said. Stinking already.
‘I don’t have a horn,’ I said.
‘Play it anyway,’ he said.
Love is possible even in a desert.
We told lies in prison. Sometimes we told only lies. Lies about the girls we’d fucked. Lies about the families waiting for us on the other side. Lies about the superhuman acts of strength, cleverness, and daring we’d performed. But mostly lies of omission.
Once, early on, at the county jail, Coach Kagen brought me cookies. As if I’d gone to sleep-away camp.
For a long time, when I closed my eyes I imagined myself encased in a shell. A full-body aluminum jacket. A cowry with the gap sealed with a steel door. In general population, nothing can protect your sleep except your imagination. And, during the night, when dreams of running tumble off ledges into nightmares, the imagination is a traitor.
When a guard said, Hey asswipe, the proper answer was Yes, sir.
When another inmate said, Hey asswipe, the proper answer was a fork in the eye.
The night before Stuart collapsed again – and this time no ambling shambling nurse could save him – he said, ‘Beating up on your past won’t do you no good, Franky.’
I said, ‘The problem is, I don’t think my past is done beating up on me.’
He said, ‘Ain’t that the truth.’
Love is possible.
TWENTY-THREE
With my thousand cuts and an imaginary box cutter still clutched in my hand, the doctors sedated me – and then words came out of my mouth, sounds that sounded like words, until the doctors sedated me some more. They rolled in and out of the room, checking boxes on charts, glaring down their noses. Nurses greased me with antiseptic salve, laying bandages over the salve and then peeling back the bandages to let the wounds breathe. When they left the room, a key turned in the lock.
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