The Bridge

by Solomon Jones

  “I’m sure you heard about Daneen’s confession,” Lynch said, sitting down in Judy’s chair.

  “Why you think I’m in here instead o’ lookin’ for my niece?” he said. “Everywhere I go, I hear it. I just can’t keep listenin’ to people sayin’ that shit.”

  “Then you don’t believe what Daneen said about killing Kenya?”

  Darnell contemplated his answer.

  “My sister real messed up in the head right now. She want it to end so bad she tellin’ y’all she did it ’cause she think that’s gon’ make it go away.”

  “There must be more to it than that,” Lynch said.

  “Only if what she said about Sonny bein’ Kenya father is true.”

  “Do you think that’s a lie, too?” Lynch asked.

  “I don’t know. I remember her sayin’ somebody did somethin’ to her when she was around Kenya age. Judy ain’t believe it, so nobody else ain’t believe it, either.”

  “Did you?” Lynch asked.

  “Not at first. I thought she was lyin’. See, after we lost our mom, Daneen spent a lot o’ years tryin’ to get that mother love from Judy. When she came home and told Judy somebody had raped her, I ain’t wanna believe it. But when we got older, and I started seein’ what Sonny was into, I started thinkin’ it was true.

  “You saw what he did with that little girl back in the day, Kevin. The way he stuck her in that trash bin. You saw that young girl over Fairview he been messin’ with since she was fifteen. So don’t ask me if I think he Kenya father. Look at all the shit he did over the years, and you tell me what you think.”

  “Doesn’t matter what I think,” Lynch said. “But I’m curious about you. If you thought that Sonny had done something to your sister, why didn’t you do anything?”

  “I was a boy, Kevin. I was eleven the first time, and I was nineteen the second time. Sonny was takin’ care o’ the whole family. What was we gon’ eat if he was out the picture?

  “So when I got the feelin’ he was messin’ with Daneen, I just told myself I ain’t see nothin’. I ignored it just like everybody else. Not sayin’ it’s right, but that’s what I did.”

  “Did you get the same feeling later on with Kenya?”

  Darnell lowered his head.

  “I did, but I ain’t face it ’til it was too late. I know that was wrong, Kevin, but that don’t change the truth. Judy did somethin’ to Kenya to protect Sonny, ’cause Kenya was gettin’ ready to tell what he was doin’ to her.”

  “How could Judy have done something to her if she was here the whole time on Friday?” Lynch asked.

  “Maybe she got somebody to do it for her.”

  “Maybe,” Lynch said. “That would explain what Bayot told us.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He said he saw a man get on the elevator with Kenya on Friday night—a man who hangs out at Judy’s.”

  Darnell looked surprised. And then he looked disturbed.

  “What’s wrong?” Lynch asked.

  “I was with Monk the other day, and he said the same thing,” Darnell said.

  “Who’s Monk?”

  “This old head that be in here sometime. He live up on the sixth floor, in 6G. He said he saw some dude get on the elevator with Kenya after he left here Friday night.”

  “When did Monk tell you this?”

  “Yesterday. Matter fact, I told him to show me where the dude was at, and he couldn’t. I asked him his name, and he said he ain’t know.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything to us?” Lynch said.

  “Monk old and crazy. Plus he be smokin’ more than I do. He liable to see anything.”

  “If two people say they saw Kenya getting on the elevator with a man, it probably happened,” Lynch said. “Now I want you to think about this, Darnell. And I want you to answer me honestly. What man was here on Friday who spends a lot of time in this apartment and left shortly after Kenya did?”

  Darnell didn’t have to think about it for long.

  “Sonny,” he said. “He left to pick up another package of coke right after Kenya went to the store.”

  By the time Wilson and other detectives conducted a third search of the area where Daneen claimed to have dumped Kenya, it was apparent that they weren’t going to find the body there.

  Leaving a skeleton crew behind to continue the search, Wilson did the only thing that was left to do. Accompanied by a homicide detective, she returned to the Roundhouse to talk with Daneen.

  When they arrived, Daneen had already been taken from homicide to be processed in the basement holding area, in the very place where she had entered police headquarters as a complainant just one day before.

  There, she was placed in a one-person cell to wait for her video hearing before the bail commissioner. Shortly after the hearing, when her paperwork was processed, she would be transported to a municipal prison called the Detention Center.

  But Wilson didn’t care about the hearings. She didn’t care about procedure. All she cared about was finding Kenya.

  So when she walked in through the prisoner’s entrance, she didn’t stop for idle chat. She simply grabbed one of the turnkey officers and barged down the dim hallway to Daneen’s cell.

  When Wilson and the homicide detective walked in, there was only one question on Wilson’s lips.

  “Why did you lie to us?”

  Daneen looked up from the cold bench that served as a cot.

  “I ain’t lie,” Daneen said calmly. “Y’all just ain’t listen.”

  “I don’t understand you, Daneen,” Wilson said. “Don’t you want Kenya found? Don’t you want whoever did this to be caught?”

  “You got me. I’m caught. What more you want?”

  “I want the truth,” Wilson said. “But obviously, I’m not going to get that from you.”

  Daneen took a long, hard look at Wilson.

  “This whole thing is like shit,” she said calmly. “You leave it alone long enough, it’ll get hard and dusty and blow away, just like it wasn’t never there. But if you take a stick and stir it up, it start stinkin’. So save yourself some trouble and stop stirrin’ it up. I killed my daughter. So just go ahead and take me up State Road now.”

  “If you’d killed her,” the homicide detective said, “there would be a body.”

  “It is a body,” Daneen said. “I already told you that.”

  “Then show it to us,” Wilson said.

  It took a while for Daneen to respond.

  “What you mean, show it to you?” she asked.

  “I can call up an inspector right now and get permission to take you to find the body,” the homicide detective said. “If you can show us the body, then you can keep whatever secrets you want to keep. Nobody’ll stir up anything else.”

  Daneen looked from one detective to the other, and for the first time, she looked afraid.

  “Where’s the body, Daneen?” Wilson said.

  She paused before uttering the answer they knew she would.

  “The Bridge,” she said, hoping to buy time with the lie.

  A few minutes later, they had the paperwork they needed. They took Daneen out in shackles and whisked her into an unmarked vehicle.

  And then they did the one thing that the police hadn’t done to that point. They set out to conduct a real search of the projects.

  But someone had already beaten them to it.

  Lynch headed for Monk’s apartment with pieces of Daneen’s and Darnell’s stories intermingled with his own.

  He thought of the abuse he’d suffered at the hands of his grandmother. And then he thought of Daneen’s stories of the basement, with its dank air and scurrying rats.

  He thought of the way his grandmother had staved off his manhood with heaping portions of pain and humiliation. And then he thought of the way Daneen’s womanhood had been forced upon her in the dark maw of the Bridge.

  He thought of it all, and after he’d knocked on Monk’s apartment door and gotten no answer, he star
ted down the steps to see the basement for himself.

  In all the years he’d lived there, he’d never ventured down that far. He’d never had the nerve. And as he walked in through the broken gate that was supposed to keep the basement secure, he saw why.

  He opened the unlocked door and saw that the room was dark, but vast. He could tell that it was massive by the hollow echo that came from the dripping water in the back.

  As he ventured farther inside, he could feel dampness resting on his shoulders like a cloak. Thick, round columns with twenty feet of space between them extended from floor to ceiling. He bumped into two of them before his eyes adjusted to the gray light.

  When they did, he sat down on his haunches and rubbed his hands against the rough cement.

  He imagined Daneen on that floor, writhing beneath a grown man, fighting to preserve what little innocence a child of the Bridge had left by the age of nine. The thought of it was almost too much to bear, so he got up and started toward the door.

  Just as he did so, there was a squeaking sound, followed by a tiny scraping noise that came from the back of the room. Lynch wasn’t sure what to make of it, so he turned around and walked into the darkness.

  The closer he got, the more scraping he heard. It was followed by a rapid, repetitive tapping. When he was almost there, he thought he heard a hiss.

  Lynch took his gun from his holster. Then he fished his lighter from his pocket. He flicked it, but it failed to light. He flicked it again, and the yellow flame cast an otherworldly glow against the darkness.

  It took a moment for Lynch to make out the large, square shape before him. It was one of the old trash bins, much like the one where the little girl’s body had been found years before. The scraping he heard was coming from behind it.

  Lynch took a deep breath and tried to prepare himself for whatever he was going to see. Then he aimed his weapon in the direction of the noise, stood slightly aside, and kicked the trash bin away from the wall.

  A swarm of flies flew toward him, their wings beating the suddenly putrid air. A half dozen rats scurried away, revealing spindle-thin legs extending out from the wall. Lynch squinted to get a better look, covering his nose with one arm as a foul odor filled the air.

  He bent toward the body and it all came into focus. Teeth protruding from an open mouth. Bushy hair in disarray. Shining eyes wide open in death.

  It was a dog. And it had been dead for a while. Lynch breathed a sigh of relief as he turned to walk toward the door. When he reached it, something suddenly drew him back to the dead animal.

  It wasn’t the shedding fur that looked like hair. It wasn’t the shining eyes that grew dimmer by the moment. It wasn’t the vermin that the animal’s corpse attracted.

  Lynch was drawn by the childhood memories that had haunted him for a lifetime. He was drawn because he wanted to face the fear he’d had since seeing that first dead body as a child. He was drawn by his desire to defeat his demons.

  Lynch approached the dog again, looked down at its body, then did what he’d come back to do. He flung open the trash bin.

  And in a moment that was frighteningly reminiscent of the one he’d experienced as a child, he saw the body of a little girl inside.

  It was Kenya.

  Wilson and the homicide detective pulled up outside the Bridge, dragging Daneen from the car in shackles. As a uniformed escort pulled in behind them, they walked her quickly inside the foyer and instructed her to show them where she’d hidden her daughter’s body.

  “Somewhere upstairs,” Daneen said vaguely. “Like I said, I was high. But I know I took her to one o’ them empty apartments on the twelfth floor.”

  “You’re sure it’s the twelfth floor?” Wilson said.

  Daneen nodded, casting her eyes downward as the residents of the building gathered around and stared at her with damning silence.

  “Okay, we’ll check the twelfth floor then.”

  Wilson pushed the elevator button as two uniformed officers came in and held back the growing crowd.

  Just as the elevator arrived, Kevin Lynch walked into the foyer with tear-stained cheeks.

  “Wait a minute, Roxanne,” he said, calling out from behind them. “I don’t think you need to go up there.”

  “Why not?”

  He turned to one of the uniformed officers.

  “Get on the radio and get a detail together,” Lynch said, wiping his eyes. “Hold them out here on a crime scene.”

  “Where’s the scene?” Wilson asked.

  Lynch pushed through the crowd and met them at the elevator. Then he spoke so that only the four of them could hear.

  “It’s in the basement,” Lynch said. “In one of the old trash bins, same as the last little girl Sonny raped and murdered.”

  They all looked at Daneen, who turned away to avoid their accusing eyes.

  “Sometime a lie a whole lot better than the truth,” Daneen said.

  “No,” Wilson said. “It’s not. Because no matter how many times you tell a lie, the truth eventually comes out. Maybe one day you’ll understand that.”

  Daneen didn’t respond. She didn’t have to. Because they all knew that the focus was now back on finding the truth.

  And as they piled into Wilson’s car for the trip back to police headquarters, the truth was looking more like Sonny Williams.

  Now all they had to do was find him.

  From what he could tell, they’d been riding for almost three hours when the minivan rolled into the darkness and came to a stop.

  And as the men closed the doors and walked away, Sonny lay still beneath the blanket, listening as the sound of their footsteps moved across a concrete floor and faded to nothing.

  He could hear other vehicles moving in and out of what sounded like an enclosed space. And a few minutes later, when he raised his head and looked out the back window at the other cars lined up in neat rows, his feeling was confirmed. It was a parking garage.

  Sonny got out of the van, slung the backpack over his shoulder, and began trying doors on the cars.

  When he tried the handle on a Lexus, the door opened, the car alarm filled the garage, and several security cameras trained their lenses on the area, pinpointing the vehicle—and Sonny—within seconds.

  He desperately fingered the steering column, ripping at the plastic casing with his bare hands in an attempt to expose the wires. When finally he got the vehicle to start, he bolted out of the space just as a security guard in a Jeep pulled in behind him.

  Gunning the engine, Sonny drove toward the open garage door and flew out from underneath it, making a hard left and speeding away from the building.

  Looking up at lights and street signs, he tried to get his bearings as he darted in and out of thick traffic on a tree-lined boulevard. He wound his way around a traffic circle, then hit a straightaway that ran toward an oddly shaped building.

  Sonny still didn’t know where he was. That is, until he glanced up, spotted the nearly forty-foot-high bronze statue of William Penn atop the building, and nearly drove into oncoming traffic as reality came crashing down.

  The men in the minivan had indeed driven for three hours. But instead of going south from Maryland, they’d gone north. And the trip that he’d believed would get him farther away from his troubles had brought him right back to them.

  His getaway had returned him to Philadelphia.

  As he struggled to digest that fact, a police car with sirens blaring fell in behind him.

  Sonny turned onto Fifteenth Street and sped around the circle leading past City Hall, weaving through the tangled traffic surrounding the building.

  When he’d gone almost all the way around, he skidded and made a sharp right, heading north on Broad Street, with the police car gaining steadily.

  As he passed Race Street, where the traffic to New Jersey slowed the flow of the southbound lanes, he knew that there were few options for escape. He would have to make his move within the next few seconds, before backup arrived
.

  Making a hard left, he jumped the median and plunged into oncoming traffic. The car screamed toward a truck that was preparing to enter the turning lane. Just before impact, Sonny jumped from the car, rolled toward the curb, and ran away from the explosion as the Lexus barreled into the truck.

  In the ensuing confusion, he took to the streets of Center City with the cop hard on his heels.

  The call went out over police radio’s central band as Lynch and Wilson were dropping off Daneen and the detective at homicide.

  “Cars stand by,” the dispatcher said. “Assist the officer, civilian by phone, at Broad and Vine Streets. An officer there is in foot pursuit of a black male, west on Vine from Broad.”

  The officer came on the air almost immediately.

  “Six-eleven, resume that assist,” he said, breathing heavily into the radio. “I lost the male around Sixteenth and Callowhill.”

  He released his talk button and came back on the air, still breathing hard.

  “I’ve got flash information when you’re ready.”

  “Go ahead, 611.”

  “Suspect is wanted for investigation for auto theft, and leaving the scene of an accident at Broad and Vine. He’s a black male, forty-five to fifty-five years old, six-foot-two, dark-complexioned, with brown eyes, black hair and a mustache. He’s wearing black jeans, white sneakers, and he’s carrying a backpack. He made his escape on foot from Sixteenth and Callowhill within the last five minutes.”

  Wilson turned to Lynch as she pulled out of the Roundhouse parking lot.

  “Didn’t Judy say the money Sonny took from the roof was in a backpack?”

  Lynch snatched the radio handset from the dashboard.

  “Dan 25, I’m en route,” he said, as Wilson turned on the car’s lights and raced toward Broad and Vine. “Tell all responding units to use caution. That male fits the description of Sonny Williams. He’s wanted for several murders and assaults against police in Central and East Divisions, and should be considered armed and extremely dangerous.”

  A gaggle of voices exploded over the radio as every officer within two miles of Broad and Vine joined the chase.