No Place Safe (16 page)

“They aren’t numbers. Can’t you call them by their names?” I asked.

“If I did that, I don’t think I could get through each day.”

Depending on how her day went, Ma might call them by their names. If the day held no discovery of a body, no names to be added to the list, she could say their names. If a parent needed to be interviewed, or calmed, she could say their names: Alfred or Latonya. On the days when a signal 48 came across on her Motorola in reference to a child, or when something about a victim made her think of Bridgette or me, it was easier for her to call them Victim Two or Victim Nine.

Even though I had stopped trick-or-treating a few years back, I still looked forward to Halloween because it was my job to go around the neighborhood with Bridgette. I’d stay out a lot longer than Ma ever would, throwing a wider net than the ten houses on either side of our own and back home again, so Bridgette got a much bigger haul and was willing to share it with me. I was too old to suffer the embarrassment of being caught almost fifteen and still trick-or-treating, but I wasn’t too old for candy.

We were in Kmart when Bridgette started begging for a costume.

“There won’t be any trick-or-treating this year,” Ma said.

“Why not?” I sounded as disappointed as Bridgette looked.

“There’s a city curfew, no kids out after dark without an adult, and I’m not sure I’ll be home from work early enough to take you.”

“What kind of fascist regime is this?” It was something I’d just learned in school, but it was wasted on Ma because she just rolled her eyes at me.

“Write a letter to the mayor, it’s his idea. He’s just trying to keep kids off the street and away from you know what.” This code-speak was for Bridgette’s sake, but she was busy picking out the costume that Ma wasn’t going to let her buy.

I wondered if my classmates paid any mind to the mayor and his curfew, whether the little kids in their neighborhoods had to give up trick-or-treating. Probably not, because the killer wasn’t hunting kids on the Northside. They were safe from the killer and from having to give up the things that made us children. They had mothers who didn’t have to work, who picked them up from school and took them trick-or-treating after cooking a nice dinner. They had mothers who had time during the day to make costumes from scratch, instead of going to K-Mart to buy the cheap polyester kind with the sharp-edged masks that made your face sweat and gave you a paper cut if you weren’t careful.

“Bridgette’s too big for Halloween, anyway.”

It wasn’t true that being ten was too old. Halloween was one of the last child things left before the time when adults began admonishing kids with
You’re getting too old for that mess, act your age,
and
You need to be more responsible
, and now it was being taken away from us, too.

*

The curfew didn’t work. The day after Halloween, nine-year-old Aaron Jackson went missing. He was last seen at a shopping center on Moreland Avenue, part of the route Ma sometimes took to get home from the north. We’d sometimes stopped for groceries in the same shopping center. It was just three miles from home, and I couldn’t help but think about how close the killer was getting to my sister and me. He was moving back and forth between Southeast and Southwest, but it seemed he was beginning to focus mostly on Southeast, in areas that my friends and I might be anytime because he was only working a few miles away from where we ate, slept, and played.

It was true that while the victims were close geographically, our worlds were still different. The victims went to the same places I did, like the Moreland Avenue Shopping Center, to hustle a dollar because they were poor, while I was going to spend the dollars I had because I wasn’t. They were more likely to get into the car of someone who offered twenty bucks for a few hours work. I made seventy dollars a week frying burgers and didn’t have to get into the cars of strangers and pray they weren’t the killer. Being a girl, I was naturally more wary than a boy might be of grown men offering me anything. And as the child of a cop, I rarely trusted anyone.

But this difference in our day-to-day lives made sense only if the killer was actually luring the kids with something they were hard pressed to turn down—money or the promise of a way to make some quickly. If that wasn’t how he was stealing these children, if he was somehow forcibly taking them off the streets, the fact that I had a job, that I lived in a middle-class neighborhood, or that my mother was a cop, didn’t make a bit of difference.

The next day, a Sunday, we went to church in the West End where Bridgette and I used to go to school, and where we still attended Mass. It was the Feast of All Souls, the day Catholics officially remember their dead. Our parish marked the day with a special remembrance of all the children who had been killed, and the church was packed with people come to say goodbye to kids they didn’t know, come to understand how such a thing could happen to innocent children, and to pray for the killings to stop.

Representatives from all kinds of community groups were there, including groups  born of our crisis, one led by the mother of a victim. Priests from all over the Atlanta diocese were joined by non-Catholic clergymen representing Baptist and Episcopalian churches, and they prayed with us, over us, and for us. One of them said something like, “Remember, sisters and brothers, the killer is also someone’s child, and we should pray for his redemption as well as his capture.”

I felt no guilt in having un-Christian thoughts while I sat on the hard pews, crushed on either side by the people who packed the church, the body heat making it feel like it was July instead of November. I was thinking that no matter whose child he was, I wished him dead.

*

Later, after the Mass, after having our post-church Krispy Kreme doughnuts and stopping by the grocery for Sunday dinner, we learned that Aaron Jackson had just been found. The discovery of this child’s body is the one that stays with me most because he was found on my street.

When Ma got the call, it was hard for her not to walk down the street to the scene. The case wasn’t assigned to her; she didn’t need to be there. I asked her not to go. It was enough knowing that just a short walk from my home, a murder investigation was beginning. I didn’t need to wonder later that night, as I tried to make sleep come, what Ma had found there, so close to the place I thought was safe. Home.

I didn’t ask Ma for the details because I didn’t want to dream about them that night. But I read them in the paper the next day. The boy had been found beneath a bridge that spanned a slow-moving creek. He died of suffocation, and was left “stretched out on the bank of the South River,” which to me sounded strange, as if he had lain down there to rest himself. He’d been friends with the tenth victim, a ten-year-old boy who had until now been the body found closest to where I lived, about a mile and a half away. This latest boy had been killed somewhere else like the others, and his body left just a few yards off the road, tossed over the bridge.

There was a long stretch of houses along the three or so miles of the street, with the final quarter mile on the north end being empty of houses, only a junkyard filled with rusted cars. The junkyard was a strange sight against a backdrop of green pine, a seemingly thick and endless forest that hid Lake Charlotte, or maybe it was the sign of things to come—five years later, the city turned the whole area around the lake into a landfill.

My house was on the north end, not far from where the woods began. That green and houseless stretch was my favorite part of the street, though I had to work hard to ignore the junkyard in order to see the prettiness in the rest of it. This stretch was where as a kid, before public transportation grew my world to places beyond my neighborhood, I’d ride my bike fast downhill, imagining I was flying through a forest. Even though I bought my own weekly bus pass and would soon turn fifteen, I’d still pull out my ten-speed occasionally and pump hard up that hill until I had to get off and walk the bike, then ride back down, arms stretched out instead of holding the handlebars, and pretend I was flying.

That all changed. Soon after the boy’s body was found, someone—maybe his mother, an angry and powerless grandfather, or a weeping aunt—placed a white wooden cross on the side of the road, marking the spot. I rode my bike up there, wanted to see if there was any clue that would tell me the boy had not died painfully, that his last place on earth was a good one. I didn’t want the kind of clues that cops look for, physical things that told secrets of the flesh. I wanted to feel something move through me in that place, maybe God’s presence, or something bigger than me, or the boy, or all of the people whose hearts were broken when his body was found. I wanted to know if maybe the pine and greenness of the place sent him off with something of the feeling I had when I flew down that hill. Nothing came to me but a great hole that was filled with sadness.

He went missing on a Saturday, was found on a Sunday, but it wasn’t clear exactly when he was left on my street. It seemed likely that it happened Saturday night, but it could almost as easily have happened during daylight. There were no houses down that way, and most people left the neighborhood through the south end of the street, heading toward I-75 and I-285. Traffic was light through that part of the street most times of the day. For a long time, I wondered what exactly I was doing at the moment he was left there. Was I drifting off to sleep in my warm bed, lulled by the far-off sound of a train’s horn? Was I giving Ma a hard time about not wanting to start dinner,
Why do I always have to make dinner?
Maybe we drove past the killer on his way to our street when we took that route to church Sunday morning. Maybe I was down the street shooting basketball in the yard of the boys who had the net and was like a magnet for kids on the weekends. We probably all felt safe, nothing on our minds but making the shot, while a quarter mile down the road, the little boy was being tossed aside like somebody’s bad mistake.

*

That Tuesday was voting day. Ma was getting off work early to vote and wanted me to come with her. When the next election came, I’d be old enough to vote and she wanted to make sure I understood the importance of it and didn’t waste the privilege. My family wasn’t very political, but there were two things that were taken seriously: supporting the unions and voting. My great-grandfather, who was born a decade after Reconstruction to a freed slave, visited with us for a month each year, and he’d tell me stories of how I came to be. And always he’d say, “Girl, don’t you know men and women swung from ropes for a hundred years so you could vote?”

I got off the bus from the suburbs and met Ma at the Task Force building, which everyone just called the Task Force because those two words came to represent a place, a group of people, and a mission all at once. Located between Spring and Williams streets on the northern edge of downtown, it was once a car dealership, but sat empty until the owners donated it temporarily to the city. Even full of desks, cops, witnesses, and ringing phones, it still felt like it was designed for selling cars. The space, with its floors bare of carpet, caused an echo in the early days of the Task Force, when there were fewer desks, cops, and witnesses to fill it.

The first time I asked Ma where the bathroom was, she warned me it wouldn’t be pretty. Clearly it was never intended to be used by women, probably because back when the dealership was open, women didn’t work as car salesmen or mechanics. The lighting was almost as bad as the smell, and there were no metal boxes that sold Kotex or Tampax for a dime. Ma and the other two or three female cops, along with the secretaries, decided to fix the place up themselves rather than asking the bosses, because in 1980, the majority still didn’t believe women should be anywhere near a police department wearing a badge and a gun. From their own pockets, they made sure the soap dispensers stayed full, put a bottle of hand lotion on the sink, and kept a supply of feminine hygiene products handy.

But I didn’t mind the Spartan conditions—the bleakness of stark walls or the chill during the cold months. When the secretary’s high heels clicked along the concrete floor, making the place seem especially desolate, it didn’t bother me much. Being there made me feel like I was part of something that was the biggest something in the city. Mostly I’d sit at Ma’s desk during my visits, listening to her one-sided phone conversations. She sounded very much like a cop, using military time, talking about the
alleged assailant
and referring to some person unknown to me as the
subject.
In these moments, she turned into the other woman without warning.

After we left her office and picked up Bridgette from her afterschool program, we went to the high school in our neighborhood that I would have attended if I wasn’t going to the private school. Ma said she was trying to help President Carter stay in Washington for another term, though the price of gas and the Beirut hostages made re-election seem unlikely, even against an actor-turned-politician.

She made Bridgette and I stand outside the voting booth even though I’d tried to convince her to let me in. We had mock elections in civics class, but all we did was darken circles on a bubble sheet at our desks. There was no blue curtain to hide our decisions, or special cards to punch holes into. Bridgette and I just stood guard outside, hearing the rickety booth rattle every time Ma punched a hole into her cards.

On the way back to the car, we saw a man on the ground in the middle of the parking lot. He was convulsing, and didn’t seem to have any kind of control of himself, his arms thrashing about in a way that reminded me of the robot on
Lost in Space
. Then he started to throw up. My first thought was that he was crazy, and the next was that he was on drugs. Beyond that, I wasn’t creative enough to come up with any other possibilities. My experience in this area was limited to what I’d seen on MARTA or at Grady, and in most of those cases, drugs and plain craziness was behind most strange behavior.