No Place Safe (24 page)

Grandma let me raid the rich man’s refrigerator, justifying it by saying the food would just go bad anyway since the man traveled and was never home, causing her more work by having to clean out the refrigerator. Besides, it was sort of like her food since she was the one who ran around to the three different gourmet stores that he specified, scrutinizing shelves looking for the foods on his list, many of which she couldn’t pronounce and had never heard of, despite her having been a school cook for fifteen years and a housekeeper for a rich woman in Cleveland. The doublewide refrigerator was always stocked with things I wished we had at home but never did. A shelf full of different flavors of soda. New York
–
style cheesecake bought from a bakery, not from the Winn Dixie and thawed from frozen. All kinds of deli meats and cheeses that didn’t require the removal of red plastic from around the meat or clear cellophane from the cheese. I’d make a big sandwich and eat it while marveling at the size of the man’s kitchen.

The kitchen, like everything else in the house, was just too much, though I could imagine living this way if I ever had the money. There were two ovens, one on top of the other, which seemed extravagant except during Thanksgiving maybe, when it might come in handy. Ice and water were dispensed through the refrigerator door, and shiny, expensive copper pots hung from the ceiling. There wasn’t a single cast iron skillet, well-seasoned by generations of cooks. No aluminum cookie sheet gone black with age and use, despite careful scrubbing. I got the biggest thrill out of the microwave oven—something I knew about but never used. It blew my mind that I could warm through cold pasta in only seconds. We’d gotten a dishwasher only a couple of years earlier, so it didn’t take much in the way of appliances to get me excited.

His bedroom alone was bigger than the three bedrooms in our house combined. It had two fireplaces. I’d never seen a fireplace in a bedroom, and two just seemed greedy. It was my first look at a jetted tub. Each time I went there, I wondered what made a man with no wife or children, who was rarely in town, buy such a house. Eventually I realized it was because he could, the reason rich folks do many of the things they do. Each trip to his home distanced me further from my classmates, whose homes I imagined were just as excessive, making it difficult to see any connection between their lives and mine.

*

On the first Thursday of February, when the air was still cool enough for a jacket but spring seemed less an impossibility, a caretaker of some land near Vandiver Lake in Southwest was out destroying rabbit traps on the property when he found the body of Lubie Geter, the boy last seen selling car deodorizer. When Ma called that night to say she was on her way home from the crime scene, I put a plate of food in the oven to get warm. Even though it was a school night, I’d wait up for her no matter how late she got in, unless she told me she’d be sleeping over on a Task Force cot. It seemed so long ago that staying alone overnight had worried me, but it had been only two months. I’d been right the first night—it became easier for Ma not to come home after the first time. Fortunately, it became easier for me, too.

On the nights she worked a scene, she always came home. And I always waited up for her because those were the worst days, making her feel blue in a way nothing else could, and I didn’t want her to feel worse by coming home to a quiet house and nothing hot to eat.

“Animals had gotten to him and he’d been out there nearly a month, but he was still identifiable.” She said this while I pulled off her boots, even though I hadn’t asked her about the scene. “Thanks. Feels like I’ve been on my feet for a lifetime.”

“These probably aren’t the best shoes for police work, but I know you gotta be cute. And look how muddy they are.” My efforts to take her mind away from the crime scene with some teasing didn’t work.

“We were in the woods. My heels kept sinking into the ground.” She kneaded her feet with gloved hands. I didn’t hear the usual strength in my mother’s voice, which once calmed my worries with a few words. “He was only wearing his underwear, but like all the other boys, there wasn’t any sign he’d been messed with. But they don’t know for sure. There’s not much for the medical examiner to go on by the time we find some of them.”

“I got dinner warm for you.”

“Let me wash up first.”

Ma came back to the kitchen table, but the minute I pulled the plate from the oven, she had to run for the bathroom. She closed her door, but I waited outside until the retching sounds ended. She was in there a long time before she told me to go to bed.

“I’ll wait until you feel better.”

“No, it’s after midnight and you have school tomorrow. I’m all right.”

I didn’t believe her, but I left my post at the bathroom door anyway.

*

I grew up with superstitions taught to me by the women in my family, mostly from my grandmother and aunts because Ma said she didn’t have time for that foolishness. I learned to burn my hair lest birds make a nest with it and bring all types of bad luck on me. I never put my purse on a floor unless I wanted to lose all my money. And I was careful not to swipe anyone’s feet with the broom while sweeping because I didn’t want to be the reason for any catastrophe that might befall them.

My greatest fear was Friday the 13th because since I’d turned ten, I’d had some mishap on every Friday the 13th: slipped in the garage and fractured my arm (didn’t matter that I was wearing flip-flops and hosing down the slick concrete floor); riding my bike down a hill, I crashed into a just-opened car door and went flying (didn’t matter that I was riding on the wrong side of the street); electrocuted while plugging in the sewing machine (this turned out to be bad wiring in the apartment we lived in at the time). Each accident put me into the emergency room, but I’d survived them all.

So I waited for whatever was coming on Friday the 13th, February 1981. It turned out the bad thing wasn’t meant for me this time. Two more bodies were found. One was the body of Patrick Baltazar, who had gone missing a week earlier from Piedmont Avenue in downtown Atlanta. The eleven-year-old, who had enough confidence and maturity to hold down a job as a restaurant busboy, had boasted to his friends that the killer would never get him. He was found in a ditch behind the Corporate Square office park just inside Dekalb County in north Atlanta. It had rained heavily on the Tuesday and Wednesday of that week, and the police could tell from his waterlogged clothes that he’d been in the ditch since at least Tuesday. He’d disappeared the Friday before.

I thought of this boy often when, a few years later as a college freshman, I got a job working in the same office park, in the same building near where he was found. I’d forgotten many of the details of the investigation by then, but this case came back to me the first time I walked past the ditch, and each time after. The memory wasn’t vivid, it was just a fleeting realization that there had been a cool February day when a dead boy had lain nearby, that his killer had been there, and that Ma had been there, too, working the crime scene, slightly distracted, wondering whether I’d gotten home safely that day.

On the same day the boy was found in the ditch, Ma and the rest of the Task Force searched an expanded area of where other victims had been found, now considered one of the killer’s dumping grounds, in some woods off Suber Road. That’s where they found the skeletal remains of Jefferey Mathis, the ten-year-old boy who’d gone missing from the West End, just two blocks from my old school, in March of 1980. It was believed he’d been lying out in those woods for nearly a year. It took the medical examiner a week to identify the remains. His mother didn’t believe, or maybe didn’t want to believe, that it was her child they’d found, said it couldn’t be her boy. But that must have been her heart and her hope talking, because there was nothing left of him that even a mother could identify with only her eyes. The boy’s medical records were enough confirmation for the medical examiner and the cops, even if not for the boy’s mother.

The third week of February was a busy one for the Task Force and the killer. The city announced that it was making some headway in the investigation, that there were fibers found on Patrick Baltazar, the twentieth victim, that matched fibers found on five others. This meant that at least six of the victims had been in the same place, possibly the killer’s car or home. It also confirmed that at least six of the victims were linked. This may have seemed like obvious information to most people, but to the cops, it was something they could finally go on. If they could find the source of the fibers, they might possibly find the killer, or at least one of them.

This news that the police were getting closer didn’t scare the killer at all. Two days later, thirteen-year-old Curtis Walker, who was last seen on Bankhead Highway trying to scare up an odd job or two at a gun shop, had gone missing. The last time people at the gun shop saw him was around five o’clock in the evening, past the curfew and already well into dusk. On the same day, the Task Force officially added Aaron Wyche to the list, the boy police originally said had fallen from a bridge over a railroad track.

In January of 1981, a witness had come forward and said he’d seen Aaron get into a car with a black male, and gave a description of the driver similar to descriptions given by other witnesses in some of the other victims’ cases. As a result of the tip, Dekalb County police reopened the case to investigate it as a homicide themselves, and didn’t turn the case over to the Task Force until nearly the end of February and after the twenty-first victim went missing from Bankhead Highway. This was just one example of the difficulties the massive and sprawling Task Force investigation had. The sheer geographic size of Atlanta and its suburbs, the fact the killer or killers were operating in multiple jurisdictions when abducting the children and disposing of their bodies, made the case difficult for even the best cops in town to manage.

*

Ma was still tracking down information on the man who claimed he’d only taken Alfred Evans to the bus stop and nothing more, convinced he was the closest thing she had to a viable suspect in the second victim’s murder. I found a transcript of an interview Ma and her partner Sid had with that suspect whose name seemed to be spoken in our house with regularity now, on phone calls, Motorola radio transmissions, and visits from other detectives working the case. Whenever I read the interviews, I had to imagine Ma taking on her cop persona to hear the words as she must have said them during the interview. I’d noticed a trend in the transcripts. When the person interviewed was a woman, especially a victim’s mother, Ma’s words sounded gentle, reassuring, like she was trying to be the woman’s friend and confidante. The male partner in the interview, oftentimes Sid, played the impatient and insensitive cop looking for a confession. When they interviewed a man, it went the other way—Ma played the bad cop to Sid’s good. I guess cops actually do that.

The dialogue may have sounded like some kind of hack TV cop show, if you weren’t a person living in Atlanta and living with the reality of the murders every day.

Sid:
  You take him out?

Suspect:
I wouldn’t do something like that.

Sid:
Somebody did.

Suspect:
Yeah, somebody. I hope y’all hurry up and find that somebody, too.

Sid:
We want to resolve this matter. This whole thing has the city in an uproar.

Suspect:
Not only the city, the people.

Sid:
  I meant the city, the people. Somehow, we’ve got to do something about this thing.

(Sid later leaves the room on some pretense, allowing Ma to interview the suspect alone.)

Ma:
  It’s looking bad for you, real bad. I was hoping you would help us. You are still not being truthful with me.

This last line is not a stretch for me to imagine, because it sounds similar to the interrogations I’d get from Ma when I missed curfew, or got into some other trouble.

Suspect:
Yes I am.

Ma:
Just think about all the times you’ve changed your story.

Suspect:
All you got to do is talk to _____, and she can tell you how screwed up my memory is.

Ma:
She could tell you that, but I don’t think that would help you in court.

Suspect:
What do you mean, help me in court?

Ma:
  That’s about where you’re going, on your way to court.

Suspect:
Yeah?

Ma:
  That’s the way it looks. You haven’t been charged with anything, I’ve tried to give you several opportunities to tell me the truth. But you know what? The more I work to prove. Really, I’ve been working to find your stories true. So I can eliminate you can’t eliminate you. The more I work  to prove you’re telling me the truth, the more I find you are lying.

Suspect:
  No, I am not lying. Don’t accuse me again.

Ma:
Okay. What you want me to call it?

Suspect:
I told you, I got a bad memory.

Ma:
Okay. The more I find that you have a bad memory.

Ma wasn’t buying his story, but a bad memory wasn’t enough to build a case on.

*

The pressure only grew as the country finally turned its attention on Atlanta. At the end of February, Phil Donahue did a special show on the investigation. National morning news shows began carrying the story, updating viewers around the country with the growing death count. President Reagan gave one and a half million dollars in aid to the city. Vice President Bush sent his special aide to town to speak to the mayor personally and to find out what more Washington could do to help Atlanta. And Ma and Sid were chosen to go on the
MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour
to discuss the Task Force investigation.