No Place Safe (27 page)

*

On the ride back home, I was weighing the good and bad of leaving my school, beginning to see more good than bad, when we came to a stop behind a line of cars on a road where I knew there were no stop signs or traffic lights. It was already summertime warm, and with the windows open, I could hear the steady buzz of crickets in the dense growth of grass, weeds, and rabbit tobacco growing alongside the road. I focused on the brush, wondering if I stared hard enough whether I’d spot a body. I’d taken to watching the woods and tall grass alongside the road as Ma’s car, or the MARTA bus, sped by an area I thought the killer might drop a victim. I searched the varying shades of green for a color that didn’t belong—a red T-shirt, a white tennis shoe, a pair of blue jeans. When we drove a wooded stretch of road and I smelled something bad, I wondered if it was a dead possum, or a dead person. At the time, I hoped I wasn’t too sick for having such morbid thoughts. Today, I don’t doubt that other folks occasionally thought the same thing while driving past a stand of pine. They might have sung along to the car radio and tried to focus on the road instead of the vegetation along the shoulder, but sometimes they probably couldn’t help but wonder.

To push away thoughts of what I might see or smell, I focused on what I actually could sense, the perfume of magnolia blossoms blooming somewhere close, though I couldn’t see them. The heavy scent made me see them in my head though: shiny green leaves cradling delicate white petals, with edges that would already be turning brown by nightfall. I saw a muscadine vine growing wild in an oak tree, and imagined how sweet the fruit would be come August. I noticed how it seemed warm for April, and how the breeze had cooled things off while the car was moving. We’d only been idling a minute and I could feel the sweat beginning to make my forehead damp, and wished Ma would turn on the air conditioner.

“What’s going on up there, can you tell?” I asked.

“I don’t know, some kind of road block. It must be for the investigation.”

“What investigation?”

“What other investigation is there?”

We crept ahead, and I was able to see officers looking into cars on the other side of the road.

“What are they looking for? Drugs?”

“Kids. The Task Force is setting up roadblocks in areas where the kids were abducted.”

“I would think the killer would just make a U-turn and avoid the roadblock.”

“You’re probably right. It’s more of a deterrent than anything.”

When it was our turn at the checkpoint, I expected Ma to flash her badge and speed on through, but she slowed to a stop, and even after showing her badge, the officer looked into the backseat of our car. I expected him to ask whether I knew this woman, but he didn’t, just said a couple of words to Ma and finally waved us on our way.

“Why’d he look into our car when he knew you were a detective?”

“Ever since the mayor said trust no one, not even a cop, everyone’s a suspect. Even the good guys.”

*

On my walk to the bus stop, where I knew I’d be the only student standing on the side of the street for the bus into Atlanta and away from the suburbs, I passed the pick-up circle full of fancy cars driven by mothers who didn’t work, waiting on kids for whom transportation between school and home was simply transportation and so required no consideration.

At the stop after I boarded the bus for home, we pulled up to a card game in progress on Alabama Street. The men playing the game were so into what they were doing that the bus driver had to ask them if they planned on riding or not. They got on without turning down the volume on their voices to accommodate the fact that they’d just gotten on a crowded bus. I was sitting in my favorite seat, one of the perks of boarding at the hub before everyone else, one row in front of and across from the back door—not too wimpy, not too risky either. Not surprisingly, the card players headed straight for the back, and took the bench seat that spread full across both aisles.

I shared a seat with either a military man or someone in college ROTC, but it must have been the full-on military because he seemed a good ten years older than I. He was good-looking, and smelled good, too. I was hoping he’d talk to me, tried to get his attention, though I had no idea what I’d do with it even if I were to capture it. He was reading something, I don’t recall what. Having next to nothing in my flirtation arsenal, all I could do was open one of the books I’d just checked out of the public library, imagining that, as a reader, he’d look over and ask what I was reading. He did not. I gave up after a few minutes. He was a grown man who’d probably been in other countries. I was a fifteen-year-old girl in a Catholic school uniform who’d been as far north as Cleveland, as far south as Orlando, and maybe a hundred miles east and west.

The card game continued as we left downtown, past the stadium and into Southeast. The card players’ voices never quieted, and if anything, grew louder with every mile. I was still able to block most of it out while I stared through the dirty window. It had recently stopped raining as I recall, and I’d been turning over some fifteen-year-old’s problem in my mind, probably the school issue. Even though the only thing that was truly Catholic about me was my unwavering sense of guilt and the ease in which I could slip into it, I got religious on this particular bus ride, asking God for a sign that my problems, whatever they were, would get worked out. At the same time, the clouds broke and sunlight filtered through in such a way that any Catholic, even a not-so-fervent one, would take it as a sign.

It was at this moment, while I was enjoying the glow of having gotten some divine attention, that one of the card-playing men shouted,
You cheatin’, man, I knew you was cheatin
’
,
or something like that. I remember exactly the words that followed:

“I’m a kill you, you cheatin’ motherfucker.”

Then a woman’s scream, and another woman’s voice saying, “He’s got a gun.”

I didn’t turn around. I was a good five rows in front of whatever was going on back there. If I didn’t look the man in his face, he’d have less reason to shoot me. And unless he had an M-16, he couldn’t shoot all fifty of us. The man must have started waving the gun around, because more screams erupted, not just from the back of the bus but from the front and middle, too. I dove to the floor, crouching down as far as possible, trying to become invisible. Shuffling noises told me others were doing the same thing. The cute soldier next to me dropped too, wrapping his body over mine. The man was at the back door, yelling, “I’m not gonna hurt nobody. I just need off the bus now!”

The bus driver didn’t stop, and I couldn’t understand why. I replayed the last street scenes I remembered seeing before the woman screamed, and realized we were about a half-mile from the police sub-station on Jonesboro Road when the gun came out. The driver was trying to get closer to that sub-station before stopping the bus. The man with the gun yelled to the driver that if he didn’t
stop the
goddamned bus, someone was getting hurt.

The driver stopped the bus and opened the doors, and the man jumped off. The soldier lifted off of me, and I sat up just in time to see the man take off running away from Jonesboro Road and into the residential neighborhood that fed away from it. Sure enough, we were sitting across the street from the police sub-station, and already a cop was giving chase into the neighborhood. I wondered how he could respond so fast, but I guessed the driver, who’d probably seen some of everything on his job, was more alert than the rest of us as to what was building in the back of the bus. He must have read something from the moment the card players got on, and phoned it in when he knew it was about to go bad.

More cops boarded the bus to take reports from the passengers and the other card players, but those men had jumped off the bus too, running the opposite direction of the man who threatened to kill them, and away from the cops who came pouring out of the sub-station. While the police asked questions of the riders sitting closest to the card game, I stared out onto the street, thinking how I could be dead and it wouldn’t have mattered a bit to the people who were going about their day. I noticed one of the billboards that had been going up around town, plain white billboards with black lettering that read: REWARD: $100,000.
THE CHILD YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN. CALL THE ATLANTA POLICE SPECIAL TASK FORCE.
The signs were all over the Southside. I hadn’t seen a single one in the North.

By the time April wrapped itself up, another name was added to the list. Twenty-one-year-old Jimmy Ray Payne went missing on April 22. They found him in the Chattahoochee five days later. That was the same day the Task Force began their surveillance of the bridges over the Chattahoochee and the South rivers. The killer was disposing of his victims’ bodies exclusively over bridges now, and watching the bridges was as good a chance as any to catch him. The sad part about that was if the theory was to work, it would mean another victim had been killed. But it was something.

A questionnaire was sent out to boys in Atlanta public schools in an effort to get leads. Had the boys been approached by anyone in the last year? Had they noticed something that didn’t seem right, anything at all? I wondered what the boys did that night when they went home and sat down with their parents in the place they usually did homework, and told them about the questionnaire. The evening was probably like any other, except for the questions. Dinnertime was likely strained. I’m sure it was difficult for some of them to get to sleep that night because the questions made them remember moments when they came
close
, much closer than they’d ever realized before the cops made them fill out a survey to help find a killer, handed out during a regular old school day.

I wondered about Kevin and the questionnaire since he was the right candidate for it —a black boy going to school in the Atlanta public system. Even though he lived just around the corner, I didn’t see him very often. At first I’d see him visiting the girl across the street, but within a few months of his dropping me for her, she’d already been dropped, too. He was sixteen by then and driving, so that I saw him once in a blue moon, and then only briefly as he passed by in his parents’ car.

Tonight he was filling out the questionnaire and that made me afraid for him simply because he fit the profile. He’d think it was a waste of time; no killer was going to get him, he was too smart to fall for some offer of easy money. No doubt all the victims thought the same thing because that’s the way boys are. But I tried not to worry about him too much when I realized that he probably hadn’t given me a single thought in months.

*

The next morning, Ma still wasn’t up when it was near time for me to go catch my bus for work. Even though it was Saturday, we both had to work, so Grandma was on her way over to pick up Bridgette for the day. I was hoping to catch a ride with Ma downtown if she was anywhere close to being ready. When I went into her room, I found her awake but still in bed.

“I had a bad night.”

“Finding the kids?”

“Yeah, it knocks me on my behind every time, even when I think I’m ready for it. I guess I won’t ever be ready.” The curtains were still drawn, making the room dark. She had the television on, turned down low and flickering the morning news. I switched it off, thinking how that was half the problem—she could never let it go.

“You feel sick? Want me to get you some Pepto or something?”

“I don’t feel bad that way. This bad goes deeper. I had a dream last night about the kids. They were alive, but they still looked the way we found them in the woods and rivers.”

“It’s too much trying to work every crime scene,” I said, because I was like Ma, always trying to find a solution. “I think you should tell your commander that it’s too much.”

“It was one of those dreams, the kind when you know you’re dreaming and you try to wake up from it but can’t. And the kids were begging me to find their killer, crying. And all I could tell them was that I’d try.”

“I was thinking I could ride with you into work this morning. We can both make it on time if you get up now. I already made some coffee.”

“The craziest thing about it was when I woke up…at least, I think I was awake by then, you never know, it was one of those kinds of dreams…but when I woke up, those kids were at the foot of the bed, right there where you’re sitting now, smiling at me.”

I jumped up from the bed, partly because I’d been raised by superstitious women, but mostly because Ma hadn’t been one of them and now she was talking about seeing ghosts.

“Let’s see, what do you want to wear today? Since it’s Saturday, do they let you wear jeans?” My back was turned to her while I went through her closet and so she wouldn’t see on my face how much she’d spooked me with her crazy talk.

“Something comfortable. I have to go back out there today to look for evidence.”

I threw a pair of jeans and a shirt across the foot of her bed, wondering if I’d disturbed the spirits.

“I’ve had dreams about the kids, too,” I said. “Probably a lot of people have, especially the people who loved them.”

My words didn’t seem to make it any better for her, though she smiled at me like she appreciated the thought. I left her in her bed, yelled at Bridgette to get up and get some breakfast before Grandma arrived, then headed out for the bus stop.

*

Ma still had questions about the people closest to the girl in her second case. Detectives who’d interviewed the mother’s cousin weren’t left with the feeling that he could be eliminated from the list. He said he had nothing to do with the girl’s death, but seemed nervous and apprehensive throughout his interview. He agreed to a polygraph, but at the time of the test, he fidgeted in his seat, making the testing impossible. He blamed his lack of cooperation on a mistrust of the police and to smoking pot earlier in the day, though the tester didn’t believe the pot explanation, saying marijuana alone wouldn’t cause such agitation. Mistrust of the police? That part was believable since it seemed most of Atlanta had come to feel that way.