No Place Safe (29 page)

I was old enough to know things rarely went the way you expected them to, nothing worked out perfectly. What I wasn’t old enough to understand, and still don’t, was how the same disappointment most of us just deal with can drive some people to an anger so hard that they can kill a child. I didn’t understand why after nearly two years of killing, the murderer still couldn’t see that it wouldn’t make the anger or the disappointment go away. It was scary to think the killer would never be satisfied, would never stop killing, until something stopped him first.

On Friday morning in the third week of May, Ma woke me early to say she had to get into work right away. One of the bridge stakeouts might have finally turned up a suspect.

*

All through school, I couldn’t wait to get home and find out if the killer had been caught. Ma didn’t have any details before she left for work, but I could hear the relief in her voice at just the possibility. I wanted to tell the kids at school that maybe it was over, though it probably wouldn’t have generated much excitement. Nearly two years after the murders began, my classmates still expressed little interest in the killer or the dead kids.

When Ma got home late that night, Bridgette and I had everything done so she wouldn’t have to do anything but tell me the news: dinner eaten, dishes cleaned, homework done, baths taken.

 “So did you catch him?”

“Can you let me get in the door first?” Ma said, but there was a lightness behind the question that told me right away they’d at least caught a good break, if not the killer. After she put away her purse and gun, dropped her briefcase on a chair in the dining room, and took a Miller High Life from the refrigerator, she was finally ready to talk.

“So, there’s some good and some bad.”

“Good first,” I said, tired of so much bad.

“Early this morning, a recruit on stakeout under a bridge heard a loud splash in the Chattahoochee, like something big had been dropped in the river from the bridge. He saw the headlights of a car slowly passing overhead. He radioed uniforms on either end of the bridge, they followed the car that was crossing the bridge just after the splash was heard, and a mile down the road, they stopped the driver.” Ma spoke in a flat news reporter voice that told me she’d recounted the story many times since this morning.

“So you caught him?”

“We have someone we’re questioning.”

“Who?”

“I’m not going to say. The media hasn’t caught on yet, and we need to take advantage of that as long as possible.”

Did she think I’d tell? My feelings were slightly hurt, but for Ma to be so tight-lipped, I knew it was a good lead.

“So what’s the bad part?” I asked.

She finished off the pony-sized bottle of beer and asked me to get her another. I always wondered why she bought the little bottles when she’d always drink two of them, which equaled more than one regular bottle. I went and got the beer, uncapped it, and brought it into the den where she picked up as though I’d never left.

“For one thing, I know the suspect from my patrol days, and my first instinct is that he couldn’t have done these murders. But that was a long time ago, people change. The biggest problem is that no one actually saw the man, or anyone, on the bridge. His was the last car to go over the bridge immediately following the splash. No one saw anything dropped into the river. And we couldn’t find anything that had been dropped in the river.”

“But I thought there was a stakeout? Seems like somebody should have seen something.”

“Seems like. That’s why we shouldn’t have had recruits on the stakeout. There was a uniform and an FBI agent at the end of the bridge, but they sent a recruit underneath. The position nobody else wanted, so they gave it to a recruit who had about three minutes’ worth of experience doing surveillance.”

“He’s in jail now, right?” That was all I really wanted to know. Could I go to sleep tonight without worry, stand at the bus stop in the morning without fear?

“No. Officers and FBI agents tailed him for a while, pulled him over, questioned him, searched his car. Then they let him go.”

“Let him go?”

“The FBI took the lead, and said there wasn’t enough to hold him. I wasn’t there, so I have to believe that. Right now, all we have is a man driving across the Chattahoochee on the Jackson Parkway bridge and the sound of a splash.”

Two days later, the Task Force had more than the sound of a splash. They had the body of the twenty-eighth victim, found in the Chattahoochee just a half mile downstream
from where the splash had been heard.

*

The Monday following the splash was the first time I could recall making the early morning walk through downtown and not being afraid. The first time I’d walked through Central City Park in the dawn, promising God I’d never do it again if he let me make it to the other side, was a month after the first two bodies had been found and my first day of school in the suburbs. Now I was starting the final week of my sophomore year, and it was the first time I didn’t imagine a child killer lurking somewhere, watching me. Instead of walking around the park, I walked straight through it. Instead of going directly to the bus stop, I used the ten minutes between buses to buy a hot-from-the-oil doughnut from the Federal Bakery. I’d planned on waiting to eat it on the bus, hidden behind my science notebook, but couldn’t hold out and feasted as I walked down Forsyth toward my bus and Luckie Street, which I called Rat Street. In the morning hours before the sun came up, the rats that roamed around Luckie and Poplar were fearless and thought nothing of running right past the feet of people scurrying to make the bus. That morning, I barely paid the rats any mind.

Ma said they weren’t sure the man from the bridge was the killer, but they were questioning him, and the FBI was getting warrants to put surveillance on him. I was satisfied. They had someone, and the cops were watching his every move. He wasn’t waiting for me around the next corner. Once I was past the initial relief that there was a suspect, I wondered who he was. Ma said it was someone she knew from her patrol days. I tried to remember those days, but I was too young to have retained much memory of them. She worked in Zone Four, that much I remembered, somewhere off Campbellton Road. Angel Lenair was found off Campbellton Road. Greenbriar Skating Rink was there, too. It was the street I’d had a hard time imagining a Klansman cruising for prey. But maybe it wasn’t a Klansman, just an angry white man who felt we’d wronged him, all of us, and he wanted to set things straight. There weren’t many white people living around there that I knew of, even six years ago, so I wondered how Ma knew the man. It didn’t matter that recent leads had pointed to a possible black suspect, I didn’t believe them. There was no way a black person could do this to his own. Even an FBI profiler said as much.

It had been hard for me to keep quiet about what I knew when I played basketball down the street on Saturday, or worked the Sunday morning shift at the restaurant, but I did. On the same day of the splash, the paper ran an article about an out-of-state suspect in the death of the twenty-fourth victim, but the media didn’t have information on the splash yet. On Monday, everyone was talking about a suspect, but not the one the police caught on the bridge. I even heard some kids talking about it in chemistry in the minutes before the bell rang to start class.

“I heard they might know who that killer is.”

“What killer?”

“You know, the one that’s been killing those kids in Atlanta.”

“Thank
God
. Maybe they can talk about something else on TV for a change.”

“I know. It’s on the news all the time. I’m so tired of it, already.”

“Totally.”

I wondered how many demerits I’d get if I slammed my chemistry book down on their heads. Between the assault and the class disruption charges, and the fact that I’d already used up ten demerits, I was certain I’d be expelled.

For the first time since Ma joined the Task Force, she became secretive about the case, taking all work phone calls behind her closed bedroom door. If someone called about the case while we were having dinner, she’d leave the table, asking me to hang up when she got on the other line. If a call came while we were watching television on her bed, she sent us away. The media still didn’t know who the suspect was, and it was easier for the Task Force to start building evidence for his arrest without their scrutiny. Even the identity of the body found downstream from the splash was kept a mystery for a few days, although I overheard his name—Nathaniel Cater—when I walked into Ma’s bedroom while she was on the phone, and before she abruptly stopped her conversation and shooed me away.

So I had to find out from the evening news that the suspect stopped on the bridge that night was a black man. Not a Klansman, not an angry white man, but someone with brown skin like mine. As much as I respected the police, knew that there were some good detectives on the Task Force despite what the rest of Atlanta thought, I refused to believe it. So did some of those detectives, including Ma.

Like many patrol officers who worked in her patrol zone in the mid-seventies, Ma knew Wayne Williams long before the kids started dying. He and his father had a small-time radio station in the same building that housed her precinct when she was a street cop. Ma remembers the father being a friendly man, and she and the other cops would chat when they passed him in the hall, the way tenants do who share a building. His son always wanted more than pleasantries from Ma and the other cops, asking about the cases they were working on or whether anything big had gone down that day. Ma pegged him as a cop wannabe the first time she met him. He was always asking about police procedure, listened to calls on the police scanner, sometimes arriving at the scene at the same time as the responding officers. She said one time she pulled up to the scene of a call and Williams was already there, directing traffic to make way for the real police. Her acquaintance with him was nearly forgotten by the time he crossed the Jackson Parkway bridge in 1981, and she was caught off guard by the FBI’s insistence that Williams was a viable suspect.

Ma just couldn’t see Williams as the killer. She questioned his size, only 5’6’’ and 160 pounds, and whether he could easily overpower streetwise teenage boys and discard their bodies so easily, hauling dead weight over bridges. From what she knew of Williams back in her uniform days, she couldn’t match his personality to that of a serial killer’s profile, though she was the first to admit he was a little strange. Specifically, he didn’t fit the original FBI profile—a white man or group of white men who belong to a racist organization like the Klan. Ma had always believed that the majority of the murders were committed by a person who matched the profile, but she also admitted she’d been in police work long enough to know that you just never know.

She was willing to concede that some of the evidence did point to the strong possibility that Williams was involved in at least some of the latest murders. His interest in all things police related got him arrested in 1976 for impersonating an officer, driving around with a blue light affixed to the top of his car, though the charges were later dropped. This jibed well with one Task Force theory that the killer was pretending to be a cop, something that would explain why street-smart kids would get into a stranger’s car. He matched the physical description witnesses had given months ago on the driver of the car some of the kids were last seen getting into—a short, slightly heavy young black man.

Williams had contact with some of the victims before their deaths through his business as a talent scout. He’d handed out flyers at several Atlanta public schools soliciting his services, calling for young people aged eleven to twenty-one to work with “professional recording acts, no experience necessary, training is provided.” He’d also handed out the flyers in the neighborhood of some of the victims, and through witness interviews, the Task Force had been able to conclude Williams had crossed paths with some of the victims. But so had I. So had half the population of those neighborhoods. Until the splash, Wayne Williams was no more and no less a suspect than anyone else in Atlanta, whose mayor had said that everyone was a suspect until the killer was caught.

*

It didn’t matter what Ma thought, or how surprised most black folks in Atlanta were when Wayne Williams was named as a person of interest. The FBI, with the full support of the mayor, named Williams the prime suspect, so Ma and Sid and the rest of the Task Force had to get to work finding enough evidence for an arrest. The district attorney had grown increasingly worried about having a prosecutable serial murder case, and he and his staff weren’t that confident in the FBI’s ability to provide the evidence needed to try it. All the fibers in the world still amounted to circumstantial evidence, even if excellent circumstantial evidence, and they wanted more to build the case on. Fibers were collected, personal items searched, but no one would ever know what Williams had gotten rid of the night of the splash when he was allowed to go home. Neighbors said they saw him burning something in his backyard.

Even if Wayne Williams hadn’t committed the crimes, there was no overwhelming evidence that would help clear him. There was his weak explanation for being on the bridge that night that didn’t check out—that at three in the morning, he’d been scouting out the location of a potential client’s house in preparation for a seven o’clock meeting that morning. Williams told police his client’s name was Cheryl Johnson and that she lived in the Spanish Trace Apartments, though he couldn’t remember the apartment number. He even provided a phone number, which he said he’d tried to call the morning of the splash, sometime around two o’clock. The first time, he got a busy signal; the second time someone answered but said there was no Cheryl Johnson living there. He’d stopped at the bridge only to verify that he’d dialed the right phone number. The police could never locate a Cheryl Johnson, and surmised he’d made up the client.