CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

11:31 AM

Will sat at his desk, listening to his recording of Angie reading the letter Monroe had written to her mother. He’d heard it enough times by now that he knew it by heart, but he wanted to hear her voice, catch her inflections. Sometimes, he’d look at the letter while he listened to the words, trying to follow along. Angie hated reading aloud and her tone showed it. Will thought if he could read as well as she could he would read out loud all of the time.

He slipped the headphones out of his ears and went back to the diagram he had been drawing in his mind. Will saw things in images, like a storyboard for a movie. Jasmine Allison’s face came to mind. She was still missing. The Atlanta PD was looking, but Will wasn’t certain they were taking this as seriously as he needed them to. Even if they did, where would they look? There were a million places you could stash a little girl—a million more if she didn’t need to breathe while you were doing it.

Aleesha Monroe’s mother wasn’t home; he had called several times that morning until the maid had finally picked up and told him Ms. Monroe wasn’t expected back until noon. Will had put in a call to DeKalb and found out that there was nothing new on the Cynthia Barrett case. He had even sent a forensic team back to the Homes to go over the pay phone. There were only seven quarters in the coin box, and none of them had usable prints.

No leads, no clues to follow up on. All he had was the letter and the slim hope that Miriam Monroe would know something.

Leo Donnelly knocked on Will’s office door as he opened it. “Hey, man.”

Will slid the recorder and headphones into his desk drawer. “What’s going on?”

“You got a minute?”

“Sure.”

Leo closed the door and sat in the chair beside Will’s desk. He looked around the room, obviously nervous. “Nice place you got here.”

Will glanced around, wondering if the detective was being sarcastic. The office was so small that Will had pushed one side of the desk up against the wall so that he didn’t have to climb over it to get out.

Leo rubbed his palms on his cheap trousers as he stared out the window. The man seemed to be in a state of shock.

Will repeated, “What’s going on?”

“I just talked with Greer. He’s my lou, right?”

“Yeah.” Will had met the lieutenant on Monday when he’d asked to be let in on the Monroe case.

Leo’s tone was still incredulous. “He just got a courtesy call from DeKalb PD. Gina filed a restraining order on Mike.”

“Gina Ormewood?” Will sat up in his chair. “What did she list as cause?”

“Her broken face.” Leo propped his elbow on the desk and leaned his head in his hand. “Greer didn’t see the pictures or nothing, but the cop who took the report said she was pretty banged up.”

The detective was obviously shaken. Will had guessed that except for Michael, Leo didn’t have many friends in the squad. Even if he was close to some of them, you didn’t rat out your friends. That still did not explain why he’d come to Will.

Leo rubbed his chin with his thumb. “My old man used to haul off on my ma. Used to watch it when I was a kid.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I thought I knew the guy,” Leo said, meaning Ormewood. “This is out of left field, you know? At first, I thought maybe the bitch was making it up, but then I called Michael and …” His voice trailed off. “He tried to laugh it off, said it was a big misunderstanding, that she was withdrawing the order, had just made it up to get back at him for working so much.” Leo’s mouth twisted to the side, like the explanation still didn’t sit right with him. The man had been a cop for much longer than Will and he had probably heard that same excuse from many an abusive husband.

Leo continued, “Then I started pushing him about it, asking what was going on. Gina’s a good girl, you know? Smart as a whip. I don’t see her putting his nuts in a vice just for shits and giggles.” Leo glanced at Will, then back out the window. “He told me to mind my own fucking business.”

Leo had obviously taken that as an admission of guilt. Will took it as proof that Michael was answering his phone only when the caller ID told him it was somebody he wanted to talk to.

“Anyway,” Leo turned back to Will, his knees banging the desk. He cursed a few times before saying, “I thought I’d come in and catch you up on the Monroe case.”

“Anything new?”

“Her pimp was shot this morning.”

“Baby G?”

“Two in the gut, one in the head. Doctors say it’s just a matter of time before he’s gone. No brain activity.”

“They catch the doer?”

“Two of his cousins, both of them fifteen. G’s grandmother saw the whole thing from her front window.” Leo gave a half-shrug of his shoulder. “Not that she’s saying shit. Both of ’em confessed, though, so it’s not like we need her. Still, you’d think she’d be a little more upset that her grandson is dead.”

Will thought of Cedric. “Did anyone else get hurt?”

“No, this was a gang thing. They said G dissed ’em the other day, didn’t give them respect.” Leo rubbed his chin again. “Shit, since when did they start handing out respect without you having to do anything to earn it?”

“You’re sure this isn’t related to Monroe?”

“Doesn’t seem to be,” Leo said. “They’re sharing a lawyer, some probono fucker from Buckhead who gets his jollies helping the poor. Both of ’em will be out in ten years, tops.”

“Maybe,” Will said, thinking Leo was more than likely right. “Did you get that memo I sent around about Jasmine Allison?”

“Missing black girl?” he confirmed. “Stick a blonde wig on her, maybe she’ll get in the papers.”

Will didn’t acknowledge the sarcasm. He had thought of something else. “Can you pull the list of recently released sex offenders for me?”

“How recent?”

Four months ago, fifteen-year-old Julie Cooper had been brutally raped, her tongue bitten in two. There was no telling how long her attacker had been operating under the radar. He told Leo, “Let’s go back at least eight months.”

“Just Atlanta or metro area, too?”

“Metro,” Will said, knowing that he’d just tripled the work.

“They don’t exactly keep that list up-to-date,” Leo pointed out. “I’ll have to do some cross-checking, mark off the ones that went back in, moved away, whatever.”

“I appreciate it.” Will felt the need to add, “I know this is a needle in a haystack, but we don’t have much more to go on.”

“I’m with you, man.” Leo stood up. “Shouldn’t take more than a day or so to get them together. You want me to leave them on your desk?”

“That’d be great.”

“I’ll take the first half,” Leo offered. “We’re working this together, right?”

“Right,” Will echoed, though he didn’t exactly count Donnelly as an ally.

Will took out his cell phone as Leo shut the door. He dialed Angie’s number, listened to the rings as he waited for her to answer.

She must have recognized his number on the caller ID. “What’s up?”

“Why would Michael’s wife file a restraining order against him?”

She exhaled slowly, taking her time with the answer. “Because he beats her.”

Will felt as if he had been beaten himself.

She asked, “You there?”

He didn’t think he could form the words. “Did he hit you, Angie?”

“What you should be asking is how long they’ve been married.”

“Did he ever hit you?”

“No, Will. He never hit me.”

“Are you lying to me?”

Her laugh was that strange, disaffected laugh she gave when she needed to distance herself from something. “Why would I lie to you, baby?”

“Aleesha’s pimp got shot this morning.”

“It wasn’t me.”

“Can you be serious for just one minute?”

“What do you want me to say, Will?”

“There’s a missing girl,” he told her. “Her name is Jasmine Allison. She lives three floors down from Aleesha’s place. Sunday night, somebody paid her twenty bucks to make a phone call to the police to report that Aleesha was being attacked. Now, she’s missing.”

Angie’s tone changed. “When was she last seen?”

“Yesterday afternoon.”

“Do you have any leads?”

“None.”

“How old is she?”

“Fourteen.”

Angie let out a soft breath. “Is anyone downtown taking this seriously?”

“Yeah, they’re bending over backward to help the GBI.”

She tried to take up for them. “They’ve got a lot of work to do down there.”

“I’m not saying they don’t.”

“Has she run away before?”

“Twice.”

“It’s not something I’d put at the top of my roster if I was working in missing persons. Teenage girls run away all the time. We both know that. They’ve probably got hotter cases right now.”

“Her home situation’s not that bad.”

“People run away for other reasons.” Angie would know. She’d run away so many times that even Will had lost count.

He looked at the copy he’d made of the letter Aleesha had written to her mother. She’d used pencil on lined paper, so the reproduction wasn’t that good. He tried to pick out some words but his eyes couldn’t focus. Aleesha had probably run away from home, too.

Angie offered, “I’ll talk to some people I know downtown and see if I can light a fire under them. They might take it better from me than some cocksucker from the GBI.”

“Thank you.”

Will closed the phone and looked at the display.

It was time to pay Aleesha Monroe’s mother a visit.

         

Will seldom drove his car to work unless he knew that he would be on his own that day. Most of the time, he took his motorcycle in so that whoever he was partnered with had to drive. Unless he was going to one of his usual haunts—the grocery store, the local Cuban restaurant, the movies—putting him behind the wheel of a car was an invitation to get lost. He could read street signs eventually, but only at the expense of the other cars behind him. Maps, with their tiny print that skipped across the page, might as well have been written in Swahili and when he got frustrated, which tended to happen when the horns started blaring, Will quickly forgot how to tell left from right.

Driving to Miriam Monroe’s house was an exercise in patience. Will ignored the angry stares and nasty shouts as he slowly made his way up DeKalb Avenue. The Monroes lived in Decatur near Agnes Scott College, a pricey little area with old Victorians and the sorts of houses most people could only dream about. Fortunately, the neighborhood wasn’t large and with a little trial and error, he would find her house before the sun went down.

Will tapped his foot on the brake as he followed the fork across the railroad tracks and onto College Avenue. He tried not to take it personally when a skinny old woman in a powder blue Cadillac sped past him, her fist shaking in the air.

With great effort, Will had managed to push Angie from his mind. He needed to work the case from the beginning to see if there was anything he had missed. There had to be some detail, some clue, that he just wasn’t picking up on.

Thirty-two Paisley Avenue was a grand old home with a wraparound porch and a massive weeping willow draping its branches across the front yard. The house was sandblasted brick on the bottom and darkly painted shingles along the top. The tile roof was covered with pine needles, and Will imagined with the large number of trees in the yard, the Monroes had a constant battle on their hands just keeping the gutters clean.

He parked his car on the street and double-checked the mailbox, making out the name MONROE in bold black letters. Still, he checked the street number against the address from the envelope.

The doorbell was the old-fashioned kind that was an actual bell mounted to the center of the heavy front door. Will twisted the bow-tie piece of metal and could hear the shrill ring echoing in the house.

Footsteps clicked on tile; a woman’s as well as a dog’s.

“Hello?”

Will assumed a wary eye was pressed to the peephole in the door. This was a nice neighborhood, but they were still close enough to Atlanta to make the residents careful about opening their doors to strangers.

“I’m Agent Will Trent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation,” Will said, holding up his identification. “I’m looking for Miriam Monroe.”

There was a hesitation, maybe a sigh, then the bolt was turned and the door opened.

Miriam Monroe looked just like her daughter. At least, her daughter would have looked like this had she lived a different life. Where Aleesha had been malnourished, almost skeletal, her mother was a robust woman, with long curly hair and an open way about her that seemed to invite people in. There was a glow in her cheeks, a sparkle in her eyes, and even though her mouth was pursed as she stared at Will, her expression guarded as she waited for him to speak, he could tell that she was the sort of woman who sought out the positive in life.

He looked down at the black poodle standing at her feet, then back up at the woman. “I’ve come about your daughter.”

Her hand went to her chest. She grabbed the door to steady herself. “Ashley …?”

“No,” he assured her, reaching out to hold the woman up. He’d never considered she had more than one daughter. “Aleesha,” he told her. “I’ve come about Aleesha.”

She blinked several times, looking confused. “What?”

Will had a confused feeling himself. Had he read the mailbox wrong? Was he on the wrong street? “You’re Miriam Monroe?”

She nodded. The dog barked, sensing trouble.

“I’m sorry,” Will apologized to the woman. “I was told you had a daughter named Aleesha.”

“I did have a daughter,” she agreed. Her voice was faraway, as if she had lost her child long ago, which by her next words was exactly how she felt. “Aleesha left us when she was a teenager, Officer. We haven’t seen her in nearly twenty years.”

Will wasn’t sure what to say. “May I come in?”

She smiled, stepping back from the door, gently moving the dog with her foot. “I’ve forgotten my manners.”

“It’s fine,” Will assured her, thinking that no matter how many times he did this, he would never be able to predict how a parent would react to news of their child being lost.

She suggested, “Shall we go into the parlor?”

Will was trying not to gawk at the foyer, which was the largest he had ever seen in a private home. A huge staircase spiraled up to the top floor and a chandelier that looked as if it belonged in an opera house dangled above his head.

“We got it in Bologna,” Miriam explained, leading him into the adjoining room. “My husband, Tobias, is an amateur collector.”

“Oh,” Will said, as if that made perfect sense. He thought about the homes he had visited over the last few days, Aleesha’s shabby two rooms, the cramped apartment where Eleanor Allison raised her grandchildren. This was a mansion, plain and simple. From the thick rugs on the floors to the colorful African folk art on the walls, this was the type of place you lived in when money wasn’t a concern.

Miriam sat back in a comfortable-looking chair as the dog settled at her feet. “Would you like some lemonade?”

“No, thank you,” Will told her, sitting on the couch. The cushions were hard and he guessed they didn’t use this room much. He wondered if the grand piano tucked under the bay window was just for show. He also wondered what the hell he was doing. Will had learned a long time ago that giving a parent the news that their child was dead should be done quickly. Dragging it out only made it harder when the information finally came. Will wasn’t Miriam Monroe’s best friend; his job was simply to tell her the truth, then leave.

So, why wasn’t he?

Maybe it was because there was something soothing about the woman’s voice, her presence. Her face could have been the illustration dictionaries used for “mother.” When Will was a kid, he had assumed that black kids were more loved than whites for the simple reason that of the hundred or so kids at the Atlanta Children’s Home, there were only ever two African-Americans. Funny how stereotypes got stuck in your head when you were little.

“How can I help you?” she prompted. Her voice was very cultured, and she managed to glance at her watch without looking impatient.

“I’m sorry I frightened you. I assumed the woman I talked to on the phone earlier told you that I called.”

“She mentioned someone called, but I wasn’t expecting a policeman on my doorstep.”

“I’m sorry,” Will repeated, taking out a spiral notebook and a pen. He used this for show, mostly to let people know he was paying attention. He had clicked on his recorder when he’d taken the pen out of his breast pocket.

He said, “You don’t seem surprised that I’m here about Aleesha.”

“I suppose I’m not. Aleesha chose a life for herself that her father and I did not agree with. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to know that you’re not the first police officer to knock on our door.” She smiled, but there was something more guarded about her manner. “If you think we can lead you to her, I’m sorry to say that we cannot.”

Despite, or maybe because of, the woman’s poise, Will knew that this was not going to be easy. “Where is your husband now?”

“He’s giving a lecture in New York,” she explained. “He specializes in health issues affecting women.”

Will scribbled something in his notebook. “I see.”

“You think it’s ironic that a man who has devoted his life to helping women has a daughter who is a prostitute and a drug addict.”

“Yes,” Will admitted. “I do.”

She sat back in the chair, seemingly relieved that they had gotten that out of the way. “We did everything we could to try to help our daughter.”

“I’m sure you did.”

“Are you really?” she asked, as if she wanted to catch him off guard. “We spent thousands of dollars on treatments, family therapy, individual therapy. Anything we thought would help her, we did.” She clasped her hands in her lap. “The simple fact was that Aleesha did not want help. She started running away before she turned thirteen.”

Will echoed something that Angie had said about the girl. “You can’t help somebody who doesn’t want to be helped.”

“That’s true,” the mother agreed. “Do you have children?”

“No, ma’am. I don’t have any children.”

“It’s the most wonderful blessing God has given us, our ability to bring a child into the world.” She held out her hands, cradling an imaginary infant. “You hold them in your arms that first time, and they are more precious than gold. Every breath you take after that is only for your child. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Will nodded, his chest feeling as empty as her arms. He figured even if his own mother had held him, she obviously had no problem handing him off to somebody else shortly after.

Miriam continued, “Aleesha got mixed up with this boy.” He could see tears wetting her eyelashes. “I grew up poor, as did Dr. Monroe. We both knew the value of a good education, though, and we worked very hard to take advantage of the opportunities that other folks had fought, even died, for.”

He tried to compliment her. “Obviously, you’ve succeeded.”

She gave him a glance that said they both knew that material things were hardly a measure of success. “We thought raising our children here in this neighborhood would protect them. Decatur has always been a little oasis.”

“Drugs have a way of getting into any community.”

“I suppose that’s true,” she allowed. “We wanted so much more for her. You live through your children. You ache for them, hurt for them, breathe for them when you can.” She told Will, “She ran off with some man she met at the treatment facility. She was arrested a few weeks later on a drug charge. Aleesha went to jail and the man disappeared, probably found himself another silly girl.”

When Will started with the GBI, he had been amazed to find how many women ended up in jail because their boyfriends had sent them out on a deal, convincing the women that cops were more lenient with the fairer sex. Prison was full of young girls who thought they were in love.

Miriam interrupted his thoughts. “Dr. Monroe and I realized very gradually that drug addiction is a terminal disease. It is a cancer that eats families alive.” She stood up and walked across the room to the grand piano, saying, “You get to a point where you look around and you ask yourself, ‘What is this doing to the rest of my family? What harm am I doing to my other children by concentrating all of my energy on rescuing this one child who will not be saved?’ ”

Framed photographs lined the piano, and she held her hand over each of them in turn. “Aleesha was the last girl. We called her our middle child because she was such a handful.” She went to another frame, another child. “Ashley is the oldest. She’s a gynecologist, like her father.” She indicated yet another photograph. “Clinton is an orthopedist. Gerald is a psychiatrist. Harley is a classical pianist. Mason …” She picked up a small frame shaped like a dog and laughed. “He’s a dog groomer, God love him.” She was extra careful as she put the frame back in place and Will wondered if Mason was his mother’s favorite.

Six children. A comfortable house. Plenty of clothes and food and parents who took care of you. What would it be like to grow up in a family like that? Why had Aleesha turned her back on all of this?

Of course, Will had been in law enforcement too long to take all of this on face value. He knew from experience that drug addicts didn’t generally start out as the happiest people on earth. They turned to drugs for a reason, whether it was the desire to fit in or the need to tune out. The absent father could be some kind of sadist. The brothers could have looked no farther than the hallway for their first sexual forays. The older sister could have been an overachiever who cast the kind of shadow in which nothing could grow.

But Will was not here to rattle the skeletons in the Monroe family closet. He was here to tell this woman that her daughter, lost so long ago, was finally lost forever.

He asked, “You haven’t seen your daughter in twenty years?”

“At least.”

“No phone calls? No cards or letters?”

Miriam recalled, “A few years ago we got a call. She was in jail. She wanted money.”

Michael had said that Aleesha listed only Baby G as a contact when she’d been arrested, but the duty officer would have made a notation of who she called while she was inside, who visited her if she was kept more than a day.

He asked, “Were you the one who spoke to her?”

“Yes,” she answered. “The conversation didn’t last more than a minute. I told my daughter that I was not going to give her any money and she slammed the phone down on me.” Miriam explained, “That was the last time we heard from her. I don’t even know where she lives now.”

“Do you have any idea who she associated with? Who her friends were?”

She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Officer. I warned you I would be little help in finding her.” She looked down at her hand, which was still resting on the piano. “Could you tell me what she’s done? She hasn’t …” She glanced up at Will, then back down again. “She hasn’t harmed someone, has she?”

Will felt a lump rise in his throat. “Do your other children live close by?”

“Not close enough,” she told him, a smile playing at her lips. “Mason is just down the street, but that’s never close enough when you’re a grandmother with three grandbabies to spoil.”

“Maybe you should give him a call.”

Her smile faltered. “Why would I need to do that?”

“Mrs. Monroe, I really wish you would call your son, or somebody who could maybe come and sit with you.”

She sagged against the piano much as she had done at the front door. The dog gave a low growl as Will stood up.

Miriam’s throat worked. “I suppose you’re going to tell me that she finally took too much.”

“No, ma’am.” Again, he indicated the couch. “Would you please sit down?”

“I’m not going to faint,” she told him, though her chocolate complexion was a marked shade lighter. “Tell me what happened to my daughter.”

Will should have just told her and left her with her grief, but he couldn’t. To his surprise, when he spoke, he sounded as if he was begging. “Mrs. Monroe, please, sit down.”

She let him lead her over to the couch and sit beside her. He should take her hand, do something to soothe her, but Will didn’t feel equipped to comfort her. He did know that prolonging the inevitable was one of the most selfish things he had ever done in his life.

He said, “Aleesha was murdered Sunday night in the stairway to her apartment.”

Miriam’s mouth opened as she gasped for air. “Murdered?”

“Someone killed her,” Will provided. “I think she probably knew her attacker. I think that she followed him out into the stairway and he injured her …” He faltered. “He injured her in such a way that it led to her death.”

“ ‘Such a way,’ ” Miriam echoed. “What does that mean? Did she suffer?”

He was supposed to lie—it did no harm telling a mother her child had died quickly—but he could not. “I don’t think there’s any way to know if she was aware of what was happening to her. I hope she wasn’t—” He stopped. “I hope there were enough drugs in her body so that she had no idea what was going on.”

She gasped suddenly. “I saw it in the paper. A woman was murdered at Grady Homes. They didn’t list her name, but … I never thought, I just assumed …”

“I’m sorry,” Will told the poor woman, thinking he’d said that phrase more times in the last few days than he had in his entire life. He took out the photocopy of Aleesha’s letter. “We found this in her mailbox. It was returned because there wasn’t enough postage.”

The mother grabbed the letter like it was a lifeline. Tears fell down her cheeks as she stared at the words. She must have read it a dozen times before she murmured, “The pariah.”

“Can you tell me what she was talking about?”

Miriam held the letter in her lap, her hands trembling. “There was this house across the street—three doors down and a world away.” She stared out the window as if she could see it. “We were the only black family in the neighborhood back then. Tobias and I laughed about people saying, ‘There goes the neighborhood’ when they already had the devil living in their own backyard.”

“Does the family still live there?”

She shook her head. “There’s been about ten different families in that house since the Carsons moved out. It’s been added onto, turned into some kind of palace, but back then, it was just this little house where bad things happened. Every neighborhood has that, don’t they? That one bad house with that one bad kid?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She looked back out the window. “Parties every weekend. Cars racing up and down the road. That boy was poison to everybody he came into contact with. We called him the Pariah of Paisley Street.”

Will thought of the letter, the way Aleesha had referred to herself as a pariah.

Miriam continued, “His mother was never home. She was a lawyer, if you can believe that.” She turned back to Will. “I suppose I could blame her until I was blue in the face, but the fact was that she was just as incapable of controlling her child as we were.”

“Aleesha ran off with this boy?”

“No,” the woman said. “She ran off with a thirty-nine-year-old man named Marcus Keith. He was one of the advisors in her treatment program. We found out later he had already served time for interfering with a minor.” She gave a humorless laugh. “They might as well put a revolving door on every prison in America.”

Will tried to tread carefully. “In the letter, she seems to be blaming you for something.”

Miriam gave a tight smile. “When Aleesha was eleven years old, I left my family. There was a man. Like mother, like child, I suppose.” She held up the letter. “Or, ‘the sins of the parent,’ as my daughter so eloquently put it.”

“Obviously, you came back.”

“Tobias and I worked it out, but things were very rocky for a long while. Aleesha got lost in the shuffle, and then she fell in with that boy up the street.” She put her hand to her collar, pulling at a small cross that hung from a gold chain around her neck.

Will reached into his pocket and took out the cross from Aleesha’s letter. “We found this, too.”

Miriam looked at the cross but did not take it. “All my children have one.”

He did not want to tell her that Aleesha had sent it back. The letter was bad enough. Still, he had to ask, “Is there any significance to the cross?”

“Tobias bought them when I returned home. We all gathered around the table and he passed them out one by one. It signified our unity, our faith that we could be a family again.”

Will put the cross in her hand and folded her fingers around it. “I’m sure she’d want you to have this.”

He left her alone in the room, walking down the hall, past the artwork, the photographs, everything Miriam and Tobias Monroe had accumulated over the years to turn their house into a home. There was a tall table by the door, and Will was leaving her one of his cards when he heard her speaking in the other room. Her tone was muffled by distance and grief. She was obviously on the telephone.

“It’s Mama,” she told one of her many children. “I need you.”