Over the next week, with LaFlora’s execution ticking closer, Jane and Hank had me hunt for records that would prove that, along with receiving reduced or dropped charges, Kim Jenkins and the other witnesses were paid to testify against an innocent man.
But a bank long ago destroyed any records that would show even a small deposit into the account owned by the first of the witnesses. The second witness never had an account. And we would need a court order to see the financial records of the newly dead Kim Jenkins – impossible without the consent of her husband.
Each morning, Jane came in grimacing. Hank stared blankly at the poster of LaFlora. Thelma danced her fingers across the computer keyboard to a fast-forwarded soundtrack only she could hear. I drove back to Callahan three times, but Kim Jenkins’s house remained empty and the employees at Aardo Auto Parts said Randall Haussen had stayed in Georgia even after the coroner released his wife’s body and a dozen friends and neighbors sat in pews at her funeral.
When I wasn’t looking into the police handling of LaFlora’s case, I tried to find out more about Coach Kagen and his night at the Holiday Inn. I searched a dozen social media sites and found two mentions of him and a kid named Jacob. Contradicting what Kagen told me, the first postings said the Tallahassee police went to the Holiday Inn on the night of the track meet after one of Jacob’s teammates called 911.
So I searched for a list of sexual predators on the city website. Two lived within a quarter mile of Kagen’s house, but his street and the streets on both sides of it were clean. Next, I looked at the house where I grew up. Again, no red flag appeared. Then I looked at the section of Philips Highway where I’d lived since getting out of prison. ‘Goddamn it,’ I said.
Thelma’s fingers stopped dancing on the keyboard.
‘They’ve got me down as a predator at the Cardinal Motel.’
‘Let it go for now,’ Jane said.
Hank said, ‘Once you’ve got your apology and money from the state, you can sue to get off the list.’
In the evenings, Cynthia and I went to my room or watched movies at the Cineplex. One night, we went back to Cardice Cold Storage, and when the watchman left us alone, Cynthia unzipped her pants and I unzipped mine in the shivering cold.
Then Bill Higby hit the news again. As one of the conditions of his release, he’d signed an agreement to stay away from the Skooners, but according to the morning news, he crossed the property line, pounded on the Skooners’ door, and confronted the judge. One report said that he punched the judge’s son, Andrew, though the Sheriff’s Office spokesman confirmed only that an altercation occurred shortly after midnight and the police now had one of their own in custody.
Whatever happened, Higby was back in jail.
A thrill passed down my back as the anchorman and reporter mulled over the dangers of rogue officers.
In a live interview on Channel 4, Higby’s lawyer said, ‘The circumstances of this incident have been misrepresented,’ but when asked to explain, said only, ‘The time will come for explanations.’
As for the Skooners, the judge said, ‘We’re installing a new security system at my house this afternoon. I would be sorry to lose confidence in our city’s law enforcement.’
I floated – like a running boy – from my room out to my car and gripped the steering wheel with both hands so I would stay on the road while driving to the JNI office.
Thelma had just come in and was waiting for her computer to boot up. Hank had pulled his chair to the side of Jane’s desk, and they were reviewing pretrial depositions from Kim Jenkins and the other two witnesses. Hank said, ‘The lawyer asked straight out, “What incentives did you receive for agreeing to testify?” and the witness said, “Don’t know what you’re talking about.” He evaded the question.’
Jane shook her head. ‘Maybe he didn’t know the word “incentive.”’
Hank jabbed the deposition. ‘They goddamned did it.’ It was just eight, but Hank already had a sheen of sweat on his forehead.
‘I hear it,’ Jane said, ‘but where does he say it?’
I turned on my laptop and said, ‘It’s too little. You know that.’
Hank glared at me. But when he turned back to Jane, he all but admitted it. ‘I’m sinking,’ he said. ‘Give me something.’
She looked at another page of the deposition. ‘The lawyer asked, “Why are you testifying?” And he said, “I’ve got kids to take care of.” It’s suggestive.’
‘Still sinking,’ Hank said.
‘Who bailed them out?’ I asked.
Hank and Jane looked at me. I said, ‘The dealer got killed while the witnesses were smoking crack. Even with the reduced charges, they had to pay a lot to stay out of jail before the trial. Who paid the bail? Crackheads are poor, and most poor people have poor friends and family. Maybe the payoff went to them.’
Hank still looked as if he was sinking, but he said, ‘Check it out.’
I spent an hour trying to identify Kim Jenkins’s family members and the families of the other witnesses, but, like a lot of addicts, they’d cut themselves off from their loved ones or their loved ones had done the cutting. I had no doubt that I would find names if I searched long enough, but after another ten minutes with no hits, I checked the latest news on Higby.
Now, three stories said he’d punched Andrew Skooner, cutting him badly enough for stitches. The Skooner family lawyer was demanding that the District Attorney charge Higby with assault. Higby’s lawyer now said no quarrel occurred.
I closed the internet connection, slapped the laptop shut, and got up.
‘What?’ Hank said.
‘No luck,’ I said. ‘Not yet.’ I headed for the stairs.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked.
‘I’m trying another approach. Maybe faster.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I’m going to talk to LaFlora’s prosecutor.’
‘Eric Skooner? You can’t do that.’
‘Watch me,’ I said.
Hank got up and followed me down the stairs. ‘You can’t afford to stick a wrench into this right now,’ he said. ‘Thomas LaFlora can’t afford it. The JNI can’t. Eric Skooner is feared on the bench, and—’
He was still talking as I got into my car and pulled from the curb.
When I rang the bell at the judge’s house, Andrew Skooner opened the door. Behind him in the hallway, as the judge promised, security technicians were mounting a video camera near the ceiling.
Andrew Skooner stared at me. He was big and square and muscled. Under normal circumstances, people would have called him handsome. But along with old scars on his nose and forehead, he had a stitched-up cut over his upper lip. Dry blood crusted the bottom of his nostrils. His left cheek was swollen.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Hi,’ I said, ‘I work for the Justice Now Initiative.’
He started to close the door.
‘Higby did a job on your face,’ I said.
He closed the door the rest of the way, and a lock clicked into place.
I talked to the closed door. ‘He did a job on me too – eight years ago. You can’t see the stitches, but inside I’m sewed up like a rag doll. Higby seemed brutal when I first met him, but I’ve met others like him since then. It seems like their hands are made of scissors and knives—’
The door swung open again. ‘What do you want?’
‘When he cut me, he was incredibly precise,’ I said. ‘It was like brain surgery, or open heart. He knew what he wanted, and he went inside and got it. If you saw me then, you would have said he was a professional – top of his field. But look at you. He swung wildly, didn’t he? From all I’ve seen, you and your family bring out the beast in him.’
The security techs stopped working and listened.
Andrew Skooner said, ‘Who are you and what are you talking about?’
‘My name’s Franky Dast. He sent me away for eight years for—’
‘Yeah, I know about you,’ he said.
‘Then you know how he carved me up. Or if you still think I did the things he said I did, he carved me up even better than you know.’
‘Why are you here?’ he said.
‘What happened last night?’ I asked. ‘What made him go after you like that?’
‘Why would I tell you?’
‘Shared experiences?’ I said.
From somewhere in the house behind him, a man said, ‘Who is it, Andy?’ I recognized Judge Skooner’s voice from the TV interviews after Joshua died.
His son stepped outside and pulled the door closed behind him. ‘You should leave,’ he said.
‘Why did Higby hit you?’ I asked.
‘Why does anyone hit someone?’ he said. ‘We argued. He got mad.’
‘What did you argue about?’
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ he said. ‘It’s over.’
‘It’s never over,’ I said. ‘Why won’t you tell me what happened?’
He stared at me, as if gauging my strength as a man he might need to fight. ‘I know you’ve had it hard,’ he said. ‘I get that. But, believe it or not, I’ve had it harder. I might not look it, but I have.’
The door opened, and Judge Skooner peered out and said, ‘Andy, what are you doing?’ Then he stared at me and added, ‘I know who you are.’
‘With respect, sir,’ I said, ‘you only think you do. I’m working for the Justice Now Initiative, and I need to ask you some questions about the case you prosecuted against Thomas LaFlora.’
The judge said, ‘Get inside, Andy.’ His son stared at him with cold eyes before obeying. The judge turned back to me. ‘I’ve dealt with Hank Cury and Jane Foley before. They should know better than to send a man like you to harass me at home.’ He closed the door, and again the lock clicked.
I knew men in prison who would bang on the bars if the guards ignored them – and others who would collect their piss and throw it at the guards until the guards tasered, pepper sprayed, and beat them, then dragged them to solitary where they could wallow for ninety days or a year or more. Me? I saved my energy for the law library, and except for the times when I pounded my head on the walls and rattled my cage after judges rejected my appeals, I left as light of a print on the prison as I could manage.
Now, in the heat of the July afternoon, I had two options. I could kick the judge’s door. Or I could walk to my car.
I walked to my car.
And then I drove next door to Higby’s house.
Shades covered the front windows. The outdoor furniture was shoved to one corner of the front porch. The little house looked like a clenched fist.
I guessed Higby’s wife had gone to stay with friends or family, but when I rang the bell, footsteps approached, stopped, and then went away. I rang the bell again, and the footsteps came back.
The door opened. Higby’s wife stood in front of me, her hair wet. She held a black pistol in her hand, but she aimed it at the floor.
I said, ‘If someone took eight years of your life – and tried to take the rest – wouldn’t you want to know everything you could about him?’
She gave me a tight frown. ‘I think I would want to stay as far away from him as I could.’
‘See, that’s impossible,’ I said. ‘Your husband is with me everywhere I go. Sometimes I think he’s as much a part of me as I am of myself.’
She held the pistol steady. I guessed she had practice shooting it, though I also guessed that, like most people, she would never shoot at a living man unless her own life was in danger. ‘What do you want?’ she asked.
‘That’s a long list,’ I said. ‘Most of it I can’t have. But you can tell me why your husband hit Andrew Skooner last night.’
‘He didn’t,’ she said.
‘At the time he arrested me, he wouldn’t do something like that,’ I said. ‘He calculated every move. He figured out every pressure point in my head and on my body, and he worked them all, one after another, until he had me where I would say and do anything he told me to. But the man who hit Andrew Skooner – and shot his brother – has lost control. He’s acting out of fear or something like it. Your husband twisted me into all kinds of shapes, but someone else is making him jump now. That’s what I think.’
She eyed me doubtfully. ‘And who do you think that is?’
‘The Skooners would make sense. But so far, he’s battering them more than they’re hurting him.’
Again, the tight frown. ‘It would be best if you got back in your car and left,’ she said.
‘I really need to talk with him. But since he’s in jail, I’ll settle for you.’
‘I have nothing to tell you,’ she said.
I stepped toward her.
She raised the pistol so it pointed at my chest.
‘I know everything you’ve done,’ she said. ‘My husband has told me.’
‘You know what he says I’ve done. But do you believe it?’
‘Every word.’
‘Then you’d better call your cop friends,’ I said, and I stepped past her into the house. Higby had locked me behind doors for eight years, and I was tired of his barriers.
The front hall reached straight back to the kitchen, where windows faced the dark water of Black Creek. I walked through the hall, with her close behind me, and sat at the kitchen table.
‘Does your husband keep copies of case files at home?’ I asked.
‘Of course not.’ She stood a few feet away, with the gun pointing at me.
‘Would you mind if I look?’
‘Yes, I would mind very much,’ she said.
‘Then tell me what he and Andrew Skooner fought about last night.’
‘You understand, don’t you, that you’re the last person he would want me to talk to?’
I said, ‘Unlike just about anyone else in this city, I think he might have been justified in shooting Joshua Skooner. I think Joshua had a gun. And I think your husband probably had a good reason, if not legal justification, to hit Andrew Skooner last night.’
‘Then you must be happy about the injustice,’ she said.
I said, ‘I have mixed feelings.’
‘Even if I thought your opinion mattered, I wouldn’t tell you anything.’
‘What if I’m the only one who can help him?’
‘Why would you be? And if you were, why in the world would you do it?’
In truth, if I helped him – if – I would do so only because I could show power over his life as he’d had power over mine. He would live every day knowing I had that power. ‘I hate what happened to me,’ I said. ‘I never want to see it happen again. To anyone. I’ll do anything to stop it.’
She considered me. Maybe she put my words into balance with all her husband had told her about me and whatever faith she had in him. She said, ‘No. Just no. You need to leave my house. You need to never come back.’
So I got up from the table. But instead of walking back out through the front hall, I crossed to a door that led into a home office. Inside, a coffee table was covered with magazines. The desk was bare except for an electric bill and a car insurance renewal notice. I went to the file cabinet next to the desk and opened the top drawer.
Higby’s wife said, ‘I can’t let you do that.’
‘It seems to me that you and your husband have enough troubles without you shooting me.’ I felt her heavy presence as I leafed through a file of travel brochures for Jamaica and Key West, another of credit card receipts, and a third of statements from Higby’s police pension.
I closed the drawer and opened the second.
Higby’s wife said, ‘I told you, he brings none of his work home.’
The first folder in the drawer contained an old photograph showing Higby in his mid-twenties, standing on a fishing dock with a rod and reel, another photograph showing him when he was still younger, alongside two other teenage boys, and a third showing him and his wife at their wedding ceremony. The next folder – thicker than the others – contained medical records. Folder after folder held only his personal and financial records. When I looked up again, the pistol was quivering in his wife’s hand. ‘Satisfied?’
‘Hardly,’ I said, but I went back through the kitchen to the hallway, with her following close behind me. I glanced into the living room. Then I headed for the front door. ‘I’m sorry I had to do that,’ I said.
She aimed the gun at my back. ‘Get the hell out of my house.’
‘Tell your husband I came by,’ I said. ‘Tell him I offered to help.’
She said, ‘If I told him I even saw you, he would destroy you.’ She slammed the door.
I smiled as I walked to my car. I would count her silence as a betrayal of Bill Higby.
When I got back to the JNI office, Jane and Hank were gone, though Thelma still drummed her fingers on her computer keyboard. She’d tracked down the brother of one of the witnesses against Thomas LaFlora, and Jane and Hank had gone to surprise him at the Long Oaks Apartments on the northwest side of the city.
Now, she peeled a Post-it note from her desk and gave it to me. ‘For you. Andrew Skooner just called. But he left no return number.’
‘Huh,’ I said.
‘What did the judge have to say?’
‘He told me to go to hell.’
‘You expected anything different?’
‘I hoped.’
‘You should know better by now.’ And she drummed and she drummed.
I dialed directory assistance and got the Skooner’s home phone number. When I dialed again, Andrew answered, and I said, ‘It’s Franky Dast.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said.
‘What doesn’t?’
‘Thanks,’ he said, and hung up.
I stared at the phone. ‘Screwy boy.’
I left the office at four o’clock. Cynthia was working at the Cineplex until midnight, and so I drove back to the Cardinal Motel. As I approached, I saw a squad car parked by my room. Once again, my door was gone – kicked or knocked off. The motel owner, Bill Hopper, stood inside the doorframe, blocking two cops who seemed to want to get inside. I started to drive past, fought the impulse, turned into the lot, and parked next to the squad car. When I got out, Hopper was yelling at the cops, and the cops were trying to peer around him.
‘What the hell!’ Hopper said to them. ‘What’re you thinking?’
One of the cops leaned in, his hand at his holster. ‘We got a call that he was—’
‘You broke my fucking door,’ Hopper said.
‘We thought—’
‘It was a new door!’
‘Sir,’ the other cop said, ‘you need to calm down.’ His fingers brushed against gun metal.
Hopper said, ‘I need to calm down? You kicked down my fucking door. I get along with the police. You just had to come to my office—’
‘We believed an assault was in progress,’ the first cop said.
‘“In progress”? How the hell?’ And now Hopper saw me. ‘He wasn’t even home. How could he in progress anyone? Jesus Christ – look at my door.’
The second cop asked me, ‘Are you Franklin Dast?’
And the first cop said, ‘We got a call—’
The second cop said, ‘Show him.’
The first cop gestured at a pair of boy’s underwear on the concrete walkway a few feet from my doorway. They looked bloody – like the pair I found hanging from my doorknob shortly after I moved in.
The second cop said, ‘Why’d you put those on your door?’
‘I wasn’t here,’ I said. ‘It’s an ugly prank.’
The cops exchanged a glance. One said, ‘We still got to check the room.’
Hopper said, ‘If you don’t have a warrant, you sure as hell don’t.’
‘Sir,’ the cop said, ‘you need to step aside.’
Hopper said, ‘Unless a crime is happening, you can’t go in.’ He reached into my room and hit the light switch. ‘You see a kid in there? You see an assault?’
The cop started toward him, as if he would go in anyway, but the other one pulled him aside. They went to the squad car and talked for a minute, and then the first one came back and, ignoring Hopper, talked to me. ‘Do we have permission to look inside your room?’
I had nothing to hide. I’d never had anything to hide. But that hadn’t kept me off death row. ‘Get a warrant,’ I said.
The second cop came at me, as if I’d given the wrong answer.
But then a black Mercury Grand Marquis drove on to the parking lot and stopped next to the squad car. Higby’s partner, Deborah Holt, opened the car door, flashed her badge at the patrolmen, and said, ‘Get out of here.’
The first cop looked confused, the second angry.
The first said, ‘Ma’am?’
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘It’s a misunderstanding. You’re done here.’
‘No, ma’am,’ the second cop said, and he seemed about to take a stand, but she got in close to him and mumbled a word or two, and then he backed down and slunk toward his squad car.
‘What about the door?’ Hopper said. ‘Who’s going to pay for it?’
Holt turned to him and said, ‘I’m betting if we kicked down a couple more doors, we’d find meth or coke. Then we could take legal possession of the motel and put your scumbag flock on the street. Do you really want to worry about this one?’
He said weakly, ‘It was a new door.’
‘Go back to your office and let me talk to Mr Dast.’
He said to me, ‘You cover my ass, and I cover yours.’
As he walked away, she said, ‘Make sure Mr Dast has a stronger door this evening.’
Then we were alone. I stared at her. The beginning of a smile hung on her lips. Suddenly, everyone was trying to be my friend. I said, ‘Why did you do that?’
‘You wanted to talk to the street cops?’
‘But why?’
‘Can we go inside?’
I wondered if she was setting a trap. I stared at my broken door.
She said, ‘We can talk in my car instead if you want.’
I stepped over the pieces of my door and she came in after me.
‘Sit, if you want,’ I said, but she stayed standing and so did I.
‘I’ll deny I ever told you this,’ she said, ‘but Higby is responsible for the underwear. He has a few friends in the department who are glad to help.’
A wave of nausea passed through me. ‘He can get to me from jail?’
‘You deserved it,’ she said. ‘He talked on the phone with his wife this afternoon. You scared the hell out of her.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘I thought I told you to stay away. I warned you.’
‘Eight years ago, when I did what he told me to do, I ended up on death row. I mostly try to do the opposite of what cops tell me to do now. It seems safer.’
‘Safer unless you like having a door on your room,’ she said. ‘And you know from experience that there are a lot of worse things that can happen than losing a door. Plenty of people would be happy to make those things happen for you. Why risk it?’
My stomach turned as I realized how close I’d come to having cops tear through my room – how easy it would be to set me up with more than a couple of pairs of bloody underwear.
‘Hold on,’ I said. I went into the bathroom and closed the door. I turned on the cold water in the sink, ran it over my hands and wrists, and splashed it on my face. I looked in the mirror. The water dotted my pale skin like a death-sweat. I splashed my face again and again until I figured my legs would hold under me.
When I went back into the room, Holt was sitting on the side of my bed. She stared at me curiously. I said, ‘Why did you wreck Higby’s plan to set me up? I thought you guys worked together.’
‘You know what?’ she said. ‘You’ve wormed into my head. I see why he wanted to put you away.’
‘Why did you wreck his plan?’
Again, she stared. ‘I’ll deny I ever told you this.’
She waited for a response, so I said, ‘OK.’
‘After I came to talk to you last time, I was looking through his old files,’ she said. ‘We share a caseload. You had a fascinating case. I’ve spent the last few days reading about it – and about you. I know you now, Franky. I could write a book. I think if I’d seen the same evidence Higby saw, I would’ve done exactly what he did. And, by the way, that track coach of yours – Ernie Kagen – he is a predator. We’ll bust him sooner or later. But he had nothing to do with the deaths of the Bronson boys.’
‘How do you—’
‘The night they died, he was in jail in New Orleans, charged with soliciting an underage prostitute. He used a phony name, and the connection came out only after the Gainesville incident. So you would still look good for the Bronson killings, except for one thing. Five years before the Bronson boys died, another boy got killed in a way that looked a lot like them but in a state park down in Putnam County. A fourteen-year-old runaway. Raped. Bite marks. A single twenty-two-caliber bullet in the forehead. DNA recovered but untested. Higby date-marked the report when it came in. He had it in his hands before you went to trial. He either read it or should have.’
‘I was thirteen when that one happened?’ I said.
She nodded. ‘And the Putnam investigator put notes at the bottom about similarities to still another killing. A ten-year-old boy went missing from a family campsite three years earlier. No rape, but he had the bite marks and bullet wound.’
‘I was ten.’
‘Yes.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘Everything else in the case file tells me you did the Bronson brothers,’ she said. ‘Or maybe you and someone else who left the DNA, but definitely you.’
‘Did the bullets match the ones that killed the Bronson boys?’
She gave me a pained smile. ‘They’re missing from the evidence file. The guys in Putnam—’
‘Missing? How?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It happens more often than it should.’
I thought about what she’d told me. ‘But you know I didn’t do it.’
‘Yes.’
No other cop had ever believed me.
‘Detective Higby made a terrible mistake when he withheld that report,’ she said. ‘He’s a good investigator, and I believe he thinks you’re guilty. I can’t see how he gets there, but I believe it.’
‘Believing him can cause a lot of pain,’ I said.
‘That’s why I broke up his racket today. He means well—’
‘No, he doesn’t,’ I said. ‘He means to hurt me.’
‘For him, that’s the same as meaning well.’
Hot air and highway fumes breathed in through the broken door. ‘I need the files on the other boys,’ I said.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘You deserve to see them.’
‘Thank you.’ It hurt to say that to a cop, but I said it.
‘I’ll deny I gave them to you. But if anyone investigates, they’ll know. If you can, I would appreciate your keeping quiet about how you got them. My job’s on the line.’ When I said nothing, she added, ‘I’m trying to do right by you.’
‘It’s too late to do right.’
‘I know that too.’ And she brought in the files from her trunk.
When she left, I spread the report about the earlier killings on my bed. The first kid, whose name was Jeremy Ballat, had just turned fourteen when he died. He’d been dead for forty-eight to seventy-two hours when a park ranger found his naked body in a ditch in the Etoniah Creek State Forest. Insects had torn into his eyes and mouth, though the medical examiner said the bite marks on his legs were human. Swabs showed that he’d been raped – tissue analysis suggested, repeatedly. The killer had shot him through his tender forehead, probably pointblank, but the skin had deteriorated too much for the examiner to say more.
Jeremy Ballat had run away from home in Atlanta two weeks before he died. He’d hitchhiked to Macon and then to Savannah, where he had hung out with a pack of teenagers for eight days before continuing down the coast and crossing the Florida border to Jacksonville. At that point, he seemingly decided to play Huck Finn. Only a handful of barges work the St Johns River beyond the Buckman Bridge at the southern end of the city, but he talked his way on to one of them that was carrying used tires. He got into an argument with the barge captain and jumped into the river near the western bank about ten miles before the Palatka dock.
Investigators looked hard at the captain, but he’d arrived on time in Palatka and his schedule back downriver gave him no time for a side trip to the state forest. Nothing in his background suggested he might commit this kind of crime.
The report included two maps. A straight shot from the riverbank to the park measured about twenty miles through swamps and timberland south of Bostwick. The paths by road, or a mix of roads and hiking trails, would have taken the boy through Bostwick – or else the slightly smaller town of Bardin – where someone most likely would have seen him. Those paths measured over twenty-five miles. The Putnam investigators speculated that whoever killed the boy had picked him up or abducted him shortly after he came to shore from the barge and that the killer went to the park only to dump the body. The police never found the jeans, T-shirt, or gym shoes that the barge captain said the boy was wearing.
The note about the earlier killing that one of the investigators had added to the bottom of the report said a ten-year-old – a Mexican boy named Luis Gonzalez – was camping with his illegal immigrant parents and sister in woods behind the Mount Zion Baptist Church on the other side of the river from the point where Jeremy Ballat waded ashore. The area, called Federal Point, consisted mostly of large farms. The parents would come in winter to pick strawberries and return in early summer for the blueberry crop. One day, while they were working, their son disappeared. Fearing the cops, they didn’t report his absence. When, a week later, a fisherman found a body floating in shallow water just downriver and the police tracked the boy back to the encampment, the parents said their son often played on the riverbank. Everyone at first thought he’d gone swimming and drowned. But when his sister said a man had come to the camp and taken the boy, the medical examiner looked more closely at the decomposed corpse and found the bite marks and the twenty-two-caliber bullet lodged in the skull. Then the parents and daughter disappeared.
And, I thought, sometime in the months or years that followed, so did the bullet.
I read and reread the note and the report, looking for any details that linked the Mexican boy and the Atlanta runaway to the Bronson brothers.
Along with the matching wounds, they all were between ten and fifteen years old, all living at the edge of legal systems that should have protected them. Steven and Duane Bronson lived in Jacksonville, and Jeremy Ballat came through the city on his way south, but Luis Gonzalez seemingly had no reason to travel off the rural farm circuit that his parents worked.
I started again at the beginning of the report and reread it for anything I’d missed. Like the Bronson brothers but unlike Luis Gonzalez, Jeremy Ballat lived with a single mother. Again like the Bronsons but, as far as I knew, unlike the Mexican boy, he had a record of minor arrests – for truancy, stealing a bottle of vodka from a neighbor’s house, and attempting another burglary. As was the case with the Bronson brothers, although the investigators never tested the rape kit, they did bloodwork and other toxicology analysis on him. They found trace THC metabolites, which meant he’d smoked marijuana in the days or weeks before he died. Otherwise, the analysis came out normal – except for highly elevated mercury.
I felt another punch in the belly. I remembered my public defender stumbling through my first trial. Were the Bronson brothers high when they died? he asked. The prosecution expert answered, No, sir, no alcohol or drugs, though the boys did have elevated levels of mercury. Of course, the expert then said that any of a dozen common causes could have led to the high mercury, including eating tuna fish sandwiches.
Even if a lot of kids had high mercury, it linked these particular ones. I figured the medical examiner who overturned the finding of accidental drowning after Luis Gonzalez’s death would also have done blood and toxicology. I should see if I could get that report when I went back to my computer at the JNI office.
I paged through the rest of the report, glanced again at the maps of Jeremy Ballat’s possible routes from the St Johns River to Etoniah Creek State Forest, and reread the note about Luis Gonzalez.
When I finished, I felt I was still missing something – another link, a pattern of the kind that I trained myself to see while fighting to get off death row and out of prison. So I started at the beginning again, reading more slowly, pausing after each sentence, thinking about each word.
As I looked at Jeremy Ballat’s route maps, I saw what I’d missed. But the realization disappointed me more than it punched me with either pain or exhilaration. The link – the little town of Bostwick – didn’t connect Jeremy Ballat with any of the other three boys, and so it almost definitely didn’t matter. As the map showed, his routes would have taken him either through or just to the south of the town. And, on one of my first days at the JNI, after I sweated through a bus ride from my motel room, Jane, as a welcoming gift, gave me a report of complaints and commendations that Bill Higby had received at the Sheriff’s Office. Along with filing two of the complaints, the Skooner family also had commended him for returning Josh who, at age eleven, ran away to a plot of mill land, owned by his mother’s family, just east of Bostwick. But I saw no deeper connection to the murdered boys.
Still, when I went back to the JNI office in the morning, I would also see if I could get my hands on Josh Skooner’s toxicology report. It couldn’t hurt to check. Maybe he’d eaten a lot of tuna fish too.
For now, I called the Skooners’ house. The last time I’d called, returning a call from Andrew Skooner, he’d all but hung up on me, but I was glad when he answered. I asked, ‘Why did your brother run away?’
‘Huh?’
‘When he was eleven,’ I said. ‘And Higby brought him back.’
‘With my dad, you either perform or run away. Josh didn’t perform.’
‘Must be hard growing up the son of a judge.’
He said, ‘You can’t imagine.’
A little before ten p.m., a man came to build a new doorframe and put up a door. Bill Hopper walked over when the truck pulled up. As the man unloaded the door and his tools, Hopper told me, ‘This one’s got steel. No one’s coming through without a battering ram.’
‘Like the doors they used in solitary confinement,’ I said.
He looked uneasy. ‘But this time, keeping the animals out, right?’
After listening to the banging hammer and the rip of an electric saw for ten minutes, I went out to my car and pulled on to Philips Highway. I had time to answer a couple of questions before I picked up Cynthia.
I wondered, if Jeremy Ballat died fifty miles upriver of Jacksonville and Luis Gonzalez died just across the river from him, did Duane and Steven Bronson also spend time in that area? Their mother would know, but the last time I visited her in her dog-filled house was a disaster. Duane Bronson’s girlfriend Lynn Melsyn also might know, but she was still hiding eight years after his death.
So I drove back toward the mother’s house. The airport was directing planes right over the neighborhood, and every minute or so a roar tore through the air.
When I knocked, no dogs barked and no one came. I could break a window pane and go inside, but what would I find in the mess of dog dishes and the disintegrated life of grief?
I went back to my car. In an hour and a half, I would pick up Cynthia. Too little time, really, to drive to the Beach and talk with Lynn Melsyn’s brother Rick and his roommate Darrell Nesbit. But too much time to hang out in the Cineplex parking lot.
I shifted into gear and hit the accelerator.
A few minutes after eleven, I rode the elevator up to the seventh floor at the Sun Reach Apartments. The corridor was hot and smelled of cigarette smoke. Dubstep and techno music played behind three of the apartment doors. No noise came from Apartment 706, but the door stood open a crack.
I opened it further and called into the apartment. ‘Rick?’
I stepped inside and closed the door. The air smelled of salt and burned metal.
‘Rick?’ I said again – quietly, though I didn’t know who I would disturb. ‘Darrell?’
I went to the balcony door, opened it, and stepped out into the dark. The sound of the ocean washed around the sides of the building – unseen waves breaking – and somewhere close by, out in the dark or clinging to the side of the building, an electrical circuit hummed. In the distance, a siren moved through the night.
I went back inside and walked into the kitchen. An empty bottle of Absolut vodka, its cap off, stood on the counter next to a half-gallon carton of grapefruit juice. Dirty glasses were scattered on a kitchen table and in the sink.
I went back into the main room. Music came through the walls from other apartments. Waves crashed and washed from outside as if water was rising. The siren droned.
I went to one of the bedroom doors. It was closed tight. I tapped it. Then I turned the knob.
This time, the punch hit so low and hard that I doubled over, and before I could catch my breath, bile rose in my throat. I spat on the floor. When I stood, the sight punched me again.
Rick Melsyn lay naked on his bed, a gunshot wound in his forehead, blood splintering across his skin. I couldn’t go close. If he’d held the only key that would get me out of the apartment, I couldn’t. But from the doorway, I saw other wounds – bites, deep and bloody, on his neck and thighs. His left nipple had been ripped away, by teeth or another jagged instrument.
I backed from the doorway. Tears and sweat heaved from me. In my ears, I heard a rushing. I moved toward the hall door, to escape – but the other bedroom door remained, and against every nerve, against every pulsing and pounding of my heart, against the throbbing in my veins, I needed to know. I crossed the room, touched the doorknob, and shoved.
Darrell Nesbit – his black boots set side by side on the floor, his black jeans and black T-shirt folded and set next to the boots – lay naked too. A bullet wound in his forehead. Bites on his neck and thighs. His left nipple, ripped and bloody.
Darkness clouded my vision, and I knew I was going to pass out. But then Darrell Nesbit’s hand moved – I would swear it did. And, against every nerve and pulsing and pounding and throbbing – against my father’s dead voice murmuring that I was always picking up the phone when I didn’t know who was calling – I stepped into the room and went to the man and touched his bloody forehead to see if it remained warm and touched his bloody chest to see if his heart was beating and held my blood-wet fingers by his mouth to see if he was breathing.
He was dead.
My tears and sweat heaved. My insides wanted out.
I ran then. Out. Out of the bedroom. Out of the apartment. Slapping the seventh-floor elevator doors when the elevator didn’t come. Pasting the first-floor button when it did.
In the lobby, I knew what I looked like. What I had done again – picking up the phone when …
But who had heard my voice when I’d answered?
No one?
No one at the other end of the line?
But I’d signed my name in blood on the elevator doors and elevator button. I’d signed it in the apartment and – what else had I touched? I’d spat bile on the floor. Some things never come clean.
I looked back at the elevator. I looked at the door leading out to my car. I looked around the lobby. A video camera, mounted near the ceiling, stared back. I went to it and we stared at each other. A set of wires ran through a back wall to a remote recorder – in a separate room or maybe another building miles away.
I jumped and smashed the camera with my fist, then jumped again and pulled it from the mount. My act of destruction would do no good. Video of me coming and going was already elsewhere, ready for processing by crime technicians, ready for a prosecutor, ready for a judge and jury. I crushed the camera housing under my heel.
When I looked up from the pieces, two women were watching me from the lobby door. They saw my eyes, and they fled back outside. Ready to talk to the police, to a prosecutor, to a judge and jury.
The sirens would come, and cops would run through the lobby and ride the elevator to Apartment 706.
And then they would come for me.
And then the doors would shut on me the way they’d shut before – as if all of earth’s energy focused on shutting them, burying me behind them.
I drove from the Sun Reach Apartments, the dark pressing against the cones that stuck into the night from the headlights.
At the Cineplex, Cynthia would be waiting for me, a curious smile on her lips, her beautiful scarred legs ready for me.
But I should run. Into the woods. Into the ocean.
I barely felt the strength to keep my foot on the gas.
The darkness in the car darker than the darkness outside.
I inched along the beachfront road. The car engine ticking. A clock against time.
I turned inland. Past closed restaurants and surf shops. Over the Intracoastal Waterway, the ebb and tide that promised everything – a cleansing, a transforming – but changed nothing. Past wetlands and gated subdivisions.
One light beckoned.
Walgreens.
Church of pharmaceuticals.
White lab coats.
Plastic and chemical smells.
I parked in disabled, went inside, and brushed past all that goodness. In the Home and Tool aisle, I found a plastic-wrapped two-pack of box cutters. When the white-coated clerk rang me up, I tore off the cellophane and laid one of the box cutters on the counter.
‘I need only one,’ I said.
The white coat gave me an ugly smile. ‘Save the other for next time?’
‘What next time?’ I said.
A thousand cuts.
My naked pulsing body, lying on my bed at the Cardinal Motel.
My new steel door protecting me from the world, the world from me.
Starting at my toes – the softness between – the arch, the heel, the ankle bones, the stretch of skin rising to the knees. The knees – the caps and the softness behind.
Licking the blade clean. Salt of my salt. Self-communion. I could taste the boys’ blood. Copper. Blood of my blood.
Thighs. The tenderness that rises from the thighs to the hips. The belly. The underbelly. The belly crying tears of blood. The chest. Oh, that bone.
The neck. Careful around the carotid, the jugular – too quick. Nicks and notches. Chipping at the marble of life. The whole body crying. The bed sheet wet, clinging – and the joy of releasing myself from prison bars.
My face. Hardly necessary. The cheeks. The forehead. Splinters of wound.
And when the sirens came, I sang with them. French-horning the Star Wars theme song from deep in my bleeding throat. And when the emergency lights flashed outside, piercing the window shade, and voices spoke through megaphones as if from a farther mountain to a man who was no longer me – making demands I no longer understood, telling me the way the world worked though the world had stopped working – I blacked out.