Ma and I were in the den watching TV. She was running the videotape of the Dan Rather special report about the Task Force investigation even though we’d watched it before. A fifteen-year-old girl from the Southside was being interviewed, being asked if she was afraid. What a stupid question, I thought, of course she was afraid. She said she always carried a knife in her pocketbook, and when she walked home from school, she put the knife up her sleeve, just in case.
The following day, on my way through downtown, I bought myself a knife with a leather sheath and didn’t tell Ma about it. I carried it in my purse, long after the Task Force was disbanded, through college and into grad school. My college friends named the knife Butch. It made me feel better about walking through Washington, DC, after my classes let out at ten at night and taking the Metro home. Years later when I told Ma about it, she yelled at me as if I was still a child instead of twenty-five, and as if the knife was still in my purse: “If you get a chance to use a knife, that means you’re too close to him and he can turn it on you. It’s a good thing you never got your ass killed.” Always too close. No place ever safe.
Now Ed Bradley was on the screen, talking about how after nearly two years of killings, kids still weren’t so afraid they wouldn’t get into a stranger’s car. Wanting to see if the student education program was working, the program that was supposed to teach kids how to avoid the killer, some plainclothes cops in unmarked cars went into some of the neighborhoods where the victims had been taken. They drove down the street, yelling to kids, “Want to make ten bucks?” It turned out every kid they approached got into the car.
Ma didn’t say anything, only shook her head in a way that made me realize she had finally decided it was hopeless. And if she didn’t have any hope, how could I?
*
A day hadn’t passed between the time the twenty-seventh victim, a seventeen-year-old boy, was last seen and when he was found dead. His mother last saw him mid-afternoon on May 11, and when he didn’t come home that night, she reported him missing at two in the morning. There was no way for her to know that by then, her son was already gone, that less than an hour before she made her report, her child had been found laying against the curb on a street in Dekalb County by a passing motorist. The boy had been both strangled and stabbed, as if the killer wanted to make some kind of point.
“Or as if he was angry,” Ma said.
“But how can you be angry at someone you’d known for hours?”
“The boy may have known his killer. Either way, the killer probably wasn’t angry at the boy. He’s either angry at what he thought the boy represented, or he’s mad at everything that isn’t the way he thinks it ought to be.”
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.