Chapter 5

 

I parked on the shoulder behind a half-dozen police cars, and carefully made my way along a path that slanted sharply down the steep overgrown bank to a wooded bend in the river. Broom and Cassandra stood on the bank. The highway roared above us, almost directly over our heads. Cassandra nodded. “We sure are seeing a lot of you lately, handsome.” 

“Yeah, I guess so. Sorry it always has to involve someone dying.” 

“That’s the biz we’re in,” she said. 

Broom beckoned me over to where he stood. A young evidence tech worked nearby with a digital camera, reviewing her work. She was a light-skinned black girl, very thin, with big doe eyes. She reminded me of my mother, dead five years now. 

“The mounted patrol says a fisherman found her a couple of hours ago.” 

I looked down the bank toward the spot where the dead girl’s body had been found. It was a weedy and overgrown place. Litter clung to the high weeds, deposited by the waters of the river when the rain swelled them, and left to mingle with the other detritus when the waters receded again. The Cahaba River flowed straight through the middle of Birmingham, and the river knew all the city’s secret sins. 

At one time, the Cahaba River had flowed past the fledgling town, nourishing and feeding its farms and industries; it had been the city’s life’s blood. Now, it is a largely forgotten estuary, below the level of the highways that carries the masses to and fro over the tenements, the slums, and the fallow lands left vacant by decades of urbanization. The commerce flows on the highways that arches over the Cahaba’s slow and forgotten waters. The long rivers of pavement carry the never-ceasing flood of cargo out of the factories in Leeds, in Ensley, in Fairfield, to the world beyond. No need for a river anymore. 

The city had been born because the elbow of a river is a great place to set up shop. Here, enterprising business men had founded a settlement, nurtured by the river that would provide the labor for their mills and mines. The river provided water, transportation, motive force. Those industries had prospered and the settlement had grown to a town, the town to a city. But now Birmingham had outgrown its old friend, the river. Now, the waste of the city came to rest here: empty oil drums, wine bottles, the odd boot, all bobbing along in the Cahaba’s dirty currents. What the city used up found its way here, to eventually sink in the forgotten waters. 

So it came as little surprise to the detectives of Homicide Division when the body of an unknown girl was found drifting in the swilling black water. She, too, had been used up and cast aside. The very presence of her body told much about how she ended up there. Her young frame showed that she had completed the cycle of a long slow death, a tortured journey of long misuse. She wasn’t the first, and she wouldn’t be the last. 

Now they would have to find her killer, or at least try. She had a single identifying mark, revealed when the evidence technicians rolled her body over, a tattoo on her left shoulder blade that read “Dixie.” Crossed above it was a tiny confederate flag on a pole and a red rose. Her long blonde hair was the color of straw, and bits of leaves and other unclean things clung within its tresses. Her open eyes were like dull blue oysters. 

“Country girl,” mused Cassandra.

“Maybe she used to be.” Broom pointed an index finger that was the size of a roll of quarters at the inside of the dead girl’s arm. “See those needle marks? It’s been a while since she was down on the farm.” 

“Poor kid, she can’t be twenty-five. What a shame.” Cassandra shook her head. 

I said nothing. I was remembering another dead girl with needle marks on her arms. She hadn’t quite been twenty-five, either. But I tried to put that thought away. 

Broom turned to me and put a hand on my shoulder. “Sorry, Roland, I know this is tough. Let’s see if she’s your girl.” 

They gently turned her over. She hadn’t been in the water long. Her friends and family, if she had any, would still easily recognize her. The old anger crawled up in my gut again when I saw the look that was frozen on her face, a frightened, lost look. I had seen that same lost look on the face of someone I’d cared for, someone who had died with a needle in her arm. 

Lena. 

Lena Walker was the name of a girl who’d been lost, and I had found, who was sinking slowly in the muck she had made of her life. I had thought that I could save her, but I had been wrong. I looked at this dead girl, now, and saw many of Lena’s mistakes, written in the telltale signs of her own slow decline. 

The red anger that welled up in my heart, in part came from the fact someone hadn’t even tried to help this girl. Instead, they had allowed her to slowly die in this hard and dirty way, and threw what was left of her away, like so much rubbish. I suddenly wanted very badly to find the ones responsible, and make them sorry for what they had done. 

Not your case, my eternally nagging inner voice told me. This one’s Broom’s. He’ll handle it. Let her go. 

I heaved a heavy sigh. “Thanks, Les. But she’s not the one. They look enough alike to be sisters, but it isn’t her.” 

All the little parts of the last forty-eight hours swirled like a tempest in my head: Baucom and the dead man, Bowman, who looked like two peas from the same pod; Senator Patrick’s reckless daughter, slumming somewhere in Atlanta where Bowman had lived and worked; and Bowman, who ended up in front of Sally’s Diner, just in time for me to watch him die. 

I had watched him die across the street from Sally’s Diner, where Baucom sat patiently waiting to talk to me about meeting Mr. Washington. If Lester Broom didn’t like coincidences, I downright despised them. Questions were already piling up, way too quickly. What I wanted was answers. If Bowman had somehow been involved in Patrick’s daughter’s disappearance, maybe he was waiting to talk to me, or perhaps even to Baucom. 

I had no facts, and was merely speculating. Whatever Bowman had known died with him. Something told me he was mixed up in the case, though. Since I was heading over to Atlanta, anyway, I reasoned that I might as well pay a visit to Bowman’s partner, and find out what he knew.