THIRTEEN

Instead of doing my paperwork, I drove my eight-year-old-piece-of-crap Chevrolet Lumina up to Alpharetta, sat in the parking lot of a lowrise industrial park, and waited until a man in a golf shirt and pressed chinos came out. It was David Drobysch. The adoptive father of my little boy. He climbed into a BMW 735i and drove off.

I followed, keeping back a couple of car lengths.

We crawled through the horrible traffic, driving past strip mall after strip mall—Publix supermarkets, Borders Books, Blockbuster Video, one after another—subdivision after subdivision—Bentwood Terrace, Windward Heights, The Meridian, Country Club of the South, Sheltering Farms—me and my son’s father, and all the other happy and prosperous white folks in their imported cars, windows rolled up, air conditioning blasting. It was five-lane roads mostly, or seven, plus the turn lane in the middle.

Eventually David Drobysch turned into one of a thousand subdivisions out there, between two giant pretentious stone gates and a huge faux-brass sign that read, ROSEMONT ORCHARDS II, A TENNIS COMMUNITY. We wound down a bunch of identical streets, not a right angle in sight, curving in and out till you lost track of where you were, past one 5,000-square-foot house after another, all built from one of seven plans, all brick, all two stories, all tricked out with the same palate of stale architectural trickery: eyebrow windows, mansard roofs, plantation shutters, copper flashing, copper downspouts, copper gutters.

Kids played in the streets everywhere. White kids, white kids, white kids, most of them dressed like little gangsters from the ’hood, pants drooping, their small thick-ankled legs sticking out of baggy shorts.

The BMW pulled into the concrete driveway in front of one the huge brick houses. An eyebrow window in the middle of the sloping roof gave the place a face—the perplexed, vacuous expression of a giant cyclops.

I drove past the house without stopping, my heart beating way too fast. It took me ten minutes to find my way out of the subdivision.

 

 

When I got home I logged on to the computer to look at my boy. Or I tried to, anyway. But when I hit the button for his Web page, an error message came up. Error 404, page not found.

Suddenly I was fuming. Had they put some sort of trap on the page so that if I tried to dig past the firewalls, they’d find out and yank the page on me? Did that mean that David and Nancy Drobysch now knew that I knew who they were? Did it mean. . . . There was no telling what it meant. Maybe nothing. Maybe they were updating the page. Maybe their server was down. It could be any of a thousand things. I sat there in a rage, staring at the white, empty screen.

Finally I cut my Internet connection, started typing up a report for the Marquavious Roberts murder. When I was done, I went in the kitchen and microwaved myself a bowl of Chicken Voila!, then sat on my exercise bike, riding and riding as I ate the bland dinner.

When I was done, I felt unsatisfied in a thousand tiny ways.

Marquavious Roberts. I’d solved a case, at least. That was something. Maybe that poor child would rest better now that his killer had gone down.

But still, something nagged at me. Solving the Marquavious Roberts case had seemed so easy. Maybe too easy. I realized I’d never absorbed the facts of the case, not to the level I had with Evie Marie Prowter’s case, anyway.

So I went back and sat down with the file, going through it page by page. It was amazing how many things I hadn’t noticed the first time around. Like for instance it was the same detective, Lt. Roy Bevis, that would go on to work Evie Marie’s case four years later. The autopsy had been done by the same person, too, Dr. Vale Pleassance, MD, Assistant Medical Examiner, Fulton County, Diplomate of the American College of Forensic Pathologists.

But when I got to the ME’s report, read it over a second time—and then a third and then a fourth and then a fifth—I started to get a sick feeling. Sick and angry and ashamed all at the same time.

I picked up the phone, called a number. When the person I was calling picked up, I said, “You knew! How did you know, you son of a bitch?” I said. I could hear breathing, but no answer. “You creepy sick diseased liar.”