THIRTY-TWO

I was going to go ahead and drive home, but I knew that when I got there I wouldn’t be able to sleep, that I’d just lie there in bed thinking about the case. And the longer I’d lay in bed, the more I’d start thinking about getting a drink. Or worse, thinking about calling up one of the many jerks I’d scored crank from somewhere along the way. Drinking, that would be a mistake. But crank? Baby, that would be a flat-out disaster.

So as I was driving home I called 411, ID-ed myself as a police officer, told them I needed an address.

 

 

The address I’d asked for turned out to be in an old run-down brick apartment complex off of Ponce de Leon Ave. Ponce is a strange area: there are still a couple of old SRO hotels, plus several homeless shelters and halfway houses that keep the area well supplied with drunks and panhandlers and crazies, but there are also plenty of yuppies and Georgia Tech frat boys who come down for the restaurants and nightclubs, and a decent collection of the nipple-ring-and-tattoo set who live in some of the cheaper apartments around. It’s the kind of place where a single woman is well advised to be careful at night.

I pulled in to the parking lot of the apartment complex and looked up at the apartment number I’d gotten from the telephone operator. Apartment D2 was on the top floor of the two-story building, up a flight of rickety wooden steps. The lights were on, so I knocked loudly with my fist.

Nobody answered, so I pounded harder. “Come on, open up.”

Still, nobody answered. I tried the handle. As I expected, it was locked. The front window was open about two inches.

“Lieutenant?” I put my mouth up to the gap in the window. “You home?”

No answer. I could see through the gap. The living room of the apartment was brightly lit, almost dead empty. A cheap stereo sat on the floor, surrounded by CD cases. A La-Z-Boy lounger sat in front of a TV. Over in the kitchenette there was a card table with some dishes on it, and one folding chair.

Otherwise the room was stone empty. “Lieutenant? We need to talk.”

Still no answer. I pulled on the window, and it slid upward about eight inches, then stopped. I stuck my head all the way inside. “Lieutenant? Hello.”

Next thing I knew I was halfway into the room, my feet kicking in the air, my torso wriggling. Why I do things like this, I don’t know. Part of what made me a good street cop is that I’m impulsive. It’s also part of what gets me in trouble. But by the time I decided my initial impulse had been a stupid one, I was already inside the room.

Since the living room was empty, I walked into the short hallway coming off the kitchen. “Hello, hello!” I called. “Don’t shoot, ha ha ha.” There was a bathroom at the end of the hall flanked on each side by a closed door.

I opened one door. The room was dark, so I flipped on the light. The room was entirely bare of furniture, but the walls were covered with racks made of wooden strips with small wooden pegs sticking out of them. On the racks were curved swords, more of them than I could count. I don’t know anything about swords, but my guess was they were Japanese. Some were short, some were long. Most of them were in scabbards, but a few were bare steel blades with no scabbards or handles, just curved arcs of gleaming steel. There must have been close to a hundred swords in the room. A stack of books lay in one corner of the room. I walked over and picked one up, looked inside. There were black and white pictures inside, pictures of sword after sword. I couldn’t read the text, though, because it was all written in Japanese.

I turned off the light, walked into the last room.

There was no furniture in the room other than a bookshelf full of paperbacks and a small desk made out of a wooden door stacked on top of a couple of cheap double-drawer filing cabinets. There was a bed, I noticed, just a rolled-up Army sleeping bag and a thin foam mat over against the window. But the creepy thing about the room was that every surface of the walls was covered with newspaper articles and pictures of children. Most of the kids I recognized—Marquavious Roberts, Evie Marie Prowter, Ronnie Gillis, Jenny Dial—but some of them I didn’t. Some of the articles were new, but most were yellowed and faded. And everywhere I could see little notes scribbled on the paper, some of it new, but some of it so old that the ink had faded almost into invisibility.

I had stood there looking around the room until it hit me. Most of these articles had been cut out of newspapers a long, long time ago. Most of these photographs were old, too, the edges curling up. And the tape holding many of them to the walls was yellowed with age. All of which added up to this: Lt. Gooch had obviously been obsessed with these murders for a long, long, long time. Damn sure, he’d been working the cases a lot longer than the eight months that the Cold Case Unit had been in operation.

I felt cold, like someone had blown on my neck, goosebumps running across my skin.

He’d known all along. Gooch had known and he’d manipulated me from the very beginning, manipulated me into finding that first case, Marquavious Roberts, eased me into it step by step, knowing all along where this thing was heading, never giving me a straight answer to a question, not since the first minute I walked into our dark office over at City Hall East. It had only been a few weeks now, but it felt like forever, like I’d been buried in that dark basement for years with this man.

So was this it? Was this all there was to know about the case? Had I reached the final place he wanted me to get to? Or was there more hidden inside this case, more hidden inside Gooch’s head?

What would make a man obsess over a case like this?

I stood there looking around the room at all the photographs. Most of them, as I said, were kids I already recognized. But there were others I didn’t. A little blond girl in pigtails sitting over the desk, for instance. There were a couple of pictures of her, and several news articles. I was going to read the articles when a terrible feeling washed over me.

Suddenly I felt boxed in, like I was closed up in a space with no air. My breath came raggedly, like I was suffocating. I went over to the window, yanked it open, put my head out into the air. It had finally started to cool a little—as cool as Atlanta gets in July, anyway. I was looking out the back window of the apartment building, looking out into a stand of pine trees that led into a residential neighborhood.

Then I heard a sound. Footsteps coming up the stairs out front of the apartment. Him. Gooch. My heart began beating hard. For a moment I was paralyzed. One thing I was suddenly sure of, as sure of as anything I’ve ever felt, I didn’t want that man finding me nosing around his shrine to all those dead kids. And so, without giving it any thought at all, I put my leg over the sill, climbed out, feeling the brick lip of the sill tearing a hole in my hose. I held onto the sill with my fingers, then let go, and fell down into darkness.