Out of the Blues Page 2

  Uniform supervisors and the rest of the two shifts from Homicide began arriving. Salt spotted Sergeant Huff and the crime scene techs. More people milled behind the tape. “Where’s my baby?” One woman ran from the group as word spread that it was the body of a child. Another uniform stood to one side with an elderly can man and his industrial-sized plastic bags of recyclables. “Grunge found the victim and started yelling,” said the first officer, nodding at the old man.

  Salt and Hamm stood at the blanket, which smelled of old garbage. The dog’s barking kept up, coming from somewhere north of them. “Ivory need to shut up,” someone said from above. Overhead, the limbs of a massive pecan tree spread up and out, shading thirty yards in both directions. The ravine bed was dark with past years’ slough and brackish puddles. The banks became increasingly dry closer to the top and were covered with tiny green sprigs, the fallen flowers of pollen from the big tree overhead. The woman who was looking for her child screamed from the street, “I can’t find him. Help me, somebody!”

  “This is going to get bad. I’m going to go set up a command post in the parking lot,” Huff said, and pointed above. Hamm nodded and went around the blanket. “I want you to come with me,” he told Salt, “but go take a look first.” He nodded to the other side of the blanket. The dog’s bark was more insistent. Salt’s shoe made a sucking sound as she turned.

  The light-skinned boy was facedown on his right cheek, hunched with his buttocks bare, tan shorts around his calves. His hands were positioned as if he were going to push up. Except for some rust-colored smears on his backside, there was no obvious trauma. “You didn’t have to see this,” Hamm said in a low voice, not looking up from her note taking.

  “I know.” Salt left her and followed Huff up and out of the ravine. “Merrily We Roll Along” played over and over from an ice cream truck’s plinky speaker. The sun shone through the canopy of mostly water oaks, their small leaves whirl-a-jigging in the bright breeze. Huff assigned the six investigators and five uniforms to a grid search for evidence and witnesses. They were to interview anyone and everyone and make notes.

  No one had to say it, but the Atlanta Child Murders were on everyone’s mind. From 1979 to 1981 more than twenty black boys and girls were killed, and their deaths still haunted the city, especially the APD. Atlanta had been forced into a conversation about race then while the city’s police tried to avoid distraction from the work. They finally broke the case when Wayne Williams, a young black man, was arrested. He had lured the children with the promise of a music audition. Even though the murders had stopped after he was arrested, and physical evidence solidified his guilt, some people weren’t convinced the murderers hadn’t been the KKK or other racist crazies.

  Salt was assigned to search the ravine north of the scene. The leather shoulder holster crisscrossed her new shirt—she’d left her jacket in the car and hadn’t thought to remind anyone that she’d not been issued a Handie-Talkie with a detective frequency. She began her part of the search, looking back once to see Hamm kneeling next to the dead child. She realized that she’d been assigned an area where she’d be least likely to encounter any witnesses or evidence, but it felt right to her to head in the direction of the barking that had been distracting her since their arrival. Reminding herself to stay focused on the terrain, to look for anything that could be significant, even if it just looked like trash or newly turned leaves, she slowed her quickened step toward the dog, his bark becoming raspy.

  The murdered children had begun turning up right after her father died. Scared, she’d gotten the idea that the children wouldn’t have been killed if he’d still been alive and on the job. Her brother, who was only seven at the time, talked about the murders constantly and wouldn’t go to sleep in his own bed.

  She came to a place where the ravine rim was about eight feet above and found freshly turned marks in the red clay bank. The dog’s barks were closer and coming from directly above. Pulling herself up by tree roots, she climbed out into a backyard Bible grotto. There were homemade signs everywhere warning of the coming Rapture, of hellfire, of the opportunity for salvation and predictions of doom. A white dog barked at the bottom of wooden steps that led to the back of a house. He turned his head, almost as if he were expecting her, wondering what took her so long, then turned back to bark at a screen door at the top of the steps. He was a large dog, uncommonly clean, more cream than white, some shepherd mix with a plumy tail held high.

  “Ivory,” she called, remembering the comment from the crowd. A doll’s head was nailed to a tree trunk on her right. “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” read a framed hand-lettered message, dangling from a tree limb by a sash.

  “Here, Ivory.”

  The dog barked up the steps.

  At a bricked-off blueberry bush there was a stake in the form of a cross, draped with a necklace of baby pacifiers. “Jesus wept” was painted in red on a flat stone. The sides of the yard were enclosed by pines bent inward, heavy with kudzu so thick the sounds from the neighborhood were muffled, almost shut out.

  “Ivory.” She lowered her voice.

  Through more signs, some hanging from tree branches, there was a path of sorts, bordered by toy parts, broken trucks, pieces of balls, plastic blocks, a pink doll’s bed.

  Ivory held his tail high, his front paws on the second step. The back of the house had been covered with chicken wire through which had been braided what looked like old clothes. It gave the appearance of quilting. Ivory was well groomed, his coat smooth and lush, but his tail had picked up some catkins that clung to the long, feathery fur. She approached him, patting her leg, which he sniffed, and he ceased barking. He allowed her to rub his ears and pat down his back. She was careful at his tail, pulling at one of the sprigs caught in his fur, examining it in the palm of her hand.

  The door above opened. An elderly man wearing a brown pin-striped suit and red tie stood holding a worn Bible. He began to laugh. He was small and stiff in his composure, his skin the same color as his suit. He bent to his knees laughing, and as he did, an enormous presence came from behind him, rushing past and launching from the porch toward Salt.

  She managed a break fall onto her back and tried to use the momentum to continue into a backward roll, but it was all she could do to get her knees between herself and the huge man before he was on her, one of his hands at her throat and the other clawing toward the gun beneath her arm. She became aware of the sound of her own breath and his heavy grunt, both amplified and muffled like the roar from inside a seashell. One of his exhalations filled her nose and mouth with the taste and smell of sour milk. She felt the thick cotton threads of his shirt fabric as she grabbed his collar for leverage. She pushed the soles of her feet against his stomach, pulling his chest down and pushing up, and used his weight to propel him over and away as she rolled up into a ready combat stance.

  “Fuck,” she said when she realized that on her first day as a detective she’d made a mistake worse than the stupidest rookie. She’d failed to check out a radio. “Call 911,” she implored the old man, while she tried to catch a breath and crouched in anticipation of the man now rising from the ground. If she’d just told Hamm to wait for her to grab a radio, she could be calling for help. She scanned the yard and sides of the house for a way out as he got up, his eyes searching the sky, unfocused like he was blind, yet he aimed himself at her. The dog was quiet now, but the old man threw back his head and either laughed or howled as she sidestepped and her assailant stumbled past, turned, and rushed her again. Salt pivoted, looking for some advantage as the big man came at her. But her left foot caught on Christmas lights strung at knee level between two bushes. Before she could untangle, he wrapped his meaty arms around her shoulders and chest and was falling to the ground on top of her. As they accelerated downward, the man drew back the fist of his other hand while she fumbled to get ahold of th
e fat fingers holding her neck. The blow glanced off her left cheek just as she turned her head and leveraged her weight against his fingers and wrist. He grunted and tried to jerk away at an angle that caused him even more pain. She swiveled from under him and into another ready stance.

  There was no exit she could see and she was backed against the rim of the ravine, breathing hard, balancing each foot as she moved backward and closer to the edge. If she pulled her weapon she knew he’d go for it, and then she’d have to use it or he’d take it. He ran at her, and at the last instant, when he towered over her, his sweat flying into her eyes, she reached out and pulled his arm straight and used it as a fulcrum to throw him over and into the ravine below. Momentum took her with him in as controlled a fall as she could manage, knowing that if she was lucky and quick, she’d have half a chance. As they dropped she pulled at the cuff pouch on her left shoulder strap. Air whooshed from his lungs as they thudded onto the ground. Her fingers found the bracelets as she landed on his back, and before he could inhale she had one cuff around his right wrist. Using the cuff against his wrist bone for pain compliance, she jerked his forearm, bent it back, and snapped the second cuff around his other wrist.

  She rolled off him, sat up, and looked at the rim of the bank some eight feet above where the old man, laughing still, stood beside the dog. She touched her stinging cheek with a dirt-streaked hand. Her new pants were torn at one knee, the linen shirt gaped where the buttons had been torn off, but she wasn’t bleeding. She couldn’t see any bloody injury on her assailant, who was rapidly gaining consciousness. She pulled him to a sitting position. His head was shaved to stubble, his face round, pink, and greasy with oily sweat. He had on matching workmen’s tan shirt and pants, new-looking and freshly dirtied from their fight. And there were smears of some unidentifiable substance on the front around his zipper.

  “Alone,” he said breathless. “Why they send you alone?”

  “What’s your name?” She stood up, trying to control her now trembling arms and legs.

  “I am The Baby, Jesus.”

  She pushed at his back and pulled him to standing. “What’s his name?” She yelled to the man above, who only put his hand to his waist, now bent with maniacal laughter that echoed down the bank.

  —

  THE MAN sang Stevie Wonder’s “Ebony and Ivory” as they walked back down the ravine. He insisted he be identified as “The Baby, Jesus,” not “Baby Jesus” or “The Baby Jesus” but—and he was adamant—it was “The Baby, Jesus.” Fine, Salt just needed his compliance as they trudged to the scene. “Ivory white like me,” he substituted some of the lyrics. His accent was stone black projects, missing verbs and mangling tenses. “You should shoot me.”

  She didn’t want to expose TBJ to the crowd and therefore wanted to bring him out north of the scene. When she could see the light color of the blanket curtain in the distance, she veered toward the ravine bank. It was rough going to get the large handcuffed man enough momentum to reach the random footholds. “Left foot,” she said pointing to an exposed root and hefting his arm as he planted his boot. At the top the crowd was thirty yards or so south of where she brought him out, and they weren’t noticed. But they’d come up and out in the common area of the apartments where the command post had now been established.

  It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, given the city’s still painful memories of the Child Murders, that quite a few city politicians and the chief of the department would, along with most of his command staff, converge on the scene, if only to assure the media and community that every resource would be made available to find the culprit. So it was just as the chief exited his car, camera people on his heels getting footage for the evening news, that Salt, abraded and covered in filth, emerged with The Baby, Jesus from between two apartment buildings. “Who’s this, Salt?” Chief asked. When he’d come to her hospital room last year after she’d been shot, he’d already known her street name, a contraction of Sarah Alt as it appeared on her first uniform name tag, “S.Alt.”

  “The Baby, Jesus,” answered the suspect for himself.

  “Of course, Baby, I thought that was you.” The chief raised his eyebrows at her.

  “You need any assistance?” He turned to his driver and motioned for him to attend to Salt.

  “Sorry, sir,” she said. “This is my first day in Homicide and I hadn’t gotten a radio yet. If you could ask someone to radio for Sergeant Huff, I believe The Baby, Jesus is our suspect.”

  “Yes, I killed, murdered, homicided that baby boy there in the gully in the ditch. I choked and crushed the baby right out of his air.”

  “Shit,” said the chief.

  “Film at six,” said some wiseass from the media scrum as they turned in unison and ran toward their trucks.

  —

  “I HAD TO look it up, too,” she told them. “They’re called ‘catkins,’ those little dangles that fall from the pecan trees. It’s why some people don’t want pecan trees—they’re messy in spring. I have pecan trees at my place, so I noticed. The tree where the boy was found was the only pecan along the ravine.”

  “Catkins in the dog’s tail,” repeated Huff.

  “But why did you go to that house?” Hamm asked. “Not that I’m in any way complaining. Thank you, Rookie Detective, for clearing this certain-it-was-going-to-be-a-red-ball-on-my-head case, not to mention he’d probably be a serial kind of guy as well.”

  “The dog,” Salt said. “The dog kept barking. I heard someone in the crowd say, ‘What’s Ivory barking at?’”

  “Did you go in the house?”

  “No, Sar—sir. He came out after me.”

  “We tried to interview the old man who lives there,” Hamm said. “He’s way, way off his rocker and supposed to be monitored by some home health-care company. I think the house is a group home.”

  “Well, I don’t know how you’re going to write this up. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as relieved as Hamm to have this guy in the Gray Bar, but we’re counting on those blood smears on his pants to come back a match for the kid, ’cause flowers in a mutt’s fur ain’t exactly what juries expect in these days of ‘Atlanta CSI.’” He made air quotes again and tipped his chair forward. “Thank God for his spontaneous admission to the chief, crazy as that was.” He shook his head and stood. “I leave the articulation to you ladies.” He tapped the thickening blue file on the conference room table and left the room.

  “You’re a mess.” Hamm smiled at her. “A fine mess, and I need to get some photos of you before you even wash your face.” She used her Handie-Talkie to call for a tech to take the photos. “But while we wait, Salt, here’s some more advice you didn’t ask for. You and I work different shifts, so I can’t help you much. You might hope this gets you off on the right foot here, solving this case on your first day.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Let me finish. It won’t. These guys are all all right, but they, most of them, have been burned by the Homicide fires too many times to appreciate any gift horse. You get what I’m saying?”

  “All I did—”

  “Salt, I don’t care. They don’t care. They’ll be lookin’ all up in your mouth and hoping that the next dog you hear barkin’ will be at a wrong tree. They want you burned and scarred, tattooed and branded to their brotherhood. Do not be talking about how you knew how to find this guy by the burrs in a barking dog’s tail.” Hamm lowered her head. “And, I’m sorry. I didn’t check to find out if you’d had time to get a radio. My bad. And yours. You got to stand up for yourself, even with me. And thanks for being stand-up and not mentioning it.”

  —

  SALT HUNG her father’s coat on a plastic peg beside the desk and sat down in the chair, which dropped suddenly to one side due to a missing wheel. She opened the gray metal bin above the desk and the drawers below, all empty except for some brittle rubber bands and bent paper clips. She picked up t
he thin file labeled “Michael Richard Anderson—861430587,” her first assigned case. Other than the autopsy report, which listed the cause and manner of death as “Accidental drug overdose,” the initial uniform reporting form, a short investigative report by the responding detective, and an envelope of scene photos, there wasn’t much to the file except for the new information that had prompted the follow-up Huff was assigning to her. The recent documents were first in the file and described the circumstances under which a new statement had been obtained from Curtis Dwayne Stone, who was doing time in federal custody. Salt looked up from the document and said the name out loud, “Stone.” She’d left The Homes, but it seemed The Homes would not leave her. She had been the one who’d arrested Curtis Stone.

  Under federal sentencing guidelines, those convicted of federal crimes were eligible to have their time reduced if they gave reliable information about other criminals and crimes.

  “So, my man Stone, you’re snitching now,” she said, turning to the next document, Stone’s signed statement.

  She pushed a switch over the cubicle desk and a fluorescent light flickered across the transcribed pages.

  Q: For the record, my name is Lawrence Jones, Special Agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I am recording this interview. Please state your name.

  A: Stone.

  Q: Curtis Dwayne Stone?

  Salt lifted her gaze from the page, closing her eyes, her memory reigniting the odor of gunpowder, replaying the bleating of a sheep. Stone had been The Homes gang member who was feared most. In her rookie days she’d witnessed the destitution of his childhood, and then it seemed he had determined it would be better for her to fear rather than pity him. Over the years he’d found opportunities to try to threaten her—finally last year assaulting her in her home. “Stone,” she said, and returned to the page.