Those Bones Are Not My Child (70 page)

Logan came over, looking ill. “One’s arguing that the identification took so long because the young man had been castrated. The other insists there’s no way to cut a man to look like a woman. They don’t seem to understand the condition bodies are in fished from the river.” His voice caught at the end and he hurried off toward the men’s room.

Clara took Logan’s place in line and kept her ears open. Mattie went in search of Bible Man. She was sure he’d gone behind the lockers, but when she reached the area near gate 1, there was only a couple sitting on upended suitcases sharing a Danish. Mattie leaned against the travel-insurance counter and surveyed the depot for Bible Man. Then something the man seated on the black alligator suitcase said caught her attention. The couple were discussing hypnosis. In the Vernon Jordan case, an employee of General Telephone was able to recall the license of a car seen just before the sniping. She didn’t recognize the other cases, amnesia victims able to describe their attackers or remember causative traumas under hypnosis. But when they began discussing federal guidelines governing the use of hypnosis on witnesses, Mattie saw an opening.

“Do you think the testimony of the Innis witness will hold up under hypnosis?”

They both turned immediately, eyes wide and eyebrows raised; then the woman laughed. “Funny you should mention that,” she said, rummaging in her handbag. “We were talking about that less than five minutes ago. How I’d love to audit that session.”

“You’re forensic psychologists?” Mattie looked from the man to the woman.

“Close,” he answered, placing two fingers against his temple and staring off at the arrivals/departures sign. “I have the feeling, yes, it’s coming clear as a picture. A group of pilgrims from Chicago will be parading past any minute now.”

“A mentalist,” the woman said. “Nightclub act. Vegas.”

“Mostly kiddie parties,” the man demurred.

“You in the business?” The woman was eyeing the jewelry Mattie had neglected to remove for the night’s activities. “Well, I’ll tell you what I think,” she continued when Mattie shook her head no. She withdrew a small square of newsprint from her wallet and unfolded it. “I
think the McGill woman is already in an altered state and that she volunteered to undergo hypnosis in an effort to be deprogrammed.”

Mattie bent to look at the photograph. It was the right Shirley McGill, but there was nothing in her expression that spelled brainwashing. She nodded anyway. And when she looked up, Logan was leaning against the lockers listening to the woman on the suitcase.

“You’re in town to investigate?” he asked.

“Heck no,” the woman said. “We’ve been back and forth all year here trying to build the southeast regional of the National Association of Magicians.” She produced a spread of aces from under the photo, then looked up and laughed, hunching the man. “Ahhh, I see what you’re thinking, madam, and mindreading isn’t even part of my act. We only entertain children. Neither of us have ever hypnotized a child, though they make the best subjects.”

“You think that’s what’s been happening?” Mattie glanced over at Logan and continued. “Do you work with deprogrammers, or have you had any experience with cults?”

“None at all,” the man said, turning to look at Logan, who in that split second moved away, disappearing around the side of the lockers. “But I think—
we
think,” he corrected himself, bowing from the waist to his companion, “that a cult is an angle; definitely hypnosis. But it would be impossible for the police to question everyone with that ability these days, not with every magazine under the sun offering correspondence courses.” He got up, set his case flat on the floor, and sprung the lock. “Health magazines, metaphysical magazines, and look, even comic books.”

Mattie reached in and withdrew a magazine she’d seen quite a bit of that afternoon on screen.

“Oh, those.” The woman made a face, then clamped her mouth and imitated a barf. “Those
Soldier of Fortune
magazines especially.”

“What’s your angle in the children’s case?” The man looked up. “Are you one of the mothers?” He exchanged a worried look with his companion. “Reporter?”

Mattie concentrated on ads with local PO boxes. One mail order for a house offering a series of learning tapes had a familiar ring from Marzala’s niece Gloria talking about her boyfriend, a tech whiz.

“Are you with the police?” the woman asked. “Is that your interest in the case?”

“This is my home,” Mattie answered.

“Yes, it must be hard,” they both murmured.

“Well,” the woman said, brushing crumbs from her lap, “I think the McGill witness was programmed by the drug cult she worked with. I really do. And I also think she’s key in the solution of the case. I don’t believe the police dismissed her story as quickly as the press reports.”

“Keep it,” the man said to Mattie. “Keep the whole copy. I get the feeling … yes, a definite picture is coming through …” He gazed off in the direction of the game arcade with one finger pressed against his temple. “… that you are about to take a correspondence course in hypnosis.”

“You’re good.” Mattie winked.

The boys had no heart to go walking. Dave didn’t either. It was all they could do to keep to their schedule.

“This street’s a dead end.” Jonesy was dancing the dance of hot wires.

“Ezra Church Road,” Raymond said, pulling his visor down and his shoulders in. “And it’s raining.”

“You see something, Mr. Morris?” Eddie stuck close.

It was only a hedge. But the damage was noticeable. Smoothly clipped in a boxy shape, the hedge was separated in the middle by a rough, bushy section where the twigs were snapped white. Leaves were scattered on the sidewalk below, and dirt had been kicked up. Had a child run through toward that house? A block captain sign was in the window. Had the pursuer crashed through, not giving a fuck, right there in plain view of the living-room window?

“Wait here a minute.” Dave went up the front walk.

But they didn’t wait. They recognized the area from the map. One of the two Rogers boys had lived on the block. They followed the youth worker up the front walk and hung back by the mailbox while he knocked on the burglar door. Eddie was the first to go all the way up on the stoop. He found the bell and rang it, then stepped back when Dave glared.

“Whattya think?” Raymond leapt onto the stoop next to Eddie when Dave went in. He stood on tiptoe in an attempt to see downtown over the roofs of the neighborhood. The good-looking girl he’d gotten
a chance to talk to before leaving the fancy estate had said that she was going to a party downtown.

“Think what?” Jonesy danced along the walk. He held his elbows in close to his sides as he spun, his shirttails fanning out from his waist.

“Think the cops are holding the McGill lady and just cooked up the story that Innis is a stiff to sucker the cult Klan?”

No one answered right away. From inside the house the “Let’s Keep Pulling Together, Atlanta” tune was playing on TV.

“I hate that song.” Eddie shivered.

They were silent again, huddled together under the metal awning watching the rain speckle the gray cement walk, each picturing the scene that played over and over on TV. Black and white citizens of all ages holding fast to a rope in a tug-of-war against an invisible team, pulling hard on the rope, some smiling, some seriously straining, pulling up the hill in the sunshine. But what was being dragged up on the other end of that rope? The ten-second public announcement was supposed to be reassuring. It gave them the creeps.

“I say the Al Starkes guy will blow the thing open. The cops keep saying so-and-so was last seen at such a place, and he jumps in every time with ‘Wrong.’ That mug’s swift. He’s got the information. He catches them every time they slip up and give out stupid information. He lets Innis take the weight when they want somebody to look bad. Starkes’s the brain. They ask him what he’s up to, and he says, ‘Our agents are in the field.’ Smooth. All right, all right.” Eddie and Raymond slapped fist.

“I can’t relate to that,” Jonesy said. “I say they got a safe house somewhere, holing up with the witness. I bet you Starkes and Innis got outstepped and don’t even know where the cops and them got her.”

“Hmm,” Eddie said, and the three watched the walk darken.

“I bet it comes out something like Mr. Morris said, though. Say two or three Bloods were dealing smack in ’Nam and after they got out they worked their way into the Florida-Georgia drug gang. Say one of them got into that kung fu mystical stuff over there, so now over here they’re dealing dope and doing some deep religious shit and stuff. So it’s a mix—Mafia, spics, dope, spades, religious stuff, ’cause—everybody deals. And when it comes to money, them cult Klan jokes don’t give a shit about race hate. Say they got little kids carrying the goods. And say this McGill lady don’t like what’s going down and books.”

“Wait up. Don’t forget one of her girlfriends got offed for dipping in the strongbox. That’s what made her split.”

“Okay. So the group gets her to do something to keep her quiet.”

“Like drink blood or eat a dead—”

“Man, shut up. Like take part in some low-down sex stuff or one of them rituals like we saw.”

“Like killing one of the kids, or witnessing it, holding him down or something.”

“Say they made her stuff the plastic bag down the kid’s throat. She won’t talk after that. She’s scared.”

“So she goes to Florida and keeps her mouth shut and maybe dabbles a little at the drug end but stays away from the sacrifice-cult part. But then the reward starts looking good.”

“Wait up. First her boyfriend phones and says something about the group’s going to grab some retarded guys. She don’t pay him no mind. But come March, Eddie Duncan, Larry Rogers, Mike McIntosh, Jimmy Ray Payne—”

“Them guys ain’t retarded.”

“Would you shut up. The papers say retarded and she’s in Florida, so what does she know? Okay, so then she better get something at her back before she makes her move for the reward.”

“She hears from somebody that Innis is into guns.”

“I heard he was getting guns for that African guy, Idi Amin.”

“Okay, so then the cops hear her story and they got to keep her alive to talk at the trial.”

“Yeah. So they hole up in one of them fleabag hotels,” Jonesy said out of the side of his mouth.

The three were quiet again, gazing off in the direction of downtown. Hanging over a building under construction that shot up through the dark blue haze of the city’s neon was a tower crane, its rectangular bar squatting among the rust-red girders of the building like a monster mosquito driving its suckers in, draining the building white.

“Yeah,” Eddie said, wriggling in his jacket, “a fleabag hotel.”

They could see it. A naked light bulb dangling from the pockmarked ceiling. A bottle of cheap whiskey on the dresser. The hotel sign blinking off and on alongside the window. Shirley McGill chainsmoking in an uncomfortable chair by the closet, away from the window, away from the door. She ain’t happy. She ain’t talking.

One of the bodyguards tips his chair back against the wall. He’s got an automatic across his lap pointed at the window. Another bodyguard, with a hip leather holster strapped across his chest, pours a drink of the cheap whiskey in one of those plastic hotel glasses. He sits half-assed on the dresser, watching the television. The sound is low.

Maynard Jackson is pacing back and forth sweating like Edmond O’Brien in that movie, D.O.A. He asks a lot of intelligent questions. Real polite, not trying to be tough or anything. Smiling in fact, the way he always does in case any minute he might shake hands with somebody who voted for him. He wouldn’t be drinking any of the cheap whiskey, at least not from one of those glasses. Maybe he’d unwrap a glass and rinse it good to drink some Tab.

“Think Maynard carries a piece?”

“Hunh? I was thinking, I hate plastic cups. They split ’fore you can get your head bad.”

They couldn’t picture Commissioner Brown drinking or carrying a piece either, or sweating, or pacing. They placed him in the bathroom doorway to catch the breeze. Bathrooms had to be guarded. The killers might be across the way with a telescopic sight ready to plug the witness when she got up to pee. Then, just when everybody was looking at
Hee Haw
, one of the killers would zip across on a cat-burglar wire and kick in the window. Maybe he’d get off two shots before Commissioner Brown could wheel around and plug him.

“You think Brown packs heat?”

“Naaah.”

“ ’Posed to, ain’t he? He’s the top cop.”

Jonesy put the smoking gun in Chief Napper’s hand and placed him on the toilet tank, unseen by the killers with the binoculars. But the gun didn’t seem right in Napper’s hand either.

“What about that FBI dude that cooled Innis out? He must carry a piece, hunh?”

“He a jerk. Bet you he empty the trash just like the brother in the movie this afternoon. Come out when they need a nigger for shit detail.”

“But wait up. None of Maynard’s bodyguards look like they carry pieces to me. They too pretty in them suits. Black belts or something. Wouldn’t mess up their threads with a bulge.”

“I wouldn’t want to be Shirley McGill,” Eddie said, leaning against
the burglar bar. He could hear Dave talking with the people inside. “Uhhh, where you figure we go from here?”

“Up to Lake Forrest Drive. Just before you get to 285, you run into Lake Placid by the Windmere Apartments. That’s where the fat lady in the gypsy getup said to check.”

“Who got offed from up that way?”

“Nobody yet. Some Klan-cult joker who deals drugs live up that way.”

“What time is it?” Eddie pressed against the wrought iron and peered through the pane of the front door.

“You punkin’ out?”

“Naw, I just gotta get home.”

“He’s punkin’ out, the punk.”

When Dave opened the door, Raymond and Jonesy had Eddie in a double headlock, wrassling him down the stairs. The shaft of light fell across the walk from the foyer. They heard Dave clear his throat. The two danced Eddie toward the bushes, playfully rubbing his head, jabbing him in the stomach on the sly.