If that didn’t happen, Quindaro would eventually claim it. Young kids would break in to see where the bodies had fallen. Drug dealers and gangbangers would turn it into a free-trade zone to be shared with rats. The weeds would grow tall, the roof would leak, the concrete would crack, and the foundation would sag. The city would place liens on it for unpaid taxes, fine the unknown and absent owner for code violations, and let the property deteriorate, telling whoever complained that the city didn’t have the money to fix it up or tear it down. The people who’d lived there had died in an instant. The house would take longer.
I found the light switch in the front room. The warped hardwood?oor had purpled where blood had been left to soak into the planks. Except for the bodies that had been removed, it was otherwise just as I had seen it two nights ago.
I walked through the house again, stopping in the kitchen, at the top of the stairs, and in the bedrooms, imagining Keyshon eating his breakfast, taking a bath, and sleeping as his mother checked on him one last time before she went to bed. The clothes still hung in the closet where I’d found him clutched in his mother’s arms, more dried blood the only testimony to what had happened in that small, dim space. His mother was dead. His father was dead. It was as if he’d never lived. There was no one to remember him.
That’s why I was there. To make certain someone did.
Chapter Twenty
The dog wasn’t in the house or in the backyard. I stood beneath the tree where Ruby had found the money, the ground now hard and rutted, turning in a slow circumference to get a sense of who and what could have been seen that night. The houses on either side were dark.
LaDonna Simpson, elderly and deaf, had probably gone to bed. Wayne Miller was still in jail, his girlfriend Tarla Hicks most likely out on the town. A light was on in the back of Latrell Kelly’s house, though I didn’t see anyone moving through the half-open drapes.
Using the tree as twelve o’clock, Latrell’s house was at eleven o’clock. The figure I’d seen, or thought I’d seen, running away was headed on a bearing at one o’clock, a path that would have taken him between the two houses to the north of Latrell’s. The backyards of those houses weren’t fenced.
I did a quick inventory. Neither Marcellus’s nor Wayne Miller’s backyards were enclosed. LaDonna Simpson’s and Latrell Kelly’s were. The man had run away from the scene and away from the fences, choosing the path of least resistance.
I walked the route I assumed the man would have taken, rousing dogs that patrolled their patches of turf from behind chain link or at the end of sturdy ropes. Most of them were big and aggressive-Dobermans, rottweilers, or a mix. None of them were friendly. I thought back to Monday night, not recalling the sound of barking, realizing that the helicopter would have drowned out the dogs’ noise. Whoever had been running away had cut his escape quite close. If I hadn’t wandered into Marcellus’s backyard, the helicopter’s searchlight may have found him.
I stopped on the sidewalk in front of Latrell’s house. The dogs had quieted, the low hum of late-season cicadas filling the void. A third of the moon hung in the sky, cool light on a cool night, the seasons shifting from summer to fall, an easy passage marked by hard dying.
The house next door to his would have blocked Latrell’s view to the north, making it impossible for him to have seen the?eeing man. Though he had told Ammara Iverson that he was asleep at the time the murders were committed, he would have been awakened by the sirens, as was everyone else in the neighborhood. Someone should have seen the man. I hoped that the follow-up canvassing had produced a witness that made him real.
My hope triggered another memory, one of omission, the kind that made me instinctively distrust every eyewitness I’d ever interrogated. I was looking for evidence of someone who may have committed the murders or been a witness to them; someone who might have seen Oleta Phillips standing beneath the tree, her hands bunched around bundles of twenty-dollar bills; someone who may have killed her for what she’d seen, not for the money she held. There was possibly no one more important to the investigation of these crimes and yet I hadn’t breathed a word of his possible existence to my squad.
I knew all the excuses and explanations. People get so excited or traumatized by a crime that they often forget details, not knowing what they know until they have time for re?ection or until a skilled interrogator walks them through the moment frame by frame. Even then, such recovered memories are often tainted by time, bias, or the witnesses’ own suggestibility.
I was one of those people the night of the murders, not only a witness to the mysterious?eeing man but a participant in my own sideline drama of shakes, shudders, and convulsions. My memory could be real or it could be pure confabulation. It meant nothing by itself, though it could lead to everything.
Not all leads are created equal. They are appraised based on the credibility of the source. At the moment, I had less credibility than a politician swearing he did not have sex with that woman. The surest way to make certain my lead about the?eeing man was ignored was to tell my squad what I thought I might have seen.
I started to walk back to my car when I heard a muf?ed, high-pitched bark, more like a burst of rapid-fire yaps. The front door to Latrell’s house was open, a splash of light marking Ruby’s swift?ight down the front steps to where I stood. She planted her front paws on my leg, her tail wagging fast enough to fall off, her joy at seeing me expressed in the puddle she deposited at my feet.
I scratched behind her ears and hoisted her to eye level. She rewarded me with a lick on my cheek and a playful swipe at my nose. I put her down and she immediately rolled on her back, legs spread so I could rub her belly.
“She act like she’s your dog.”
I’d been so preoccupied with the dog and Latrell had been so quiet in his approach that I didn’t realize he was there until he spoke. He was a half a head shorter than me, round-shouldered, and soft, just as he’d appeared on TV.
Despite his innocuous looks and the clean pass Ammara had given him, I knew better than to dismiss him as a suspect. Most murder victims know their killer. Neighbors always qualify. He lived close enough to Marcellus to have shot everyone and gone home before Ammara rang his doorbell. If anything, his easy innocence should give me pause. I’d learned that lesson with Kevin’s killer.
“We met the other night. I found her hiding under Marcellus Pearson’s bed.”
“You a cop?”
“Jack Davis. FBI.”
“Lemme see some ID.”
“I’m not here on official business.”
“You’re standing out here in front of my house tellin’ me you’re FBI. Show me some ID.”
He was asking, polite, not demanding, more curious than defensive. I showed him my driver’s license.
He handed it back to me. “That’s not an FBI ID.”
“I’m taking some time off.”
“They take your ID when you go on vacation?”
Same tone. Just trying to understand. No offense intended or taken. I started to shake, so I bent down to pet the dog, hoping to break the rhythm or distract Latrell’s attention. Neither worked.
“Why you shaking?”
I stood, letting the spasm pass, taking a breath. “I don’t know.”
“That why you don’t have your FBI ID anymore?”
I tried half a smile. “Yeah. Hard to catch the bad guys when I shake.”
“But you say you were here the other night?”
I wasn’t certain how I’d lost control of the situation, letting him question me, but I didn’t mind. He’d already been interviewed, maybe more than once. He’d want to ask his