The Killings (14 page)

“Maybe? I’d say that was pretty damn certain. Why else you think this lunatic left ‘em both with a second smile beneath they chins? Fuck! Now them paddy’s gonna be all over my Black ass!”

“I thought you
wanted
me lookin’ into these killings so at least it would be somebody you know and trust snoopin’ around instead of some paddy or Uncle Tom lookin’ for an excuse to bust you. I’m sorry, Henry. I didn’t mean to-”

Henry’s shoulders sagged and his face softened. His voice was calm and measured when he spoke again. “Don’t worry about it, Bobby. You just keep doin’ what you doin’. I’ll handle the police. You just catch this nigger. People scared to come out after dark. It’s startin’ to hurt my business, and I can’t have that.”

Robert nodded and returned to sweeping the floor. When he didn’t hear Henry leave, he paused. “You wanted something else?”

“Yeah, nigger! I came in here for a haircut,” Henry said, taking off his tie and loosening his collar. Robert smiled and relaxed for the first time since Henry entered his shop.

“Then sit your ass down in that chair ‘til I’s finished sweepin’ ... nigger!”

Henry laughed and, for a moment, they were old friends again, but Robert didn’t forget the look he’d seen in Henry’s eyes. It wasn’t quite the blackness and evil he remembered from his dream - but it was close.

SIXTEEN

August 7, 2011, Downtown Atlanta, Georgia 

When Wayne Williams was escorted to the visitors’ area, Carmen Mendoza was already waiting for him. She could tell he was nervous as he seated himself on the other side of the glass partition. Carmen picked up the phone receiver and regarded him as Wayne slowly followed suit.

“Uh ... hey, Carmen,” Wayne said. “What’s up?”

“What else did Grandma Sable tell you about the Fury?”

Wayne’s eyes grew downcast. He was looking at everything except Carmen. “What do you mean?”

“It’s a very simple question. What else did Grandma Sable tell you about the Fury?”

“Just what I told you before,” Wayne said, his voice low. “Just that ... she placed a hoodoo spell on her grandson to protect him. And that it got out of hand.”

“Why would she bring something like that up to a nine-year-old child, Wayne?”

Wayne Williams seemed at a loss for words. “I don’t know.”

“I think you
do
know.”

“Why you think I would know? I already told you everything!”

“Does the name Yolanda Brown mean anything to you?”

“Uh ... no.” Wayne looked confused.

“Patricia Rutledge? Tammy Walker?”

Wayne shook his head. He was beginning to lose his nervousness. “No. I’m sorry, Carmen, those names don’t mean nothing to me.”

“Those are the names of murder victims from the spring of 1968,” Carmen said. “Roughly during the same time period you claim Grandma Sable told you and your friends about the Fury and this story about placing a curse to protect her grandson.” Carmen rummaged in her bag for a file folder, which she pulled out. From within the file folder she extracted a photocopy from the
Atlanta Constitution
and held it up for him to see. “These young women were one of seven murdered that year by this man.” She tapped her index finger on the mug shot of a dazed Black man in his mid-twenties emblazoned on the front page, proclaiming that the FOURTH WARD KILLER had been caught. “He strangled them, usually with their own clothes, sometimes with his bare hands. Know what he told his defense attorney?”

“No,” Wayne said. He was looking at her with wide-eyed nervousness.

“He said something called the Fury made him kill those women!”

Wayne said nothing. He wouldn’t look at her.

“Ten years ago there was a series of hobo murders. A serial killer. He preyed on the homeless. A man named Antoine Miller was convicted of the crimes. You remember that?”

Wayne Williams nodded. Carmen knew that Wayne was aware of Antoine Miller. They were both serving time under the same roof; Miller was currently incarcerated on the other side of the prison, but word traveled among the prisoners. Surely Wayne would have known about his fellow inmate, even if they’d never crossed paths.

“Antoine Miller claims he was innocent too. Unlike you, he actually opened up a little more to his defense attorney. The papers at the time thought he was trying to cop an insanity plea when he admitted this, but a few times he made it perfectly clear that it wasn’t his fault he killed those men. He said he was
driven
to kill, inspired by something called the Fury. That’s the word he used, Wayne.
Inspired.
Why do you think he’d say that, Wayne?”

She watched his reaction as the pregnant silence descended. She could tell she’d struck a nerve. Wayne looked nervous. He shrugged but wouldn’t look at her.

“I’ve spent the last few days backtracking through every serial killing case in Atlanta,” Carmen said. “I also looked at other murders involving African Americans, especially mixed-race African Americans. There have been a lot of one-shot murders involving mixed race people. And you know what I found in all those cases?”

Now Wayne finally met her gaze. His eyes looked haunted. Fearful. “What?”

“Those who were convicted of those crimes - that number is at least ten over a twenty year period - they all claim that they don’t know what came over them. That they couldn’t have done this. And they all said they felt some uncontrollable fury just take over them.”

Carmen held Wayne’s gaze. For once, Wayne wouldn’t look away.

“Is there something you want to tell me, Wayne?”

“If you’re trying to get me to confess to those murders, it ain’t gonna happen.”

“I’m not trying to get you to confess.”

“I didn’t kill those boys.”

“I know you didn’t, Wayne. It was the Fury that did it, right?”

Wayne opened his mouth to answer, and the look in his eyes, his reaction to what she’d just said, confirmed everything.

“None of this is going into my book,” she said, her voice low, comforting. “Nothing we say here today will go into any article I write. I give you my solemn word as a journalist.”

Wayne Williams turned away from her. She could see the conflicting emotions raging through him. She waited patiently on the other side of the glass partition, almost convinced he would signal for the guard to come take him back to his cell, but he never did. Instead, he sifted through his thoughts and seemed to get himself together.

Then he turned to face her, a sense of resolve on his features. “I didn’t kill those boys,” he reiterated. “I would have never even thought about it. It was someone else. It was the Fury.”

“How do you know it was the Fury?”

“Because ... that’s what it called itself.”

Carmen felt the flesh along the back of her neck crawl. “Last time we spoke, you told me Grandma Sable mentioned it. What did she say about it?”

“That she’d unleashed it.” Tears pooled in Wayne’s eyes and his voice was shaky. “She was ... she only told me and one of the other kids I used to pal around with. A kid named Bryant Hefner.”

“Is he Black?”

Wayne nodded and wiped the tears from his cheeks. “Yeah. Bryant and I were tight. Kids we hung with, it was a mixed-race neighborhood. Grandma Sable was nice to all us kids, but she seemed to single Bryant and me out more. And the few times we were alone with her, she told us stuff. About Reconstruction ... the children she had that were sold shortly after they were weaned ... the beatings she went through ... the terror, the hardship ... and then she told us about having to watch her son and his daughter and her great-grandson go through abuse ... beatings ... that’s why she called it up. She only wanted to protect her great-grandson.”

“You mentioned something about regret in her voice,” Carmen said, her voice soothing, gentle, encouraging him to continue. “Tell me about it.”

Wayne shook his head, seemingly at a loss for words. “I don’t know how else to describe it. It was so long ago. But ...when I think about it now, I honestly think that whatever she let loose ... she didn’t intend for it to get out of hand the way it did.”

“What makes you think that, Wayne?”

Wayne seemed to think about this. Carmen waited him out, checking the time on the clock behind him - they had another five minutes.

“She said that old White man didn’t beat her granddaughter no more, he didn’t lay a hand on her great-grandson no more neither, and she knew it was with him, that it would watch out for him. But she told him to be careful with it or it would get greedy. She said ...” Wayne shook his head at the frustration of trying to relive old memories. “She said he laughed at her. He didn’t take her seriously.”

Carmen let this soak in, trying to fill in the missing pieces.

“That’s all she spoke about it,” Wayne said, looking at Carmen from his side of the glass partition. “The only other thing she said to us was to be careful out there. That we needed to get away from this area, needed to get out of Atlanta because if we stayed we were in danger.”

“She didn’t say what kind of danger?”

Wayne shook his head. “No. She didn’t.”

“Did you know at the time she was a voodoo queen?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Your parents didn’t know you were coming around her place?”

“They didn’t. My folks knew about her. They warned me not to bother her. I just got the impression it was because she was so old. But now that I think back on it, I think they were scared of her. I think everybody was.”

“The Fury,” Carmen said. “Can you tell me about it? How did you know you had it?”

Wayne shrugged, suddenly looking embarrassed. “It was like ... shortly after, a year or two later she told us this, I felt this ... I don’t know ... this ...
presence.
It was a warm feeling, right on the base of my skull.” Wayne rubbed the back of his head. “It felt like a pet that was just sleeping there, you know? Like a cat? It was like when you’re at church and you can feel God watching you, but it’s like he’s inside of you and all around you at the same time, watching you from the inside. It was like that, except it wasn’t God. It felt more like some old pervert watching me, you know?”

Carmen nodded. “Sure. Go on.”

“I thought there was something wrong with me, but then it just ... I don’t know how to describe it ... it just settled into me and it felt natural. It felt normal. Pretty soon I barely knew it was around. But I could feel it every so often, whispering things to me, making suggestions about what I should do. It knew I was into music and wanted to get into the music business. My father didn’t want that, but it ...” Wayne gestured with his hands. “It’s like it encouraged me, you know what I’m saying? So I did everything it suggested and then I was doing it! I was a music promoter. Doors opened for me. Most importantly, nobody stood in my way. Nobody tried to knock me down a peg or two and nobody denied me a job.” Wayne’s features fell. “That’s when it started to make its demands.”

“Demands?”

Wayne’s voice grew low. “I didn’t want to kill those boys, Ms. Mendoza. I wouldn’t do nothin’ like that. It was that voice in my head ... the Fury. It was persistent. It begged me to do it, filled my head with all these thoughts and feelings. It made it seem so right. It made it sound ... it made it sound good - sexy, you know? It was driving me crazy. I was angry all the time, horny all the time, but the fantasies I was having ... they were wrong. They were so sick. You couldn’t imagine the things it made me think. I could feel it egging me on, instigating, goading me into doing those ... those
things
. It was getting me all worked up, whipping me into ... into a fury!”

Carmen nodded solemnly, trying her best to keep her expression neutral. Wayne Williams had practically just confessed to her and confirmed everything she’d begun to suspect about the killings that had plagued Atlanta’s African American community.

“Are you admitting that you killed those boys? That The Fury made you do it?” She leaned in closer and gently slid the digital recorder toward the suspected child-murderer.

“I think I’ve said enough.”

“No, no, wait. One more question.”

“Uh uh. That’s it. Goodbye.”

“Wait!”

He hung up the phone and signaled for the guard. As the guard opened the door and began to lead him away, he shouted back to her. “Remember what you promised. You don’t write about none of this, not if you know what’s good for you. The Fury’s still out there. It’s still out there!”

SEVENTEEN

August 15, 1911, Atlanta, Georgia 

“Why you followin’ me for?” Mary Ann Duncan asked with a tremor in her voice, quickening her steps. She glanced over her shoulder and fumbled in her purse for the knife her father had insisted she carry ever since folks started talking about Jack the Ripper coming to Atlanta and killing Negro women. Mary Ann was just out of her teens, twenty years old with dreams of love and marriage and children. She’d been following the railroad tracks home when she heard the footsteps behind her. When she turned, she saw a dark shadow in the shape of a man silhouetted by the moonlight walking toward her.

“Who is that? What you doin’ back there followin’ me?”

He didn’t answer, just continued walking toward her, quicker now, almost jogging to catch up to her.

“Oh, Jesus, save me,” Mary Ann whispered as she pulled the knife free and began to run.

“Damnit!” she heard the man shout from behind her. His voice was filled with rage. Whoever he was, it was clear that he meant to do her harm.

Could it be a friend playing a joke, trying to scare me? A rapist? One of them Klan boys? Or is it Jack the Ripper come to claim another victim?

Mary Ann screamed, tucked her head to her chin, and began pumping her long legs as hard as she could, running for her life with every ounce of strength she possessed, but the man was getting closer.

Help me, Jesus! Help me, Jesus! Oh, Jesus, HELP ME! OH GOD!

The shadow man was closer. She could hear his heavy breathing. It was like the moist steamy breath of an animal, like her father’s prize bull. She imagined that she could feel it, hot and humid, on her skin. She turned and saw two black eyes surrounded by white, like tunnels cored into the man’s head. She felt herself falling into those dark pits. It felt like they were pulling her into them. Another scream tore from her throat, shrill, desperate, agonized, unlike any sound she’d ever made before or would ever make again.