TEN
Vernell Moncrief's address was six years old, taken from his parole sheet stemming from an assault conviction seven years earlier. Guys like Vernell Moncriefâfelons, lowlifes, bottom-feedersârarely stay at the same address for six months, much less six years. So I didn't expect to find him here. Amazingly, when I knocked on the door of the squalid little house in southeast Atlanta, the man who answered looked just like the man in the mug shot. He was tall, thin, black as creosote, shirtless, and barefoot. A scar ran across his throat, almost from ear to ear.
“Vernell,” I said, showing him my badge, “come with me.”
“Whuh?” he said.
“Now.”
“I'ma get my shoes,” he said. He closed the door, locked it.
I strolled around the back of the house, stood behind a scraggly bush with my gun drawn, and waited. About thirty seconds later he climbed out the back window, a pair of Air Jordans hanging by the laces from his teeth.
“Man!” he said, when I stepped out from behind the bush, pointed the gun at his sternum. “I ain't did nothin'!”
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Strangely, Vernell Moncrief agreed to giving me a DNA sample without complaint. While we were standing around in the hallway of City Hall East waiting for a crime-scene tech to take a mouth swab, I decided to pump Vernell for information. Not a formal interrogation, just a friendly chat.
“So how come you ran, Vernell?” I said.
“I ain't realize this about Marquavious. I thought y'all was, like, Narcotics or something. Them narcs all the time be hassling me.” He gave me a real serious face that was hard to give much credit to. “Yes, ma'am. Anything I can do to help. 'Cause every time I think about that poor boy, Marquavious, it hurt me right here, you know what I'm saying.” He whacked himself in the middle of his chest with a loosely balled fist.
“I do know what you're saying.” Since the mouth swab procedure would only take about five seconds, I had told the crime-scene tech to take her time getting to us. That way I'd have time to talk to Vernell. “So tell me about your relationship to Marquavious,” I said.
“I ain't had no relationship! No ma'am! I ain't like that.”
I smiled as sincerely as I could. “Nah, nah, I don't mean that way. I mean like your family situation, that type of relationship.”
“Oh, yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. See, what it was, me and Marquavious's mama was like married.”
“Church married?”
“Well, you know. Common-law type of thing. We was fin to get married, but then Marquavious . . .” He shrugged sadly. “Well, you know. One thing and another. Me and Marquavious's mama, Loeesha, we had to go our separate ways. It was all this tension and everything, due to Marquavious dying, it done broke us up.”
“Plus your going to jail for that thing over in Decatur.”
“Plus that. But I was just in
jail
, Miz Deakes. Not the penitentiary or nothing.”
“Right. It was mistaken identity or something probably, right, because you never got convicted.”
“That's what I'm saying. Them charges was dropped.”
“So look, we get this test back, everything works out, you get eliminated as a suspect, this whole dark cloud that's been hanging over youâit all goes away.”
Vernell nodded earnestly.
“You didn't do it, right?”
“No, ma'am!”
“So who you think it was? Had to be somebody, right?”
Vernell blinked.
“You understand, Vernell? Most crimes like this, they're committed by somebody close to the victim. Was there an uncle, a cousin, a minister . . . anybody that was around this boy that didn't seem right to you?”
Vernell's eyes widened, playing it to the hilt, Mr. Innocent, trying to help out. “Mm. Yes, ma'am. Come to think on it a little, you might just be right.”
The hallway was silent for a moment. The crime-scene tech poked her head around the corner. I shook my head, hoping Vernell wouldn't notice. The tech got the message, disappeared.
“Talk to me, Vernell,” I said softly.
“Bugs.”
Long silence.
“Bugs?”
Another long silence.
“It
was
this dude, see?” Vernell made a big show of thinking, big frown, stroking his face. “We was staying over in East Lake. And the home we was staying at, we was renting from this white dude, Mr. Shively. Now Mr. Shively, he use to come around every Friday, get his rent money, sometimes if you come up a little short, whatnot, you tell him like how it was a drain that was clogged up or the roof leaking, something like that. Tell him until he fix it, you ain't gone pay no rent.”
“Sure. I know how that is.”
“Only Mr. Shively, he ain't never do nothing. He ain't never fix no leak, ain't never unclog no drain, nothing. He just say, you don't pay next weekâfront rent, back rent bothâyour black ass out on the street. You know how they play you.”
“Hey, you got to keep on keeping on.”
“That's what I'm saying. But anyway, one time I'm a little short, and so Mr. Shively come around and I'm like, âYo, man, I ain't paying the rent, we got bugs. We got roaches. We got roaches on the roaches, ticks on the fleas, fleas on the ticks, you know what I'm saying?' ” But Mr. Shively, he like, âThat don't confront me.' And I'm like, âI ain't paying no rent money till you send the bug man around.' Right? I'm like, âI want some of that Orkin shit, man, or you ain't seeing
no
rent money.' ”
“Hoo-hoooo!” I said, playing the appreciative audience.
Vernell smiled slyly. “I ain't figure Mr. Shively gone actually
do
nothing. But two, three days later, this truck roll up, big-ass picture of a roach on the side. Bug man. This white dude, the bug man, he pop out the truck, come in, spray all this shit all over the house.”
“A white man.”
“Yeah. Jolly-ass dude. Joking around and everything. Talking to Marquavious, see.”
“But you didn't like him, did you?”
Vernell pulled on his lip. “Truthfully? I ain't think about it. But like a week later, here come the bug man again. He walk around spraying every damn thing in sight. And when he done, man, he play with Marquavious. Give him candy and everything.”
“Candy, huh?”
“And so for like a month or two, this white dude coming around all the time. And that's when I start getting suspicious.” Vernell was putting on a big show now, all indignation and outrage. “I ain't like the way he look at Marquavious.”
“See?” I said. “This is exactly what I was hoping to hear from you.” I figured, let him get wound up talking a bunch of baloney, eventually he might say something damaging, something I could use on him later.
“Next thing I know, Marquavious gone.” A tear slipped out of the corner of Vernell's eye, a pretty nice touch, I thought, getting so involved in his bullshit story that he'd almost convinced himself it was true.
“Tell me about the bug man. What he look like?”
“Medium height. White man. But dark complected.
Real
darkâfor white, I mean. Almost could of been a brother. Like a Jew or a Eye-talian maybe? He run about six foot, maybe a hundred and seventy pounds. You know, normal looking. Brown hair. Always had a big old grin on his face. But it was something about that man I ain't trust.”
I nodded earnestly. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And this bug man, did you ever tell the detectives about him?”
Vernell scowled. “I done told the po-lices
all
about that man. But they ain't listen.”
“What, they say you made him up?”
Big nod, big outrage. “That's right! Them two white po-lices was all like, âYou telling us a fairy tale, Roscoe.' Motherfuckers kept calling me
Roscoe
. Telling me they can't find no
receipt
to prove he done sprayed that house! Damn. Telling me Mr. Shively say he ain't sent no bug man.” Vernell leaned toward me. “But that bug man, he wasn't no fairy tale. Bug man, he all the time be putting his hands on Marquavious.” He groaned a little for effect, showing me how hard it was for him to even think about this.
“You remember his name, this bug man?”
“Never did hear it.”
“What about the company?”
Vernell shrugged. “Damn sure wasn't no Orkin. That's all I know.”
“Anything else at all?”
“I wish I could remember something else. I surely do.”
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I bagged the mouth swab and drove it over to the south side of Decatur, where the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has a big complex. The forensic science center was in the back, a four-story brick building with a glass-fronted atrium.
I'd dealt with one of the techs there on a regular basis back when I was in Vice. He was a boyish-looking blond guy named Mark Terry, who flirted outrageously with everything that moved.
“Mechelle Deakes!” he said, making a little frame with his fingers, then looking through it at me like a photographer getting ready to take my picture. “Mm-
mmmm!
Work it! Yes! You know that's right!”
I vamped a little.
“Saw you on TV the other day,” he said. “You get all famous, can't come see us little people anymore?”
“I'm in the Cold Case Unit now.” I decided to skip telling him all about my fall from grace, my year on suspension.
“Oooo! Big promotion, huh?”
“Baby,” I said, “if you want to call it a big promotion, you just go head on. Tell me I'm beautiful, too.”
“You
are
beautiful,” Mark Terry said. “I've always said that.” He gave me a big, leering once-over. “Good to see you put some of that weight back on. You were getting straight-up gaunt for a while there.”
“Now, don't you be making me feel bad.”
“Shoot, girl. I like a woman with curves.”
“That a fact?”
“Scout's honor.” He turned to his keyboard and tapped in some information, then checked the seals on Moncrief's DNA swab, recorded the number in the computer. “When you need this by?”
“Tomorrow.”
He made a big show, laughing and flopping around. “No, seriously,” he said finally.
“When can you get it done?”
He peered at the case numbers on the evidence, then at the monitor. “The computer estimates that we're looking at a two-hundred-and-forty-one day turnaround.”
“You're kidding me. That's almost a year.”
“We had four techs last year, and we were already running six weeks behind. The state put a hiring freeze on us, and two techs quit the next day. I got eighteen hundred rape kits and another four, five hundred blood and semen samples in the queue. You do the math.”
“I heard you got new machines, you could do this stuff overnight.”
“If God himself asked us real nice, we
might
consider giving him overnight service.”
I laughed. Terry and I made a little chitchat about the job while he was logging in the evidence. He asked about the Cold Case Unit, and when I mentioned Lt. Gooch, Terry's grin faded and his eyes went just a little dark.
“You and Gooch have met, huh?” I said.
“Yeah, me and the good lieutenant go back a long, long way.” Terry squinted at the information he had just put into the computer. “In fact, I thought he'd already sent this in before.”
“Sent
what
in?”
“DNA. For this case.”
“I don't see how he could have. This is my case.”
Terry shrugged. “I'm probably thinking of something else.”
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That night I went home and fired up the computer, logged on, brought up the screen with the baby pictures on it.
My son. The boy on the screen was my son.
I tried not to think of him that way. Before he was born, I'd met the couple who adopted him, David and Nancy No-Last-Name-As-Per-Written-Agreement-With-The-Adoption-Agency, and I'd told them, “You're his parents now.” I had tried to believe that, to convince myself that I could cauterize that connection, ease the hurt of giving away my own child.
They seemed like nice people, a little stiff, a little earnest, a little . . . well . . .
white
. They seemed very David-and-Nancy. But I can read people, and I knew they were good people, that they could love that boy and take care of him in a way that I just wasn't prepared for, not right then. Not with all my problems.