Daneen threw her head back and unleashed a tortured howl. Then she fell backward into Lynch's arms, weeping. He let her go quickly, as if he had touched something hot. She staggered to the far side of the room, sliding down the wall and sobbing loudly.
Lynch heard a movement behind him and turned to find neighbors standing in the doorway, staring openmouthed at Judy sprawled on the floor, her head surrounded by a fractured halo of money and crack.
He went to the door and closed it, then pulled his police radio from his belt and called for a paddy wagon before walking over to Judy.
“You're under arrest for possession of narcotics,” he said, reaching down and placing handcuffs on her wrists. “Now, where's Kenya?”
“Like I told Daneen when she came in here a hour ago,” Judy said through swelling lips. “She'll be back.”
At that, Daneen jumped up and tried to charge, but Lynch held her.
“Back to what, Judy?” Daneen said. “Back to Sonny screwin' her every chance he get?”
Judy seemed genuinely confused. “What you talkin' about?”
“Sonny raped Kenya,” Daneen said, enunciating each word for emphasis. “Molested her, whatever you wanna call it. And you knew about it, didn't you, Judy? You knew what he was doin'.”
“Sonny ain't never touch Kenya,” Judy said emphatically.
“Yes he did,” Daneen said. “And you knew all about it. Just like you knew all aboutâ”
“All about what, Daneen?” Judy asked quickly.
Daneen looked up at Lynch, who stared back and waited for her to answer Judy's question. Daneen fell silent as she looked at Judy, then dropped her eyes to the floor.
Just then, Lynch's radio squawked.
“Six-oh-two on location,” the wagon officer said over the air.
“This is Dan 25,” Lynch said into the radio. “Send me a car to secure this location. Hold them out on a crime scene detail.”
“Okay, Dan 25.”
Lynch placed his radio in his belt and spoke without looking up. “Daneen, I'm going to have an officer meet you here and take you around the neighborhood so you can look for Kenya.”
“How I'ma find her ridin' around in a cop car? That ain'tâ”
“You asked me to help you, Daneen,” he said in measured tones. “That's what I came here to do. Now, I already saw you running the hallways, so you obviously looked in the building. Now it's time to look outside.”
She folded her arms like a petulant child, then opened her mouth to speak.
“We'll find her,” Lynch said, looking Daneen in the eye. “One way or another, we'll get Kenya home.”
As he reached down to help the handcuffed Judy up from the floor, Lynch wasn't sure if what he'd said to Daneen was true. In fact, what he'd seen in the last few minutes caused him to question more than Kenya's whereabouts. But he knew that the answer to it all lay in Sonny. And he knew that the sooner he was able to find him, the sooner he'd find the little girl.
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A breeze rustled the vertical blinds that covered the picture window of the second-floor loft. It whispered through the room, kissing each of the trinkets that graced the tastefully appointed wallsâfrom the Fulani tribal masks to the Andrew Turner oil paintings.
When the breeze finally brushed against a grim-faced Sonny Williams, he was standing in front of his walk-in closet, hastily changing his clothes.
Sonny had kept his apartment on Third Streetâhalfway between
the historic Betsy Ross and Ben Franklin housesâfor just such an occasion. He'd known for years that the day would come when he'd leave the Bridge for good. But he hadn't known that his plans would allow him to do it so soon.
But then, things had always gone better than expected for Sonny. In the Seventies, he'd sold the bulk of the heroin that fueled Girard Avenue's shadow world of prostitution, ruthlessly taking from a community that could ill afford to give. It was around that time that he took Judy. First as his lover, then as his tool.
By the late eighties, when the lucrative crack trade took hold in the projects, Sonny had convinced Judy to part with some of the welfare she'd collected through multiple identities and fake dependents. He took the money, then added some of his own to buy their first package of cocaine.
In a scant three years, Sonny and Judy became two of the most prosperous crack dealers in North Philadelphia. But to look at them, no one would ever know.
They eschewed the inordinate flash of the young dealers who passed away as predictably as time. Instead, Sonny and Judy carefully orchestrated their appearances to hide their success.
They dressed simply, never donning the jewelry and designer clothing their young competitors preferred. Sonny's Cadillac was eight years old, and Judy had never owned a car. They even let people believe that Sonny was merely the enforcer who allowed Judy to operate unharmed.
Neither the neighbors, nor the police, nor the pipers who bought their crack knew the extent of their enterprise. In truth, neither did Judy.
One year into their partnership, Sonny had begun skimming money from their packages. Soon, he'd taken enough to begin buying and selling quantities of powder cocaine to select clients in Center City. After the first kilo, it was easy. He merely reinvested the money and repeated the process again and again.
Sonny's nest egg was held in a bank account under an assumed name, and totaled over half a million dollars. Judy held the bulk of the profits from the day-to-day cap trade, which amounted to a little more than one hundred thousand in cash.
But five-to-one wasn't good enough for Sonny. He wanted it all. And in order to have access to the money he knew Judy had hidden away, he needed more control. Simply put, he needed to make Judy disappear.
He had decided that night, when he'd left shortly after Kenya did, to make Judy's disappearance happen quickly. So he stopped at a phone booth on his way back from Ninth and Indiana with their package, and he made an anonymous 9-1-1 call.
When he arrived at the building with the hack taxi driver and saw the police van outside, he believed the police were there to investigate his call about a man with a gun in apartment 7D. Of course, there was no gun. But there were drugs. And Sonny hoped that the drugs would get Judy arrested.
When he shuffled out of the hack taxi, ran back to his car, and drove to his Old City apartment, he waited an hour, then called one of Judy's neighbors. She told him that Judy had been led out in handcuffs.
Sonny called one of his Center City contacts and arranged for funds to be transferred to his bank account in exchange for the package he'd brought back to his apartment in the garment bag. He left the drugs in his normal pickup spotâa mailbox outside the building. Then he made plans to return to the Bridge.
He was going to pick up the money that Judy had hidden in a place that only the two of them knew about. That money, combined with the cash in his account that he planned to wire to his new location, would allow him to leave Philadelphia and never look back.
But as Sonny left his loft at seven o'clock on Saturday morning for the short drive back, he had no idea how very wrong his plan had gone.
The heat in Central Detectives' locked interrogation room was stifling. Judy could feel her thighs sticking to her chair's vinyl cushion as an oscillating fan recirculated the hot air. It was difficult to breathe, much less answer questions.
But the heat wasn't the cause of the rivulets of sweat that trickled down Judy's back. Judy was sweating because she was starting to believe what the detectives had been saying to her for the past hour: Kenya was missing, and Sonny was somehow involved.
It didn't take much to convince her. She was tired after spending the night selling crack to the disheveled pipers who shuttled in and out of her apartment. To make matters worse, the effects of the beating she'd taken from Daneen were starting to wear on her. The copper-colored skin around her eyes swelled to a shiny blue, and there was a steady, throbbing pain at her left temple.
Though the crust of blood on her cracked lower lip made it difficult to speak, she opened her mouth and croaked a few words.
“Can I have some water?” she asked Lynch, who sat across the table from her in the cinder-block room.
“You can have some water as soon as you tell us where Kenya is.”
“I told you I don't know,” Judy said, slightly exasperated.
“What about Sonny?” the female detective on the other side of the table chimed in.
Judy glanced at the thick-framed black woman, whose piercing eyes seemed to look straight through her.
“What about him?” Judy said with an attitude.
“You know what?” the woman said, standing up and moving closer to Judy as she spoke. “You can talk that smart shit if you want. But we got you on possession, conspiracy, possession with intent to deliver, simple assault, aggravated assaultâ”
“I ain't assault nobody,” Judy interrupted.
“You did whatever we say you did. Now where's Sonny?”
Judy looked at Detective Roxanne Wilson and knew that she would have to give an answer. The look in her eyes said she would stand for nothing less.
It was a look that had come from twenty years on a force where being a black woman pitted everyone and everything against her. It was the look of a woman who had survived shoot-outs and foot beats and unwanted advances, racism and sexism unchecked and unpunished.
And lingering just beneath the look, there was something elseâa sadness that she'd earned from her struggle to raise two boys in a West Philadelphia neighborhood called the Bottom.
One of her sons had made it. He was a Temple University senior, studying to become a lawyer. The other was dead, struck down eight years before by a drug dealer's stray bullet.
Roxanne Wilson had buried her son and promised herself that she would never allow another child to die needlessly. That's why she had made it her business to be assigned to the Juvenile Aid Division.
Lynch had called her in shortly after he'd brought Judy to Central Detectives. He knew that Wilson was the one officer in the department who cared more about children than he did.
That's why he wasn't surprised by what she did next.
“You think I'm playin' with you?” Wilson said suddenly, nearly leaping across the table at Judy, who flinched just enough to let them know she was about to break.
“I want a lawyer,” Judy blurted out nervously.
“And people in hell want ice water,” Wilson said, scowling as she stood over her.
Lynch stepped between them. “Daneen's out there riding around with a cop looking for her daughter. But I don't think she's going to find her. And deep down, you don't either.”
“I don't know what you talkin' about,” Judy said, turning her head.
Lynch smiled. But there was no humor in his grin. “Just like you didn't know what Daneen was talking about when she said Sonny was having sex with Kenya?”
Judy looked down and didn't speak.
“Stop protecting him, Judy. You know, just like I do, what Sonny's capable of doing to little girls.”
“That ain't fair,” Judy said with tears welling up in her eyes. “It ain't about that.”
“Oh, but it is about that,” Lynch said, his stare boring into her. “It's all about that.”
Wilson stepped back, looking at the two of them and trying to figure out what they meant.
“You remember, don't you, Judy?” Lynch asked. “I do. Sonny likes children. Always did. Even back when I was nine years old, I remember Sonny liking kids. He would come around to see you, Judy. He was all flash and smooth talk. You remember, right? Had a stroll you could see from a block away. Used to lean to the left and dip his shoulder, swing his arm and drag his foot just a little bit. And it all looked so cool. Had all the little boys trying to walk like Mr. Sonny. But we never could quite get it down.
“I remember the ice-cream man would come and Sonny always seemed to time it just right. We waited for him, tooâspotted him
walking down the street, swinging that arm and dipping that shoulder. We'd run up to him because we knew Sonny was always likely to pull out a whole bunch of money.
“I can still see it, clear as day. He used to take a rubber band off his roll, because a bill clip just wasn't big enough to hold it. He would fold all those bills back and peel dollars from underneath. Then he would give everybody one. A whole dollar. We'd run and go buy our little ice cream and still have fifty cents left over for the next day.
“I didn't know until later on that those dollars came from the money he made selling dope. Didn't know that the man we found in '72, slumped over in the stairway with a rubber tube around his arm and a needle in his vein, had died from the shit Sonny was selling.
“All I knew about was the ice-cream money. Remember the money, Judy? Remember the dollar bills he used to give all the kids whenever they wanted some ice cream?”
Judy was rocking back and forth in her chair now, wearing a blank stare and listing to the right, like a ship sinking low in an ocean full of dark memories.
“That was a long time ago,” she said in a monotone. “Things different now.”
Wilson looked at Lynch with a question in her eyes. And Lynch didn't hesitate to answer it.
“One day they found this little girl named Tish,” he said, looking at Wilson but speaking to Judy. “She was in the trash bins behind the main building, underneath the garbage. She was naked. I remember that she was naked because that was the first time I had ever seen a naked girl.
“She didn't have a thing on her body, but her face was sticky, like she had been eating something sweet. Her hands were sticky, too. And they were closed real tight.”
Lynch paused to allow the phrase to linger in the air.
“Maybe that's why they didn't see it at first,” he said.
“See what?” Wilson asked.
Judy didn't give Lynch a chance to answer.
“The dollar,” she said. “They found a dollar in the little girl's hand and tried to say it was Sonny. They tried to say he bought her some ice cream and lured her back there and raped her and killed her. But they never found nothin' to prove Sonny did that.”
“And why couldn't they?” Lynch asked.
“'Cause it wasn't Sonny,” Judy said, a fire suddenly burning in her eyes. “I know it wasn't.”
Lynch sat down in front of her and gazed at her with something approaching sympathy.
“How do you know it wasn't Sonny this time?” he asked softly.
A tear rolled down Judy's cheek, and she looked away.
“I don't,” she said.
And with that, she began to tell them everything.
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After leaving his Old City apartment and driving through a gentrified neighborhood called Northern Liberties on his way to North Philly, Sonny drove west on Girard Avenue from Third, watching as the morning rituals unfolded.
Men stood outside the Seventh Street bar where prescription drugs like Xanax were bought and sold. Dope fiends trudged toward the Eighth Street hospital, where methadone fed their heroin addictions. Desperate junkies stood on every corner, selling the bus tokens they'd received from a nearby outpatient program.
It was a drama played out by actors who didn't know or care that they were being watched. Sonny was their audience. And he was anxious to use Judy's money to leave the theater of the streets. Because anything would be better than another day in North Philly.
By the time he passed Ninth Street, he could see the projects, ahead and to his left. Almost immediately, he sensed that something
was wrong. When he slowed the car and glanced down at the projects, he saw what had given him that feeling.
There were two police cars parked on the corner, and there was an officer standing on the corner, holding a notepad and questioning one of the neighborhood children. Another officer walked along the edge of the trash-strewn lot a few blocks down, near the corner where Daneen had waited for Lynch just hours before. He seemed to be conducting some kind of search. But Sonny couldn't be sure, so he kept driving.
His mind raced as he tried to figure out what the officers were doing. It took only a few seconds for him to decide that children and vacant lots had nothing to do with him. Still, he opted to be cautious, and rode to Eleventh Street, where he parked his car and began the walk back to Judy's building.
As he strolled the passageways that ran through the labyrinth of street-level houses surrounding the high-rise, he could feel eyes upon him. People were staring out from the closed windows of apartments where whispered rumors about the fate of Kenya Brown had already begun.
Sonny ignored the incessant buzz that seemed to ring louder with his every step. He walked in through a hole in the chain-link fence that surrounded the back entrance of Judy's building. Then he stepped between the Dumpsters that had replaced the trash bins where the dead little girl had been found years before.
The back entrance, like the front, was a large, open passageway without doors. He walked inside and stepped around a pole. Then he disappeared into the hallway near the front entrance to catch the elevator.
He pushed the button and waited for the car to descend to the ground floor, hoping that the officers wouldn't come inside the building.
When the elevator arrived, and the doors slid open, he stepped on and pressed the button marked 12. The rusting cables creaked
as the elevator began its slow climb. Sonny looked straight ahead at the doors, then glanced offhandedly at a torn piece of cloth in the corner. It looked to be from a striped cotton shirt.
He turned away, thinking nothing of it. After all, there was always some random piece of clothing littering the projects. He'd seen everything from pants to skirts and panties, even used condoms and tampons. So a ripped piece of someone's shirt was nothing.
Or so he thought.
Sonny looked down at his watch, then cursed under his breath as the elevator slowed to a stop at the fifth floor. The doors lurched open and a little girl who looked vaguely familiar stared up at him, her eyes abruptly filling with something that looked like fear.
“You gettin' on?” he said, trying not to sound as aggravated as he felt.
“No,” Janay said absently as she spotted the torn piece of Kenya's shirt in the corner.
Sonny jabbed impatiently at the twelfth-floor button.
When the doors closed, Janay ran down the hall to tell her mother what she'd seen.
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Judy sipped the water Lynch had brought her a few minutes before, then glanced at him and Wilson and wondered how much longer they would keep her at Central Detectives.
She had spent the last half hour venting about Sonny. Judy knew the detectives needed to know more than she was telling them. But once she began to talk about the pain of loving Sonny, she didn't want to stop. Even as she withered beneath the words.
Lynch stood back and watched warily as her silken black hair fell down in strands around her bruised face. Before his eyes, it seemed, the rough sensuality of Judy's sturdy feminine frame began to fade. The light in her face went flatâstamped out by the words she spoke about Sonny.
She saw him watching her and tried to force herself to think of happier times. And then she tried to speak of them.
“I used to be somethin' else,” she said with a wry smile that faded almost as quickly as it appeared. “Had men fightin' just to get next to me.”
She paused, staring straight ahead as if she were caught in the memory.
“I used that pretty young skin and them long, thick legs to get their attention. Used that hard switch to make sure they seen how I looked in a skirt. Used my eyes to make 'em look twice in case they missed it the first time. If they was real cute, I'd lean down just so, 'til they got a real good look at everything. But they couldn't touch nothin' less they had some money. And if they had enough, they could touch it all they wanted.”