Those Bones Are Not My Child (75 page)

On the walls were no cabalist drawings, no cowled robes hanging, no rifle rack, no Bible stuck through, no Polaroid shots or rebel flag, only a calendar. Not a child pinup, or a 6 Star promotional, but a bank calendar. Two dates were circled. April 11. For the arrival of Roy Innis? Had it been the announcement of evidence, of a witness, that had sent 6 Star scurrying? Broom tracks and drag marks led the eye from the metal shelving to a trash heap by the stairs where a broom leaned. April 30 was the other circled date. The next kidnap? Walpurgisnacht? What? The thumbtack was removed, and the calendar dropped smoothly into the bag.

The pile by the washroom was not rocks, nor boots, nor children’s underwear. Just rags, girlie magazines, a used can of Sterno, a few matchbooks, the torn cover of a
Reader’s Digest
, and some plastic bread
wrappers. With the salad tongs, the wrappers were eased into a bag. A ragged remnant of a curtain with brown teddy bears with green bowties on a yellow background was placed in a bag after a quick conference decided that a stain—shoe polish, rust, or worse—needed more careful inspection. One of the matchbooks was plucked up in the tongs; red foil bore the name of an Atlanta restaurant mentioned by a colleague on the Task Force.

The boxes on the top shelves of the metal unit in the middle of the room held reams of paper—white, blank, no logo, no address. Below were cartons marked “Cleaning Supplies”—abrasive cloths, bristle brushes, cans of lubricant, needlepoint oilers. An already open box was full of small plastic funnels, rubber tubing, and various-sized tweezers in glassine bags. On the middle shelf was a shallow box with bottles that looked like India ink, but the labels said “Gun Stock Wax.” Next to it was a square box of aerosol cans, gun solvent. Dust on the bottom shelf told the rest of the tale. Several cartons had evidently been removed and dragged across the floor. The flash went off when someone on the other side of the shelving found a crate, empty, but with stenciled lettering on the side, a munitions supplier.

On the bottom shelf in the boxes that remained were CO
₂
cartridges for air guns and .22 balls and pellets. Samples were taken to go with the snapshots. A shopping bag of white nylon rings gave them pause until one member, bending down to scratch his ankles, mimed breaking a rifle stock, inserting one of the rings into the breach of the barrel, then snapping the rifle closed before taking aim at the worktable against the far wall. The bag of sealing rings was replaced, and the team moved past the large wooden bins and empty metal lockers.

A pegboard hung over the worktable. All that remained were the outlines of tools that had hung there—chisels, scrapers, a mallet, a drill, a rack of bits. Near the end of the table between four screw holes was a rectangle of raw wood where a Versa Vise had once been clamped on tight. The front drawer was lined with a September 1980 program guide of the American Forces Network. In the side drawer was a tool with a cloven end, the kind used for removing tacks—the only thing in the area that did not spell a gun workshop. The overseas program guide was placed in a bag as the team moved back past the crates and lockers to the “living” side to explore the washroom.

It looked ordinary: sink with a washpan underneath, a toilet,
splotchy mirror, odds and ends in the medicine cabinet; slivers of soap in a dish in the stall shower, a hose on its cement floor. The showerhead and a roll of toilet paper were on a low stool by the radiator. But behind the radiator was a length of spattered board, a large hole near one end. If one end of the board rested on the window ledge and was supported by the toilet and radiator, the stool became the exact height to hold it at the other end. Once the basin was placed under the hole in the board and the hose was nozzled to the faucet, the washroom no longer looked innocent or ordinary.

They vacated while pictures were taken, several retracing their steps to the storage side of the shelves to check again. The only thing that had escaped notice on the first go-round was a belt doubled up between two stenciled crates marked “Ammunition.” Assembled at the steps to go down, they scanned the area again, hoping that whatever they missed would collect in the lens and emerge unambiguously in the developing pan.

In the office file cabinet they found no invoices, ledgers, or business flyers. No Bible, Vedas,
Battle Axe News
, or copies of
Gung Ho!
, either. Only the rest of the
Reader’s Digest
in one drawer and several rippled circulars that had been used as coasters under a coffee mug in another. In the rest were husks of insects, roaches, water bugs. On the desk was no telephone, no jumper cable with pincers, no dry-cell battery with lead wires and a tube of elastoplast, only more junk mail addressed to Occupant. The address of 6 Star was not 666 or any other number of significance, though two members studied long and hard. In the drawers of the desk, a few thumbtacks and paper clips, a stubbed-out butt, and a crumpled napkin from the coffee shop of a Cobb County hotel. The napkin was bagged. A pint bottle, greasy with fingerprints, was removed from the green metal waste can and placed in a open brown bag.

Going down to the first floor, several stood on tiptoe to see what was in the galvanized cans hanging from the cross beams—spare parts of trucks and cars. Others bent down for a closer look at the block and pulley; the hook on the end had a shred of cotton cloth that took ten minutes to remove. Two others squatted to unwedge a thick book in the crook of the L bar of the catwalk grid. Not a phone directory, as they’d thought, but a mail-order catalog, with a burnt corner, torn-off cover, and the order blank removed.

The first floor was a combination garage, gym, and lounge area. It
seemed odd that the exercise rings were on ropes looped over the crossbar and not attached to the pulley chain; the four feet of chain would have alleviated the need to climb on a beer crate to reach the exercise rings. While one member stood there pondering the meaning of that, another shimmied up for samples of rope fibers. The rest moved off to inspect the lounge area under the metal staircase.

A beat-up couch, two folding chairs from Aaron Rental, and a leatherlike La-Z-Boy were assembled in a semicircle around a hotellike coffee table. Delta Airlines playing cards were spread on the table, the two jokers leaning against a Coors beer can. Smudges of orangy-pink lipstick covered the punctured opening in the can. What looked at first like burn holes from a cigar in the back of the recliner proved to be, after poking under the vinyl, gunshot holes. With the tip of the chisel blade, three spent bullets were jacked out of the stuffing and into the coffee can the magnets had been in. The sound was thunderous. Several ducked, two slapping their hips for guns, three pushing others down as they hit the floor.

The member with the can muffled a husky tee-hee and helped the men to their feet. Together they took the chinning bar apart. The barbells were taken apart too. Fibers from the exercise mats were removed with tweezers and placed in the newly acquired glassine bags. Photos were taken to go with the fiber and ballistic samples.

Those by the truck up on blocks had taken a vote not to remove the license plates from the premises. The five license plates in the toolbox were spread out, photographed, and replaced. There was one clear mud print of a sole and heel on the floor mat in the truck. In a crevice of the passenger seat was a square of slightly curled wood shaving. It was held up with tweezers for inspection. From a bark canoe? The front seat cushion was lifted out. In the compartment below were tools—ratchets, wrenches, channel-lock pliers, an electric drill, a propane torch, a battery charger, and a blue plastic ice tray with an assortment of screws and wing nuts.

While fiber samples were taken from the truck’s interior and paint and rust were scraped from the fenders, the drill and the propane torch were carried over to the cellar door, where those who’d been taking turns trying to pick the lock of the burglar bar or bust the hinges on the side were chided for overlooking valuable resources in the unlocked truck.

An hour later—their throats dry with the dust, eyes stinging with sweat, nostrils burning with the acrid smoke of hot metal—one of the team gave up rubbing his neck with his thumb and kicked the door in frustration. Miraculously, two bars buckled enough to insert a stout pole from the chinning bar and wrench the base of the door from its metal groove.

Flashlights held low, the three fathers led the way when the cellar door was opened. The bottom of the stairs could be the end to an old agony and the beginning of a new grief. A finish at least to the worse-than-useless comebacks to “I’m looking for a boy”: “Whatsamatta, your wife on the rag?” “Ole lady got lockjaw?” “Fuck off, punk.”

The first thing they saw was the wood pile. Logs, planks, two-by-fours, railroad ties, stumps, posts, and six slats from a junior-size bed. Flashlights next converged on a large mound in front of the furnace. Sacks of sand, gravel, cement mix, and river stones. Already a fortress, was 6 Star Storage preparing to strengthen its barricade for a major siege?

The youngest of the fathers squared his shoulders and led the group single-file into the darkest recess of the cellar. There behind the furnace was a large, army-green cabinet. More than the upstairs shelves, crates, and lockers, it justified “storage company.” Built like a safe, it measured five feet high, four feet across. While the torch, drill, and chisel were applied, the others joined the youngest father standing by the water heater fingering his belt buckle.

Back of the water heater was a space startling in its cleanliness. Swept, scrubbed, and polished, the area was no more than three feet all around but seemed immense in the otherwise grim and filthy dungeon. One of the fathers shouldered through to add his light. He brushed at his mustache and stared at the floor, as if in staring he could reproduce the contour drawing made with fluorescent chalk as described in the confidential memorandum coaxed from an ally who finally came across over drinks.

“Bonanza!” someone said in a constrained whisper behind them. The doors of the army-green cabinet were open. Those wearing rubber gloves, courtesy of Grady Hospital, waited for photos to be taken before they moved in.

On the middle shelf, a marked-up map of Atlanta lay haphazardly folded on top of a box of dynamite. The box was seventeen sticks shy.
On a higher shelf, in a scramble of clockworks and batteries, was a key ring. If four of the keys fit the outer gate, the two front doors, and the cellar door, that left six keys unaccounted for. Had they overlooked a room, a bank of lockers? Might they be the keys to the killers’ homes, or to the kidnap houses where the children were being held?

Carefully, painstakingly slowly, the keys were lowered into a plastic bag that had been blown open so fingerprints would not be blurred by the bag. The operation was too much for one of the team, who fainted, her right arm bent and close to her side, as if afraid to drop the alligator handbag she was no longer carrying.

Two flashes went off simultaneously. Those without cameras stepped back close to the wall while more photos were taken. It wouldn’t do to appear on the pages of
The Call
, or in the packets that would be pitched through the transom, shoved through the mail drop, and placed in editors’ desks.

Z
ala held on to the refrigerator door and leaned in, oddly starving. Purple plums sweated in the china bowl Mattie had brought in with the late-breaking bulletins from her now famous neighborhood. Edged in fleurs-de-lis, flowers of announcements, the bowl had been given as a good-luck gift. Who knew what information the arrest of Mattie’s neighbor might yield? In the amber Ball jar next to the leaky milk container were the irises from Paulette’s backyard. Those flowers were also symbols of forthcoming messages. Zala roamed her eyes over the crammed shelves. White spots were turning gray on the egg carton. Drops of milk slid down the plastic wrap covering the melon and dropped through the bars of the shelves to the top of the vegetable bins. They were so full the drawers wouldn’t close properly.

Zala made no move to take the milk out. “When
The Call
comes calling, Spence wants to be able to say he’s broke from stocking up. Then how in hell will Speaker get the money for the printer to release the most important issue of all?”

Mattie and Paulette looked up from what they were doing, arranging headlines in chronological order It was urgent that a fact sheet be circulated given the recent turn of events, the arrest of a young Black man from Verbena Street named Wayne Williams.

“Why be upset with Spencer?” Mattie said gently. “He’s not to blame for the turn things have taken. Who could know our disclosures would force the authorities to act? And we don’t know for certain that they did arrest someone simply because of our mailings.”

As Zala continued to lean into the cool of the refrigerator, Paulette clipped headlines, swinging her foot in time with the music. From the corner of Ashby and Thurmond the piano tuner was testing his work with “I’m on the Battlefield for My Lord.” Paulette murmured a few
lines, then sang out, “And I promised Him that I would serve Him till I die … Yessss, I’m on the battlefield,” then hummed the rest.