A Visible Darkness - By Jonathon King Page 0,34

Crime scene techs were working in the kitchen, spinning small fat brushes dipped in fingerprint powder along the window casements. Outside on the patio Richards was sitting at a table across from an elderly black woman who was chastising the detective as if she were a dull schoolgirl.

“Young lady, I have toll you and seven more of you all, no. I did not struggle. I took me a gasp of breath when I heard George go to chokin’ and spittin’ and I laid myself still. I didn’t even breathe until that pilla eased up on my face and then I still didn’t move. I knowed what was comin’. I didn’t just come in from the fields young lady. I know what these mens want.”

The woman looked at me when I reluctantly stepped out of the house. Her eyes stopped me. She’d seen too many men in her house in the last few hours. Richards turned and nodded at me and I took a step back and waited.

“So you just laid still and fooled him?” Richards asked, turning back to the woman.

“I don’t know about fooled,” she said. “Only one been made a fool is me. I stayed still. Left that pilla on my face and prayed to the Lord. Then I felt him put George down next to me. He covered him up like he was layin’ him to rest and I guess he was.

“I heard him leave and I still laid there, not movin’ a muscle, a dead man next to me. But I knows when to keep my head down, young lady. An’ when to get up and holler and that wasn’t no time for hollerin’.”

The woman turned her head and looked down at the empty tabletop. A single tear formed at the corner of her eye and then rolled down her cheek and disappeared into the wrinkles of her face. For some reason, it seemed out of place to see an old person cry. My own mother had always hidden that aspect of her sorrow.

This woman was unashamed.

“When I was truly sure he was gone, I called y’all on nine-one- one,” she said, still not looking up. “And I waited right on the bed, watchin’ after George.”

Richards let it go, touched the back of the old woman’s hand and got up quietly. Back in the house she crossed her arms in front of her. I put my hands in my pockets.

“The first guys on the scene had to take down the front door to get in,” she said. “Luckily, it was an experienced patrolman who checked the other doors and windows first and eyeballed everything. The place was tight. No signs of forced entry.”

She must have seen the frown on my face. “You saw the burglar bars on the windows?”

“And the deadbolt and chain on the front door,” I said.

“The utility room door leading to the carport is the only other entry not covered. The bolt was tight. Even the chain was hooked. But the crime scene guys studied the shit out of it this time,” she said, and I could see her eyes taking on the grayer cast that came with either anger or challenge.

“The clips on the jalousie panes, four of them, had recently been bent out, and then back.”

“Which means he put them back?”

“Carefully. Took his time. Had to figure both of them were dead and he had time to cover.”

“Jesus.”

I thought about Gary Heidnik in North Philly. Heidnik was a self-styled minister who’d been abducting mentally handicapped women for years and keeping them chained in his basement. When police finally discovered his “house of horrors,” they found one woman still alive and body parts of another in his freezer. Each day his neighbors saw him. Each day he carefully locked up his house to go out. Each day, careful and meticulous like a business.

“So that’s the husband?” I asked, hooking my thumb to the body bag. “It doesn’t fit my guy’s motive or yours, going after a couple.”

“Boyfriend,” she said, and she couldn’t keep a sardonic smile from pulling at the corners of her mouth.

“Excuse me?”

“George Harris is, was, Ms. Thompson’s boyfriend. He lived three blocks away. A widower. She’d been seeing him for about a year.” Richards was flipping through a narrow notebook. “Younger man. Seventy-four.”

Ms. Thompson was closer to eighty. She was in the same generation as the others on Billy’s list. Her living arrangement didn’t bother me. It was the change. If this was meant to be part of the