The Bullet Read online

  I started brainstorming whether there might be some way to honor my birth family. Perhaps a donation to a charity they might have supported? If any sort of inheritance ever did turn up, I could direct it there. Cheral might know whether Sadie Rawson had embraced any particular cause. It cheered me to have a plan. These last seven days had been wretched. So painful. But perhaps I was through the worst.

  I began to hum as I threw the last sweater into my suitcase. “Sweet Emotion.” Aerosmith is hard to beat when you need perking up. Steven Tyler’s screech is too infectious. When had that song first come out? Midseventies, I was pretty sure. The radio stations would have played it nonstop. Boone and Sadie Rawson had probably owned the album on eight-track tape. They might have played it at parties, Boone playing air guitar for real, Sadie Rawson dancing so hard the gold Gypsy hoops flew off her ears. I stood grinning at the thought.

  Then my cell phone rang.

  • • •

  THIS TIME IT was Leland Brett. People had been calling the newsroom in response to the story about me.

  “Some real nut jobs out there,” reported Leland. “Not that that comes as any surprise after forty years in the news business. One lady says she’s a psychic, she can help you contact your parents beyond the grave.”

  “Hah! That would be useful.”

  “Yeah. So would winning the lottery, but that’s not gonna happen either, is it? But listen. This one guy. Says his name is Beamer Beasley.”

  “Beamer Beasley?”

  “Now, don’t laugh, sweetheart. It’s not such an unusual name for Georgia. His middle name’s probably Bubba. Anyway, he says he’s a cop. Says he worked homicides for the Atlanta PD back in ’79.”

  “Why did he call?”

  “He says he worked your mama and daddy’s case. I had Jessica check him out. He sounds legit.”

  “And . . . did he seem to know anything that might be relevant?”

  “I don’t know. He wants to speak to you personally. Asked me to pass the message along.”

  I glanced at the clock. I had a couple hours before I needed to leave for the airport. I’d been planning to return a few phone calls, then go for a walk.

  “Maybe I could meet him.”

  “Sure. Why not? Tell you what. How about you meet him here, at the newspaper? Nice, neutral territory for you both. I could find you a quiet meeting room to use. And afterward, I’ll take you out for lunch.”

  “Absolutely not. Not least because I’ll be racing straight to the airport to catch my flight.”

  “Meet him here anyway.” Leland sounded disappointed. “Maybe he’ll agree to an interview after you and he are done talking. There might be material there for a follow-up story.”

  • • •

  AN HOUR LATER Beamer Beasley and I were seated across from each other in a small conference room.

  He was African-American, older, perhaps in his seventies, with grizzled hair cropped close against his skull. Time had thickened him around the middle and left him stooped. But his eyes were clear and gray and intelligent. Beamer Beasley had a stillness about him. You sensed that he’d seen an awful lot in his years on this earth, and that there wasn’t much left in the repertoire of human depravity that might faze him.

  “I came here to say two things,” he said, after Leland had finally been persuaded to leave us alone and shut the door behind him.

  “I’m listening.”

  “The first is that I’m sorry. For failing you. You deserved justice after what happened to you and your family. You deserved that. And we tried hard, but we failed you and I failed you.”

  “I’m sure you tried your best—”

  He held up his hand to hush me. “Please. Let me finish. When you work law enforcement for as long as I have, you learn to forget most of the wickedness you come across. You learn to leave it at the office, put it out of your mind. Only way you can keep on getting up in the morning. But some cases—you carry them here.” He pressed his hand over his heart. “I’ve been carrying yours for a long time. I always hoped to get the chance to tell you that. I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry and ask for your forgiveness.”

  A tear sprang to my eye. I was genuinely touched. “Thank you. It was brave of you to come here and say that.”

  “Not brave at all. Wish I’d been able to say it thirty years ago.”

  “Well, I appreciate your saying it now.” We sat in silence for a moment, then I leaned forward. “May I ask you a question?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I did wonder . . . how a case like that was never solved. A double homicide and a child shot. It’s such a dramatic crime. But the news­paper made it sound like you guys just gave up.”

  He flinched.

  “I don’t mean to sound rude.”

  “No, you’ve got every right to ask. We didn’t give up. But you have to understand what was going on in the city.” He frowned and shifted in his seat. “You ever hear of a man named Marc Tetalman?”

  I shook my head.

  “I expect his name is lost to the history books. He was a doctor, visiting Atlanta from out of town, for a convention. He got shot down and killed by robbers trying to steal his wallet. This was a few months before your parents died.”

  I waited.

  “I was on duty that night. We were interviewing his wife, down at Grady Hospital, when the surgeon came out and told her he’d died. It was their wedding anniversary. Eleven years married. That’s why they’d left the hotel and gone out to dinner that night.”

  Beasley swung his head from side to side sadly. “Marc Tetalman’s death caused a big old scandal because he was well-off and white and ­everybody worried the publicity would hurt the city’s convention business. It did, too. After that, everybody decided they’d rather go to Houston or Miami. But what stuck in my head was that Tetalman was the one hundred and twelfth homicide that year in Atlanta. The one hundred and twelfth. And he died in June, Ms. Cashion. One hundred and twelve people killed, and we weren’t even into the hot part of summer yet. Do you understand what I’m telling you? We were dealing with a new murder nearly every day.”

  I remembered what Jessica Yeo had said. “Somebody told me Atlanta had the worst murder rate of any city in America.”

  “That’s right. Not even Detroit could keep up. Nobody knew why. And then, when you thought things couldn’t get worse, little boys started turning up strangled.”

  “The child murders.”

  “Yes, ma’am. On top of everything else we had a genuine serial killer running around the city, murdering black kids and throwing their bodies in the woods or in the river. You can’t imagine. Folks were scared to let their kids ride bikes down their own street. And the politicians, they were blaming us. The old governor came out and said we cops ought to show ‘less jawbone and more backbone.’ His exact words, I never forgot them.”

  Anger flashed across Beasley’s gray eyes. “Worst of it was, Governor Sanders was right. You had black cops—not all of us, but some—­whispering that maybe it was the Klan, the KKK, that was killing the kids. You had a lot of white cops who just up and quit the force. And then to top it off, the courts went and ordered a hiring freeze. Said the police department was racist, the hiring policies were racist, and we needed to stop hiring new cops altogether for a while. You can guess how much that helped things.”

  He puffed the air out of his cheeks and leaned back. “I’m going on too long. I don’t imagine you care much about the sorry history of the Atlanta PD. But you asked me why we let your family’s case drop, and that’s the only way I know how to answer you.”

  “You’re saying, basically, that it was a bad time for the city. Too many murders to investigate and not enough of you to do it.”

  “In our defense, we did try. Your case got under a lot of people’s skin, not just mine. A young couple gunned down with the
ir daughter watching. You didn’t see that every day, not even back in 1979. And I hate to say it, but you all were white, and that meant folks paid more attention. But there wasn’t much to go on. No murder weapon, no witnesses.”

  “Except me.”

  “Except you. But I gather you don’t remember anything, and I don’t think you were old enough to understand what you’d seen back then, either.”

  I hesitated. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer to my next question. But I might not get the chance to ask again. “Would you describe for me exactly what happened that day? As best as you all were able to reconstruct it? I would like to know the details of how they died.”

  “Hmm. You sure about that?”

  “I think so.”

  “Once you get an image in your mind, it can be hard to shake it back out. The way your parents died wasn’t pretty. You know the basics of what happened, don’t you? Might be best to leave it at that.”

  Again I hesitated, then made up my mind. “I’d like to know.”

  The gray eyes searched mine. “All right, then. I expected you might ask. I read through the old incident report before I drove over, to refresh my memory.”

  “I’d love to get a copy of that report, if possible.”

  “All right. I don’t have it on me, but I can do that.”

  I bit my lip, then prompted him, “I know from the newspaper account that they died in the kitchen, and that it was late afternoon.”

  “That’s right. Neighbors heard a commotion and called it in. There was no sign of forced entry. The first responders had to kick in the door. They found you three together on the floor.”

  “But they were—my parents were already dead when police got there?”

  “They would have died instantly. The nature of their wounds suggested that, and the autopsy results were consistent. They wouldn’t have suffered.”

  “It’s so strange,” I murmured. “Why I lived, and they didn’t. I mean, if we were all shot at once, three bullets from the same gun. You’d think it would have gone the other way, since I was smaller and weaker. Was it—was it just the location of their wounds?”

  Beasley looked at me. “I told you when we started that I wanted to say two things.”

  “You did, that’s right.”

  “We’re treading close to the second one now.” A look of grim determination settled on his face. “You sure you want to do this?”

  “Yes.”’

  “Then I’m going to walk you through the sequence of what we think happened. Let me get through it, and then I’ll answer your questions as best as I can.”

  “Sure. Okay.”

  “We believe your father was shot first. That’s based on the way he was found positioned on the floor. And it makes sense, if you think about a man trying to defend his family. He would have tried to put himself between the gun, and your mother and you. So the shooter would have hit him first.”

  I shuddered. Took a breath to steady myself. Then nodded at Beasley to go on.

  “Your father, as you may know, was shot in the head. Shot at close range, ten feet or less. The bullet passed right through. It came out the back of his head and lodged in the wood of the doorframe. But the shooter dug it out and took it with him. The wood was splintered and broken from where he’d hacked at it.”

  I frowned. “That doesn’t sound like something a random burglar would do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The old newspaper articles, the ones that Leland Brett wrote.” I motioned at the closed door of the conference room, and the newsroom beyond. “He quoted a cop who thought the shootings were an accident. A burglary gone wrong. But wouldn’t a burglar have panicked and run?”

  “And not stuck around to dig a bullet out of a wooden doorframe?” Beasley completed my thought. “You’re right; it’s odd. But people are odd. They do all kinds of things that don’t make sense.”

  “At any rate, you never recovered the bullet.”

  “We never did.”

  “And my mother. She was shot in the chest?”

  “She was,” he said carefully. “She was trying to protect you, too. She had pushed you down behind her.”

  Tears sprang again to my eyes. I tried and failed to keep my voice steady. “So . . . you’re saying . . . what, that the guy shot her and then pushed her aside to get to me? What kind of person does that? What kind of a person shoots two people and then aims a third bullet at a ­defenseless three-year-old child ?”

  “No, Ms. Cashion.” Beasley leaned forward and folded my trembling hands into his. “There was no third bullet. The bullet that killed your mama passed right through her, too.”

  “I don’t—I don’t understand.”

  “The reason you didn’t die was that bullet was going slower by the time it got to you. Your mama did protect you. She slowed it down.”

  I blinked at him.

  It took a moment for the full, sickening significance of what he was saying to hit home. Then my hands flew to my neck, and I began to claw.

  Seventeen

  * * *

  In the wild, a mother tiger will fight to the death to defend her young. She will knock down an animal four times her size, will attack and kill even a male tiger. When she senses a threat to her cubs, she growls. Then she flattens her ears and bares her canines, the corners of her open mouth pulled back. That snarl is the last thing a would-be predator ever sees.

  Human mothers share the instinct. Most of us know at some raw, unspoken level that our mothers would fight like a tigress to protect us, would give their lives to save our own. But it is one thing to believe, in the abstract, that your mother would take a bullet for you. It is quite another to learn that she has literally done so.

  Beasley had to pin my arms to my sides to prevent me from opening my skin. He must have been twice my age, but he was still strong, and I was no match for him. I thrashed for a minute, then went limp.

  The bullet throbbed. A hot, white pulse through my neck and shoulders. It defied belief: the same bullet. The very same piece of metal had passed through Sadie Rawson’s breast, through her heart, on its way to me.

  “I want to rip it out,” I whispered.

  “I know.” Instead Beasley made me focus on taking shallow, jagged breaths. He held me upright.

  Gradually, my breathing slowed. When I could speak, I asked, “Was that the second thing you wanted to tell me? Please say there isn’t more. I don’t think I can take it.”

  “That’s the worst of it.” He extended a handkerchief and I blew my nose.

  “Thank you. I’m sorry. Sorry for going crazy like that.”

  “No need to apologize.”

  “Just that every time I think I’ve heard the worst of it, there’s some new revelation that knocks me flat. The bullet that’s in my neck is the same one that killed my mother? That’s—that’s—I don’t even know what it is.”

  “It’s gruesome.”

  “Gruesome. Yes. That it certainly is.” I shivered. Pain was shooting down my wrist now, too. I folded my right arm tight across my chest and cradled it, hunched over like a broken bird.

  “Ms. Cashion.” He was looking at me sideways. “I have to ask. Has coming back here triggered any memories? Going back to look at your old house? Or hearing me describe the details of what happened that day?”

  “No. Nothing. I’d hoped it might.”

  “Probably wouldn’t have been admissible anyway. In court, I mean, if you’d remembered anything relevant. But I had to ask.”

  A thought occurred to me. “Were you one of the detectives who questioned me? After I was shot?”

  “Yes.” His voice was neutral, quiet. “You were heartbreaking. Tiny little girl, all bandaged up. The doctors didn’t want us anywhere near you, but we had our jobs to do. I didn’t talk to you myself. They bro
ught in a child psychiatrist, a lady trained to deal with kids who’ve experienced trauma. But they allowed a couple of us to watch from the corner.”

  “And—what did I say?”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t talk. You were barely more than a baby, barely talking as it was. I never heard you say a word. But we hoped you might remember what the guy looked like. The shrink showed you photographs, and you pointed at one. She shuffled ’em, and you pointed at it again. Same one. But two days later when we could organize a lineup, you wouldn’t ID him. Wouldn’t point at anybody at all.”

  I thought about this. “How did you know what pictures to show me? I mean, were they random? Or did you have a suspect?”

  “We had a few. We questioned the man who used to clean your parents’ gutters. He couldn’t keep his story straight about where he’d been that afternoon. Turned out he spent it blind drunk in a bar, didn’t want his wife to know.” Beasley shrugged. “More promising, there was a guy who’d done a few burglaries around your neighborhood. We picked him up when he tried to off-load silverware and jewelry he’d lifted from a house on Cantrell Road.”

  “The random-burglar theory.”

  “Exactly. And there was jewelry missing. Apparently your mama had a particular necklace she favored, that she never took off. It was gone. Never did turn up. But . . . there was nothing to indicate the Cantrell Road guy ever set foot inside your house.”

  I shook my head in confusion. “So whose picture was it that I picked out?”

  “We also had—we had a statement from a neighbor. Directing us towards someone.”

  “What neighbor? The Rooneys?”

  Beasley screwed up his face in concentration. “Can’t say I remember the name. She was a teacher. Lived next door.”