BLOOD CRIES: a John Jordan Mystery (Book 10) (John Jordan Mysteries) Read online

  Michael Lister

  Blood Cries

  A John Jordan Mystery, Book 10

  The Atlanta Years, Volume 2

  Praise for the John Jordan Series

  “Michael Lister may be the author of the most unique series running in mystery fiction. The Body and the Blood proves that once again. It crackles with tension and authenticity.” Michael Connelly

  Publishers Weekly Starred Review:

  “In Lister’s superior fourth book featuring cop-turned-prison chaplain John Jordan (after 2006’s story collection Flesh and Blood) . . . A plausible resolution concludes this first-rate locked-room mystery.”

  Kirkus Starred Review:

  “A realistic drama and surprising character depth. The spiritual dimension of John’s inner life adds a depth that’s often absent in the mystery genre. A realistically portrayed prison setting and a cast of characters depicted with complexity and nuance together form a quietly effective character-study/whodunit.”

  “Eerie and cinematic, John Jordan manages to be deeply flawed yet utterly appealing. Lister, with his gift for exploring the nuances of human relationships, creates a vivid and multi-faceted supporting cast, each character finely-wrought, each portrayal unflinching. Suspenseful, complex and original, a page-turner with a soul.” Lisa Unger

  Florida Book Award-winning series Florida Weekly called “a treasure of contemporary literature–suspenseful, provocative, and unsettling,”

  “Michael Lister writes one of the most ambitious and unusual crime fiction series going. Not for the faint of heart, it’s Heart of Darkness meets The Shawshank Redemption. Read this book and see what crime fiction is capable of.” Julia Spencer-Fleming

  “Chaplain John Jordan is one of crime fiction’s most original heroes, and his creator, Michael Lister is one of the genre’s freshest new voices.” PJ Parrish

  Click Here to get BLOOD OF THE LAMB for FREE!

  Books by Michael Lister

  (John Jordan Novels)

  Power in the Blood

  Blood of the Lamb

  Flesh and Blood

  (Special Introduction by Margaret Coel)

  The Body and the Blood

  Blood Sacrifice

  Rivers to Blood

  Innocent Blood

  (Special Introduction by Michael Connelly)

  Blood Money

  Blood Moon

  (Jimmy “Soldier” Riley Novels)

  The Big Goodbye

  The Big Beyond

  The Big Hello

  In a Spider’s Web (short story)

  The Big Book of Noir

  (Merrick McKnight / Reggie Summers Novels)

  Thunder Beach

  A Certain Retribution

  (Remington James Novels)

  Double Exposure

  (includes intro by Michael Connelly)

  Separation Anxiety

  (Sam Michaels / Daniel Davis Novels)

  Burnt Offerings

  Separation Anxiety

  (Love Stories)

  Carrie’s Gift

  (Short Story Collections)

  North Florida Noir

  Florida Heat Wave

  Delta Blues

  Another Quiet Night in Desparation

  (The Meaning Series)

  The Meaning of Jesus

  Meaning Every Moment

  The Meaning of Life in Movies

  Sign up for Michael’s newsletter by clicking here or go to

  www.MichaelLister.com and receive a free book.

  Click here to get SPILLED BLOOD for FREE!

  The LORD said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.”

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter One

  From the summer of ’79 until the spring of ’81, a serial killer stalked the African-American children of the city of Atlanta.

  The Atlanta Child Murders, as they came to be known, was a two-year nightmare the city couldn’t wake itself up from.

  During this terrible reign of terror, twenty-eight children, adolescents, and adults were murdered.

  It began on July 21, 1979, when Edward Hope Smith went missing, and ended on May 24, 1981, when the body of twenty-seven-year-old Nathaniel Cater was fished from the Chattahoochee River.

  Between these two murders, some twenty-six others were committed, as many as one a week near the end.

  Of course, these weren’t the only murder victims in Atlanta during the time. They weren’t even the only black children to be murdered. They were the only ones who made it onto the task force’s ill-advised and incomplete list.

  Wayne Bertram Williams, a twenty-three-year-old music promoter, was arrested on June 21, 1981.

  Just a few short months before—during a family trip to Atlanta over the last weekend of November in 1980—I had come face-to-face with Williams in the arcade of the Omni Hotel.

  He was there passing out his flyers, and I had intervened when I saw him harassing one of the other kids.

  I had been obsessed with him and the case ever since.

  On February 27, 1982, he was convicted of the murders of Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Payne, two of only a few adults on the list.

  He was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences.

  Labeled the Atlanta Child Murderer, Williams was never charged with, tried for, or convicted of killing a single child—an irony and injustice I had never been able to get over.

  Following his trial, officials claimed Williams could be linked to some twenty-five of the twenty-eight names on the list through trace evidence—specifically, green trilobal carpet fibers found in Williams’s bedroom and on the victims—and closed those cases.

  Those same officials claimed the murders stopped.

  Officials stopped counting them.

  Reporters stopped reporting them.

  The world stopped watching.

  The list stopped.

  The murders did not.

  And
like Abel of old, their blood cries out—tortured, mournful, inconsolable cries I couldn’t help but hear, couldn’t help but be haunted by.

  Chapter Two

  I was sitting on an uncomfortable barstool in a dive on Memorial Drive, trying to find the sweet spot.

  It was early in November of ’86, less than a month since I had buried Jordan and Martin, and some four years after Wayne Williams was convicted.

  The storefront bar was named Scarlet’s and it was in the end of a tin-building strip mall with a cluttered video store, a passable pizza place, and a consignment shop with a meager amount of merchandise.

  The bartender-owner was a middle-aged lesbian lush named Margaret.

  She had of late become one of my closest companions and the nearest thing to a mother I had in Atlanta.

  “What’s your sweet spot?” I asked.

  “I’m old and dried up,” she said. “Got no sweet spot no more. But my niece . . .”

  Always trying to set me up with her niece—for Margaret, all roads led to Susan Daniels. But she was wasting her breath. I wasn’t interested in Susan or anyone else.

  A thin forty-something woman with shoulder-length wavy brown hair and big blue eyes, Margaret looked like a former tennis pro. Nothing about her looked old or dried up.

  I was only interested in finding my sweet spot in, at, or near the bottom of my next glass—the one that would cause the specters of Jordan Moore and Martin Fisher to fade.

  “I didn’t say G-spot. I said sweet spot.”

  I could hear the slightest of slurs in the words tumbling out of my mouth a little too freely. But even if I hadn’t, I could tell I was drunk by the way I felt my center wasn’t holding.

  That thought led to a line or two of unbidden verse. Turning and turning in the widening gyre . . . Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.

  “Things fall apart,” I said.

  “Never a truer statement uttered,” she said.

  “‘Anarchy is loosed upon the world,’” I said. “‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere . . . The ceremony of innocence is drowned.’”

  Meeting Jordan the first time made its way into my mind.

  I’m Jordan Moore, she said, extending her small, cold hand.

  I smiled. Really? I’m John Jordan.

  She smiled back but looked a bit embarrassed, her face and neck blushing crimson.

  “Is that biblical?” Margaret asked.

  “Might as well be,” I said. “Yeats.”

  “What?”

  “Who,” I said. “A Mr. William Butler Yeats.”

  “This about that kid?” she asked.

  Little Martin Fisher trying to make a layup on the rickety basketball goal at my old apartment complex shimmered like heat lighting on the night sky that was my mind.

  Though I knew she was talking about Martin Fisher, her question reminded me of the one Wayne Williams asked on the night he was stopped. This about those kids?

  “Everything is,” I said. “Especially Yeats.”

  The joint had a new jukebox but everything in it was old, and that was just fine with me.

  A moaning saxophone let me know another of my selections was coming on.

  It was a live version of Seger’s “Turn the Page” from the Live Bullet album. When the song came on, Seger and his band had just finished Van Morrison’s “I’ve Been Working,” and he was still out of breath when he said, “This is from ’72 also. About being on the road. It’s called ‘Turn the Page.’”

  On a long and lonesome highway east of Omaha . . .

  The song was about something I had been as yet unable to do—turn the page—and it perfectly captured my mood.

  The isolation and loneliness of a world-weary traveler being burned up by the road.

  Life is the road and it had done one hell of a number on this young journeyman, whose center was no longer holding.

  What was there to do but drink and listen to good music and try not to think?

  “Why were you askin’ an old leathery lesbian about her sweet spot?” Margaret asked.

  She had waited until the song was over.

  “You know that small, fleeting spot between dulled agony and oblivion, the one you can never sustain?”

  “’Cause the center doesn’t hold,” she said.

  I nodded vigorously. “Exactly. ’Cause the center doesn’t hold. I’m trying to find it and hold it.”

  “They say there’s no treading in the bottle,” she said. “Only drowning.”

  “To drowning,” I said, lifting my glass.

  “To drowning,” she said, raising her glass to clink mine.

  They say Margaret used not to drink the way she does now. They say it started when she lost the love of her life and business partner, Laney Mitchell.

  Margaret Hart and Laney Mitchell were happy when, inspired by the combination of their names, they started a Gone with the Wind-themed bar called what else but Scarlett’s.

  The joint was admittedly a bit kitschy and touristy, but it was a happy place, owned and operated by a happy couple, frequented by customers who quickly became friends.

  At least that’s what they say. That was all before my time.

  Now that the Mitchell was gone and there was only the Margaret, the place was dim and in disrepair, the book and movie memorabilia dingy and dust-covered, and a hint of desperation hung in the air and clung to everything and everyone who entered, but frankly, Margaret didn’t give a damn.

  “Fuck my liver if it can’t take a joke,” she said, and poured herself another.

  I had another myself, as time slowly ticked along and Atlanta’s missing and murdered children remained missing and murdered, and frankly, no one seemed to give a damn about that either.

  Chapter Three

  Later when Susan, Margaret’s niece and the person solely responsible for Scarlett’s doors still being opened, stormed in, Margaret looked at me and said, “Uh oh, we’re in trouble now.”

  “What’re you doin’?” Susan asked.

  “My job,” Margaret said. “What? I can’t drink with my customers? What?”

  Susan huffed and shook her head. “I’m not even talkin’ about how far into the bag you are. You’re serving someone underage.”

  Susan wasn’t unattractive—or wouldn’t have been if she weren’t so closed and rigid.

  “Him?” she said, nodding toward me.

  “Me?” I asked in surprise.

  “He’s got one of the oldest souls I’ve ever met,” Margaret said.

  “I don’t think that’s what the authorities check.”

  “He’s twenty-one,” Margaret said. “Says so right there on his ID.”

  “Hey, it’s your liquor license, your livelihood—if you can call it that. I just work here. Drink yourselves into a stupid stupor and let the world burn down around you. Up to you.”

  “She said stupid stupor,” I said.

  “Tell her why we drink,” Margaret said.

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Because the center doesn’t hold,” she said.

  “Oh, that. Yeah,” I said. “It’s why the world is burning down around us too. Anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed.”

  “Something’s dimmed,” Susan said. “I’ll give you that.”

  “I was just trying to find my sweet spot. Sorry. I didn’t mean to . . . I’ll sober up and . . .”

  “I’ll pour you some coffee,” Susan said.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Drop a wee splash of Bailey’s in it, would you?”

  She sighed and dropped the cup on the counter.

  “I was kidding,” I said. “You’re not as far gone as you think I am.”

  “No,” she said, “I’m not.”

  “I said wee because Bailey’s is Irish.”

  “When you’re sober you don’t explain shit like that,” she said.

  The tinted glass door opened and Lonnie Baker, a thin, narrow-framed thirty-something b
lack man with large tortoiseshell glasses and a slight mustache, walked in right on time.

  His arrival signified the transition from afternoon into evening.

  Lonnie Baker owned the video rental store at the other end of the strip mall, and every day at five o’clock he taped the tattered piece of paper that read “Back in Five” onto the door, locked up his shop, and came down to Scarlett’s.

  Every day he would sit on the same barstool. Every day Margaret would pour a shot of bourbon and place it before him. Every day he would stare it down. And every day he would eventually slide it back toward her without drinking or spilling a single drop.

  Lonnie Baker was a recovering alcoholic who never missed a meeting. This daily exercise of facing down his demon was part of his ritual. He had four years sobriety. What he was doing was working for him, and he wasn’t about to stop working it.

  Today, like every day, Margaret clanged the bell behind the bar, which was followed by a smattering of claps and cheers from the few patrons present who, permanently or momentarily, weren’t close friends with Bill W.

  As Lonnie stood, the front door opened again, and to my astonishment Ida Williams ambled in.

  She paused for a moment to let her eyes adjust and scan the room. When she saw me, she began making her way over, but stopped when she recognized Lonnie Baker.

  The two hugged and exchanged a few words, then hugged again, and Lonnie left to reopen his video store as Miss Ida made her way over to me.

  I stood.

  I had had only coffee since Susan arrived, but I was still a bit unsteady on my feet, and I felt embarrassed and self-conscious for Ida to see me this way.

  I started to walk toward her, but figured it best if I didn’t.

  We embraced when she reached me, each refusing to let go for a very long moment. Like the rest of her, Miss Ida’s breasts were bountiful and she held me to them as if I were her own child—and for a while there I thought I was going to be.

  In addition to being a friend and a colleague in the missing and murdered children’s group, Ida had been Jordan’s mother and the closest thing to a mother-in-law my young self had ever had.

  “How are you, son?” she asked.

  “Been better,” I said. “Not gonna lie.”

  Jordan there again, permeating my being. Small enough to be a schoolgirl. Shy green eyes. Straight sun-streaked blond hair. Smooth, unvarnished, suntanned skin. A simple, understated, graceful beauty I found irresistible.