The Killings Read Online Free PDF Page B

for the rest of his life for a crime he didn’t commit?”
    Wayne had been on the verge of hanging up, of getting up and leaving when she said this. Her little speech stopped him. He nodded at her, this time meeting her gaze. “Go on,” he said.
    “I can’t help you with your case,” Carmen began. “But if you tell me what I need to know, maybe you and I can put a stop to this.”
    The enormity of what Carmen Mendoza was saying to Wayne had a visible effect on him. All of a sudden it appeared that he had a great weight on his shoulders, that he was saddled with its burden. He sat forward and slumped over. He scooted his chair closer to the glass partition and regarded Carmen with his haunted brown eyes.
    “I’ve never told anybody about this,” he said, his voice a whisper. “Not even that other writer who wrote a book about me. Guy wanted details of my childhood and high school years. I told him all of it. All except ... about her.”
    “Will you tell me?”
    Wayne nodded.
    “Why me and not another writer? Why me and not the police?”
    “Because when you said her name, it was the first time I’d even thought of her in more than thirty years.”
    “You didn’t think to bring her up when you were a suspect?”
    “There was no reason to.”
    Carmen was silent for a moment, letting this sink in.
    Wayne shifted in his seat. “She ... she’s not still alive, is she?”
    “I don’t know, Wayne.”
    “Because if she is, well ... that would be impossible.”
    “I know. The few people who would even talk to me about her told me she’s been dead for more than thirty years. I couldn’t find a birth record, but she had to have been at least a hundred and ten.”
    Wayne smirked.
    “She was at least a hundred years old when my grandmother was young. She was older than that. A hundred and seventy. A hundred and eighty maybe.”
    Carmen smiled sympathetically, the way you smiled at an eight-year-old before you told him there was no Santa Claus. “That’s not possible, Wayne. No one lives that long.”
    “No one normal lives that long. But she wasn’t normal, was she? Obviously you know that or else you wouldn’t be here.”
    “I don’t know very much, Wayne. I’m hoping you can fill in some of the blanks.”
    Wayne bowed his head, closed his eyes. Carmen let him gather his wits. Finally he looked at her, determination on his face. “Okay. When do you want to start?”
    “How about now?”
    “Let me ask you a question first. These murders, what makes you think they’re connected?”
    Carmen raised an eyebrow. “The mutilations.”
    She watched Wayne Williams’s eyes widen.
    “They’re the same as others that have happened.”
    “Others that have happened?”
    Carmen nodded. “Some are mutilated, some strangled, others are shot or bludgeoned. There’s always a pattern in each cluster. That’s one connection. The other connection is the victims themselves. All Black, some mixed-race, all from the same general area. I noticed the pattern when I first started researching your case. That’s what got me intrigued about it. So why don’t you tell me more about what you know about her?”
    For the next forty-five minutes Wayne told her. What he told her was just the tip of the iceberg, but it confirmed everything. And it chilled her. She couldn’t help it. Listening to it made her shiver.
    In time, the skin along her arms and the back of her neck broke out in gooseflesh.

FOUR
    July 20, 1911, Atlanta, Georgia
    As always, when Robert Jackson saw Henry Parker mount the steps to his barbershop and saunter inside, he felt a twinge of nostalgia for days past.
    It was a slow day. His only customer was Stan Brady, a seventy-five-year-old former slave who came in twice a week for a shave and once every two weeks for a trim. Stan practically lived in his shop every other day of the week. Mostly he liked to look at the magazines Robert kept in neat stacks on the small coffee table in the waiting room or on