“Do you think you’d remember him if you saw a picture of him?”
“He was white,” Cedric said. “I didn’t see him too good. I was over here.”
Will turned back to the phone booth. The lights around the parking lot and the mailboxes were strong enough to blind a grown man, but none of them would have illuminated the pay phone.
He asked Cedric, “What do you think happened?”
He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he started shuffling the mail again. “She always told me before,” he said. “When she was going off with Luther, she always told me so I wouldn’t worry.”
“After Jasmine made the call, which way did the man go when he left?”
Cedric pointed up the street toward the exit.
“He didn’t have a car?”
“Don’t know,” the boy admitted. “We was out here on our way to Freddy’s, and then he hollered us over. Jazz told me to go on see Freddy, but I stayed around to make sure she was okay.”
Will wondered at the girl going up to a strange man in the dark. Maybe she was heading down that wrong path faster than her grandmother thought.
He asked, “Where’s Freddy’s?”
Cedric pointed across the street to another building.
“Did Jasmine go with you after she made the call?”
“After, yeah.”
“And the man left up the street, toward the main road?”
Cedric nodded, chewing his bottom lip like he had more to say. Will gave him some time, and eventually, the boy said, “Jazz say she heard screaming in the stairs. Leesha was yelling.”
“What was she yelling?”
“Jazz don’t know. She was just yelling like she was being hurt, but she done that before, you know? Leesha takes up men sometimes and they kind of mean, but she say she don’t mind.”
“Cedric,” Will said, putting his hands back on the boy’s shoulders. “I need you to be straight with me now. Did Jasmine see who was hurting Aleesha? Did anyone talk to her, say anything to her?”
Cedric shook his head. “She told me she didn’t see nothing, didn’t hear nothing.”
“Was she saying it like she did today, where if you thought about it awhile, you might think that what she was really saying was that maybe she did hear something, but she just wasn’t going to tell anybody?”
“No,” Cedric insisted. “She would’a told me.”
Will didn’t know if that was true or not. Jasmine wanted to protect her brother. She wouldn’t have told him something that might put him in danger.
Cedric reached into his pocket and took out a twenty-dollar bill. “This is what she wanted,” he told Will. “I took the money he gave her for making the phone call. That’s why she was chasing me.” He was trying to give Will the money.
“Hold on to it for me,” Will said, knowing he couldn’t do anything with the bill. “Jasmine didn’t leave because you took the money, Cedric. You know that, right?”
The boy shrugged, and the mail slipped from his hands. Will bent down to help pick it up. From the colors, he gathered they were mostly bills with about ten pieces of junk mail thrown in. Will probably had the same limited-time offers waiting for him back home.
He looked up at the mailboxes. “Cedric?”
“Yeah?”
“Did Aleesha have a mailbox here?”
“Yeah,” Cedric answered, pointing to one of the higher boxes.
Will stood, making note of the number. “Let’s get you back inside, okay?”
“I’m all right.”
“I need to check something in Aleesha’s apartment. Let me walk you up.”
Cedric was slow going up the stairs. He used his key to get into his grandmother’s apartment, but didn’t go inside. Instead, he watched Will continue up to Aleesha Monroe’s place. Will felt the boy’s silent disapproval burning into his back: Where are you going? You promised you’d help.
Will still had the key in his vest pocket from earlier. He slipped it into the lock and turned it to the side, hearing the bolt engage. He tried the knob but the door did not open. Will was the first person to admit—at least to himself—that he had trouble with left and right, and God knows it got worse when he was tired, but even he had opened enough locks to know which direction to turn a key in order to open it. He slid the key back into the lock and tried the other way, hearing the bolt click again. This time, the door opened.
The apartment still had that same feel to it, like something bad had happened. He stood in the doorway with only the light from the hall illuminating the room. Will saw a drop of blood on the floor and knelt beside it. Without thinking, he put his fingers to the drop to check whether or not it was dry.
His fingers came back clean, but Will hadn’t noticed the drop the first time he had come into the apartment. He flipped on the lights, thinking about the lock. This morning, Jasmine and Cedric had been making a racket when Will was locking the door. Michael and Will had run down the stairs at full speed. Maybe Will hadn’t locked the door all the way. He’d certainly been in a hurry.
But Will remembered locking that door, hearing the bolt catch.
He checked the apartment, making sure nothing was missing. Because of his reading problem, Will doubted he had a photographic memory, but he could memorize scenes. He remembered where things went and he knew when they were out of place.
Still, something was off. The room just felt different.
The junk drawer looked the same, the ring of keys still tucked into the corner under a couple of store receipts. Will checked through them until he found a smaller key like the one Cedric had. Every cop who came into this building had to pass those mailboxes. Will had, too, though, and he hadn’t asked if Monroe had any mail. Then again, Will wasn’t the lead detective on the case. With Michael on leave, the inimitable Leo Donnelly was now in charge.
Will made sure to lock the door, checking it twice before heading back down the stairs. As with every other surface in the Homes, the mailboxes were sprayed with graffiti, and Will identified Aleesha’s by the obscene drawing that pointed up to it. He slid in the key and turned the lock with some difficulty. He found the problem when the door swung open. The small compartment was packed with mail. Will took out the envelopes in clumps, noting the colors and the bright logos adorning the outsides. There was a plain white envelope in with the rest. A bulge was in the bottom corner, and he felt it with his fingers, guessing something metal was inside. From the shape, he thought it might be a cross. Someone had addressed the envelope by hand in a looping cursive that Will could not begin to decipher.
He looked at his watch, really looked at it like he never did, until he could make out the time. It was almost midnight. Angie would probably be getting home from work soon.
Will sat on Angie’s front porch, the hard concrete making his bottom numb. He had no idea where she was and his cell phone battery had finally died, so he wasn’t even sure of the time.
He had put the phone to good use before it had quit on him, calling a contact at the Atlanta police, making sure the report on Jasmine Allison wasn’t filed away like the thousands of other missing persons reports the city collected each year. They had put out an APB on Jasmine, and Luther Morrison had found a highly annoyed cop knocking at his front door. The patrolman had searched the house and discovered an underage girl there, but it wasn’t the underage girl they were looking for.