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 news-paper 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 their 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?”