“That’s awful.”
“It is. What’s interesting is these rapes were committed nearly thirty years ago. Back in the mideighties. Not quite as long ago as your case, but close.”
“What changed? Why charge him now?”
“DNA evidence. There wasn’t a national database thirty years ago. DNA from the rape kits of several victims indicated it was the same guy. But we only had his DNA profile, not his name. In May, Wade popped up as a match.”
“So you’ve arrested him?”
“No need,” Beasley said wearily. “He’s already in federal prison in Kentucky. Locked up on unrelated robbery charges, until at least 2021. After that we’ll aim to extradite him back down to Georgia.”
I was quiet.
“Not a fairy-tale ending, by any stretch. But I raise it because at least those victims get some closure after all these years.”
“Closure.” I rolled the word around my tongue. “No disrespect to those women, who I’m sure went through a horrible experience. But I don’t know that there is such a thing as closure. Not in a case like mine. My parents were murdered, right in front of me.” My voice cracked. “Even in the one-in-a-thousand chance that somehow, after all this time, you could find the man who killed them, it wouldn’t—it won’t bring them back.”
“Course not. No power on this earth’s gonna bring back your family. But you’re confusing two things. Closure isn’t about raising the dead. It’s about providing the victim with a sense that—that justice has been served.”
“I guess.”
Beasley heaved a heavy sigh. “I know it comes too late, and that it’s not enough. But in a case like that—in a case like yours—that’s what we aim for now. Justice.”
Twenty-six
* * *
Jessica Yeo hit pay dirt at the Fulton County courthouse.
She dug out the deeds for the house on Eulalia Road within ten minutes. They showed that my birth parents had bought the house for $45,300 in 1975. It had sold four years later, in December of 1979, for $99,500. A tidy profit back then, especially for a young couple barely out of college. I felt a stab of pride for them. They had been on their way to building a comfortable life for our family, before it had all been snatched away.
Boone and Sadie Rawson’s wills had proven equally easy to lay hands on. The clerks in the Records room had needed only their full names, and the year they had died.
“Bingo!” said Jessica, when she reached me that afternoon. “Guess what I’m holding in my hot little hands? All freshly photocopied and stapled? They’ve got all the wills lined up on open shelves, just sitting there in white plastic binders.”
The wills were straightforward, two pages each. There were no complicated assets to dispose of. The documents were mirror images of each other. Boone left everything to Sadie Rawson; she left everything to him. Should they not survive each other, then their daughter, Caroline Smith, was to be the sole beneficiary of their estate.
My breath caught. So strange to hear my name, rising up from pages drafted decades ago, by two people I had loved and then forgotten.
I had Jessica read my father’s entire will out loud, down the phone line. Three details stood out. The first was the name of the executor of my parents’ estate. The person they had entrusted to carry out their wishes. They had both named the same man: Mr. Everett A. Sutherland, of Charlotte, North Carolina. I had never heard of him.
The second was a savings account number.
The third, intriguingly, was a reference to a safe-deposit box.
Both the box and the savings account were held somewhere called Trust Company of Georgia.
“Trust Company?” I asked. “Is it headquartered in Atlanta?”
“It was. Come to think of it, maybe it still is. But it’s like all the big Southern banks. Lots of mergers and name changes over the years. I did some research, right before I called you. Trust Company of Georgia merged with a Florida bank back in 1985. Then they acquired a bank in Tennessee, and then other assets. They all consolidated, changed their names to SunTrust in the mid-1990s.”
“Oh, we have SunTrust banks here in Washington. There’s one inside Safeway. My grocery store.” I tried to clamp down my excitement. “I wonder—I guess we can just call them, right? Find whoever would know where old records are kept, for dormant accounts.”
“Yeah. I don’t know how complicated that process is. I’m guessing they’ll need to see the wills, and maybe your parents’ death certificates, and any other documents we can dig out. As for the safe-deposit box . . . that’s interesting. I don’t know what physically would have happened to it, after thirty-four years of inactivity. Like, whether the bank would be required to hang on to it, or what.”
“No idea. I’ll make a call to SunTrust. See what I can ferret out.”
“Oh, I can do that. I’m having fun.” Jessica was breathing faster, as if she had started walking. “I’ve got to race back to my office. Show my face, since this has been, like, the longest lunch break ever. Tonight, though, I’ll nose around. See what I can find out about this Mr. Sutherland. The executor.”
But I was starting to question the wisdom of our arrangement. “Thanks for the offer. You’ve been amazing. Really. But I’m thinking I should take it from here.”
“Why?” She sounded hurt.
“Because you’re a journalist, and I seem to keep ending up a story in your newspaper.”
“But that’s Leland’s doing! You’re paying me off the books—”
“I know, but what if you dig up something newsworthy? What if—I mean, this is incredibly unlikely—but what if you discovered that my parents left me a million dollars? Wouldn’t you have an ethical obligation to report that to Leland?”