No Place Safe by Kim Reid

Author:Kim Reid [Reid, Kim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NLA Digital Liaison Platform LLC
Published: 2013-09-05T16:00:00+00:00

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The curfew didn’t work. The day after Halloween, nine-year-old Aaron Jackson went missing. He was last seen at a shopping center on Moreland Avenue, part of the route Ma sometimes took to get home from the north. We’d sometimes stopped for groceries in the same shopping center. It was just three miles from home, and I couldn’t help but think about how close the killer was getting to my sister and me. He was moving back and forth between Southeast and Southwest, but it seemed he was beginning to focus mostly on Southeast, in areas that my friends and I might be anytime because he was only working a few miles away from where we ate, slept, and played.

It was true that while the victims were close geographically, our worlds were still different. The victims went to the same places I did, like the Moreland Avenue Shopping Center, to hustle a dollar because they were poor, while I was going to spend the dollars I had because I wasn’t. They were more likely to get into the car of someone who offered twenty bucks for a few hours work. I made seventy dollars a week frying burgers and didn’t have to get into the cars of strangers and pray they weren’t the killer. Being a girl, I was naturally more wary than a boy might be of grown men offering me anything. And as the child of a cop, I rarely trusted anyone.

But this difference in our day-to-day lives made sense only if the killer was actually luring the kids with something they were hard pressed to turn down—money or the promise of a way to make some quickly. If that wasn’t how he was stealing these children, if he was somehow forcibly taking them off the streets, the fact that I had a job, that I lived in a middle-class neighborhood, or that my mother was a cop, didn’t make a bit of difference.

The next day, a Sunday, we went to church in the West End where Bridgette and I used to go to school, and where we still attended Mass. It was the Feast of All Souls, the day Catholics officially remember their dead. Our parish marked the day with a special remembrance of all the children who had been killed, and the church was packed with people come to say goodbye to kids they didn’t know, come to understand how such a thing could happen to innocent children, and to pray for the killings to stop.

Representatives from all kinds of community groups were there, including groups born of our crisis, one led by the mother of a victim. Priests from all over the Atlanta diocese were joined by non-Catholic clergymen representing Baptist and Episcopalian churches, and they prayed with us, over us, and for us. One of them said something like, “Remember, sisters and brothers, the killer is also someone’s child, and we should pray for his redemption as well as his capture.”

I felt no guilt in

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