As the Wicked Watch(5)
Scott easily found parking on the street. I jumped out of the van and surveyed the sidewalk for rocks and cracks, anything that could trigger a misstep or snag the heel of my pumps during my walk and talk.
“It’s hard to look at these, isn’t it,” Scott said.
“What?” I asked.
“These posters. I mean, what a nightmare for a parent,” Scott said. I couldn’t pretend to completely understand what it was like for Scott, the father of a five-year-old son and an eight-year-old daughter he sees every other weekend and twice during the week since his divorce. “I mean, there’s been no sign of her in three weeks. What are the chances she’s still alive?”
I fought to hold back the answer, forcing the air down required to articulate what I was thinking.
Fawcett’s pronouncements spun around in my head. Finally, police no longer viewed Masey as a potential runaway. Five more detectives had been put on the case. His mission was accomplished. His effortless PR stunt playing out, leaving me feeling like a useful idiot. My mic and camera the tools he needed to make people think it was all okay.
Scott asked again, “Do you think she’s alive? What are the odds, Jordan?”
“Probably not good,” I responded. “Most missing persons cases don’t have happy endings. You heard what Fawcett said. This is a different investigation now. And they’re probably afraid they’re going to catch heat for misclassifying Masey as a runaway for damned near three weeks if she turns up dead.”
While I couldn’t fully wrap my head around what Scott was thinking as a dad, especially the dad of a young girl, I could fully understand the loss and helplessness Masey’s family must be feeling.
Jordan, don’t go there. Get out of your own head.
“Scott, look, Masey had just started attending this awesome STEM school. She dotes on her little brother and her cousin’s baby girl. She shops in her mother’s closet and redoes her nails every other day,” I said, bragging on Masey, a girl I’d never met, like I’d heard her mother do, a feeling of kinship that gave my words a tone of protectiveness.
My best friend in Austin, Lisette Holmes, and I had talked about this.
“Masey sounds like a loving, happy child,” Lisette said. “Not a girl that would just take off like that. Something’s not right.”
I ignored my own warning and went deeper into the dark recesses of my mind. While Scott set up, I told him about a case I’d covered while working at a Dallas station that haunts me to this day.
“Two sisters, six and eight years old, who lived in a small town about an hour from the city were reported missing by their mother, Luella Buford. She told police she last saw them playing in the backyard, which backed up to a wooded area. When I interviewed Luella one-on-one, she told me she’d seen a Black man in a black van circling the area, even driving past her house a couple times the day the girls went missing.”
A Black man in a black van. The color of fear. The descriptor of evil. Was it possible? Of course. Did I doubt her story? Yes, from the very start. The mental gamble it took to look at a presumed victim and see them as the villain was a hard place to be as a reporter. The urge to look them in the eye and flat out call them a liar was a disorienting circumstance to fight.
But the fact she went overboard with black—Black guy, black car, wearing dark clothing—it was something that even now, when I tell people the story, some get it right away. Others, like Scott, struggled to connect the signs and the red flags. I didn’t feel like explaining it to him.
“After about two weeks, their bodies were found in a well on an abandoned property,” I said. “They’d been sexually assaulted.”
“Let me guess. It wasn’t a Black guy,” Scott said, his tone indicating he knew where my story was going.
“Exactly!” I said, pointing my finger like a game show host when a contestant guessed the right answer. “But the mother wasn’t innocent. Luella had a boyfriend named Jerry Branahan. Jerry was well known around the area. A lot of people felt sorry for him because he’d had his struggles, and he was mentally disabled. He wasn’t the girls’ father. Luella met Jerry at a laundromat a year after her breakup with her baby daddy. His $568-a-month disability check was a big help to her. She was a piece of work. She manipulated him to the point that he knew to hand over that check before he could close the mailbox.”
All these years later, I still remember a mundane detail such as the amount of Jerry Branahan’s monthly disability paycheck, but not my own checking account number.
By now, Scott and I, but more important, the news truck had attracted attention, like it was an open invitation for someone to come over and ask, ‘‘What’s going on?’’
“To make a long story short,” I said, “it turned out Jerry had the girls at an abandoned house that was one of his former foster homes. Luella thought she could play on the townspeople’s and her family’s sympathy to extort money. But Jerry, high on glue, ended up raping the girls.”
“Wow, that’s terrible,” Scott said. “I didn’t know glue sniffing was still a thing.”
“It is in rural Texas,” I said. “Oh, oh. We’ve got company.”
The few people who’d gathered moved in closer. I was in no mood for random questions. I was here for answers, but I knew I’d have to help Scott escape the growing crew of folks around him.