Eventually, it became clear that while he might have consigned Natasha to her death by his actions, he probably wasn’t her killer. In a cruel irony, it appeared that in Natasha’s short and brutal life, her boyfriend-pimp was the only one who’d cared enough to tell somebody she was gone.
The next body, Lisa Washington, was hooked by fishermen angling for carp at the Scioto reservoir off Greenlawn. Her grandmother had reported the twenty-four-year-old African American woman missing two weeks earlier. She was the same age as Jessica Byrnes and, like her, hadn’t been seen for a while by the time the report was filed. People began to get nervous. Fear started to heal estrangements. Family feuds were swept aside. A new reality settled over the city like a chill summer mist.
The headlines surged and then, as they do, faded again. By now it was fall in central Ohio, which meant football season, which meant people had more important things on their minds. Then, just two weeks ago, a kid playing hooky stumbled across the partially decomposed body of Juanita Cowgill in a field along 3C highway between Mound and Alkire, a straight shot south from the Bottoms, the neighborhood served by Roy’s church. A part of town where many of the city’s most desperate prostitutes plied their trade. Juanita’s parents threw her out at eighteen when she accused a family friend of abusing her. She bounced from boyfriend to boyfriend until she landed with one looking for a source of revenue without actually having to work himself. She was two days shy of her twenty-first birthday. After her body was found, the coroner announced at a news conference that each woman had been strangled with a similar cord and each showed signs of sexual assault. There was no disguising it. Columbus had a serial killer on its hands.
Five. Five women raped, strangled, and thrown away like garbage. A task force was assembled. Hands were wrung at City Hall. The FBI got involved. Missing person reports rained down on the police department like parade confetti. Johns grew wary as Columbus vice started running nightly soliciting stings. Right after Juanita’s body was discovered, the Dispatch and Channel 7 interviewed Roy, whose church worked with trafficking victims. “Being poor and hopeless is not a crime,” he said, urging people to put family disagreements aside and account for loved ones.
And then Bill Byrnes called.
4
IT WAS STILL MILD THE NEXT DAY WHEN I pulled into the parking lot of Byrnes’s apartment complex in Whitehall, a working-class suburb just east of Columbus.
“Thanks for coming,” he said, opening the door of his spare second-floor unit shortly after two o’clock. We walked into the living room, where a boy sat on the couch watching TV.
“This is Robbie,” Byrnes said. “Can you say hi?”
The boy, three or four, grudgingly nodded at me after some additional prodding. My eyes lingered a moment too long on the child, who was dark-complected, unlike Byrnes. “He’s Jessica’s son,” he explained. “I’ve got custody of him.”
So this story got even worse, I thought. We went into the kitchen, where Bill offered me a chair. One leg was shorter than the others, and I braced myself to keep from rocking. I looked around. The cupboards were clean and the counters were spare but tidy. The sink was empty. Robbie’s drawings covered the refrigerator.
“So,” I said after a couple of moments of silence passed. Byrnes watched me like a patient waiting for the doctor to give it to him straight. “When was the last time you saw your sister?”
“Early July. She called, asked if she could come over.”
“OK.”
“Her, and that girl Lisa.”
“Lisa?”
“Lisa Washington. The one they found in the river.”
“They knew each other?”
“They were friends, I guess.” He had a corrected harelip and a way of looking just past you when he talked, as if afraid of what he might see. But the worry in his eyes, when you could catch them, looked genuine.
“And did they? Come over?”
Byrnes nodded. “They stayed about an hour. Jessica seemed, I don’t know, a little preoccupied or something, but nothing she’d talk about. She played with Robbie. They both did. Seemed to cheer them up. Especially Lisa. Right at the end Jessica asked if she could borrow some money.”
“What’d you say?”
“I gave her a hundred bucks. It was all I had.”
“And that was it? Last time you saw her?”
“Yeah. But a couple weeks later she called. July 26. I only remember because it was the day after Lisa’s body was found. She didn’t leave a message. I called back, but there was no answer. That had happened before, so I didn’t think much about it.”
“But now you’ve reported her missing.”
He shrugged. “I read what that minister said. Everything that’s been going on, I thought I better.”
“And why’d you call him?”
“See if he’d seen her.” He glanced into the living room and lowered his voice. “Since she worked in the Bottoms, for a while. Friend of mine saw her once, on Sullivant, staring at guys in cars. The minister said he didn’t know her. But thought maybe you could help.”
“Do you have a picture of her?”
He pushed a manila envelope toward me. I opened it and pulled out two photos. The first was of a teenage girl, sixteen or seventeen, laughing at something out of the frame of the picture. She had a pretty face with freckles marching up her nose, light blue eyes, and brownish hair pulled back off a high forehead into a ponytail. There was something wild in her expression, a gleam in the eyes that hinted at rebellion. But basically hers was no different than the faces of a thousand other girls that age. Girls with nice clothes and straight teeth and futures that didn’t include bending their heads into the laps of men with working ATM cards. I put the picture down and examined the second. I almost didn’t recognize her. She was heavily made up, her eyes dark with eyeliner and mascara, her lips the red of cheap Christmas ribbon. She was curled on a bed wearing nothing but a scarlet bra and panties, sucking on her right forefinger, glowering at the camera. Glowering a generous word, because the photo was a cruel parody of seduction. She looked sexy the way roadkill looks like taxidermy. Even with the photo’s grainy quality, it was clear the light in the eyes of her lively, teenage self had dimmed, replaced by something opaque and exhausted. She looked much older than she should have, weary beyond her years, her face tense, her body strained as if recoiling from a blow. I examined the photo more closely and made out a dark line across her neck, which I first took for a strand of hair but then realized was a name tattooed in cursive. The first letter, B, was all I could decipher.
“When were these taken?”
“First one’s from high school,” Byrnes said. “Eleventh grade. At a sleepover, I think. Right before she left home. I found the second one on the Internet this summer, looking for her. It was on Reardoor.com. It’s a personals site.”
I nodded. I’d heard of it. There’d been a lot in the news lately about websites and the trafficking industry. Both Missy Loomis and Natasha Rumsey had advertised themselves that way. A congresswoman was holding hearings on the sites and whether they should be outlawed as facilitating prostitution.
