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Naomi Powers opened the front door to her dingy apartment. She tossed her purse on the table in the hallway and kicked off her shoes allowing them to land where they would. Her neatly ordered world was back to the chaos that it had been that night thirty-one years ago when she was just a baby. An eight month old baby learning to crawl. Through her mother’s blood when she did not answer her cries.
They say her father found her there asleep in her mother’s cold arms the next morning when his night shift ended. When he first saw the scene he had thought that she was dead too, she was so covered in her mother’s blood. It was the paramedics that discovered she was alive. Dehydrated a dirty diaper and covered in her mother’s blood. But alive.
Naomi did not remember that night. Just starting kindergarten at five and wondering why all the other children had these things called mothers. Her dad had explained that her mother had gone to heaven and left it at that.
She was thirteen and they had gone to a family reunion in South Carolina before she learned the truth. She had gone to take an empty platter into the kitchen, fill it up and bring it back to the buffet table like a good girl when she heard her grandmother and aunt talking about her mother’s murder. She had dropped the platter. They had looked up when they heard it shatter on the floor. She had run, just run, as far and as fast as her legs could carry her. Her father had found her a couple miles down the road, convinced her to get into the car. They had talked. He told her the basics then but Naomi could tell that it was painful for him, that he was not telling her everything.
Of course, being a curious thirteen year old girl, she turned to the only place she could for information…the Internet. What she discovered there shocked her. She found out not only about her being alone with her mother’s body all night, but that the prime suspect had been her own father. Of course, they had any evidence to convict or even arrest him.
Naomi knew her father. Knew he could never do what they said. She had seen the pain in his eyes as he told her in that car. The man had never even dated since her mother’s death and she knew he had the opportunity. Several women at their church had eyes for the forty-one year old factory worker. But even more than any of that evidence, Naomi knew that her father would have never, ever left her alone with her mother’s body. He loved her, he just would not have done that to a helpless little baby, his baby girl.
She began to brood over those online news articles, look for some clue that the police had missed. They had moved from that house, moved across town. But one day when she was fifteen she had taken the bus back there. The house was empty and boarded up as many were in the city with its depressed economy. She had walked around until she found that the board on the back door was loose. She had only gone a few feet into what had once been a kitchen when she heard a moan in the darkness. She realized then that the place had become one of the cities crack houses and fled as quickly as she could.
That trip might have been the end of it, except that as she ran crying from that darkness the nice older woman next door yelled after her. She recognized Naomi. Not as the little baby that she had once cared for, but as her mother’s daughter. Miss Ethel had asked her in for tea. Who had tea in these modern days? Let alone in that neighborhood. But Miss Ethel did. And she talked to Naomi about the whole sorted thing as she called it over pots of the strong brew that required both milk and loads of sugar to make it bearable.
Miss Ethel had filled in many of the blanks about the case, about her early life from the woman. Things that were not in the police report. Because of course the police ‘knew’ it was the husband that always did these sorts of things. Miss Ethel like Naomi though had known that her father could not do that, not to her mother, not to the woman he loved.
But Miss Ethel had never been able to fill in the most important blank…who killed her mother. Who would do such a horrible thing to the young mother? To her family? Why did they leave Naomi alive? And simply…why? Why?
Like Bruce Wayne, it was the question that had haunted the young woman’s every waking moment and turned her dreams into nightmares. Nightmares of babies crawling through warm, sticky blood. Caressing cooling mommy’s cheeks. Curling up next to stiff bodies.
And like Bruce Wayne, it had guided her career choice. Naomi had excelled at school, making the honor roll every semester, scoring in the top ten percent on her SATs. Even her final year in high school when Miss Ethel had died of a heart attack and her own father sickened with cancer, she had not let up. She would take her books with her to the hospital, study while her father took his chemo.
The hardest of course was those nights when he was too ill after his treatment to come home. Naomi would stay at the hospital as late as possible, until the nurses kicked her out. They thought the young woman was just a devoted daughter. The truth was that she was afraid to be alone in their house. Even if it was not the same house, the same neighborhood even. Naomi had learned early that no one was ever safe. She would not really sleep those nights, listening for every sound. She had even slept with a knife under her pillow.
Her father had lived long enough to see her graduate. Long enough to know that she had been accepted to college, had a full scholarship. Long enough to raise the daughter that had been left behind. As the cancer ate at his body, Naomi saw the relief in his heart. He would be with her mother. He would find out the truth. Nothing would hurt him where he was going.
Despite being alone in the world, Naomi had done well in college, excelling again. She had focused upon her career choice…forensic psychology. And the more she learned the more she applied it to her mother’s case. By the time she graduated with honors, she had developed a profile of her mother’s killer.
After college she had been recruited by the FBI, but she had turned them down. Instead she went home. Was it home? Not really. But it was the place that she needed to be to get the job done. To find her mother’s killer.
And she had. Five years of her life. Fighting within her own department to get the case re-opened. Pushing the Cold Case unit to do their jobs. Making more enemies than friends. It had all paid off. Among the stains of blood that covered her little pajamas had been one small spot that did not belong to her mother. A few years ago it would not have been enough even to get a DNA profile, but Naomi knew of a new technique that she had studied at college.
But she had to fight again. Why should the department spend that kind of money on a twenty-five year old case? The killer was likely either dead or in prison for another crime. In a city where murder was a daily reality, they simply did not have those kinds of resources.
Naomi had made a couple of calls, when even political pressure did not work on the departmental powers that be, she had called in a personal favor from a technician at the lab. Hell, she had even considered paying for the damned test out of her own pocket but she knew that if she did it would probably not be admissible in court. As it was she was walking a tight rope.
She just needed answers. And now she had them. Turns out that the department was right. Her mother’s killer was both…dead and convicted in other crimes. The man had been executed for killing six white women. In exactly the same way that he had killed her mother. But because her mother was black they had never made the connection to crimes that bore a remarkable resemblance to her mother’s death.
So now she knew. Knew who killed her mother. She even knew why. The FBI had profiled the man extensively before his death. After he had converted to Christiani
ty he had been among the most cooperative of their subjects. He had spent hundreds of hours talking with the team about why he committed his crimes, how he chose his victims. It was all there.
And none of it mattered. None of it made any difference. Her mother was still dead. She had still grown up never knowing the woman. Her father had died under the cloud of suspicion.
And her? Her whole fucking life, almost thirty years, had been about solving this one case. Finding her mother’s killer. She knew all the psycho-babble about closure. Where was that closure? Even knowing all that she knew now…it still did not make sense. It was still as random as being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
What now? The department had given her a week off. Supposedly to grieve. The truth was that she had made so many enemies there by going over people’s head that she really did not have a career left. She had no personal life either. Despite being a beautiful young woman she had been so focused that she had never really dated. Besides honestly some part of her had been afraid to care about anyone…what if something happened to them too? What if something happened to her and she left young children behind?
Naomi sat on the crappy old couch and just stared out the window looking at the city where she had grown up. It was falling down all around her. Just like her own young life. The city spoke of rejuvenation, redevelopment. The truth was that this place was probably drawing its last breaths as dying as the industries that had built it.
She shook her head and asked the question that seemed to have replaced that other one…’What now?’
Haven
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