One former associate remembered that Greg strongly approved of the Fulton County DA’s crusade against pornography. Massage parlors, adult bookstores, and adult theaters disgusted him. He would cuss a blue streak with no qualm or discernible sense that some people might find such language as offensive as he found photographs of naked people. In hot weather, he worked in denim cutoffs and tennis shoes, shirtless and proud of it—but, given a context marginally interpretable as erotic, bare skin outraged him. Once, during a lunch break, he had yanked a men’s magazine from a seventeen-year-old apprentice who had held up the foldout for his approval. “This is shit you’re lookin’ at!” he had raged.
The house on I-285 yielded even more information. As Greg Burdette, Craig had been careful not to subscribe to any publications that state or federal law-enforcement agencies might classify as racist or provocatively right-wing. But he had bought them from newsstands, where possible, and had taken pains not to visit the same newsstands often enough to give their operators any real grasp of his reading habits. These were magazines devoted to firearms, post-nuclear-holocaust survival, legal redress for white “victims” of affirmative-action laws, and creationism. Along with these magazines, agents had found, stuffed in drawers, circulars announcing Klan meetings and pamphlets on many topics from ultraconservative politicians. Also, Craig had possessed a small arsenal of unregistered handguns, most with serial numbers metal-rasped or sandpapered away. A bulletin board in his bedroom displayed clippings from the Atlanta newspapers about racial conflict and crimes perpetrated by blacks. Prominent among these clippings was one recounting the acquittal of some Klansmen in a Greensboro, North Carolina, murder trial. Craig had marked every word in the headline with a red highlighter.
Also in the house: items suggesting that Nancy Teavers had lived there with him at least three months—clothing, toilet articles, mementoes of her marriage to Craig’s dead friend, E. L. In fact, the arrangement of sleeping quarters in the little house—Nancy occupying a room that Craig had once set aside as a business office—strongly suggested that they’d treated each other as brother and sister. The punk wardrobe that Nancy had worn to Sinusoid Disturbances, the GBI agents discovered not in Nancy’s bedroom but in a steamer trunk at the foot of Craig’s bed. Perhaps he had had a fetishistic fascination with such items. The clothes in Nancy’s “closet,” a cardboard chifforobe purchased from a long-defunct Forest Park dry cleaners, had about them a small-town conventionality totally at odds with the shabby glitter of the getup in the trunk. Moreover, Nancy had filled her bedroom with decorative pillows, stuffed animals, even a few dolls. The Little People doll that Craig had hung up in Abraxas beside T. P. had been Nancy’s. Her late husband had given it to her for Christmas over three years ago. An interview with Nancy’s mother revealed that, in the privacy of her mobile home in Beulah Fork, the young woman had behaved around that fabric-sculpture infant—Bonnie Laurel—as if it were a living baby. More than anything, Nancy’s mother told the GBI interviewer, her daughter had wanted to bear her own child. She and E. L. had just about decided to take the plunge when… but if you knew E. L.’s fate, those words constituted an unfortunate turn of phrase.
Craig had strangled Nancy in the little house off I-285. The Newsweek cover that had caused him to flip out, a betrayal of his every hate-handicapped concept of decency, had probably merely surprised Nancy, without leading her to believe that only the child’s murder would properly expiate and punish the parents’ flagrant sin. She had resisted Craig’s arguments to kill Paulie. Her resistance had further outraged him. He had attacked her. Signs of the struggle marked the house and her body: overturned chairs, broken dishes, a curtain pulled off its rod. The coroner’s report on Nancy mentioned not only contusions about her throat, but also deep bites on her breasts and upper arms, and her severely cracked ribs. She was small, though, and Craig had overpowered her—after their initial chase and scuffle—with ease. Afterward, he had dressed her in the orangutan outfit, which he’d rented shortly before or shortly after her murder. Her installation in the sanctuary of the Little Five Points Unaffiliated Meditation Center had then had to await the cover of darkness.
As for Tiny Paul… Is there any need to continue? The reader can imagine the details of the child’s execution far more easily than I can write them.
Late on Tuesday afternoon, the child’s body was shipped to a crematorium in Macon. On Wednesday, his ashes were returned to the Montarazes in an ornate funerary urn. They had decided together on this means of disposing of the corpse, and, upon the recovery of Tiny Paul’s ashes, they observed a private memorial service in their own home. Bilker Moody attended these rites, but Caroline Hanna and I did not because Adam had asked me to run an errand in Beulah Fork—to visit Craig’s family and to invite his mother to bury Craig beside T. P.’s ashes in a state-approved plot of my pecan grove on Paradise Farm. It was an errand I might not have accomplished without Caroline along for moral support. Morale support, to use Adam’s own coinage.
Public reaction to Tiny Paul’s murder was prolonged, sometimes thoughtful, occasionally fulsome, and always wearying. The President sent a wire, as did other prominent heads of state, including the Pope. A triumvirate of East African leaders released a joint communiqué offering the Montarazes citizenship in their countries and free transportation “home.” A. P. Blair, the Zarakali paleoanthropologist, sent a two-page handwritten letter of commiseration and belated apology, but neither RuthClaire nor Adam could deduce from his self-referential prose the specific injustice for which he was apologizing. A host of network commentators and TV evangelists delivered eulogies. Every major daily newspaper in the country ran an editorial. In Atlanta, by special gubernatorial dispensation, the flags on the capitol grounds were flown at half-mast. Even more impressive, a procession of people clad in crepe marched in triple columns through Inman park to the mournful music of drums, fifes, and bagpipes. In Beulah Fork, I closed the West Bank for the remaining five days of our work week.
Georgia Highway Patrolmen directed traffic. Uninvited out-of-towners they sent back to the interstate. Relatives, friends, and invited locals, they checked through the front gates of Paradise Farm. They also saw to it that those who could not park their vehicles inside the walls pulled them safely off the two-lane connecting Tocqueville and Beulah Fork.
Through the window of the upstairs bedroom we’d shared, Caroline estimated that nearly every inhabitant of Beulah Fork had showed up—nothing like a funeral to draw people together and nothing like a double funeral for a killer and his final victim to swell the crowd a hundredfold. My parched front lawn swarmed with would-be mourners. Most women wore Sunday dresses or tailored Sunday suits. Most men, ties knotted beneath their Adam’s apples like tourniquets, sported linen or seersucker jackets. A gay solemnity informed their movements. Some children with scrubbed faces clung to the adults’ hands. Other children, more eager, darted through the maundering crowd to find good places in the pecan grove from which to watch the ceremony.
“Thank God we don’t have to feed this bunch,” Caroline said.
Standing at a mirror trying to put a Windsor knot in a new tie, I grunted.
Fifteen security guards roamed the grounds, while a sixteenth had his vantage on the widow’s-walk just above the room that Caroline and I were in. The Montarazes and I were sharing the cost of the guards, RuthClaire and Adam because the FBI had told them that most of their ransom money would be recovered, I because I hoped to keep a few of the rowdier mourners out of my flowerbeds and shrubbery.