On Saturday night, two additional Bureau agents rolled into Birmingham to assist Williams and Vance. They were there to help conduct interviews and build a case for a search warrant. It was clear that Alan and Terra left Birmingham somewhere near 4:30 P.M., which the Bureau confirmed by a videotape of them walking out of a local hot dog joint near Jessica’s attorney’s office. The restaurant just happened to be across the street from the Alabama Theater. Alan and Terra and every one of their friends from the theater knew the owner. It was a staple in town, a favorite place for friends to get together.

Then word came from the crime scene in Georgia that the bullet recovered inside the trunk of the rental was a .44 caliber. The battery in Alan’s wristwatch—now a key factor in the case—stopped the bullet as it passed through Alan’s wrist. He could have been holding up his hands, trying to defend himself, at the time he was shot.

Finding that bullet was a major break.

Great news for the Bureau and HPD. Now all they needed to do was find a matching weapon to the bullet, or some other piece of evidence tying that bullet to a suspect—a glass slipper, essentially.

Late Saturday night, February 16, HPD detective Laura Brignac was at a local Hoover bowling alley, enjoying a night out with her sister and a friend. It wasn’t Brignac’s weekend to be “on call.” Detectives in her unit shared the responsibility. Brignac was off that weekend, out having some good old-fashioned fun.

She should have known better. Near midnight Brignac’s cell phone rang. It was her husband.

“Tom’s trying to get hold of y’all. He wants you to call him.”

Brignac’s husband was referring to her boss, HPD detective sergeant Tom McDanal, who was running the Hoover end of the Bates case. The HPD still wasn’t sure whose case it was going to end up being. If the Bateses were murdered at that Georgia crime scene where their bodies were uncovered, it was the Bureau’s. That detail had not been uncovered, as of yet.

Brignac called McDanal. Soft-spoken and cordial, she asked, “Yeah, Tom, what’s going on?”

“Can y’all be at the office at eight tomorrow morning?”

A Sunday? Brignac hadn’t heard anything about a case big enough to drag her into the office on a Sunday. She had no idea what the HPD had been involved with over the past twenty-four hours. But the HPD could certainly use her, seeing that Brignac had years of experience dealing with abused children and juveniles. Ultimately the McCord children would need to be questioned—and Laura Brignac was, unquestionably, the best cop for that job.

“What’a y’all got, Tom?”

“I would rather not get into that now,” McDanal said. “Just be there at eight. I’ll explain everything.”

PART II

RED BOOTS AND WATER

13

A fine middle-class community of hardworking, good-natured people, Cahaba Heights, Alabama, is located in Jefferson County, inside the confines of the Birmingham-Hoover metropolitan area. Birmingham was one of several central locales during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, led by the late American hero Dr. Martin Luther King. In fact, at one time, early in the movement, Birmingham was called “Bomb-ingham,” being the violent stage for eighteen unsolved bombings in black neighborhoods over a six-year period. This, mind you, on top of what became known as the “vicious mob attack,” which was centered on the Freedom Riders on Mother’s Day, 1961. There is a long history of violence in Birmingham; but also, perhaps more relevant to the peace Dr. King inspired, there is an air of redemption and civil obedience, there inside the internal framework of the community. Wrongs being righted. People being treated as the human beings they are, regardless of the color of their skin.

The Cahaba Heights section of Birmingham is just about in the middle of the state. The name was born from a Native American settlement originally located in the southeastern United States, the Choctaw (“water above”). Cahaba Heights has always been small-town. In the year 2000, there were some five thousand people living in this particular section of Birmingham, a metropolis with a population (including its suburbs) consisting of 1,079,089 people, making Birmingham the largest city in the state. Many of the people are assiduous, churchgoing, true-to-heart Southerners, living out the honorable moral virtues instilled in them by their ancestors. Cahaba has an ideal relation to the city, set on a perfectly placed cross section of Interstate 459 and Route 38.

Shades Valley High School has been part of Irondale’s landscape, on Old Leeds Road, since 1996. Irondale is another fine Birmingham suburb that built itself up into a community of fun-loving, caring, pious people. One of its most famous residents is actress-turned-author Fannie Flagg, who brought fame to the town of just under ten thousand via her Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café novel and a later Hollywood film version, starring Kathy Bates, Mary Stuart Masterson and Mary-Louise Parker.

Comparatively speaking, Shades Valley has a reputation among students and parents as being one of the best schools in the region, if not the state. Of course, this is an open-ended argument, rooted in the deep feelings locals in the South have for their high-school football and basketball teams. Yet, maybe a little bit of God’s grace and goodness seeps into the pores of the people in Irondale, no matter what their take on reglion or spirituality is. The most recent Shades Valley location on Old Leeds Road is a literal neighbor to Mother Angelica’s successful Catholic-based Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) studios, where Catholic programming is aired worldwide to upward of 160 million households, twenty-four hours a day.

Alan Bates grew up as the middle child in a household of three boys. Alan and his brother Robert both attended Shades Valley when it was located in Homewood, just off Route 31, near the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. Alan excelled in high school. He was one of those kids every mother prayed their daughter would drag in through the door one day after school and announce as her boyfriend. Alan took Southern hospitality to new heights, learning all he conveyed from two fine and loving parents. Alan was an honor student. He was voted class president three years running, beginning his freshman year, in the tenth grade. (Shades Valley ran things differently than most schools. Junior high was seventh grade through ninth; high school tenth through twelfth.) Not only was Alan an active member of his church and his family, a God-fearing unit of reverent Christians, but Alan played drums in various bands, including gospel and Christian.

“[Alan] picked up an interest along the way,” his father, Philip, later said, “in technical theater and was responsible for . . . his senior class having a stage production at Shades Valley, which they hadn’t in years. But he was interested in the lights and the sound and the set design and the behind-the-scenes things that make a theater production go. He wasn’t interested in the drama. But he loved that!”

Alan loved the theater so much, it wasn’t uncommon for friends to stop by the Shades Valley auditorium during lunch hour and find Alan sitting there, eating, relishing the feel and smell of just being around the stage. One such friend, Marley Franklin (pseudonym), who had known Alan and the Bates boys since they were all in diapers, often sat and ate with her buddy.

“Alan and I,” Marley said later, “were raised like brother and sister. He loved the theater, even then, in high school. He just felt so at home there.”