by J. D. Barker
“Definitely not a kid. I’m not sure I could move him on my own.” Fogel flipped through the printed pages. Six of them had copies of receipts. “What are these?”
“He seemed to like eating at the diner across the street. Krendal’s. Went in a couple times a week. One of the waitresses recognized him from a photo but didn’t have much to add. Quiet, ate by himself. Always ordered a ham and cheese melt with a Coke and fries.”
Faustino turned the folder back around. “I ran into a kid at the diner, Duncan Bellino. I saw him standing around at the crime scene, too. He got real nervous when I cornered him about it. I get the feeling he may have found the body, tried to lift the wallet, and chickened out. I tried to get a warrant for his prints, but the judge wouldn’t sign off on it, too flimsy. Right age, though, and the shoe size looked about right.”
Fogel leaned back in her chair. “That, my friend, would be a dead lead.”
“Probably, but I don’t like loose ends. If he was first to the body, he may have seen whoever dumped Flack there. He got picked up a few years back for some petty shit, so he’s in the system now, but the records are sealed. I tried to get those to match the prints, but no-go. Different judge, same problem—too flimsy. I don’t think the kid did it, but my gut tells me he knows something.”
“Okay, so Flack is a bust, too, no real evidence.” She nodded at the board. “Tell me about 1986.”
Faustino returned to the board and pointed at the photograph under 1986. “She’s our oldest victim on record—forty-seven-year-old black female. No record. She was a cashier at K-Mart. Lived alone. She clocked out on August 6, usually walked home. That was the last time anyone ever saw her. We found her in Baptist Park on August 8.”
“Do you have a date or time of death?”
Faustino shook his head. “The ME couldn’t place it. Because of the condition of these bodies, he flat-out told me he can only provide a best guess. None of the usual markers hold up.”
“That means she was missing at least two days. Your perp might be keeping them alive. Any evidence of sexual assault?”
“The ME didn’t think so, but couldn’t be sure on that, either. We’ve got a wide range of victims here, though, all ages, both sexes, multiple races. Sex crimes usually have a type, and from what I can tell, Flack was the only sexual predator attached to this case.”
“And he’s a vic.”
“He’s a vic.”
Faustino pointed to three more pictures on the board. “’85, ’84, and ’83. ’85 and ’83 were male, ’84 was female. We haven’t been able to identify any of them. All were fished out of the Ohio River anywhere from two miles outside the city to ten. They were all nude. The condition of the bodies tied them to this case, nothing else.”
Fogel said, “1982 looks young.”
Faustino glanced at the photograph of the tiny body—black, dry, and shriveled—next to the picture of a smiling little girl. “Our youngest. Six-year-old Rebecca Pohlman. She was nabbed from Monroeville Mall on August 2 and turned up in a Dumpster behind an Eat’n Park in West Mifflin on August 8.”
“Isn’t that the mall where they filmed Dawn of the Dead?”
“The same.”
“Creepy.”
Faustino said, “Her mother was shopping at Sears, browsing clothes, and Rebecca wanted to look at the toys across the aisle but within eyeshot. We have about ten minutes unaccounted for, so we think that’s when she was grabbed. Most stores put the toy section as deep into the space as possible for two reason—kids tend to drag their parents there, so you want the parents to have to walk through as much of the retail space as possible, hoping for an impulse buy or two. The second reason is to get it as far from the exits as possible. Most kids are taken from the toy department. This gives store security a fighting chance at stopping someone before they get outside. When Rebecca was taken, no alarms went up. She vanished.”
He reached back into his drawer, found another folder, and opened it on the desk. There was a grainy eight by ten photograph inside. He handed it to Fogel. “The security cameras didn’t capture anything worthwhile inside, but we got this picture from the parking lot.”
Fogel studied the picture and frowned. “What exactly am I looking at?”
“Four adults, from the back. Female, we think, based on the long hair. Can’t be sure, though.”
“This is August, right? Why are they wearing coats?”
“That’s what we noticed first, too. Four identical coats. White trenches.” He leaned over the photograph and placed his finger near center. “What do you see right here?”
Fogel leaned in closer, too. It took her a moment. “Looks like a kid walking between them.”
“Her mother identified the tee-shirt. It’s Rebecca.”
“If you’re six years old and four adults tell you to go somewhere, you probably just go, right? She probably didn’t put up a fuss.”
“If she did, nobody noticed. But yeah, I bet they just told her her mommy was looking for her, they’d take her to her, and walked Rebecca right out.”
Fogel said, “The camera didn’t capture their vehicle?”
“All I’ve got is this photograph. When I first started piecing all this together, I tried to pull the tapes from evidence, and they were gone, lost. I figured another camera might have the vehicle, or maybe earlier footage caught this crew walking in, but without the tapes, we’ll never know.”
Fogel traced the adults with her fingertip. “If all these murders are connected, this tells us there are at least four perps, not one. The identical coats could mean a cult of some sort. Considering the state of the bodies, it’s hard not to go there. These murders span such a long time frame. That would suggest a cult, too—possibly different perps over time, all working toward the same thing.”
Faustino only nodded at this. He had suspected some kind of cult for years. “Rebecca was found in a Dumpster, 8/8/1982.”
The two of them fell silent at this, both lost in their own thoughts. All these deaths, but that little girl always seemed to hit Faustino the hardest. By the expression on Fogel’s face, he knew he was not alone in that.
After about a minute, he cleared his throat and went back to the board. “1981, unknown male. 1980, unknown male. 1979, unknown female.” Each of the bodies in the photographs looked the same: black, dry skin, almost powdery, burnt, clothing untouched. “Considering the age, I don’t know that we’ll ever identify them unless we catch whoever is responsible.”
Fogel stood from her desk and approached the board. “What happened in 1978?”
“From what I can tell, this was our first, and by far the worst. Three bodies that year, all male.” He pointed at the picture in the center. This guy had a metal plate in his head from an injury in Vietnam. The ME used the serial number to identify him. Twenty-four years old, his name was Calvin Gurney. He came back from ’Nam in ’75, got picked up for some petty stuff early on—vagrancy, shoplifting. Otherwise, there’s not much on him. The other two guys were never identified. They were found at a bloodbath, though. The crime scene was completely different from all these others. I think it was our ground zero.”
“Different how?”
Faustino reached into his drawer and retrieved one more file. This one was about half an inch thick. Inside were a dozen photographs and various reports. “They were found inside a townhouse in Mount Washington. A three-bedroom with a nice view of the city. The place was supposed to be vacant, looked like a squatting situation. Two adults were found downstairs, both dead, both shot. These three men were found in a bedroom on the second floor. Their bodies match all our others. The investigating officer wrote it up as a B&E that went sideways.”
He slid the folder across the desk to her. “Read it. We’ve got time. I’ve got someplace to be.”
“Where?”
“I’m gonna stick to the Bellino kid all day.”
“Seriously? The Flack murder was five years ago. At best, he stumbled into it.”
“It’s all I
’ve got.” He pulled his car keys from his pocket and tapped at the folder. “Read. I want to know what you think it all means.”
“What part?”
“You’ll see. It’s different.”
A few other detectives had arrived while they were talking. As he started out of the room, they turned away from him, from the board, murmured to each other. The Wall of Weird was out. Today would be an interesting day.
2
Oddly, the cancer didn’t start in Auntie Jo’s lungs, but in her blood. I couldn’t remember a day when Auntie Jo wasn’t tired, but in the spring of 1992, she got really tired. She’d come home from one of her shifts at the diner and collapse into her chair and sometimes didn’t get back up until morning. She lost her appetite, and I noticed that the random bumps and bruises inherent to waiting tables stopped fading from her arms, instead becoming dark, this nasty shade of purple, lingering for weeks. Then the random fevers started. I convinced her to go to the clinic in April, and a blood draw revealed a high count of white blood cells.
The doctor at the clinic referred her to another doctor, and in turn, she referred us to a specialist with offices near West Penn Hospital. Dr. Pavia called the extra white blood cells blasts and said they weren’t fully developed. Unlike normal white blood cells, these blasts could not fight off infection. They originated in her bone marrow.
My Auntie Jo had leukemia.
Acute myeloid leukemia, he called it.
He was quick to point out her smoking was probably a contributing factor but not the sole cause. He advised her to quit anyway. She said she would, but she lit up a cigarette the minute we left his office, and I had yet to see her cut back from her current pack-a-day habit.
There was talk of a bone marrow transplant. Dr. Pavia scheduled her for chemotherapy and radiation treatment all while nodding in response to Auntie Jo’s complaints of time, money, and the lack of both. She didn’t have insurance or healthcare, and this bit of news would not make obtaining either of them any easier. He’d heard these things before. I got the impression he heard them a couple times each day, because his answers were clear, concise, and well rehearsed. Cancer ran a tight ship. There was no convenient time to pencil it in, nor could treatment be put off. Valuable time had already been lost.
Auntie Jo asked the doctor how long she had.
He spread his hands, palms up—a couple months, five years, longer, hard to say. Another practiced answer to the most common of questions.
Although I insisted she rest, Auntie Jo worked through the first week of treatment. She even squeezed in a few doubles in an attempt to bring in extra money, but by the second week she began cutting shifts, by the third the vomiting and lack of energy kept her confined to our apartment.
About that time, the bills started. First the clinic, then the doctor, then the specialist, then treatment, followed by more treatment. We also had rent, utilities, food. The monthly envelopes containing cash continued to arrive on the eighth of every month, and I saved most of it. $34,108 on the day Auntie Jo was diagnosed, (I counted the moment we got home from Dr. Pavia’s office) but now, I found myself down at the corner store buying money orders on an almost daily basis—nearly ten thousand spent in the past few months, with no end in sight.
I didn’t let Auntie Jo see the bills. I most definitely didn’t let her see the payments—both would cause worry, and there was enough of that. She had been home, either in her chair or in bed, when the last two envelopes appeared in their usual spot at the center of my bed, but when I got home on both of those nights after my shift at the diner, she said nothing of an intruder. She made no comment at all. The door had been locked, yet somehow, someone still managed to get in and out unnoticed.
I spent a lot of time at the diner, more time than I probably spent at home. Auntie Jo continued to insist the job kept me off the streets and out of trouble, and Krendal had no trouble finding work for me. Back in January, when I turned sixteen, he even started showing me how to work the grill. He had taught me the deep frier the year before, and the year before that I had learned the proper way to prep fresh fruit and vegetables. I was grateful for anything that took me away from bussing tables and doing dishes, although I had yet to grill a burger remotely close to the quality Krendal churned out. “Too red, too thick, too flat, too brown,” he’d shout at me, his hearing long gone. Even with the two monstrous hearing aids he began wearing last year, he could make out nothing but the loudest sounds.
There were four people at the counter, six more in the booths, with Gerdy waiting and covering hostess duties.
Gerdy McCowen had moved to Pittsburgh last year with her folks. She was one year behind me at Brentwood High School, just a freshman. Outgoing and pretty, she had no trouble making friends and had taken a job at Krendal’s to save up for college—she wanted to go to Brown. Lurline talked about retiring on account of her bad knees. Gerdy was good, not as good as Lurline, and certainly couldn’t hold a candle to Auntie Jo in her prime. She had a pretty smile, though, and even prettier legs. Dunk called her a plain Jane, but that didn’t stop him from staring at her whenever he came in to harass me. Krendal caught me staring at her on more than one occasion, too. This usually earned me one of his smiles, followed by a grunt, then a thunderous, “Dishes! Dishes!” or some other push toward busywork.
Gerdy was waiting for me to ask her out, something I knew I probably should do, but the right moment had yet to present itself (although she would tell you the right moment had presented itself plenty, and I just went chicken shit). Maybe the homecoming dance. That was coming up.
I tried hard to forget Stella, I really did, but she was never far from my thoughts—particularly today, August 8.
“You’re wasting water! Turn that off!” Krendal shouted, passing through the kitchen to the small office in the back. He had put on a lot of weight in the past few years. I was standing in front of the large three-compartment aluminum sink washing the dishes from the first wave of the dinner rush. The clock above the prep station read 5:31 p.m.
I had to leave soon.
I picked up the last plate from the rack on my left and soaked it in the hot water. As I rinsed the suds away, Gerdy came in with a bus bin containing four more plates, six glasses, and assorted silverware. She shrugged, smiled, and set it down beside me before heading back out front. My eyes lingered on her backside as she strutted toward the swinging door, and I had to force myself to look away. I thought of Auntie Jo in that same uniform. That did the trick.
“Mr. Krendal! I gotta get out of here for a few minutes. I need to run home and check on Auntie Jo!” I shouted, dumping the contents of the bus bin into the water.
Krendal’s head appeared around the side of the office door. “How is Jo?”
I started to answer before I realized that he actually heard me. My eyes went to his left ear, and I noticed that the thick beige hearing aid on that side had been replaced with a smaller white one. When he caught me looking at it, he said, “New model. Doctor recommended. Not sure I like it, though. Most of the conversations I heard today were not worth hearing. Politics, war, hunger, and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. Sometimes the world is better under a dull hum.”
I started pulling the dishes from the soapy water, dipping each in the rinse bin before placing it on the drying rack. “She’s getting worse, I think. She won’t talk about it, so it’s hard to tell. She’s moving so slow, though. The doctor said he increased the chemo on this round, so decreased energy is to be expected. She gets sick a lot, too. When I try to get her to drink water, she doesn’t want any, but she has to drink to keep her fluids up. I’m hoping she’ll eat something tonight. She hasn’t kept any food down for two days.”
“Maybe bring in a nurse to help?”
And what would that cost? I thought. “Maybe, if it keeps getting worse.”
I glanced back up at the clock—5:42 p.m.
“Go,” Krendal said. “I got this until you get back. Give Jo my best. We miss her here.”
“Thanks.” I grabbed a towel from the rack beside me, hastily dried my hands, smacked him on the back, and bolted for the back door.
I had to go to the apartment first and check on Auntie Jo.
I nearly knocked two people over running down the sidewalk on Brownsville. In our building, I took the steps two and three at a time.
Dunk pulled the door open, while I fumbled with my key at the lock. “Dude, she’s getting worse.”
I pushed past him into the apartment. “You need to open some windows in here. Feels like I just walked into an oven.”
“I tried, then your wonderful aunt fell trying to get out of her chair to close them. Said she was freezing. She was shaking, too. Bad. I got her back in her chair and put a blanket over her. She stopped shaking and started sweating instead. When I tried to take away the blanket and cool her off, she gave me a death stare—when a woman looks at me that way, I know it’s time to back off. She’s sleeping now.”
Auntie Jo was in her chair by the closed window, reclined, with a thick quilt pulled up to her neck. Her eyes bobbled under her lids, lost to some dream. She wore a bright green ski cap on her head.
Auntie Jo wore hats now.
Always.
I knew most of her hair had fallen out, but she wouldn’t let me see. She was too proud. I considered getting her a wig, but I didn’t know how to approach the issue without things getting weird.
A Coke can sat on the scratched wooden table at her side, smoke trailing out of the opening. “How many today?”
Dunk shrugged. “I saw her with at least five, but I think she snuck one more in the bathroom. She was in there for nearly forty minutes, without so much as a courtesy flush. She finally came out when I told her I was coming in if she didn’t.”
I found the pack of Marlboros crammed between her leg and the side of the chair. There were six left of the original twenty.
When she was first diagnosed with leukemia, I tried to get her to stop smoking altogether. Hiding her ashtrays didn’t work—I tried that years ago, and she always found another way to dispense of her ashes (like the Coke can, the window, or one of my shoes). When the chemo and radiation started, I took away her cigarettes, only to find new packs would mysteriously appear. I had no idea where she got them. I tore the apartment to pieces trying to find her hidden stash. She didn’t go out. They had to be here somewhere.