A Child Shall Lead Them (A Joe Burgess Mystery, Book 6)

by Flora, Kate;

  Before the rest of his life had passed, and before he was infuriatingly late heading north for the autopsy, a twenty-year-old woman named Bambi Bailey was on her way to jail, and Burgess and Remy had their heads together in the Explorer.

  Burgess got permission from the patrol supervisor to borrow Remy for the day, shared his team’s questions about the spot chosen to dump the body, and then described the kind of search he wanted Remy to make. Remy was a hundred percent on board.

  He was almost out of time, but Burgess had one more idea. He told Remy about Cary McCann’s desire to go back onto the trail to recover his “missing property.” “Tell the officers who are securing the scene that if he turns up while you’re out there searching, it’s okay for him to look for his property as long as you accompany him. If he agrees, that should give us a read on what he’s up to and what he’s looking for. If he refuses? That’s information, too.”

  “I’m on it, Sarge,” Aucoin said. “If I find something, or I need help, do I call you?”

  “I’ll be at the autopsy. Call Kyle or Perry. I’ll check in with you when I’m done, though. Got some follow-up questions about yesterday.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Aucoin continued on to Stroudwater Park while Burgess headed north to Augusta, where Sage Prentiss would meet him. As he drove, he made quick calls, leaving messages for Kyle and Perry about the task he’d delegated to Remy Aucoin, and that he’d follow up with Remy later, taking that task off Kyle’s list. He was just flying past Brunswick when his phone rang. Expecting Kyle or Perry, he answered without looking, and had the pleasure of Captain Cote’s voice exploding in his ear.

  “What the heck were you thinking, Burgess?”

  There were so many possibilities. He was thinking about crude amputations and what instrument might have been used. Where they might look for the missing body parts. What kind of killers posed their victims, and why. Whether the ME would find something they could use. Whether Remy would find anything. And a critical, maybe existential question: how comfortable was he about delegating what might be important tasks to anyone outside his team? It was hard to teach an old dinosaur new tricks.

  “About what, sir?”

  “That girl you arrested. Do you have any idea who she is?”

  “Other than a danger to herself and others, sir? No. I do not. Did you read the report?” Burgess had never been interested in curtsying to the self-important, something Cote excelled at and frequently berated Burgess about.

  “She’s Senator Bailey’s niece.”

  Now he understood the source of her careless indifference. She thought she was untouchable. “And?”

  “And now we have a public relations mess on our hands.”

  “All I have on my hands is a legitimate traffic stop, an infant that was nearly killed by a driver who drove onto the sidewalk while eating with both hands, and a distraught mother. Oh, and a savagely mutilated body, Paul. If you want to let Bambi go, despite her outrageous behavior, feel free. Now excuse me, but I’m late for an autopsy.”

  Cote began to sputter. Cote spent his life demanding reports. In this case, so patrol would know what to charge, he’d done a quick write-up of the girl’s erratic driving and the offenses she’d committed, so Cote had a report. “Paul,” Burgess interrupted, “she’s a dangerous driver. You let her go and she kills herself or someone else instead of learning a lesson, it’s on you.”

  It was insubordination, for sure, but he disconnected and went back to driving and thinking about his case. Let Cote sort this one out. That’s why he got the gold bars and the big bucks.

  Burgess took a moment to savor the phrase “let Bambi go,” thinking “Catch and Release Bambi” sounded like a movie title, and then went back to thinking about his case and to exceeding the speed limit, because catching Bambi had really taken a bite out of his morning.

  Wink was there without Dani, processing the body and taking his pictures and shaking his head at all the things he’d normally do that he couldn’t do here. No fingernail scrapings. No head and pubic hair combing. No fingerprinting. He did take a footprint, just in case there was a birth certificate somewhere with an infant’s footprint on it, and lots of close-ups of the bruises and the unfinished tattoo sleeve. Unless they found the missing body parts, or someone came forward, those tattoos were one of their best shots at identification. If the tattoos were local. People who trafficked young girls often sold them, traded them, moved them around so she might not be local.

  Sage Prentiss looked as pale and stiff as a man going to his own execution. Burgess took a moment with him before they went in. “It’s ugly,” he said, “so brace yourself. But it’s still our job to find out who she is, and find her killer, and we may miss something important if we’re thinking of our own discomfort instead of focusing on what we can learn. If you feel sick, go outside and get some air. There’s no shame in that.”

  He wouldn’t tell Prentiss this, but he had to brace himself as well. Maybe he was getting soft in his old age. Maybe things like this just got harder when you had a daughter.

  Before Dr. Lee could begin, Burgess had a request. “Could we put something, a towel, or a cloth, over her…” He fumbled for a word, then came up with an ugly one. “Stumps.”

  The ME gave him a puzzled look, but signaled to his assistant to find something.

  “Leaving her in the woods like that…it was bad enough. Being laid out on a stainless steel table depersonalizes her even more. I want a moment when I’m just looking at her body, not distracted by the amputations, to see her.”

  He wasn’t explaining this very well but he didn’t have better words. The assistant covered her neck, a white cloth where her head would have been, two more covering the ends of her arms. Everyone was silent as Burgess studied the form on the table. He felt, at last, like he was speaking to her, to a person rather than a mutilated body, as he quietly made the promise he made to all his victims. “I will get you justice.”

  He nodded to Dr. Lee. “Sorry for the delay.” And the autopsy began.

  Lee began at the neck, describing what he was seeing, amplifying what he’d said at the scene about the crude method used to sever the head, pointing out the torn flesh and muscle, the scrapes and nicks on the spine, leaning in closely to examine the neck.

  Burgess and Prentiss were in wait and watch mode, listening, but settling in for a long process, when Lee reached for some tweezers, poked into the wound, and pulled out a small piece of metal.

  “Here’s something for you, gentlemen. Looks like this broke off a hand saw.”

  The small piece of metal clanged into a dish, and Wink moved in to photograph it while Lee dictated the details of his find.

  It was a piece of evidence, certainly, but one that only amped up his frustration. He couldn’t find the saw because he couldn’t find the owner of the saw because he didn’t know who the victim was and so he didn’t know where to look. If only this were television. Then they’d stick this piece of metal into some machine and magically know the brand of the saw. Then another machine could quickly trace it to the store that had sold it. Which store would, of course, have a clear video of the purchaser and a sales slip with the man’s name and address. Oh, to live in a CSI world. He suppressed a sigh. Dr. Lee didn’t like sighs in his autopsy room.

  “For what it’s worth,” Lee said, as if he’d read Burgess’s mind, “it looks like a new saw. And it has deeper gullets between the teeth than many.”

  Lee knew the most amazing things. Burgess got out his phone and snapped a picture of the broken saw tooth. In his business, you never knew what might be important.

  So it went. By the end, Burgess had the serial numbers for both breast implants, while Wink had the implants themselves, Dr. Lee’s opinion that the girl wasn’t older than fifteen and might be younger, and that, for a girl so young, she had had a lot of sex. The ME had confirmed the presence of semen in both anus and vagina, which would be sent to the lab for testing. The bruises were prem
ortem, but recent, and her body showed evidence of previous beatings and old breaks in her bones, some of which likely hadn’t had medical care. They would check for drugs in her system, but there were no needle marks or other obvious signs of drug use.

  “That break in her ulna,” Lee said, “is recent. And it was treated. You get a name, you might find x-rays.”

  The body can tell a lot about how it has been treated, and this girl had been someone’s punching bag since she was very young. Someone’s punching bag and someone’s sex slave. Just one person using her for sex, or was someone pimping her out?

  Now, with those two attributes humans used most to connect with the world—head and hands—removed, she had been thrown away. Dehumanized. Just a thing. A girl no one seemed to have missed.

  “You’ll find him, Joe. Him or them,” Lee said. “She’s counting on you.” The ME let that hang in the air a moment, then he added, “I’m counting on you.”

  Burgess was surprised. Normally, Dr. Lee was clinical and efficient. The only thing that got to him was kids. Which, Burgess supposed, this girl was. “One of these days I’m going to let you down,” he said.

  “How about not this time?”

  Burgess felt the weight of Dr. Lee’s expectations join his own. The girl was slight but the weight was not.

  Ten

  As they walked out to their cars, Wink lugging his cameras and workbag, and Burgess carrying the bits of evidence they’d collected, Sage Prentiss said, “That was a good suggestion, Sarge, covering her neck and arms like that. It sounds weird, but it made her come alive…I mean, more real, more human somehow.”

  “That was the idea,” Burgess said.

  Prentiss ducked his head like he was being reprimanded.

  “No,” Burgess said. “I mean I’m glad it worked.”

  Wink shot him a look, probably wondering if mean Joe Burgess was a thing of the past. He was beginning to wonder about that himself.

  “Got something you want me working on?” Prentiss asked. He was young and eager, still excited to be on the detective’s squad, still learning the ropes. The task Burgess had in mind was boring and a real long shot, but it needed to be done. “See what you can dig up about people who’ve recently bought hand saws,” he said. “Especially ones with deep…what did Dr. Lee call them? Gullets. And maybe check reviews, see if some are more prone to breakage?”

  “I’ll give it my best shot, sir.”

  Prentiss might like the job, Burgess thought. Going to big box stores and hardware stores, flashing his badge, and looking for answers.

  “Hold on,” he said, pulling out his phone and showing Prentiss the close-up of the piece Lee had pulled from Mermaid’s neck. “Teeth like this,” he said. He shared the photo to Prentiss’s phone.

  He sat in his car and watched them drive away, glad he would be driving back alone. He used his patches of alone time to think about his cases and plan what avenues to pursue next. He always hoped that he’d get back to 109 and something would have broken or some essential piece of evidence discovered. He didn’t dawdle, exactly. But back at 109, a prune-faced Cote was waiting for his not yet written reports, and to complain about Burgess’s treatment of Bambi. Who would hurry toward that?

  He would be writing reports, and nagging his team to write reports, though there was little to put in them at this point beyond the initial information from the scene. He understood reports were important. But in these very early stages, particularly when confronted with a puzzle like this one, investigative time was better spent investigating.

  Cote was always looking for a quick solution, which, in this case, was even more unlikely than in most. Even though Kyle and Perry were good, cases took time. Long, slow, slogs of time as they explored and collected and built their case. It was a lot harder when the opponent took essential pieces off the board. But hope sprang eternal. Hope and determination. They would identify their Jane Doe, their mermaid. It might just take a long time.

  Now that he wasn’t immersed in the autopsy, Burgess realized he was hungry. He’d lost some weight over the past year, and was trying to keep it off for the benefit of his bad knee, and his good partner, but healthy eating could be incompatible with his irregular work schedule. When he was rushing from point A to point B, and fielding questions along the way, salads didn’t work. Trying to eat a salad while driving was a recipe for disaster. Dressing would drip, those slimy little tomatoes would escape into his lap, and recalcitrant bits of lettuce would go everywhere. He’d be as bad a driver as Bambi. And salads, like cereal, took two hands.

  He compromised on a chicken sandwich from his friends at the Golden Arches. That he could eat with one hand. He even skipped the fries, though hot, salty fries often had a positive effect on his disposition.

  Back at 109, he braced himself for the message that Cote wanted to see him as soon as he came in, but there was no such message. Either Cote was also mellowing, or he was tied up practicing his curtsy. Better him than me, Burgess thought. It was hard to curtsy with a bum knee.

  He dropped into his chair and picked up the stack of waiting messages. Given the effect of cop cuisine on their digestive systems, Pepto-Bismol pink was a poor choice for the pieces of paper thrust in their faces every day, but he couldn’t remember a time when message slips weren’t that color.

  Nothing that couldn’t wait. No one had called and confessed. No anxious parent had left an urgent message.

  Continuing to procrastinate, he checked his phone in case there was a message from Kyle or Perry. Nothing.

  Dammit. There had to be something. Somewhere. Growling with frustration, he pulled up the report template and went to work.

  He’d just hit “save” on the last report when he saw Janice, the new CID assistant, approaching his desk, followed by a man he didn’t recognize. The man was dressed like an office worker—khaki pants, blue shirt and tie but no jacket—tall and well-made and looked to be in his forties. “Joe, this is Mr. Hooper. He’s a foster parent. He read about that poor murdered girl in the paper, and his foster daughter is missing, and well…” She stammered to a stop, blushing. “I’ll just let him tell you.”

  She waved vaguely at the chair beside Burgess’s desk and fled. Once Burgess had yelled at her when some important papers had gotten misfiled. He’d apologized and tried to be extra nice ever since, but she still acted like he’d probably bite her if she got too close, and likely was rabid as well. His life never stopped teaching him lessons about his temper, though he thought he lost it more rarely than most people.

  “Mr. Hooper,” he said, thrusting out a hand. “Detective Sergeant Burgess. How can I help?”

  Despite his vigorous appearance, Hooper’s handshake was a limp, slimy press. Then he drew his hand back and parked it under his buttock, like he needed to protect it or was about to use it to vault from the chair. Cops made people nervous. Some more than others.

  “I don’t know if you…I just read in the paper that…I mean, maybe I should just file a missing person report? Because my daughter. Our daughter. Our foster daughter. She’s missing. Run away again, I guess?”

  It was the first time he’d heard an adult male use what Nina told him was called “upspeak”, a form of talking where everything was posed as a question and the speaker ended everything on a high note. She’d made him watch a YouTube video that explained it. He hadn’t noticed it in the real world before now.

  He got Mr. Hooper’s first name, address, date of birth, and phone number—the usual information police collected. Checked the license to confirm it, and wrote down the driver’s license number. It took some time and Burgess was already frustrated before he asked his first real question.

  He collected the missing daughter’s name, Alicia Johnson. How long she’d been with the Hoopers. Three years. Alicia’s age. Sixteen. How long she’d been missing. He wasn’t sure.

  “Are we talking a day? A week? She lives with you. You must have some idea.”

  Alicia, it seemed, ran aw
ay a lot. She always returned home after a few days. Once after a week. But when his wife had read about the girl in the paper, she’d been concerned that it might be Alicia, and sent him to inquire.

  “What does your foster daughter look like?” he asked. It was the all-important question. He already believed this wasn’t on the up and up. There was something off about this guy.

  Hooper hesitated for a while, and Burgess forced himself not to drum his fingers on the desk. If this wasn’t going to be productive, he had better uses for his time.

  “She’s maybe 5’ 5”, slightly built. Pretty. Very pretty.”

  “Hair color?”

  Hooper shrugged. “It changes all the time. Last week it was kind of a mahogany red with a few pink streaks. Curly. Long.”

  “And before that?”

  “Black.”

  Burgess’s sense was that their girl was a brunette, but he had no basis for that beyond gut.

  “Eye color?”

  “Hazel. I think.”

  Right. She’s lived with you for three years. There’s no reason you should have noticed. “Distinguishing marks?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Moles. Scars. Birthmarks. Short leg. Missing digits. Piercings. Anything personal that could be used to identify her.” He wasn’t going to mention tattoos. If Mermaid was Hooper’s daughter, that was the first thing he’d mention.

  But Hooper shook his head. “I can’t think of anything.”

  “When did you last see Alicia?” Another version of the question he’d asked earlier.

  Hooper shrugged. “I don’t know. My wife might remember.”

  This was the situation the state was putting foster kids into? No wonder the girl ran away, if that was in fact the case. If anything this man was saying was true.

  “Does Alicia have a cell phone?”

  Hooper shook his head.

  “What about friends? Who could we contact who might have an idea where she is?”