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

by Flora, Kate;

  “My wife might know.”

  What was this guy doing here? Why hadn’t his wife come instead if she was the person who might know something about the girl?

  “What about school? Which school does she attend? Who was her last homeroom teacher?”

  Hooper didn’t know.

  “How is she spending the summer? Does she have a job?”

  Hooper looked confused. “I didn’t realize this was going to be so hard,” he said.

  Burgess didn’t think it had been hard at all. Nor did he believe Hooper was confused. The man was here for a reason. Possibly not one involving a missing child, or at least, wanting to locate a missing child. Maybe his goal had been to get Burgess to describe the murder victim? Or was he here to suss out the detectives?

  “Can you excuse me for a second, Mr. Hooper? I have to grab a form.”

  In the assistant’s office, he asked to Janice to arrange for someone to follow Hooper when he left. Get his plate number and record where he went. “Unmarked,” he said, though Janice probably knew that. It wouldn’t be the first time someone involved in a case came in “innocently” looking to file a report. Kyle had once spotted a guy in the lobby who was there to report his wife missing. The officer taking the report had missed the fact that the guy had blood on his clothes. The man’s wife wasn’t dead yet, but she would have been if Kyle hadn’t acted.

  In this case, Burgess was wondering whether Hooper was hiding his hands because they had blood on them. It could be darned hard to get it all off. Then he grabbed a form and went back to his desk, making a pretense of transferring his notes to the form.

  “Do you think your wife might be able to provide more information about Alicia?”

  Hooper shrugged. “She might.”

  “When would be a good time to contact her?”

  Hooper wasn’t sure.

  “Does Alicia work?” Burgess asked again.

  “She’s got a job somewhere. Ice cream place, I think.”

  “Have they contacted you wondering why she hasn’t come to work?”

  “Nope. Maybe she’s going to work but staying with a friend. I just wanted to know, you know, if something had happened to her. If she’d gotten herself killed. Because of the crowd she hangs out with.”

  “Who’s in that crowd, Mr. Hooper? Where do they hang out?”

  He shrugged.

  “Did you happen to bring a picture of Alicia, something we could use to help us find her?”

  “I did,” Hooper said, sounding proud of himself. He pulled out a photo and handed it to Burgess, quickly tucking his hands away again. The girl in the picture was about ten years old. According to Hooper, Alicia hadn’t lived with them when she was ten.

  “This is the girl who is missing?”

  “Yup.”

  “Does she still look like this?”

  “Nope.”

  “Do you have a more current photo at home?”

  “My wife might.”

  The girl in the photo had brown eyes. He turned it over. Someone had written Shelley, 2006. It was 2009, so even if this was his foster daughter, she wasn’t sixteen or named Alicia.

  Burgess flashed on the bar scene in Star Wars. There’s nothing to see here. He didn’t know if the child in the picture was the droid he was looking for. It was time to move along.

  “Why are you here, Mr. Hooper?”

  The man shifted in his chair and gave Burgess an innocent look. “To see if Alicia’s been murdered.”

  “Without a photograph, information about her friends or employment, or even the date she went missing?”

  Hooper failed to suppress a smirk. “You’re the cops. I thought you could figure that out. About this murdered girl. What did she look like?”

  Burgess thought he understood why the man was here.

  “I’m afraid we’re not releasing any information about the victim yet, Mr. Hooper. I’m sorry. When we do, it will all be in the papers.”

  Anger flashed across the man’s face, and he tensed, like he was about to start yelling. Then it faded, and he used the hands under his buttocks to push himself up. “I expected you to be more help,” he said, and headed for the door.

  Burgess picked up the phone and called down to the reception area. “The man I want followed is just leaving. Forties, sandy hair, white shirt and tan pants.”

  Then he turned to his computer and typed in Hooper’s name, address, and date of birth. Despite the fact that he’d checked Hooper’s license, there was no such person. The number on Hooper’s license belonged to an elderly lady named Ida Mae Wilson. Burgess wrote down her information. He’d have to check it out. He glared at the screen, hoping Kyle and Perry were having better days.

  Eleven

  Sighing for his wasted time, he opened the notebook where he had recorded the serial numbers for Mermaid’s implants. After five minutes online it was clear to him that making the calls to track their manufacturer wasn’t a job he had time to do. It required someone with the patience to spend hours at a desk and on the phone, and to find that kind of sleuthing interesting. While he could do it if he had to, he wasn’t the best man for the job. He called Rocky Jordan, their computer whiz, and asked if he had some time. Rocky usually had time for him and he liked solving the puzzles Burgess’s cases presented. Burgess gave him the serial numbers, explained what they were, and asked him to track down the manufacturer and get the name of the surgeon who’d installed them.

  Rocky said it sounded like fun, and he carried off the numbers. Burgess was reaching for his phone to check in with Kyle and Perry when it rang. Remy Aucoin said, “Got a minute?”

  Burgess had a minute. “What’s up?”

  “I think I’ve found something. A black plastic trash bag. A buried bag. It was farther into the woods, but in the same area as the body. I started to uncover it, then I thought someone should be with me. Or maybe Wink or Dani should collect it. From the shape, it doesn’t look like it’s the missing body parts. It’s too flat. It may not even be related.”

  “Flag it,” he said, “and meet me out on the path. I’ll grab Wink or Dani, and meet you there.”

  Nearly six hours since he’d sent Remy out to recheck the site. A long time to make the kid crawl through the woods. Between the mosquitoes and the ticks, it would be a lucky thing if Burgess’s assignment didn’t kill him. Remy’s fiancée would not be pleased by that. Kid survives a sniper attack and Burgess kills him with an evidence search?

  “Remy, have you been working all this time? Have you taken any breaks? Did you get lunch?”

  Misunderstanding the question as meaning he wasn’t working hard enough, Aucoin said, “My supervisor, Sarge. He said I had to take a break, hydrate, and get some lunch. It’s not me, sir. Honest. I would have worked right through. But my uncles are on my case to take it easy.”

  His damned reputation again. Invaluable for getting officers to take him seriously and to do the job well. Difficult when it put pressure on the wrong people. “I wasn’t criticizing you, Remy. I’ll see you soon.”

  Aucoin had two uncles, Guy and Steven, both Portland cops. They’d raised him from a pup and were always there to look out for him, sometimes to the detriment of his career. But when Aucoin was shot, Burgess was glad he had his uncles, and a lovely young woman who said she was his fiancée, pulling for him. He might not be a religious man himself, but he believed that having people praying for you, and surrounding you with love, could make a difference in your recovery. It was between him and God, but maybe, when Aucoin and Melia were shot, he’d added a little prayer of his own.

  In any case, he was glad Aucoin’s supervisor was looking after him. Looking after your people was important. Speaking of people, he needed to check in with his. He popped down to the lab, didn’t find Wink, but grabbed Dani to come back with him to Stroudwater Park. She said she’d drive herself because she had an errand to do on the way home, so he agreed to meet her there.

  In the truck, he called Kyle, and g
ot a brisk, “Terry Kyle.”

  “Burgess,” he said. “Getting anywhere?”

  “I checked McCann’s car. It’s been cleaned out. There’s nothing in it. Not even a water bottle or the dog’s water dish or that blanket Remy described covering the back seat. Schools are a bust, too. It’s summertime, so there’s no one to miss her if she doesn’t show up. They’re pretty short staffed, and no one who was around, which is just the office staff, remembered a student with a heavily tattooed arm. You get anything?”

  “Not much. Remy just called and said maybe he had a find, so Dani and I are going to check it out.”

  “Out at Stroudwater Park?”

  Burgess made an affirmative sound.

  “What about Stan? Anything?”

  “Haven’t caught up with him yet.”

  “I can’t ever remember a more unproductive first twenty-four. We meeting later?”

  “Can you?” A question the old Burgess, the one who didn’t understand about families, wouldn’t have asked.

  “After dinner, if that’s okay.”

  Part of the deal when Kyle got custody of his daughters from the ex-wife from hell was that he’d be available to take care of them. The PMS Queen, as they called Kyle’s ex, liked to drop around from time to time, just to see if she could catch him out. It had always been ugly, and was ugly still. Kyle had Michelle, and she was wonderful, but it wasn’t her job to raise his kids. Or rather, it was fine with her to raise his kids so long as she would eventually get a kid of her own. Kyle loved her, but he was scared of another failure. Of marriage. It was not easy times at the Kyle household.

  “After is fine. I’ll let Stan know.”

  His call to Stan Perry went to voicemail. Probably Perry was talking to someone and didn’t want to break it off to talk. Burgess hoped that was the case. Someone had to have something. He just prayed this wasn’t going to be one of those cases where they hit nothing but brick walls. It happened sometimes. No matter how hard you worked, how many people you interviewed, how many angles you tried, you couldn’t solve it.

  It worried him that he wasn’t feeling the obsessive thrill of the chase that usually enveloped him at this stage in a case. Did his cop gut know something his body didn’t? Was this one going to drag them through everything, wring them out, and then leave them without a resolution for that butchered girl? It would be an albatross they’d carry all their lives if they couldn’t get this victim justice.

  He was hitting the beginning of the end of the day rush hour this time and there was plenty of traffic. At least there was no BMW Bimbo eating breakfast. Ah, he thought. Alliteration again. Maybe he should chuck it in, take retirement, and become a poet of the mean streets.

  The two officers who were guarding the scene and still blocking access to the path looked like they’d had a hard day. It was a rotten job dealing with a public unused to having anyone say no, and they’d just had a whole shift of saying no to walkers, bikers, joggers, and to dog owners who believed their pets were their children, and that their children should be denied nothing. The same dog owners who didn’t clean up after their pets, or left bags of poo on the ground like there was a designated poo collector who would come and pick it up. Kyle sometimes expressed a desire to become the poo police. He’d be dynamite, and Portland’s poo problem would vanish. But Burgess needed Kyle for more important work.

  He got his search gloves, some evidence bags, and a shovel out of the truck, and paused to ask whether they’d seen anything suspicious. No. They hadn’t. Unless raging entitlement was suspicious. Well, there was a guy who drove in, circled the lot slowly as though looking for a way around them, but that was all.

  Could they describe the man or the car?

  Both, it appeared. The man sounded suspiciously like the one who’d presented himself as Charlie Hooper. The car was one of those ubiquitous Priuses that were so quiet they could sneak up on people. They had the plate number for him.

  Aha. Some small corner of the plot thickened, Burgess just had no idea how. He wrote down the number, told them to send Dani in when she arrived, and headed down the path.

  He’d revisited crime scenes countless times over the years, and never quite got over that eerie sense of menace when he did. Today was no exception. He wondered if it spooked Dani as well, and decided to wait for her and walk her out to the scene. No matter how often he thought he was done with monsters in the closet or under the bed, not even now that he chased them away for Neddy, they could still haunt him. He couldn’t shake the sensation that something was lurking just beyond the tree line. That maybe a gun was pointed at him even now. Someone with a crossbow crouched in the undergrowth. A thug with a knife waited in the clearing. Not so long ago, someone with a gun had been waiting. He had the scar to prove it.

  He shook his head to clear it. He was being ridiculous. There was no reason to think there was any danger lurking in these woods. He faded back against a tree and waited.

  Dani wasn’t far behind, striking him, as she always did, to be too small a woman to carry such a big job. The equipment was heavy and the hours were long. And he was a chauvinist dinosaur. She spotted him instantly and swung the heavy bag off her shoulder. “You can carry it, Joe, since you think it’s too heavy for little me.”

  “Am I so obvious?”

  “Afraid so. I find it sort of charming, partly because I know the next thing you’ll do is not hit on me. I don’t go for the ‘let me carry that big old bag for you, honey, so I can get close enough to cop a feel.’ You and Wink are just paternalistic representatives of a bygone era.”

  “In my day, we called them ‘gentlemen,’ Dani. Do people still say ‘cop a feel’ these days?”

  “Don’t know. It’s not like they announce it. They just do it. Anyway, in my case, wouldn’t it be to feel a cop?”

  But Burgess was being paternalistic again. “Police officers? In our department?”

  “You bet your ass,” she said.

  “I never bet my ass.”

  “I’ve heard. So why are we here?” She burst out laughing. “That sequence didn’t sound quite right, did it?”

  “Remy says he may have found something.”

  “I hope so. We find who did this to that poor child, and I want to chop off a few body parts myself.”

  Strong words from Dani, who was usually so quiet and reserved.

  “It’s just, Joe, you know, that I’m kind of sick of seeing young girls victimized.”

  He knew the case she was thinking of, and he agreed. “As a paternalistic dinosaur, I wish you didn’t have to see these things. But you are critical to getting them justice. You know that.”

  “Thanks, Joe. I appreciate that. Wink and I often feel like we toil in obscurity.”

  “Don’t we all.”

  Aucoin was waiting where his yellow tape led the way off the trail. They followed him to the clearing where the body had been, and beyond it through thicker brush until he came to an abrupt halt. “It’s right here.”

  Even though Aucoin said he had partially excavated it, when Burgess looked down, he couldn’t see a buried object. Obligingly, the young cop got out his flashlight and illuminated an area of disturbed leaf mold and branches. “Right here. I kinda put it back together.”

  “Wow,” Dani said. “How on earth did you ever see it in the first place?”

  Her gaze fell to the muddy knees of his uniform pants. “Have you been crawling through these woods all day?”

  Aucoin looked away, embarrassed. “Not all day. When I came back after lunch, I was trying to think like a tracker would, and I noticed some kicked rocks and sticks and some broken branches. I got down on my knees to follow the trail, and found this.”

  “Let’s see what we’ve got,” Burgess said, sincerely hoping what they were unearthing was not someone’s dead cat.

  Dani took her pictures, and then Burgess used his shovel to carefully remove the layer of old leaves and earth until they could see a black plastic trash bag. Dani took
pictures again. Burgess was about to pull out the bag and open it when he thought of Remy Aucoin crawling through the woods on his knees.

  “You want to do the honors, Remy?”

  Aucoin’s grin was huge as he reached out with gloved hands and gently extricated the bag from its burial site. He gave the bag to Burgess, who undid the plastic ties and peered inside. The others leaned in for a look, then pulled back with disappointed faces when they saw the bag held a handsaw.

  Trying to keep his hands in one spot, to avoid smudging any prints that might be on the bag, Burgess peeled it open more so he could look at the blade of the saw, his eyes slowly running down the row of teeth until he saw it. A place where some teeth had been snapped off.

  He’d been holding his breath as he examined it. Now he could breathe again.

  “Dani. This picture,” he said, tilting slightly so she could get the saw and the bag. “This is fantastic. Remy, without you crawling around, we never would have found this.”

  Remy still looked puzzled. “Why would someone come all the way out here to bury a saw?”

  “Because it’s what they used to cut her head off.”

  Dani flinched. Aucoin stared. And Burgess wished he’d tempered his words and avoided such a brutal statement. He wasn’t with the musketeers right now. They’d understand, but showing enthusiasm about the instrument of someone’s beheading generally wasn’t cool. “I should explain. This morning, during the autopsy, Dr. Lee found a piece of broken metal in the victim’s neck. He said it was some teeth from a saw. Now you’ve found a saw with missing teeth. We can’t be sure the two are related, but circumstances suggest that they are. Remy, this could be huge.”

  He was good at finding evidence, but would he ever have found this? His knee wouldn’t have let him do what Aucoin had done.

  Maybe it was time to get a dog out here to see if anything else related to their case was hidden in these woods.

  As Dani collected the saw, still in its bag, Burgess took a step backward, watching her work, trying to keep his enthusiasm in check, but hoping this meant they weren’t going to be totally empty-handed in their first twenty-four.