by Flora, Kate;
“We’re police, ma’am,” Kyle said. “What’s your emergency?”
“That girl over there,” she said, pointing to a bench in the park. “I think she’s dead.”
Twenty-One
Burgess pulled over and got on the phone to dispatch while Kyle followed the woman. Then he joined them. The girl on the bench was unconscious, not dead. Likely an overdose. He called dispatch back and asked for medcu. The woman hovered nearby as patrol arrived to take charge, and Burgess and Kyle got back in the truck. They drove the two blocks to the garage and went upstairs.
“All of this makes you want to lock girl children in a tower guarded by dragons,” Burgess said.
“Roger that.”
Burgess’s faith in humanity, in all its permutations, was restored when he found a message to call Captain Cote on his desk. Ignoring Cote’s peremptory summonses had always punctuated his investigations. Rather than respond, despite his curiosity, he took a few quick minutes to type up what they’d learned from Kit. He still needed to write his reports for last night. Then he went to find Rocky Jordan.
Rocky didn’t look pleased to see him. “I’m working as fast as I can, Sarge. This stuff takes time.” He picked up a folder. “Here’s what I’ve got so far.’
Burgess surprised him by smiling. Usually, he didn’t smile. “I’ve got something else I need you to look at. Shelley or Michele Minor. Foster kid. See if you can dig up anything about her.”
“DHHS records…”
“Just anything. Arrests. New stories. It’s a long shot, I know.”
“I’ll put it on the list.”
“Anything on Ida Mae Wilson?”
“It’s in the file, Sarge.”
“Thanks.” He headed back to his desk, thumbing through the papers as he walked, so focused he almost walked straight into Captain Paul Cote.
“Burgess!”
“Paul? You wanted to see me?”
“My office,” Cote said, and stalked away.
It looked like the old Cote was back. And Burgess couldn’t pretend not to have seen him. He followed the captain down the hall and sat in one of Cote’s comfortable visitor’s chairs, waiting to hear what the man wanted.
“Your reports,” Cote said.
“You should have them, sir. Except for last night. We haven’t had time to…”
“Make time, Sergeant. Your team is involved in a major operation involving human trafficking, and I don’t have anything to tell the press.”
“Terry Kyle and I are canvassing that neighborhood. When we get back, I’ll do those.”
“Reports first.”
Burgess studied his nemesis. Like many of them, Cote hadn’t escaped the attempted assassination of their officers unscathed. He was looking better, though. He’d lost some weight and seemed to have spent some time outside.
“Okay. Reports first. How’s the puppy doing?”
Cote got a photo from his desk drawer and showed Burgess a tiny animal playing with a tiny chew toy. ‘She’s great.”
The pictures Burgess had to share weren’t so cute. He stood up. “I’ll go do those reports. Sir.”
There was a moment when it looked like Cote was going to say something else, but it passed.
Burgess left.
Irritation made his fingers fly as he and Kyle, at their respective desks, worked on the reports Cote had demanded. Burgess didn’t mind that much. Report writing was an essential part of the job. Recording things as they’d happened created the story that prosecutors would use down the road to shape the case for trial. He’d just always been impatient with the process. He needed to be going and doing. Shaking witnesses and chasing leads until it all led him to the bad guy. Or guys.
As he finished and hit save, then print, he looked at Kyle, still a one-fingered typist after all these years. It was the one thing Kyle couldn’t rush through with his intense, vibrating sense of urgency.
“Shouldn’t Stan be back by now?”
Kyle grinned. “Maybe he ran away. Kid must be scared to death about all the adult responsibilities about to descend on him.”
“Mine came more like an avalanche,” Burgess said.
“Roger that,” Kyle said. “Maybe he just moved on to the next task on his list. What would that be, exactly?”
Burgess was in charge of steering this damned thing, and he couldn’t remember. This was where being a compulsive note taker was helpful. “Schools?” he said. “But he doesn’t know her name.”
He called. Got a slightly slurred, “Stan Perry.”
“Fuck no, Stan! Where are you?”
“Lost Moose. S’okay. Dani’s looking…after me.”
It was three in the afternoon on a work day, and one of the detectives working a front page homicide and human trafficking case was drunk, tying up an evidence tech to babysit him. “Stay there. Terry and I are coming to get you.”
“S’okay, Dad. I got Dani.”
“Stay.” Like Stan Perry was a naughty dog. Which it sounded like he was.
He got up, checking his gear and grabbing his jacket. “Terry, we gotta go. Stan’s in trouble.”
“I called it, didn’t I?”
“That’s not a good thing, Ter, being able to predict when our third musketeer goes off the rails.”
“My motto is ‘Be prepared, and expect the worst,’” Kyle said. “Besides, Stan’s predictable. Half the time when we can’t find him he’s in trouble. Other half he’s following hunches and pulling rabbits out of hats.”
“I’d be happier with a seventy-five/twenty-five ratio,” Burgess said. “Kid’s getting married in less than a week. He can’t be like this.”
“He is like this. You think words from a minister and a golden ring are gonna change that?”
Treating it like the emergency it was, they used lights and sirens to clear the ambling summer traffic blocking their path. Clearly breaking the rules and not giving a tinker’s dam. To avoid thinking about what they’d do when they got there, Burgess mused on whether people understood the meaning of a tinker’s dam.
They went silent before they pulled into the Moose’s small parking lot. No sense in calling attention to the situation.
Dani and Stan were sitting at a table in a front alcove. She jumped up when they got there and threw herself into Burgess’s arms. “He didn’t have that much to drink and suddenly he was like this. I didn’t know what to do, so I just stayed with him. It had just…he’d just gotten like this. I was about to call you when you called.”
She shifted nervously from one foot to the other. “I don’t know if this means anything, but he said he had a headache. He took a couple pills on the way up and then again just before we ate.”
As Burgess consoled her, Kyle was getting Stan to his feet.
“Have you paid?” Burgess asked.
She nodded.
“Okay. Let’s get him outside.” They half-led, half-carried their third musketeer outside. “Dani, go back to 109, and don’t mention this to anyone, okay?”
She nodded. “But I was riding with Stan. My camera, evidence, it’s all in his car.”
Kyle fished in Perry’s pocket, and handed her his keys. Along with the keys came a handful of pills. Kyle examined one and shook his head. “Stan’s not drunk. He’s drugged. Gone overboard dealing with premarital jitters.”
They put Perry in the back seat, Kyle got in with him, Burgess behind the wheel, and headed for the hospital. In the interest of Perry’s career and reputation, they might have taken him home and stayed with him, hoping he could walk it off or sleep it off. But it had happened so suddenly. They had no idea how much he’d taken. And drug overdoses were nothing to take lightly.
They handed him off to Dr. Sarita Cohen, who seemed to work 24/7 in the Emergency Room. Burgess described Dani’s observations, the suddenness of the symptoms, and gave her one of the pills they’d found in Perry’s pocket.
“This is helpful information,” she said. “I’ll take good care of him.”
She gave quiet orders to the nurses, who began to treat Perry.
“While you are here, Joe and …” She looked up at Kyle. “It’s Terry, right? And I am Sarita. Maybe you want to look in on your girls? Two of them are doing very well. We’ve had a Spanish language translator in to help us communicate. The third has been moved out of the ICU. The fourth?” Her face was sad. “As I told you. It is not looking promising. We are a good hospital, but we can’t always make miracles.”
“We’ll be back,” Burgess said.
“I’m afraid this is always true,” she said. “Only please. No more stitches, Joe, okay?’
“That’s what my partner always says, too.”
“You, too, Terry.”
They were already at the hospital, so it made sense to look in on the girls. He also wanted the name of the interpreter, and their doctor’s opinion about whether it would be all right to interview them. Usually Burgess bulled his way into any hospital room he wanted to be in, but these girls were fragile. He didn’t want to inflict any more brutality on them, even in the interest of catching whoever had done this to them.
“I hate this place,” Kyle said.
“Not as much as I do. I’m the one with more stitches than a football.”
“Yeah, and I’m the one who has had to drag you in here to get those stitches.”
“Friends forever,” Burgess said.
In an act of kindness unexpected in a bureaucratic medical facility, they had put all three girls in a room. Cleaned up, hydrated and fed, they were a stunning contrast to the filthy, dull-eyed girls his team had pulled out of that fetid basement. A woman was sitting beside the first bed, talking to the girl in language Burgess recognized as Spanish. She turned and smiled as they came in, said, “You are the officers who rescued these girls, aren’t you?”
They admitted they were. Burgess said, “There were three of us,” giving Perry credit since he was the one who would carry the horror of that initial discovery with him forever.
She introduced herself as Clara Sanchez, then said something to the girls, and the one she sat beside held out a hand to Burgess.
He approached the bed carefully, knowing how big he must seem, how scary his scar could be, and took her hand. It disappeared in his, making him feel like an awkward giant.
“This is Sofia,” the translator said. Burgess didn’t speak Spanish, but he tried “Hola” and the girl in the bed giggled.
The translator smiled and indicated the next girl. “This is Magaly.”
Another small hand came out, this time indicating Kyle. Kyle took it between two of his. “Hello,” he said. “I’m Terry.”
“Magaly,” the girl said.
The girl in the third bed was sleeping. “I don’t want to disturb her,” the translator said. “But that is Gabriela. Gabriela and Magaly are sisters. Sofia is their cousin. Sofia’s sister Maria is still in intensive care. May we step outside?”
They found a small private room to talk. “We need their information about who did this to them if we’re going to find the person and arrest him,” Burgess said.
“I think you are looking for more than one person,” the translator said. “There were two men who were directly involved, I believe. And others who came and went. I know this information is important to you. I am trying to ask them slowly because when these men are mentioned, they get very upset. They cry and go silent.”
“Can you tell us anything?” Burgess asked.
“Did they see the other girl killed?” Kyle asked.
She looked from one of them to the other. “To your question, Detective Burgess, the answer is not very much. Yet. I take the questions in small bits, as I’m sure you can understand. One man was younger than the other, with lighter hair, and he was kinder to them. Not kind, just kinder. I think his wife was there as well, but they do not speak about her. The other one, he was, according to Sofia, a better dresser. He wore, as she put it, “shirts in colors.” I don’t think she has the words to give the kind of description you want. American men, how they look, talk, act, dress, this is all foreign to them.”
She shifted her attention to Kyle. “Sofia…she is the oldest and she speaks for them…says the door was shut, but they heard terrible sounds and screams. Then it all was quiet for a long time. Then the men came back, and they made a lot of noise. When the door was opened, there was blood everywhere, and the girl’s head and hands were lying on the floor. Sofia says the girl looked after them. She was nice and gentle. Sofia says the girl was trying to find a way to get them some help or let them escape, and that is why the men killed her.”
Twenty-Two
“I have a photo of a man I’d like to show them,” he said. “But I don’t want…” He wasn’t sure how to put it. Getting answers was critical, but not doing these girls further harm mattered, too. “Maybe I can have it brought to you, and you can show them, or show Sofia, when you think she’s ready?”
“That would be a good approach, Detective,” the translator said. “I should probably introduce myself. As I said, my name is Clara Sanchez. Many years ago, when I was a small girl, you were very kind to my family, when we were being threatened by some boys in the neighborhood. You made it stop. My family still speaks of it.”
Burgess remembered a small girl peering at him from between her parents’ legs. “You were a very curious little girl,” he said.
“I still am.”
Burgess thought that was all, and was about to hand the translator his card, with the usual request to call them with any further information, when the translator added, “Sofia said there was also a woman. Sometimes she would bring the men. And she would beat them if they didn’t cooperate.”
“It would be helpful if you could get a description of the woman.” He wrote his cell number on it and gave her his card. “I’ll send you the photo. And please, if any of them tell you something you think I should know, call me.”
He and Kyle left. She returned to the girls.
They stopped back in the ER to check on Stan. He was hooked up to an IV and appeared to be asleep.
“We’ve given him an antidote and some IV fluids. He should be okay in a few hours.” She hesitated. “I mean okay to go home and rest, not okay to join to two of you on your next adventure.”
“Can someone call when he’s ready to be released?” Kyle said. “We’ll come and get him.”
“Promise you won’t put him right back to work? Joe? Terry?”
“Sarita, we promise,” Kyle said.
“Then we will call you. Now get out of my ER, and don’t come back except to pick up your friend.”
“Hey,” Burgess said, “This is practically the Joseph Burgess memorial emergency room.”
“I think,” she said, with that same grin he’d seen before, “that for it to be a memorial, you have to be dead. You do not look dead to me. Now scoot. Both of you. I have work to do.”
Before they left the hospital, Burgess asked about Bambi and was relieved to hear she’d survived that accident.
As they came through the doors into the parking lot, Kyle said, “Are you in love with Dr. Cohen? I am.”
“Sure,” Burgess said. “You know she’s had her hands on my bare body.”
“Not touching that with a barge pole. So what now, Fearless Leader? Head out to Ida Mae Wilson’s neighborhood?”
“That’s the plan. Let’s see what Rocky put together for us.”
He opened for folder Jordan had given him hours before. Ida Mae Wilson, the record owner of the property, was eighty-five. She still had an active Maine driver’s license and was the registered owner of a Toyota Prius. Her license number matched the one on the license the man who called himself Charles Hooper had given Burgess, and the plate on the car matched the car patrol had followed to Ida Mae Wilson’s house.
“He’s probably ditched it by now, but let’s put out a BOLO on the car.”
“On it, Fearless Leader.”
“Terry, you’re starting to sound lik
e Stan.”
“So you won’t miss him. I guess we don’t let Lily know what happened?”
“No. We’ll just yell at Stan when he’s back on his feet.”
“What about Dani? Should we tell her what the problem really was so she won’t think Stan drinks on the job?”
“Or can’t handle his liquor. Sure. Make those calls.”
While Kyle was doing that, Burgess’s own phone rang. Sage Prentiss. Burgess forgot he’d given Prentiss the job of trying to track down that saw. “Hey, Sarge. Just a quick update. Dani gave me the brand of that saw Aucoin found. I’ve been to every big box and mom and pop hardware store around. There are only two that carry it. One has no record of a recent sale. The other is still checking. They’re going to get back to me but the only person who understands their computer system, who might be able to pull up the records, is off today. They’re supposed to call me when she comes in tomorrow.”
“Great job, Sage. Let me know when you hear back from them.”
“Got anything else you need me to do?” Prentiss asked.
“Check with Rocky. He’s got a list. I’m sure he’d appreciate the help.”
“Whatever you need, Sarge.” Prentiss had the grace not to sound disappointed.
“One other thing. Stan was checking with the schools to see if we could identify our victim. Now we may have a name. Be great if you could check in again, see if any middle or high schools around have any record of a student named Michele Minor.”
There was more enthusiasm in Prentiss’s voice when he said, “Will do, Sarge.”
“Stan’s gonna be pissed. That was his job,” Kyle said.
“I have something else in mind for young Stanley.”
“Part of his training to become mini me?”
“Maybe.”
“Don’t be coy, Joe. We’re both feeling the weight of this. I feel like it takes two steps forward and at least one backward to get a bit of information in this thing.”