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

by Flora, Kate;

  “There’s no computer here,” Burgess said. “Which is odd. Especially if the late Charlie Dornan was in the business of making and selling kiddie porn. So where would it have been? Is its absence another suggestion that Charlie’s death is not a suicide? That someone else was here and took it away?”

  “Or all these photos were taken somewhere else. Also, that if there are still photos like this, there’s bound to be video as well,” Kyle said. “Do you think they’re stored here somewhere? Or on that missing computer?”

  “Maybe his partner has them and this was Charlie’s insurance policy?” Burgess asked.

  “Didn’t work very well, did it?”

  “You think his partner is one of the men in these pictures?”

  Kyle shrugged. “Could be.”

  “When we’re done here, we’ll take them back to 109. See if anything in the background looks familiar. If any of the…uh…” Burgess searched for a word.

  Kyle supplied it. “Child rapists.”

  “Child rapists look familiar. If any of them might be the man DeSpain and Kit saw.”

  “I am so freaking glad I didn’t have a chance to eat dinner tonight,” Kyle said.

  “I’m regretting mine. I can look at those two out on the couch, and it’s a puzzle. It’s sad that people are dead, but the crime scene becomes the challenge of learning everything it has to say. This stuff…” Burgess waved a hand at the photographs. “I have no words.”

  “We’d better check the rest of the drawers,” Kyle said. “Every freaking drawer in this house. And we haven’t looked in the basement yet.”

  “Did you want to be there when I photograph…” Dani said from the doorway. She was stopped by the pictures spread out on the desk and the bed. Speechless for a moment. These pictures were the kind of thing Wink always wanted to protect her from. But you can’t protect an evidence tech from the ugliness of some evidence. “Oh dear, no. No. I guess. I mean I should have thought. Should have known, I suppose, because of those poor girls in that horrible cell. I just…”

  She straightened her shoulders and turned so she couldn’t see the pictures. “I’m ready to photograph that crumpled cloth under the bed. Do you want to be there?”

  Burgess and Kyle put the photos back in the envelopes, then officially collected them as evidence and put them on the evidence log. Aucoin had finished securing the scene and was now keeping that log and taking the collected evidence to the crime scene van.

  Burgess and Kyle followed Dani back to the bedroom. Kyle lifted the bedspread and she lay on her stomach to get her pictures of the object under the bed. When she was done, Kyle pulled it out. It was a very bloody bath towel with two holes in it. Dani photographed it again, then stored it, marked it as evidence, and gave it to Aucoin, who logged it in.

  “She’ll have injuries to her head where someone knocked her out, wrapped the towel around her head, and then shot her,” Kyle said. “Or, if there were two people involved, bruises on her shoulders or arms where one of them held her down and put that towel over her face, while the other one shot her.”

  “You can tell that from a towel?” Dani said.

  “We’re speculating. Thinking out loud. The towel is information,” Burgess said. “We put it together with what we’ve already observed in the living room, plus the signs of disturbance here. You’ll want to bag her hands. She may have struggled with her killer. Bag his hands, too.”

  “You don’t think her husband killed her?”

  “That’s just one possibility,” Burgess said. “Your meticulous documentation, and collection of fingerprints and other evidence, is what will help us establish what did happen here.”

  “Back to work,” she said with a faint smile. “Very meticulously.” She began following, and photographing, the drag marks and dark dots that might have been blood, down the hall to the living room. She was almost back to the front door when there was a commotion—Gabe Delinsky’s voice saying, “Sir, hold on, you can’t go in without…” and a belligerent, “Let me pass!” Captain Cote, not wearing booties or looking where he was going, stepped through the door in all the vigor and indifference of his self-importance, and slammed right into her.

  Burgess had held his temper a thousand times when Cote did stupid things at his crime scene, but those photographs had unlatched the hinge on his temper. He slid along the wall, stepped past Dani, who had dropped her camera and was rubbing her head, and stepped between her and Captain Cote, advancing on Cote and using his bulk to steer the man out the door.

  “Get out!” he yelled. “You’re not wearing protective footgear. You’re stepping on drag marks, maybe footprints, and a blood trail. You’re mucking up my crime scene. And you may have injured my evidence tech when we have two bodies and a long night ahead. What were you thinking, Paul?”

  Burgess was thinking that Vince Melia should have been here by now to run interference for his detectives, so Cote couldn’t have barged in like this. He stepped outside with Cote, blocking the man’s access with his body so Cote couldn’t push his way back in. He was carefully not touching Cote, but forcing him out onto the front walk and preventing him from entering the house.

  “If you want an update, I’ll give you an update. Just don’t go stomping all over those drag marks and possible blood spots on the carpet, and contaminating my scene before Dani can finish her photographs and swab the spots.”

  He turned, grabbed protective booties from the box, and handed a pair to his boss’s boss. “If you want to view the scene, you’ll wear these. You’ll follow right behind me. You’ll step where I step. You won’t cough or sneeze or touch anything. You won’t ask my evidence techs questions that might distract them from the work they’re doing. You used to do this, Paul. You know what a slow, methodical process it is. So don’t be a chucklehead. Are we clear?”

  Cote was clearly fuming, but miraculously kept his mouth shut.

  “You want me to brief you first?” Burgess said.

  Cote shook his head.

  Before an audience of officers trying not to clap, and struggling to keep straight faces, Cote put on his booties and followed Burgess back into the house.

  Twenty-Seven

  As they entered the living room, carefully following the path along the edge, Burgess narrated the events leading up to their discovery of the bodies. He was explaining how their knocks had failed to bring someone to the door, so he’d looked through the window, when Cote spotted the bodies on the sofa and made a beeline toward them.

  “Dammit, Paul. No! You fucking stop right now.”

  He rarely yelled at a death scene. It was a subdued process, one where they spoke in lowered voices as they moved around the bodies and through the rooms, so Burgess’s yell brought everything to a halt as he reached out, grabbed Cote’s collar, and hauled him back to the wall. He’d tried his best not to touch the man, but if the captain was going to act like a willful toddler, he needed to be restrained.

  Burgess didn’t lower his voice, because he was speaking for the benefit of everyone who put in the long, slow, painstaking hours at scenes like this, not taking shortcuts however exhausted they got, and doing everything they could to avoid contamination or the destruction of evidence. Burgess said, “Don’t you ever do something like that in one of my crime scenes again. You stay by the wall. You follow me and step where I step. You do not deviate from this line. You do not touch anything. You do not risk stepping on footprints, or evidence, or contaminating this scene like an impetuous eight-year-old boy. You do not approach the bodies until Wink and Rudy say they are ready. If you can’t follow the rules, you’ll have to leave. This is my crime scene and you are not going to screw it up. Are we clear?”

  He had not released his grip on Cote’s collar.

  “Look, Burgess,” Cote said. “I’m your boss. I’ll do whatever I…”

  “Are. We. Clear?” Burgess repeated.

  “Let go of me, Burgess, or I swear, I’ll have your badge for this.”


  Was that a cop show cliché or what? Burgess flicked a glance at the TV. CSI was just wrapping up. And where the heck was Vince Melia? The people here shouldn’t be wasting their time arguing with Cote when there was work to do.

  “You want my badge, Paul? Bulling your way through this scene is that important to you? Taking the risk that you’ll step on evidence, destroy a footprint, or otherwise contaminate the scene, that’s okay with you so long as you get a closer look at the bodies? Seriously? What are you, a child? Everyone else here is coming off an all-nighter at a related, horrific scene. Everyone here is exhausted, but we’re still giving this the slow, painstaking examination it deserves. So tell me, Paul…why does being the boss give you the right to piss all over everyone else’s work?”

  Cote didn’t reply.

  Burgess didn’t release his grip on the man’s collar. “We’ve got a girl murdered and mutilated, Paul, a girl we believe was a foster child in this house. We’ve found suspected kiddie porn using young girls in this house. All this in the home of a woman who works with refugees and asylum seekers. Who may have had ready access to vulnerable children. We’ve got enough material here for a dozen press conferences, but we have to understand it first. Investigate. Link it up. Establish the connections. Right now, you are deliberately interfering with that, and I have no idea why.”

  He was still keeping his voice up, so everyone around them would know the score. “You want me to retire? Maybe I will. But not before I find who was responsible for killing that girl, and imprisoning those children we found the other night. Not before I understand the connections, if there are connections, between what happened here and those other events. Not before I do my job, which right now, you, for no good reason, are keeping me from doing.”

  He dropped his hand, releasing Cote. “Do you want to run this scene, Paul? Is that what this is about? Because if that’s what you’re here for, slamming into an evidence tech and carelessly contaminating a scene is not the best way to start.”

  From the doorway, Melia, who should have been here half an hour ago, said, quietly, “Burgess? A word.”

  It was softly spoken, but it was a command, and it put Burgess in a bind. Stay and disobey Melia or risk letting Cote wreak havoc here?

  He reminded himself they’d gotten answers, and justice, before when idiots like Cote had pushed their way into scenes and mucked things up. Reminded himself that despite their cautious détente, Cote was still Cote and he would still be challenged to hang on to his temper whenever Cote appeared at a scene.

  “Excuse me, Paul,” he said. He stepped around Cote and followed Melia outside.

  Before he could speak, Melia held up a hand. “Take some breaths and count to ten, Joe.”

  Burgess swallowed a mouthful of imprudent remarks, closed his eyes, and breathed in the sweet night air, gloriously free of the death smell that was already pervading the house. Fresh death has a smell of its own.

  “When you’re ready, bring me up on it,” Melia said.

  He took another minute. Then opened his eyes and gave Melia the story he’d tried to give Cote. The story that explained why everything in this scene was so important.

  “You got enough people on it?”

  “It’s a small house, Vince. Too many bodies…uh, live bodies…and we’ll be stepping all over each other.”

  “Okay.” Melia eyed him, a cop’s assessment. “You gonna be able to do this without losing it, Joe?”

  “I hope so, Vince, if you can keep Cote from screwing things up. We’re just getting started. Terry and I don’t have enough to develop our theories yet. It’s murky.”

  “Murky how?”

  “Who killed whom, and whether there was a third party involved.”

  “You think that’s likely?”

  “Trying not to reach any conclusions yet. Trying to let the facts speak for themselves.”

  “Terry agree?”

  “We haven’t discussed it. Been busy. Still busy. Lots more to do in this house.”

  Melia took a moment. “Oh,” he said. Meaning he understood their process. How they’d each reach a conclusion based on what they were seeing, and then debate if they didn’t agree. Kyle and Burgess usually agreed, but not always.

  “Terry and I need to finish searching the house. We’ll do the basement next, the living room last, after the ME releases the bodies. Can you check on Dani, see if she’s okay. Cote really knocked into her, and I’m pretty sure she hit her head.”

  “What else?”

  “I’ve got Sage working on a warrant for the cars. The one the male was driving, the Prius, isn’t his. I don’t know about the other vehicle.”

  “And?”

  “We need patrol to search the yard. No one has done that yet. And a canvass of the neighbors. Did they hear any gunshots. See anyone leaving the house. See any vehicles around the house or leaving the house this evening. The usual.”

  “It’s late,” Melia said.

  “And their street is full of cops and flashing lights. Tomorrow they’ll be back in their own bubbles, may have forgotten something they’ve seen.”

  “What else?”

  “When Sage gets here with the warrants, we’ll do the cars. Someone will need to do the trash. That’s it for now. Lee is sending an assistant. Someone new. We’re trying to get the scene processed—pictures and evidence collection—before anyone disturbs the bodies.”

  “So, not to let assumptions get ahead of the facts or anything…” Melia gave a faint smile as he used one of Burgess’s favorite lines, “when you looked through the window, what did you think you were seeing?”

  “You mean if I were just any old detective, seeing what I was supposed to see, instead of Burgess or Kyle, who question everything?”

  “Yes.”

  “Murder suicide. Husband kills wife and then kills himself.”

  “And you’re not buying that because?”

  “Because I haven’t finished my investigation. Haven’t checked their hands for GSR. I haven’t seen the autopsy results. I haven’t done my victimology. I don’t know enough about the people on that couch. I haven’t even examined the bodies closely. I don’t know if there are defensive wounds. If someone was unconscious before being shot. You know the drill, Vince. This is a classic case of assume making an ass of u and me.”

  Burgess told him about the photos he and Kyle had found. “Stomach turning, Vince. We need to finish searching, make sure there’s not more in the house. That we’re not missing something. So far, we haven’t found a camera or a computer and no phones, though they may have phones on their bodies. In a pocket somewhere.”

  Melia nodded. “Where’s Stan?”

  “Hospital. Having a baby. Or Lily is. Actually, she just did. He called a few minutes ago to say they have a girl. Autumn Angela. I told him not to come in.”

  Melia shook his head. “I wonder if it will change him?”

  “Temper him, maybe. Some of the time. We are who we are, and getting into trouble, larking off on his own, and pulling surprise rabbits out of hats, that’s who Stan is. It’s hard to picture him as a father.”

  “It was hard to picture you as a father, too, Joe, despite your compassion for the weak and helpless. But you and Chris seem to be doing okay.”

  “This week.”

  Burgess was eager to get back inside, but felt like there was something else Melia wanted to say, so he waited.

  Melia didn’t look at him. He stared off into the darkness. It was often easier to talk in the dark. “I think I’m changed, Joe. I’ve lost my edge, my passion for this. I look at my family, think what I’ve put them through, and wonder if I want to do this anymore.”

  He understood. Coming as close to death as Vince did had to have an impact. But Vince was a cop, through and through. Burgess thought maybe he just needed more time. Maybe a couple of good solves where justice was served. Maybe a good therapist.

  “You talking to anyone? Getting help with this?”

  Mel
ia smiled. “You wouldn’t.”

  “I have. Anyway, I’m a dinosaur. You’re a modern man.”

  “Yes. I am seeing someone. But it goes so darned slowly.”

  Burgess put a hand on Melia’s shoulder. “Just so you know. I didn’t carry you out of that place and guard you at the hospital so I could lose you. I did it because we need to keep you. Because Terry and Stan and I can’t do this without you. Without a buffer between us and those who get impatient with the fact that putting these cases together takes time. We need a touchstone, someone to act as our sounding board. Who can tell us when we’re out of line and full of crap.”

  “Like now?” Melia said.

  Burgess nodded.

  “I’ll be sure to tell my therapist that,” Melia said. “And by the way. For the record. In there with Cote? You were out of line.”

  “Right,” Burgess said. “I know. Getting back to the work thing. And your uncertainty. There’s going to be fear, Vince. And hesitation. I’m sure the temptation to do something less intense is strong. Just also think about why you’re doing this. What you get out of it. Maybe most important? How another job will meet those needs.”

  He tipped his head toward the house. “If you do step away from investigations, promise you won’t become like him and forget what we all do.” He considered. Said, “Like you ever would.”

  Melia went to check on Dani, then to organize a canvass of the neighborhood and a search of the yard. Depending on how they came down on the question of who died first, that towel under the bed could be very significant.

  Burgess went to join Kyle in the bedroom, where Kyle was methodically checking the bottom of every single drawer. He left Captain Paul Cote to do whatever damned thing he wanted to do, knowing Wink or Rudy would let him know if Cote got seriously in the way. Or if it was time to do the man physical harm.

  Twenty-Eight

  They found no more envelopes or other items taped to the bases of the bedroom drawers or the bottoms of either dresser. Nothing under the mattress. Then they checked the nightstands. There were condoms and ammunition in his, suggesting that there had also been a gun in there. That was something they’d have to check—whether the ammunition matched that used in the shootings. Whether it was his gun.