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

by Flora, Kate;

  He lingered in the cool night air, reluctant to explore the possibility that there might be another victim on the other side of that wall. He literally ached for some sleep. His whole body ached, not just his whiny knee. Beside him, Rudy Carr waited patiently, perhaps no more eager than he to encounter another crime scene.

  At last, Carr said, “Ready when you are, Sarge.”

  Burgess led him into the storage building, snapping on the light as they entered. Finding electricity in the building had made him wary. Most people didn’t bother to put lights in their storage sheds. He pointed the blank wall. “I moved the cushions and chairs and found this. It looks like a door.”

  “It does look like a door,” Carr agreed, starting to take his pictures.

  After a few minutes, he lowered his camera. “You going to open it or shall we follow Wink’s lead and come back tomorrow?”

  Of course he was going to open it. He couldn’t put it off any longer. Not when there was any chance he might find a missing girl. He just didn’t want to find any more bodies. Maybe it would only be more storage, like that drawer under the dryer. His gut said that was not what they’d find. Sometimes, a cop’s gut could be such a pain. Sometimes his gut was literally a physical pain, often a pain that lingered until a case was closed.

  He slid back the latch, grabbed the leather thong that served as a handle, and pulled the door toward him.

  Hot, foul air poured out, washing over them in a stomach-curdling wave. Air that reminded him way too much of the cell in the basement at Ida Mae Wilson’s house.

  Behind him, Carr said, “Oh fuck!”

  Still avoiding the moment when he’d have to look inside the room and confront what was in there, he used his flashlight to examine the wall by the door, searching for another light switch. He found it and turned on the light, illuminating a barren cell with a mattress, a bucket, and a small naked girl curled on the mattress in a defensive ball. There was blood on the mattress. And on the child. Given the business the Dornans were in, his mind filled with ugly speculation.

  Before he could stop himself, he said, “Oh, shit. Not another one.”

  The room was small, but Carr was able to stick his head in. “Holy fuck,” he said. “Is she alive?”

  He raised his camera and started taking shots.

  “I’ll check,” Burgess said.

  She didn’t look alive. She was absolutely still and hadn’t responded to the light or their voices in any way. Burgess stepped carefully along the space between the mattress and the wall until he was beside her, and knelt down. He reached out to check for a pulse, but before he could touch her, she wriggled frantically away from him and began to scream.

  He looked up at Carr. “She’s alive.”

  It was the camera, he thought. Cameras meant she would be hurt again. They needed to get the pictures, though.

  “Make it as quick as you can, Rudy,” he said. “The camera scares her. She thinks we’re going to…”

  Joe Burgess, tough guy extraordinaire, the man who didn’t blink at the most horrific crimes, couldn’t bring himself to say it. Luckily, he didn’t need to.

  “Got it, Sarge,” Carr said. “Quick as I can.”

  They both knew it would take as long as it took to adequately document what they’d found. The child in the scene. The dirt, the blood, her terror. At least they could do the room after the child was gone. But Carr was good. Experienced. Quick.

  Burgess stepped out of the room so Carr could take some pictures, pulling out his phone, thinking it was too bad you couldn’t kill someone who was already dead. That foul couple on the sofa should have had to answer for this. They hadn’t acted alone, though. He would find the other—or others—and they would answer for this brutality. All the brutality.

  In the good old days, sometimes also the bad old days, cops might have made their negative feelings clear when they found the subjects who’d done things like this. Especially when the victims were children. Sometimes he wished he could bring the tender-hearted folks who were always screaming police brutality into rooms like this. It might help them understand how a cop could lose it.

  Cops couldn’t lose it because it would impact their cases and might let a criminal go free. But holding it in could eat them alive.

  He called for an ambulance. He called Vince Melia, so Melia could add securing this building to his list. He called Wink, so Wink could add this to his dance card when they came back to finish in the morning. He hated to put it off. Burgess never liked to let time pass, the risks of “accidental events” that destroyed scenes and evidence was too great, but cops would be here guarding the scene, everyone was fried, and tomorrow would be here soon enough.

  He was unbuttoning his shirt when Carr stepped out, his face pinched and sad, saying, “The poor little thing. Is there anything we could—” Like Wink, Carr was unflappable, but someone who wasn’t affected by scenes like this wasn’t human.

  Carr saw the shirt and nodded. “Oh. Okay.”

  Burgess stepped back into the room, slowly and carefully approaching the terrified child. “Bella,” he said. He pointed to himself. “Amiga.”

  The dark eyes stared at him as he wrapped her in his shirt and carried her out of the room, the child struggling in his arms.

  “Amiga,” he said again, struggling to remember the Spanish word for safe. “Seguro. I won’t hurt you. Estas seguro, Bella.”

  “See if you can find someone who speaks Spanish, Rudy,” he told Carr as he headed back across the lawn, the child a feather in his arms. She had buried her face in his chest. He didn’t know, couldn’t know, whether it was because she didn’t want to see any more bad stuff, or because his words had reached her.

  He flashed on carrying Neddy from the car to the house. On other children he’d carried out of crime scenes. Hadn’t he vowed that he would not do cases with children anymore? Didn’t the universe understand that his heart couldn’t take it?

  For years, until Chris begged him to take the pictures down so Nina and Neddy wouldn’t see them, the inside of his closet door had been his bulletin board of brutalized children. Chief among them had been Kristin Marks, raped, suffocated with her own underpants, and thrown away in a landfill. Burgess had nearly killed himself trying to get her justice, until Cote screwed up the chain of evidence, lost key pieces that tied the killer to the crime, and her killer walked away with a slap on the wrist. Between Kristin and little Timmy Watts, Burgess wasn’t sure there was enough left of him to take on this new batch of horrifically abused children. But now the child in his arms had raised her head and was staring up at him with huge, dark eyes. She needed everything the cops and the legal system could give her. How could he let her down?

  “Seguro, Bella,” he repeated. “Estas seguro.”

  Then, as the eyes continued their unwavering stare, he said, “Mi nombre es Joe.”

  He had now exhausted his Spanish.

  He met Kyle halfway across the lawn, Kyle’s eyes going from his face to the little bundle in his arms.

  “Oh, fuck, no!” Kyle said. “Not another one.”

  “Another one. This is Sofia’s little sister, Isabella.”

  Before he could continue, the small girl he believed was named Isabella said, “Sofia?” and launched into an explosion of Spanish, the only part of which he understood was “please.”

  “Si, Bella,” he said, “we go to see Sofia.”

  The outburst seemed to have taken the last of her energy. She burrowed into his neck and her scared eyes closed.

  “Sofia?” Kyle said. “Is she one of…”

  “That’s right. I had a message from the translator, asking if we had found Sofia and Maria’s little sister.”

  Kyle muttered a string of expletives and jerked his chin toward the storage building. “She was in there?”

  “Behind a hidden door.”

  “Pray God she is the last,” Kyle said.

  “Roger that,” Burgess said. “By the time we put this one to be
d, they’re going to need a new A team.”

  Kyle nodded. “Stan’s going to be sorry he missed this.”

  “Sorry? He should be glad. Tonight Stan is all about life, while we’re all about death.” He changed the subject. “You find anything in the cars?”

  “Nothing like a note that says ‘I shot my husband and then my lover shot me,’ but I want to tow them both back to 109 and get Wink and Dani to go over them.”

  “Cote’s going to love that.”

  “Cote is lucky he’s alive, Joe. He ought to remember that.”

  “You think the shooter was her lover, Terry?”

  “I think someone was. Maybe they were into threesomes. Given the other sordid stuff this couple was into, that wouldn’t be much of a surprise.”

  “So you think she or she and someone else killed him and then that someone else killed her?”

  “I think that’s pretty obvious. Maybe with some exciting post-shooting sex in between? What’s less obvious is why, if there was a struggle in the bedroom, and the towel the shooter put over her head was shoved under the bed, we didn’t find more blood there.”

  Burgess shook his head. “Gonna take a real good detective to figure that one out.”

  Kyle did an elaborate yawn and stretch. “Ain’t gonna be this one. At least, not tonight. This detective is signing off and going home to hug his family.”

  “One smart detective,” Burgess said. “This detective wishes he could do that, too.”

  “He could,” Kyle said, though they both knew Burgess wasn’t done until this little girl was safely with her sisters.

  In the distance, they could hear the approaching ambulance.

  “You all set with the tows, Ter?”

  “All set.”

  Kyle drooped with weariness, looking as tired as Burgess felt. He fumbled in his pocket for keys and held them out. “Take the truck, Ter. Leave it at 109. I’m going to ride to the hospital with Bella.”

  Kyle nodded and snagged the keys. “Thanks, Joe.”

  He turned away from the silent yard and back toward the house, still blazing with lights. “Doesn’t do any good to say ‘no more kids’ does it, Joe.”

  “I keep saying it.”

  “And I’m right behind you.”

  Burgess handed off buttoning up the scene for the night to Melia, who was still standing in the yard, talking on his phone. Let Melia tell Wink that there was yet another scene to process. Wink was a steady as a rock, but he could get cranky when the work piled up. There were other officers who could process crime scenes, but on something big like this, they only wanted Wink and Dani and Rudy.

  Then he carried Bella to the waiting ambulance, and climbed in with her for the ride to the hospital. She screamed when they tried to take her out of his arms, and clung to him, her eyes widening in panic.

  “Guess it can wait a few more minutes,” his favorite EMT said. “But Joe, you’ve got to stop bringing us these poor children.”

  “It’s not on me,” he said. “Tell it to the bad guys.”

  She patted his shoulder. “I know that.” Then she poured some water into a cup and handed it to him. He took it with his freer arm and offered it to Bella. “Agua?” he said.

  Now his Spanish was totally exhausted. But it worked. The little girl took the cup in two hands and gulped the water, holding out the cup to the EMT and saying, “Mas?”

  “She’s cute as a button, Joe,” the woman said, “and I think she likes you. I wonder if Chris would like another daughter?”

  “Don’t even joke about it,” he said. “She has two sisters.” He hoped she still had two sisters.

  The woman grinned as she refilled the cup and handed it to Bella. “Maybe five kids is too many.”

  “I used to think any kids was too many, and now look at me.”

  She just smiled.

  He was too tired even to return her smile. He leaned against the wall, rocked by the swaying ambulance. If the girl’s restless foot hadn’t kept kicking him, he would have fallen asleep in an inappropriate place for the third time today.

  Thirty

  Burgess stayed with the child until she was through her evaluation in the ER and finally settled in a room with her sister. He understood the phrase “bone weary” far more than he wanted to by the time he was ready to leave.

  Dr. Cohen was in the ER, he didn’t know whether it was still, or again, and she teased him gently as he delivered Bella into her care. “Haven’t I told you to stay out of my ER?” she said.

  He would have said that at this point in this day, nothing could make him smile, but she did. “I’m afraid I find you irresistible,” he said.

  She poked a finger into her chest. “Damage magnet,” she said. “What have you brought me this time?”

  “This is Bella. Isabella,” he said. “We have two of her sisters upstairs.”

  “You catch the ones who did this?”

  “Dead,” he said. “Now we have to catch their killer.”

  She bent over the child, murmuring something, and once again, Burgess was impressed. It appeared this kind Indian doctor spoke Spanish. When she straightened, she said, “It appears that this brutalized little girl likes ice cream. Do you think—”

  “I’m on it,” Burgess said, happy to leave the desperate chaos of the ER behind. “Does she like chocolate?”

  There was another exchange, and Dr. Cohen said, “Vanilla.”

  Burgess lumbered off in search of ice cream. He would need to know the girl’s condition and what had been done to her, but the good doctor had rightly surmised that he’d rather have a report than see the damage inspected. She was right. His unspoken marching orders had been to get himself a coffee, take his time, and then return with ice cream. Burgess didn’t always follow orders—Paul Cote could vouch for that—but in this case, he was glad to have them.

  When he returned, the coffee having had no effect on his nearly somnolent state, Bella was clean and dressed in a small hospital johnny . She smiled at Burgess and held out her hands for the ice cream. Kids so often amazed him. Nina and Neddy had been through absolutely horrific experiences, and yet, while there was residual damage, mostly they went through life as normal kids. In reality, he supposed, few children got through childhood unscathed. But there were degrees. What Nina and Neddy and these girls had experienced was extreme.

  “We’re sending her upstairs,” Dr. Cohen said. “Do you want to talk about it now?”

  She gave him a head-to-toe assessment and shook her head. “I think we’ll talk tomorrow. I’m off home soon, but I’ll be back in the morning.”

  “Tomorrow’s better,” he agreed, feeling like he was wimping out. “I’ll just lumber along and see her settled.”

  “Lumber’s a good word, Joe,” she said, “but don’t sell yourself short. These kids would all be dead, now or sometime soon, without you and your team. You may feel like an old dog too weary to learn new tricks and too world-weary to want to, but you give the words “serve and protect” real meaning.” She patted his shoulder—the same shoulder she’d mended for him not long ago. “Now get Bella settled and then go home and get some sleep. Otherwise, you’re going to start hallucinating.” She dropped her hand. “And I can imagine what those hallucinations will entail.”

  He called Patrol for a ride back to 109, grabbed the Explorer, and went home. If there were any more killings in his city tonight, someone else was going to have to deal with them.

  There was a sandwich wrapped in plastic on a plate on the table, and two notes. One that said, “Eat me,” another that said “Choklate Milk for my Joe.”

  He smiled at Neddy’s spelling, though he supposed that as a parent, he should be concerned. Then, like a good soldier, he followed orders. Ate the sandwich and drank the surprisingly delicious glass of chocolate milk, then stripped off his clothes, showered, and got into bed. He was asleep before he could even finish wrapping himself around Chris.

  Though tonight’s events should have summon
ed bad dreams, he didn’t dream. He didn’t even stir.

  When he woke, the house was empty and silent and it was almost nine-thirty. He couldn’t remember when he’d last slept so late. Sleeping in was something other people did, people who didn’t have helpless victims waiting for justice and cold-blooded killers trying to avoid it. His phone was beside the bed where he’d left it, but it was on vibrate. The number of messages he found when he checked it made him wonder how it hadn’t spun itself right off the nightstand. Everyone in the world was looking for him.

  He yawned, lay back down, and closed his eyes. He wasn’t going back to sleep. He was mentally reviewing the case. He could do it just as well in a reclining position as when he was upright. The pillow was soft. The background hum from the fan Chris had set up by the window was soothing. Right in the middle of the to-do list he should right now be reviewing with his team, he fell asleep.

  This time he woke because someone was banging on the door and calling his name. He yelled, “Hold on. I’m coming,” threw on his robe, and went to answer the door.

  Kyle, poised to knock again, was shifting nervously from foot to foot, his whippet-thin body trembling. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve called you six times. You never sleep in. You always answer your phone. I thought you were dead.”

  “Not dead but only sleeping.”

  Burgess checked his watch. Ten-thirty. No wonder Kyle was worried.

  “Sorry, Ter. Let me get dressed. Anything happen while I was hibernating?”

  “Nothing happens unless we make it happen,” Kyle said.

  Burgess surmised, from the sour tone, that Kyle was not in a good mood. Before he could cope with that, he needed coffee. Badly needed coffee. It felt like he was viewing the world through a haze of spider webs. “I need coffee, Ter. You want some?”

  “Anything to delay going back to 109. Stan’s still awol, going gaga over his new baby. Cote keeps stalking by, no doubt looking for you so he can harass you or snag some critical detail to share with the press. He thought he’d made Stanley his go-to guy, and then Young Stanley disappears. Dani looks like a bedraggled orphan and Wink is in the worst mood I’ve seen in all the time I’ve known him. Sage is keeping his head down, trying to help where he can while avoiding being noticed. The only person not out of sorts is Rocky.”