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

by Flora, Kate;

  She gave him a wink. “Harder to let friends use the place when it’s empty, you know. And yes. Charlie thinks I’m going to leave him my money. Silly boy. He’s not very attuned to people, you see. Only to what pleases him or satisfies his desires.” She waved a wrinkled and liver spotted hand toward the expensive Scotch. “The way I’m going, between what this place costs and the treats I like to indulge in, there won’t be much left. Do you think I’m a mean old lady, Detective?”

  He thought she was a wise old lady, but wondered if she was more attached to her nephew than she was letting on.

  “Charlie and Marilyn have a foster daughter, Shelley. Have you met her?”

  “Sweet as pie, that girl, which is kind of amazing, given that she’s got Charlie and Marilyn for parents. Charlie can be feckless but kind, but Marilyn doesn’t have a maternal bone in her body. Last time I saw Charlie, which was a few days ago, he said Shelley had run away.”

  She refilled her glass and gave him a knowing smile. “What’s this really about, Detective?”

  “It’s really about trying to find the man with the black town car. Larry.”

  Burgess hesitated, deciding whether to give this feisty old lady the bad news.

  Before he could speak, she said, “There’s bad news, isn’t there? Is it about Charlie?” She paused, drank, and said, “It is about Charlie.”

  “I’m afraid it is, Mrs. Wilson. Last night, I paid a visit to Charlie and Marilyn Dornan to ask them some questions about an on-going investigation, and…” He hesitated again. She put on a good front, but she was old. Very old. And very old people could have devastating reactions to shock.

  “Spit it out,” she said. “I may be old, but I’m one of those tough old birds.”

  “I’m afraid I have some very bad news, Mrs. Wilson. The Dornans have both been shot.”

  “Dead?”

  He nodded.

  “Murder/suicide?” she asked.

  Before he could answer, she added, “Though he would have to have killed her, because Marilyn doesn’t know the meaning of remorse and wouldn’t have killed herself just because she shot him. And Charlie wouldn’t have the guts to shoot Marilyn. She’s got his manhood locked in a safe somewhere.”

  “We’re still trying to figure that out.”

  This time, she nodded. “I’ll miss Charlie. He was amusing. Even his greed was amusing, and it definitely worked for my benefit. When I wanted things done, he’d do them.”

  “You don’t have a very good opinion of Marilyn Dornan.”

  “I’m not supposed to speak ill of the dead, am I, Detective?” There was a twinkle in her eye. Despite having just been informed of a favorite nephew’s death, she was enjoying this visit. Maybe, despite the fancy digs and the country club atmosphere, she was lonely. Drinking alone was drinking alone, even when the drink was expensive Scotch.

  Burgess shrugged. “Many of the people I interview speak ill of the dead. It’s the nature of my business.”

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” she said.

  Burgess waited.

  “Drink your Scotch and I’ll tell why I didn’t like Marilyn.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  Ida Mae Wilson pantomimed an elaborate yawn. “Then it will be my bedtime.”

  “You drive a hard bargain, Ida Mae.”

  She grinned. “Always have, Detective. Always have.”

  He picked up his glass and took a drink. He was a bourbon man by choice, but this was very good.

  “I don’t like Marilyn because she’s evil.”

  Mostly it was cops who knew people were evil. “How so?” he asked.

  “Charlie doesn’t…didn’t…pretend to be anything he’s not. He was lazy and greedy and would admit it to your face. Marilyn is sneaky. She’s two-faced. She pretends to care about people. She pretends to embrace the values of her job. Pretends to care about the people who come here fleeing horrific conditions seeking asylum. But she doesn’t care. She makes fun of them. She laughs at their pain. And she is always looking for ways to make a buck off people she’s supposed to be helping.”

  So was Marilyn Dornan the engine behind the decision to prostitute children and sell their violation to the consumers of child pornography?

  “Can you give me some examples?”

  “She would help people get jobs and then make them give part of their salary to her, even though finding them work was part of her job. I know that she basically sold children to families eager to adopt. And Charlie and I began a parting of the ways—another incentive to sell that house—when they began prepping little Shelley to be part of their business.”

  “Excuse me,” Burgess interrupted. “You knew they were planning on prostituting their own foster daughter?”

  “I knew that’s what Marilyn wanted to do. I told Charlie that if they went ahead with that ugly scheme, I was done with him.”

  “But you didn’t call the police?”

  “I called social services.”

  That was the third call. Who knew how many others there were? He now had a priority for tomorrow after the autopsy.

  “When was this?”

  “Maybe a month, six weeks ago. He had Shelley in the car when he stopped by and he didn’t want to let me see her. That’s when I made the call to the state and emptied the house and put it on the market. That’s also when Marilyn, who never visits me, stopped by with a cake she’d made just for me.”

  “And?” he said, somehow knowing that she hadn’t eaten it.

  “And it’s right here in my freezer. I was hoping for an opportunity to feed it to Charlie and Marilyn. That would have been fair play. And that’s when I changed my will.”

  Even though the Dornans were dead, Burgess still wanted the cake tested. It would be part of building the case. “May I take the cake?”

  “I think you often take the cake, Detective.”

  Kyle would love this woman.

  “Only if you promise no one will eat it,” she said.

  “I promise.”

  “It’s late and you’re tired,” she said. “Is there anything else you need to know?”

  “I don’t think so. May I come back if there is?”

  “You can come back if there isn’t. You’re good company. Are you married?”

  “Kinda,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means we’ve adopted two kids, plus I have my son, but she won’t marry me.”

  ‘Why not?”

  “Because she thinks my job is too dangerous. Because she doesn’t want to marry me and then lose me.”

  “But she’ll live with you?”

  He nodded.

  “So if anything happens, she’ll still lose you. Well, it’s been very nice having a drink with you, Detective. Go carefully on the drive out, because the deer think the road belongs to them, and so do the coyotes.”

  “I will. And thank you.”

  He waited while she got the cake from her freezer, and left her pouring a little more Scotch. He sat in the truck, not ready to drive, filing away all that he’d learned from Ida Mae Wilson and kicking himself because he hadn’t made interviewing her a priority. Then he drove slowly down the long manicured drive.

  It was good he was going slowly, because just as he approached the stone pillars a deer flew into his path. There was flash of brown and he stood on his brakes as the graceful creature landed once in the road and then disappeared into the darkness. A moment later three awfully healthy looking coyotes followed. It was most of the ride home before his heart stopped pounding.

  Thirty-Eight

  He didn’t go inside right away. He sat in the truck, going over things, considering whether what he’d learned from Ida Mae changed their agenda for the morning. It seemed like schools had moved to the top of the list, especially now that they had a photo they could show people. That photo also needed to be shown to Dr. Morton and his staff, and to Kit and DeSpain at Sweety’s. He wanted this guy in custody. In part
icular because of the “in your face” game the man had played when he reported the body. No doubt his desire to get his phone back was so that he could warn the others. He must have been laughing up his sleeve when he walked out of 109.

  Cops don’t like to lose. Not only because of the competitive game of cops vs. bad guys, the battle of good vs. evil, but because of the pressure to get justice for victims. An unsolved case can haunt an investigator for his whole life. Here there were six victims that they knew of. No one involved was going to walk on this.

  That assertion—that no one was going to walk on this—led him back to the interview earlier today with the “real” Cary McCann. What role did he play in all this? What was the connection that led the elusive Lawrence of the black town car to be driving McCann’s Prius and using his name? Was it a connection through McCann’s wife?

  He wondered if the clue lay in fingerprints, and whether they would ultimately put McCann at one of their crime scenes. He also wondered—a sick kind of wondering—whether the real McCann was featured in any of the videos the Dornans had made.

  He went upstairs, where the house was finally quiet, and into the bedroom. Chris turned sleepily and asked, “Coming to bed?”

  “I wish. I just did an interview that opens some doors. I’m going to go back in. There’s something I need to check out.”

  “Don’t be too late,” she said. “I miss you when you’re not here.”

  “I shouldn’t be long,” he said, though he had no idea how long he’d be. He kissed her and headed out.

  The city was quiet tonight. A weeknight. No cruise ships in town. The heat had cooled to a good sleeping temperature, and Portland’s sensible citizens were grabbing sleep before the muggy heat forecast for the weekend made sleeping impossible. He liked to sit on Munjoy Hill and look out over the city, hoping all was well, and unable to avoid wondering what dark deeds were taking place. They’d hear about them soon enough.

  Burgess didn’t believe in psychic connections. He was too much of a cynic for that. He did believe in the cop’s gut. Trying to sleep when a case was unsolved and new horrors kept breaking out could be impossible. When he turned into the garage and parked, he wasn’t surprised to see Kyle’s car. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see Perry’s as well, but Stan Perry was embarking on the complicated new balancing act of job and family. As he was punching in the door code, Perry appeared behind him.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” he said. “Lily said to just go, I was making her nuts.” As they headed up the stairs, he said, “Why are we here?”

  “Did I call you?”

  “On the psychic hot line.”

  “Right. We’re here to look at the Dornan’s videos.”

  “That’s going to be ugly.”

  “Yeah. Couple years ago, we’d go to my place, get pizza and drink heavily. Now none of us has a place where we can watch that stuff. And we can’t drink here.”

  “Which is too damned bad because I…”

  “I know.”

  Stan Perry had been a father for less than two days, but it was already transforming him. He’d be as torn as the rest of them, seeing these videos. Viewing stuff like this—the sick, ugly things that people memorialized on video—took a cast iron stomach and forced the calmest and most detached investigator to contemplate breaking the rules and inflicting torture and death on the perpetrators. It could be challenging not to yield to that impulse.

  The detective’s bay was mostly empty, a few souls with the night shift on the phone, or sorting papers. Kyle was at his desk, working on reports. He looked up when they came and said, “It’s about time.”

  “I was doing a very interesting interview with Ida Mae Wilson,” Burgess said.

  “I was walking a fussy baby. She seems really pissed off at being out here in the world. Lily says give her time. She’ll adjust. I am envisioning a grim and sleepless future.”

  “Everything all set for Saturday?” Burgess asked.

  “It is. I sure would like to have this wrapped before then.”

  “Optimist,” Kyle said.

  “And I wish the weather wasn’t predicted to be so stinking hot,” Perry said. “She wants me to wear my uniform.”

  “Me, too,” Burgess said. He went to Evidence and got copies of each of the six different CDs they’d found in the Dornan’s laundry room. How ironic to store such filthy stuff in a room devoted to making things clean. Then he reminded himself that they didn’t yet know what was on these disks. They could be recordings of a church choir. But each disk had a name, and the names were pretty much a giveaway. Shelley, Sofia, Maria, Magaly, Gabriela and Isabella.

  They took the disks into the conference room, and Burgess started the first one. Shelley Minor had been a sweet-face girl, very pretty. The enhanced breasts looked wrong on her child’s body, but that didn’t seem to stop the men who were taking advantage of her.

  “How could they?” Kyle said. “She was their daughter.”

  “Ida Mae Wilson says that Marilyn Dornan had this in mind all along. That the woman was cold as ice and very greedy.”

  “Then why didn’t she…”

  “She did. She’s the third person who called DHHS. Three chances to save the girl, and no one acted.”

  Sadly, it was not the first time and they all knew it wouldn’t be the last time that an overworked, understaffed agency with a mission to keep families together let predators or incompetent parents destroy innocent children. It wasn’t worth getting mad about, or they’d always be mad. Still, they were going to have an interview with Shelley Minor’s social worker, and it was not going to be a pleasant one.

  The videos were grueling to watch. Burgess was glad his dinner was long ago, or he might have lost it. Though many men cycled through the abuse of the girls, none of the three recognized any of them. Burgess wondered how the Dornans and their partner recruited their clients, and whether any of the client’s fingerprints found in Ida Mae’s house or the Dornan’s shed would be somewhere in the system.

  “This could take us months,” Kyle said, reading Burgess’s mind as he often did.

  “I hope we catch some of these guys,” Perry said. “I just wish we could put a few of these images on the front page of the paper and let the whole world see how foul and twisted these men are. These are fucking children!”

  “These men are fucking children,” Kyle corrected. “But sharing these pictures just feeds the type of creep who thrives on this stuff. It will be enough to charge them with child rape,” Kyle said. “If we can. I hope we can. And by the way ‘fucking children’ is this case in a nutshell.”

  The talk was partly to dissipate the stomach turning effect of what they’d just seen. They knew these children. They’d seen them in that fetid cell, carried them in their arms, talked to them. And there was still number six. Isabella. Sweet, bright-eyed little Isabella. None of them were eager to watch that.

  “I don’t think I can…” Perry began.

  “It’s okay,” Burgess said. “It doesn’t take three of us.”

  “I’m just going to sit over here,” Perry said, moving to a farther away chair and turning his back to the screen.

  “You ready, Terry?” Burgess said.

  “Just let me get my wastebasket over here, just in case.”

  It was as bad they’d feared, and confirmed the evidence of those shoeprints in the dust that Wink had focused on. Four men crowded into that small space, sharing it with Marilyn Dornan and a camera, waiting to take their turns with a small child. One of the men was the real Cary McCann.

  “Sick,” Kyle said. He used his wastebasket.

  Kyle was gray and sweating. Perry wore the twisted face of a man who wants to kill the next thing that crossed his path. Burgess couldn’t see his own face, but he felt gray and consumed by rage. He wished they had Ida Mae’s Scotch. Or anesthesia. People who liked to imagine cops spent their whole days harassing the public and eating donuts couldn’t imagine the impact of something like this.
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  Burgess ejected the disk, went to his desk, and wrote an arrest warrant for McCann and a search warrant for his condo, his car, his trash. They could have just arrested McCann, but they wanted to search the place before someone else—the mysterious Lawrence, or McCann’s wife, cleaned house and got rid of evidence. “Now we understand why McCann let our mystery man Lawrence borrow his car.”

  “Can we do this now?” Kyle said.

  “We’re busy in the morning.”

  Warrants signed, the three musketeers, with some patrol officers for backup, climbed into their cars and headed out to McCann’s condo, wearing their vests despite the heat and Stan Perry’s complaints. The man’s wife was a teacher, McCann had said. Burgess wondered if part of the attraction was access to children?

  They all stopped a block away, and Kyle and Perry went to scope out the property. “Watch out for a dog,” Burgess said. “The fake McCann said the dog was his, but maybe he borrowed the dog as well as the car.”

  Five minutes later, they were back. “Two entrances, front and back, and there may be an entrance to the garage as well,” Kyle said. “Two cars in the garage. A blue Prius and a red Mini.”

  “No lights on inside,” Perry added.

  Finding two suspects dead last night had spooked them. What if the mysterious Lawrence had severed another connection in a very decisive way? It made any entry that much more difficult, because if they were entering a crime scene, they needed to think evidence preservation at every step. “Wink and Dani will kill us if we find more bodies in here,” Kyle said.

  “Don’t even joke about it,” Perry said. “I’m not feeling so left out that I need a crime scene so I can catch up.”

  The sky began spitting rain as they moved toward the house. Burgess sent two officers to the back, drove the Explorer across the front of the garage to block any possibility of vehicular escape, and the three of them went slowly up the steps behind an officer with a battering ram. If the McCanns were home, as their cars suggested, they were about to get a hell of a wake-up call.