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

by Flora, Kate;

  He was too tired to argue with two strong women. “As soon as I know Dylan’s okay.”

  “Oh,” Dr. Cohen said, “we are a big hospital. I think we can handle two patients at once,” and somehow he found himself in a cubicle, on a bed, with a doctor and a nurse taking off his shirt. His vest. His undershirt. And staring at the huge purple bruise on his chest.

  Then, it was if Chris and Sarita Cohen had been working together forever, tests were ordered and the official poking and prodding began.

  “I’ll go check on Dylan,” Chris said. She put a warm hand on his naked shoulder, and kissed him before bustling off.

  “I thought I told you to stay out of my ER,” Dr. Cohen said.

  “Believe me, I tried.”

  “But you found the men? The men who hurt those girls?”

  “I did. We did.”

  “We are all lucky to have you.” Correctly reading his desire to get up and go, she put a restraining hand on his chest, warm and comforting against his cold skin. “Rest now. We will make sure no ribs are broken and nothing internally is badly bruised.” She gave him her impish smile. “Then you are free to go fight bad guys again. Chris is your wife?”

  “She would be if she’d marry me. For now, just the love of my life.”

  “I heard that,” Chris said, stepping through the curtains. “I remember another time, here in this hospital. Me a nurse, you on a gurney…”

  “The beginning of something beautiful,” he said. That got him a smile.

  Switching gears, she said, “They’ve sent Dylan for a head CT.”

  He was awfully tired and wondering how long he could stay awake and be polite to these nice women when they did the twin thing again, both saying, “You should rest.” And they left him alone.

  He dozed through being wheeled here and there for tests, then fell into deeper sleep. He was having an unpleasant dream in which he was reliving those moments in the cottage—McCann turning toward the kids, the shot from McCann’s gun, the breathtaking pain in his chest—when he heard someone giggle. It couldn’t be coming from his dream. No one in Cashman’s cottage had been giggling. Then he felt a hand on his arm. A small hand. He opened his eyes and found four sets of dark eyes staring at him. The moment his eyes were open, there was a barrage of Spanish. Four voices, he thought. He knew who his visitors were.

  Behind the crowd of girls, Clara Sanchez said, “I am sorry for the intrusion, Detective Burgess. But the girls heard that you were hurt, and they insisted they needed to see you.”

  “Estas bien?” Bella asked, standing on tiptoe and peering anxiously into his face.

  He looked at Sanchez. “How do I?”

  “Estoy bien,” she said. Then spoke to the girls, assuring them that he was okay.

  Bella didn’t look convinced. “Need ice cream?” she asked, touching his face with her small hand.

  “What time it is?” he asked. “What are you doing here so early?”

  They’d arrived in the dark hours. While he’d been dozing, the clock had crept toward nine-thirty.

  She smiled. “It’s not so early. And there was good news about Maria, so I came in to tell them.” Then, ducking her head, “Against all rules, I am becoming attached.”

  He knew how that was.

  “There’s good news about Maria?” he asked.

  Sanchez nodded. “She has turned the corner. It looks like she will recover.”

  He looked at the four small girls and found them amazing. After what had happened, they should fear—and hate—all men, yet here they were, concerned about him. It wouldn’t be all roses, but Nina and Neddy had taught him how resilient children could be. He smiled at them, then looked at Sanchez. “Can you translate ‘later we will have ice cream’ for me?”

  “With pleasure,” she said. She relayed his message and shepherded the girls out.

  They were almost instantly replaced by another small, dark-eyed woman. Dr. Cohen. “Was that your fan club?” she said.

  “Looks like it. Am I done here?”

  “Until the next time.” That impish grin again. “You have a cracked rib, which means taking it easy. No vest. No heavy lifting. You know the drill. Please, try to set aside your macho nature and take it seriously.”

  He took a breath, ready to argue against her assertion. The breath hurt. “I’ll try—”

  “Try?” she said. “I told Chris. So don’t mess up.”

  “I’m feeling outnumbered.”

  “By women who want you to take care of yourself? That doesn’t seem like a bad thing,” she said.

  “And my son?”

  “The Burgess clone? I’m torn between knowing you’ll have a legacy of caretaking and anticipating another twenty years of patching up Burgesses.”

  “His head?” Burgess said.

  “He has a mild concussion. Chris took him home.”

  Burgess could imagine how that was going to go.

  She was watching his face. “She knows what to do.”

  Maybe she thought he was worried about Dylan’s care. Or maybe she understood what Chris and Dylan had to settle between them.

  “I’ll repeat my admonition, Joe. Stay out of my emergency room, okay?” That fleeting grin again.

  “I really did try.”

  Dr. Cohen left him.

  He was ready to leave. He felt like he was marooned on an island. Couldn’t stand the information void. He needed to get back to 109 and back into the loop as soon as possible. He had no idea where his car or his car keys were.

  The clothes he found near his bed were not the clothes he’d been wearing when he arrived. Those had been wet and dirty and the shirt had a bullet hole in it. Chris must have brought clean ones. He figured someone had collected his shirt and vest. He struggled into his pants—not an easy process when every movement made him want to howl like a wounded animal.

  He was buttoning his shirt when Kyle appeared, wearing an uncharacteristic smile.

  “We got him. Once he realized what we knew, it all spilled out. He tried to put it all on the Dornans, of course. Like we didn’t know he likely shot her. But he said plenty. I’m sorry you weren’t there. It was fun!”

  Kyle’s idea of fun—fixing his cold blue eyes on someone until they squirmed like a bug on a pin. Getting into their face, their space. Calling “bullshit” on their lies in a deadly quiet voice once he’d pinned down those lies. It was Burgess’s idea of fun, too. He felt gloom slide over him like he’d been licked by some giant tongue of despair.

  “While I am being fussed over by women who want me to take it easy.”

  This time, Kyle gave the invisible smile. “Like Dr. Cohen?”

  Burgess nodded.

  “You can have McCann. Will that make you feel better?”

  Burgess considered. “It will,” he said, but he couldn’t shake the gloom.

  He thought about the last few days. No Cote at the crime scene last night. No Cote at the hospital. “Did Paul show up to get the scoop?”

  Kyle shook his head. “Maybe you scared him out at the Dornans when you nearly took his head off.”

  “And Melia read me the riot act.”

  Kyle gave him a ‘since when did Joe Burgess care about that?’ look. “I don’t care why he’s not showing up. I’m just happy not to see him.”

  Not having Cote stick his nose in ought to have been disposition-improving news. He still couldn’t shake the gloom. The feeling that he was a hopeless dinosaur that had to go off to the doctor while the other cops got to do police work.

  “Something else that won’t make your day, but you still want to know,” Kyle said.

  Burgess waited.

  “Sage took the warrant over to Human Services bright and early this morning.”

  Something Burgess had wanted to do himself. Badly wanted to vent some of his rage over Shelley Minor’s death to someone who could have prevented it. “And?”

  “Turns out the social worker on the case has been on leave, being treated for cance
r, and no one else picked up her caseload. They only assigned it to someone else last week. The poor girl is barely out of college, barely trained, and as soon as she read the file, she tried to get in touch with the foster family.”

  “Dammit,” Burgess said. The agency was overworked, understaffed, and so kids fell through the cracks. The police couldn’t be the safety net for all of society. At least they’d done their job.

  He contemplated his shoes and socks. Getting into them would be only slightly less awful than being whacked with a baseball bat. Or shot in the chest. “What else?”

  “Stan and Sage have gone up to Augusta for the autopsies.” Kyle stopped. Gave him another assessing look.

  If Kyle could read his mind, Burgess wondered what Kyle was reading.

  “Why don’t I catch you up over breakfast?” Kyle said.

  “As long as it’s not here.”

  Kyle was doing his impatient shift from foot to foot, which increased Burgess’s sense of being past it. So past it he couldn’t even put on his own goddamned shoes. He wasn’t about to ask for help.

  “Will you hurry it up, please? I’m starving.” Then Kyle stopped vibrating and gave a slight duck of his head. “Sorry. I’m being stupid. But so, for the record, are you. Just let me help you put on your goddamned shoes, okay?”

  Burgess let him help with the damned shoes. Then the two of them headed out. Kyle striding forward, rushing toward the promise of fuel, Burgess coming behind him, bent like an old man, glaring at everyone they passed.

  Forty-Four

  “You need to look on the bright side,” Kyle told him, as they sat before heaping platters of breakfast. “We did it. We got the bad guys. Even if McCann lawyers up and never says a word, we’ve got him. Sure, there’s a ton of work ahead, but we’ve done it.”

  “I just can’t get past the bad stuff,” Burgess said.

  “I know,” Kyle agreed. “I know you always say we just pick the cotton and someone else has to make the cloth, but we do a hell of a lot more than pick cotton.”

  He picked up his fork and began demolishing eggs, pancakes, and fried potatoes. “Is it the paperwork?”

  Burgess shook his head. Paperwork was just part of the job. He tried eating, knowing his body needed fuel to function and to heal. It all tasted like sawdust. He couldn’t put his finger on what was bothering him. He wasn’t a prima donna. He wasn’t a depressive. At least, not often. He’d learned not to let the ugliness and inhumanity of cases get to him.

  “Maybe I’m just tired,” he said finally. “Getting old. I’ve fallen asleep twice this week during the day. Something about this case. It just seems to siphon off my energy.” He started on a blueberry pancake. It tasted slightly better.

  Kyle, whose plate was bare, watched him like a mother watches a fussy eater, a little anxious, a little encouraging. “You need a vacation,” he said.

  “Think that will fix things? Help me recapture my energy? My passion for the job?”

  “Dr. Kyle thinks you’re just tired. Burned out. Temporarily out of gas. A vacation can help with that.”

  “I’ve got five raped and exploited children and one child raped, exploited, and murdered. It would have to be a hell of a vacation.”

  “We’ve got five raped and exploited children and one raped and murdered,” Kyle said quietly. “You’re not in this alone. We’ve all got to wade through the filth, be baffled that someone can do these things, and then go home to our families.”

  Burgess looked at his plate, which, despite his lack of appetite, was empty. “I know that, Ter. Just thinking maybe you’d be better off without me. You and Stan could build a new team. I—”

  “Stop right there,” Kyle said. “Who would be better off without you? You think I want to learn to read someone else’s mind? Mind reading is hard. You think I want to handle young Stanley’s impulsivity alone? You think I want to work with cops so young they can’t quote Shakespeare and don’t feel their knuckles ache when they hear the word ‘nun’?” Kyle gave it a beat, said, “You want to leave this to detectives who can’t read crime scenes? Can’t figure out how the bad guys work? You can’t do that until you teach them your skills.”

  Burgess’s eyes stayed on the empty plate. He didn’t know what to say because he didn’t understand his reaction himself. It was as though he’d gotten up on the wrong side of life this morning and couldn’t get back.

  Their waitress came by. Gave them coffee. Took away their empty plates. Came back with a plate of cinnamon rolls and blueberry muffins. She rested her hand briefly on each of their shoulders and said, “Thank you. I’m a mom, and just…thank you.”

  Burgess hadn’t seen a paper yet. Wasn’t sure what they were being thanked for. He’d never much liked being thanked for doing his job anyway.

  He felt disconnected. Like Kyle and this waitress and the whole world were far away.

  Kyle, who needed as many calories in a day as Burgess did in a week, grabbed a cinnamon roll and demolished it. He didn’t say anything. Just sat. Patient and watchful. Waiting for something. Burgess had no idea what they were waiting for. But Kyle, impatient, jittery Terry Kyle, seemed to have all the time in the world this morning.

  “Have you seen the paper?” Burgess asked. “Do you know what we’re being thanked for?”

  “Taking a bunch of child predators off the street.”

  Kyle took another roll.

  “Not before they—”

  “Dammit, Joe. Give yourself…give us…some credit, okay?”

  Burgess closed his eyes. Saw McCann’s gun swing toward Cherry and Dylan. Saw, as surely as if he was still there, his own gun come up. The bullet coming out and charging toward McCann. Striking him and driving him to his knees. He felt Bella’s small warm hand on his face, her child’s voice asking if he was okay.

  He opened his eyes and looked at Kyle. “I said no more children. Please. No more battered, raped, murdered children.”

  Kyle nodded.

  “I knew my soul couldn’t take it.”

  Kyle waited.

  “And then we got all these children.”

  Burgess was beginning to understand. His pain wasn’t only about getting shot. It was about doing the hardest part of the job. Having to do it. Needing to do it. And needing to understand the toll it took. When you choose to play on the victim’s team, you choose ugliness, pain, regret, rage. The dark side. Nobody made him do it. Except himself. In the aftermath, he could choose to walk away. Or he could choose to fortify and rebuild himself to fight another day.

  The world was coming back.

  To hell with controlling his weight. With healthy eating. He was a weary old detective with a bruise the size of a salad plate on his chest. He looked at Kyle and took the last cinnamon roll. “So I can live to fight another day.”

  Before You Go…

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  Page Ahead for an Excerpt From:

  A WORLD OF DECEIT

  A World of Deceit

  A Joe Burgess Mystery, Book 7

  Burgess was in a hammock under the pines. In a tee shirt and shorts, barefoot, his eyes closed. The summer breeze, warm and gentle, slid over his skin like a caress. Nearby, lake water lapped against the shore. Farther out, there was the muted roar of boat motors. Cedar waxwings bustled busily through the tree overhead. The book he’d been reading lay on his chest, ignored. Chris had taken the kids to the other side
of the lake to rent paddle boats so he could have a quiet morning. He was on vacation. Absolutely alone. His phone inside and turned off. No matter what emergency the city of Portland might have, for these two weeks that would be someone else’s problem.

  His latest homicide put to bed, he was hoping this vacation might restore his energy. Lately, he’d been feeling too old and tired for the job—the word “dinosaur” was cropping up too often in his thoughts—and retirement had been on his mind. Then he’d gotten a call from his favorite ER doc, Sarita Cohen, a woman who had patched up his victims, and himself, many times. Her soft voice was tentative as she said, “Joe, I’ve taken a liberty here. I hope you won’t be angry with me. But I was concerned that you were feeling so tired…” She’d given one of her gentle laughs. “Though with your job, it’s no surprise. Anyway. I checked your thyroid function and I think, with medication, you can be more yourself again.”

  There was another laugh when he said, “The meanest, grouchiest cop in Portland?”

  “That’s the one. Anyway, stop by when you get a chance and I’ll give you your prescription.” A hesitation, because people who knew him didn’t generally tell Detective Sergeant Joe Burgess what to do. “Do this. Get the script. Take the medication. It’s going to help.”

  So he’d swung by the ER, gotten the prescription, and filled it. Now, while he waited for the miraculous return of his energy, he was practicing the mysterious art of being on vacation. Two days in, he was beginning to like it. He felt like his life had slowed down. There was no urgency. None of the daily pressure to track someone down, ask the right questions, and get results. He could walk across the yard and feel the softness of grass under his feet. Go down to the water and feel sand between his toes. Slide his body into the lake and feel refreshed as he floated on his back and watched the clouds.

  It wouldn’t last. Tomorrow his sisters and their kids would be here and family chaos would reign. Chris had insisted that he invite Stan Perry and Lily and baby Autumn, so they would be coming out one day, as would Terry Kyle and Michelle and Anna and Lexie. Soon peace and quiet and squabbling birds would be a thing of memory. But today he was going to lie here and vegetate and someone else could attend to the world of bad guys and the world of family and friends.