And Grant You Peace (A Joe Burgess Mystery, Book 4)

by Kate Flora

  The way they worked was to hope for the best and plan for the worst. Burgess didn't think that would be any comfort to his boss. "About this case, Vince. We've got your back. You worry about what you need to worry about."

  Melia's mouth stretched in a thin smile. "I'm the lieutenant in charge of CID."

  "And a dad. This case is a bitch, but the Crips will solve it. We always come through, don't we?"

  "Not before you try my patience. I gonna have some reports from you today?"

  "Something to throw to the lions? You bet. I just have to figure out how to bury all the sensitive stuff in a snowdrift of words."

  "That's damned poetic, Joe."

  "It's the coming of spring, Vince. It gets the sap aflowing, turns a man's thoughts to—"

  "There's only one place I want your thoughts going, and it is not in the direction of your sap."

  "Autopsy got my anger flowing, too, Vince. That was brutal. And Dr. Lee was... well, you know how he is. Today he was mad. Really leaning on me about solving this." He filled Melia in on what they'd learned. "It's time we got the AG's office working on the paper side of this. Especially since we're getting zero cooperation from the Imam and his family."

  "Good call," Melia said. "Rocky can't do it all."

  "No man is an island."

  "You can stuff the freakin' platitudes, Sergeant Burgess."

  "Yes, sir. Did you know that Sage speaks some Somali?"

  Melia's hands were knotted in a tight ball. Burgess watched them uncurl. "That's good news, right?"

  "Right."

  "You want him on this?"

  "I need him on this."

  "Okay. Write me some reports. Then get me some results." He stood, and grabbed his jacket, shoving his arms into the sleeves as he headed for the door. "Gina's at the doctor's with Lucas. I've gotta go get Link at school. He's really spooked by all this."

  Identical twins—of course Lincoln was spooked about what was happening to his brother. Burgess nodded. "I see the captain, I'll head him off and bury him in paper."

  "You do that. Keep me up on any developments."

  "Count on it."

  Burgess watched Melia's square shoulders disappear from the detective's bay, seeing a reluctance in his boss's walk about leaving a place where maybe he knew what was going on.

  Then he went to his desk. Around him, the place swarmed with controlled chaos. He shut it out and settled into his chair, ready for his least favorite part of the job. It looked like a roll of that pink insulation had exploded somewhere in midair and the detritus had drifted down to land willy-nilly on his desktop. Although the department was getting modern and a lot of information now came via e-mail, their sensible obsession with keeping a paper trail meant most messages still came in written form.

  He gathered them into a single stack and set them aside as he called up the report form on his computer screen. He might not be much of a typist, but it was far better to work from an onscreen template than to fill this out by hand. He pushed his way through a narrative about the fire scene and one about what had happened at the hospital with his victims. He was about to start on his visit to the Imam when the strain of ignoring all that pink paper overcame him.

  He hit print, then snatched them up, turned his back on the screen, and began reading through them. A message from the hospital confirming that a psych consult had been done on his mystery girl, and giving him a name and number to call for details. A message to call Wink Devlin in the lab about prints from the car they'd seized last night at the hospital. Another from Wink asking him to stop in the lab when he had a chance.

  There was a message to call Scott Lavigne and one to call Davey Green in the fire marshal's office. Then there was a message from Chris, asking him to "handle it." He hadn't discovered what "it" was yet. He quickly sorted through the pile until he found one from Dylan's school, asking him to call as soon as possible. A second, inviting him to come and pick up his son. A third, saying that Dylan had been suspended and could he please call the principal's office.

  Dammit! They had his cell phone number. Why had they called the department? Why hadn't one of the assistants thought to call him? These messages were hours old. They must think him the worst parent on the planet. And this probably meant that Dylan had been cooling his heels outside some administrator's office, waiting for his father to arrive, all that time.

  Crap. He snatched up the phone and dialed the number that appeared on all of the messages.

  Chapter 17

  The woman on the other end of the phone, when he finally reached the person identified on the message slips as Dr. Alyce Jorgensen, assistant principal, sounded way too smug when she said, "Mr. Burgess. We've been waiting for your call for hours."

  He admitted to being a ball of knee-jerk prejudices, and one of them was a visceral negative reaction to educators with PhDs who called themselves "Doctor."

  "I apologize, Ms. Jorgensen," he said. "I was attending the autopsy of a murdered baby. We can't take calls in there. And you didn't call my cell phone, so that compounded the delay. If you could make a note of that, for your file?" He reeled off the number, then carefully and slowly repeated it, and asked, "Can you read it back to me, please?"

  All right. He was misbehaving and he knew it. But even at the fine school his son attended, the administration was all about power and control, and so was he. So he wanted to start this off on the right foot, power-wise, whatever his son was alleged to have done.

  He realized that he was acting like almost every parent he'd ever dealt with—the ones who cared about their children, at least, perhaps even the overprotective ones—and had to smile at how easily he'd fallen into this.

  When she'd read back the number, he said, "Now, tell me what this is about."

  "Well, Mr. Burgess—"

  "Detective Sergeant Burgess," he corrected.

  "Officer—"

  "Detective Sergeant," he said. "Go on."

  "Dylan was in a fight," she said, in a tone that suggested the boy had just blown up city hall. "We've given him a one-day suspension. We need you to come and pick him up."

  "Tell me about the fight," he said.

  "We can discuss the circumstances when you get here, Mr.... uh... Detective Sergeant Burgess."

  "Fine."

  He grabbed his coat and checked for all the usual gear. A lot more stuff than an American Express card that he couldn't leave home without. And this might not be home, but he'd sure spent more time here than anywhere else in the last three decades. He clipped the reports he'd just done together and stopped at the assistant's desk.

  "Can you get these up to Captain Cote? He's waiting for them." Then, "The next time one of my kids' schools calls, give 'em my cell number, okay?"

  He wanted to do more, but no sensible cop offended the support staff unless a staffer was hopelessly incompetent. They had way too much power over whether life went smoothly. He had enough bumps in his road without creating new ones.

  "Kids?" the younger one, Lorna, said, raising an eyebrow.

  "Three. Dylan, Nina, and Ned," Burgess said. "I'd show you pictures, but I'm in kind of a rush. Dylan's been suspended."

  "I'm sorry," she said. Then, with an impish grin, she added, "You go set 'em straight, Sergeant."

  "That's the plan," he said, and headed for the stairs.

  * * *

  Dr. Jorgensen looked too young for her job, though she'd tried to compensate by wearing her hair in a severe bun that made her face look stretched, and glasses with thick, dark rims. After he'd navigated the school security and was admitted to the building, he'd found Dylan slumped in a chair outside her office, and now he entered with his son in tow.

  She glanced from him to Dylan and back to him. "I'd hoped we'd get a chance to talk before—"

  "It's Dylan's business, too, Dr. Jorgensen," he said, glad she didn't know about interview protocols the way he did. He would never interview two people together if he wanted to get their separate versions of t
he story, nor if he wanted to be completely in charge of the agenda. He figured she wanted to give him the "official" version before he spoke with his son. He figured that Dylan had a right to hear what the administration had to say. He might be figuring wrong. His son might have done something unacceptably aggressive—he was very inexperienced at this parenting thing—but that was not the Dylan he knew.

  He and Dylan sat in the visitor's chairs facing the desk she had retreated behind. He was aware for the first time of how big his son was. How much of a matched set they must seem to her, two hulking men with shoulders too wide for their chairs, one with crisp dark hair, the other graying, both with fierce featured faces set in "show it to me" mode.

  Chris would have laughed and softened them both right up. Dr. Jorgensen, on the other hand, seemed intimidated by so much male bulk filling her small office.

  He leaned back in his chair, creating the illusion of more distance, and said, "Tell me what happened."

  Beside him, he felt Dylan stiffen, preparing to defend himself. He put a light hand on his son's arm. "We're just beginning our conversation here. You'll get a chance to speak."

  If she resented him taking over the agenda, he was sorry. But he didn't have time for too many niceties or beating around any bushes.

  "As you know, Mr.... Detective Sergeant... we have a no-fighting rule here at the school."

  He nodded.

  "And this afternoon, during lunch period, your son engaged in a confrontation with two other students in the cafeteria, during which he yelled at them and then shoved them both with enough force that one knocked over a chair and the other nearly knocked over a table. Several students' lunches were spilled."

  Beside him, Dylan drew an angry breath. Burgess held up a hand.

  "Were either of them injured?" he asked.

  She shook her head.

  "Were either of these boys significantly smaller than Dylan?"

  She shook her head again.

  "Did Dylan tell you why he shoved these boys?"

  She nodded. "He said they were picking on a girl in a headscarf."

  "So he just went up to them and shoved them?"

  "Well, no. He asked them to leave her alone and stop teasing her."

  "And?"

  "He says they didn't. Instead, one of them pulled the scarf off and was waving it around, and so he asked the boy to give it back, and when the boy didn't, Dylan grabbed the scarf away from him and sent him sprawling."

  It sounded honorable to Burgess. He tried to keep that off his face.

  "Is the girl all right?"

  "She's fine."

  "She got her scarf back?"

  "Certainly."

  "Have these boys engaged in this type of behavior before?"

  "Our concern here, Mr. Burgess, is with your son and his behavior."

  "Detective Sergeant," he said. "I understand that, Dr. Jorgensen. Just trying to get the whole picture." He gave her an embarrassed smile. "Just the facts, ma'am, you see. I assume you have a policy on bullying? And one on sexual harassment? I would like copies of both of those, please."

  She looked like she was ready to explode. Burgess was sorry. He'd gone to this school. It was an excellent school that provided a strong, old-fashioned education in both academic subjects and character. He admired the school. He'd chosen it for Dylan. That didn't mean they never made mistakes. He needed to be sure that coming down this hard on Dylan, when his son was already struggling with so much adjustment, wasn't a mistake.

  "They are both in the handbook you were given when Dylan was accepted."

  "Of course," he said. "I mean for now, for the purpose of this discussion, if it wouldn't be too inconvenient."

  She swung her chair around, grabbed a thin book off the shelf, and shoved it in his general direction.

  He'd put his phone on vibrate and now it was doing a demented dance in his pocket. He wanted to check it. Probably needed to check it. But she would take it the wrong way, and things weren't going swimmingly as it was.

  He thanked her, took the book, and quickly checked the sections on fighting, on bullying, and on sexual harassment. Satisfied, he looked up at her.

  "Let me back up a bit. Were there any teachers or monitors in the room who observed the circumstances which occurred before these boys were pushed?"

  "Yes," she said. "There were two."

  He had his notebook out, a habit as natural as breathing, and now his automatic response was to take names. "Their names and their titles?"

  Reluctantly, she told him. A Mary Stevenson, who was a lunchroom monitor, and Mr. Randall, a teacher.

  "And you've spoken with both of them?"

  She nodded.

  "Do they confirm Dylan's account or are their versions different?"

  "They are pretty consistent with his account."

  "What about the girl? When you spoke with her, what did she say?"

  "She's very shy. Very reticent," Jorgensen said. "She didn't want to talk about it. She doesn't like to make trouble."

  She doesn't like to make trouble sounded like this sort of thing had happened before. Beside him, he felt the change in Dylan. His son had stopped waiting for a chance to speak and was watching like this was theater. Which, in a way, it was.

  "When you interviewed the two boys, what was their version of the events?"

  "They were just teasing her. The girl didn't mind. Your son didn't understand the dynamic and overreacted."

  "Were the two boys who were harassing that girl suspended?"

  She shook her head.

  "Reprimanded? Put on in-school suspension? Given detention? Punished in any way?"

  This time, she could barely bring herself to respond that no, nothing had happened with respect to the other boys.

  "So my son has missed an afternoon of classes and will miss a day of school tomorrow, but these two boys, who you admit acted in concert and forcibly removed an item of clothing from this girl's body—an intimate item, in fact, given its importance in protecting her modesty—received no punishment? Is that correct?"

  When she didn't answer, he opened the handbook for students and parents to the section on sexual harassment, turned it to face her, and slid it across the desk. "As I read your policy, this is a textbook case of sexual harassment. Do you disagree with my interpretation?"

  "Just like your son, Mr. Burgess, you are making a mountain out of a molehill."

  He thought Captain Cote might agree. Knew how often Cote had been wrong.

  "At this point, I'm just locating the mountain and the molehill, ma'am," he said, "so I can understand their relative positions. But so we're clear. Would the administration's reaction have been the same if these boys had pulled off a different article of this girl's clothing? Like her blouse? What if they had snatched a cross she was wearing around her neck? I think we both understand that that headscarf isn't fashion, it's an aspect of her religion."

  He gave her a moment to process that, then said, "Let's hear Dylan's version."

  At some point, his son had probably had a pretty clear and coherent version of the events prepared. Dylan was a pretty methodical kid. But what came out was pure emotion.

  "Dad, Dr. Jorgensen, those guys pick on Leyla every day. They're always grabbing at her. At her books, at her backpack, at her purse, and especially at her scarf. Keeping her scarf on, that's really important to her. It's part of being modest. They know it upsets her, so they try to pull it down. She's asked them to leave her alone. She's asked the teachers—the ones she can bring herself to speak to—for help. She's very shy, Dad. But they don't pay any attention. They think it's just boys teasing girls. And it's not. It's about her religion. It's about making her feel unsafe and unwanted."

  Dylan grabbed a breath and went on. "I've asked them a couple times to stop. They're juniors and I'm just a lowly freshman, so they don't think they have to listen to me. Especially since there are two of them and only one of me. But Dad. But Dr. Jorgensen. What am I supposed to do? Sit
by and let this happen, when no one else will do anything? She really...."

  The size-twelve sneakers shifted on the dull brown carpet and Dylan watched them as he formulated what he wanted to say next. "She really wants to get a good education. No one in her family has ever gone to high school. But she's feeling so helpless she's wondering if she should give it up."

  He pulled himself up in his chair and squared his shoulders. Burgess could see himself in the gesture. Nature, clearly, not nurture. The big brother. Burgess figured Dylan would do the same for Nina, despite their endless squabbling. "So I know I shouldn't have shoved them like I did, but they wouldn't leave her alone. I could see that she was terrified. I asked them to stop and they just laughed and Tyler pulled her scarf off. And Mr. Randall was standing not six feet away and he wouldn't do a thing about it. He wouldn't help her."

  He shifted his gaze from the shoes to Burgess's face. "What was I supposed to do? Let them pick on someone small and helpless, like Leyla? I couldn't do that."

  Unexpectedly, Burgess felt like he might cry. He could imagine his mother meeting this boy. Getting to know her so very decent grandson, and Dylan getting to know her. He felt the pain of that two-way loss like a knife in his gut.

  In his pocket, his phone danced and spun.

  He put his arm around his son's shoulder, probably a gesture that would leave Dylan not speaking to him for a month, and squeezed. Then he looked over at Dr. Jorgensen.

  "This is what you suspended him for? For protecting someone helpless and terrified from a pair of bullies?" He gave that a beat. "As I see it, there are three ways this can go from here. You can retract the suspension based on your further investigation of the incident, punish the other students involved for their infractions, and ensure that this girl, Leyla, is given the adequate protection from sexual and religious harassment she deserves. That would be the best resolution.

  "Second, much as I dislike the press, I could share this story with some local reporters. It's just the kind of thing the national news would jump on. Muslim girl harassed at Christian school while male teachers stand idly by and watch. Or I could hire a lawyer and make us all waste unnecessary time and money. I would far prefer that we agree on the first."