by Paul Bishop
“Yes. The three brothers cooperated only by branding themselves to a reputation. Otherwise, they could never work together. I know now that having the three separate branches helped with buying in bulk and other business saving opportunities, but beyond those practices everyone went their separate ways.”
“Was there competition between the brothers?”
“Not on the surface, but even now Uncle Harvey and Uncle David have an underlying dislike of each other.”
“Who took over your father’s branch of the mortuary?
“I think they fought over who would run it. Eventually, they sold it to the McDowells, the Irish couple who lived on the premises as caretakers, and split the profit.”
“Did any of the money go to you and Chad or your mother?”
“Are you kidding? My mother was already dead by the time it was sold and Uncle Harvey was our guardian. He would never stand for me having any money of my own.”
“What do you think happened last night?” I asked, changing the subject.
“I don’t know. Gerrard went down early. He’d had a good couple of days. No seizures. He’d been as loving as he gets. He went off to sleep no problems.”
“How much later did you go to bed?”
“As soon as he was down. Even on his good days, Gerrard is a handful. I have to sleep when he sleeps.”
“And you didn’t hear anything, you didn’t wake up at any time?”
“Not once. I was a little amazed to wake up of my own accord this morning at five-thirty. It doesn’t happen often. I got dressed and went to get Gerrard, but he was gone.”
“What about the weight vest and the monitor?”
“The vest was gone. I don’t know what happened to the monitor. It never went off.”
“Anything else missing? Clothes or toys?”
Sophie shook her head. “He couldn’t get out. He couldn’t get out…”
Cops hear declarative sentences all the time…He couldn’t have…She wouldn’t have…He didn’t…She’d never… You often heard it from the families of suicide victims, refusing to accept the responsibility and perceived shame of their loved one dying by their own hand. They all want it to be an accident, or like they see on TV where every suicide is a cover-up for murder. It is the natural, knee-jerk reaction of those affected by circumstances they don’t want to accept. Despite what Sophie thought, the fact was, Gerrard was gone.
Like most individuals in a heightened state of emotion, Sophie was sensitive to the emotions of those around them. She immediately picked up on the thoughts running through my head.
“You’re wrong,” she said. “You’ll see. It’s happening again.” Defiance settled on her face like a thick fog.
I felt somehow untethered. There was nothing here yet to grab onto to provide an explanation.
At the moment, the return of the wee folk was the only working theory we had.
Chapter 17
“As one knows the poet by his fine music,
so one can recognize the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice.
Here, as elsewhere, practice must precede perfection.”
- Oscar Wilde: The Decay of Dying
We tried to sort it all out in a powwow back at the RHD offices.
Pagan had surprised me when we left patrol officers and a uniformed sergeant in charge at the Martin residence. He flipped me the keys to the Escalade, proceeding to the passenger side himself. After setting our destination as PAB, the Police Administration Building, he told me he had to shut his eyes for a few minutes. Without further ado, he reclined the seat and to all appearances dropped immediately off to sleep.
I would come to find this was not unusual behavior. Turns out Pagan rarely slept more than two or three hours at night, relying on two thirty minute power naps during the day to keep him going. I would eventually get to know his rhythms, to know when he was running out of gas and needed either food or sleep, but this first time caught me off guard.
I was full of questions and a need for more information. I wanted to talk about all that had happened. I needed to find out what Pagan had learned from Chad, needed to bounce ideas off him, but that was hard to do with him virtually snoring next to me.
I felt like a spurned lover. I was aroused and he’d rolled over to his side of the bed.
I was being stupid.
I was angry.
He didn’t make this being a wolf thing easy.
Still being a neophyte acolyte, I didn’t realize I was in the midst of an unspoken lesson – things Pagan respected you enough not to explain.
We all rush into things. We overload on information. We don’t take time to think and consider – to even remember – all of the little things we’ve seen and heard before we jump to conclusions. He was teaching me the difference between a good interrogator and a great interrogator – the ability to process and understand nuance.
Pagan’s naps were his time to let his subconscious cogitate. He always woke up in a good mood and full of energy. It had to be learned behavior. If somebody woke me up after twenty or thirty minutes, I’d be a volatile crank bucket ready to snap at anyone unfortunate enough to cross my path. I had to find my own way to accomplish subconscious reflection.
That was the thing about being mentored by Pagan, he always gave you space to find your own way. He didn’t expect, or even want, you to do things his way. He wanted you to find and develop the way best suited to your specific personal strengths and personality.
Pagan’s wolves were not at all cookie-cutter versions of him. They varied wildly in style and temperament, connected only through the excellence they demanded of themselves and their loyalty to Pagan. They were all in his pack, but each was equally dangerous alone.
We had gathered in the RHD conference room. Coffee cups and energy drinks abounded. Captain Carl North was overseeing the briefing. He was a competent, slim, quiet spoken man given to three-piece pinstripe suits, expensive ties, and – oddly – black patent leather shoes. Nobody ever mentioned the dead raccoon of a hairpiece he wore on his head, which somehow never sat straight.
Livia Nelson and Johnny Hawkins had come in from Smack Daddy’s residence in the Hollywood Hills.
“Patrol and Sheriff’s Search and Rescue are still at the scene, but there’s nothing further. No ransom demand. No sign of the child,” Livia said. She was a black woman in her early forties. Experienced and hardened by it. Twice divorced. Her two middle-schoolers were cared for by their grandmother, who lived with them.
“What about the house next door?” Captain North asked.
Johnny Hawkins spoke up. A college basketball star not quite good enough to play in the NBA, he’d spent a couple of years playing in Italy before coming home and on the job. Word was he was angling to be his partner’s third Mr. Nelson – a tough assignment by anybody’s standard. “An expensive dump. We cleared the residence, rousted a half-dozen meth heads.”
“Maybe they took the kid to sell her or some other meth-addled scheme. Maybe they killed her by accident.” This was from Castano who hated meth heads.
“No way,” said Hawkins. “There’s not enough brain cells left in this bunch of burnouts to keep their story straight if they were lying. None of them had a record for anything beyond petty theft, forgery, vehicle burglary, or possession. Anyway, we tore the place apart, what was left of it. We even dredged the scum in the pool out back. We thought we had something there, but it was only a dead dog.”
Ken Dodd, Castano’s partner, made a look of distaste. “This freaking job gets more pathetic every day.”
I remembered he was very active in a greyhound rescue project. He was probably more upset by the dead dog than the missing child, but that was me being unkind.
“What’s the score with the other missing?” North asked.
The other missing. None of us had yet mentioned the name of either child. You kept things at a distance. You didn’t let it ge
t personal. You never promised the family you would find a missing child, or promise to get the guy that took them. You did the best job you could at the time, but that still meant sometimes you didn’t find ‘em or get ‘em.
“Same deal as the Hollywood case,” said Castano. “Zip. No ransom and no evidence. The batteries in the motion monitor in the missing’s room must have been dead. No sign of forced entry.”
“Anything substantial to tie these two cases together?”
We all looked at each other, except for Pagan who was staring into space.
“Ray?” North prompted.
Pagan reeled his mind back into his body and turned a flat gaze on Captain North. “They are connected,” he said.
“Okay…How? Why?”
Pagan rubbed his chin. “Pattern of behavior. On the surface we have two unconnected missing six year-olds, from two different parts of the city, occurring in the same relative timeframe. If that was all we had, I’d say they were separate incidents, but the fact we have zip on both cases, as Castano so elegantly stated, makes them feel the same to me.”
“I know better than to disregard your gut feelings, but is there anything solid?”
Pagan sighed. “Only negatives – no ransom, no forced entry, no prior history of either child wandering off, and no specific clues.” He flicked his eyes over to Castano. “Did you bring in the baby movement monitor from Gerrard’s room?”
Pagan would be the only one of us to use specific names for the missing children. I figured he did it on purpose, knowing it would focus everyone.
Castano dug into a brown paper bag next to his chair, pulling out the plastic movement monitor. He handed it to Pagan.
Pagan took the unit. He tried to turn it on, but nothing happened.
“Batteries are dead,” Castano said. “There aren’t a lot of electrical plugs in those older homes, so there wasn’t one close enough to the bed to use. It’s supposed to have an alarm when the batteries are getting weak, but it must have malfunctioned.”
Pagan turned the unit over and opened the battery box. He popped out six double-A batteries. He looked at each of them. He selected one and held it up to the light. With everyone watching him, Pagan used a fingernail to peel a transparent piece of tape off the negative end of the battery. “Not dead,” he said. “Silenced.”
The malevolence of the act hit everyone. This was not a random crime of opportunity. Garrard wasn’t missing. He’d been taken. Targeted.
“Why?” North asked, voicing the question in everyone’s head. “What’s the motive?”
There were clearly bad motives for kids being taken, but these two cases didn’t feel sexual. There were far easier ways, with less logistical problems, to victimize children for sexual purposes than kidnapping them from their rooms. Also, neither of these victims fit the profile of children taken as part of human trafficking rings. Particularly Gerrard.
We were all experienced enough to know it wasn’t possible to completely rule out somebody with a specific fetish involving a special needs child or an unattractive, racially specific child. However, if Pagan was right and the two cases were connected, then that particular motivation didn’t make sense – the suspect would have taken one or the other, not both.
So, that left, what? Money? No ransom demand appeared to rule it out as a motive.
Revenge? Against who? For what?
The moment was broken when Detective Chris Lancaster, the unit’s administrative whiz, entered the room holding a raft of papers. “I’ve got the scans of the reports from ten years ago when Connor Martin went missing. Also the hit and run report on Jack Martin, Connor’s father.” Lancaster handed copies all around. “I’m getting someone to dig the originals out of the archives, so there may be more than what records scanned to the computers.”
This was a common problem. Scanned reports were okay in most cases, but chaos law determined the more important the reports you want, the more chance of missing pages or unscanned follow-up reports. Getting the originals was a pain, but necessary.
Pagan sped his way through his copies of the scanned reports and placed them on the table in front of him. “Apparently,” he said, “ten years ago, nobody thought to connect the missing kid to his father being the victim of a hit and run.”
“Why would they?” Castano asked. “The reports would have been handled by completely different units. Juvenile would have handled the missing and traffic would have handled the hit and run.”
“What makes you think they are even related now?” Livia Nelson asked.
Pagan didn’t bother to answer her, and nobody else jumped into the breach.
Cases have weight. Some cases are straightforward, lightweight, run-of-the-mill. Other cases are tangled masses of barbed wire, painful to dissect, yet still resolvable. Some cases are brick wall, dead end, slams to the solar plexus, filled with frustration – unsolvable, but without resonance.
Then there are the spook cases – those rare occurrences where you get drawn in despite yourself chasing wisps of clues. Cases where you can see tendrils of smoke stretching across the years to affect the present, yet you can’t grasp a single solid lead. Cases you must solve or they will haunt you forever.
Pagan swiveled his chair and tapped some keys on a computer set on a stand behind him. The screen at the front of the room suddenly glowed with the frozen image of Chad Martin’s flat facial features – small nose, upturned eyes with small skin folds at the corners, tiny ears, and the soft tip of his over-large tongue protruding between his lips.
Pagan had used a lapel camera to record his interview with Chad and had cued the feed to what he considered the appropriate moment.
“The fairies would come into our room at night,” Chad said, his voice low and serious.
“The room you shared with Connor?”
“Yes.”
You were nine and Connor was ten?”
“Yes.”
“How did you know they were fairies?” Pagan’s voice was a soft lullaby, no judgment, no disbelief.
“Connor told me.”
“Like in the stories he read to you?”
“Yes.” Chad turned and walked over to a shelf. He took down a book and handed it to Pagan with what appeared to be reverence. “Fairies do bad things. They don’t like humans.”
Pagan held the book up in front of his lapel camera. The title Tales and Legends of Ireland ran in ornate gold script across a picture of wizened male fairy spiriting away a baby. This wasn’t a book about Tinkerbell. These stories would be much darker, more the original Brothers Grimm than Disney happiness.
“What did the fairies do to you?”
There was a pause as Chad clearly struggled with this question.
In the squad room, Pagan glanced over at me. I knew he was looking for confirmation of what he already knew. I nodded my head, letting him know I was in agreement with him. I could see no purple streamers attached to Chad’s words. There were pastel greens, blues, and yellows, even an interesting touch of orange, but not a trace of purple. Chad was telling the truth – the truth as he knew it.
On the video feed, Pagan didn’t prompt Chad. He simply waited, letting silence build.
“He didn’t like it,” Chad said finally, not specifically answering the question.
“Connor didn’t like what the fairies did to you?”
“Not to me,” Chad said, his face clearly showing his distress. “To him. Connor told me when the fairies came, I had to roll over and look at the wall. He told me the fairies would take me if I looked, but I could still hear them pinching him.”
“Pinching?”
“Connor said they pinched him and it hurt, but not too bad. I didn’t like it. I was scared, but Connor said it was okay. He said the fairies wouldn’t pinch me or take me if I was looking at the wall.”
Pagan stayed silent, letting the moment stretch.
“Then one night the fairies came, and in the morning Conner was gone…and then the fairies ran Papa d
own when he tried to get Connor back.”
“How do you know that’s what happened?”
Chad looked at Pagan plaintively, as if the answer was obvious. “I told Uncle Harvey about the fairies taking Connor, but he said there were no such thing as fairies. He said it was God who took Connor and Papa because they had been bad. But Connor said it was fairies.” Chad’s emotions were etched deep into the softness of his face. “God wouldn’t take Connor for being bad. Connor was good. He protected me from the fairies. Uncle Harvey was wrong!”
Pagan stopped the video feed with the tap of a button. Everyone in the room was silenced by Chad’s raw emotion and innocence.
Then Castano stamped his size thirteens into the moment. “Hope you’ve got some teeny-tiny handcuffs available if you’re going fairy hunting…”
Chapter 18
“I’m not upset that you lied to me,
I’m upset that from now on
I can’t believe you.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
The Smack Records building was on a side street off Sunset Boulevard, a couple of blocks away from the once renowned Whiskey a Go Go nightclub in West Hollywood. The distinction between Hollywood and West Hollywood was far more cultural than geographic. We Ho is upscale, hip, and gay-centric. The Viper Room and The Roxy, along with the Whisky, regularly throbbed with nightlife.
Next door, Hollywood’s stars were only on the sidewalk. A seedy tourist mecca populated by meth heads in character costumes outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater, Hollywood is a worn dowager long past her prime.
We Ho had once been part of the unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County. It’s bordered by the Los Angeles City areas of Hollywood and Fairfax on two sides and the city of Beverly Hills on another. In 1984, We Ho became its own incorporated city and is patrolled by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office. There has been more than one incident when a body found on one side of the boundary between the LAPD and the LASO has miraculously risen from the dead long enough to deposit itself in the other department’s jurisdiction – all depending on which department arrived on the scene first.