“She’s just a little run-down,” said Lydia, biting her tongue so as not to spill the Porter’s secret.
“More shall be revealed!” said Dabba Doo. “As our friend Mrs. Porterhouse likes to say. Though maybe more won’t!” He laughed again, accidentally spitting a gummy onto the carpet. He grabbed it and plunked it back in his mouth. “What concerns me is that I don’t know how much longer I can keep the balls in the air. Hell, I don’t even think of the moment of balance anymore—I’m just worried about the old ticker.” He tapped his chest. “I can feel it winding down. I’ve tried asking Annie about it. ‘How long can these fucked-up dead bodies keep going?’ ’Course I didn’t put it quite that way but it’s a damn good question, huh? And boy, does she not want to go there! Tell you something else: I’m starting to feel more like my old landlord self, and that’s very confusing. Isn’t it supposed to be the reverse? It’s like my tenant—Dabba Doo—he’s still in there somewhere but the kid’s gone real quiet. Giving me the silent treatment. Sometimes I feel like I swallowed him,” he said. “Aren’t I supposed to feel like he swallowed me?”
Maya started to go quiet too; Lydia was ready to go home. What he said about swallowing his tenant had frightened her. She felt guilty as well for having gone around Annie—she hated being disloyal and knew the Porter wouldn’t approve of their mutinous outing. She was still glad they came. It was good to have a playdate, especially with someone who shared the same purgatory.
For his part, Daniel tried his best to hide the brutal funk that had descended during their visit. He couldn’t put his finger on it. It seemed to be a mixture of rage and abject fear, an indecipherable storm of emotions and physical reflexes incongruously reminding him of two things: Daniel’s inadvertent slaughter of the boy in Afghanistan—and Troy’s strange feeling of déjà vu that time they first met Willow Wylde in his office.
As they left, Dabba Doo said, “Let’s hope it’s just a glitch in the system and everything turns out fine. We’ll all have our moment of balance and ride El choo-choo into the sunset together.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Lydia.
“All roads lead to Rome,” he said. “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes. That’s Mark Twain but I take credit for it all the time.”
3.
After her session, Honeychile again waited in the anteroom while the therapist told Harold and Rayanne in no uncertain terms that their daughter was having a psychotic break and urgently needed to be hospitalized. They listened in shock and disbelief. Mindful of client confidentiality, Jacquie omitted much, though what they were hearing was more than enough to leave them terrified.
When the couple stepped outside the office to speak with their daughter in private, Honeychile vehemently denied the account of what transpired. “I think she’s loaded,” she snarled. “The shrink’s the one who needs a shrink!” Indeed, to the untrained ear, Dr. Robart’s redacted version sounded like the ravings of someone who was high or unbalanced, especially so because the irascible client offered no evidence that would support such theories.
The family left, angry and unresolved, without a goodbye.
Jacquie immediately called her supervisor for counsel; she was flummoxed enough to begin to doubt her own perceptions. Had the girl been putting her on? Her colleague remained annoyingly noncommittal, “not having been in the room.” Jacquie defensively dug in: while it was possible she had been “played,” she insisted that the girl’s pathology was too real, too complete, too something. Still, she was embarrassed at being so dramatic. Either she’d been hoodwinked by a brilliant sociopath—or met an authentic “multiple” head-on, the likes of which come along once in a career, if that.
When they hung up, she gathered her thoughts. She anxiously drummed her fingers on the desk, replaying gory highlights of the session. In her agitation, Jacquie had forgotten to run something else past her boss. She was about to ring him back when she stubbornly thought: I’ll figure this out myself.
She wavered a moment before deciding to err on the side of professional prudence, not legal obligation.
She called the police.
* * *
• • •
Owen and Dubya were having their twice-a-week shoot-the-shit lunch, not at Early World, which Willow would have preferred, but at Owen’s favorite, KFC. The sheriff admitted to having a full-blown addiction to the $5 Fill Up, faithfully ordered with two hundred grams of coleslaw. KFC coleslaw got him crazy. The whole beggar’s banquet, washed down with a mix of lemonade and iced tea, really made the man happy.
They usually touched on personal things before getting into cop talk. This time it was their prostates. Owen confided that his PSA “went rogue” and he needed further tests. He hadn’t mentioned it to Adelaide yet. (The woman loomed large for these two men.) When Owen asked about Willow’s romantic life—he seemed to have an abiding, vicarious interest—the detective said it was “great,” without mentioning Dixie. But it was interesting to him that he did have the urge to talk about her; he’d been feeling a tug of a desire to promote his girlfriend to someone, anyone. He felt that pride of alliance and burgeoning love that compels one to share. He just wasn’t comfortable yet with Owen putting his shit on the street and gossiping about it to Adelaide.
When it came time to cut up Cold Case business, the sheriff made his usual rape kit backlog pitch. “It’d do wonders for the department if we nailed a few of those, Dubya. My educated guess is, we’d see a serious bump in funding. We need the rah-rah goodwill and the political muscle that would provide. I don’t want ’em to shut us down in nine months. Hit a few home runs with those kits and it’ll go a helluva long way. Don’t get me wrong—anything cold we can put to bed is going to be a big win.”
“Understood.”
“Solve a few and we can add some new hires.”
“Well, that’d be nice. I actually have my eye on three more cases but I’m still training the newbies. We’re stretched a little thin.”
“I know—but good.”
“I went and saw Elaine and Ronnie Rummer.”
“Is that right?” said Owen, his interest piqued.
“I thought they needed to know we’ve reopened the case.”
“And how’d that go?”
“Ronnie’s found religion.”
“Did you see Elaine?”
“Yeah.”
“How was she?”
“Okay—I guess. I mean, it was interesting. Not what I expected.”
“What about her face? What’d it look like?”
“Not like it used to, that’s for sure. But it’s not some Phantom of the Opera deal.”
“And was she rational?”
“Very much so. But I may have caught her on a good day. I was kind of surprised she wanted to see me. When I talked to Ronnie on the phone before I went over, he didn’t mention her at all. Not a word.”
“The man has hoed a tough road.”
“Tough isn’t the word.”
“There’s probably some serious caregiver burnout in there on top of everything else.”
Willow shifted gears. “How’s the Collins boy investigation going? Any breaks?”
“Don’t ask. We get a hundred tips a day—‘sightings.’ You know the drill. He’s in Chicago. Nope, someone’s one hundred percent certain they just saw him in Seattle. Nope, he’s with some vagrant in Florida living under a freeway. And the vagrant looks suspiciously like Jimmy Buffet. Nope, he’s tied to a leash like a monkey, to a busker in Times Square . . . Wait! He’s frolicking in the surf with some shady family in Cuernavaca.”
“There’s no surf in Cuernavaca, Owen.”
“Not according to our tipster. Hell, we got a call from a psychic in Moscow.”
“At least it wasn’t a Russian hacker.”
“I might have more luck with one of those. But you will not beli
eve the latest. Yesterday, a therapist calls. Says she had a session with an unstable girl who claims to know where Winston Collins is buried.”
“What kind of therapist?”
“A shrink—totally legit. I checked her out.”
“Dios mío.”
“It gets better. The girl tells the shrink that she’s some sort of zombie—you know, ‘Hey, Doc, I’m actually dead but I know where the kid’s buried because I’m channeling him.’”
“Makes sense to me,” Willow said drolly. “And what do you plan to do with this valuable information, Sheriff?”
“What do you think I’m going to do?”
“‘Press delete’?”
“Hell no. My men are out there digging as we speak.”
Willow couldn’t help but laugh and Owen broke into a smile himself. “It’s called desperation, Dubya. Desperation with a healthy scoop of public outrage and political pressure.” His phone rang and the sheriff knitted his brow as he listened. “On my way,” he said, then hung up. “Let’s go.”
“What’s up?” said Willow.
“A kid just got stabbed to death at Mount Clemens High.”
4.
The ambulance sirened away as Owen and his cohort roared in. The area around the crime scene had been cleared. A few crying students loitered behind the yellow tape, hugging one another.
A skittish flock poured from the main building, shepherded by teachers. The little (some not so little) lambs blinked in confusion as they emerged to survey the scene. Some pointed to the slick of bright red blood smearing the pavement at the foot of the steps.
Hysterical parents, alerted by calls and texts while the school was locked down, arrived in panicky droves. The police wouldn’t let them park. A few jumped from their cars, demanding to know if their kids were all right.
Willow couldn’t blame them.
Owen was briefed by one of his deputies. The victim was a football player. A student had been arrested. The deputy pointed to a witness, a distraught student named Zelda.
Willow and the sheriff walked to the squad car where the suspect sat cuffed in the caged backseat. They peered in. Her eyes were closed. A funny-looking thing—tiny too. How the hell did she nearly cut off the head of a muscle-bound gridiron king? Owen tapped the trunk, signaling the driver to take her away. The sooner she was gone, the faster calm would prevail.
“Jail or hospital?” said Willow, knowing the answer.
“County General. I have been duly informed that the perp discussed the possibility of self-harm.”
“She did appear to be an unhappy camper,” said Willow.
“Being a leprechaun amidst jolly green giants’ll do that to you. Makes you want to slash some throats. You know what’s funny, Dub? Back in the day, this would’ve been some kind of world news. Now? It’s just a blip on the Internet—or whatever they call blips on the Internet. Something to tweet about. When it comes to schools, people only really pay attention when you’ve got a ten-plus kill count. Or they’re little bitty kiddies.”
“Different times for sure.”
“To put it mildly,” said Owen derisively. “It’s like that line in No Country for Old Men. ‘It’s the tide, the dismal tide . . .’”
“‘It’s not the one thing.’”
“God, I love that movie.”
Another deputy urgently interrupted.
“Sheriff? They found Winston Collins.”
“You are shitting me.”
“They just dug him up.”
CROSS WIRES
1.
They went straight to the marsh from the school—it was turning into that kind of day.
The body had been found in New Baltimore, about twelve miles northeast of the high school, in a boggy area of Anchor Bay not far from Walter and Mary Burke Park, where Owen watched fireworks as a boy. The area was public enough (downtown shopping and popular beaches were close by) that both men wondered if the killer was trying to make a statement.
It took a moment for the startling connection to be made: the girl who provided the information that led to the discovery of Winston Collins’s body was the very same who stabbed the star athlete to death. In the sheriff’s mind, Renée “Honeychile” Devonshire was quite possibly a double-murderer.
Owen phoned Dr. Robart from the exhumation site. When she asked him certain details about what they had found, it was compelling enough that the sheriff broke confidentiality. He told her that toilet paper had been stuffed down the boy’s throat and all of his teeth removed. When he shared about the penis being severed, the therapist said that Renée, “speaking as Winston,” had told her the killer “hurt my mouth and pee-pee with a sword.”
He needed to speak with the parents right away—but most of all, he needed to interview “Honeychile.” Unfortunately, that would have to wait. When he called the hospital, they said she’d become violent and was hallucinating. The doctors were bombing her with antipsychotics.
Standing on the sidelines of the dig, Willow’s thoughts drifted to the bedroom of Elaine Rummer—then back to the Cold Case conference room with its files and baggies, its corkboard and spilled evidentiary detritus. He floated there awhile before dipping his toe in the stream of subconscious memory, whose waters lapped up on the old Rummer place—
July 4, 2000.
Their photos weren’t on the corkboard, but he could already see them there, pinned in his mind’s eye:
Roy Eakins and his ungainly son, Grundy.
2.
Harold and Rayanne camped out in the family waiting room of Macomb County General’s psych wing.
They wouldn’t let them see their daughter and Rayanne was right behind Honeychile in losing her mind.
She blamed herself for not having listened to the therapist. Harold reminded her that he hadn’t believed the woman either—how could anyone have? Rayanne attacked it from all angles. One minute she was attributing the surreal, horrendous events to some undiscovered neurological quirk of cleidocranial dysplasia; the next, indicting Honeychile’s birth parents for being a “minefield of shitty genes,” something she’d always believed but never dared declare out loud. She even went after the bully football player, impugning him for sending those cruel, disgusting texts to their daughter. (They’d looked at her phone before handing it over to the police.) When Harold gave her a look that she’d gone too far and was being unchristian, she grew quiet and relented, though without becoming contrite.
Rayanne said We need an attorney and Harold said We’ll talk about it later. Rayanne wondered if they should reach out to the parents of the dead boy and Harold said Too soon, talk about it later. She broke down and said Oh, Harold! What if they put her in jail and throw away the key? and Harold said They’re not going to do that, Rayanne. She wrung her hands and said They never allow an insanity defense, never! and Harold said Maybe not on TV but they do in real life, they do it all the time. He said it like a seasoned criminal lawyer.
Zelda came by with her parents and sat with the Devonshires awhile. Zelda’s mom and dad were kind, but standoffish. Later Rayanne told Harold it was “obvious” Zelda’s folks never liked their Honeychile, never liked the way she looked or acted, never liked her “bad influence.” Did you see how far away they sat? Like we had shit on our shoes. Harold said she was being too sensitive and that Zelda’s parents behaved just fine.
Two cops came into the waiting room after Zelda left. When they said they were here to see their daughter and just wanted to say a quick hello, Rayanne’s eyes sparkled for the first time since the world turned on end.
“Please,” said Rayanne, in the quietest, sanest way she could muster. “Please tell them it’s all right for us to see our baby. She’s probably so scared! And please come back! Come back and tell us how she’s doing?”
Lydia promised she would.
* * *
�
�� • •
They wore their old deputy uniforms, a strategy both cagey and naive, thinking they could bluster their way into visiting the girl under cover of “official business.”
Why had they come in the first place?
This time it was on Daniel’s instigation.
A few days before the high school killing, he awakened from a deep sleep with an overwhelming feeling (like the one Lydia had about Rhonda) that “Winston,” the new girl from the Meeting, was in some kind of danger. When they learned Honeychile had been arrested for murder, the vision was validated. The two of them rehashed Dabba Doo’s theory that wires had been crossed and decided more would be revealed—once they got into a room with her.
But the head nurse wouldn’t allow it.
The frustrated deputies returned to the waiting room. When they told her, Rayanne was stoic. She knew what she was about to say was futile but couldn’t help herself.
“Did she ask for us? Did they say that she asked for us?”
“We didn’t talk all that long,” said Lydia. “The nurse kind of had her hands full.”
The deputy wisely kept to herself the only intel they were able to gather: that Honeychile had been screaming for her mother—whom she alternately referred to as “Hildy-Bear,” “Mommy Bear” and “Mrs. Collins.”
* * *
• • •
The next morning at the office, Willow laid into them.
“What the fuck was that little stunt about?” Lydia and Daniel stared at the floor and took it in the neck; there was nothing else to do. “Do you know the shit I got from the sheriff about you going to see that girl? What did you think you were doing?” They remained silent. “Open your mouths and give me some fucking answers. Now!”
“She’s—a family friend,” said Lydia, without looking up.
A Guide for Murdered Children Page 23