by Dale Mayer
So which of those assholes should he shake down first?
Chapter 12
Friday Midmorning
“How is it that possible?” Kate sat here at her desk, in the early morning, sipping her coffee. The selfishness of people stunned her. “An Amber Alert goes out, and people pitch a fit because they were woken up by a text about a child gone missing,” she said, shaking her head, staring out the window. It was a dreary Vancouver day, the coastline weather having hit and hit hard.
“Children go missing every day of the year,” Lilliana said. “If they aren’t personally affected, they don’t care.”
“Isn’t that the truth.”
“Don’t you have something to work on for the meeting?”
“I do,” Kate said. “But I have this nagging thought at the back of my head, and I don’t like it.”
“Since when is that new,” Lilliana said. “You brought all these cases up to the front. Give your head a rest. We have that meeting now, so let’s go.”
Slowly Kate got to her feet, threw back the rest of her coffee, grabbed her notepad and pen, and walked through the bullpen, past the coffeepot. Lo and behold, there was a little bit left. She quickly drained it into her cup and carried on.
As she sat down in the meeting room, she mulled over the fact that people from her supposed team were talking to her now, since Colby’s lecture. Some still had the same ol’ animosity. Back when she’d been a rookie—for a long time—as long as she did everything right, everybody who’d knocked her had eventually come to respect her. She thought she’d use the same tactic here, but, with her added experience, she no longer gave a shit about peer acceptance. And yet, if that were true, why the hell had these last few months been so hard on her?
When Colby walked in, he said, “You better have some news for me.” And he looked directly at Kate.
She gave him a wan smile. “Outside of the fact that the little girl is dead, appears to have a broken neck, she was also sickly, so we’re waiting on the autopsy report now,” she said. “I spoke with the parents. Obviously they’re devastated. They have no understanding, even at this point in time, that their little girl is gone,” she said quietly.
He nodded. “What about your buddy?”
“I thought these two were picking him up.” She turned to look at her other team members.
Colby turned his attention to Rodney and Owen. “Did you?”
“No,” he said, “short of having a warrant to go into his place, he is not answering.”
Colby shot his gaze back to her. “Will you have any better luck?”
Her eyebrows slowly rose. “I might,” she acknowledged, with a nod.
“So, Rodney, you are her sidekick.”
Rodney just nodded.
Colby turned his piercing gaze to Owen and Lilliana. “What about the other little boy?”
“He is in the hospital, sedated. He was sexually abused. A little bit of time will heal that physically—the mental, psychological, not likely. The parents are in the hospital with him.”
“Good, do we have any DNA, any forensics, anything on the boy?”
“They’re on it, but, so far, I haven’t heard or seen any report of it.”
He pivoted to Kate. “And you? Did you come up with anything regarding the other man who was approaching the child?”
She shook her head. “No, just an impression in my head. I haven’t got it down on paper.”
“Do you want to work with the sketch artist?”
“Nothing in my head for him to work with.”
“I could comment on that,” Rodney said from the front. Muttered titters came around room, and she just ignored them.
“People, at the end of the shift, I want something on my desk,” snapped Colby. “I want something concrete. If you need to grab some street clothes cops to help with interviews, do so, but we need answers, and we need them today.”
Everybody got up but her. Colby looked at her and asked, “What are you up to?”
“I’m going to set up my boards in the conference room. I brought them from home. Then I’m going to try and figure out why these cases were never solved.”
He just stared at her.
She shrugged. “I get that we didn’t have the links between them before. What I don’t get,” she said, “is that these dead children cases are still all unsolved.”
“Some of them are from a long time ago,” he reminded her. “Don’t criticize the teams who have gone before you. We didn’t have DNA from any potential suspects. We didn’t have countrywide digital connections to other PDs. You know that we have more pending cases to handle that do tend to overshadow the dead-end cold cases. We didn’t have a lot of what you have today. The question really is, how long will it take you to solve this now?”
“No clue,” she said, “but hopefully by next Monday.”
He looked at her in surprise, his eyebrows slowly rising. “Why next Monday?”
She nodded. “I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or not,” she said, “but those children were taken on different days of the week.”
“And?”
“They go in cycles,” she said. “We’ve got a Sunday, a Monday, a Tuesday, no Wednesday, and then there is a Thursday, no Friday, a Saturday, and now a Sunday. They are all different weeks, months, and years, but …” She went through each of them for him, adding, “They are in order, but I can’t be sure if I’m connecting them properly.”
“Do you think we are missing other cases?”
“Yes, we are missing other cases. Reese is looking at all unsolved for the last thirty years for me,” she confirmed. “What I don’t know is if another child could go missing on this next Monday, which will be the next day of the cycle. I just don’t know which Monday.”
“Jesus,” he said, frowning at that thought. He gave her a quick headshake. “Did you check out those two latest children? Do they fit the pattern? Have the same mark?”
“I checked the little boy that night,” she said, with a nod, “but the evening light was really bad, and he was too traumatized. I’ve asked Forensics Division specifically to have photographs of his wrists.”
“Maybe you should go check him yourself.”
“I will,” she said, but that’s the last thing she wanted. That little boy had broken her heart and to see him now, today? If he even remembered her—yet it might be better if he didn’t remember her—she would never forget him.
“What about the little girl?”
“I didn’t see anything, but again,” she said, “the same circumstances apply. It could take the autopsy to confirm.”
“So you know what to do then, don’t you?”
She nodded. “Do I have to take Rodney with me?”
“Is it a problem to have a partner?”
“Sure,” she said, “it’s like having a leech attached. I do better on my own.”
“He doesn’t have to go everywhere with you, but he should go when he can.”
She gave a quick nod and got up.
As she walked out, he said, “Kate?”
She turned. “Yes?”
“Go easy on him,” he said. “They are all good people.”
“So am I.” And she turned and walked out.
At her desk, she sat down long enough to check her email, realizing she didn’t want to even look at the twenty-odd emails sitting there. Logging off her computer, she stood and grabbed her weapon. As she walked to the coatrack, she snatched her vest.
Rodney called out, “Where are we going?”
“To the hospital,” she said. “To see the little boy who came in last night.”
“The one you picked up?”
She nodded and walked to the door. She didn’t care if he came or not, although she preferred to be alone. But, sure enough, the sounds of running feet had him coming up beside her.
“You could wait for me, you know?” he said good-naturedly.
“Or I could go alone,” she said, hitting the but
ton on the elevator.
They squeezed in, with the dozen other people in the elevator. When the door opened at the ground floor, it was just like a pressurized can popping, letting the contents spill out. At least she was at the forefront of the spill. Outside, she stopped, looked up at the weather, and smiled.
“You are the only one I know who smiles at the gloomy gray.”
“Lots of reasons to smile at the Vancouver sky.”
“Maybe, but it’s usually not chilly weather that people smile about.”
“Who said I’m smiling about that now either?”
He didn’t have an answer for that.
At the hospital, she walked in and talked to the receptionist, got a room number, and headed to the stairs.
“We might see the parents here,” he said.
“I highly doubt the parents left,” she said. And, sure enough, as she shoved her hands into her pockets to walk down the last little bit of the hallway, she shut down on the inside as she prepared to see the little boy. The father stood outside, rubbing his exhausted face. At least she assumed that was his father.
When he looked up and saw them, he frowned immediately.
She reached out a hand and identified herself. “I’m the one who found your son last night.”
Immediately the thundercloud in his face cleared, and he threw his arms around her and hugged her tight. “Thank you, thank you,” he whispered brokenly. “Oh my God, we are so grateful to have him back.”
She gently disentangled herself. “How is he doing?”
He shook his head. “The doctors don’t know. He keeps screaming, so they have him lightly sedated,” he said. “He is a little bit awake, but he drifts off to sleep really fast. It’s funny but not funny in a way. It’s just, whenever he is fully awake, he screams again.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I do have some questions to ask of you.”
His shoulders shrugged, and he nodded slowly. “Of course,” he said, “the trouble is, I wish you could answer my questions. Like what was he doing on that street corner?” He raised his hands in disgust. “Anybody could have got him there.”
She stopped, gave herself a headshake. Maybe that was the point. But that was another whole discussion she wanted to sort out in her head. Because this ugly impression was going on in her mind, she didn’t quite understand it. “I need to ask you, did you recognize the clothing he was in?”
“Yes, of course. Although the big sweater wrapped around him wasn’t his.”
“And did the police come and take away all the clothing?”
He nodded. “They said they needed it to check over for forensic evidence.”
“And I presume they checked him over too?”
He winced. “They went over his body, with a fine-tooth comb, magnifying glass, and tweezers. That was absolutely degrading.”
She reached out a hand, gripped his with hers, and said, “But remember. It’s important. If we find just one hair, … we might find the person who did this.”
He closed his eyes and nodded. “But investigators do that to a dead body, not to my little son,” he said, tearing up. He sat down on the bench outside the room, outside the window in the door, and motioned at Kate. “My wife is inside.” He sobbed and just curled up and cried.
Leaving him alone, she rapped lightly, then she stepped inside. A woman stood, looked over at her. And Kate explained again who she was. The mother began to cry gently. “Thank you for finding him,” she whispered. “We’ve been just so lost.”
Kate walked closer and looked down at the little boy. He was sleeping lightly. She reached out a hand and gently stroked a curl off his temple.
“They didn’t seem to have hurt him,” his mother said anxiously, “but we haven’t had a full report from the doctor.”
Kate looked at her. “He was quite bloody when I brought him in,” she said. “I don’t know the extent or what damage was caused or even if it was his blood that he was covered in.” She wished to God it wasn’t, but she highly suspected that the sexual assault she already had confirmed had been a large part of it.
“And then there is, you know, that other part that they did to him,” the mother said, motioning at her son’s lower body, “but he could just forget about that.”
Kate stared at her, wondering how that was even possible. She hoped, for the little boy’s sake, that he could grow up and forget about what had been done to him. But she highly doubted he would walk away from it as quickly and as calmly as the mother thought.
Just then, the little boy’s eyes opened; he looked at his mom and frowned a little bit. Started to whimper. She reached over to him immediately, calming him down—or trying to. “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay. Mum is here.”
He shifted his gaze, saw Kate, and froze. And Kate feared he would start screaming now. She smiled at him and said softly, “Hey, buddy.”
Maybe it was her voice, maybe it was just the way she reached down a hand, but tears came to his eyes, yet he didn’t scream. Instead he did something that completely shocked her. He reached up his arms to her.
Everybody in the room stiffened. But unable to stop the request of the child, she reached down and hugged him gently. When she tried to stand back, he locked his arms around her neck, so that, as she straightened, he came up with her. He just cuddled in close, and she held him.
“Oh my God,” his mother said, tears in her eyes. “He remembers you.”
Kate looked over at Rodney, who stared at her in surprise. She felt awkward holding the child; she had zero experience with children. But just something was so needy about this one, and that broke her heart. She held him close for a long moment and then whispered, “I think your mother needs a hug too.”
He looked up at Kate, looked over at his mother, who stood shaking, emotions racking her soul.
Kate walked around the bed, so he was closer to his mother, and he held out his arms, and his mother snatched him up, sat down in a chair with him in her arms, and just bawled. Kate looked at the empty bed, where the child had been, and looked at the mother and then back at Rodney, as if to say, Now what?
Rodney smiled at her—one of the truest smiles she’d ever seen on his face, at least directed at her—and he said, “That was a lovely thing to do.” She looked up at him in surprise. And he motioned to the mother, who desperately hung on to her son.
Thankfully it looked like the little boy was also hanging on to his mother.
Kate sighed softly. “We’ll come back another time,” she said to the mother, but Kate was pretty-damn sure the mother hadn’t even heard her. As Kate and Rodney stepped out of the doorway, realizing absolutely no answers were to be found here, she noted the father still sobbed at the bench. She reached down a hand, and he looked up startled.
She said, “You might want to go in and see your wife.” He bolted to his feet and walked in. She turned in time to see the look on his face, when he saw his son holding on to his wife. And he jumped forward and snatched both of them into his arms.
Kate turned and walked away, once again shoving her hands in her pockets, as if that would lighten the blow of all those emotions running amok inside her. As she walked toward the elevators, Rodney said, “You dealt with her really well.”
“Depending on what you mean by dealt with,” she said. “It’s not like we got any answers.”
“What answers were you looking for?”
“Ones I’ve got actually, the little boy has the same mark,” she said thoughtfully having seen the little boy’s arms. She hit the button on the elevator panel that led to the morgue. Rodney stepped up beside her.
“Are we are going to see the coroner?”
She nodded. “Unless you’ve got something to do?”
“No, I’m totally okay to tag along.”
“Well, if you get any leads,” she said, “I’ll be happy to tag along with you too.”
He grinned at her. “This seems to be your show.”
“Not my show,” she sai
d quietly. “I just feel I don’t have any choice in the matter.”
“That’s how we all feel,” he said. “You are not alone in this.”
“Maybe,” she said, “but sometimes it feels like it.”
“And we get that,” he said, “but that stage is over.”
“Hope so.” She didn’t say anymore. At the basement, she checked in the coroner’s office, but it was empty. As she walked past another office, she saw two people inside, talking. She stopped and asked, “Dr. Smidge?”
One of them just pointed her farther down the hall and turned back to their chattering. Following the direction given, she reached the autopsy room. As she pushed open the door, a buzzer went off inside the room, a warning for those working.
Smidge’s voice rapped out, “No visitors.”
She popped her face around the corner and said, “Unless you are working on my cases.”
He looked up, frowned, and then nodded. “You can come in,” he said, “but gown up.”
She nodded, headed off to the side, pulled on a gown off a hook on the wall, scrubbed down, and snapped on gloves. As she joined the coroner, he had the little girl stretched out on the table, a sheet up to her collarbones. The doc worked on her head. Something was so devastating again about that tiny little body. So fragile and so broken. She felt Rodney’s disquiet at her side. “She looks ethereal, like a fairy tale princess.”
The coroner looked up and asked, “You have anything more for me?”
“No,” she said. “The same early morning hours when we found this little girl,” she said, “I found a little boy alive, about an hour earlier.”
His eyebrows shot up. “I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “I have more than enough work of my own, you know?”
“Oh, I know,” she said. “I get it. Unfortunately there seems to be a never-ending supply of work for both of us.”