They walked back to the car. Lauren slowed her pace to match Washington’s.
“I should’ve asked sooner,” she said before opening the car door, “but I think you should say something at his funeral.”
Inside, Lauren pulled on her seat belt and waited to start the engine until Washington eased into his seat.
“I’ll tell people how great it was to work with your dad. He was the best partner I could ask for.”
“You don’t have to lie. I’m the greatest partner you’ve had.” She took a deep breath. “I’m only going to say it once—and I don’t want to be reminded that I’m saying this—but I may even miss you, a little bit.”
Washington laughed. “Medina! Look at you showing emotion and everything,” he wiped his eyes. “I promised your dad I’d watch after you. Make sure you got settled into the job.”
The dashboard illuminated when she turned the car key. The radio blared a weather report warning of early morning snow showers sure to jam rush hour traffic. Chicago in the fall would never please Goldilocks, the weather was either too hot or too cold, and rarely, if ever, just right.
Washington reached over and changed the station. Spanish lyrics filled the car. A high tempo followed by a brilliant chorus.
“You’re serious about learning Spanish, then?” She asked, imagining him retired and settled in a little Mexican beachfront town away from all of this murder and mayhem.
“I’ll even order my coffee in Spanish the next time you take me to that Puerto Rican place you like so much.”
“I’m going to hold you to that.”
As Lauren placed the car in drive, she took one more look towards the park. Junior still stood beside the police caution tape, taking in the graffiti. She wondered why a tagger would choose that name: Pied Piper. She hoped it was just a coincidence, but within, she could feel the growing branches of dread braiding around her heart.
It would not be a coincidence.
Either way, she had a feeling she would find out soon.
It was as if Junior knew she was watching. He raised his head and looked directly at her. Their eyes met.
He smiled.
She felt her throat close. His smile told her all she needed to know. At that moment, and with that look, she finally allowed herself to really believe the Pied Piper had returned.
Lauren closed her eyes tight. There in the darkness behind her eyelids was her little sister, Marie, clearly, in her school uniform, a khaki-colored skirt and a white Polo shirt.
Little Marie. So sweet. So innocent. So long dead. Missing, then murdered. A case so long forgotten it was no longer cold, it was iced.
In Lauren’s mind she could so clearly see her, and that wide-eyed smile. Her cheeks, once rosy, turned cracked and gray. Her lips, once red, twisted up in rage, and when her mouth opened from it erupted black and brackish water. Lauren gasped, catching her breath.
She coughed and for a moment she could smell the rotten, stagnant water.
“You alright?” Washington pat her on her back.
“Yes,” she lied, knowing very well dead things and wicked things drew near.
CHAPTER 2
The air this morning had a sting to it, maybe because it was Monday. Maybe because a sheet of frost covered the ground. Lauren slammed her car door and walked across snow-dusted leaves, coffee cup in hand, to the nondescript building. Her car was one of just two parked here this early. She thought of the girl who had bled out on the sidewalk last night and how everyone had heard gunfire, but no one had seen the shooter. The girl’s name was Hadiya. This would have been her final year at DePaul College Prep, where Lauren herself attended high school not that many years ago.
There were no leads, but there was some chatter. Lauren had spent her night chasing suspicions and social media gossip. All she could verify was Hadiya was an honor student on her way to college in the fall. A classmate, Jordan, had arrived at the park after Lauren had left with Washington. He had been supposed to meet Hadiya there. The injured kids were her cousins, in town from Indiana for the weekend. The cousins had given willing interviews to the police and would be released from the hospital today. Their injuries were minor.
Jordan, however, refused to speak. Officer Guerrero told her that Jordan had screamed when he saw the graffiti of the Pied Piper’s name. Jordan was who she needed to speak with, but he was already avoiding her calls.
An icy wind blew, and Lauren pulled up the collar of her black trench coat. She could feel the city’s demons laughing, cheering, taunting her that they claimed yet another beloved child. Lauren took a sip of coffee. She had stopped at Intelligentsia, a coffee shop just a few doors down, before coming here. A shot of espresso there, and a black pour over of their El Diablo blend to go.
Her phone vibrated. She pulled it out of her pocket to find another text from Van. He had texted four times since last night, and each time she’d ignored his message. She did not want to accept the fact that he was going to be her new partner.
There was no one at the security desk. She turned her phone off and pressed the button to call the elevator. A part of her dreaded coming here, but a part of her enjoyed the illusion of progress. There was no one here who would look at her accusingly. There was no one here who would ask if she should have taken an alternative path.
“Why didn’t you use pepper spray?”
“He stabbed me in my chest. There was no time to think.”
She could still hear the knife plunging into her as it hit her collar bone. It sounded hollow. Like when you carve a turkey on Thanksgiving.
“And the others?”
“There isn’t much time to think when you’re going to be killed.”
The elevator opened to a dark hallway. The worst part of coming here was how empty and silent she always found this building. Lauren did not trust the quiet. At the end of the hallway she found suite 337. Inside, there was no receptionist to greet her. This office did not work that way. Her appointments were pre-set, pre-booked—everything managed via email, anonymous behind a digital veil.
It was dim. An essential oil mist of lavender hung in the air. As soon as Lauren took a seat a door opened, and a woman with large, long golden curls smiled.
“Ready?”
Lauren followed Stephanie down a short hallway and into a small room with a bright blue sofa on one side, and a gray plush chair across. A large window looked out over Millennium Park and Lake Michigan.
“How was work last week?” Stephanie asked, and Lauren responded “Good.”
Both took their seats, and sat still for a moment, gathering their thoughts.
The word was a reflex. Good. It meant nothing—a pleasant, non-threatening exchange. Work was never good. There was nothing good about uncovering charred and decomposing bodies in moldy, abandoned buildings. There was nothing good about investigating a beheaded, nude body on the banks of Goose Island. There was nothing good about the pink and bloated body of a toddler found in a bathtub of scalding water. There was nothing inherently good about her actual job. The only thing good about her career was the level of effort she gave these people who could no longer speak for themselves. She served as the eyes and the voice of the dead, walking with her victims and Father Death, to find their killers.
Lauren noticed a fresh box of tissues set out on the corner table beside the sofa.
“How have you been sleeping?” Stephanie asked.
“Last night was hard,” Lauren forced herself to say. Hard meant she had not slept.
Stephanie nodded, leaned forward, and remained silent. She was allowing time for Lauren to elaborate.
Lauren felt as if she sunk farther into the sofa each time Stephanie leaned forward. Stephanie’s eyes zoomed in, analyzing, maybe over-analyzing, Lauren’s movements. But that was why Lauren was here. The only place she allowed herself and the trauma she carried to be examined.
Lauren carried many scars. She was raised by a police offic
er and a musician, two people who knew a lot about the city and its people. She was groomed to absorb the city’s tragedies, but not necessarily allow them to affect her. To Diana’s disappointment, she had no musical skill. Diana tried exposing her to every instrument she could: violin, guitar, saxophone, but there was no talent there. Lauren’s gift resided in reading people and things and constructing a story from whatever puzzle pieces were exposed. Her father steered her into a career in law enforcement, first becoming an officer and then a detective, just like him.
“The funeral...” Stephanie started.
“It’s tomorrow morning.”
“How do you feel about that?”
Even though his body had been removed from the house days ago, her father had been dead for months. It was no longer Armando Medina who lived in that skin. She had lived with an angry, confused stranger; one who spent many nights outside in their backyard, staring up at the stars, muttering curses and accusations that this world had been tainted with magic so black it was driving him mad.
“I don’t feel anything.”
Stephanie nodded.
Lauren had been attending therapy in one form or another since she was fourteen. At first, her sessions were mandated by her doctor, the courts, her parents. Later, when they were no longer required, her father still encouraged her to attend.
“Maybe you will remember something,” her father had said.
Lauren did not want to remember.
During college, and her first few years on the job, she was lax about attending therapy. But given the recent attention she was getting from her actions on the force, and her father’s death, Commander McCarthy stressed she attended counseling.
“And he will be buried at?”
“Rosehill Cemetery,” Lauren answered. “Next to my mother...”
“And sister?”
“Yes.” Lauren felt her chest tighten, those branches strangling her heart. She reached for her coffee and when her eyes scanned across the window she thought she saw a small figure with long dark hair standing at the edge of Lake Michigan in the distance. As she focused her gaze the figure waved both arms overhead, signaling she was watching.
“Is it a family plot?”
Lauren looked back to Stephanie. “I guess, but there’s no space for me. I want to be cremated and scattered across Lincoln Park.”
“The zoo?”
“No, the actual park. It used to be a cemetery. The first city cemetery—the Chicago City Cemetery in the 1840s, right along the lakefront. When the city grew,” Lauren made quote signals in the air “they removed the bodies.” She reached for a bottle of water in her bag, unscrewed the cap and took a drink. “The bodies, at least for those families who could afford it, were moved to the newer cemeteries away from the city center, Rosehill, Graceland...” She screwed the cap back on and put it back in her bag. “I want my ashes to be scattered there in that park, alongside the rest of the forgotten.”
Stephanie took a deep breath and leaned back into her chair. “People who are a mystery?”
“I guess.”
“You live for mystery, and your death will be a part of a mystery, Detective.”
“Yes.” It wasn’t a question, but Lauren acknowledged what Stephanie had connected.
“There was this girl last night. She was just seventeen. She and her friends were in Humboldt Park, just playing and being kids. On the swings. I don’t believe she was the intended target,” Lauren looked down at her fingernails, bitten and broken. “She went to my old high school.”
Stephanie nodded and allowed the silence to settle for a moment before asking “How does that make you feel?”
“It makes me angry. This girl wasn’t in a gang, from what I can tell. She wasn’t affiliated with any of that, and even if she was, so what? She was just a kid. No one deserves to bleed out on the concrete.”
Lauren could feel the muscles in her neck tighten. She looked out of the window. The small figure now gone, Lauren followed the outline of Lake Michigan until it disappeared from her sight. “I’ll find who did this,” she said.
“Does it bother you...” Stephanie started and then continued. “I mean, does this one bother you more because of where it happened?”
“I didn’t want to think about it, but it’s there. It’s something that won’t go away. I can’t drive through that park without thinking of Marie. I wonder, is that where she went? The playground? Was it there someone snatched her up and dragged her to the lagoon? It messes with me every time I think of it, and I’m not going to let go of that pain. I deserve that pain because I messed up. I let her wander off.”
“You were just a kid yourself,” Stephanie came to Lauren’s defense.
“A stupid kid, whose stupid decision cost her sister’s life,” her voice wavered.
“Is that why what you do means so much to you? Like you’re trying to fix something? Undo something?”
Lauren nodded. “Maybe. Prevent something.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. I’m just tired.” She made to reach for the box of tissue, but then stopped herself. She was not going to allow herself to do this, to feel more anguish than she should. All she breathed in was guilt.
“You mentioned last week the anniversary of Marie’s death was approaching.”
“Yes, I like to visit my mom’s favorite place on that day...”
“Which one?”
Lauren did not want to talk about these things, to excite entombed ghosts, but she needed to speak to someone, and that is why she was here. With silence, these memories could lay still, but the present was rattling them free. Even when her father was alive, she could not speak with him about her mother or Marie. Concerned friends…there were no friends. Her job pushed away any of her friends who held on after high school and college.
“Rosas. The jazz club close to our house.”
“You still don’t talk about either much, especially your mother,” Stephanie said.
Lauren nodded.
“What are you feeling, Lauren?”
“I’m angry. This was her fault.”
“You mentioned last week at the end of our meeting that the anger gets you into trouble? How?”
Lauren removed the lid from her coffee cup and drank the remaining liquid. She set the cup back on the stand. “A suspect was brought in, related to a shooting off the I-290 that struck a car. He died a short time later. When the suspect was brought in, I slipped on another detective’s ID and went into the interrogation room and started beating him.”
Stephanie held back any judgement. “You were angry because of Diana that day?”
“Yes, and because that’s how it goes, right? You’re happy, and you’re looking forward to your day, your life, the moment that you’re living in, and then all of that comfort and stability is ripped away from you because you think back on why your life is so shitty.”
Lauren reached over to the cup but remembered it was empty and instead lay her hands on her lap. “People think I killed those other people because I was angry. That’s not true. If I discharged my weapon, it was either because I was in danger or another person was in danger.”
“Did you ever talk to Robert about any of this?”
Lauren laughed and wiped away at tears that formed in the corner of her eyes.
“I don’t even know why I bothered.”
“With what?”
“With him,” Lauren said. “With believing in the lie of happily ever after, in believing that I could ever be happy.”
“Were you happy with him?”
She was, very much so, at one time. It was the only point in her life where she felt she could think clearly. “Yes, and it fell apart.”
“You’ll be seeing him at the funeral?”
Lauren said yes and that she did not want to think about that right now, about seeing Bobby. She just wanted to make sure her father’s memory was honored app
ropriately for all of his service. Lauren did not know how she was going to return to work and concentrate after this. The sense of heaviness and agitation that dug into her chest and shoulders when she arrived here only intensified the more she spoke.
Stephanie leaned forward, her long curls, the comforting hair of Rapunzel, cascading down around her face. “You blame Diana for what happened to your sister, but not your father?”
“No.” Lauren straightened herself up. She knew this would happen. She knew the spirit of Marie would join them and confuse things. That’s what the spirits of tricksters did.
“It wasn’t his fault. It was Diana’s fault. Diana was busy in her stupid room, working on music. Dad sent me a message to pick up Marie from school since Diana couldn’t. Marie didn’t wait for me. She just left school and tried to walk home on her own, alone, and no one knows what happened between the time she left the building to when she was found in the water.” Lauren closed her eyes tightly. Tears ran down her cheeks. “Dammit,” she muttered under her breath. Quickly, and silently she brushed them away.
“Lauren, you were lost and eventually found that night. That was a lot of responsibility for a fourteen-year-old. It’s not your fault. Not your sister. Not your mother...”
“Diana...” Lauren said.
Lauren looked at the small clock on the table beneath the window. There were four more minutes left in their session. Four minutes was not enough time to unravel how she felt, and how she thought she should feel. A lot of people’s lives were destroyed the day Marie did not return home. Some people’s lives were damaged immediately, while others collapsed into their sorrow. That’s what was happening to Lauren in many ways; she was wasting away along the edges of her own life.
Her nine-year-old sister had been dead, found floating in the Humboldt Park lagoon. Then, a few weeks later, Lauren discovered Diana drowned in their bathtub at home. One death ruled a suspicious drowning. The other ruled a suicide.
Lauren knew there was more to the story of Marie’s drowning, enough that the spirit of her tortured sister had come to her frequently in dreams and waking nightmares. The ghost of a dead girl demanding justice, but like all stories, there was more to be told. Marie’s murder turned up no leads. Yet, someone, or something, had lured Marie out to the lagoon that day. Known, or unknown, there was a villain to every story.
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