The Brotherhood of the Wheel

by R. S. Belcher

  “Of course, dear,” he said. “I’m using FairPlay and a few other programs to give this one a good going-over. This might take a spell. You want to use my laptop to review the other stuff on Rears’s drive while you’re waiting?”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  Russell set her up at a small desk in the corner of his office and opened the drive for her on his computer. She casually scanned the contents, looking for anything that might jump out at her. Once she was sure Russell was deep into his work, she clicked open Rears’s files on Black-Eyed Kids.

  She noticed that beside the photos in the file Rears also had notes and detailed interviews with parents and friends of missing children in more than thirty states. Shawn Ruth’s family was among those interviewed. There was also a map of the U.S., with each abduction he had investigated pinpointed on it, along with hyperlinks to news articles about missing children, abductions, and the sex-slave trade. Another layer of links connected the map to some of the photos in the file, which, in turn, were linked to the interviews and any media coverage about the missing children. Another layer of links bizarrely connected all his data to a map of the U.S. highway system, showing, for each disappearance, the relative proximity to highways and major routes.

  “Russ,” Lovina said, turning in her chair, “did Rears try to access the FBI database at any point on his computer? Especially the Highway Serial Killings Initiative?”

  Russell looked up from his screen, his white eyebrows raised. “As a matter of fact, in between frequenting numerous porn websites, 4chan, and 9GAG, he made several inquiries to the bureau’s site, and that section in particular. He even incorporated the map they have on there of the national unsub cases into that interactive database you’ve been perusing. Guess what turned up?”

  “A highway serial case near every abduction point,” Lovina said, nodding, as she clicked between the layers of the database. “At least one, most more than one. Looks like Rears was onto something.”

  “Or involved in something,” Russell said. “This may have been his way of keeping trophies of his victims. And going back and interviewing the victims’ families, making them relive all the horror he caused. That’s powerful stuff to these monsters.”

  “Anything that would tie him to a crime in here?” Lovina asked. “A photo of a victim or a crime-scene photo he shouldn’t have? Anything past theory?”

  “Nope,” Russell said. “Like I said, clean as an investigative-reporting whistle. You don’t like him for this, chère?”

  “I don’t,” she said. “Just doesn’t feel right. “Of course, my gut has been known to be wrong.”

  “Well, darlin’,” Russell said. “It wasn’t wrong on your prize photo here.” He gestured for Lovina to come look at his monitor. “This photo shows up on a few Black-Eyed Kid and paranormal websites. Its point of origin is an IP address that goes back to a cell-phone service in Granite City, Illinois. Any current cell activity to that phone number has been flagged by the FBI and the Illinois State Police—”

  “—due to it belonging to a missing kid,” Lovina said.

  Russell nodded. “Exactly,” he said. “They found the phone at the crime scene, but no kid. I’m requesting access to the Illinois State Police case-management system. Give me a second.” A page with the Illinois State Police seal at the top and columns of case file numbers filled the screen. He selected the case number and, after a moment, a police report appeared. A picture of a smiling young girl with long brown hair was in a box in the upper left-hand corner of the report. “Here we are. Cell phone belongs to Karen Collie, age fifteen at the time of her disappearance. She went missing along with friends: Stephanie Bottner, Aaron Kline, Kristie Plunkett, and Mark Baz. All of them teens, all good kids with no record of any trouble. They were going to the mall, and when none of them showed up back at home that night Mark’s parents filed a report. They found Mark’s car in the mall’s parking lot, but all five kids were gone without a trace.”

  “Sounds familiar,” Lovina said. “Group of kids, no history of trouble. All just up and disappear. So Shawn Ruth and her friends go missing five years ago. Then they show up on a cell-phone photo from this Collie girl several states away, who also goes missing with her friends two years ago. Russ, what are these Black-Eyed Children supposed to do, exactly?”

  “They approach people,” Russell said as he read from a website. “Usually in pairs. They are teens in apparent age, and they ask to be let in to wherever the witness is—their house, their car. They keep asking.”

  Lovina felt her breath catch in her chest, a cold, tight hand clutching the air in her lungs. “So what happens?” she asked. “What happens to you if you let them in?”

  Russell grinned and wiggled his eyebrows. “No one knows … because if you let them in you’re never heard from again. Muwhahahaha!” he laughed, doing his best mad-scientist impersonation.

  The spell broken, Lovina shook her head. “Hilarious.”

  Russell grabbed another doughnut. “Well, that’s part of the myth, anyway,” he said. “They’re always saying they were sent to gather you. But they never say why or to where. Are you holding out on me? Did something happen?”

  “Russ,” Lovina said, leaning forward in her chair, “Do you … do you believe … in any of this? Have you ever seen something you couldn’t explain away?”

  Lime leaned back in his chair. “Yes, of course I have,” he said. “Any cop, any EMT, nurse, lab rat, fire and rescue—we’ve all had those unexplained things that happen when you’re on the job. We see the world with the curtains pulled back—we see horror that other human beings can’t even begin to comprehend. Then, every once in a while, you get something that goes so far beyond even that—beyond the street, beyond reason, sanity, logic. Back in 1972, I had a corpse, on the table, dead for over forty-eight hours, Y incision and all, open his eyes and speak to me—without lungs attached in his chest anymore, mind you.”

  “What did he say?” Lovina asked.

  “‘Fuck Nixon,’” Russell said.

  “I’m serious,” she said.

  Russell nodded. “So am I, chère. I swear it. What has you so jumpy? You know you can tell me—what is it?”

  “I think I ran into a pair of these … kids at Rears’s apartment last night,” she said. “They had the eyes, the voice, everything. And, Russ, I was terrified of them, and now I couldn’t tell you why. You think I’m crazy?”

  “No,” Russell said. “Not even a smidge. I take it you refused to let them in the apartment? Were you alone, was Roselle with you? Local PD? Anyone?” Lovina shook her head. Russell frowned. “I see.”

  Lovina saw the wheels turning in the old scientist’s mind. She pointed to another photo that had been in the computer file with Shawn Ruth’s photo. She recalled seeing a crumpled printout of it in Rears’s apartment office. It was a blurry photo depicting shadowy outlines of people, a forest in daylight. There was a central figure, dark and featureless against the sunlight and blur, with branches, perhaps, behind the looming figure—they looked like massive antlers growing from the shadow’s head. “This one,” she said. “Russ, what can you tell me about this one? Rears had some note on it about ‘patient zero,’ or something.”

  Russell frowned slightly and went back to work on his computer. He pulled up the photo and began to examine it with both his eyes and an array of forensic computer programs.

  “That’s interesting,” he said, furrowing his thick white eyebrows. “You do have a knack for picking them, chère.”

  “What?” she said, looking over his shoulder. The photo was a blur of pixels on his screen. He clicked a control, and it zoomed back a few magnifications but was still blurry. In the right corner of the photo, Lovina could now see a symbol superimposed over the photo. “What the hell is that, Russ?”

  The symbol came into focus a bit more. It was a circle, and above it was a crescent turned on its side, so that it touched the top of the circle and the two points at the end of the crescent
pointed upward.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “but I aim to find out. I’m running it through Forensic Image Analysis and a few other databases, including what the Feds have access to—the SST and BCOE over at the Department of Justice. It may take a spell to cook, but we’ll get something. It looks like this photo has had a history online since the late nineties. It’s a tangled mess, but I’ll see what I can get for you, darlin’. It may take a day or two to hear back. You, uh, need me to let Roselle know it will be a bit, keep him off your back about the delay? I know you said the case is hot right now.”

  They looked at each other. Russell had an odd look on his face. Lovina had seen it before. Russell’s inner bloodhound was close to chasing down a hidden scrap of truth. She shook her head.

  “Okay,” she said. “Roselle has no idea I’m here. I’m on the beach. I’m mucking around in a case that’s not mine, and it’s far from hot. But I am onto something, Russell. Shawn Ruth, those other kids, this Karen Collie girl … they’re gone like they were swallowed up whole. Rears was onto it, too—”

  “Or part of it,” Russell interrupted. Lovina held up a hand.

  “Maybe, maybe he is … was,” she said, “but I think he stumbled onto something and that something came for him. How many missing-children cases are there in Rears’s database?”

  “‘Something’?” Russell said, narrowing his eyes. “You think Black-Eyed Children snatched Dewey Rears because he knew too much? Lovina, darlin’, knowing the world is odd and having any kind of walk-into-court proof of that strangeness is a whole ’nother animal. You have a solid career here, chère. You start talking this cooyon and—”

  “How many, Russ?” Lovina asked. “How many missing children?”

  “About eight hundred kids,” Russell said. “But, Lovina, and please forgive me for bringing this up, but no matter how many of them you go hunting for, no matter how many you find, it don’t change what happened to Delphine.”

  Russell felt the name strike Lovina like a slap, and he regretted having to invoke her dead sister, but they both knew why she had latched on to this case, why she always chased them. They were quiet for a moment. The murmur of the lab’s usual chaos filled the empty space.

  “I know, Russ,” she said finally. “You have always been a good friend to me and to my family. Mama always appreciated all you did for us when Pops was in the hospital, at the end. And all the help you’ve given me over the years when I started on the job. I appreciate all of it, more than I can ever say. I don’t want to cause you any trouble. I understand you can’t—”

  “The hell, I can’t!” Russell said. “Pardon my language, Lovina.”

  “Russ, you got a good thing going here. I don’t want to get you mixed up in my crazy,” she said.

  “Then don’t,” he said. “If Roselle gets wind of this, I will tell him everything looked in order on this end. He don’t ask, I don’t tell.”

  Lovina leaned over and hugged him. “Thank you,” she said. “You’re a good friend, Russ.”

  “A good friend would tell you to stop this damn fool nonsense before you do lose your job over it. You have a lot of people who care about you—Roselle, me—and none of us want to see you suffer for this obsession of yours.”

  “Russ, if it had been your sister those animals … did that to—”

  “I’d do the same damn thing,” he said. “I know, darlin’. But you can’t find all of them, you can’t save all of them.”

  “Eight hundred kids, Russ. All connected to one missing man. Isn’t that worth at least a little inquiry?”

  Russell sighed and took the last doughnut. “I’ll tell you what I get on the history of your blurry-antler ‘patient zero’ picture and that symbol on it.”

  “Thank you, Russ,” she said, and handed him the crumpled paper she had taken from Rears’s place. “I found this in Rears’s apartment. It’s some GPS coordinates and a bunch of babbling about Four Houses or something. Can you try to make some sense of it for me, please?” Russell nodded.

  “And there was someone in that apartment with Rears,” Lovina said. “I’m betting a print is going to come through the system off that overturned beer can or something else in there.”

  “If they’ve been printed,” Russell added. “You want me to run it down for you?”

  “I want to find whoever it is,” Lovina said, “before someone else does.”

  “I’ll call you,” he said. “I’ll keep all this on the DL, chère.”

  “On the DL?” Lovina said, and laughed.

  Russell chuckled. “Always good to see a smile on that pretty face,” he said. “My love to your mama, as always.”

  “Love to Treasure as well,” Lovina said. “How is she, Russ?” The twinkle left Lime’s eye at the mention of his wife’s name, but the smile remained, set on his face. “Oh, Russ … is she—”

  “Back to the hospital for a spell,” Russell said. “Been there about two weeks. They say it’s the cancer again, but I think she bribes the doctors to tell me that so she can get a little break from me.” He chuckled; it was a dry sound in his throat. Lovina hugged him again, tight. He patted her back gently. “It will all be fine, chère,” he said. “Just fine.”

  Lovina lived in the Contesta Apartments, third floor, overlooking Decatur Street. She had lived there since she started with the NOPD, back in 2004. Even when the Quarter was trashed by Hurricane Katrina a year later, Lovina had stayed, along with the other die-hards who refused to let the most deadly force of nature in U.S. history drive them from their city. She remembered sitting in her dark, hot living room, only a stale humid breeze from the open balcony doors to cool her; dressed in her sweat-stained police uniform, drinking water in plastic bottles provided by the Red Cross and the National Guard. This place, this city, was home. She had fought for it, cried for it when it fell, reveled in it when it arose, and shed her most precious blood here, in New Orleans. Some places marked you, made you theirs.

  She unlocked the front door, and as she did she heard the click of the lock on the door across the hall, Lake’s door. She turned to see her neighbor open his door and step out.

  “It’s about damn time you showed your narrow little ass up in here, sugar!” Tyson Lake said, hugging Lovina. “That four-legged little misanthrope you call a pet was about ready to maul me!”

  Lake was a slender, six-foot-four black man with delicate features, large expressive eyes, and a body that had been sculpted to perfection by long hours of worship at the temple of iron and sweat. She was a drag queen, working a burlesque show down in the Quarter at the Golden Lantern, over on Royal Street. Miss Lake, her stage name, had been named for Mike Tyson by the father and mother who no longer talked to Ty. Tyson had actually played a few years in the Erie BayHawks, a D-League NBA team that was a feeder for talent for the Orlando Magic. Ty had been pretty good, but he fell in love and decided to quit living a life that belonged more to his dad than to him. Lovina was Lake’s only family now.

  Lovina hugged her neighbor back. “You mean to tell me you afraid of a trifling little pussy hissing at you, girl?” They both laughed.

  “Mmmhmm,” Lake said. “Them nasty things scary.”

  “Sorry about last night. I expected to be back yesterday afternoon. The case got hot,” Lovina said, opening her door. “I’m actually just home to tell Wafflez to leave you be and to grab some clothes. Do you mind feeding her, Ty? I hate to ask.”

  “It’s no trouble, Love,” Lake said. “You know I got you, boo. Something … odd happened last night, though. I thought I should let you know.”

  “What?” Lovina asked, flipping through the mail that Ty had left on the small table by the door, just inside her apartment.

  “There was a pounding on your door last night,” Ty said. “Round three or so. I had just got home from work, and it was so loud it scared me. I looked through the peephole, and there were two kids beating on your door—boom, boom, boom, not stopping. No pattern, y’know, like, knock, knock kno
ck, then stop.… They just kept on pounding.”

  Lovina felt a sick fear twist in her gut, like rats gnawing on her intestines. “Boys?” she said. “Hoodies? Ty, did you see their eyes? Did they look at you? Did they see you?”

  Lake shook her head, frowning. “No,” she said. “Only through the peephole. That was the weird part. By the time I unlocked the door and opened it, they were gone. Not by your door, not in the hall, no sound of them headed down the stairs, just … gone. Love, what’s wrong? You look sick, honey, what’s happening? Let me help.”

  Lovina walked into her apartment, gesturing for Lake to follow. “Listen to me, Ty, please listen. I mean this. Do not approach those kids if they show up again. If they knock on your door, do not answer it. Do you hear me?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Just don’t,” Lovina said. “They keep knocking, you call the cops, y’hear me? But you do not answer that door! They are dangerous, and I’m … I’m not sure what they are, exactly.”

  “Okay,” Lake said, placing her hand on Lovina’s shoulder. “Okay, Love, I will. I promise. This some kind of work thing?”

  “I guess,” Lovina said. “They must have tracked me somehow. This can’t be real, can it? This is stupid. Things like this don’t really happen … do they?”

  “Talk to me,” Lake said. “I sure as hell ain’t gonna judge you, boo. You tell me.”

  “I’ll tell you when I’m back from this,” Lovina said. “I promise. Right now, just please do what I say, Ty. Okay?”

  Lake raised her hands as if she was surrendering. “Okay, okay,” she said, turning back toward her apartment. “I’ll feed the little creep while you’re gone. Do you need me to turn over the engine on the Charger while you’re—”

  “No,” Lovina said. “I’m taking Dad’s car.”

  “Not a cop car,” Lake said. “You sure this is about work, boo?”

  “Jesus!” Lovina said, stepping into her kitchen and opening the fridge. She fished out a cold bottle of Dixie beer and opened it. “I must be the worst damn liar in town.” Lake hurried toward the door and began to pull it shut.