Little Boy Lost

by Trafford, J. D.

  “Area is closed.” He kept walking toward me. The deputy’s chest was puffed. His teeth were gritted. “You gotta move along.”

  “Sergeant Schmidt from the Saint Louis Police Department sent for me.” I nodded toward the woods. “He back there?”

  The deputy was about to yell at me. Then he realized what he had just heard and stopped—delayed reaction. The deputy was mad, in a way that only cops can get mad. Cops hate people who mess with their protocol and make them think, and it didn’t help that I was black. The deputy had just issued me a clear command to leave, and now he had been forced to back down.

  “I’ll radio it in.” The deputy took a few steps back but did not turn. His eyes studied me, filled with suspicion. He pressed a button on top of a box attached to his belt and spoke into the radio attached to his shoulder. Noise came back at him, which I couldn’t understand. Then he barked questions into his shoulder. “Got a guy here who claims he’s supposed to meet up with some Saint Louis cop.” His voice dripped with skepticism and disdain.

  Static came back along with a mumbled response from dispatch.

  “Says there’s a Sergeant Schmidt here to meet with him.”

  More static, and then there must have been a response that the deputy didn’t like, because I saw his lips tighten and his eyes roll.

  To the person on the other end of the radio he said, “Fine.” Then the deputy walked back toward me, still skeptical. “The sergeant will be out here in few minutes.” He pointed at my car. “Wait in there.”

  I sat and listened to the radio. I switched between KMOX and Saint Louis Public Radio, wondering if and when they were going to report the discovery, but there was nothing. The media didn’t know yet, or didn’t know enough to report.

  I thought more about it and then considered the possibility that maybe they didn’t care. Maybe Devon Walker and his short, tragic life didn’t warrant any news coverage. Perhaps the only people in the world who cared were me and his little sister, Tanisha.

  I waited for another ten minutes and then decided to call my mother. I didn’t know how long it’d take, and I wanted her to be home when Sammy got back from school.

  We talked.

  My mother wasn’t too happy to hear about my field trip, but in the end, she promised that she would take care of Sammy. As I hung up the phone and fiddled with the radio, Schmitty emerged from the woods just below where I’d parked.

  He ducked under the yellow police tape and began walking up the small hill to the side of the road. I grunted as I got out of the car, paused to catch my breath and allow the pain to subside, and started walking toward him. We met halfway.

  “Sergeant.” I held out my hand. “Always in the middle of things.”

  We shook. “Never thought I’d be calling you for help, but”—Schmitty paused and looked back at the woods—“figured we owed you a heads-up after kicking your ass the other night.”

  I looked at him sharply. “Not funny.”

  “Nope, not funny at all, but at least they didn’t shoot and plant a gun on you.” It could’ve been a joke, but I didn’t think it was.

  Schmitty wiped the sweat from his forehead, and we began to walk back to the small break in the woods where he had emerged. “I also figured you’d be getting the call soon enough about this,” he said. “Thought you might be willing to share any information with us, maybe do me a favor with the vic’s family.”

  I shrugged. “Don’t know how much help I’ll be, but I’ll tell you what I know.”

  When we got to the police tape, Schmitty ducked under the yellow line and then held it up for me to follow. It hurt to bend, but I tried to hide the pain.

  As soon as we were in the woods, the temperature seemed to drop fifteen degrees. The trees were tall, nothing but shade. Even though it was now the end of August, there were no signs that fall would ever come.

  Schmitty walked ahead, pointing around us. “Got the area secure. Tech did the initial run through, pictures and all that. The forensic chick from the university just left, but I’m wondering if we need to expand the scope.”

  This confused me, but I didn’t say anything. The scene looked plenty big for one dead body.

  We walked another fifty yards and then stopped. Schmitty pointed at the ground. “See that?”

  I looked down. My eyes had adjusted to the darker space, and I saw a small tire track in the dirt about three feet away. There were two little yellow flags marking the spot.

  I looked up, and when I didn’t say anything, Schmitty filled in the blank. “Wheelbarrow.” He turned and started walking again. “We figure he killed them pretty quick, as soon as they got out of the car or truck or whatever he was driving.” Schmitty looked around. “Already dead when he got them back here. Must’ve loaded them into the wheelbarrow and took them into the clearing.”

  “Why are you saying them? Thought you just found Devon Walker.”

  Schmitty shook his head. “Afraid not.”

  We rounded a small outcropping of rock, and then I saw the clearing. At least nine bodies were partially excavated from the dirt, each marked with little yellow flags.

  Schmitty pointed. “Your kid is over there, on the far side.” Schmitty wiped his nose and then waved away the gnats circling his head. “He’s one of the fresher pieces of meat.”

  We walked around two bodies. “Takes about a month to go from flesh to bone, unless they were buried in the winter.” Schmitty paused for a moment, waiting for a question like a tour guide in a museum. When I said nothing, he continued narrating what we were seeing. “Think these were some of the early ones.” He pointed. “Removed the clothes and buried them naked. Also yanked out the teeth, so dental records won’t help.”

  He stopped so I could look, then started walking again. “Later, I figure the perp stopped doing that, maybe too messy or maybe it took too long, or maybe he just got more confident.” He pointed at another two bodies. “With these he started leaving the clothes on and they got to keep their teeth.”

  Schmitty stopped in front of a wheelbarrow and shovel. “This is what we think left that track back there.” He smiled. “Know what you’re thinking. Brilliant police work back there, right?” He emitted a little laugh, then picked one of the tech’s flashlights up off the ground. “Guy had a system.” He took a pair of glasses with orange lenses out of his pocket. “I say guy because it’s almost unheard of for a woman to do something like this. Women aren’t this cold. They kill for money or freedom, not this kind of stuff.”

  Schmitty handed the glasses to me and then pointed the flashlight at the wheelbarrow.

  As I put the glasses on, I realized that it wasn’t a normal flashlight. It was a black light, and it bathed the inside of the wheelbarrow in a blue light.

  Big and small splotches appeared all over its surface.

  “See that?”

  I nodded.

  “Dried blood.” Schmitty turned off the black light, and the splotches on the wheelbarrow disappeared. “That’s some of the only good news we found out here.” He set the tech’s light back on the ground, and I took off the orange glasses. “Should be able to get some DNA and maybe make some matches. Might even find some of the perpetrator’s DNA. Who knows? Depends on how hard the victims fought.”

  I handed the glasses back to Schmitty. Then he led me to an area about ten feet from the other bodies. “We think this one is yours.”

  I looked down at the body.

  It didn’t look like much. A dead body deflates over time. What remained of Devon Walker was not so much a body as a pile of clothes and bone, caked with mud.

  “How’d you get the ID so quick?”

  “Utilized an old police trick.” Schmitty looked toward the heavens and placed his hands together in prayer. “Divine intervention combined with dumb luck.” He picked up a long stick and pointed to a pile on the side. “See that?”

  I knelt and looked a little closer. “Jeans?”

  “Correct,” Schmitty said. “Bu
t more specifically, it was what we found in the back pocket of those jeans that helped us out.” He backed away. “Because of budgets, a lot of schools in the city don’t bus themselves anymore. The era of the yellow school bus is over. They issue all the high school students these plastic cards for the city bus. We pulled the card from the back pocket and could still make out the barcode numbers.” He shrugged. “Made a call to the school, they looked up the number, and that’s how we got the name.”

  “Might not be him, though,” I said. “Wasn’t exactly an academic.”

  Schmitty nodded. “True. We’ll run the DNA and other stuff, but still, it feels right. A lot of kids just show up for the first day of school to get the bus card and never come back, and he’s been missing for the right amount of time for the condition of the body.”

  “Doesn’t explain all this.” I looked around at the other piles of bone surrounded by flags.

  “Nope,” Schmitty said. “Sure don’t explain it all, but having one of them ID’d sure helps.” He crouched down again, near the side of Devon Walker’s body, and pointed. “See that?”

  “I think so.” I edged closer, looking. It appeared to be a narrow band of white plastic.

  Schmitty and I stood back up. “Those are disposable handcuffs,” he said. “One loop. Heavy-duty nylon. Zip it on. Impossible to get off. You can buy them at any army navy store. Police use them in riot situations or when they’re making multiple arrests during a raid.” He turned back and looked over the field of bodies. “They all had them. Hands secured behind their backs.” Schmitty started walking back the way we came. “Like I said, the guy had a system.”

  He led me away from the scene and toward the road. “Now as for you, his family probably don’t like the cops too much, so we were hoping you could help us get some information about what Devon was doing before he disappeared, new people he was hanging with, rivals, anything.”

  “I can try, but it means more time and probably getting the mother and grandmother to talk. Nobody has been able to tell me too much so far.” I dodged a branch from a tree, then asked an unrelated question. “Who found them?”

  The tree cover over our heads started to break, allowing the Missouri heat to come back. “Hiker found them,” he said, “doing that geocaching stuff.”

  Schmitty stopped at the edge of the trees, before the full sun came down, put his hands on his hips, and caught his breath. If we were going to continue talking, we might as well stay a little cooler in the shade. “Anyway, the current theory is that our perp couldn’t bury the newer bodies deep enough because of the rock in this area. So the oldest ones were in the deepest holes.”

  Schmitty wiped the beads of sweat from his forehead. “Some critter found Devon, or who we think is Devon. Kid got dug up, and that’s how the hiker found him. He called the cops. The local sheriff checked it out, and then this morning we were cleared by the medical examiner to poke around a little more. That’s when we found the others.”

  Overhead, there was the sound of a helicopter. Schmitty stepped out into the break. I followed him, and we looked up at the helicopter and then at the cluster of vehicles down the road.

  “Media bastards.” Schmitty shook his head. “Now we’re in for it.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  One of the many mysteries of Saint Louis is its absurd traffic patterns. It doesn’t matter if you’re going into the city or leaving the city or cutting across the city. Even with more than half the town’s population drained away, traffic is jammed up in every direction.

  And so I found myself crawling across the county border into Saint Louis. An exit came up ahead. It wasn’t the one I wanted, but I took it. I’d rather go twenty miles an hour on a side street than sit in traffic for another thirty minutes. I cut across the highway, took a couple of turns, and found Taylor Avenue heading north.

  It wasn’t bad scenery at first, filtering through the neighborhoods. There were a few churches, some nice cafés, and the Central West End’s beautiful brownstones.

  Then I crossed an imaginary line, and everything dimmed. Cafés were replaced with dirty fast-food restaurants. Churches went from majestic to pop-up, and the brownstones devolved into a mix of questionable housing, pawn shops, and dollar stores.

  I checked the address on my notepad again, took a couple more turns, and returned to the cluster of houses on the edge of nothing. Tanisha Walker’s little brother was in the same place, sitting in the dirt, alone in the front yard.

  Yuppies and new urbanists always talk about the need for green space. Well on the north side there was plenty of green space, just not the right kind.

  I walked past the little kid, but I didn’t stop. At the door, I knocked and waited. Nobody came, although I could hear noise inside. It sounded like live voices, maybe a radio in the background. I knocked again, louder. This time the stronger, faster movement of my arm hurt.

  There was life from inside. “Who is it?”

  “Justin Glass.” I waited a moment for a response, but nothing happened. “Tanisha hired me to look for her brother.”

  “Don’t know nothing about that.” There was a little more commotion, another voice—too muffled to understand—joining the conversation.

  “If you could just open the door so that we could—”

  An argument had started beyond the door. It grew louder, and I stopped talking because nobody was listening to me.

  I turned and looked back at the boy, who I hoped was named Deon, not Dice. He watched me with the same intensity as his sister. He didn’t smile or wave. He just watched as I stood alone on the porch, waiting for it all to play out inside. Then a deadbolt turned. A chain was unhooked, and the door opened.

  Tanisha stood in front. Behind her was a well-worn older woman with her skinny arms crossed tight before her. She didn’t like the look of me. That much was clear.

  I took a step back from the door. “Tanisha, wondering whether I could talk to you and your mom.”

  Tanisha cocked her head to the side. “Find Devon?”

  I nodded. “Maybe.”

  Tanisha turned and looked at the older woman behind her. “It’s OK, Mama. See?” She touched her mother’s arm, reassuring her. “He’s just my lawyer.”

  We sat around the kitchen table. I was on one side. Tanisha and her mother were on the other. Auntie and Grandma had materialized and lingered behind them, shooting me suspicious looks. A half dozen kids of various ages came in and out. The radio continued, now joined by a television in the background. Not another man to be seen.

  “I don’t know if you know this, Ms. Walker, but Tanisha came to my office a few weeks ago and asked me to help her find Devon.”

  Tanisha’s mom leaned back in her chair. “First I heard of that.”

  “Well she’s a persistent young lady.” I looked at Tanisha and nodded, then looked back at her mother. “It wasn’t too much trouble to help out,” I lied. “Called a contact down at the police station. There wasn’t much information, at first, but then I got a phone call today.”

  Tanisha’s eyes widened, excited.

  “In jail, ain’t he?” Tanisha’s mother locked her arms across her thin body again. Her arms were mostly bone and bruises with a few needle marks.

  “Afraid not, Ms. Walker.” I took a breath, trying to keep my upper body still while thinking about how best to phrase it. “They’re going to be running some tests, but the police think they found his body in a wooded area about an hour from here.”

  Tanisha’s face tightened, but her mother’s expression didn’t change. I continued to tell her everything I knew. There were no tears or anger. No wild sobs or whispers, just acceptance, like she’d known all along this conversation was coming her way, in one form or another.

  It was a safe bet, with a young man like her son.

  Maybe the tears came later, maybe not.

  I didn’t stay too much longer. I warned them that the police would be stopping by, and I encouraged them to cooperate. I told them t
hat the police were going to need more information about who Devon was hanging around with and whether they knew anybody who might’ve done it.

  “I already told you everything.” Mrs. Walker wasn’t interested in talking to the police, and she certainly didn’t want them to drop by. The idea that she might cooperate with the police was crazy. “Only cause more problems than I already got.”

  “Well I just thought I’d let you know.” I turned and stepped off the stoop, unsure of how to say good-bye. “Thank you for your time, Ms. Walker.” As I walked past the little boy in the front yard, I pointed and turned back. “Is this Deon or Dice?”

  The mother didn’t respond, but Tanisha answered. “Dice.”

  That’s too bad, I thought.

  As I pulled into the driveway at the Judge’s house, I called Schmitty and filled him in on the conversation. Then I slowly extricated myself from the car. It had been a hard day, and my body wasn’t happy. I walked around to the back of the house. My mother was in the kitchen working on a late dinner. She was washing and chopping vegetables. Everything smelled like garlic.

  I took in the aromas. “Now that’s a nice way to come home.”

  She picked up a handful of onions and carrots and tossed them into the Dutch oven on the stove. The vegetables sighed as they hit the hot oil. “Do my best.”

  “Sammy in the library with the Judge?”

  “Always.” My mother set the timer and then picked a bowl off the counter. She emptied the chopped green and yellow zucchini within it into the Dutch oven with the onions and carrots. She stirred it a few times, lowered the temperature, and turned back to me. “Long day?”

  I nodded as I walked over to the refrigerator. I removed a beer and opened it. Then I started to pull out a barstool from underneath the kitchen island, but thought better of it. I remained standing and watched my mother fuss over the vegetables. “That boy I was looking for was found, but not in a good way.”