by Alex Gates
All naked.
And all…broken.
Bruised and bent, dirty and colored with markers, the dolls had shaved hair and missing limbs. They’d survived some sort of Fisher-Price gulag only to be stashed inside the home of a man who had no business playing with toys—and less of a reason to watch a little girl pick her favorite.
“What the everloving…” Ben pulled off his sunglasses and checked the corners of the room. His gaze paused over the wall posters. Disney starlets grinned at us, despite the grime and other…substances coating their pictures. “What is this freak doing?”
If Ben wanted to sleep at night, he wouldn’t ask those questions.
“Police!” I shouted. “Eddie Kirwin, answer if you can hear us.”
Ben knelt to the floor and examined a beaten and scuffed Cabbage Patch doll. “What sort of man does this to a freaking doll?”
“He didn’t. A kid did.”
“No kid is that destructive.”
I nodded to the goodwill bag doubling as a trash can for the wrappers of prepackaged TV dinners. “All kids are that destructive. He got the dolls second-hand.”
“Remind me not to have kids.”
That was how I felt once. Now? I wasn’t so sure.
I stepped deeper into the living room and listened. The voice was clearer. Definitely a child.
And she was upset.
Her words clipped with little sniffles. Only the occasional word floated through the hall. I followed, but my steps were impeded by stacks of banker’s boxes lining the corridor. Ben reached inside, made a face, and showed me the cover. The Barely Legal DVD advertised itself well. The doe-eyed model on the front should have been showing her ID instead of what she hid under her skirt.
“This guy is a freak,” he said. “Who the hell buys porn nowadays? Isn’t that why they invented the internet?”
I shushed him, regretting the sharp inhale of breath. A thick layer of gas slowly bubbled through the house. I coughed.
This wasn’t safe for us, and the house was certainly no place for a child.
“Hello?” I called out, silencing Ben before he shouted too. Usually, kids responded better to a woman—it was how I got roped into most of the skin-crawling domestic cases in our Sexual Assault and Family Crisis unit. “My name is London McKenna. I’m a police officer.”
I crossed the hall, peering up the dim staircase. Most of the windows layered with dirt. Thick clouds hovered outside, threatening us with more snow. I couldn’t see much in the crowded halls, and we couldn’t turn on the lights. A chill crinkled the hair on my neck.
“…Blue…”
A girl’s voice murmured from the master bedroom. Ben stilled, but I had enough faith in him to think twice before firing a gun in a house filling with natural gas.
A man answered the little girl. “Your favorite color is blue?”
“…Yeah.”
“Why do you like blue?”
I could practically hear the shrug. “It…it’s…I don’t know.”
“Cause it’s pretty like you?”
Ben and I waited outside a closed door, the hinges rusted and door warped. We silently counted, neither of us liking to take orders from the other.
Three. Grimace.
Two. Silently swear.
One…
“Police!”
We rushed inside.
Mistake.
The stench of the natural gas overwhelmed me. My head instantly dizzied. The corners of my vision darkened.
Ben stumbled into me, grabbing my wrist and yanking me into the hall.
“Gotta get out…” His coughing bent him in two. “Dangerous.”
I didn’t answer. Couldn’t, even if the gas hadn’t choked the words from me.
There was no little girl. No burly man with a rasping voice asking her questions.
Only a TV playing the video.
A tiny blonde girl sat in a wooden chair, wearing a fancy pink dress, tiara, and blood red lipstick two shades too dark and ten years too early for her. She hooked her ankles in the legs of the chair and squirmed, avoiding eye contact with the camera. The room blurred as the camera focused on every part of her body that shouldn’t have earned his attention.
The princess motif turned a plank board room into a rainbow of despair. Posters on the walls of kittens and smiles yielded to a freshly made king-sized bed.
The bed was too big for this child.
So were the restraints on the headboard.
“Tell me about your favorite food.” The man behind the camera asked, voice distorted with editing software.
The girl looked like she hadn’t had a good meal in quite some time. She wiped her face, smearing the lipstick. Or had it already been smeared?
“Pizza.”
“Pizza, huh?” The man chuckled. “And what would you do for some pizza?”
She reached down, picking up a teddy bear from her feet. The oversized brown bear snuggled into her lap, and she rested her chin on the puffy chef’s hat tilted on his head.
I surveyed Eddie Kirwin’s bedroom.
The floor was covered in dirty clothes. Dozens of mason jars stacked in the corner, filled to the brim with urine. The bathroom door ripped from the hinges, unable to protect the room from the wads of tissues and toilet paper piled near the toilet, stained with every bodily function. No water in the house meant no showers, no toilets, no livability.
But someone had stayed here.
Recently.
The sheets might have stained and dried with crumbling bits of dirt, but someone had slept beneath the covers.
Because they left their bear.
A brown bear wearing a chef’s hat.
“Oh God.” I pointed to the animal, coughing against the heaviness settling in my lungs. “Get it. Take it. Call…get a warrant.”
Ben ignored me. His grip tightened on my arm. He yanked me out of the room.
“This place is a time bomb,” he said. “We gotta get out of here.”
“The girl!”
“She’s not here! It’s just…a video.” He spat the word. “Let’s get outside. Can’t help her now.”
No one could.
No one had.
Until now.
We turned, stumbling into the hall and tripping down the stairs. The gas welled within the walls and poured into Eddie Kirwin’s bedroom. The doors had opened, and the house surged with enough pressure to launch it halfway across the North Hills.
Neither of us waited for the other. We bowled through the front door, sprinting into the yard.
“I’ll call the gas company,” Ben said. “You okay?”
I sucked in a breath but didn’t stop running until I hit my car. I opened the back door and dove for my laptop.
“That girl—”
The explosion tore through the house.
A howl of splitting timbers and shattering glass shrieked over the neighborhood. The shockwave tossed us, slamming against the car. Ben shouted, curled fetal to cover his head as the first wave of splintered wood and roofing tiles rained over the street.
Chunks of burning wood and metal, nails and insulation, furniture and glass punctured the trees, road, the passenger side of my car. My head struck the ground, but at least I still had one. The dizzying shrillness of the explosion reverberated in my ears.
The plume of smoke surged into the sky, but the damage was done before the fires began. I blinked from the ground.
No.
It couldn’t be destroyed.
A long minute passed before I had the capacity to move. I rolled onto my stomach and stared at the house…or what was left of it. Charred ruins burned in a gaping pit in the yard. The walls had collapsed. The explosion tore through the roof, blasting it into nails and shattered shingles. Only the foundation wall remained.
“No!”
I couldn’t hear myself over the whistling in my ears.
The bear. The TV.
The video!
All the evidence
. Gone.
The girl. Gone.
And any hope of finding her after all this time…
Gone.
Ben rushed over, shaking my shoulders until my eyes focused on him. I blinked. My hearing returned in a punctured rush, and I flinched away from his shouts.
“London!” His dress shirt tore over the chest, and he’d lost his sunglasses. His vanity would never recover, especially with the black eye blossoming across half his face. A broken nose too? Not his day. “Are you hurt?”
“That girl…” I crawled forward. Stumbled. But I could stand. “Did you see…we have to get over there…”
“Jesus, London. You just got blown ten feet through the air. That’s a good Friday night for me, but that’s pretty disastrous for you.”
“The girl! We have to find Eddie Kirwin!”
Ben rubbed his face, leaving a trail of ashes and soot. “You’re hurt. Sit down.”
“We don’t have time!” I hyperventilated through the panic. “Why did he have that bear?”
“What the hell is wrong with you? Christ, London, you almost died!”
Dying? That was what scared him most?
Some fates were worse than death.
I stared into Ben’s eyes, forcing him to listen, to hear me.
“Ben…the little girl from the video. I know her.”
“What? Who?”
“She’s one of the three girls kidnapped from Poppy Drive.”
2
You think you’re brave.
But I’ve never seen anyone so scared.
-Him
Over the past seven years, three little girls had been kidnapped.
All three under the age of ten.
All three living on the same street.
All three had vanished without a trace.
Until now.
Ben pawed through the first-aid kit hidden in my desk. “Jesus, hotshot. You have no bandages, no Neosporin, no gauze?”
I brushed him and the kit aside, diving for the computer. A post-it note clung to the monitor.
Call James Novak.
Below it, a second scribble.
He called again – 7:25 PM
Eddie Kirwin’s house wasn’t the only thing exploding. My cellphone lit up—texts from James and a single voicemail.
I’d forgotten the dinner reservation with my future in-laws. Maybe I could blame it on head trauma? Hell, Eddie Kirwin’s living room had ended up pelting my car with debris.
Just my luck. I’d promised to make it to Lydia’s restaurant before the reservation, if only to support James. It was the first time in nearly ten years that his estranged half-sister decided to grace the family with her presence. Wasn’t much of a surprise when her greeting, after a decade of silence, included a plea for money to pay for car repairs, but the contact warranted a dinner out anyway.
I checked the time. Half an hour late. Fantastic. But I wasn’t getting out of here tonight.
Not until I knew where to find Eddie Kirwin.
And not until he led me right to the kidnapped girls from Poppy Drive.
…And not now that I had a stack of paperwork to complete for the department, the fire marshal, the gas company.
And Internal Affairs.
I’d deal with them later.
“They said you were always getting hurt.” Ben bound the cut on his wrist with a tissue and strip of scotch tape. “I figured you’d have a damn infirmary here.”
“There’s a hospital down the street. Be my guest.”
“You going?”
I laughed. He didn’t.
“Adamski said to go,” Ben warned.
My sergeant said a lot of things when the bodies in his unit got a little banged up. Nothing I couldn’t handle.
“It’s not important.” I logged into the system and pulled the cases from Poppy Drive. “I got a lead.”
“We.” Ben gestured between the two of us. “We got a lead. I deserve a little credit. My ass bounced a hell of a lot further than yours.”
I stared at my double monitors, trying to figure out how to split the screens for three cases. Each girl smiled from her file. Perfect blonde angels. Missing. Lost. And not a trace of them during the seven years since the first kidnapping.
Ben bled on my inbox, but I couldn’t get annoyed. The box hadn’t seen a new file in months. A stack of wedding magazines piled up in their place. Now the particularly bubbly looking bride had a splash of crimson on her A-Line dress. That looked more realistic to me. With my luck, I’d need a gown that could cover bruises, cuts, scrapes, and the occasional lung full of water. I doubted the Pittsburgh Bridal Expo would feature any Kevlar wedding dresses, but my sister, Vienna, insisted on dragging me to the convention center next weekend.
We’d decided on sleeves at least. No strapless, ruffled monstrosities.
It was all the wedding planning I’d done.
I reluctantly offered Ben my chair. “Here. Sit. Read these files.”
“And where are you going?”
“I got a lead.”
“Damn it, London.” He ignored the computer. “We have a lead. What are you planning?”
My grin was practiced, a blending of plastic confidence and false excitement. I wove them as a shield to protect me from the depravity that came with the badge.
“What I do best,” I said. “I’m solving a case.”
Most of the department had split after dinner, but one office remained lit. It would stay occupied for most of the night. Sergeant George Simms didn’t have anywhere else to go, anyone to go home to, and hadn’t the strength to overcome the guilt that tethered him to his desk. I knocked on the door, and he called me inside. The door swung open only a couple inches.
“Keep pushing.” Simm’s voice rasped like he shot a fistful of needles with his Pepto-Bismol. Three empty bottles lined his desk. I couldn’t see much else beyond the trash.
I edged into his office, avoiding the raggedy boxes of files and papers, the books pitched to the side with places marked by plastic utensils. The couch was pulled out and covered with a torn quilt, heavy jacket, and stack of notebooks.
Things had gotten bad for Simms.
Real bad.
Ben struggled to fit into the office behind me, knocking over a Chinese container full of fried rice so old the grains plinked against the floor. His boot accidentally ground some into another unidentifiable, sticky stain.
What the hell had happened in here?
The florescent light flickered. Simms didn’t notice. He chugged a mug of black coffee and stirred a styrofoam bowl of Ramen Noodles. He swallowed a mouthful, ignoring the steam and a disturbing amount of salt for a man wrestling with a raging blood pressure problem.
Not that he seemed to care. He dosed the soup with a hit of soy sauce from one of the dozens of packets lining his top drawer. I supposed we were just fortunate he added flavor to his meal and not anti-freeze. Hell, just eating food and not a bullet was a relief.
“Hey.” I introduced Ben before he spilled more leftovers across the office. “You know Detective Chase?”
“Nope,” Simms said.
“Bennett.” My partner nodded. “Ben.”
Simms might have shrugged or he might have swallowed. The soup smacked onto his desk, narrowly avoiding a scattering of pencils, pens, paper clips, and empty Powerbar wrappers. He kept the Kit-Kats by the monitor.
“They got you partnered now?” he asked.
“Temporarily,” I said.
Ben agreed. “Until she gets us killed.”
Simms smiled at that. “Permanent retirement. Counting down those days.”
Was he?
I snuck another subtle glance over his office. What had happened to George Simms?
He’d gone from a ladder-climbing, schmoozing son of a bitch to corner-office cliché. He was once a charming go-getter, even taking me and James out for dinners when I was the hopelessly, discreetly despondent one.
Now? He’d gained a pot belly but l
ost one hundred and sixty pounds of Mrs. Simms during the divorce. His office smelled too much like fried food, and I doubted he knew the way back to his apartment now that she had the house. I didn’t envy his life.
But I had something that would make his day.
Week.
Reverse the past seven years of misery.
I stepped close, hands on his desk. “I saw one.”
Simms’ eyebrows were thin, and the wrinkles on his forehead furrowed more. His expression pursed in a perpetual disappointment, but the buzz-cut made him especially unapproachable. He clipped it short for practical reasons. Easy to wash in the bathroom, easier to get done on a break between cases.
“Yeah.” Simms rubbed his eyes, pushing his thumbs so hard against his face I wondered if the dark circles were bruises and not a lack of sleep. “I see the girls everywhere too.”
“I saw a video. I responded to an unrelated case—”
Ben was quick to correct me. “We responded.”
“—and the perv had a video of one of the Poppy girls.”
His flicker of interest extinguished almost immediately. Simms avoided looking at the television in the corner when we mentioned the girls. It was deliberate. A windbreaker obscured most of the TV. It wasn’t a good place for a coat, but it’d hide any images of the girls that had burned into the screen. Couldn’t say the same for his retinas.
It wasn’t a job that anyone wanted, but he did it.
And now maybe we’d have a chance to end it.
“The video wasn’t…” I hated the word. “Pornographic. The little girl was Kaitlyn Gibson. She was talking to the camera man. Answering questions, like he was interviewing her.”
Simms nodded. “Pink dress?”
Damn it. He knew it. “Yeah.”
“That’s an old one. Three years or so.”
A bitterness crept into Ben’s voice. “Huh. She looked about twelve to me.”
Simms dumped his soup into the garbage, the cup thunking against the can. “Probably. That’s one of the last videos we’ve found of Kaitlyn. She aged out.”
“Aged out?”
Simms didn’t sugar-coat it, and it left a bitter taste in all our mouths. “The man kidnapping and raping these girls prefers if they’re prepubescent. Once they hit puberty, he gets rid of them. Finds another girl from Poppy Drive.”