Amid the Shadows

by Michael C. Grumley

  Griffin could see her beginning to get angry. Roberts instructed everyone in the room, except Griffin and Buckley, to drop everything and search first the floor then the entire hotel. She also had the hotel’s security team checking all footage from the cameras. A kidnapping was a different priority to cops. A kidnapping meant there was still hope.

  “Get everything,” Roberts said, “ballistics, tire marks, every fingerprint we can find, everything.”

  Suddenly, one of the investigators burst into the room. “Come quick!” He disappeared back out into the 8th floor hallway with the others running after him. They ran down to the end of the hallway where a laundry cart sat next to one of the doors and another officer was waiting. They all came to a stop and looked at him expectantly. The officer calmly motioned toward an oversized cloth laundry bag. At the bottom sat a small blond girl, looking up, and scared to death.

  4

  Christine Rose parked her old, silver Honda in front of the 19th Precinct station on East 67th Street and climbed out from behind the wheel. She looked up at the five-story gray and red building, swallowed hard. Slowly climbing the half dozen steps, she reached for the large blue door and jumped back when the door suddenly flew open. She turned and watched an angry teenager storm down the steps. Being one of the nearest police stations to Central Park, the 19th was always busy and filled with interesting people.

  She walked in and showed her ID to the sergeant behind the front desk who gave her a pen and slid a thick book in front of her for a signature. He then pointed her to the elevator and turned to help the next person. She walked gingerly down the hall and waited for the elevator, watching people pass back and forth. Christine took a deep breath when the doors opened and stepped inside. It had been over two years since she had last been there.

  A few moments later, she stepped out onto the fifth floor. She peered through the double-glass doors and spotted the person she was looking for. She took a deep breath, pulled the door open, and walked through. Crossing the room, Christine stopped just outside the last office. Through the glass door, she could see Cheryl Roberts sitting next to a tiny girl, holding her hand.

  “Christine?”

  She turned to see Detective Griffin behind her. “Oh…hi Danny,” she said, with a brief but nervous wave.

  Griffin looked around with a confused expression. “What are you doing here?”

  Christine took a breath. “Well, it’s nice to see you too.”

  “Sorry,” he said, “I just meant…”

  “That’s okay.” She looked at the little girl and then back at Griffin. “I, uh, was assigned this case.”

  “Really?” he asked, surprised. “You’re with Social Services now?”

  Christine nodded and gave him a meek shrug. “I got reassigned. That’s why it took so long.”

  “I see,” Griffin said, looking over her shoulder at the girl. “Listen, Christine. I’m not sure if you’re ready for this. This little girl has gone through some serious trauma.”

  Christine fumbled for her purse and pulled out a folder. “I know. I read the report. How is she? They said it was a homicide.”

  Griffin sighed and shook his head. “It’s hard to say. Roberts has been with her all morning, but she hasn’t said anything. Looks like her mother was thrown out of a window, and she may have heard the whole thing. She hasn’t slept all night.”

  “Right.” Christine nodded, watching them. She suddenly remembered something and reached into her bag. “I brought her some food.” She pulled out a small package.

  Griffin looked at the package and frowned. “Donuts?”

  “What?” Christine said innocently. “Kids love donuts.”

  Griffin’s frown turned into a smirk. “I hope you don’t have a soda in there too.”

  Christine didn’t answer. Instead, she looked at the man approaching from the other direction.

  Griffin turned as Buckley reached them. “Oh, Christine. This is my partner, Mike Buckley. Mike, this is Christine Rose with Social Services. She’s here for Sarah Baxter.”

  Buckley shook Christine’s hand. “Nice to meet you.” He pulled out a small doll and handed it to her. “I found this in the lost and found. I thought maybe she’d like it.”

  Christine smiled and took the doll. “Thank you.” She gave Griffin one more look and turned away, knocking gently on the glass door and cracking it open. She walked softly across the room, hoping her nervousness was not entirely obvious. When she got to the couch, Roberts patted Sarah’s hand and stood up while Christine slowly sat down on the other side of her.

  “Hello, Sarah,” she said softly. “My name is Christine.”

  Sarah looked at her apprehensively with big green eyes, but said nothing.

  Christine nodded to herself and looked at the other three standing outside watching her. She remembered the doll and held it up for Sarah to see. “Sarah, do you like dolls?”

  Sarah stared at the doll and nodded. Christine held it out, and Sarah cautiously took it from her hands. Okay, Christine thought to herself. Here we go.

  She cleared her throat. “Sarah, I work with these nice policemen, and we just want to make sure you weren’t hurt.”

  Sarah did not answer.

  “Sarah, I know you’re scared, but I’m here to help you. Can you tell me if you were hurt?”

  She remained focused on the doll. After a few moments, Sarah slowly shook her head.

  “You were not hurt?”

  Eyes still down, Sarah shook her head again.

  “Okay.” Christine put her hands between her knees and looked at Sarah’s doll. “So, you like dolls?”

  Sarah nodded.

  “Me too.” Christine smiled, watching her begin to play with it. “Sarah, can you tell me how old you are?”

  She held up six fingers.

  “You’re six?” Christine said, with raised eyebrows. “You’re…really getting to be a big girl.”

  Christine looked at Griffin outside and reluctantly pulled the donuts back out of her bag. “Are you hungry? I brought you something to eat.”

  Sarah looked at the donuts and mumbled something under her breath.

  “What’s that?”

  Sarah said it again a little louder. “I’m not supposed to eat that.”

  Christine frowned. “Ah, okay.” She reached into her bag again and brought out a small juice box. “How about orange juice? Are you thirsty?”

  Sarah looked up at her and then to the box. She nodded and took the juice when Christine nudged it into her hand. She carefully unwrapped the straw, poked it into the top of the box, and took a long drink. When she was finished, Christine took the empty box back and very gently placed her hand on Sarah’s knee.

  “Sarah, I want you to come with me so I can take care of you. Would that be okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Christine smiled. “Okay!” She slowly stood up and reached for Sarah, who also stood, placing her tiny hand inside Christine’s.

  Christine took a deep breath and smiled. She began to walk forward when little Sarah suddenly pulled on her hand, stopping her.

  “Did my mommy die?”

  Christine’s smile promptly disappeared.

  5

  “So, that’s Christine,” Buckley said. They stood at the window upstairs watching Christine down on the street, fumbling with a car seat in the back of her Honda. She finally managed to get it right and buckled Sarah in.

  “Yeah.”

  Buckley nodded. “She’s cute.”

  “Shut up,” Griffin replied, watching the car drive off.

  Buckley turned from the window and looked at him. “So, what was the problem again?”

  “She has…some issues.”

  He nodded. Both men turned around when someone called out for them.

  “Phone call on line six!”

  Griffin walked to a nearby desk and picked up the phone. “This is Griffin.”

  Buckley turned and watched a large television on the wall w
here several officers were following the coverage of the explosion at Saint Patrick’s. All of the major news channels were onsite. As he watched, another officer approached and handed him a Post-it note.

  After a few minutes, Griffin thanked the caller and hung up. He turned back to Buckley. “Do you know a Glen Smith over at FBI?”

  Buckley shook his head.

  “Said he was supposed to meet with Barbara Baxter today.”

  “About what?”

  Griffin shrugged. “He didn’t know. Says she wouldn’t tell him over the phone.” He paused. “What did she do for a living?”

  “Secretary for a law firm.”

  “Right.” Griffin looked out the window thinking.

  Buckley held up his note. “We just got a message from forensics; looks like they found blood in the stairwell at the hotel. And it doesn’t match the victim.”

  “Let’s check it out.”

  In the forensics lab, Patty Eisendrath sat across the room on a stool, dressed in her usual white lab coat and staring into a large electron microscope. Eisendrath was arguably the best forensic scientist in New York state and, according to Buckley, one of the prettiest, too. So far though, his queries had resulted in zero dates. Which was just another reason why Griffin considered her about as smart as they came.

  They walked up behind her and waited quietly.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” she said without taking her eyes from the microscope lenses.

  The detectives looked at each other. Before they could speak, she answered their question.

  “It’s Buckley’s cologne.”

  Buckley, shorter and stockier than Griffin and showing the first signs of losing some hair, almost blushed.

  Patty turned away from the instrument and held up a finger while she jotted down some quick notes. She looked up expectantly. “You obviously got my message. Did you check out the hotel?”

  Griffin nodded. “We just came from there. Saw the blood in the stairwell. Looks like he made a run for it out the back parking lot.”

  “He and the others,” she said standing up.

  “Others?” Buckley asked.

  They followed her to a large desk where she sat down and brought up a computer file, displaying several pictures of blood drops. “These are the blood samples we found descending the stairwell and out through the parking lot. Same blood type, same DNA, so one person was bleeding.”

  Griffin leaned in for a closer look. “You said others?”

  Patty nodded and pointed to one of the drops. You can see a pattern here in this drop.” She zoomed in to display a higher resolution image of shapes within the drop of blood.

  “What is that?” Buckley asked.

  “That’s a shoe print.”

  “A shoe print?” he asked again. “It just looks like some random markings.”

  “Most of it is, but here,” she highlighted an area of the screen, “you have a few impressions that are clearly part of a design from a shoe tread.” She zoomed in on another large drop. “And here we have part of a tread again, but this one’s a little different.” She spun her chair to face them. “And since it’s nearly impossible to step on your own blood drops while running, that means there was a minimum of three people fleeing the scene, probably at the same time.”

  Buckley raised his eyebrow. “So we need to start tracking down sole patterns of popular shoes.”

  Patty smirked. “No, I just thought you might find it helpful. There’s not enough here to determine what kind of shoes they were. Besides, we would have to factor in additional variables such as speed of the run, the body’s natural tendency to pivot the foot while running, and a host of other things.”

  “Okay,” Griffin said, looking at her. “I’m guessing you didn’t call us in to show us something that was just helpful.”

  Patty frowned. “Of course not. What I wanted to show you was the other sample, which is much more interesting.”

  “What other sample?” Griffin asked.

  “They didn’t tell you there was another sample?”

  Both Griffin and Buckley looked at each other and shook their heads.

  Patty smiled. “Well then, this is really going to cook your noodle.” She brought up another sample. This one was much larger. “The blood on the stairs was noticed first, which is why those were the first samples. However, when the investigators came back upstairs, they checked all the floors and carpets with Luminol.”

  Griffin and Buckley were both very familiar with Luminol. It was the crystalline agent used to make blood visible in a darkened room, primarily by reacting with the hemoglobin in blood. Every forensics team used it.

  “When they sprayed the hallway outside the room,” Patty continued, “it lit up like a Christmas tree!”

  “So there was more blood in the hallway,” Buckley surmised.

  “Not just more blood,” Patty corrected, “a lot of blood! And from a different person.”

  She brought up a picture of the hallway. “It wasn’t noticed originally because the carpet is dark red. But judging from the sheer amount detected, this person stayed in that hallway for a long time.”

  Griffin looked at Buckley. “So someone else was injured, and they just decided to hang around?”

  Buckley shook his head. “But security was there in a few minutes. How much could someone bleed standing in the hallway for three or four minutes?”

  “Well, let’s put it this way,” Patty said folding her arms. “I’ve never seen that much blood without a dead person lying next to it. Whoever it was, I would say they had less than twenty minutes to make it to an emergency room, at the most.”

  6

  The site of the Saint Patrick’s explosion was somber, with only a third of the cathedral still standing. The rest of the area was leveled and covered in dust and rubble over twenty feet high. Every pane of glass, even from the walls that were still standing, was gone and now scattered in millions of fragments, some landing as far as two hundred yards away.

  On three sides, the site was surrounded by emergency vehicles and construction equipment. Three days later, the crews were still finding bodies beneath the destruction.

  Several bulldozers and backhoes belched smoke and picked through the rubble, lifting and moving the largest pieces so the search and rescue crews could comb below them. From a distance, hundreds of people watched and hoped for miracles, for another person to be carried out with a stretcher instead of a body bag.

  Among all of the rescue workers, one individual was not looking for survivors. He was looking at something else. Carefully stepping through the large pieces of crushed stone, he examined the walls that were still standing. He looked at them thoughtfully, then turned and traced out where the cathedral’s multiple altars had been located.

  His tanned, bald head was covered in a light coating of dust as he methodically cleaned the debris from an altar and examined it. Flipping up a pocket on his khaki style shirt, the man withdrew a small camera. He zoomed in and snapped several high resolution pictures before standing up, pushing the debris back in place with his boot.

  7

  Christine sat at the table with the phone to her ear. While she listened, Christine watched Sarah slowly wander around the small living room looking closely at all the framed photographs. Most of the pictures were of Christine in her younger years and included what appeared to be her parents, always smiling with their arms around her. Sarah continued studying the pictures and noticed that her father was missing from a number of them. The more recent photos included only Christine and her mother.

  Christine was speaking to Liz Iverson, a longtime friend and now her boss. Christine’s old department had been disbanded due to budget cuts. Luckily Liz had been able to make a position available for her in her city social services department, in spite of her lack of experience.

  “Okay, that’s fine,” Liz said through the phone’s speaker, “but she’ll need to see a doctor tomorrow.”

  Christine shrugged
and looked across the room at Sarah. She kept her voice low. “I’ll try, but she was really reluctant.”

  “That’s normal. Where are you now?”

  The pitch in Christine’s voice changed slightly. “Um, my apartment.”

  Liz’s sigh could be heard through the phone. “Christine, it’s against policy to take them to our homes.”

  “I know,” she replied. “But she fell asleep in the car, she wouldn’t go to the doctor’s, and she didn’t want to go into the office. I didn’t know what else to do.” Christine watched Sarah bend down and gently pet the top of her cat’s head.

  “Alright, alright,” Liz said. “It’s not the end of the world. Just get her into the office as soon as you can.”

  Christine nodded. “Okay, I will.”

  “Don’t worry Chris, you’re doing fine. I’ll see you tomorrow.” With that Liz hung up, and Christine pushed the button on her cordless phone to end the call. She sighed and looked around her tiny apartment. How did she manage to get herself into this? It was her first real assignment and it felt like she was already doing everything wrong.

  She looked up when she heard her cat hiss. Sarah was grasping the cat by the tail, trying to keep it from going through the cat door.

  “Oh honey!” Christine exclaimed and ran over to help. “It’s okay, she’s allowed to go outside.” She grabbed Sarah’s hand and gently pulled the cat’s tail free. Sarah whined as the small calico quickly darted away, jumping through the tiny plastic door and leaving it swinging behind her.

  “It’s okay, she’ll be back.”

  Sarah frowned and abruptly pulled away from Christine. It was hard to tell whether she was sad or irritated.

  “Are you hungry Sarah?” she asked, standing back up.

  Sarah nodded and lowered herself down on the couch.

  “Do you like eggs?” Christine walked into the small kitchen and opened the refrigerator. “I think I have some cereal, or maybe…a piece of pizza?”