Suffer the Children

by Lisa Black

  “Must be tough when you grill steaks.”

  “I’m a cop,” Riley said. “Who can afford steaks?”

  *

  Luis Borgia studied the two men. The tall one looked tough, kind of like his stepfather but with even more muscle to back it up. The shorter one could easily be outrun—Luis had outrun a lot of cops, and felt confident in this assessment. But for once he didn’t have to. For once he could talk to cops with nothing to hide, no reason to worry. That was weird.

  And he still worried a little, of course.

  White guys. He knew they looked at his dark hair and olive skin and put him in a category somewhere below black guys and bikers. This made him angry. Most things made him angry.

  Justin Quintero said, “Here is Luis. He said he’s okay with talking to you without me in the room, so I’ll leave you to it.”

  The guy ducked out like his pants were on fire and shut the door, leaving Luis behind.

  He took a seat without waiting to be asked, feeling it important to establish that he wasn’t nobody’s bitch and wasn’t going to be pushed around, not this time. They were good-cop, bad-copping him, the big one just staring at him, arms crossed, and the little one being all friendly and shit. Luis’s brother Esteban had clued him in to this technique. He wished Esteban would be at home to rehash this with, but he had had to leave with his hijo de puta father.

  Meanwhile the short one, he gave Luis their names, some blah blah blah that Luis didn’t listen to. The guy even apologized for interrupting his school day, as if Luis were so concerned about his grades that he might worry about missing algebra. The idea made Luis laugh, but he stifled the smirk. Guys usually hit you when you smirked. His stepfather always had.

  He wondered how Esteban was getting on now that he didn’t have Luis and his mom to absorb his father’s blows. Luis had begged the social workers to keep an eye on the kid. They said they would but Luis didn’t believe them. Without an adult making a complaint, Esteban would be on his own.

  He forced his mind back to the present. No one is going to hit you here, his healthy brain said.

  That might be what the docs say, his not-healthy parts argued , but they ain’t in this room now, are they? And these cops know they’re free to question you without a parent or guardian present and without reading your Miranda rights because you’re not arrested or in custody. Though of course he was in custody while in the day program, as he had been required to attend by a judge’s order and his movements were supervised. Either way, he’d better be careful.

  But unless these guys were idiots they had already checked with the teachers and found that Luis had been gone from the building before Rachael left the dorm unit and therefore couldn’t have had anything to do with her death. Even if he could have somehow gotten to the northwest stairwell when all the day program areas were concentrated in the east and south parts of the building. So he had nothing to worry about.

  And he did want to know what had happened to Rachael. If one of those other bitches had pushed her—

  “Did you see Rachael yesterday?”

  “Yes.”

  The short one asked about her “state of mind.” He told them, “She seemed fine. I mean, normal. Complained about the homework, said the bitch—oh, sorry, that’s what we call her—”

  “That’s okay,” Riley assured him. “I had teachers I didn’t like when I went to school, too.”

  Thinking of this old guy as a person his age made Luis smile. “Rachael said having to read a whole chapter was bullshit and she didn’t do it. She never did her homework, really. I started because my mom makes me now—anyway, I sat by her at breakfast and she told me about the new Star Wars movie. She’d read about it in the paper. They get newspapers in residence because they want you to be aware of what’s going on in the world. But they don’t like girl magazines, ’cause they say they’re unrealistic—which I guess they are. But Rachael’d read the paper a lot. She hated school but she wasn’t stupid—she knew a lot of stuff. She was … cool.”

  He was talking too much. They could probably see that he’d wanted in Rachael’s pants since they were ten, before he even knew what girls had in their pants. He’d had girlfriends since, but Rachael had always been more than that. She’d been a friend, not just a girlfriend. And it sucked that the state took her away and made her live with that dirtbag of a grandfather.

  “How did you and Rachael meet?” the cop asked.

  “We lived in the same building when we were kids. On Thirty-Seventh. That was before her dad went to jail. He’d been in jail a few times but just for, like, a couple weeks. He didn’t tell anyone about Rachael so she’d stay by herself until he came back.”

  “How old was she then?”

  “Seven, eight, I think. We’re the same age. I’m two and a half months older. She’d come over when she got hungry and my mom would take care of her.” They would play on the monkey bars at the end of the street, walk to the ratty school, and try to lift candy from the 7-Eleven but the old guy there always caught them. He’d hide in her apartment when his real dad beat up his mother, thinking he could still hear her crying through three apartments of walls, hating himself for not protecting her. But Rachael convinced him not to, that it would just make his dad more angry, that he would just get hurt as well. She used to hang on his arm to keep him from leaving.

  That was why he had healthy parts of him, and unhealthy parts. Seeing his mother bleed and not be able to get out of bed for days and, later, take up with another man who did exactly the same thing had created unhealthy parts. Those parts made him angry all the time and made him yell at his mother and take drugs and beat up other kids who didn’t want to buy the ones he sold. The unhealthy parts weren’t his fault but they were his responsibility.

  The healthy parts of him were the ones that wanted to take care of his mom, that liked playing baseball, that were smart enough to know he needed to get a real job someday so he’d better graduate from high school. Every day he learned more how to listen to the healthy parts and not the other ones. When Dr. Szabo first told him about the parts he thought it was stupid, something you’d tell little kids, but then he began to see how it explained a lot of things. It made sense. Luis liked things to make sense.

  “And then her dad went to jail for a long time?” the short one asked.

  “Yeah. I tried to get my mom to adopt her but she said we couldn’t, the court wouldn’t give her to us with my dad’s record.” Though he knew it didn’t have anything to do with her numerous domestic violence reports—she just didn’t want another mouth to feed; the relationship between him and his mother remained a work in progress.

  He had found Rachael again only to lose her permanently—another reason sadness gripped his heart. “They sent Rachael to her grandfather, who was a—” He couldn’t think of a word bad enough to do justice to Rachael’s violation.

  “Yes, we know. So the next time you saw Rachael—”

  “Here, in class. When she got here a couple weeks ago.”

  “Since that time have you seen her outside this building?”

  Was this guy stupid? “No. She can’t leave. The residents can’t leave. It’s a jail.” Duh.

  “What did she say about being here, at Firebird?”

  “Hated it,” Luis admitted immediately. “Hated the food, hated the classes, hated the other kids. She kind of liked her room, though.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “It had a door. All Rachael wanted was to find a place where she could live alone, without anyone else. I think that’s why she talked to me.” Luis watched his fingers, clasped in his lap. “I think, like, the best time in her life was when her dad went away and nobody knew about her and she could just live in her apartment by herself. Do whatever she wanted, go where she wanted.”

  “Sure,” snorted the big one, “until the building shut the utilities off and she ran out of food.”

  “She was ten,” Luis reminded him. Idiota.

  “Did sh
e get along with the other girls?” the short one asked.

  “No. I mean, she thought they were lame.” Rachael thought everyone was lame, except him. Kinda except him.

  “Any fights? Beefs?”

  “Nah. I think she shoved someone when she first got here, but that wasn’t nothing. She pretty much ignored them.” The other girls, he meant. Not the boys.

  “What about the staff?”

  Luis gave him a shrug, the universal kid gesture to demonstrate don’t know and/or don’t care and/or that’s not important. “She didn’t say nothing.”

  “Ms. Washington?”

  “Called her a bitch, too. But nothing, you know, specific.”

  “She carried a gold ring in her pocket. Do you know who that belonged to?”

  “Huh? No. I—I didn’t know she had …” From some guy? Or had she stolen it? Knowing Rachael—“Look, what happened to her? Why did she fall?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

  Luis didn’t think they were doing much of a job, but he didn’t say so. They were trying (his healthy parts said), so he should help them. If Rachael had a ring from a boyfriend she would have shown it to him. That would be Rachael. “She probably stole it. She must have done a few burglaries, maybe a lot. Everyone does.”

  “Everyone?” the one guy pressed.

  “Yeah. Everyone.” Luis felt the anger welling up. Rachael had helped his loneliness for his absent stepbrother and now she was gone, too, and the adults were as clueless as ever. “You … you don’t get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “What it’s like being from my generation.”

  “That’s a lot of syllables,” the big one muttered. The little one frowned at him. The bad-cop/good-cop thing again, which didn’t fool Luis one bit.

  He said, “You don’t get that every day we go to school and wonder if somebody’s going to shoot us. Maybe over drugs or girls or money or maybe for the hell of it, like those psychos who bring AK-47s and try to kill all the jocks. You want us to focus on getting good grades and following the rules and living up to our potential, but for us, we’re just trying to stay alive.”

  That shut them up for a minute. Then the big one said, “Morality and survival are sometimes mutually exclusive.”

  Luis studied his face for signs of sarcasm, but he didn’t seem to be yanking Luis’s chain. “Yeah. That’s it.”

  After that they let him go, gave him a card and said that if he thought of anything else he should call. Luis threw the card out in the visitor’s area before returning to class—if he got jumped on the way home he wouldn’t want to look like a snitch. If he thought of anything he could tell a teacher to get hold of them but doubted that would be necessary. They would write Rachael off as another bad kid and forget about her. No point getting angry about it, that was just the way it was.

  It occurred to him that he had talked to cops without being, or getting, in trouble. He hadn’t gotten in a fight and they hadn’t threatened him with juvie. Maybe Dr. Szabo was right.

  Maybe his healthy parts were winning.

  *

  Outside on the sidewalk Jack drew a deep breath. “We done?”

  “I think so. Autopsy said no drugs, no weird bruises. No one heard a scream or saw an argument. Doing a headstand in therapy. You think she was fooling around on the railing and fell?”

  “It makes more sense than anything else. She didn’t sound suicidal or even depressed.”

  “Their moods turn on a dime at that age, though,” Riley said. He waved to a motorcycle cop cruising by, eyed a hot dog cart across the street, and then plopped into the driver’s seat of their assigned car. Jack settled opposite him. “I speak from experience. And not that it’s a consideration but it doesn’t do anyone any good to have her go down as a suicide, least of all those kids in there. Suicide can be contagious.”

  “More things point to accident anyway. She’d been cocky, forward looking, possibly athletic, and not interested in kitchen duty. It’s a lot easier to picture her deciding to fool around on the bannisters instead of figuring out that she’d never dig herself out of the sinkhole life had thrown her into.”

  “Yeah. I’ll tell the ME we’re good with death from misadventure. I’m sure they’ll agree. Ready for lunch? That hot dog smell got me going.”

  Jack said sure, glancing up at the stone building as they pulled away. He didn’t expect a return visit to the Firebird Center anytime soon.

  As usual, he was wrong.

  Chapter 7

  Monday

  Maggie taped one end of a bright pink string to the wall, rubbing the piece of duct tape to be sure the string’s end wouldn’t escape. Then she dabbed a chunk of the tape to the other end and held it out—gently—with one hand while holding a protractor to the wall with the other. When the extended string made an angle of thirty-two degrees she attached the free end to a vertical metal rod protruding upward from a heavy metal base, making sure the angle stayed at thirty-two. All was well for a moment, but then the end taped to the wall snaked through its duct tape anchor and fell to the floor. Maggie breathed out a quiet and uncharacteristic swear word.

  “This is the part they never show you on TV,” her boss, Denny, agreed. He used a disposable pipette to douse a different section of the wall with Amido Black, trying to darken a pair of bloody handprints. The Amido Black would turn the red ridges to a deep black. If the friction ridge patterns were clear enough to compare and didn’t belong to the victim, they had to belong to the killer.

  Maggie used the protractor again and retaped the string. “That’s because on TV they have cool lasers and foggers and a set of twenty-five tripods and they do it all in high heels.”

  “That’s your problem. You’re not wearing high heels.”

  “It’s bad enough in boots.” She sat cross-legged on the floor in worn BDU pants and department-issue steel-toed shoes, her back curved in a hunch to be able to view the bloodstain directly on without skewing the loupe’s perspective. Her neck ached. The hardwood planks hadn’t been swept and certainly not washed in months or years, but at least without carpeting she didn’t have to worry—or so she hoped—about fleas. The cockroaches had disappeared into their cracks and would stay hidden as long as she kept moving.

  She moved on to the next bloodstain, holding a rounded plastic magnifying loupe to the red spot on the wall. Bloodstains when they struck a surface at a less than ninety-degree angle formed an oval shape. Dividing the width of this oval by its length gave her the angle at which the drop hit the wall. The loupe had a built-in scale to measure with. She did the math on the wall in pencil, next to the drop. Any new owners would have to paint the wall anyway and a few pencil marks would be the least of their worries compared to all the blood and especially the Amido Black. That stuff stained like the dickens.

  Her problem lay in that after a drop hit the wall, while most of the blood would instantly stick, momentum would push the still-liquid extra bit farther to form a tail. This tail could obscure the exact end, and therefore the exact length, of the drop. Even half a millimeter changed the angle by more than a few degrees. Between this lack of precision and the duct tape and carrying the heavy rod bases up two flights of dingy apartment steps, she couldn’t help thinking there had to be a better way.

  Denny doused the wall again with tap water, rinsing off the excess Amido Black. It pooled in a gray mess mostly caught by a wad of paper towels at the baseboard. He made a satisfied little sound, meaning that a sufficient amount of ridge detail appeared and could be able to be compared to a suspect’s known prints. The forty-year-old mother of three had been taken to the Medical Examiner’s office for her final appointment with a doctor—a forensic pathologist—but with luck her blood remained to tell them who had killed her. So far everyone’s bet rested on an abusive ex-husband.

  “So you’re back with Dr. Michaels again,” Denny said.

  Ping. The next string also slipped from its duct tape, possibly because Ma
ggie’s hand had twitched. “Yes. Again.”

  “You don’t have to sound so aggrieved. The department is trying to make sure you’re okay with two different people nearly killing you in the past, oh, six months. Three, if you count the guy who shot at you on Euclid.”

  “That one doesn’t count. He wasn’t aiming at me,” Maggie said, knowing that might not be true.

  “Besides, I thought you said you liked her.”

  “She’s a nice lady. I’m sure she’s an excellent doctor, too. But I don’t need her and I’m sure many people in this county do, so I hate wasting her time.”

  “Very altruistic of you,” Denny commented, pointedly neutral.

  “Okay, I hate wasting mine, too. Damn. Can’t we at least get those little plastic anchors with sticky wax?”

  “Tried ’em. They pull off even more easily than the tape. And before you mention lasers again remember that in order to photograph the cool lights in the cool fog we’d have to cover all the windows to get it dark in here. I know how much you love doing that when we spray luminol.”

  She didn’t admit that, yes, by the time they did all the prep and set up all the tripods and blocked out all the light, cool lasers would take longer than the tape-and-protractor route and still be harder to photograph. But she’d rather talk about forensic equipment requests than her visits with the department shrink. Dr. Michaels seemed an excellent psychologist—certainly good enough to figure out that Maggie still kept a whole lot of things locked inside herself. And Maggie didn’t need anyone getting near her with a key.

  “Well, just do the mandatory. No going around that.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Denny squinted at the wall, his black skin glistening in the stuffy apartment. “I’ve got most of the interdigital here.”

  “Good.”

  “Let’s hope it’s his and not hers.”

  “The odds are good. There’s no more blood in the hallway and this is the only spray on the walls. With that huge pool by the couch—she went down and stayed down. She didn’t stagger around the place.”