by Lisa Black
“They’re like a cryptogram,” Riley observed.
“Yeah, sorta! Kids’ behavior is their communication. They’re acting the way they are because they’re trying to figure something out. A baby throws all his food on the floor, and Mom has to run around cleaning it up. Once that’s done, he thinks about it and then deliberately does it again.”
“I remember those days,” Riley said.
“The kid isn’t being a little shit. He’s studying the phenomenon of Mom freaking out. Why did that happen? Let’s re-create the circumstances and see if we get the same result.”
“Actually, I’m pretty sure Hannah was just being a little shit.”
“Hang on.” Hunter left them to join a group of the three biggest boys in the yard, whose body language had become confrontational. Within minutes they had been dispatched, not too reluctantly, to other spots of the playground to move around equipment or help out a younger one.
The blond man retook his sentry position, continuing a lecture he apparently felt he had begun. “A good rule of thumb is however the kid is making you feel, that’s how they’re feeling. Kids who are overwhelmed by anger become aggressive and disruptive to make you angry. Cocky, experimenting-with-sex preteens make us feel uncomfortable, unmoored, because they’re discombobulated by the changes that are occurring in themselves, and more than a little frightened by them. The kid who’s constantly breaking the rules actually wants the restrictions made clear, because their life seems unpredictable and chaotic—we get that a lot with kids who get shifted from house to house with unreliable parents who disappear and reappear without warning. We worry over kids who mope around like they’re worried sick.”
“That one’s moping.” Jack referred to a little girl who slumped against the chain link, watching the other children without interest. Her face remained blank, changing only to a concerned frown if anyone came too near.
“And I’m worried. The boisterous, the aggressive kids can be a pain in the neck but at least they’re still trying to have a relationship with other kids and adults. The withdrawn ones have given up all hope. They’re the ones you really have to watch. I have to make sure she knows that I know she’s here, that I care, that I’m watching out for her. Okay, Shonda?” He shouted the last two words to the girl. She briefly met his gaze, her only response.
“And Damon?” Jack asked, unable to see where all this information could get them, other than ready to schedule a vasectomy.
“Damon … Damon was a combination of many things. Damon was exactly like a man transported to a future world, overwhelmed by the new sounds, things, colors, smells, living beings in it. He was starved for human contact so he grabbed it with both hands. Literally. Every game was tackle, not tag. Most of the kids in the under-twelve residence have been abused, so they’re hypersensitive to touch as it is. They’d pull away, push him away, or ignore him. All of which only sharpened his need, so he’d get even more physical.”
The three men took two steps to the rear as a rubber ball skidded in front of them, followed by two boys running neck and neck and a third who seemed to be keeping up simply for the company, without any real interest in the ball.
“But of course Damon was also deeply angry.”
“At his mother?”
“Certainly, if he could put that into conscious thought. His mother, society, the world. Children are born knowing that it’s the job of us, the adults, to take care of them. When we don’t, they know they’ve been cheated. Damon knew he had been wronged, and the flip side to being freed to live with normal, quote unquote, children is that he knew it more every day. This amazing world had been kept from him, so he’d bounce between joy at every new discovery and fury that it was, only now, discovered.”
“Who did he take it out on?” Jack asked.
“Anyone who crossed his path. Especially anyone who rejected him. The desire for acceptance and the pain of rejection is so deeply ingrained in our DNA that language isn’t necessary. Anyone who pushed him away could expect a blitz in return. He and Martina had a spectacular battle one day. A more neurotypical group of kids would be more understanding, if still terrified, than you’d expect, in the way they understand when their infant brother pokes them in the eye. But these kids have too many of their own issues to be sanguine about someone else’s.”
“Any adults?” Jack asked. “That he attacked?”
“Oh, all of us. Ms. Cooper, me, the lunch lady. Size didn’t matter—he’d take you on without hesitation.”
“He did.”
“We passed the fourteen-to fifteen-year-old girls one time—we try to keep the age groups completely segregated, but this is not that big of a building and our routes are limited—and he jumped into them like the Tasmanian devil. Being presented with a new set of human beings overwhelmed what little self-control he’d been learning. He nearly twisted one girl’s arm off.”
“Rachael Donahue?”
“What, the girl who died? No, not her. Some skinny little thing. Name started with a T. She was okay, though.”
“So he terrorized everyone, but was there anyone he seemed afraid of?”
The blond eyebrows shot up. “Damon? He was afraid of everything and nothing. It sounds condescending, but basically, he was a puppy.”
“Are those kids fighting?” Riley asked, regarding the three boys Hunter had interrupted earlier. Two had started throwing punches, though none connected with flesh.
“They’re play fighting. It used to be known as boys being boys when people used to let their kids out of their sight once in a while. It’s how boys learn about their bodies and, believe it or not, show affection, but the flower children decided all aggression is bad and tried to breed it out of our genus. But it’s good for them—until it turns into real fighting. Then I’m here.”
“Puppy?” Jack asked.
“You know how puppies and kittens jump and run at the slightest movement? Then curiosity drives them back. That’s how Damon viewed the world. Every new person seemed like Godzilla, but Godzilla fascinates enough to spawn countless sequels.”
The sun had grown hot and Jack readied to leave. Damon’s history with whoever had come to visit him in the infirmary had died in his mute, reeling, powerfully hungry brain.
One of the boys swung at his mate and this time it did connect. The smack of skin on skin rang up and down the street.
“That’s my cue,” Hunter said, and went to intervene.
Jack said to his partner, “Well, this was pointless.”
Riley pulled the door handle, but it wouldn’t open. They’d have to wait for child psychologist Hunter to let them into the building. The guy couldn’t have a kid he supervised sneaking back into the building while he broke up fights.
While they waited Riley agreed with Jack’s assessment. “All we know so far is that whoever murdered our wild boy is a coldhearted monster if they couldn’t see the puppy inside the Tasmanian devil.”
“Or a child,” Jack said, “who can’t see past his own issues.”
Chapter 21
Maggie met them at the center.
Riley glanced at his watch. “Including the lunch we just ate, I think I’ve only had ten hours in the past three days when I wasn’t at this place.”
She said, “I have the prints we lifted and photographed yesterday. Will they let me have the applicant prints?”
“Yes,” Riley said, “and no.”
With that he meant that Dr. Palmer and the Firebird Center, not unreasonably, had no intention of opening their human resources records to the police en masse. Maggie would be allowed to examine the fingerprint cards collected from the staff when they were hired and compare them to the prints from the infirmary, but she could not remove them from the building or copy them. She could, of course, obtain copies from the state or federal system to which the applicant cards had been sent for their background check, but that would involve a little bit of red tape and a whole lot of time.
The detectives could ex
amine the time cards of the staff members to determine who had been on the premises and when but would not be able to review their personnel files without a warrant. They didn’t really want to anyway, as that would involve too much irrelevant information and if someone there had a history of abusing children that person was unlikely to list it on his or her resume. The only advantage the cops had in this case was a conveniently narrow window of opportunity, so they wanted to filter out the staff to who could have killed Damon, and go from there.
The center gave them a corner of the second-floor visiting room to work in. Maggie spread out at one round table while the detectives set up at another. She decided to wait until they’d narrowed the suspect pool down rather than compare her latent prints to the entire staff of thirty-one. Without the use of a computer program to create a database of the patterns she needed to search, and a corresponding database of the patterns of the staff to compare them to, it would be a long and laborious project. She didn’t relish the idea of spending hours bent over magnifying loupes in a place where she couldn’t adjust the height of the chair or the table. At least the windows gave her a decent amount of light.
While she waited she sorted out her latent print cards into piles containing fingerprints, palm prints, and both. Then she joined the detectives.
“Reese, F.,” Riley read.
Jack checked the time card. “Clocked out at six a.m. Must be night shift.”
“Bailey, G.”
Maggie and Jack both shuffled buff-colored tickets. “Nothing for yesterday,” Maggie said.
Across the room therapist Melanie Szabo led in a parade of people of varying colors, genders, and ages, heading for a private meeting room off the main visiting area. She let the group find their own way and came over to the detectives and Maggie.
They explained their presence and she nodded toward the assemblees. “Family counseling. We make them come up with their own strategy for dealing with their problem child. Rules, schedules, custody, consequences.”
“Wow,” Maggie said.
“Yeah. These sessions can go really well or really bad. Or alternate between both. But most of the time they come up with amazingly precise and effective strategies. It works better in the long run than busybodies like me trying to tell them what to do. If the family isn’t on board, nothing is going to change. Correction, on board and realistic. Even more frustrating than the parents who don’t give a single shit are the ones who are totally dedicated to the kid but in complete denial. Not my kid. Not my parenting technique.”
“That sounds like a thankless task,” Maggie said.
“Sometimes yes. Sometimes folks think we did it all when it was actually them. This group isn’t going to go that route, not today. They’re extra uptight because their kid helped create the disturbance yesterday, helped Quentin smuggle in his gun.”
“I thought they were day students,” Riley said.
“They are. We’re a full-service place; we counsel all involved families. Especially the day students. They walk out of here every day and go home to those same families. And the families are more motivated when the child isn’t in custody—they want to keep them out of custody, but custody will be an inevitable outcome if things don’t change. It gives us a stick to hold over their heads, in addition to the carrot of having a less troublesome kid. When a kid is in residence it’s too easy for them to throw up their hands and wait for us to work magic.”
“Melanie,” a man called from the doorway to the private meeting room.
“Okay, just a sec.”
“How is little Quentin doing?” Jack asked.
“He’s in isolation—meaning his schedule is rearranged to keep him away from any other residents. We try never to do that here. Isolating an already disturbed child only makes their problems worse. But shooting down an acquaintance in cold blood—yeah, we’re not eager to give him another opportunity. On the plus side he’s got the basketball court to himself. I’ve gotta go—a brawl may break out if I don’t get them started.” She hustled over to the meeting room, long skirt rustling around her ankles.
Maggie and the cops continued to work, narrowing down the possible suspects to roughly half of the total employees at the center.
Security officer Coglan stopped to chat as he made his rounds. “You guys making any progress on our poor little wild boy? I heard the ME said definitely murder. I thought poor Doc Palmer was going to have a heart attack. He threw a hissy fit at the DORC board and now they’re going to be doing double time on the renovations. The cameras should all be operational by the end of next week.”
“About time,” Riley said.
“Tell me about it,” he said. “For a high-risk, extremely high-risk, youth place the security infrastructure here wouldn’t be acceptable at a 7-Eleven. But there was no place to put these kids while the work goes on, so—”
Perhaps because of the amount of body heat a large group of people created, the family in counseling had not closed the door to the private meeting room and snatches of their words carried into the visiting area. Officer Coglan stayed on his feet, pacing slowly around their table, obviously listening and obviously monitoring the stress level in the conference room. Violent children learn their violence from adults, after all.
Someone said something in a low tone and a momentary silence ensued. “That was not my fault,” a gravelly voiced woman insisted.
A man spoke in a somewhat high and clear tone: “No, that’d be your new baby daddy.”
“Ain’t his gun.”
“He know where to get one, though, don’t he?”
“Where we living? Everybody know where to get a gun.”
Riley said to his partner, “Is evidence obtained by eavesdropping admissible?”
“I don’t see why not. It’s voluntary admission.”
“In that case we should be taking notes for Property. The gun used did come back to a burglary.”
“But isn’t it technically therapy?” Maggie asked. “So doctor-client privilege—”
A squeal rang out from the room as a chair pushed back. “You ain’t never raised that boy with no discipline. When I was a girl I—”
“When you was a girl you still rode streetcars.”
“So? At least my kids knew what respect meant.”
“It meant their daddy hit them every day. After he was done hitting you.”
“At least they knew who their daddy was.”
“He’s got to get back into that charter school. He ain’t never going to get nowhere without that.”
“Those teachers are insane. You see the amount of homework they give?”
“Why are you worryin’ about where he going to go, when the court say he’s got to be here?”
“He’s doing good here. His grades are decent.”
“He helped a boy kill another boy yesterday. That ain’t decent.”
“And where did he learn that from?!” a woman shrieked.
Melanie Szabo’s voice calmly interjected. “We’re here to talk about Donnell, not ourselves. What habits are going to serve him best to keep him on the path to a productive life?”
“The Johnsons and the Carters,” Coglan said to the detectives. “They’ll make you think the Hatfields and those other folks sat in a circle and sang ‘Kumbaya’ by comparison.”
Szabo’s voice murmured a bit more, then ended with a bald statement that they were all going to stay in that room until they came up with a mutually acceptable plan to schedule Donnell’s time and agree on goals and consequences for all future behavior—for instance, deciding on a curfew, which social activities were curtailed when he violated that curfew, and so on. Until they had a written plan to which all factions could pledge cooperation, no one could leave.
“Melanie—you can’t make us stay here!”
“No, I can’t. But you will. Because no one wants to be the one who gave up on Donnell’s future.”
With that closing salvo she emerged from the room and shut the door b
ehind her. After a shocked moment, the voices started up again, now muffled.
Coglan shook his head. “You are playing with fire, missy.”
“Don’t I know it. You’d better keep some flash-bangs handy.”
Riley watched the closed door for eruptions. “Does that work?”
“You’d be amazed at what they can do. As I said, it has to be their ideas, or the whole process is doomed to failure.”
Coglan kept shaking his head. “I give ’em five minutes.”
Szabo said, “Nah. They’re too stubborn to give in but they’re also too stubborn to give up. I just do this to hurry them along a bit. Lock them in a warm room with no food or water and no bathroom. Don’t you guys do this with suspects? Just wait them out?”
“It’s less effort than bright lights and rubber hoses,” Riley joked.
“I’ll pull those out next if this doesn’t work.”
Jack didn’t appear to have listened to any of this and glanced up from his time cards with a question. “Could a staff member come and go without signing in or punching the time clock or however you do it here?”
The security guard and the therapist exchanged a glance.
“They ripped the time clock out,” Coglan said. “We just fill out a form now.”
Szabo said, “When the key card system is installed that will monitor everything—and not just for security but for billing our hours. Especially ancillary services like me. Efficiency studies, etcetera.”
“But it’s not operational yet?” Jack asked, though he clearly knew the answer and wasn’t happy about it.