Suffer the Children

by Lisa Black

  “Trina!”

  Through the high window in the door the girl watched her, a triumphant grin creasing her face. She rocked on her toes and clapped her hands in delight at her accomplishment.

  Maggie pulled, to no effect. The chair under the latch didn’t budge. She’d have to either take the hinge pegs out or break the whole door down. Neither would be impossible for a lightweight, interior door whose purpose had been more for privacy than security, but that would be a bit of an overreaction. She wasn’t in any actual danger and Jack would come looking for her, eventually.

  She coughed. The air had turned acrid. How much ammonia had the kid poured into this bucket?

  That’s when she noticed the emptied bottle lying on the floor.

  Bleach.

  Bleach + ammonia = chlorine gas. Chlorine gas, which had killed over ninety thousand soldiers during the First World War. If it didn’t flat-out suffocate it would damage the respiratory epithelium and cause a toxic pneumonitis, not to mention chemical burns. There was no antidote.

  However, Trina used stuff she stole from bathroom duty, not a weapons armory. Even commercial strength bleach wouldn’t be much more than typical household fare, a 5 percent solution, the ammonia perhaps up to 10. The reaction would produce hydrazine, with a melting and boiling point close to water. No explosion of fumes, then, and if she—

  Outside the door Trina watched, her feet shuffling beneath her as if dancing a small jig. Then she launched onto the chair, both holding it in place under the knob and giving her a front-seat view of the show.

  Maggie coughed. And then she coughed again.

  Then she held her breath.

  While doing that she picked up the bucket by the handle and moved it about two feet to the center of the room. She slid the chairs out of the way and upended the entire small table. The magazine and toys slid to the floor. Heavier than she expected but manageable; she flipped it upside down so that the skinny legs pointed to the ceiling. Then she set its flat top onto the top of the bucket, straining to keep it steady. She didn’t want to either crush or tip the bucket, which would leave herself worse off instead of better.

  Her lungs reached the limit of their ability to freeze and she sucked in a half breath. The air felt like a living thing, reaching deep into her alveoli with tiny stabbing knives of pain, but she stifled another cough long enough to get the table situated. The bucket held. The flat surface of its top covered the bucket and would hold in the fumes; they wouldn’t generate much pressure to speak of and definitely not enough to shove the table off. And the pour lip would act as a vent. The lip also made it impossible to completely seal the top but still the fumes would be largely contained. She debated setting a chair on top of the overturned table for good measure but decided that would be unnecessary and possibly destabilizing and she really wanted to breathe now.

  She returned to the door, not that the air was any fresher there, and drew in a deep breath.

  Trina had been watching all this activity, and her smile faded. Her plan to create a mini gas chamber had possibly been foiled. A mighty frown creased her brow.

  The breath made Maggie cough, long and deep. Her stomach roiled until vomiting seemed a possibility.

  This made Trina smile. “You’re going to die! You’re going to suffocate.”

  Maggie made herself stand tall. She stood back from the door and faced its window with crossed arms. “I’m not going to die, Trina. The solutions aren’t strong enough. At worst I might get a headache.”

  The girl’s face fell as she spoke. Perhaps if she convinced Trina that the plot would never prove fatal no matter how long she waited, she’d give up and let her out. Maggie didn’t have time for attempted murder. She had a fiber to identify.

  And her lungs burned. She tried another shallow breath; it caused a cough that made her want to double over but she fought it, stayed upright. Her eyes watered with the effort. For all her calculations of percentages and cubic air space, perhaps she had gotten enough in that first snootful to give her a case of instant bronchitis. Or worse.

  But she could do nothing but stand there and breathe it, one tiny mouthful at a time, until Trina gave up.

  A shape moved behind Trina. Maggie heard Jack’s voice, asking the girl something.

  Trina turned away, her face melting into that same feral mask Maggie had seen. Then the girl threw herself at Jack with all the force in her tiny frame.

  Maggie rushed to the window. Jack saw her and had one quarter second to sum up the situation before Trina was upon him.

  She beat at him with her fists, kicked with both legs. Though twice her size and twice her weight, Jack had not been trained in hand-to-hand combat with a child. He hesitated, not knowing what or where to grab, and in that instant the girl launched herself up and slashed at his face with both hands. The chewed nails couldn’t do much, so she clung to the front of him and bit his neck. Maggie saw his face contort in pain.

  “Jack!” she shouted.

  In her distress she forgot to keep her breaths shallow and sucked in enough chlorine-tinted air to double over in coughing. It felt as if she might leave a lung on the carpet. Five percent was still too damn much.

  The door flew open, and Jack stood in the open space. Blood flowed from the wound on his neck. Beyond him she saw Trina’s still form, prone on the linoleum floor of the visiting area.

  “Jack,” Maggie wheezed, “what did you do?”

  He grabbed her by the shoulders and yanked.

  Chapter 25

  The black, portly, chatty EMT who cleaned and patched the wound over Jack’s carotid asked if he had been attacked by a vampire. And he didn’t seem to be kidding. When told it had been an undernourished fourteen-year-old girl, the guy said only, “I hope she had all her shots.”

  “Me too,” Jack said.

  Two seats away from him, Maggie coughed again. She had an oxygen mask strapped over her nose and mouth and her watery eyes watched him, the brows pointing down in a heavy frown. Then she ripped the mask off to demand, “Where is she?”

  “Keep that oxygen on,” the EMT ordered. Maggie gave him a darker look than Jack had ever seen from her, ignored the demand, and repeated the question, complete with cough.

  Jack told her, “She’s in the infirmary, getting ice on her jaw. She’ll be up and attempting murder again in no time.”

  “You didn’t have to hit her so hard.”

  He held up the bandage, now soaked with his own blood. “Hello! I’m going to have to get twenty-one shots now—”

  “It’s not that many,” the EMT corrected. “It’s only four or five now. And—”

  “Not to mention the fact that she was trying to kill you. You’re welcome, by the way.”

  Maggie said, “I wasn’t in any danger. All I needed you to do was open the door—” Her shoulders ducked and she spewed out coughs that sounded deep and wet. She slapped the oxygen mask to her face.

  The EMT continued, “And it’s not necessary unless her blood turns up abnormalities. A course of antibiotics—”

  “I didn’t know that, did I?” Jack guessed that he sounded silly and that annoyed him even more than his bleeding neck.

  Maggie took away the mask long enough to ask the EMT if he had seen Trina.

  “No, my partner’s got her. She didn’t lose consciousness, just had the breath knocked out of her and a goose egg on her jaw—”

  “What do you think, I killed her?” Jack demanded, even while not believing he would say such a thing out loud and in front of a witness. But, more importantly, Maggie’s glare told him that, yes, that had been exactly what she’d thought.

  As if that would have been a bad thing. Trina was a crazy, homicidal menace.

  He didn’t bother trying to explain that to Maggie. These days there was a lot he didn’t bother trying to explain to Maggie, he thought sourly.

  “We’ll have to start her on antibiotics, too—” the EMT mused. “I’m sure you don’t have any communicable diseases, du
de, so don’t take it personally. It’s just the accepted protocol to avoid infection from the usual mouth bacterias—”

  “All right,” Maggie said, and took one last suck of the oxygen before hanging the mask over the tank and turning to Jack. “Are you ready?”

  The EMT stuck one more piece of medical tape to Jack’s neck. It felt as if the guy had used most of the roll. “For what?”

  “To find out if Trina has succeeded in anyone else’s murder.”

  “Sweetie!” Carol exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”

  “I have to identify a fiber,” Maggie wheezed.

  “Can’t anyone—well, no. I guess you’re it, huh?”

  Maggie didn’t bother to agree, only moved to the microscopy bench and got out a glass slide, a glass cover slip, and a heavy brown bottle of liquid mounting medium. Fiber and hair comparisons were rarely done anymore in a field that preferred the certainty of fingerprints and DNA. No one new had been trained, which left Maggie the only fiber analyst within a hundred miles.

  “Can you breathe okay?” The older woman hovered. “You sound wheezy. We heard that some little juvenile delinquent tried to gas you.”

  “Bleach and ammonia.”

  “Fabulous,” Carol said. “Hydrazine. How are your eyes? Will you even be able to see through that microscope?”

  “They’re still burning a little, but not too bad. Mostly it just gave me an instant case of bronchitis.”

  “Which will probably turn into pneumonia.”

  “You’re not cheering me up.” Maggie pulled out the tiny envelope with the fiber and made a concerted effort to stop coughing. She had one, tiny fiber. If she blew it away into the oblivion of the lab’s floor, their chance to stop the murders of children would be lost.

  “Sorry. Can I get you anything? Coffee? Tissue? Z-Pak?”

  “Coffee would be great. The EMTs have me covered for the rest.”

  Carol moved off and Maggie took a slow, tentative breath. She had to think and move calmly, slowly, deliberately. Her lungs would have to cooperate until she got the fiber stuck in the liquid Permount. Then it would be secure even in case of a typhoon.

  Her lungs were having none of it. So she let them hack while she put a few drops of the clear viscous liquid onto the slide. Then, fine-tipped tweezers in hand, she flipped open the top of the envelope. The slender thread had at least been dyed a helpful dark color and even with watering eyes she could see it nestled in the bottom. Another shallow breath, and she plunged the tweezers inside.

  A tickle sprouted at the bottom of her right lung. It quickly spread to the bronchia.

  She moved hands, envelope, and tweezers to just over the slide, reducing the distance the fiber needed to travel to about two inches. She willed her torso to freeze, commanded her lungs and even her blood to stop all movement just until she got the thing in the sticky stuff please.

  It didn’t listen. The alveoli went into a quivering frenzy, wanting to cough, wanting to breathe in and out and up and down, all at once.

  She pulled the fiber from the envelope. It seemed to have lost half its mass inside the manila and seemed barely visible. But perhaps that was only her irritated eyes. Move it to the tiny puddle of Permount—

  She sneezed.

  No, no, no!

  It had disappeared. No—the spasm had made her hand dip and clench, so that the tweezers held the fiber but had also dipped into the Permount and now the fiber wouldn’t come off the tweezers. She used its predicament to take a moment to cough the tickle out of her body, then used another set of tweezers and a solvent to get the fiber both freed from the tweezers and stuck enough in the Permount, dropped on a cover slip, and that, thankfully, was that. After, of course, she cleaned the sticky stuff off both sets of tweezers before they were ruined for good.

  She moved the slide under the light microscope and promptly determined that the miniscule piece of thread consisted of two fibers, a thin cotton and a wider synthetic. They were both the same shade of brown. A trip to the polarizing microscope made the synthetic fiber glow with the pale pinks and greens of polyester. Probably a pair of cheap work gloves.

  Maggie made a quick note of the polyester’s diameter and cross-sectional shape. If their crime scene had been a home, a pair of work gloves wouldn’t be much in the way of evidence. Every home owner needed a pair. But in a school–slash–jail–slash–office building, they would be harder to explain away except for the maintenance man or the construction crew. Someone—perhaps Ms. Washington—had said that the children didn’t maintain a winter wardrobe as they didn’t have the storage space. There had been no construction work under way on the roof and it didn’t appear to get a lot of maintenance, either.

  Maybe this would lead to the killer. He or she couldn’t have known to get rid of them, had no reason to think they would turn into damning evidence.

  And Trina. Did Trina have a pair? Maggie could easily picture the girl scaling the chain link as if she were in Cirque du Soleil. She would barely have dented the links.

  At some point she would have to deal with the fact that the little girl she had befriended had tried to kill her. She knew she shouldn’t take it personally—obviously Trina had severe issues—but when her eyes still burned and her lungs ached it was damn hard not to.

  Carol returned with a steaming, fragrant mug, proclaiming, “Caffeine. It cures all ills.”

  “I’m eternally grateful. But can I get it to go?”

  Chapter 26

  Jack had begun to wish he’d accompanied Quentin Sherman’s body to its autopsy instead of Riley. Jack felt much more comfortable around dead bodies than convincing a live judge to authorize the search of a building full of county employees and disadvantaged children. He’d made Jack strike out the part that included computer data and cell phones, saying that to his knowledge technology had not advanced to the point where a pair of gloves could be hidden in cyberspace.

  But at last the guy had signed the thing so Jack only needed to pick up his car keys, which he had stupidly left on his desk blotter, and get out of the building before Maggie realized he’d gone. She didn’t need to sit in on a search, coughing all over creation and providing a target for any other murderous teens.

  Speaking of Maggie, her ex-husband sat at his desk in the nearly empty homicide unit. Gardiner seemed to spend a lot of time at his desk. Crimes were solved mostly by legwork but you would never know it from watching Rick Gardiner.

  As Jack’s fingers closed over his key fob, he looked up and said, “Where you from, Renner?” in a friendly tone that didn’t fool Jack in the least.

  “Huh?”

  “You’re not from Cleveland, originally, right? So where you from?”

  “Minneapolis. Why?”

  “You don’t have an accent. Like in Fargo, yah?”

  “Didn’t grow up there.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  Jack couldn’t figure out if Gardiner was just wasting time, at which he excelled, or had some bug up his butt. Jack had never spent more than two seconds trying to figure out Gardiner, and began to wonder if he should.

  “Where you from before that?”

  “I’ve got to go, Gardiner.”

  “I was talking to an old pal of mine in Minneapolis the other day.”

  “Fabulous. Still got to go. We have a bunch of dead kids and no answers.”

  “Howie Romero. You remember him?”

  Yes. He’d better start spending some time figuring Gardiner out. Jack picked up his keys, fixed his gaze on the other man, and asked, “You call him Howie?”

  Gardiner’s smug look faltered. “You didn’t?”

  “Not unless I wanted to get stuck on night shift on the north side.”

  Gardiner’s mouth fell slightly open. Jack left the room with his keys, his search warrant, and a slight smile.

  He made it as far as the hallway before running into Maggie.

  “Brown cotton/poly,” she said.

  He moved past her and aimed f
or the bank of elevators, still hoping for a quick getaway. “Good. I’ve got the warrant and Riley’s going to meet me—”

  She grabbed the cuff of his sleeve, pinching an inch firmly between thumb and forefinger and not letting go even after he snapped to a halt. “Kind of like what you’re wearing.”

  He met her gaze, giving the words a moment to sort out into some kind of sense. They didn’t.

  “What?”

  A surreptitious glance around to be sure they were alone in the hallway, and she stepped closer.

  “You—” She stopped, swallowed, and started again. “You kill to prevent future crimes. These kids are all future criminals, unless all the classes and therapies and structure turn them around, and for many the odds aren’t good. That’s right up your alley.”

  “You think I killed all these kids?”

  “Why not? You helped in Derald Tyson’s arrest, knew the difficulties of keeping him inside due to his age. You might have gone there looking for him and found all these other kids who were never going to peacefully reenter—”

  “And how would I be getting in and out of the Firebird Center without being noticed? All the exits are monitored. The staff all know each other and they have a set routine for coming and going—”

  “The kids’ movements are regimented. Adults can roam at will, and there’re always family visitors, attorneys, parole officers in and out. We’ve been all over that place for the past week and never once did anyone challenge us or even ask what we were doing there.”

  He couldn’t believe this. This weird—arrangement—between himself and Maggie couldn’t continue if she was going to suspect him of every murder that took place within city limits. Even if she sometimes hit the mark.

  He put his hands on her shoulders. “Maggie. I didn’t kill these kids. I didn’t even know these kids existed, and even if I had, you’re missing the important point. They were already in custody. They weren’t out on the streets, hurting innocent people, impervious to law enforcement.”