Snow and Christmas lights. Arlington and Paxton.
It was about three houses from the corner. Yeah, I remember. Arya made me drive so he could eat his stupid bear claw, or that was his excuse. The old hands always make the rookies drive.
I think the notes I need are in the second box. I pop the cover off and run my fingers down the rows of old notebooks. They smell like old paper and ink. I’ve always liked that smell.
All the notebooks have a date range printed on the front of them. I’ve always been obsessive about keeping good notes and keeping evidence clean, that sort of thing. I like to think that it makes up for my sometimes erratic behavior. I locate the eight notebooks from November and December of that year and flip through the first five or so without finding what I’m looking for. I’d forgotten about a lot of this.
“The shit you see on patrol,” I whisper.
I locate it about halfway through the last notebook. The date is December 18. I shudder. My dad hanged himself on that date. What I wrote in the notebook matches my memory.
We’d gotten the call at about three in the morning, and we were first on the scene.
A girl, maybe thirteen years old, met us in the front yard. She was followed by a younger boy, both of them wearing only thin pajamas. They ran up to me, the girl crying and shrieking in a way that made her seem much younger. Smudges on her pajamas looked as though they could be blood, and when the boy got closer, I could see that there was blood on his hands and pants. Are you okay? I asked them. Did someone hurt you? They nodded. I asked their names, but they gave no reply. I asked where their foster parents were. He was silent, and she wailed that she didn’t know.
I asked them what was wrong, what happened, and who called 9-1-1. The girl clung to me without responding. I helped her into the back of the zone car and told her to sit tight then lifted the boy in to join her. I remember checking them to make sure they weren’t bleeding before locking them in the car.
Hand on his gun, Arya walked toward the house, bellowing an order. I followed him with a flashlight. The radio chattered. The dispatcher said it was a foster home. All the lights were out inside the house. There was only darkness.
I hit the radio and told whoever would listen that we needed Child and Family Services there right away and that we’d stay on-scene until a social worker arrived. We went up the porch steps and entered the house through the front door, calling out that we were police. No answer.
Another girl, a little older than the first, appeared in the hallway by the staircase. She seemed calm. I remember that calm. She directed us to the kitchen. Her voice was like an adult’s but in a child’s timbre. And her eyes… a shiver went down my spine when I looked into those deep-brown eyes that had seen too much. She was covered in blood, much more blood than the other two, but she didn’t seem upset. At first we thought she was hurt, but we checked her out, and she had no injuries. She led us into the kitchen with a weird smile on her face.
In the middle of the kitchen floor was a dead white cat. Its left front paw was severed. Next to it was a ceramic mixing bowl filled with blood. A pair of red-handled hand pruners lay beside the bowl. Blood was splattered on the floor and the white refrigerator.
I don’t remember what I said. Probably something to the effect of “Oh, holy shit.” We cleared the rest of the house, and I remember wondering why no adults were home in the middle of the night. There’s a note in my notebook that there were no signs of forced entry.
Standing in my bedroom, I shake off the memory. I call for Ivan. He comes trotting in and jumps on top of one of the totes.
I don’t remember much about those three kids, but I do recall the younger girl telling me about her little brother Sean not talking much ever since the summer before, when something bad had happened in the woods. She wouldn’t explain further. She said—and I have this written in the notebook—“If I tell, I’ll get hurt, too.” Marnie Miller, aged thirteen, my notebook says.
I remember thinking that somebody had messed with those kids pretty badly. I also remember giving each of them my card and telling them to call me if they needed anything. I don’t remember waiting for the social worker—but someone must have come, or we wouldn’t have left—or following up. We got another call, and Arya talked me into leaving.
I have one more note from that night: What happened? Biological parent showing up to terrorize them? A former resident? Now I’m sure I was wrong.
I send Becker another text: I need a list of everyone who stayed in the foster home at the corner of Arlington and Paxton. I add a date range at the end.
“Wow,” I say to my cat. I slide the old notebook into my inside pocket, in front of the current one.
I clean up the mess I made with my search and turn on a couple of lamps in case it gets dark before I get home. I dump some food into Ivan’s bowl and give him another scratch. He meows once then walks away.
When I get back to the station, Goran is working at his desk. I stop beside him and wait for him to look up.
“Anything on Miller’s condition?” I ask.
“Nothing yet. You look crazy. Are you all right?”
“No, not really. I need to tell you something, but let’s do it in Fishner’s office so I don’t have to go over it twice.”
“Okay, let’s go.” He shuts off his monitor and follows me into the LT’s office.
Fishner is on the phone, but she takes one look at my face and tells the person she’ll call them back. When she hangs up, she waves at the guest chairs. “What’s up, Boyle?”
Goran and I sit down. I fill them in on my hunch and what I found in my old notebook.
Fishner taps a pen on her desk. “If the business cards aren’t separate from the killing—maybe killings, plural—there’s going to be a real problem.” She leans back against the wall as if she’s planning to sit there and talk to me all day.
“Yeah, I know.” I don’t ask her what kind of real problem she has in mind. It’s probably something about defense attorneys and how I’ve compromised the entire investigation just by existing.
“Dot your i’s and cross your t’s, both of you. I was just on the phone with the captain. We need to get this tied up and, in an ideal world, solve all of this at once.”
It’s not an ideal world. “Yes, Lieutenant.”
“What’s your plan?”
“I’m going to look into their juvenile records—what little I can get—and try to find a connection. I’m thinking Craig Phillips is good for this, but I’m still trying to find a pattern.”
She nods. “Close the door on your way out.”
Becker is waiting when we emerge from Fishner’s office. She crooks a finger at me. Goran tells her hello then goes to his desk.
Becker leads me down the hallway. She’s holding three file folders under her arm. Two are thick, and one is normal size. “Don’t ask me how I got any of this. I’m serious. Don’t ask. And don’t tell anyone, either. Make it seem like you got all this on your own.” She pushes open the door to the Z-room, the room we use for naps on long shifts. “Are you all right?” she asks.
I raise an eyebrow. “Not really.” I don’t like piles of bodies. Nor do I like finding business cards all over the place or receiving prank phone calls. And I don’t like the jurisdiction in which Allie’s case is or the fact that I have no evidence on Craig Phillips beyond my gut. Yet. I don’t have evidence yet.
Becker nods and bites her bottom lip.
“Shouldn’t we look at this at, I don’t know, a table or a desk?” I ask as the door closes behind me.
“No camera can see that I’m showing this to you.” Her face is grave, her eyes downcast.
“Wait a minute. Are you breaking the rules?” My mouth twitches into a grin in spite of my own gloom. I’ve never seen Julia Becker break the rules before.
“I’m breaking a law, Liz.” She han
ds me the folders, which are heavier than they look. “Don’t let these leave your sight for even one minute.” She points at me. “I mean it. You’re not supposed to have this kind of information. But I know you need it.”
“I got it. Thanks.”
She pulls the door open. “None of it will be admissible. Speaking of which,” she says as she glances at her watch, “I’m due in court. Get those back to me as soon as you’re done with them. Lock the door. Not a word to anyone, not even Goran.”
When the door closes behind her, I turn the lock. I take a seat on the bottom bunk and open the first folder, the Child and Family Services case file on Craig Phillips.
His social worker’s name was Amanda Tanner. She’d been on his case since he entered the system back when he was removed from his single father after a kindergarten teacher got suspicious about some odd behavior and called CFS.
According to her notes, his father was an alcoholic who started beating Craig soon after the mother ran off to Colorado with another man. The abuse escalated to sexual abuse of the kind that no one wants to imagine. The only way they were able to get any information was to have him draw pictures. The first ones are about what I would expect from a child who had gone through what Craig experienced: monsters, penises, a naked man, that kind of thing. The notes mention that he was a good artist, even at six. Eventually, the father confessed and was sent to prison. He was shanked in the shower two years later for stealing another con’s peanut butter.
There are photocopies of some of the pictures Craig drew over the years after he entered the system, all dated by hand in Amanda Tanner’s handwriting. As he got older, they became disturbing in a different way. Right around the time his dad was killed, he started doing detailed anatomical drawings of the insides of both people and animals. He sketched the person or animal from the outside—as time went on, they got to be good sketches, too, because this guy is quite an artist—and then peeled back the layers, so to speak.
Just after his thirteenth birthday, Craig was accused of felony assault for beating the crap out of an eight-year-old neighbor boy, allegedly because the boy made a joke about Craig’s biological mother. The victim’s name is redacted in the file, so it will be difficult to follow up on that. As far as I can tell, though, he was never at the foster home at Arlington and Paxton. It looks as if he lived on the West Side for most of his life.
Amanda Tanner and I worked together on another abhorrent case a few years back, right after I started in Special Homicide. She retired last year after ten years of working a caseload that was four times what it should have been. And I think my job is hard. The shit people do to each other boggles my mind.
I get up to stretch. After grabbing the rickety old wooden chair from the corner, I pull it over to the bunk so I can use the bed as a desk.
The next file is Marnie Miller’s. She entered the system after her parents were killed in a car accident when she was four and Sean was two. Their grandparents lived in California and wouldn’t take them, so they were placed in a group home until a foster family could be found.
According to the file, the foster family at Arlington and Paxton wanted to adopt Marnie. There’s no mention of Sean in those notes.
Someone knocks on the door and jiggles the doorknob, but I ignore it. The last file, Sean Miller’s, is the slimmest. It contains a lot of information that mirrors Marnie’s but with less detail. For some asinine reason, he’d ended up with a different caseworker, one who wasn’t very descriptive.
I check the list Becker included on a sheet of paper between the files. Two boys and five girls are listed. I write their names down in my notebook so I can look them up later. Three of the girls stand out as being the right age as the girl I saw in the house that night: Elizabeth Conrad, Sarah Taylor, and Jenny Perkins.
I flip back through my notes—I’ve taken eight pages of them—looking for a pattern, some kind of connection.
There’s a loud knock on the door. “Boyle!” Fishner bellows. “Wake up and get out here. Now. I need you in my office. Now.”
I unlock the door and pull it open. “I’m not sleeping.” Why the hell would I be sleeping?
She gives me the side-eye and glances at the bunks. “I’m not even going to ask what you’ve been doing in there for so long.”
“I’ve—”
But she lets the door close in my face.
I gather the files and shoot Becker a text message: I have to tell Goran and Fishner about the juvie records.
She replies almost immediately: None of it is admissible. And you didn’t get it from me.
I know. Thanks for this.
Back in the squad room, I lock the files in my desk. When I enter Fishner’s office, I see Goran is already there. “What happened?” I ask.
Fishner tosses me a pair of latex gloves. “Put these on. You need to see this before I send it to the lab.”
I notice that Goran and Fishner are both wearing gloves and that the table is covered with a paper evidence bag.
She points at the chair closest to Goran. “We’re not going to ignore this, especially given the business cards.”
I sit and scooch the chair up to the table. I try to catch Goran’s eye, but he’s giving all his attention to Fishner.
Fishner pulls her chair over next to mine. “This came today.”
She uses a gloved hand to pull a folded piece of paper out of what looks like a handmade manila envelope and a copy of the feature that the Plain Dealer ran on me this past summer, the big interview Fishner made me give because CDP was trying to make us look like caring nurturers. There I am, in the photograph, standing in front of my desk with my hands on my hips, looking very cop-like. She passes everything to me, and I hold it gently.
Even through the gloves, I can feel the texture of the heavy white paper, the kind that illustrators and printmakers use. I unfold it over the table and lay it flat. Written across the top is “Haiku for Hero Cop” in black ink. I lay the article next to it.
I start with the envelope. It’s postmarked Cleveland. I sniff it and catch a whiff of sandalwood. I wear sandalwood. It looks as though he’s tried to copy my handwriting, too. He got some of it correct but missed the fact that when I write, all my Ns are capitalized. It’s never occurred to me that my handwriting might be hard to forge.
I pick up the paper. At the bottom of the page, he’s mimicked my full signature. And he’s gotten it pretty close. I wonder where he got it—maybe from an old police report, since those things are pretty easy to track down. I start reading the poems.
For Elizabeth,
Genius clever roguish cop
Blind and in the dark.
All the pictures show
Your fucked-up family line,
Your cold silver eyes.
You will never see
Forms moving in gray shadows
Shift into the light.
Hero in Cleveland:
Depraved and indifferent
Gun, badge, radio.
I flip the paper over. More poems.
Ropes hang from ceiling:
Noose on auntie, Boyle,
And a kindred soul.
Everything goes black—
All but this, struggle over.
Can’t breathe, can’t see, done.
Darkness covers us:
Ontological chaos.
Screaming black abyss.
Good night, sad women.
I might not see you again.
Eternal sleep waits.
“Who the hell is the aunt?” I whisper.
“Do you have any nieces or nephews?” Fishner asks.
“Not that I know of.”
“We need to get a handwriting sample of Cox’s,” Fishner says. “She could have sent this before she killed herself. Work with Heights. Have they sent you a copy
of the suicide note yet?”
“What, you think Allie sent me this shit? No way. Craig—”
“Finish those reports and then go home,” she says. “And for God’s sake, be careful. I’ll get Heights to sit on your place.”
Goran and I leave the office. I head over to my desk to grab my stuff.
“Like she said, be careful,” Goran says. “Don’t put your gun in the safe anymore.” He flicks a wadded-up piece of paper at me and tries to smile. “You can stay with us if you want.”
I feel my eyebrows come together, so I will them to separate. “Thanks, but I’ll be okay.”
“You sure? This is some creepy stuff, and—”
“I’ll be okay. Thanks, though.”
I sit down and pick up the phone. I call Cora three times before she finally answers.
“What do you want, Liz?”
I put on my most saccharine voice. “Hi, Cora. May I please have a copy of the suicide note? Right now? It might relate to the case we’re working. The kid case.”
She’s silent long enough that I wonder whether she’s hung up on me. Then, she gives a dramatic sigh. “Whatever, okay. I’ll have a digital copy to you within the hour. But you owe me a drink.”
“Thanks, Cora.”
“Don’t get any ideas about stealing my investigation. Or about anything else.”
“Okay. Thanks again.” I don’t remind her that she never wants to see me again. And I don’t tell her that I’d love to buy her a drink.
On the way home, my phone plays the happy chirp I assigned to Cora’s text messages, way back when. I make a mental note to change her alert sound. Sitting at a red light, I pull up the text. There’s no message, just the attachment that I assume is Allie’s suicide note, which can wait until I get home.
Back in my apartment, I put on Nirvana’s In Utero and make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I scarf down the food then bring out my phone.
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