Next to Die: A gripping serial-killer thriller full of twists

by T. J. Brearton

  One of the overhead fluorescents was flickering; in one corner, the ceiling was festooned with cobwebs. “What’s that smell?” Lena asked Mike in a soft voice.

  “We think there’s a dead mouse down here somewhere,” Jaquish said, overhearing. She finally stopped, squaring her shoulders with the end of a cabinet. “Here we go. 2000 to 2005. That what you’re looking for?”

  Mike boggled at the sheer volume of information surrounding them: the whole thing resembled a kind of prehistoric data farm. Instead of servers in rows, there were storage units jammed tightly together.

  “The units move on tracks, you control with these,” Jaquish said, and grabbed a large three-point knob and spun it. The first unit in the group rolled away, creating a corridor. Mike stepped in and had a look. Each unit had six shelves, bisected to form two sections, each about four feet wide, crowded with manila folders. There were a few colored folders – some reds and blues, interspersed.

  “How is the information arranged?” Lena asked.

  “Alphabetical, by client. If there’s many charts for the same client, then in year order for that client, then year order for the next client, and so on.”

  “They’re not arranged by caseworker?” Mike’s heart sank a little.

  Jaquish shook her head. “This is the area for Child Protective Services, these two sets of shelves cover 2000 to 2005.”

  Mike looked around at all the other storage and did a quick mental calculation: Five-year sections, dating back to the establishment of DSS in ’77, meant roughly ten to fifteen of these cabinet blocks. “So what’s all the rest of this stuff?”

  Jaquish put her hands on her hips and rotated around. “Disability, Adult Protective Services, Child Support, Medicaid, HEAP, Temporary Assistance, SNAP, Day Care, Accounting.” She finished her spin, pointed to a corner. “That’s the server over there. You might see Trevor Garris coming down here; he’s still working out all the kinks of our new EHR and all the networking. Hope that’s not a problem?”

  “No, that’s fine,” Mike said. “Whatever.”

  She looked at him, eyes sharp as a sparrow’s. “You’re lucky this isn’t Mental Health – they’re not required to hold onto anything past ten years. But with Child Protective Services in particular, children aren’t necessarily grown up ten years on. So…”

  “What about transferring all this to digital?”

  “We’re actually still in the process of that – have been for years – scanning and storing in digital. But we haven’t destroyed the old stuff yet.”

  “How far back are you scanning?”

  “Ten years.”

  Mike suppressed a sigh. No luck jockeying a mouse and doing a little clicking instead of wandering around in the catacombs. To hell with this ‘old scores’ theory…

  Jaquish flashed a quick smile then hurried back to her busy world. “Let me know if you need anything.”

  Mike was surprised – the records room was treated like Fort Knox; he’d expected supervision the whole time. But she was already through the door and pounding back up the stairs. Then he looked around, saw the camera mounted in the corner.

  * * *

  “Well,” Lena said. She slid open the top drawer. “We’re only looking at three years, right? The overlapping years that Harriet and Lavoie both worked here.” She pulled out a file, flipped through. “Usually, the first thing is the referral sheet, that’s for the initial call. And then back here… okay, this is the discharge summary. And, see this? There’s the caseworker, right there.”

  “But the referrals,” Mike asked, “they’re not all coming from the state register?” He kept eyeing the different-colored files, hoping for an easy way out of this and not seeing it.

  “If it’s a civilian that calls the hotline, okay. But anyone with a public licensure to help children is a mandated reporter, and I don’t know if they have to go through the register.” Lena put the file back and jotted a note on a legal pad beside her. She seemed resolved to see it through, but Mike was still antsy.

  He pulled out a red folder. “What about these?”

  Lena looked over. “Yeah,” she said. “We’re going to need a bit more help. Hang on; I got someone to call.” She stepped away, pulling out her cell phone.

  Mike heard her talking, then sifted through the photos in the red folder. They made him sick; pictures of a child’s arm and neck covered in huge bruises. He wanted to be chasing down Pritchard’s alibi, not seeing images of abused kids. But Lena was right – this was his idea. Pritchard looked good for it, but if they couldn’t connect him to Lavoie, it didn’t feel right, because one missing and one murdered caseworker in less than a year felt like more than coincidence. The idea was that it was someone like Gavin Fuller, but a decade or so back, whose resentment of Child Protective Services had cooked until it boiled over.

  “Okay, Mary, thanks so much.” Lena stepped back into the aisle between cabinets. “So that was my friend who works for DSS in Oneida County. Certain cases might be classified in a different-color folder. Permanently separated families, for example.”

  “Or serious abuse cases,” Mike said, holding up one of the pictures.

  Her mouth formed a tight line. “Yes.”

  He nodded at the red folders. “Then let’s start with these?”

  “Okay. But let’s look for the discharge summary first, so we can separate out the ones with Harriet’s name, Corina Lavoie’s name.”

  They pulled two smaller tables together and went to work, each amassing a stack of colored folders. The flickering fluorescent continued to bother Mike, and he could smell the bad smell now, too. He got up.

  “What are you doing?” Lena glanced at the clock.

  “Looking for that mouse.”

  She didn’t say anything else, just tucked back into the work.

  He didn’t care about the mouse, he needed a moment.

  After he wandered back to the table, he’d formed the complete thought. “So, the people that call in the complaint, you know, about a child in danger, they can be anyone. Like we said, mandated reporter, or just someone off the street. And their name goes into the file.”

  “Usually. They can withhold it. They’re certainly going to want it withheld from the alleged perp, but the name is recorded by the hotline staff.”

  He crossed his arms, looked down at the spread of files on the table. “But I bet the perpetrator often figures out who reported anyway. Or has suspicions.”

  She leaned back, looking thoughtful. “I see where you’re going – someone angry with whoever reported the suspected abuse or neglect; they’re pissed off someone rang the bell on them.”

  “Just thinking, if I was upset someone came in and took my kid, I’d be just as likely to be upset by the person who made the call initiating the investigation as I would be anyone else. Maybe we factor that in. Maybe our guy found out who called it in, harassed them, something, and there’s a report.”

  “Okay, but by that token, we might as well be looking at everyone involved – cops, lawyers, judges, other social workers. I think we need to keep this narrowed to caseworkers. If we don’t come up with anything, then we widen out.”

  “I can go with that.”

  “We’ll be looking at police reports if anything piques our interest, and we can cross-reference to hotline data…” She touched her lip a moment, lost in thought. “But, I have another question, something we never addressed.”

  “Shoot.”

  “If this is something that happened ten to fifteen years ago, when both Harriet and Lavoie were working here together – why does the perp wait all this time to go after them?”

  “Because he’s in jail.” Mike took a seat beside her. “That’s the whole thing. Someone gets investigated for child abuse, neglect – something – and goes to jail. Meanwhile their kid goes into placement, gets adopted, who knows. When the parent is released, years later, he goes after the caseworkers.”

  “Well we’re back to the same problem. T
his hypothetical parent might just as likely blame the complainant – or why not the cops? Or the judge who sentenced them? And anyway, in most of these cases, the parent doesn’t go to jail. They get parenting classes, counseling, drug rehab…”

  “But what we have is one dead caseworker and one missing caseworker. We don’t have any dead judges or cops. The complainant could be anonymous – cops, forget it – judges probably hard to get to, too. The caseworkers are the most vulnerable.”

  “You mean mostly women,” she said.

  “Yeah. That might be part of it. This guy’s a coward. Probably has some history of violence toward women…” Mike thought about Jameson Rentz for a moment, then he put it out of his mind. Same problem – Rentz didn’t connect to Lavoie.

  Lena turned back to the files, her expression grave. “Alright, here’s a brush-up for us both: Once a call is placed to the hotline, then they forward it to the local CPS, where it gets assigned the caseworker. Okay? Assignments are handed out based on current caseload, or on rotation – who’s on call at the time a new case comes in. There might be an initial person who responds at first to the emergency, if there is one, but then another could be assigned after that for various reasons. So, this is why the records aren’t kept by caseworker.”

  “Understood.”

  “Once a person is assigned to a part of the work, their name, any credentials, and the date, should be on every piece of paperwork. Getting back to an emergency case, though – if the report is an emergency and happens at night on a weekend, let’s say, the state register puts them through to the police, and the police dispatcher notifies the caseworker on call. So, like I said, we can cross-reference with police records.”

  “The good news is,” Mike said, surveying the pile of files, “we can focus on the three-year overlap.”

  But Lena was shaking her head. “Actually, I’ve been thinking about that. As a supervisor, Harriet can still be directly involved. We need to look at everything from 2003 to 2008. So that means getting into the next five-year cabinet section. And this is all presuming that our perp is reacting off something that specifically had to do with both of them, and that, even if it did involve both of them, Harriet’s name is even going to show up. Sometimes her role is just to offer guidance, and she’s not going to be on any paperwork.”

  Mike let his eyelids droop and stared at her.

  “Get to work,” Lena said.

  Sixteen

  The kids jumped around and chased each other. They were just eighteen months apart in age and made good playmates. They climbed a hill beside the house, sometimes disappearing, but still within earshot as Bobbi spoke to Anita Richardson in the garden.

  Anita was stoic as she pulled weeds around the tomato plants. “People don’t change,” she said. “You think she’s gonna stay clean? No way. Huh-uh.”

  Carrie hadn’t returned since the cops warned her off the night before.

  “Well, she’s taking full advantage of our services,” Bobbi said carefully. “She’s been to see the judge, and she’s about to start parenting classes.”

  “Good for her. See right there? I’ve got an infestation of voles.”

  Bobbi looked where Anita was pointing at some holes in the soil.

  “They make tunnels,” Anita said. “They ate all my radish tops, chewed off my cucumber leaves before they even got started.”

  “Anita, it’s my duty to inform you that Carrie’s aim is to get full custody of the children. And as her parental rights were never terminated, she has that option, provided she meets all requirements.”

  Anita didn’t respond, moved on from the tomatoes to the peppers. For a woman in her late sixties, she was nimble. And for a grandmother who’d been watching the children for over a year, the whole thing had to be heartbreaking. Their father Roy was an alcoholic and sporadically showed up, usually to take something from the property and try to hawk it.

  Bobbi said, “I also wanted to add that Carrie is incredibly grateful to you. But she shouldn’t have just shown up like that, and she knows it.”

  Finally, Anita stood, hands pressed against the small of her back, and looked off where the children were taking turns rolling down the hill, their bright laughter filling the air.

  “Would I get visitation?” Anita asked.

  “Oh, I think absolutely, that’s a strong possibility. And… Mrs. Richardson, this is a ways off. Carrie has a lot of work to do. And my first responsibility is to those kids. I know they’re happy here. With you.”

  Anita snapped a look at Bobbi and said, “You’re still a kid yourself.”

  She pushed out of the garden gate and called to the children that it was time for lunch. They came along willingly, bounding up the porch steps.

  Bobbi slowly left the garden, feeling stung by Anita’s remark but trying for compassion to transcend ego. It was tough. All of these situations, though, when you looked right at it, were tough. There was never a time someone didn’t get hurt. Her job was to serve the best interests of the kids. If that meant having a healthy, stable mother in their life, then that was what it meant.

  Still, driving back to Lake Haven, she felt like shit.

  She moped a little back in her office, the mental funk clinging when the IT guy came in to work on her computer. DSS was still dealing with the addition of several offices, and computer networking had needed a massive overhaul. The whole thing was a major inconvenience on top of everything else. She left him sitting at her desk, his hands flying over the keys.

  She needed to get a cup of coffee, have a talk with Lennox, get her mind off the morning. The whole dilemma with Connor and Jolyon remained playing like background noise in her mind: keep going, feeling anxious about her role in the life of a six-year-old, motherless boy? Or confront it?

  She was never one to run from confrontation.

  * * *

  Mike rolled his neck on his shoulders, feeling beaten. Lena was a machine, her posture straight after two hours, notepad filled, eyes clear. They’d gone through fifty files by his count. Everything a person could do to a child was there, in some form or another. Some of the referrals came from doctors. Some from teachers. And there were more than a dozen complaint calls on record that cited civilians as the source. Every caseworker was a mandated reporter, but Harriet Fogarty never had occasion to call in a complaint.

  Lena was right – going after the complainant was a needle in a haystack. Regardless, he’d listed several on his own yellow legal pad under the heading “John Q. Public” – people whose call might’ve spurred an investigation resulting in a child removed from the home of a now very angry, resentful parent.

  Emilia Watson: a concerned neighbor who heard shouting every night come from next door, a child crying incessantly.

  Paul Hoffnagle: a hardware store worker who called after a man left his toddler in the car on a hot summer day, windows rolled up.

  Belinda Baker: called the police, fearing that her boyfriend had shaken their baby to silence it when she’d gone out for groceries.

  Mike stood to stretch his back, rotate his shoulders. Couldn’t seem to get out the stiffness. Reading about this stuff, seeing the pictures, it put him in a mood.

  Harriet had never made a complaint call on record. And no one had threatened any judges or cops. It was all about cases both Harriet and Lavoie had worked on. That was the key.

  He eyed the groups of files on the table. One pile was everything they’d found so far with both Harriet’s and Lavoie’s names on it. A growing stack of red folders marked the cases where there were more serious allegations of neglect and abuse.

  He took the file on the top, went through it. Picked up the next one, sifted through the pages.

  And the next.

  After twenty more minutes his vision was getting blurry and his thoughts kept gravitating to the list of complainants.

  “Okay,” he said, and Lena jumped a little. “I’m going to head over to my office to check something out.”

  S
he didn’t look up, but said, “Might be nice if you brought back a little late lunch.”

  “I can do that.”

  * * *

  Two dead ends: Emilia Watson, concerned neighbor, had passed away. Belinda Baker, young mother with a violent boyfriend, had taken her child and moved to Florida. They were doing fine, the kid now twelve years old. That left Paul Hoffnagle, who was no longer working at the hardware store in Cold Brook, but bartending at an upscale place called The Lodge on the edge of Lake Haven. Not only had Hoffnagle been the one to call in on a child in danger, there was another report less than a week later when he told police he’d been threatened by someone, but he didn’t know who. Mike called The Lodge, learned that Hoffnagle was in fact working a shift.

  Ten minutes later Mike found him slicing up lemons and dropping them into a plastic dish. The bar was enormous, at least ten yards long, all lacquered wood, like pine. The dining room was dark as Mike picked his way through the tables, chairs turned upside down. Everything was rustic and cozy – chandeliers made from deer antlers – and in the winter a fire would be crackling in the big open fireplace down at the far end.

  He knew because he’d had dinner here with Molly; she’d been pregnant with Kristen and they’d gone out to celebrate.

  Hoffnagle looked up from the lemons and turned on a smile, a careful face Mike figured employees of The Lodge had learned to curate for their typically rich, persnickety guests. “Hello, sir – dining room’s not open again until five this evening. Is there something I—?”

  Mike showed his badge and sat at one of the stools. “That’s okay – I called a little while ago? The manager said you were here; I just have a few questions for you. My name is Mike.”

  Hoffnagle wiped his hands on the towel over his shoulder and shook with Mike. “You’re with the state police?”

  “That’s right.”

  There was something that happened with most people – you could tell right away whether they’d ever had any trouble with the cops, you could see it sitting just inside their gaze, sometimes feel it in the thrum of nerves if you shook their hand. Hoffnagle didn’t have any of that. After working the hardware store as a young man, he’d gone to New York City for some art school, then came back and joined the restaurant world, like most graduates of art school. He was thirty-five, wore his hair short but stylish. “What can I do for you?”