The Devil's Own Crayons

by Theresa Monsour

  “We’ve come this far without trouble,” she said to passenger the window.

  “They’re still getting the word out on us, that’s all.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. The cops. Everyone.”

  “Why would they be after us?”

  “Gee, I don’t know. Maybe because right after we left, the entire northern half of Illinois blew up or burned down. Or maybe because we’ve got Rosemary’s babies in the back seat.”

  “Who’s Rosemary?” asked Adeline.

  The abbess laughed dryly and finally looked at him. From the time she’d turned away from him to the time she’d turned back, she’d aged ten years. Her eyes were two red marbles sunk into a white skeleton face.

  “Do whatever you want,” she said tiredly. “As long as we continue heading east.”

  “You gotta lose the habit, too.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “The scarf. Nobody wears those things anymore. It attracts attention.”

  Stubbornly immobile, she sat with her hands in her lap.

  Even as they argued, the driver of a sedan one lane over eyed her. Petit accelerated and sped ahead of the man. “Please.”

  She reached up and peeled off the veil. Almost as long as the fabric that had hidden it, an avalanche of black streaked with grey tumbled out. “Happy?”

  “You’re the wicked witch,” said Babette, and her sisters giggled.

  The Chucky dolls were all chummy back there now. They had someone outside their little circle to torture. Mother Magdalen pretended preoccupation with folding her veil, but Petit could see her face coloring with humiliation. The abbess was losing control over them. Before all the crap started, they wouldn’t have dreamed of mouthing off. Where were the sweet, polite girls who used to play with Barbies and get a big thrill out of staying up an extra ten minutes at bedtime?

  He eased the Buick to the right and took the next exit, which looked like it led to a dinky town south of the tollway. He hoped to find a route that would allow them to stay parallel with the highway while threading through the flat Indiana countryside. “We got a map in this car?”

  The abbess opened the glove compartment and dug around. Closed it. Reached under her seat and produced a mangled paper map. “Illinois.”

  “Won’t do me any good.”

  “Are we lost?”

  “We ain’t lost.”

  “We should get back on the highway.”

  They came up on a black, horse-drawn buggy with an orange triangle mounted to the back. The thing was traveling about five miles an hour. Petit went around it. The driver was dressed in a black hat and dark suit.

  “Amish,” said the nun.

  The girls got on their knees and watched it through the rear window.

  “Cool.”

  “A pony.”

  “That’s a horse, silly. Ponies are babies.”

  “Sit back down,” said Petit. “Buckle up.”

  “You’re not our dad,” Babette said.

  “Please,” the abbess said.

  “Pretty please,” said Babette.

  The nun hesitated. Then with resignation: “Pretty please.”

  Petit heard the belts click.

  “You’re going too fast,” the abbess told him.

  “I’m trying to make time.”

  A half a mile down the road, they came up on another slow-moving buggy. Petit stomped down on the gas pedal to speed around it, and the horse bucked as they passed.

  “You’re going to cause an accident,” said Mother Magdalen. “Slow down.”

  “You want to get there or not?”

  Red and blue lights flashed in the rearview mirror. Since they’d left the toll road, Petit hadn’t paid much attention to their rear. A quarter of a mile behind them, the white squad could have been a state trooper who’d been alerted about the Buick and followed them from the interstate. Or maybe it was a local cop who’d been hiding in wait for speeders. Regardless, this wasn’t good. They’d fled the scene of a deadly explosion, and he had a gun tucked into his jeans.

  “Shit.”

  The abbess turned and saw what he saw. “Speed up.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Go!”

  He floored it. The Buick’s rubber grabbed the dusty road and lurched forward. The squad shrank in the rearview mirror, and seconds later recovered, a white missile emerging from its own cloud of dust. The Buick had a big engine, but it was old. “We can’t outrun him!”

  “Faster!”

  “We’re screwed!”

  “Go faster!”

  One of the girls started screaming over the adults. “Stop yelling! You’re scaring me!”

  “Who is it?” shrieked another.

  “A policeman,” said the abbess. She unbuckled and got on her knees to talk to the girls. “Babette...”

  Petit heard paper rustling in the back seat, and the mother superior say, “Yes. Good.”

  He kept his attention on the road ahead. It was a straight shot with flat fields on either side. Hands locked over the steering wheel, he could feel the beater vibrating. Straining under the stress of the speed. They weren’t going to make it.

  The mother superior turned back in her seat to face the front, and buckled up again. “He’s gaining on us.”

  “No shit!”

  One of the kids started bawling. Mother Magdalen said with surprising calm, “Stay buckled, girls. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  “Policemen are good,” said one of the girls, sounding confused and frightened. “Baab shouldn’t...”

  “This one is very bad,” the abbess interrupted. “He wants to throw us in prison.”

  “What? What the hell are you telling them to do?”

  The nun made the Sign of the Cross. “God forgive us.”

  “What? What’s happening?” Petit looked from his front seat passenger to the rearview mirror. The squad was three car lengths away.

  The abbess: “Do it, Babette!”

  “Now?”

  “Now!”

  Petit heard paper tearing, and checked the rearview mirror again. The squad was nearly on top of them. He could see the driver, a guy with a jarhead haircut and those aviator glasses cops wear. Suddenly the car swerved to the left and the right. Back to the left.

  The nun glanced in the rearview mirror and covered her face with her hands. “Dear Lord.”

  As Petit watched in the mirror, the squad veered sharply to the right and flipped amid a cloud of dust. Rolled and rolled and rolled so violently, it seemed to be doing it in midair.

  “What did you do?” he yelled.

  No one answered.

  Petit slowed and braked. The squad had finally stopped tumbling, and was stretched across the middle of the road, resting on its hood. Petit turned in his seat and looked through the rear window. Even upside down, he could read the oversized badge on the puckered driver’s door.

  It wasn’t the state police, and he felt guilty for feeling relieved. It was a local cop. Petit threw open his door.

  “Where are you going?” hollered the abbess.

  Petit jumped out of the car. “I gotta see if he’s alive!”

  “He’s dead, Trey!”

  He took a step toward the squad. “We can’t be sure until we...”

  “Look at him!”

  Through the driver’s window of the squad, Petit saw a blood-covered face with wide, unblinking eyes. The head was upside down and tipped to one side, pressed down by the weight of the body above it. One of the man’s arms had flopped outside the window, and it wasn’t moving.

  Turning away from the sight, Petit rested both hands against the hood of the Buick. Everything was spinning and tumbling the way that squad had tumbled, and he closed his eyes. He still felt dizzy. A kid on a tilt-a-whirl shutting his eyes, trying not to throw up.

  “Trey?”

  Petit cracked his lids open and focused on a gnarly tree in the distance, planted in the midd
le of a field. Nothing else around it. The scenery stopped moving and he let go of the hood. Got back inside the car, slamming the door hard. He dropped his head on the steering wheel and groaned. “She killed a cop.”

  “We had to,” said the abbess.

  He sat up straight and banged the steering wheel with his fist. “There’s no we! I didn’t do it! Don’t put this on me!”

  “She had to,” the mother superior said.

  “How’d she do it so fast? What’d she draw?”

  From the back came two scraps, deposited on the seat between the adults. Petit lifted his head off the wheel and picked up the papers, a piece in each hand. Babette had done a simple, sloppy line drawing of a heart – and torn it down the middle. She’d ripped the poor bastard’s heart in half.

  A child’s paper Valentine turned into a murder weapon.

  Petit bunched the scraps in his fist, rolled down his window and hurled the wad outside.

  “We’ve got to get away from here,” the abbess said. “He may have radioed our location before...”

  “Before his heart exploded?”

  “We didn’t have a choice.”

  “Stop saying we. Where do you get this we crap from?”

  “It was partially your fault,” she shot back. “If you hadn’t been speeding...”

  “You don’t know that’s why he was chasing us. You don’t know shit. Stop trying to make me the guilty one. You told them to do it. I ain’t guilty of nothing!”

  “Guilty!” chimed in one of the girls, and they all three laughed.

  “That’s enough,” he said.

  The trio chanted and clapped. “Guil-ty! Guil-ty! Guil-ty! Guil-ty!”

  “Shut the hell up!” he hollered.

  The interior of the car fell silent, and Petit dropped his head against the steering wheel again. Maybe he had caused the guy’s death. Anyone who came near them was at risk, and he’d drawn some sorry son-of-a-bitch to them through his driving.

  “We’ve got to go,” said the abbess.

  He didn’t move.

  She put a hand on his shoulder. “Trey, we’ve got to get out of here.”

  He shook her off and raised his head. “Heard you the first twenty times,” he said, and accelerated.

  When they were a quarter of a mile down the road, he gave one last look to the overturned squad - and didn’t believe what he saw. He braked and turned to gape through the rear window. The abbess looked behind them, and two of the girls unbuckled and kneeled on their seat to watch through the rear window. The middle child didn’t bother looking.

  Engulfed in a blaze that was steady and controlled and smokeless, the police car was being consumed.

  Petit wondered if he was at fault again. “Did she have a lighter back there?”

  “I don’t think she needs one anymore,” said the mother superior, a hint of pride tingeing her voice.

  He gunned it. Petit didn’t care which direction he was going, as long as he put miles between him and the burning wreck. He wished he could put light years between him and the car full of crazy females. “Do me a favor and take the colors away from them, so I don’t have to worry.”

  “We’d never hurt you, Mister P.”

  Babette’s promise made Petit’s stomach tighten.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Paramedics weren’t satisfied with treating the trio at the scene of the explosion, and insisted that they all be seen at the ER. On their way in – Khoury via ambulance and Rossi and MacLeod in Jasperson’s car - Rossi worked the phones getting the AMBER Alert set up.

  News stations were still vacillating between pinning the explosion on the nuns’ ovens and suggesting that the rioters did it. The story would change as soon as the alert went out, telling the public that Xavier and the handyman had manufactured the disaster to destroy evidence of the trafficking ring, and to cover their getaway with the three girls.

  Rossi had the names and photographs of the girls and their abductors, along with a description of the fleeing vehicle, sent to the Illinois State Police Springfield Communications Center. So that the search expanded to the national level, she made sure the information was also entered into the National Crime Information Center system.

  She phoned the National Weather Service and flagged them that abduction details were headed their way. The NOAA Weather Radio Emergency Alert System would air the alert in much the same way severe weather warnings were handled, with messages scrolling across the bottom of television screens and announcements being made on the radio regularly.

  The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children was working to format the AMBER Alert message and would send it electronically to Syniverse, a provider of technology services to wireless telecommunication companies. Syniverse would send the message to wireless carriers, and the carriers would text its subscribers.

  The Illinois Department of Transportation and Tollway would activate electronic road message boards, flashing a description of the Buick and its license plate.

  Beyond the AMBER Alerts, the relatives of the fleeing adults were being questioned and put under watch. Petit’s mother and a sister lived in the Wormwood area, but Rossi doubted they’d harbor the fugitives. Besides being too close, they weren’t Xavier’s people. Rossi had no doubt that it was the mother superior who was calling the shots.

  The nun had a large family scattered all over the country. The sibling who was the closest geographically and in age was a brother living in Minnesota. Guys from the bureau’s Minneapolis office were grilling him.

  “Mother of God,” said MacLeod as Rossi closed her phone and reopened it as she thought of another call to make. “These people don’t have a chance, do they?”

  “That’s the way we like it,” said Jasperson.

  Things seemed back to normal at the hospital, though Rossi overheard two ER nurses talking about what had happened during the shift before theirs. The section of the basement with the autopsy lab had been sealed off, and the hospital was keeping a tight lid on the cause of the morning fire. The bodies of the nuns who’d been pulled from the rubble of the convent were taken to a different hospital for autopsy.

  Rossi’s scalp needed two stitches while Khoury’s head needed twice that. The cuts and punctures on his arms and shoulders were irrigated. Two were deep enough to require stitches, and the rest were bandaged. Both he and Rossi had to get tetanus shots. MacLeod had to be treated for an infection to his stab wound – not a surprise to either one of his partners.

  On their way out of the hospital, they snagged a late supper of sandwiches from the vending machines. Soggy egg salad and bologna. They were starving, and the food was nearly gone by the time they hopped into the Jeep Grand Cherokee, a replacement rental delivered to the front doors by a deputy. The sheriff had even gone so far as to have the wrecked Suburban towed and have all their belongings transferred into the Jeep.

  “A flattened hot dog?” asked MacLeod, riding shotgun while popping the last corner of bologna-on-white into his mouth.

  “Pretty much,” said Rossi, starting up the Jeep.

  He licked his fingers. “Delicious. How do they manage such a feat?”

  She turned out of the parking lot. “One of life’s great mysteries.”

  “Leave it to the Americans.”

  While she drove, she turned on the radio and was pleased to hear the AMBER Alert in all its panicky glory:

  Illinois law enforcement authorities, along with the Chicago Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, have confirmed a child abduction that occurred in the northern Illinois town of Wormwood earlier today. Three six-year-old girls – triplets – were taken from Little Sisters of the Orphans Convent. The siblings – first names Adeline, Babette and Cecelia – are white females, three feet ten inches in height, and have curly brown hair and brown eyes. They were taken from Little Sisters by Trey Petit, a janitor at the facility, and Magdalen Xavier, the head sister at the convent. Both suspects are believed to be involved in a child traffick
ing ring. Suspect vehicle is a blue Buick...

  “Perfect,” said Rossi, turning down the volume.

  “You have no qualms about putting out such a vicious tale?” asked Khoury.

  “They have kidnapped the girls,” Rossi said defensively.

  “But this whole child sexploitation story...”

  “Had to make it juicy to get everyone’s attention,” she said. “We couldn’t soft-pedal this thing.”

  “I think it was pure genius, lass.”

  “Thank you, Patrick.”

  “Their families are going to have to live with the idea that their loved ones were involved in something completely immoral and reprehensible,” said Khoury. “It isn’t fair to them.”

  “Fair?” She braked hard at a stop sign. “We are talking about the exploitation of kids. It’s not sexual, but it is immoral and reprehensible.”

  “I think the handyman is being victimized along with the girls,” said Khoury.

  “We’ll sort it out after we get our hands on them.” She accelerated and the Jeep rolled through the intersection.

  “Where are we going?” asked Khoury.

  “No reason to hang around Wormwood. Chicago would make a better base, especially if we need a plane fast. Got us a hotel downtown. Figured we all needed a shower and a chance to regroup. Make some calls.” She frowned. “Anyone hear from Nardini?”

  “Not a peep.”

  “I tried,” said Khoury.

  During the drive, Khoury and MacLeod took turns trying the cardinal’s direct line and still got no answer.

  She’d reserved two rooms at the Drake - a family room with two beds and two bathrooms for the boys and a room with one bed for herself. After the hospital stop and the drive from Wormwood, they’d pulled in late and the hotel was quiet.

  “Plush,” said MacLeod as they walked through the lobby, filled with potted palms and rich, red carpet and drapes.

  Her room was as plush as the lobby, with more heavy drapes and potted palms. After Rossi finished showering and changing, she phoned Camp. She immediately apologized for the lateness of the call, and he brushed it off. He was turning out to be much more pleasant than his reputation had painted him, at least over the phone. He was from the south, and when he spoke his drawl made everything low-key. Talking to him calmed her, albeit only for the length of the conversation.