by CJ Lyons
“What happened? When did it start? How often?” Questions poured from Flynn as she knelt at Esme’s side.
Esme sat up, one hand slipping on the wet sheets, and looked horrified. “I wet the bed?”
“That doesn’t matter. Tell me what happened.”
Tears slid down Esme’s cheeks. “I never wet the bed. Not since I was a baby. Not even when Mama—”
Flynn bundled her into her arms and carried her from the wet bed out to the living room. At Esme’s command, she’d bought them a real Christmas tree. A first for both of them. It shed needles all over the carpet, kept sagging in the tree stand, and although the pine smell was heavenly, it made Flynn’s eyes itch. But they’d had fun dragging it in, setting it up, and decorating. Esme had even taught Flynn how to make a popcorn garland and the proper way to hang tinsel icicles.
Tonight, Esme ignored the tree, instead curling up on Flynn’s lap, her face against Flynn’s neck. “Tell me,” Flynn coaxed, once the tension had fled Esme’s body and her tears had stopped.
“I knew you were there—I could see, hear, feel everything.” Esme’s voice filled with wonder.
“Has it happened before?”
Esme nodded, her braids bouncing against Flynn’s shoulder. “A few times. Once it happened in school, and I could see the answers sitting on the teacher’s desk while we took a pop quiz. Not really, not with my eyes, but I’d walked past them on my way into class, and she’d turned them over before I could see. But then, when I was frozen, I could see, like I could go back in time and flip through my memories, rewind them.”
Esme looked up at her, swallowed, and tried on a brave smile. “It’s kind of cool. When it’s not scary. I’m sorry I wet the bed. You’re not mad, are you?”
Flynn’s pulse buzzed, a wasp beating its way free of a spider’s web. Maybe she wasn’t in the fight of her life, but Esme might be. Because Flynn had seen the same kind of thing happen to one other person…the doctor who’d saved her life.
Angela Rossi.
Chapter Twenty-One
Nineteen kids from one apartment complex, all with the same symptoms. This was so not good.
“Let’s see what we have.” Somehow, I kept my voice calm, reassuring even. But my mind was whirling with the ramifications and consequences. If Devon was right, I’d have to get the Health Department involved, call the CDC, alert the staffs of all the local hospitals…except…I had no idea what to tell them.
I left Ozzie with the other families while Devon led me into a storage room that Sister Patrice had converted into an examination area. The cement-block walls were as stark white as the sheets on the cot that functioned as an exam table, but colorful, crayoned drawings and finger-painted masterpieces hanging from a bulletin board broke up the monotony. The room smelled of candle wax and antiseptic, a strange mix of faith and function.
A dark-haired boy, maybe five or six, sat on a cot, hunched over a coloring book, his back to me. A young woman, thin from worry, her cheekbones hollowed out and eyes rimmed red, held his hand and stroked his hair. She shifted to stand between me and the boy, while an older couple stood on the far side of the room, the man gray-haired with thick glasses, pressed against the wall as if hoping to melt into it, and the woman, her hair dyed black, regarding me with a fierce challenge. The grandparents.
“These are the Lees,” Devon made introductions. “They run the Imperial Lotus restaurant. Randolph is their grandson, and this is his mother, Veronica.” The grandparents nodded, but the mother ignored the social niceties.
“Tell me what’s wrong with him, please,” she pleaded.
Randolph sat cross-legged on the cot, drawing, eyes scrunched in concentration as he refused to make eye contact with me. Classic if I can’t see you, you’re not there.
“When did it start?” I asked.
“A little more than two months ago, right after school began. At first I thought it was just stress. Kindergarten, being away from me.” She stroked his hair as she spoke. Randolph kept working his crayons. He gripped them with his full fist like a toddler, and his lines were shaky.
“What have you noticed?” I asked, sitting down in one of the wooden folding chairs, the kind used for funerals or bingo.
“He drops things and he falls all the time. We took him to the clinic. They said everything was fine.”
“What tests did they do?”
“Blood counts, lead, something they called a chemistry panel.”
Ruling out all the easy-to-treat causes, including my initial theory of lead exposure. “And then what?”
“He stopped sleeping. Began having what the doctors call night terrors.” She reluctantly pulled her hand away from Randolph to reach into her purse and remove a small spiral notebook. “Here. I kept a record.”
I opened the notebook. Pages after pages of detailed observations. I saw why Devon had wanted me to start with the Lees. It wasn’t often I had actual data to create a diagnosis with. In the ER, finding the right reason for a patient’s symptoms was more art than science. I couldn’t help but think that Louise would have loved it if I’d kept a symptom journal like this for her.
According to his mother’s notes, Randolph’s sleep had been disturbed since September, but his night terrors were now occurring daily, and he wasn’t sleeping more than two to three hours at a time. He’d also stopped eating, was choking on anything too large, and was basically subsisting on protein shakes. I kept flipping pages, the words mirroring every case report of Fatal Familial Insomnia I’d been able to find.
It could have been my own medical history, in fact. Shock ran cold through me. No. It was impossible. I glanced at the door, the other families waiting beyond, then at Devon. He nodded grimly.
Randolph’s crayon slipped from his hand and fell to the floor with a clatter. I retrieved it, tried to hand it back, but he’d already moved on to a different color.
“Show her,” the grandfather urged his wife. The grandmother nodded reluctantly and took a folded piece of paper from her coat pocket. She unfolded it and handed it to me, her gaze imploring.
It was a remarkably detailed freehand crayon drawing of a dinosaur. With Randolph’s name carefully printed in childish block letters below it.
“He did that in August,” his mother said. “Drew it all himself. Now, he can’t even scribble in the lines.” She sounded close to tears.
Everyone in the room went silent. Randolph’s hand froze, hovering over the paper, mid-scribble. His eyes were open, unseeing, unblinking. I snapped my fingers near his ear, checked for corneal and other reflexes. Nothing.
“Has he done this before?”
The mother sniffed back her sobs and nodded. “It’s new. Three times this week.”
“Anything run in the family? Symptoms like this? Seizures? Anything at all?”
“Diabetes on my dad’s side. But not in kids.”
“And Randolph’s father?”
“He was killed. Iraq. I asked his parents. The only thing that runs in their family is breast cancer on his mother’s side. But she’s fine.”
Randolph blinked. Gave a shudder, as if shaking off a chill, then went right back to coloring as if nothing had happened.
“Randolph.” I lowered myself to his eye level, although he still refused to look at me directly. “What just happened?”
“Echoes.” His voice was so low I could barely hear it.
His mother wrapped her arm around his shoulders, her body shifting to cover as much of his as possible. “That’s what he calls the spells. The echoes.”
Like the shimmers of color and music that preceded my fugues? Or was I reading too much into it? Maybe it was a simple petit mal seizure.
Or maybe it wasn’t. If it wasn’t…no, how could that be possible? I forced myself to stay calm. There was already more than enough fear filling the room. “When the echoes hit, what happens? Do you see or hear anything?”
He nodded. “I see everything.”
“Can you tell me so
mething you saw?”
He thought a moment, then jerked his chin up, finally looking at me. “I want to play with the dog.”
“We don’t have a dog,” his mother said, sounding panicked. “Randolph, there is no dog.”
“Yes, there is.” He twisted to point to the closed door behind him. “She brought him.”
I glanced at the door, then at Devon, who stood silently in the far corner, listening. There was no way Randolph could have seen Ozzie when we came in. The door was behind him and had been open for only a few seconds.
Unless, during his fugue, he’d rewound those few seconds and noticed what had happened too fast for him to realize before. Maybe he hadn’t even seen Ozzie, but with the hyperacuity the fugues brought, he’d heard or smelled the dog. At any given moment, our brain absorbs millions of data points, ninety-nine percent of which it files away as irrelevant. But in a fugue, I was able to access all of those sensory impressions, those hidden memories that the fugue allowed me to replay and slow down, analyze.
In a fugue, I truly could “see everything,” just as Randolph had claimed. It was how I’d saved Esme last month.
“His name is Ozzie,” I said. “Want to go out and play with him?”
For the first time, he smiled. “Yes, please.”
The mother gasped. Randolph slid away from her grasp and scrambled out the door. I looked up to her anguished face as she realized her nightmare had just begun.
Chapter Twenty-Two
After ensuring the medics didn’t contaminate the crime scene as they evacuated the few victims with vital signs, Ryder had the uniforms secure the area while he returned to the patrol car where Littleton waited.
He pushed through the school’s front door, the wind catching his open coat, flapping it around his knees like wings. All hell was about to break loose. He only a few minutes before the brass and press arrived along with the crime-scene techs, detectives, and for a sensational mass murder like this, any warm body with a badge. A crapstorm of blue.
This was why he preferred having no partner, why he preferred working with victims one-on-one, like he did at the Advocacy Center. Little glory, but less bullshit.
The cold felt good, cleared his head from the bloodbath inside, eased the nausea threatening to bring that stale protein bar back up again.
Animals.
Same thing he’d thought when he’d seen Tymara’s body splayed open like a dissection class gone horribly wrong.
More than animals. Predators. Powerful. Using others as their tools. Manipulative. Coercive. Controlling. He glanced around the front of the building, his mind assembling and reassembling multiple versions of the crime from alternative points of view.
Had he seen them on the street? No, they would have already been inside. Watching.
The woman, the final victim. What had Littleton said to her? Some kind of message? Or a delaying tactic while his partners made sure everyone inside was dosed with whatever drug they’d used?
Why was she singled out for special treatment, forced to watch, her death delayed until after the others were gone? Wait. Victim or one of the perpetrators? A proxy, like Littleton claimed to be? He glanced at the squad car. Littleton had his face pressed against the window, eyes wide with delight. Feasting off the pain that he had helped wrought. Feeling superior.
If Littleton felt that way without even stepping inside the scene, his only role to lure Ryder here as witness, then how much more powerful did the men who controlled him feel?
He waved the officer standing guard over Littleton to him. “I’ve got a list for you. There are cameras on a few of the businesses across the street. Get the video for the entire day.”
“The full day? But we know when—”
“The full day. Someone was here earlier, set up the drinks, coffee, brought the cookies, whatever. It’s going to all be spiked, and they would have seen to it that no one at that meeting missed out.” He was rambling, but it helped to think out loud. If this Brotherhood fed off the excitement that came from manipulating others to do their dirty work, maybe that someone was the final woman, the one who’d been forced to stay alive long enough to witness the results of her handiwork.
And then they’d killed her.
“Wouldn’t the cameras inside the school show that better?”
Ryder shook his head. “They’ll most likely be useless.” The men behind this, Littleton’s so-called brothers, would have seen to that. “Take a few guys and scout for cameras outside the other exits. You’re going to find an exit that’s open but isn’t supposed to be—that’s how they left. Get any security footage and secure that door for the techs to check for evidence.” The last was an easy leap in logic. Someone had fired that gun and left after the others were dead. And they hadn’t come out the front.
The officer nodded and galloped off. Ryder straightened, his gaze locked on Littleton. Fuckwad had used Ryder. Forced him to bear witness, turned Ryder into one of their goddamned proxies.
A game. That’s what this was to the men pulling the strings.
It’d been seven months since Littleton raped Tymara and offered her up to his partners. No, not partners. Bosses. Hmm. That didn’t feel quite right either. Maybe Littleton had nailed it the first time. Brothers. Big, bossy brothers who could persuade you to do anything.
Ryder stopped, halfway down the steps to the squad car. Brothers in blood. A fraternity hazing, taken to the extreme. The pledges so desperate to become members of the family that they’d debase themselves, sacrifice anything. He glanced back at the school.
Littleton wasn’t important enough for them to stop while he’d sat in jail. In fact, Ryder guessed he was damn lucky he hadn’t ended up executed like the woman inside. Maybe he’d been their first, and only after he was arrested did they realize it was safer to kill their proxies, their pledges? Hmmm…felt closer, but still not quite right.
Not quite right. That pretty much described this whole scenario. Everything felt faked, staged, from Littleton’s outburst in court today to the smirk he’d given Ryder while people were dying behind the doors of the school.
He reached the patrol car, strolled around it twice before he was certain he’d reined in his anger. Then he got into the driver’s seat. He didn’t want anyone to have any reason to believe he’d physically intimidated Littleton—although, Lord only knew how much he wanted to.
Not tonight. Tonight, Littleton was going to be treated like a precious gem.
One of the most effective interview tools Ryder had cultivated over his years as a police officer was silence. It took no more than a minute before Littleton broke.
“What did you find inside?” Littleton asked, his voice breathless.
“Exactly what you wanted me to find,” Ryder said, purposely avoiding any salacious details. “You and your brothers.” He allowed Littleton to maintain the illusion that he was equal to the men who’d orchestrated tonight’s atrocities. In reality, Littleton was a dead man walking. As soon as his usefulness ended, his brothers would silence him.
Littleton leaned forward, unable to mask his excitement. “Tell me.”
“You’re admitting to being involved?”
“Hell no. Besides, I’m technically in custody back here, so anything I say is inadmissible, even if I did. But I’m not.”
Apparently, Littleton fancied himself a bit of a jailhouse lawyer. “Off the record. Hypothetically. How many other performances,” he hated the word, but it was the best description he could come up with, “did your brothers stage while you were in jail? This was much too sophisticated to be their first.”
Littleton leaned back, frowning. He obviously hadn’t considered what his brothers had been doing while he’d been abandoned in the county lockup, protecting them. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Ryder went with the flow, changed direction. “It must have taken a lot of time and effort, convincing that woman to kill all those people. Did she know she was also condemning herself t
o death?”
“She’s dead?” He sounded surprised.
“Throat slit.” Ryder didn’t mention the more personal message of his business card. “Is that what you and your brothers are running, some kind of bizarre suicide cult?”
Littleton shook his head. His eyebrows drew together in thought. Maybe he wasn’t as stupid as he seemed. He opened his mouth, closed it again. Then he slumped and opened it once more. “I’m not saying anything.”
Not yet, Ryder thought. But the night was young.
He settled in, letting the silence lengthen and coil itself around Littleton, strangling his resistance. Littleton glared at him in the rearview, shuffled his weight, his handcuffed wrists restricting his movement. Then, finally, he stilled.
Ryder watched and waited, giving him a few more seconds to marinate. Time to talk.
A rap on the window opposite broke the spell. It was Manny Cruz and John Marsh, the Major Case commander. Ryder left the car, closing the door on Littleton, and circled around to join them on the sidewalk. Manny’s coat, unlike Ryder’s, was buttoned against the cold and fit as if it’d been custom-tailored. He wore a black silk scarf around his neck and an old-fashioned fedora, like Frank Sinatra’s. Marsh, despite his rank, was dressed like Ryder, an inexpensive suit beneath a wool overcoat, no hat, no gloves.
“What the hell, Manny?” Ryder said. And then to the commander, “Littleton was just getting ready to talk.”
The commander answered, “It’s not your case, Ryder. From my understanding, Mr. Littleton has you as his alibi. There’s no way he committed this crime.”
“Gena Kravitz is going to own your ass,” Manny added. “She hears of this, she’ll sue you and the department for harassment.”
“Release Littleton,” Marsh ordered. “My guys will invite him for an interview in the morning once we have more from the scene.”
Ryder shook his head. “He’ll be dead by then. Did you guys see what these actors did to that woman? What they had her do? They’re mocking us and getting off on it.”
