by Kate Flora
"Eight at this address. Another two using the mosque's address."
"And you can account for five?"
"Five here. We're gonna swing by the mosque, see what's parked on the street, soon as Stanley stops kicking things."
"Check out the one on the next street. The one that got shot up tonight. Stan can show you. You get a handle on his problem?"
Kyle blew out a breath. "Damned if I know. I asked him if anything was wrong. He said 'what the fuck wasn't wrong.' You know, I used to be a pretty good interviewer, but going by today, I'd say it's time to hang it up."
Burgess knew exactly how he felt. Some days were like that. "One brick at a time, Ter."
He made a quick note about the Imam of the many cars. He had to get back to 109, start looking through the information Rocky was piling up. First, he had to check out their mystery girl. And check in at home. "Over here, we've got a confirmed sighting of Kimani Yates."
Kyle uttered an exclamation which, when the expletives were deleted, amounted to the word "that."
"My sentiments exactly."
The night was getting old and taking Burgess along with it.
"When shall we three meet again?" Kyle said.
"Morning's soon enough. We're not getting anywhere tonight."
"Think the morning sun will bring clarity?"
"And the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny and a turducken."
"What the fuck is a turducken?"
"You really don't want to know."
"Gotta take some time off tomorrow afternoon," Kyle said. "Lexi has a soccer game. Her team's doing great and she made me promise I'd be there."
Terry Kyle really loved his girls. He'd fought hard to get custody from his ex-wife, a bitch from hell they all referred to as the PMS Queen. Now Kyle felt the heavy weight of the court and the PMS Queen, watching to see if he could handle it.
"We'll make it work."
"Thanks, Joe."
"See you tomorrow. Meanwhile, see if you can dig anything out of Stan. He's getting as bad as he was last fall. And we both know where that led."
"Roger that," Kyle said, and was gone.
Burgess turned his attention back to Aucoin. "Let's brief your replacement, then you can ride back to 109 with me if you want."
Together, they went up to their mystery girl's room. Burgess took a moment to study the girl, who appeared to be sleeping, before motioning the watching officer out into the corridor. She was curled on her side, one hand under her cheek, looking terribly small and helpless. Her hair was long, dark, and curly. Thick eyelashes lay against her pale cheeks. Her face still had the sweet plumpness of a young adolescent, and there were the faint traces of healing bruises along one jaw. The hand that bore the marks lay outside the blanket. Seen close up, the marks were ugly and unmistakable.
A child. A child who had had, and lost, a child of her own. Where had the adults been, the people who were supposed to be looking after her? Was there anyone to support her in this terrible time? He knew nothing about her and, so far, had no way of learning much. The people who seemed to know were either bad guys or know-nothings. He didn't even know how she'd felt about that baby, only that when they'd found her in the closet, she had been curled protectively around it. A child without protection trying to save a child of her own. The pain in his chest was not a heart attack.
"Wink or Dani come by to photograph that?"
"Dani. She was pretty upset about it."
Dani Letorneau was their newest evidence tech. She was a crackerjack at a crime scene, and the guy who ran their crime lab, Wink Devlin, had made her his special pet. Wink's version of making Dani his pet wasn't to be protective or give her plum assignments, it was to ensure that Dani saw crime in all its ugly glory. Burgess wasn't sure whether Wink was trying to make her the best tech she could possibly be, or if his secret agenda was to drive her out of the business into something he thought better suited to someone with her diminutive stature and delicate beauty. Wink could be hard to read sometimes.
"I gave mystery girl's clothes, and the baby's, to Dani," Aucoin said. His hands tightened into fists. "I hate it that that poor little guy doesn't even have a name." Aucoin didn't have kids, but Burgess remembered him at an interview once, picking up a fretful baby and calming it so Burgess could concentrate on the mom. Aucoin liked kids.
"Me, too."
Burgess quietly instructed Aucoin's replacement about the situation. How the girl wasn't to be left alone at any time. To use security as backup. Not to hesitate to call for more police if the slightest thing seemed out of place. Then he headed back to 109.
* * *
His desk looked like a paper blizzard had occurred in his absence. When Rocky went to work on things, this was often the result. Rocky had left a note on top of the heap. "Sgt, I called over to the jail about Kimani Yates. They said he hadn't been released. I suggested that since he'd just been seen over at the hospital, they might want to check again. And sure enough, he's gone. They're calling it a 'paperwork mixup.'"
Rocky strolled back in, carrying a cup of coffee, as Burgess was reading the note. "Pathetic... right, Sarge?" His wide shoulders rose and fell in a world-weary shrug. "Those guys would lose their asses if they weren't attached. If it's okay, I'm going to head out before anything else hits the fan."
"You make it sound like a busy evening," Burgess said. "A fire that resulted in a death, a barrage of gunfire in a quiet city neighborhood, and a bad guy mistakenly released from jail? All in a day's work for Portland's finest."
"Happy to hear it," Rocky said. "I was starting to worry. But if you're going to have it all solved and locked up tight by morning, I think I'll go home and see if there's any beer in the fridge. Both my brothers are living with us right now, and..."
He trailed off. Didn't want to be complaining in the face of real-world problems. "See you tomorrow."
Left alone in the quiet detective's bay, Burgess dropped into his chair and started going through the papers.
His phone rang. Chris. "Are you ever coming home?" she said. She sounded tired and cranky. This wasn't what he'd anticipated when he'd longed for normal. But he knew this was what normal was like. There were ups and downs. Just like there were here at 109.
"Twenty minutes," he said. "I'm leaving in twenty minutes. Have things settled down?"
"I'm patrolling the border between two warring countries," she said. "Right now, everything's quiet."
"I'm sorry," he said. "I never meant—"
"I'm not complaining," she said. "At least, I'm trying not to. What can I say? Right now this just sucks. My optimism says this is an adjustment and later on we'll be okay."
"I love your optimistic side."
"And my grouchy side?"
"Love that, too. Keep a light on for me."
"I always do."
He stared at the papers a little longer, but his focus was gone. Unless his phone rang with something important, he was better off heading home and getting some sleep. Tomorrow, as Scarlett O'Hara said, was another day.
He shoved everything into his briefcase and headed for the truck. He'd just closed the door and was reaching for the key when his phone rang.
Chapter 8
"Joe? We've got a problem." It was Kyle. Calm and controlled, as always, but with an undercurrent in his voice that said "real bad news."
"I'm listening."
"You're not going to believe this," Kyle hesitated. "Someone has stolen the baby's body. I was just checking. I don't know why. Some crazy instinct, and when they opened the drawer, he wasn't there."
Burgess could believe it. What he couldn't believe was that he'd been so careless he hadn't anticipated it and that the hospital had been so careless they'd allowed it to happen. Someone had been trying to control their mystery girl. It wasn't unreasonable that part of what that someone wanted was to ensure that he wasn't tied to the baby. At a minimum, when they found the baby's father, it was going to be a case of statutory rape. And kidnapping and fal
se imprisonment for whoever had locked her—them—in that closet. He thought it was probably far worse than that. Like felony murder, even if it was a set fire and the person who set it was different from whoever had locked them in that closet.
Stealing the body at this point would not achieve what he suspected was perpetrator's purpose—to keep from being linked to the child. They already had the baby's clothes, from which they could certainly get DNA, and the hospital would have taken blood. Unless this was some weird cultural thing that involved a need to have the body? This case was getting stranger by the minute.
"Who called you?" he asked. "And when?"
"Nobody called me. And I take it no one has called you, either. Stan and I were taking Osman to the emergency room—"
"Whoa!" Burgess said. "Slow down. You were doing what?"
"Stan was supposed to call and update you about that. He didn't?"
"He didn't."
Burgess was struggling to tolerate Stan Perry's out-of-control behavior while he got a handle on the cause, but not updating him on a major event in an ongoing death investigation? That was not acceptable.
"Where are you?" he said.
"At the hospital."
"Is Stan with you?"
There was a pause. "He seems to have temporarily disappeared."
"I'm on my way," Burgess said. "Have security cue up their surveillance video. Again."
How many times tonight was he going to have to go back to the hospital? He called Chris, briefly explained the latest development, and then called Stan. After a few rings he got a weary, "Stan Perry."
"And you were going to call me about Osman when?" he snapped. "At a time more convenient for you?"
"Oh, shit," Perry said. "I forgot."
"You forgot? This isn't an invitation to tea, Stan, it's a homicide investigation. I'm on my way over, so fill me in. What happened to Osman?"
"I don't know."
"Stan, you took him to the hospital."
"Right, Joe. Someone tried to bash his head in, but we don't know who or how or why. We couldn't get another translator to come with us to the Imam's place, so we tried to reach Osman. When he didn't answer, we went there by ourselves and you know how that went. But Terry had this feeling, so we got Osman's address and took a ride over there, found him bleeding on the lawn. We scooped him up and brought him over here, and that's when the rest of all hell broke loose."
"Do something for me, will you, Stan? Scoot up to our mystery girl's room and make sure that she's still there? Way too many things are going wrong tonight. I'd really like that not to be another one."
He hesitated, about to hang up, then said, "Call me as soon as you've confirmed that she's still there, okay?"
"Okay."
Perry sounded suitably chastened, but it was past time for them to have a talk. "I forgot" was never an acceptable answer under these circumstances, and Perry wasn't the forgetful type.
Burgess pushed down hard on the accelerator, swooping back across town at an unseemly speed. He felt pressure in his chest, certain the night was going to keep bringing more and more bad news. It happened sometimes—a shitstorm that came on so fast you never had time to put up your umbrella. He wouldn't breathe easily until Perry called and confirmed that their mystery girl was still there.
Losing the baby was bad enough. It would make Portland police and hospital security look like a bunch of bozos, and give the press endless scope for snarky headlines. He had little patience for talking heads shoving their fuzzy mikes at him, especially when he couldn't tell the truth. He wasn't allowed to say that they would have had more security if Cote wasn't such a goddamned ass-wipe about overtime. He wasn't allowed to say much of anything, come to that. Cote or Melia always briefed the press. Burgess never talked to them—his reputation with the press was "grouchy and taciturn"—but they never gave up trying.
If they lost the girl, too, they might as well all resign and go live in rural Alaska, somewhere north of the Arctic Circle, where there weren't many newspapers around and a person could quietly disappear. Losing a victim's body, and a prime witness and second victim, all in a single night, would be a hard thing to live down. Especially when coupled with the drive-by shooting of a Somali related to the Imam of the mosque where the baby died. And a vicious attack on a Somali translator.
He was trying to keep the car on the road, and dial Melia, when his phone rang again.
"Jesus, Joe. Jesus," was all Stan Perry could manage.
Anxiety stabbed him with a pain so visceral it almost took his breath away. "Is she gone, Stan?"
Perry didn't answer.
"Talk to me, Stanley. Talk to me. Is she dead? Is she gone? What's happening?"
"She's not in her room, Joe. I—" He heard a crash, a commotion of voices, Stan Perry yelling, "Hey! He's getting away!"
Burgess dropped the phone and floored it, spinning around the corner and into the Emergency entrance, swinging his car so he was blocking most of it as a dark Honda came accelerating straight at him.
He jumped out, already clawing for his gun, yelling, "Stop! Police!" as he shot out one front tire. The car swerved to go around him and slammed, full tilt, into a cement post.
The two security guards who'd been chasing it dove for the car, hauling the dazed and bleeding passenger out as the driver flew out his door and took off down the street with Kyle and Perry flying after him. Burgess only had a vague impression of a dark uniform before the man disappeared around a corner.
"Pop the trunk! Pop the trunk!" Perry screamed back over his shoulder as Kyle, who was closer to the running man, was yelling, "Stop! Police!"
"Hang onto him," he told the security guards, who were grappling with the uncooperative passenger, "until I can get these cuffs on." This one was not getting away.
Then Burgess called it in, asking for patrol to take charge of the passenger and to back up Kyle and Perry on their search for the fleeing driver.
It had all the elements of a bad TV cop show. A comedy cop show. In this case, a comedy of errors. A snafu. Fubar. Also very much like their real lives, those nights when one crazy thing after another kept happening, until trying to prioritize became like trying to catch feathers from an exploding pillow. You snatched at things as quickly as you could and they just kept coming.
Even as he hurried to the Explorer to move it so it wouldn't block the hospital entrance, and to grab a pry bar, Burgess's mind filled with a big-screen image of Captain Cote demanding an explanation for tonight's events, the man's liver-colored lips pursed in his expression of perpetual disapproval. Cote was never satisfied with "we don't know yet." He might as well have been a character on a TV show—tonight's episode was called "Black Honda Night"—he wanted it neat and clean and solved in an hour. The captain hated complexity. Anything that didn't fit on a chart or graph or couldn't be quantified was anathema to him.
Depending on how many players turned out to be involved in this mess, they'd be lucky if it was solved in a lifetime. And that was with good, diligent cops on the case.
He jammed in the pry bar and popped the trunk. Inside, along with the usual detritus of a car trunk, was the tiniest body bag he'd ever seen. If he was right, this was their missing baby, but until he was gloved, and had another officer with him, he wasn't touching it. He couldn't leave it, either. Not until patrol got here. Otherwise, the way things were going tonight, it would disappear again. Probably into the trunk of another black Honda.
He could hear the reassuring sounds of sirens in the distance. Help was on the way. But he needed Melia over here as well, someone with rank to coordinate this three-ring circus. He needed to deal with this car and what was in its trunk. He needed to get upstairs and make sure that their mystery girl was all right. Make sure the cop who was supposed to be watching was watching, and not lying injured or dead on the floor. He needed to get to the morgue and find out what had happened.
Burgess had been a cop for longer than he'd lived before he became one. Cops like to
think they've seen it all, but there's always something new. Something crazier or more unimaginable or so purely weird it went on the life list of "most crazy things I've ever seen." Today would be a contender.
He grabbed the first patrol officer who arrived, pointed to the open trunk, and said, "Stay right here. Don't move. Don't touch anything and don't let anyone near this car until I come back."
"What's—" the officer began, then remembered she was talking to Joe Burgess, the meanest cop in Portland. She lowered her eyes. "Yes, sir," she said.
Burgess grabbed the next officer and sent him to help the security guards. "Don't let that man get away. Don't take those cuffs off unless a doctor says it's absolutely necessary. Got that?" He got another nervous nod. Then Burgess headed for their mystery girl's room.
He stabbed the elevator button. Stabbed it again. Sighed for his bad knee, and sprinted for the stairs.
He found a male nurse staring at an empty bed and an overturned chair. "Where is she?" Burgess demanded.
The man turned to him, a puzzled expression on his face. "Who are you?"
"Detective Sergeant Burgess, Portland police. The girl who is supposed to be in this bed is the unidentified victim of a fire this afternoon."
He glared at the overturned chair. "There's supposed to be a police officer with her at all times."
The male nurse shrugged. "I don't know what to tell you, Detective. I just came on—"
"Joe," a woman's voice called. "Joe, we need you."
Burgess and the nurse sprinted toward the voice. A young woman in scrubs was staring into a dark room. She turned, started to say, "There's someone—" then stopped, surprised to find two men answering her call instead of one.
Burgess, being a good detective, deduced that the male nurse's name was Joe. "Where's the light switch?" he said.
The other Joe moved quickly toward it. It illuminated a sprawled figure in a police uniform crumpled on the floor in a corner. Nurse Joe and the woman moved toward hm. Burgess spotted a wad of cotton on the floor. Chloroform, he wondered? Not a legal product for consumers, but then, Maine was full of creative chemists able to get their hands on prohibited substances.
