And Grant You Peace (A Joe Burgess Mystery, Book 4)

by Kate Flora

  There he went again—making assumptions about people. He had insufficient facts about Norton on which to base that opinion. Despite the druggie affect and the smell, when he wasn't in jail or knocking down senior citizens, Norton might be a successful broker. A lay preacher. Perhaps a recently returned missionary who had snatched that purse because he had a Robin Hood complex. Steal from the old and give to the young. On the other hand, he had had a taste of Norton's record, and he'd seen this hundreds of times before.

  Not doctors getting dragged by the neck around the hospital. That was rarer. But people who were bad to the core acting badly? He'd seen a lifetime of that.

  Perry was no longer behind him. Burgess figured he'd slipped back through the door and would come in through another entrance, come down the corridor behind Norton.

  He kept walking toward Norton, knowing Kyle was doing the same. They would keep enough distance between them so that Norton could only watch one of them at a time. They wanted him as off balance as possible.

  Burgess had a lot of experience controlling his temper, but sometimes it got away from him. Right now, they had a million important things to deal with regarding an imprisoned child-mother and her poor dead baby. This asshole who'd been paid by someone to come and swipe that baby was not important. He was just wasting their time with his "I'm a dangerous thug" act.

  "So, Akiba," he said. "You sure you want to do this? You want to hurt this woman, this doctor who just spent all that time patching you up, right in front of the cops? You do, and you're going away for so long you can kiss your youth goodbye."

  He moved steadily forward. "Why don't you drop those scissors, Akiba. Drop them on the floor, let the doctor go, put your hands up, and we'll pretend this never happened."

  Norton had a far-away look, like he wasn't at all aware of what he was doing. He'd seemed calm before, but Burgess wondered if he'd taken something to jazz himself up for his mission and now it was bringing on some full-bore paranoia? There was so much stuff on the street from homemade labs it was hard to keep up with what it all did. They were just beginning to see some really dangerous synthetic stuff call "bath salts," crap that seemed to be coming in from China.

  Druggies loved it. They didn't even know it made them crazy 'til they found themselves chewing off their mother's face or walking naked and bleeding through Walmart because they needed cheese worms.

  Norton was up against the door, pushing backward through it, dragging the terrified woman with him. Suddenly, he shoved her at Burgess, turned, and darted through the door.

  Burgess jumped around her as she sprawled to the floor, leaving the more courtly Melia to help her up. Fueled by anger, he dashed after the amazingly fast Norton, dodging gurneys and wheelchairs as he ran. It was like being on the football field again, except that the opposing players were mechanical.

  Norton was almost through the second door when Burgess launched himself and knocked the younger man to the floor, Kyle right behind him. Stan Perry, who should have been there to back their play, was nowhere to be seen.

  Together, they flipped the man and cuffed him, seeing in the man's stiff-armed resistance a lot of experience with handcuffs. They flipped him onto his back and Burgess rested his foot gently on Norton's stomach. "Next time you decide to screw around in someone's emergency room, pick another city to do it in, okay? They've got real patients here with real emergencies to deal with. Doctors don't need to be wasting their time getting dragged around by a piece of shit like you."

  Norton glared up at him, teeth bared like a cornered dog, and uttered a string of filth. Then, with something that looked way too much like a smile, he said, "I'll be out in an hour, and then you had better watch your back. You have no idea who you're dealing with."

  Chapter 10

  Burgess pressed down on the man's stomach. What he'd like to do was stomp. Break a few ribs, remind the man that threatening cops was a bad idea. Cops had an expression—make me run, you're going to end up hurting. These days, most of that was played out on TV. In the real world, it was the bad guys who had all the rights and the cops who had to walk the straight and narrow. The good old days had too often also been the bad old days, but there were times when he and many of his fellow officers longed to take someone out to a deserted parking lot and do a little reeducation. Someone, occasionally, still did.

  Guy like this wasn't going to stop hurting other people until someone put him down like the rogue dog that he was. Harsh? Maybe. Also true. The lapsed Catholic in him might always hope for redemption, but the realist could tell the difference between those who might learn from their mistakes and those who didn't believe they ever made them. He'd seen a quote once to the effect that you could never understand an antagonist until you understood how he was the protagonist of his own story. That was about as true as it got. He worked at understanding their psychology. But when you were faced with someone who'd misspent his entire youth preying on the weak and vulnerable, you didn't cherish much hope that that predator was going to see the light. And Burgess didn't use the word "predator" lightly.

  "I had a dollar for every time some hopped-up yo tells me he's connected, I could retire," Kyle said.

  He bent down close to Norton's ear. "Listen, Akiba... with your record... your pending charges, and now the attempted murder of an ER doc who's just put you back together? I don't think anyone has friends powerful enough to bail them out of this. Bail, see, part of the analysis is dangerousness. I think you just established that beyond any doubt."

  He rested his foot on the man's stomach next to Burgess's and pressed just enough to make the man squirm. "Don't worry. I'm sure they'll find you a nice cellmate who will appreciate your specialness."

  Burgess saw a tremble in Kyle's leg. Kyle, whose cool he could always rely on, wanted to stomp the man as much as he did.

  Their last two big cases had taken so much out of them he'd labeled them "the Crips." There had been some quiet months since then. Quiet in the sense that while there had been plenty of their usual ration of ugly crime, there hadn't been any cases that kept them running on empty for days at a time. Kyle had had time to spend with Michelle and his girls. Stan Perry had seemed to be getting his restless womanizing under control. But a tough New England winter could take a lot out of you. Driving in snow and ice, standing in the cold, crawling though people's nasty apartments, cold apartments, working crime scenes in garbage-strewn alleys. Seeing how people neglected their kids to pleasure themselves. It took a toll.

  Today's mild spring day had been a breath of hope, and it had ended with this. Except he thought it was probably tomorrow by now.

  "Kenny Munroe's supposed to be getting someone to transport this guy. Let's hand him over and then go talk to Vince. If we're lucky, Vince will already have taken a statement from the doctor."

  He looked up and down the empty hall. "I wonder what happened to Stan?"

  Kyle made a show of looking, too. "He didn't exactly have our backs on this one, did he? I'm starting to worry about young Stanley again."

  Stan Perry was a good instinctive detective with two persistent problems: an occasional lack of impulse control that often brought great results but equally often caused Burgess and Kyle infinite grief, and a weakness for the wrong kind of women.

  Norton flopped around, trying to shake them off, and Burgess increased the pressure with his foot. "Stay still," he said.

  Norton responded by attempting to flip them off.

  "I said stay still," Burgess repeated.

  "You guys better not have families," Norton said, "because if you do, when I get out, I am really gonna fuck them up. And if I don't get out? I got friends."

  Burgess took his foot off the man, reached down, and hauled Norton to his feet, slamming him hard up against a wall. "If you, or any of your scumbag friends, ever comes near a cop's family—you, or they, can expect a body bag in their future."

  He pulled Norton away from the wall and slammed him back again. "I mean it, Norton. Don't even
think about it."

  There was something feral about the man that made Burgess's skin crawl. Bad guys were bad. That went with the territory. But sometimes they were hollow inside. Cold, empty vessels where compassion, empathy, or any normal emotions were absent. He thought Norton was one of those. It took someone awfully cold to stomp fragile old ladies and steal dead babies.

  "Let's go find Kenny, Ter. I've had enough of Mr. Norton's company."

  They pulled Norton away from the wall, each took an arm, and started walking him back to the lobby.

  "Joe?" Kyle said.

  Something in his voice made Burgess pause. Their eyes met, and Burgess read what Kyle wouldn't say. Kyle was thinking that if this guy did get out, they were going to have to watch their backs, and their families. That threats to their families were completely unacceptable and that if it became necessary, the Norton problem would need to be resolved without the benefit of any due process. Though Burgess thought if it came to that Norton would be getting exactly the due process he was entitled to.

  The bad guys seemed to be getting increasingly savage, and that savagery was having an effect on the good guys. Kyle was his conscience. It was Kyle who sometimes had to remind him that they were about catching bad guys. That the court system was about justice and Burgess shouldn't start thinking about playing God. But when it came to their families—as Burgess was learning—cops drew a line in the sand and protected it with everything they had. Cops might hurt their own families, but no one else better try it. It was the families that kept them sane and balanced, the ones who managed to hold their families together. He had always known it was hard. Now Burgess came face to face with it every day.

  They passed through an emergency room that fell silent around them. There was no sign of the Indian doctor.

  Melia was in the lobby with Kenny Munroe and Munroe had two big patrol officers waiting to take the prisoner to jail. Burgess briefed them quickly on the situation. "And you tell them that even if God and the governor show up wanting to post bail, this man is not to be let out."

  Once they'd led Norton out to the waiting cruiser, he also made a call over to the jail and reiterated his concerns. He got them to promise they'd let him know if anyone showed up looking for Norton. They'd lost Kimani Yates without noticing, so his faith wasn't strong, but it was the best he could do.

  "Where's Stan?" Melia said.

  Burgess shrugged. "I thought he must be with you. He was right behind me in the ER. When he disappeared, I figured he was going to circle around to get ahead of the guy."

  "Gotta get him under control, Joe. He's becoming a liability."

  Another time, Burgess might have defended his detective. But Stan had gone out of bounds one time too many. At least, thanks to Andrea, he now had an idea what the problem was.

  "Let's go to the morgue. Figure out what that story is. Whether they've still got our baby, and if they're missing another child."

  The three of them trooped to the elevator and took it down to the morgue.

  Burgess needed a cup of coffee. He'd almost suggested they get some and bring it along. But while cops can eat and drink under pretty awful circumstances, higher up the food chain they were concerned with the department's public image. Walking into the morgue to talk about a dead baby clutching their take-away coffee set the wrong tone.

  * * *

  An hour later, they'd found their dead baby and confirmed that the one in the trunk of the car was a second child who was missing from the morgue. They'd spoken sharply with the morgue attendant who had released the baby without any paperwork or identification. They'd returned the stolen baby to the morgue and left someone guarding the baby killed by the fire until he could be transported to the medical examiner's office in the morning. Seemed like half of patrol was tied up here at the hospital tonight.

  Now they did have coffee and were stuffed into the security office, watching surveillance tapes. What they were watching explained some things and pissed them all off. A man in what looked, to the uninitiated, like a Portland police uniform, walking into the hospital, consulting the information desk, and heading down to the basement. It made the morgue attendant's defensive statement, "Hey, I thought he was a cop and it was okay," more understandable. And amped up their sense that they were dealing with someone—or ones—who were both clever and devious.

  But almost eight hours in, they still had no idea what this was about. They had no ID on the girl or the baby. No idea what her connection to the mosque was or who might have locked her in that closet. Not the who or the why. They had an Imam who claimed to know nothing, and a man who denied being at the scene when he had been. They had no idea why the fire had been set. Not even confirmation, as yet, that it had been set. Nor a reason why it had been, despite the anti-Muslim graffiti and the presence of some guys on motorcycles at the scene.

  They had a translator who appeared to have an antagonistic relationship with the Imam and his people, a man who had later been attacked himself and had then run away. And they had the man who had earlier in the evening tried to snatch their mystery girl from her room who was a known criminal but who was not Muslim. What was his connection to this? And how were the two men who had tried to steal the baby involved?

  Rocky Jordan had been right. They were going to have to make charts just to keep track.

  His instinct said that this would be a case of overlapping circles, where some things were connected and some were not. But he was frustrated that they had so few facts to work with.

  At least the surveillance video had given them a good, if grainy, look at the driver's face. A big white male in his early forties, a strong man with broad shoulders, well-trimmed facial hair that would probably disappear by morning if patrol didn't scoop him up, and a strange scoop to his walk, like his back was bad or he favored one leg. If it was his leg, it hadn't stopped him from running plenty fast when he bailed out of that car. He'd run like a man who couldn't risk getting caught. But if that was the case, why take on a job like this? Because he needed money? Because he was more scared of whoever hired him than of the police?

  With luck, they'd grab his prints from the car and get an ID. Burgess wasn't optimistic that they'd get anything from Norton.

  "Hold on," Kyle said. "Can we see that again?"

  They reran the video.

  "Those whiskers aren't real," Kyle said. "This is someone who thought it was important to get the girl and the baby, and went to a whole lot of trouble with the car, and the plates, trying not to be recognized. Careful, but not careful enough. Take a look at his watch. And his ring. Your run-of-the-mill bad guy usually doesn't have the money for accessories like that."

  They all leaned in. Burgess didn't know much about fancy watches. His rule was they had to be reliable, sturdy, and easy to read. He didn't have time to learn a lot of fancy gadgets. But this one, peeping out beneath the sleeve of the faked uniform, looked like it could have been used to fly a commercial jet.

  "We better take this video back to Rocky. See if he can get us some close-ups of the watch and the ring. That ring might tell us a whole lot."

  Kyle's grin was wolfish. There was nothing cops appreciated more than stupid bad guys, especially when those guys were trying to be so smart.

  They looked at the rest of the videos, but there wasn't anything else that was useful. "Time for everyone to get some sleep," Melia said. "Let's all meet again at eight."

  "Hold on, Vince," Burgess said. "You were going to tell about Cote's press conference."

  A pained look crossed the lieutenant's face. "He tried to give away the farm. Without talking to us. Said it was a set fire, anti-Muslim, and that a girl and a baby had been found locked inside, the girl survived and the baby died."

  "Based on what?" Burgess said. "We don't have anything back about the fire."

  They tried hard to keep facts they didn't want blabbed to the public away from Cote's eye. But the man fancied himself a keen detective and brilliant public speaker, and someti
mes he got away from them. At least he didn't have any more facts he could blab to the press. But that was because all Melia and his detectives had was a growing pile of conundrums, and very few answers. Cote thought answers grew on trees.

  "Sorry, Vince," Burgess said.

  "Not as sorry as I am. See you in the morning."

  Burgess had a couple things he had to do before he went home. He had to stop by the fire scene and take some pictures. And if the investigators were still there, he hoped he could find out if they thought the fire had been set. Then he'd go to bed.

  Slowly, moving like old men and not detectives in their prime, they rose from their chairs and headed out to their cars.

  Stan Perry had never returned.

  Chapter 11

  Before he left the lobby, he glanced out at the parking lot. The car was being loaded onto a tow truck, Melinda Beck watching, impatience in every line of her body. He went upstairs to see how Dwyer and his mystery girl were doing. The girl was curled on her side, deeply asleep. Dwyer was in a chair doing a Sudoku puzzle. She smiled at him, stood, and stretched. "Watch her a minute, Joe?"

  "Sure."

  Dwyer ducked into the bathroom and he sat down in the chair. He looked at the puzzle she'd been working and shook his head. His son Dylan did Sudoku. He'd tried a few times, but he didn't get it. Dylan thought that meant he was beyond simple. Learning to get along with a kid when you didn't have a lifetime of experience was a constant challenge. Some days he wanted to throw up his hands and send the boy back. But Dylan's mother was dead. The old girlfriend who had left town rather than tell him she was pregnant. A few months ago, he'd gotten a letter telling him about Dylan, with a scrawled note on the bottom saying that the woman was dead.

  He'd seen enough of how family tragedy could screw kids up. He couldn't do that to his son. It just made his own hard life harder. His girlfriend, Chris, had been extremely supportive. But her agenda included wanting kids—she wanted to adopt the two foster children they'd met through an earlier case—while his did not. What was that thing they said—life is what happens while you're making other plans? He just wished his son would try a little harder. Meet him halfway sometimes. He probably wasn't the first parent to think this.