by Kate Flora
The girl on the bed stirred. Her eyes opened. She saw him, and there was recognition there. One small hand came out from under the blanket. He crossed to the bed, and took it. She made a small sound and closed her eyes.
He watched her, wishing their hands could transmit the information she otherwise wouldn't share. If they could communicate without speaking, the way he and Kyle did. He wished he could "fix it" but there were so many things that needed to be fixed for this child, he wouldn't know where to begin. Chris, his optimist, would say "with one thing at a time." His job required patience, something he was well-schooled in, but by nature he wanted to bull his way through things, make people tell the truth, act decently, stop lying or hiding or pretending they had no responsibility for anyone but themselves. It was a constant battle.
Tonight, he had wanted so badly to pound the crap out of Norton.
He squeezed her hand gently. "We won't let anyone hurt you," he said. "We're going to keep you safe."
What he said. And what he hoped was true. But sometimes things just got so screwed up.
He looked up and saw Andrea Dwyer watching him. "It's a screwed-up world," she said. "I thought Melia wasn't going to give you any more kids?"
"No one gave me this kid. I was just sitting in my car, enjoying a quiet spring evening, when a boy banged on my car window and said there was a fire. What was I supposed to do? Just drive away because it might get complicated?"
"People do."
Dwyer arranged her gorgeous, long-limbed body in the chair again. "If I were a betting woman, I'd bet that PFD read you the riot act for going into that building."
"You'd win that one," he said. "I guess it's a character flaw. I take an oath to serve and protect, and when someone is screaming inside a burning building, I feel like I've got to go and do that."
Her eyes shifted to the girl in the bed. "I'd like to castrate the bastard who did this to her."
"Bastards plural," he said. "This one looks very complicated. And you'll have to get in line. Lotta people already volunteering for that job."
Dwyer shook her head. "I'm the kiddie cop, Joe. That gives me first dibs. You go find 'em. I'll be sharpening my knife."
Lot of female officers might have resented being labeled "kiddie cop." Dwyer embraced it.
"You know a kid named Jason Stetson? Spindly towhead, maybe fourteen now? Lives over near the fire scene?" Burgess said. "He's the one who came and got me. After that all hell broke loose, so I didn't get a chance to get back and talk to him. But he's always around, and kids like that, they can be pretty invisible, so they see things."
"You want me to talk to him?"
"Got any kind of a relationship with him?"
"Pretty good one," she said, "and I know the foster parents. They're good people."
"If I don't find him first, I might need you to talk to him."
He needed to go. Didn't want to let go of his mystery girl's hand. Dwyer saw that. "I'll take care of her, Joe. I promise. And if I get to Jason before you do, I'll talk to him."
"Thanks," he said. "I wish—"
But he wished for so much, and wishing wouldn't make it so. Not in the cop's world. Putting your shoulder to the boulder and pushing, that got results. Instead, he asked, "I may need a window into the Somali community. You know any Somali kids? Any who might talk to you?"
"Kids?" she shrugged. "I'll have to think about that, Joe. I've got a couple concerned mothers I interact with pretty regularly. You give me some names, I can see if they know anything."
"I'll do that. Go through my notes tomorrow and give you the names." He was too tired to do it now. He needed to grab some sleep before it was time to get up again.
"I'm around tomorrow," she said. "And you've got my number."
"I think I do."
"I've got yours, too," she said. "Get some sleep."
Reluctantly, he pulled his hand away and headed for the elevator. He should have taken the stairs, but he was too out of gas for that.
* * *
The night wasn't that cold, but so many hours in and his head full of questions, the chill could get to him. He turned the heat on high and headed back to the fire scene. Despite the questions he wanted to ask, he hoped no one would be there and he could take his pictures, get back in the truck, and head home. Hoping. Wishing. It only came true in love songs and Disney movies.
The scene was hopping. At least the guy from the fire marshal's office was one of them. A cop. Someone who'd talk to him without playing games.
He parked and walked over to where Davey Green and Scott Lavigne stood talking, and held out his hand.
"Davey. Scott. It's good to see some friendly faces. First time tonight."
Green nodded. "This one's gonna be a ball-buster, Joe. Fast as we can develop techniques for spotting how a fire was set, the bad guys develop newer techniques to fool us."
"But the fire was set?"
"It was," Lavigne said. "Unusual accelerant, though. Davey's going to take it back to lab and see what he can figure out. Done with a timer, too, so it would happen after everyone left for the day."
"Except the ones who couldn't get out," Burgess said.
"What's the story on that, Joe?" Green asked.
Burgess shared the little he knew. "So far, the girl is not talking. I mean not a word. They're getting a psych consult tomorrow. See if that helps. She's just a child."
"A child with a child," Lavigne said. "Someone out there has something to answer for." He looked over at the smoking hulk of the building. "Some things to answer for."
"I've got nothing to base this on," Burgess said. "People we've talked to so far are totally know-nothings. But I suspect whoever burned this building may be different from whoever locked that girl and her baby in that closet."
"Keep me in the loop, Joe," Green said. It was just as valuable on his side to have a good relationship with someone inside the investigation. Public safety organizations were notoriously territorial. It helped to have a personal connection.
"You know I will. And you've got Scotty." He hesitated. "And PFD."
The rivalry between police and fire was a long-standing one, with each side convinced that the other did little to nothing. They'd worked together, side by side, hundreds of times, but when the event was over and they returned to their respective stations, it seemed like memory failed.
It was years in the past now, but Burgess still remembered after 9/11, and during the anthrax scare, Portland cops having to handle dangerous situations because the firefighters wouldn't. Partly it was just culture. Firefighters liked to wait until their equipment was assembled and a game plan was designed. That was their training. Their Standard Operating Procedure. Cops often just had to go and do stuff. Get a bus and evacuate a building. Open suspicious letters. Rescue screaming people from burning buildings.
"You hear that a couple lowlifes tried to steal the baby's body from the morgue?" he said.
That got their attention.
"We stopped 'em in the hospital parking lot. One ran away, the other is sitting over at the jail, lawyered up. One of them was dressed like a cop. Well, sorta like a cop. That's how he was able to get the baby. Of course, he got the wrong baby. And earlier tonight, someone else tried to kidnap our mystery girl. Things been crazy over there tonight."
He looked over at what was left of the building. "I wonder if there's anything left of that closet that might give us some clues?"
The other men shrugged. "You never know, Joe."
"I was only in the room for a few seconds, but it was full of computer equipment. New computer equipment. And it was the only door that was locked." He described where the closet had been. For all he knew, there would be piles of melted plastic or boxes with Apple logos somewhere in the wreckage.
"We've got people sitting on it," Lavigne said. "No one will be messing with it overnight."
Burgess hoped that was right, but the way today had gone, he didn't feel very confident.
"Just g
otta take a few photos," he said. "See you both tomorrow. And I'd appreciate hearing what you learn about that accelerant."
* * *
His living room was lined with his crime scene photos. Stark black and white pictures of the scenes after the victim had been taken away and the public safety personnel had gone home. To Burgess, they represented the questions that needed to be answered, the blanks that had to be filled in. He might need to come back in daylight, get some clearer photos. For now, he circled the smoking wreckage, taking pictures he imagined were going to look like one of the circles of hell.
When he was done, he climbed in the truck and headed home. Where he'd been heading so many hours ago, before Jason had banged on his window.
He'd like to think that if he'd gone home instead of taking a few more minutes for peace and quiet, this might have been someone else's mess. More likely, it just would have been a mess that came to him later. A mess with two deaths instead of one.
If he hadn't been there, his mystery girl wouldn't have had a chance. And what he didn't know was whether, having lost her baby, she would want that chance. Whether there was someone out there loving her and missing her and hoping she would come home, or whether she'd been in this mess because the people who were supposed to care for her and be responsible were lost in drink or drugs or mental illness, and hadn't really noticed she was missing. Or hadn't cared.
He sighed, thinking of home. At least it would be quiet there. The kids asleep. He could curl up next to Chris, and for a few hours, at least, the world would be a good place to be.
Chapter 12
He slipped off his shoes outside the door, and crossed the dark, silent kitchen in stocking feet. There was a bottle of milk on the counter, the lid off, just waiting to go bad. That would be Dylan. It was one of his signature moves. In his former life, there had been some discipline, but the boy had also been indulged, perhaps in compensation for his rocky relationship with his stepfather. Burgess thought about his own mother, cleaning other people's houses, then coming home and caring for her own home and children. She would have been scandalized if any of her children had left the milk out to spoil. They were lucky to have milk and they all knew it. He supposed if he said that to his son, the boy would think he was just an old fart.
More than once his son had called him a dinosaur. Not, perhaps, the best way to bridge a gap of fifteen years. There was no easy way to do that. Burgess had adopted the tortoise model—slow and steady wins the race. Not that it was a race, or that there had to be a winner. It was a shared life, and there had to be two winners. It was just so easy to take refuge in work and be "too busy" to come home.
Terry Kyle was his role model for this. Kyle, whose ex-wife had dragged him over burning coals for years, while he had held onto his temper and kept his children safe and loved. None of it came without a struggle. But as his mother would have said, "Whoever told you it was supposed to be easy?"
There was a plate on the kitchen table, covered in plastic wrap, with a note: Nina is afraid you'll starve, so we've left you a sandwich.
Nina could be such a little mother. Burgess found it sweet when she tried to mother him, sweet and disconcerting. Parents were supposed to look after children, not the other way around. Another one of the many crazy ways that their blended household was coming together. It was better than being afraid of him, which Nina had also been. He worried about Nina. At fourteen, she'd been through a lifetime of trauma, beginning with watching her father kill her mother. A lifetime of adults trying to blame her for their bad acts and of trying to look after her little brother, Neddy.
Miraculously, Neddy seemed to be doing all right. He had a naturally sunny disposition and genuine optimism. Even Dylan, who wore his cynicism and adolescent cool like armor, couldn't hold out for long when Neddy wanted to play catch, or play a game. Maybe it made up for some of the void created by moving away from his two younger siblings. He just wished Dylan and Nina would reach some kind of a truce. Their social worker said it was normal. They were jockeying for position and competing for love and attention. And who could argue with that?
Well, there were those in Portland who'd tell you Joe Burgess could argue with anything. If those who found themselves on the food chain below him had given him the label "meanest cop in Portland," those who were above him often claimed they wished he'd just shut up and follow orders. They might have labeled him "most obstructive cop in Portland," but he could cite decades of cases that would have gotten screwed up by following directives from above. Not the least of which was the death of his old high school friend, Reggie. His boss's boss, Captain Cote of the famously loose lips, had immediately judged Reggie's death an accidental drowning and told Burgess not to waste any resources on it.
Typically, Burgess hadn't listened—Cote's order had, after all, asked him not to follow protocol in an unattended death—and he and his team had brought that case to a successful resolution. Despite the number of times Stan Perry screwed up. Which led his thoughts back to tonight, and Perry's disappearance, ignoring Melia's direct order to come in. The kid must have a death wish, at least for his career. Melia cut Burgess and his team some slack because they got results. But he didn't look kindly on insubordination. Especially with Captain Cote looking over his shoulder and implying that he couldn't control his troops.
Burgess poured milk into a glass and then put the bottle away. Sat at the table and ate the sandwich. He wasn't hungry, but there were certain things he needed to do to keep the women in his household happy. One of them was eat food if they put it out for him.
He stripped off his smoke-scented clothes, showered, and climbed into bed. Chris was wearing that little blue thing that was more of an enticement than a garment. Being no fool, he let himself be enticed.
Later, when they were curled up together on the cusp of sleep, he said, "I'm sorry about today. About not being here to back you up."
"We've all got to learn how to do this, Joe. I have to learn to handle their squabbles without calling in the big guns."
"I'm the big gun?"
"What do you think, Detective?"
"I think I'm an awfully lucky man."
"We will get through this, won't we?" she said, working her head in between his neck and his shoulder. He could feel her breath on his throat.
"I think we will."
"What does Doro say?" Doro was Chris's mother. She covered the home front when he and Chris couldn't be there.
"That we're nuts, but she understands. She pretty much says exactly what you'd think she'd say. Firm discipline, a united front, and patience. She says that Nina's therapist seems to be doing her good and that maybe Dylan needs one, too."
"She might be right. I just keep hoping—"
"Give it a little more time," she said. "He likes the school. He's making friends." Her head burrowed deeper into that hollow. "It's just around here that he's a problem."
"Maybe because we're the only safe place."
"We try," she said. "Go to sleep. You've only got a few hours and we both know long before it's necessary, Cote will be on the phone complaining that he doesn't have your reports yet."
That was one of life's certainties.
"Okay," he said.
They arranged themselves like spoons, and almost immediately he could tell from her breathing that she was asleep. He wanted to sleep. His body felt beaten up and he knew he needed rest, but his mind wasn't with the program. Too many years of assessing information and triaging clues. He couldn't turn it off at will, and anyway, experience had taught him that letting the thoughts run was a great way to get insight into a case.
Not that he had enough information yet to gain many insights, but sometimes just letting his thoughts run would rearrange them in ways that would let him see a pattern, or patterns, or at least get a clearer idea of what the next set of questions to be answered should be.
By the time he finally fell asleep, with only about four hours left before it would be time to start another da
y, he had a list in his head for the morning meeting.
* * *
As Chris had predicted, the phone rang bright and early. Before he could drag himself from sleep or untangle his aching arm from the covers, someone else had answered. Through the half-open bedroom door, he heard Nina's sweet, girlish voice answering. Then, very calmly, "I'm sorry, sir, but he's sleeping. Can I take a message?"
He pictured Cote's face. The man was a natural bully, but would he use that on someone who was obviously a young girl? He got his answer pretty quickly, convincing him, once again, that Nina might have a great future in politics.
"Oh, dear," she said, just as sweet as pie. "Well, I will absolutely tell him that if I'm still here when he gets up. Maybe I should write that down, in case I've left for school. Let me just get some paper."
There was a rustling, and then Nina's voice again. "Let me see if I've got this right, sir. Sergeant Burgess is to get his lazy ass out of bed and get down there ASAP, because you need to see his supports?"
Burgess could have hugged her for the "sir," an honorific the man's behavior did not deserve. And for the word "supports." Cote hounded them like a demented sheepdog for reports that he gathered in a file and rarely bothered to read. The man hoarded paperwork the way Midas had hoarded gold.
"Oh. Sorry. Reports," Nina said. "All right. I've got it. I'll leave it here on the table so he sees it first thing. What?"
Burgess listened as Nina listened, imagining that Cote would be insisting she wake him. He wondered what she would say.
"Sir." This time her voice was sharper. "My dad didn't get in until almost two a.m. I certainly am not going to wake him up. I'll see that he gets your message. Now, please excuse me, I've got to get ready for school." And she hung up on whatever order Cote was barking.
