All the Dying Children

by James Halpin

  They were just kids. Young, stupid kids who wanted nothing more in life than to be accepted. It was those around them who failed to give them the only thing they wanted. The only thing they’d ever wanted.

  “Lauren? I’ve been thinking,” Daly began. “I was wrong about you going to the prom with Kevin. It was wrong of me to judge him based on what his father did. You’re free to go to the prom with whoever you want.”

  The shift in the conversation seemed to catch Lauren off-guard. She rose off her elbow and sat up in bed, turning to face her father.

  “Thank you, Daddy. He’s a really nice guy. I think you’ll like him,” Lauren said.

  “I don’t have to like him,” Daly said. “But I do love you.”

  * * *

  The lights were still off when Daly got to the newsroom. The only sound was the muted squawk of the scanner chatter in the corner. After setting down his coffee and logging into the computer, he set about trying to verify what the parents had told him, as best he could. Checking on Mr. Gillespie’s presence at the schools had been fairly straightforward. The solicitors for all three districts were able to verify that Mr. Gillespie had subbed at the same schools as all three victims — although none of them had any exact dates available right away.

  That showed Mr. Gillespie could have been involved. But it was still a far cry from showing he was involved. For that, Daly needed to call Wojcik to see if the police were also looking into him. A story about parents suspecting a substitute was molesting kids was a good basis for a defamation lawsuit. But a story about police investigating allegations of misconduct against said teacher was fair game.

  Leaning back in his chair, Daly dialed the digits to Wojcik’s cellphone and listened as Journey faded in, with Steve Perry beseeching him not to stop believing.

  Christ.

  Wojcik answered just after Perry finished advising Daly to “hold on to the feeling.”

  “Phil, I’ve been looking into these deaths some more and wanted to run a few things past you,” Daly said.

  “What do you got?” Wojcik asked.

  “Well, some of the parents have told me they were concerned about a substitute. Vincent Gillespie. He was apparently giving kids some advanced reading assignments, and I’ve found indications that it might have gone further than that with some of them. Is he someone you’re looking at?” Daly asked.

  On the other end of the phone, Daly could hear Wojcik exhale deeply, followed by a long pause. The detective was thinking carefully about how to respond.

  “Look, the only thing I can say on the record right now is that it’s an ongoing investigation,” Wojcik said.

  “And off the record?”

  “We’re looking at him. We’ve got information that he was sexting Justin Gonzalez, and we think he may have been involved with the others somehow too. We’ve got warrants for Facebook and Verizon, and right now we’re waiting for them to provide the records,” Wojcik said.

  “Where’s that filed at?” Daly asked.

  “It’s sealed by court order,” Wojcik said.

  Shit, Daly thought. Of course it is.

  “Fair to say he’s a suspect?” Daly asked.

  “I’d say we’re very interested in what comes back on those warrants.”

  “When do you expect them back?” Daly asked.

  “I’m hoping in a few more days. If it comes back the way I think it will, we’ll have him in bracelets by the end of next week,” Wojcik said.

  By the time Daly ended the call, John Richardson was already at his desk in the editors’ cube flipping through a copy of the Other Paper. As Daly walked over, he let the paper droop into his lap and peered over the top of his glasses.

  “Making much progress?”

  “We’ve got something big here,” Daly said.

  He proceeded to walk Richardson through his progress the last few days and what he’d learned about Vincent Gillespie. The explicit chats. The graphic poems. The parents’ concerns. Gillespie’s hardened stare.

  “What about the cops? Where are they on this?” Richardson asked.

  “Officially, it’s still under investigation,” Daly said. “Off the record, Wojcik told me they’re looking at Gillespie hard. They’ve got warrants out for his social media and cellphone records. They could make an arrest next week.”

  “So what do you think we should do?” Richardson asked. It would be up to the editors to decide how to play the story, if at all, but Richardson liked to get input from his reporters first. It was a good way to gauge their news judgment.

  “I don’t think anybody else is on this,” Daly said. “If we wait until they file charges next week, we’re going to be in a pack of reporters at the arraignment. If we do something now, we can get ahead of the story and have a leg up when they file.”

  Richardson sat back for a moment, staring at the wall with his hands clapped together in front of his mouth. It was tempting to get the scoop on the Other Paper, for sure. But writing a story before charges were filed could be legally perilous. Especially if the basis for the story was simply the suspicions of prying parents.

  What if there really was nothing there? What if the police never charged Gillespie? What if it was all a mirage conjured up by a few hysterical PTA moms with nothing better to do than gossip and conspire?

  “I think we need to be careful with this one, Erik,” Richardson finally said. “These are some serious allegations. I think we need more than just the fact that there is a search warrant – especially since we haven’t even seen it.”

  “If we hold off on this, we could get beat,” Daly said, fuming inside. He couldn’t believe Richardson was willing to let a scoop so big slip through his fingers.

  “We won’t get beat,” Richardson assured him. “I’m confident we’re miles ahead of the Other Paper on this one. Worst case scenario is we both do the story the day of the arrest and it’s a draw. But you’ll already have the legwork done, so we’ll be ready with the story on a silver platter while they’re still reading through the complaint.”

  Daly shuffled back to his desk and slumped into his chair, reaching for his coffee. If they got beat, it wouldn’t be on him. Richardson had made the call, and he would be responsible for the outcome. But that wasn’t much solace to Daly. He tried to put it out of his mind as he began clicking through the online dockets, searching for new and interesting crimes.

  In the movies, newspaper reporters are usually caricatures. They’re either nuisances in brown fedoras with oversized press passes who lob softballs until the cops swat them to the side, or they spend months cultivating sources and meeting in dark garages to expose some grand wrong. The reality is that very few local newspapers have the resources anymore to do real long-term investigative journalism – but that doesn’t stop them from trying. The reporters just have to do the investigation in between everything else that goes on. The daily beast is always hungry.

  As Daly clicked through the docket sheets, his desk phone began to ring. He glanced at the caller ID but didn’t recognize the number. He picked it up, hoping it wasn’t some conspiracy theorist asking why the paper didn’t investigate and expose the truth of some crackpot idea.

  “Newsroom, this is Erik Daly,” he said.

  “Erik, this is Jack Foster,” the voice said.

  “Hey, Jack. What’s going on?” Daly said.

  “Not too much. I just wanted to let you know about Kim’s journal,” Jack said.

  “Did you find anything?”

  “Mostly it was just her writing about school gossip,” Jack said. “You know, who likes who, who was flirting. Stuff like that. She also had some poems. Nothing too crazy. But toward the end of it, she had something that made my skin crawl.”

  “What was it?” Daly asked.

  “It was written in the margin. Just scribbled like a note,” Jack said. “It s
aid, ‘End it now. Before they find out.’”

  Daly paused for a moment, startled by the bleak message.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Do you have any idea what it means?”

  “I don’t have a clue,” Jack said. “As far as I know, Kim didn’t have any secrets. There’s nothing she could have done that would make us stop loving her.”

  Daly ended the call, not sure what to make of it. The words he thought might be there hadn’t been there. Instead, there was a cryptic message that raised more questions. The last words that connected the three teens remained as big a mystery as ever.

  As Daly leaned back in his chair contemplating what Jack had said, the scanner in the corner of the newsroom screeched to life with a report of a gunshot victim. The dispatcher called for Nanticoke police and firefighters to respond to a report of a male found with a gunshot wound to the head. Daly perked up and grabbed a pen to write down the address. When it came across, Daly paused for a second. He felt a sense of deja vu as he scribbled down the Noble Street address. Then it hit him.

  It was David Kowalski’s house.

  CHAPTER 17

  Thursday, April 5, 2018

  11:24 a.m.

  When Daly pulled onto Noble Street, he could see from down the block that he wasn’t going to find a spot in front of the house. The Ford Thunderbird was still in the driveway of a home with peeling paint and rusting furniture on the front porch. But the porch was now adorned with crime scene tape that police bent under as they came and went into the house.

  Police dispatchers are trained to keep their cool, especially when the shit hits the fan. But when a serious emergency arises, the stress and excitement still show in their voices. The dispatcher on the scanner hadn’t sounded very excited at all. From a single glance at the scene, Daly could tell the police weren’t too excited either. There were only three patrol cars and a sport-utility vehicle from the coroner’s office. The front of the house was blocked by crime scene tape, but the sidewalk and street were open. The cops and deputy coroner seemed to be going about business as usual.

  Someone had clearly died, but the cops definitely didn’t think it was a murder.

  Already, a reporter from the Other Paper was standing a couple of doors down, trying to give the cops a respectful distance as he waited for someone to come tell him what happened. The TV stations hadn’t yet shown up — if they were even coming. Daly walked over to stand by him.

  “What’s up, Derrick?” he asked. “They say anything yet?”

  “No,” he said. “One of the cops said the chief would be over in a few.”

  “You want to tag team it?”

  “Sure,” Derrick said. “It sounds like a suicide anyway.”

  If so, it almost certainly wouldn’t be a story. Unless it turns out to be David Kowalski, Daly thought.

  Some of the older newspapermen still held a grudge from the union strike that led to Wilkes-Barre becoming a two-newspaper town, but most of the younger ones were more concerned about their increasing workloads and job security. Daly fell into the latter camp. After years of covering the same perp walks and court hearings as reporters on the other side, he’d become friendly with many of them. He offered to do a joint interview because he figured there was no sense in trying to hide something from another reporter when the reporter would easily get the same information as soon as he talked to the cops.

  That said, there was no way Daly was letting on he knew who lived at that house. Or how Kowalski was connected to the dying children.

  Chief Jerry Fitzgerald was a portly man with a brown bushy mustache that had overrun his upper lip and sharp eyes that gazed out from behind rectangular rimmed glasses. As he sauntered over to Daly and Derrick, he raised a finger to his temple and brought it forward in salute.

  “Nothing much for you here, boys,” Fitzgerald said amiably.

  “What happened?” Daly asked.

  “We have a seventeen-year-old male with a gunshot wound to the head,” Fitzgerald said. “His father found him in his room shortly after ten-thirty this morning. He was pronounced dead at the scene. No foul play is suspected.”

  “Suicide?” Derrick asked.

  “We’re still investigating, but right now we don’t suspect foul play,” Fitzgerald said, his mouth curling into a wry smile.

  Daly could read between the lines. It was clearly a suicide, but Fitzgerald was reluctant to announce it to the world. He was worried about the family’s privacy. What he didn’t realize was that if he just confirmed it was a suicide, the reporters would walk away without a story. But by introducing some doubt to the case, Fitzgerald was actually increasing the chances of the death making the paper.

  With some information in hand, the reporters backed away from the scene and got on their cellphones to report back to their newsrooms. After a brief conversation, Derrick got back in his car and drove off. Daly got back in his car but decided to wait it out.

  David Kowalski was almost certainly the victim, and he needed to make a run at speaking to his father when police cleared the scene.

  After about an hour, the deputy coroner and a few officers came outside, hoisting a shrouded corpse into the coroner’s black SUV. Not long afterward, an officer began pulling down the yellow crime scene tape that had been wrapped around the front porch. After milling around for a few more minutes, the police began to disperse.

  Daly waited about five minutes after the last cruiser had pulled away before popping his door open and heading toward the porch. The timing was hardly ideal. Within the past couple hours, Mr. Kowalski had discovered his son dead, most likely by his own hand. Now a reporter was knocking.

  Mr. Kowalski opened the door almost as soon as Daly’s knuckles left the door frame. He was a wiry man in a yellow-stained tee-shirt and blue jeans that were coated in a sickening layer of brown grime. The greasy hair that formed a perimeter around a bald patch up top extended in every which direction, giving him a crazed look. He appeared as though he’d been suddenly awakened from the deep sleep of a man who’d had a six pack or two the night before.

  He probably had.

  “Mr. Kowalski, I’m Erik Daly with the Observer,” Daly said. “I was wondering ...”

  “No comment,” Kowalski said, pushing the door closed. Daly put up his hand to stop it.

  “Please, just hear me out for a minute,” Daly said. “I have reason to believe your son didn’t kill himself. At least, not on purpose.”

  Kowalski glanced up with a look of surprise in his glazed, bloodshot eyes.

  “What do you know about my son?” he asked menacingly.

  Daly told him about the deaths he was investigating. He explained how David’s name had come up before and how he’d spoken to him a couple of times about his connection. How he had felt David was somehow connected but didn’t know in what way. Now David had become the latest member of the suicide cluster, and Daly needed to find out what the connection was so he could try and stop it.

  “Was there anything unusual going on with David recently?” Daly asked.

  “Not that I can think of. He was having problems at school. Like usual,” Mr. Kowalski said.

  “There’s a guy I’ve been looking at who has a connection to some of the other kids,” Daly said. “Some of the parents think he might have been doing something … bad. Do you know if David knew Vincent Gillespie? He’s a substitute teacher.”

  “Can’t say that I do,” Mr. Kowalski said.

  That didn’t come as a surprise. Even if David had been seeing Vincent Gillespie every day, Daly guessed there was a pretty fair chance that Mr. Kowalski wouldn’t have known. He didn’t really strike Daly as the PTA type.

  “I heard that David had an app that one of the other victims got from Mr. Gillespie,” Daly said. “It’s called Soma. It’s a white-noise app to help you sleep.”

  “Oh yeah, I
know about Soma. David’s been using that for a while,” Mr. Kowalski said. “Or had been, I guess.”

  “Are you sure he didn’t hear about it from a teacher? Or someone at school?” Daly asked.

  “No, he didn’t get it at school,” Mr. Kowalski said. “He got it from his psychiatrist. Dr. Radcliffe.”

  * * *

  Mr. Kowalski confirmed David had begun seeing Dr. Radcliffe over the previous summer. Their first meeting would have been in June, not too long before David used the app at camp. Therapy for David had been court-ordered when he got in trouble for his little fireworks experiment with the neighbors’ cat. It was apparent that Mr. Kowalski didn’t generally hold therapists in very high esteem – he seemed more the type to turn to Dr. Jack Daniels in his hour of need – but he seemed to think David was doing better since he started seeing Dr. Radcliffe. It seemed he measured progress primarily by how often the school contacted him about David’s misbehavior. Fewer contacts meant less scrutiny on him as a father, which Mr. Kowalski recognized as a good thing. He was all about less government interference, especially when it came to his drinking.

  On his way back to the newsroom, Daly kept trying to make sense of what he’d learned. His sights had been focused on Vincent Gillespie. He was a substitute teacher who worked at schools around Luzerne County. He had the ability to contact all of the victims. Daly had solid information that Mr. Gillespie had been sexually involved with Emma and Justin, and he had reason to believe something might have been going on with Kim as well. Mr. Gillespie looked like a predator who was preying on the students of the Wyoming Valley to fulfill his sexual desires. The cold stare he’d gotten at Mr. Gillespie’s doorstep had only solidified Daly’s suspicions.

  But Dr. Radcliffe’s resurfacing in the case could not be ignored. There were four victims spread across as many school districts and separated by miles. The likelihood that three of them would have been going to the same therapist seemed remote. And Daly couldn’t stop wondering about the white-noise app Dr. Radcliffe had been handing out. It seemed a strange thing for a psychiatrist to be distributing. The App Store has dozens of white-noise apps. Most of them are free. Why would a doctor need to give his patient a special app?