The Sixth Wicked Child

by J. D. Barker

  Clair stepped around the man, got between him and the window, and that was when she saw the blood and the three small boxes lined up on the floor.

  10

  Nash

  Day 5 • 8:31 AM

  Nash shrugged out of his coat as the elevator doors opened on the basement level of Chicago Metro. Normally deserted, the hallway buzzed with activity. The moment the doors opened, some kid in his twenties stepped inside, wheeling a hand truck loaded with file boxes.

  Boxes Nash recognized.

  “Where are you taking those?”

  “Roosevelt,” the kid replied.

  Nash noticed the FBI badge clipped to his belt. “On whose orders?”

  The kid reached forward and pressed the button for the ground floor. He jerked a thumb back toward the hallway. “You have any questions, I suggest you speak to Agent Poole.”

  When the elevator doors started to close, Nash jammed his foot between them. As they reversed and opened again, he reached over to the elevator control panel and pressed the buttons for every floor before stepping out.

  Another young agent stepped past him with a hand truck holding six more file boxes.

  For several years now, the 4MK task force operated out of the basement in a space they dubbed the War Room. They found it easier to focus downstairs rather than up in the bull pen with all the other detectives. Too many questions, too many prying eyes, too many leaks to the press. The isolation put a stop to all of it. Well, most of it. Several months ago, when Anson Bishop was identified as the 4MK killer and escaped, the FBI took over the investigation. They also took over the space across the hall from the War Room. Porter had insisted it was temporary. Either Bishop would be caught or the FBI would return the case to local law enforcement once it fell off the front page of the papers, but that never happened. Instead, things escalated. Things grew worse.

  Nash looked first in the FBI office—four agents, none he recognized. All were packing boxes and stacking them near the door.

  Across the hall, in the War Room, he found Special Agent Frank Poole sitting in a chair at the front of the room, staring up at the three white evidence boards.

  Nash felt his face burn red as he stepped inside. “What the hell, Frank?”

  “SAIC Hurless wants everything consolidated at the FBI field office on Roosevelt. We’ve got details coming in from New Orleans and Simpsonville—the six bodies found in that lake…the house…everything Sam stumbled through from the moment he left Chicago to when we found him at the Guyon Hotel.”

  “Why can’t we do that here?”

  “It’s not my call.” Without taking his eyes from the boards, Poole said, “How well do you know the mayor?”

  “Me? I’ve met him twice at city functions, shook his hand, took a photo. I don’t think he has any clue who I am.”

  “What about Anthony Warnick from his office?”

  “I just met him today,” Nash replied. “Why?”

  Poole still didn’t look up. “Warwick called the mayor’s office. The mayor called my supervisor’s supervisor, and in less than five minutes I was under orders to include you in this investigation. Ten minutes prior to that and SAIC Hurless wanted me to lock you up with Sam. Somebody is holding something over someone’s head. Nothing else explains a knee-jerk reaction like that.”

  Poole stood, went to the first board and pointed at three words written with the information on Arthur Talbot—Friend with mayor.

  “Sam must have written that,” Nash said. “We know Talbot played golf with him. Contributed to his campaign, too. His real estate projects were all large-scale. I can’t imagine those things happen without the mayor involved somehow.”

  “Did you tie him to anything criminal?”

  Nash shook his head. “Nothing came up. I don’t know that anyone looked, either. Talbot was our focus, not the mayor.”

  “I think he’s got you here as his eyes and ears,” Poole stated flatly.

  Nash smirked. “If that’s the case, he picked the wrong guy. I’m not talking to him.”

  Poole fell silent for a moment, then said. “Does he have anything hanging over your head?”

  This time, Nash laughed. “You think he’s going to strong-arm me somehow?”

  Poole shrugged.

  “That won’t happen,” Nash insisted. “He’s got nothing on me. I’m a Boy Scout.”

  Poole opened his mouth to reply to that but changed his mind. Instead, he cleared his throat. “Let’s just focus on the case.”

  “Yeah, let’s do that.”

  Poole rolled his fingers over the arm of the chair in several rhythmic taps, and then his eyes went back to the boards. “A few hours ago, I got a call from the sheriff down in Simpsonville, South Carolina. She found a male posed on the courthouse steps, identical to the two women we found up here. Eye, ear, and tongue removed and placed in white boxes tied with black string near the body. The words ‘father, forgive me’ written nearby. He’s covered in a white powder, just like the two we found up here. I haven’t heard back from the lab yet, but I think it might be salt.”

  “Shit. That means we have four bodies today,” Nash replied.

  “What?”

  “Clair called me. She’s got a man, a doctor named Stanford Pentz. They found him in his office at Stroger. Identical to the others down to the boxes and the white powder.”

  “What about the phrase?”

  Nash nodded. “Father, forgive me. It was written on a prescription pad on his desk.”

  “Anything on his forehead?”

  “No, that’s the only difference.”

  “Nothing on the forehead of the guy in Simpsonville, either.”

  Poole thought for a moment, then said, “The hospital is on lockdown. Does she have a time-of-death? How’d anyone get in there?”

  Three agents entered the room and began boxing up everything, moving it toward the door.

  “Leave the boards,” Poole instructed.

  They nodded and continued their work.

  Poole looked toward the front of the room again. “Four bodies discovered within hours of each other. Two here in the city, one in a hospital currently locked tight, another seven hundred miles away. This can’t be Bishop alone.”

  Nash grabbed a chair and sat beside him. “Do you have an ID on the one in South Carolina?”

  Poole nodded. “A man named Tom Langlin. He wrote up the original arson report on Bishop’s house down there back in the nineties. He’s retired from the fire department.”

  “Do you have his report?”

  “It’s still in South Carolina. I only glanced at it.” Poole tilted his head back and closed his eyes. “‘August 1995. Way before my time. Ruled arson on the spot. Tom Langlin wrote it up. He’s retired now but still lives in the area. I can drive you out to his place if you think it would be helpful. According to this, the entire area reeked of gasoline. By the time the trucks arrived, the house was a total loss. They found three bodies inside, all male. Cause of death says undetermined due to condition on account of the fire. One survivor, an Anson Bishop, twelve years old. He had been fishing out at the lake and came back when he saw the smoke. They believe his father was one of the men found inside. His mother was suspected of starting the fire—looks like she disappeared. Her information went out on the wire, but she was never located. The trailer behind the house had been rented to a Simon and Lisa Carter. They also went missing after the fire. No hits on their wire report, either. The boy went to the Camden Treatment Center not too far from here.” Poole’s eyes opened. “That’s what the sheriff told me.”

  “Okay, that’s creepy. You remember the conversation word-for-word?”

  Poole brushed his hair back and returned his attention to the whiteboards. “I have eidetic memory. Near-perfect retention.”

  “Christ, half the time, I can’t remember where I parked my car.”

  “You shouldn’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Self-deprecating hum
or,” Poole replied. “I know you’re a smart guy. You’re good at your job. Putting yourself down is counterproductive. It takes you down a notch in the eyes of those around you. You’re better than that.”

  The corner of Nash’s mouth went up in a slight grin, and his voice went low. “I’ll let you in on a little secret, Frank. People tend to drop their guard around the dumb cop. You’d be surprised how disarming a couple jokes and some ruffled clothes can be. Somebody like you walks into the room, and every asshole puckers up. People are on guard. They watch every word. With me, they want to have a beer. They forget they’re talking to a cop.” He gestured at the boards. “A little humor helps me deal with all of this, too. There’s a lot of death in this room, and that can weigh heavy after a while.”

  Poole let out a breath and looked down at the floor. “Is Sam part of this?”

  Nash wiped his palms on his pants legs. “I want to tell you no. I want to say there is absolutely no way. I’ve known him for a long time, and he’s one of the best cops I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. I suppose, if you asked me that question a month ago, I would have told you all of that. But now, I’m not so sure, and that scares me. He’s obsessed. Irrational. Going off like he did. Busting that woman out of prison…I keep telling myself he kept me out of all that to protect me, Clair and Kloz too, but it doesn’t feel like that. It feels secretive, deceptive. If I were to write everything he did on one of those boards up there and not put his name up at the top, just look at the evidence, his actions, he’d be my number-one suspect. I’m having a hard time with that, but I know it’s true. That said, we’ve got four new bodies and he’s been in custody the entire time. There’s no way he’s responsible, but that doesn’t mean he’s clean, either. There’s something he’s not telling me, something big, and whatever that something is, it’s been growing over the years we’ve worked this case. I’m scared to death of learning what that something is, but the cop in me won’t stop until I do. For better or worse, that’s how this works.”

  They both went quiet for a minute or so, then Poole said, “At the bureau, they believe the investigation is compromised. They think that’s why 4MK has eluded capture for so long.”

  Nash was shaking his head before Poole finished his statement. “4MK eluded capture for so long because he’s a crazy fuck whose motives make no sense to anyone but himself. If Sam is involved, and that’s a big if, it never compromised his work. You saw his apartment, that wall. Those weren’t the actions of someone trying to derail a case. That was a glimpse inside an obsessed mind. Someone who wanted to take down Bishop at any cost. The man sitting up in that interview room still does.” Nash turned to Poole. “You need to let him read those diaries. Let him help. Whether you trust him or not, nobody is more qualified to pick through Bishop’s ramblings. You know that, whether you’re willing to admit it or not.”

  “The box went up to him ten minutes ago,” Poole said.

  Nash frowned. “So you made me say all that for nothing?”

  “Say what?” Poole said. “I wasn’t listening.”

  “Oh, so you’ve got jokes, too?”

  “Only that one.”

  Poole stood and photographed the boards with his phone. “There’s a briefing in thirty minutes at Roosevelt. The mayor will want you there.”

  Nash wasn’t sure if that last statement was meant as a joke or not.

  11

  Porter

  Day 5 • 8:36 AM

  Porter was too wired for sleep. They allowed him out of the interview room only long enough to use the bathroom and get a drink of water from the fountain in the hall. When a uniformed officer led him out, those in the hallway went quiet. Detectives he’d known for years, staffers, all of them just watched without a word. He fought the urge to raise his hands above his head and shout out “Boo!” to get a rise out of them. When they put him back in the room, they left him in there alone. He expected to be charged with a crime, anything from the jailbreak to the murder at the Guyon Hotel, but that hadn’t happened. Not yet, anyway. He supposed there was no hurry. He knew they weren’t letting him out. He’d closed his eyes, tried to rest, but found himself listening to the screaming in his head—all the facts of this case shouted at once, a hundred voices debating in his mind.

  When someone knocked on the door, his eyes snapped open, and he realized two hours had passed.

  He wasn’t sure why they bothered to knock—he certainly couldn’t open the door. He’d fought the urge to try the doorknob for more than an hour before he finally gave it a twist, confirming the door was locked. When the knock came, he only looked up at the door and waited. He heard the click of the lock disengaging. The door swung open a moment later. A woman in her twenties wearing an FBI ID and a Chicago Metro visitor’s pass stepped inside with a white file box. She set it on the table. “This is from Agent Poole.”

  A moment later and she was gone. The door closed and locked behind her.

  The room went still, the hum of the HVAC the only sound.

  Porter found himself staring at the box. He knew what was inside. He could damn well feel the composition books through the thin cardboard waiting like a living, breathing animal at rest. When he placed his palm on the lid, he swore it was warm.

  Sweat trickled down from his brow to his cheek. He felt it drop to his shoulder and made no attempt to wipe the side of his face.

  “I’ll need something to write with,” he said without looking up. He knew someone was watching him from the other side of the one-way window. Probably multiple someones. “Maybe some coffee, too.”

  They brought these things a minute or so later—a whiteboard, marker, a mug, and coffee in a pot stained deep brown with duct tape on the handle.

  Only when he was alone again did Porter remove the lid from the file box, extract the composition books one at a time, and spread them out on the table. They were numbered, digits written in the top right corner of each—one through eleven—in handwriting he knew well.

  When Porter poured himself a cup of black coffee and settled back in his chair with the first of the books, he felt one of the someones on the other side of that one-way glass lean just a little bit closer. He fought the urge to read aloud.

  12

  Diary

  The Finicky House for Wayward Children spoke at night. There was the creak of old bones and joints, riddled with arthritis living within the walls, floor, and ceiling. The house gasped for breath—a subtle wheeze and raspy exhale which always seemed to start on the floors below and exit from somewhere above. The interior rooms of this place served as nothing more than tired lungs, pocked with cancerous tumors and scar tissue, abused and forgotten by those who once called this place home.

  Home.

  I found that to be a funny word, because a year ago I could have told you what it meant to me. Without question, without doubt, I understood home and could have pointed to it on a map and told you the best way to find it. It had been a singular place at that point, the only one I remembered or had ever known. Home had been the comfort of a warm blanket. The moist dirt between my toes as I walked barefoot down the path to my lake. Home had been Mother’s laugh and Father’s smile and a gentle wave from the lovely Mrs. Carter as I cut across her yard, hoping to gain a whiff of perfume or a glimpse of the lines of her body as the sun caught her yellow flowered dress just right from behind.

  When I closed my eyes, I could go back there, and I did—I went back there often. As time passed, each time I returned, something had changed. At first, those changes were subtle—a bare clothesline rather than one covered with damp, flapping linens. A refrigerator, once stocked, now containing nothing but half a gallon of spoiled milk. Rooms that had once been warm and inviting now chilled with the icy touch of fall, layered in dust. And that place, my home, grew harder to find, as if placed in a box in my mind against the far back wall, and each day new boxes appeared, stacked in front, slowly burying that first box away.

  I woke today thinking about
my cat, all alone on the shore of my lake, nobody to take care of her anymore.

  I wondered if I’d ever see my home again.

  Then I remembered the last time I had seen that home—the fire, those men, and I wondered if anything was left at all.

  Paul snored.

  Mr. Paul Upchurch, the drawer of worlds, the creator of The Misadventures of Maybelle Markel, and resident of the top bunk in our shared room, snored each and every night with the rumble of a poorly-maintained generator. Because he had the top bunk, being so close to the ceiling, each wet inhale echoed that much louder. So much so, he sometimes woke himself up with zero recollection of the cause. He’d mumble incoherently to himself, then drift back off again only to repeat the process an hour or so later.

  I had no such luck.

  For some reason, when his malfunctioning respiratory system snatched me from slumber, I’d find myself wide awake, staring at the bunk above me, the glow of our alarm clock across the room illuminating the space in thin red light. This always seemed to happen at two minutes after four.

  Tonight was such a night, and when I closed my eyes, all else seemed amplified. I tried to tune it all out and listen only for her.

  I had yet to meet Libby McInley, the girl in the room across the hall, but part of me felt I already knew her, and with each passing day I felt a pull. This invisible rope securing the two of us together growing shorter by the hour. It started while I was under the care of the illustrious Dr. Joseph Oglesby in the Camden Treatment Center. As it was now, her room was slightly down the hall from mine—far enough to be out-of-reach, close enough to give off heat. Her time there had been spent behind closed doors, crying mostly. I longed to hear her laugh, If I had money, I’d pay a hefty sum just to hear her sneeze, but she only ever cried and I didn't know why. Aside from Ms. Finicky, the other girls in the house took turns with her—slipping in and out of her room at all hours. I knew their names were Kristina Niven and Tegan Savala, fifteen and sixteen respectively, but aside from passing glances in the hallway and awkward hellos, I didn’t really know them, either.