Broken Places

by Tracy Clark

  I stopped sweeping. “What’s her last name?”

  Crowell shrugged. “Don’t know it. We don’t go in for a lot of formality around here. It’s easier to get the kids to trust us that way.”

  “Where’s she from? What school?”

  Crowell shook his head, frowned. “Don’t know that either. The kids volunteer. They come. They stop coming. New ones take their place.” He fished into his pocket and pulled out a checked handkerchief, the kind my grandfather used back before Kleenex made everything disposable. He wiped at his nose and eyes. “Hay fever.”

  “Someone saw her wearing a hat from St. Brendan’s,” I said, pushing, looking for an angle.

  “We have a bin inside with all kinds of T-shirts and hats and such that we exchange with other places. A kid is free to take whatever they want.”

  I’d counted on the hat to make the connection, and fought hard to hide my disappointment that it’d gone nowhere. “When’s the last time she was here?”

  Crowell thought for a moment. “Winter, but whenever she comes back we’ll welcome her with open arms.” Crowell smiled.

  “What about Cesar Luna? Do you know him?”

  Hector had followed Cesar to Gentle Peace. He’d seen Cesar out front with Dee Dee. I could tell Crowell knew the name. “Tough one there. Not so good to begin with, but he was trying. Dee Dee was helping him study for his GED.”

  “He was killed,” I said, watching him for a reaction.

  “I read about it in the papers. That was a real shame.”

  “Did either of them mention knowing Father Heaton, or having any connection to St. Brendan’s?” Crowley scratched his head. “Don’t think so. What’s all this about?”

  “Cesar and Dee Dee were seeing each other. She may know why he ended up where he did. I’d like to ask her about that.”

  Crowell smiled shyly. “Seeing each other? Well, I wouldn’t know. That’s not something they’d talk to me about. Dee Dee came in a van with other kids a couple times a month. Their schools give them community service points for volunteering with us. I never met her parents, and she never talked about them, at least not to me. Cesar came on his own, parking his car out back instead of in the lot. I thought that was strange, but I didn’t press him on it. We mostly take them as we find them, regardless of where, or who, they come from.”

  Frustration gave my voice a near-desperate edge. “You don’t talk to these kids at all?”

  He smiled calmly, as though he’d been asked to explain The God Particle to a circus mule. “About the important things—self-respect, decency, personal responsibility. That’s what we teach here, along with the three Rs.”

  I eyed the kids standing around, sweeping a little, but mostly flirting and passing the time. “Would one of these kids know more about either of them?”

  Crowell searched the group. “Trina might. She was pretty friendly with Dee Dee.” Crowell called over a cute girl dressed in tight jeans and a pink sweatshirt. Petite, wide eyed, and looking as sweet as a teacup poodle, she appeared to be about sixteen.

  She ran over smiling, but eyed me shyly. “Yes, Reverend Crowell?”

  “Trina, this is Detective Raines. She has some questions about Dee Dee.”

  Trina’s eyes got big. “What’s Dee Dee got to do with the police?”

  “I’m a private investigator. My name’s Cass,” I said, extending a hand for a friendly shake, hoping to ramp our encounter way down. People tended to get nervous around detectives and clammed up tight, which was the opposite of what we needed. The kid looked like she’d rather be anyplace else but here talking to me. “I hear you and Dee Dee are close.”

  She shrugged as though she wasn’t interested, then stared down at the tops of her shoes, absentmindedly kicking at the dirt around her. “We talked. She was nice.”

  “When’s the last time you spoke with her?”

  Trina shrugged. “A few months ago, I guess. She stopped coming, then she stopped answering my IMs.”

  “Around wintertime?”

  Trina looked up at me. “She was at the Christmas party. Did something happen to her?”

  “Why would you ask that?”

  “It’s like she just disappeared, or something.”

  “Any reason why she would?”

  Trina frowned, looked away. “Guess not.”

  “Do you know her last name? Where she lived? What school she went to?”

  Trina shrugged. It was a teen thing. “Her last name’s Baxter, and she was homeschooled. She didn’t talk about her parents a lot. She did say they were really into her business, very strict, way stricter than mine. She had to like, check in all the time, every minute almost, and get permission for every place she went, even to use her own cellphone. It sounded like jail, or something.”

  “But her parents let her come here?”

  “You have to have volunteer work on your college applications, or else you don’t have a good chance.” Trina slid an embarrassed glance at Crowell. “It’s fun here, though.”

  “She met Cesar here,” I said. “Her parents weren’t happy about that.”

  Trina shuffled some, avoiding Crowell’s steady gaze. Hanging out and hooking up were not things you discussed willingly with an old reverend present. Crowell got it. I got it, too.

  “Well, it doesn’t look like you need me,” he offered. “I’ll get back to my sweeping. Holler if you need anything.” He drifted away, back to the glass. I could almost see the tension in Trina’s body drain away.

  “So Cesar and Dee Dee were hanging out?”

  “Man, I’ll say. It was like one day they don’t know each other, the next they’re like stuck together with glue. No way could she tell her folks that. They would have gone crazy, especially her father. Dee Dee said he told her she wasn’t allowed to even talk to boys . . . at all, especially a boy like Cesar.”

  “What else do you know about her?”

  “Not a lot. We mostly talked about music and stuff. It was like she was afraid to say too much. I know her dad would drive by and make sure she was here. She’d look out and see his clunky van in the lot and go all weird. It made her nervous all the time. I mean, he was real into the parenting thing. She hardly mentioned her mom. I guess she was cool with her.”

  “Did you ever meet her dad?”

  Trina shook her head. “I mostly saw him as he cruised by outside. He never came in, but I guess I got a good look. He just looked like somebody’s dad.”

  I pulled my phone from my pocket, scrolled to the picture of Ted Raines. He said himself he was an overprotective father, that he’d moved around. Could Dee Dee’s father be mine, too? He said he lived in St. Louis, but I only had his word on that. Maybe it was a long shot, but still I couldn’t just dismiss the possibility. He resented Pop taking one daughter away from him. Could he have tolerated him taking two? “Does he look familiar?” Trina studied the photo, but shook her head. “The man I saw wasn’t so old.” I put the phone away. “Tell me about Cesar,” I said. “How’d he feel about Dee Dee’s parents?”

  “I guess he was kind of mad about how her dad was treating her, and he wanted to do something about it, but I don’t think Dee Dee wanted him to, you know? The IMs stopped right before the party at Christmas; I do remember that. I just figured they got busted, and her folks grounded her and took her phone away. Her phone!”

  Trina made a gagging noise as though her airway had been cut off. The cellphone was a teenager’s lifeline, practically another appendage. “I was real shocked when she showed up. Then when Cesar walked in, too, it made sense. After that, though, poof, nothing, and then we heard about what happened to him. Dee Dee must have gone crazy.”

  “Do you still have her number?”

  “Yeah, but it’s disconnected now.” Trina reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone, scrolling through it, her nimble fingers moving as fast as lightning. “Here it is.” Trina held her phone up for me to see, and I jotted the number down.

  “Did you
save any of her texts?”

  Trina shook her head no. “My parents check my phone, too.”

  Crowell drifted back. “That photo you have of Dee Dee’s pretty old. We have newer ones inside, if you’d like to take a look? Ones of Cesar, too.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” I said.

  Crowell led me inside, both of us stepping around the debris scattered over the floor. Around the large room, every wall was covered in corkboard that held hundreds of photographs of children. Trina followed us in, invested now in what I found out about her friend.

  “We put their pictures up to show we’re family. There’s even a few of us old folks up there somewhere.”

  We searched the images, moving deliberately from one board to the next and back again. We went all around the room twice, studying every smiling, freshly scrubbed face, but there were no photos of Dee Dee or Cesar anywhere.

  “That’s strange. I know they’re here.” Crowell took off his glasses, blew on them, and put them back on, as though a speck on the lenses was the cause of our futile effort to find what we were looking for. “Could just be these old eyes.”

  It wasn’t the old man’s eyes. I couldn’t find the photos either, and my eyes were just fine. I took another slow pass, using the photo I had as reference when I found a girl on the wall who looked a lot like Dee Dee, but wasn’t. I turned to Crowell. “They’re definitely not here.”

  Confusion blanketed his face. “Where could they have gone?” He looked to me for the answer. I didn’t have it. Trina, too, looked to me for an explanation. Still, I had nothing. But I was beginning to get a bad feeling about the whole thing. An overnight break-in, a stolen computer, missing photographs of two kids—one dead, one vanished. This was not coincidence.

  Crowell patted his pockets, reached in, and pulled out a cellphone. “Wait. I’ve got the pictures from our holiday party. I know they’re on there.”

  I watched as he hunted and pecked at the small screen.

  “My grandson was supposed to transfer these so we could print them out and put them up, but he hasn’t yet.” Crowell grimaced. “You know how kids can be.” His thumb swiped across the screen as he scrolled through his photo gallery. I stood in the sea of chaos, glancing around at overturned chairs and shredded kiddie artwork. “Ah. See? Here they are.”

  He handed over the phone. He was right. There they were— Dee Dee and Cesar together, standing close, obviously besotted, Cesar looking much younger than in his mugshot, Deanna much older than in the photo I had.

  “May I look through the rest?”

  Crowell waved a dismissive hand. “Of course.”

  I found at least a half-dozen more of the couple caught at candid moments, their heads close, staring at each other as though they couldn’t bear not to. The final photo was a group shot: kids dressed in red and green crowded in, arms around each other, facing an unknown photographer. Their backs were to the front picture window, which now lay shattered on the sidewalk outside. Everyone in the photo was smiling, except for Dee Dee and Cesar. Why? What had happened between the time the first photograph was taken and this last one? “They don’t look happy here,” I said. “What happened?”

  Crowell had no clue. Trina leaned over to see. “I remember that. They were having a good time, then all of a sudden they freaked out. I asked Dee Dee what was going on, but she just walked off like she didn’t even hear me. Right after that, they ducked out the back.”

  “And you have no idea why?”

  “Oh, no, I know why,” Trina said. “Right after they left, her dad’s van pulled out of the lot and followed them.”

  “You saw Mr. Baxter in the lot that night?”

  Trina’s face crinkled into a confused frown. “Who?”

  “Dee Dee’s father.”

  “His name’s not Baxter. He’s her stepfather, not her real one. I don’t know what his name is, really, but I know it’s not Baxter. Whatever it is, she never ever used it, but he was trying real hard to get her to, so they could be like a real family. He wanted to adopt her and everything, but she thought he was real creepy and didn’t want him to.”

  My stomach began to flutter, part excitement at feeling I was close to something important, part foreboding. Where was Dee Dee? God, don’t tell me I was about to stumble upon another dead kid.

  “Mind if I copy these photos to my phone?” I asked Crowell.

  “No, go ahead. Did you find something you could use?”

  I handed the phone back to him. “I hope so.”

  Chapter 29

  I headed north, calling Ben from the car. “I need a favor,” I said when he picked up.

  “Where the hell are you? I’ve been calling you all day, so has Barb. I know this because when she couldn’t reach you, she called me. And what in the Sam Hill is a Pouch? She said she and Whip and this Pouch were backing you up on this thing.”

  I checked my watch. It was after five. “No, no, no! Did she say what they were doing?”

  “Not to me. Try returning a call once in a while, and you might find out yourself.”

  “All right. I’ll call. Happy now?”

  “Huffy, really? That’s a lot of nerve, even for you.”

  “You done?”

  “Not even close, but we can talk about it later. What’s this favor?”

  “I need whatever you can find on a Deanna Baxter. She’s maybe about sixteen. No address, but I have a cell number. She’s the girl in Cesar’s photograph. I found a community center where she and Cesar hung out, but he’s dead and no one’s seen her since December. She could be important.”

  “Now I’m tracking down teenagers?”

  “She’s the mother of Cesar’s unborn child. If anyone knows what he was up to before he got killed, it’s her, but all I’ve got is a disconnected cell number.” He grumbled on the other end of the line. I couldn’t blame him. It wasn’t much. I heard paper rustling on his end.

  “All right, give it to me.”

  I rattled the number off. “Thanks.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Just answer your damn phone.”

  He clicked off.

  Dee Dee and Cesar were together in December. Where was Dee Dee now? Had she run away? Did her stepfather have her under lock and key? Was she dead somewhere, too? I shuffled through the disparate bits of information I had—Pop’s Bible, the sticky note, 430/HWY, 150-DB. DB. Deanna Baxter. That fit. What about the rest of it? God, I hoped Dee Dee was still alive.

  * * *

  Yancy was moving. He had to be, otherwise, why couldn’t the police find him? Moving was good. Moving meant alive. I checked, but there had been no reports of unidentified homeless men brought into any of the nearby hospitals or the morgue.

  I drove away from Gentle Peace not nearly as excited as I should have been. Yes, I had a name. That was something. But I had little else so far. I hit the expressway headed north and when I hit Stony Island, I took it all the way to the Midway before turning for the Drive where I slowed and scanned the lakefront for signs of Yancy. It was raining again, and Lake Michigan was a mass of gray, undulating water, bleak and gloomy. It was easy to see why Yancy found it comforting even like this, the rocking of the waves, the soothing comfort in the ebb and flow. You could watch it for hours, as Yancy undoubtedly did, if one had the time and the temperament. At the moment, I had neither. Before I knew it, I was parked and back at Yancy’s squat, looking up at the sky, wishing there were stars pointing in his direction. It was almost six p.m. but because of the rain, the sky was dark, and the park was deserted. I noticed that the beach house had a new gate across the entrance and a new lock securing it. The garbage cans Yancy and I had cowered behind had been removed. There was nothing like a late-night shooting to goose slow-moving bureaucracies into fast action. I headed north up the path toward Promontory Point just a half-mile or so away, ducking into the pedestrian tunnel as I passed it, to make sure Yancy wasn’t huddled inside. As I walked, I listened to the beat of the rain bouncing off my slicker, breathing i
n the scent of wet rubber, my flashlight dry in my pocket. It was too early for the streetlights to come on, even though the sky was murky, but I made my way along the slippery path by the light of passing headlights on The Drive, rainwater squishing in my shoes.

  Through a thin curtain of rain, I could just make out the Point’s castlelike building sitting at the head of a lonely peninsula jutting out into the lake. It was surrounded by a tumbled seawall of limestone blocks that stair-stepped down to the shallow water below. In summer, sunbathers sprawled on the rocks like Catalina seals awaiting high tide, and intrepid swimmers used them as jumping-off points for daily laps in the choppy water. Bike riding, kite flying, and Tai Chi on the lawn at dawn, kept the spot humming. Would Yancy feel safe here?

  I trudged up the trail, headed toward the darkened building, slogging over the wet grass to avoid the parts of the path that had flooded over with muddy water. The path veered away from The Drive here. There were no more headlights to guide me, so I grabbed the flashlight from my pocket and turned it on. The sound of the waves crashing against the craggy rock competed with the drumbeat of rain echoing in my ears. It had been a long day, and I was exhausted, though it was more mental than physical. I’d been shot at, almost arrested, had my office broken into and on top of that Pop had left behind a puzzle I couldn’t solve. Someone wanted me to stop digging, that was for sure, but whoever it was didn’t know me. It would take far more than a broken window and a trip to the police station to turn me back.

  Squinting past raindrops, I thought I saw a light, a flicker inside the building. I stopped cold and waited for it to come again. There. It was definitely something. I raced forward, the beam from the flashlight dancing, and my feet slipping on the sodden grass. I careened into the building’s French doors, my muddy shoes skating along the stone veranda. I emitted a sound, half expletive, half prayer, but managed to keep my footing.

  I rattled the doors. Locked. I peered through the windows, but it was too dark inside to make anything out. Then I saw the light again. It was not inside the building, but around the back, something shining and reflecting off the wet windows. I picked my way around the side, feeling along the stone walls, my fingers digging into narrow niches in the stone to keep me from falling as the rain beat down and gusts of disgruntled wind threatened to blow me over.