A Guide for Murdered Children

by Sarah Sparrow

  He was stymied over what direction to take next. Just what was it that he wanted to know, what was it he was trying to find out? Willow was at a total loss. At least it felt good talking about the woman—it got her out of his head, made her less of a chimera.

  A few couples settled into the picnic tables. Most of the men were cops. Willow and his ex joined them as they fed their faces and shop-talked. The wives were used to it.

  “A friend in California told me about a pretty wild case,” said one of the men. “All these folks were being murdered in Atlanta. I’m talking straight-out executions. This happened, oh, I think over the course of two or three years. Not thugs or gangbangers or drug addicts—just folks who’d given information on homicide cases. Not CIs. Regular people. Witnesses, whatever. It wasn’t even a Crime Stoppers deal, just members of the community calling in tips from what they heard on the street. Some were probably doing it for the reward, but most were just trying to make the community safer. Gettin’ bad guys off the streets. And none of the murders were connected. Zero. No one in homicide could figure it out. For a while, they thought it was a serial deal. Know what they all had in common?”

  “What was that?” said Owen.

  “Every one of the vics had been interviewed on a reality cop show. There’s a hundred of ’em now. During interrogations, when the shows aired, they were heavily blurred out, voices altered, the whole deal. To protect their anonymity. Now here’s what’s amazing. Turns out there’s a guy working at the editing facility out in Hollywood—”

  “The blur-out guy?” said Willow.

  “That’s right. There was one guy who had that job. The motherfucker was selling pre-censored images to the criminal community.”

  “Jesus,” said Adelaide. “That’s like an Agatha Christie. Or whoever’s writing that kind of thing now.”

  Guests came and went, replenishing their paper plates. When the talk fell to Winston Collins, the women didn’t want to entertain the hardboiled husbands’ certainty, backed up by stats, that the boy was killed within hours of his abduction. To placate the ladies, one of them half-heartedly said, “He’ll probably turn up.” A wise guy couldn’t help adding, “Parts of him, anyway.”

  A few of the wives asked Owen if his office had any leads, and he shook his head. “Something’ll break,” he said. “Just a matter of time.” Willow was familiar with that kind of optimism, or at least its compulsory public face. One of the men brought up the infamous, unsolved Oakland County murders that took place an hour southwest—four kids between the ages of ten and twelve were killed in a thirteen-month period between 1976 and ’77. But the “Oakland County Child Killer” was never found.

  “Maybe the guy’s still doing his thing,” said a wife. “And living in Macomb.”

  “Possible, but unlikely,” said her husband. “He’d probably be in his seventies by now.”

  “Let’s get our cold case expert’s opinion,” said Owen, turning to Willow.

  “Oh, you find serial killers who are ‘active seniors.’ I’m sure there’s a few out there who are wearing Depends. It’s atypical but it happens. They don’t usually lay low for forty years, then pick up again. But as the man said, anything’s possible. It’s more likely that he’s dead.”

  “Or she,” said Adelaide.

  “Or she,” echoed Willow. “It certainly wouldn’t be without precedent for a woman to be involved. The prime suspect in that Oakland deal shot himself in the head, though, didn’t he?”

  “That would be Christopher Busch,” nodded Owen. “There were a lot of ‘prime suspects.’ And speaking of cold cases, how’d you like my deputies?”

  Willow suddenly felt remiss for not having called his boss to compliment him on the recruits. “Good people,” he said. “They’re green, but sometimes green’s a good thing. A very good thing. You just may be right. I think there is something special about them.”

  “Willow’s heading up our new task force,” said Owen to the others, mostly for the benefit of the wives because the men already knew. “He very courteously allowed me to lure him out of retirement. He was the Big Apple’s Cold Case king.”

  “Your wish is my command,” said Willow.

  “The king and the genie,” said the wise guy. “There’s a pair to draw to.”

  “I don’t mind playing genie,” said Owen. “As long as there isn’t any rubbing involved.”

  “I’ll try to keep my hands to myself,” said Willow. Everyone laughed. “You won’t believe who they chose for their first case.”

  “JonBenét?” said the wise guy.

  “Troy and Maya Rummer.”

  “You are shitting me,” said Owen, genuinely surprised.

  “Oh my God!” said Adelaide. “Dubya, are you being for real?”

  He got a pang, thinking it was probably something he shouldn’t have casually announced at a barbecue. But the cat was out of the bag.

  “It came down to the Rummers and two other cases, but that’s the one they stuck with. Almost insisted on it.”

  “Funny,” said Owen. “Those two were working at the substation in Saggerty Falls when I pulled them for the task force.”

  “They did have an awareness about the abductions,” said Willow. “But I don’t think it was something they’d ever given much thought.”

  “Well,” said Owen, almost meditatively. “What are your thoughts, Willow? About reopening the case?”

  For a moment, he wondered if the sheriff might have a problem with it, though he wasn’t sure why. “At first I thought it wasn’t a good idea—too personal. To me, not them. So I’m going to let ’em run with it.”

  One of the women theorized that the recruits’ selection of the Rummer kids was probably influenced by the disappearance of the Collins boy.

  “That may be true,” said Willow. “But I’ve found that in cold cases, there isn’t always an obvious correlation or rationale behind the circumstances of why we investigate what we investigate. It’s not always about going into a file and identifying, say, a glaring error in how an unsolved crime was prosecuted, or following a lead that was never pursued but should have been. It tends to be a little more mysterious than that. Or can be.”

  “Somebody put this man on the lecture circuit,” said Owen, without sarcasm.

  “I can’t tell you,” said Willow, “how many times I’ve heard a cold case detective say ‘I don’t know’ when some journalist asked what it was that initially caught their interest.”

  “That was an awful, awful time,” Adelaide said solemnly. She turned to Willow. “You heard what happened to Elaine Rummer, didn’t you?”

  “No,” he said.

  “She went out of her mind,” said Owen.

  “Can’t blame a mother for that,” said Adelaide.

  “Shot herself in the face with a rifle—and lived.”

  “Recoil saved her,” said one of the cops. “Happens more often than you’d think.”

  “What doesn’t kill you,” said the wise guy, “tends to rearrange your features. They call that the penny-saver’s facelift.”

  “She’s had a bunch of surgeries,” said Owen. “They did a pretty good job too, from what I hear.”

  “It’s a funny way to take yourself out,” said another cop. “Particularly for a woman.”

  “Are you being sexist?” said one of the wives.

  “On the contrary. Women usually aren’t that stupid.”

  “I would have overdosed,” said Adelaide. “I’d have taken ten thousand sleeping pills. There is no way I would have been able to bear what she went through. There is just no way.”

  “ODs aren’t foolproof either,” said Willow. “Do it wrong and you can end up strapped to a chair in a nursing home.”

  “Believe me,” said Adelaide. “I’d have done it right.” She clenched her jaw. “Believe me.”

 
2.

  Is there a hell more specific than the chaos following the disappearance of a child?

  If two children vanish (a brother and sister, ages nine and six) from a cookout on Independence Day, in a pastoral village in the late afternoon—is it possible for hell to double and become worse? If all happy families are alike (families whose children never disappeared), is each unhappy, disappeared-child family unhappy in its own way? Or is there a sameness to their torment?

  The question and its queer permutations haunted Willow, not merely because he happened to be in Saggerty Falls when Troy and Maya Rummer went missing. For years prior, like many parents, Willow and Adelaide shuddered over the possibility of their child being snatched by the bogeyman. Pace had just turned sixteen when it finally came true—for the Rummers. It was like some nightmarish wish fulfillment of the collective unconscious. He was living in New York, working in the narcotics division, the occasion of his return to the place he once called home being to surprise his estranged daughter on her Sweet Sixteenth.

  Elaine and Ronnie Rummer, friends and onetime neighbors, had warmly spearheaded the welcome wagon on the Wyldes’ arrival from Chicago in 1993. A few years later, when Troy was almost five and Maya had just turned two, they agreed to let twelve-year-old Pace apprentice in the art of babysitting. The Wylde girl proved such a quick study that she effectively became Troy and Maya’s big sis, and a second daughter to the Rummers. When they disappeared, the abyss of evil that opened at Pace’s feet was intensely personal; the shock of what happened to her babies brought the hormonal girl’s relations with the dark side to a level that was more than flirtatious.

  Willow extended his stay for a week after Troy and Maya fell off the face of the Earth. In the first few days, Owen, now Saggerty Falls’ chief of police, begged Willow to use his “spooky” ways to help find the children. Dubya tried, but shamefully came up empty; he had suppressed those gifts for too long. At that point, Owen and Adelaide had been “out” for eight months—apparently the two began seeing each other while he and Owen were still partners. In the shock-time of the abductions, Willow stuffed his animosity in view of the greater tragedy and greater good—but mostly because he wanted to be there for Pace, who was suffering. He didn’t want to add to the burdens she already shouldered.

  Among other off-color hobbies, she’d been secretly (then not so secretly) cutting herself. It started when she was fourteen. Willow and Adelaide kept as close a watch as they could. But he was hundreds of miles away and it was his ex who waited by the phone for the dreaded call from police stations, hospitals and morgues; it was his ex who crept into Pace’s room to sigh with relief when she confirmed, after tortured observation, that their daughter was asleep and not dead. When Pace didn’t come home for days at a time, it was his ex who visited the police stations, hospitals, morgues . . . and when she could take no more (to his credit, Owen tried his best to be a father figure, but Pace wasn’t having it), she called Willow, usually while he was in bed with one of his snitches, whores or whatevers, shouting You’re a piece of shit who does not care about your own daughter! In his heart, he knew he was a good father, but actions were the only thing that mattered.

  The road to Hell was paved with men who knew they were good fathers . . .

  When Willow returned to New York immediately after the catastrophe, he started having the dreams—not of Pace being dead, but that she was gone and he would never see her again. Never! The idea was enough to drive a person mad; no wonder Elaine tried to blow her head off. Not to have a body to bury . . . though was it better to have a body? Were the moms and dads of the Oakland County Child Killer’s victims—or the parents of April Millsap, whose body was found a few years ago by the tracks of the Macomb Orchard Trail, not far from Owen and Adelaide’s home—were they better off? How could one know? To have or not to have a body . . . that was the question. Not having one to bury was a primal terror—that a beloved was out there rotting, their soul anchorless and defamed. Willow recalled a case in Minnesota where a killer led investigators to the remains of a ten-year-old boy he murdered in exchange for not being charged. (He was already in jail for other barbarities and would never get out.) The parents agreed to the deal because having a body meant that much to them. They no longer cared that the record would declare for all eternity that no one—no one—was officially accountable for the rape, mutilation and extinction of their shining star.

  Willow wondered if he would do the same. Would he plea bargain with God Himself, if it meant bringing the closure that he imagined would be provided by a body? Closure! Symmetry! Balance . . . He hadn’t seemed to care enough when she was alive; might caring too much when she was dead be the ultimate selfish act? When God fulfilled his request and her body was retrieved, plucked from earth or water or the barrel the killer encased it in, when He laid Pace at his feet, where would that leave Willow? Would he realize what he’d done and put a shotgun to his face? The travesty of demanding back the girl who had hated him in life and now would hate him in death for calling her back as if she were his property, like a teenager grounded for violating curfew, seemed like the worst desecration, unholier than letting her be, letting her go.

  He dreamed those dreams of losing her for years, but they stopped right around the time of his first dream about the train.

  THE NEW AGE

  When would he see Annie again?

  The peculiar thing is that he wasn’t dwelling on it, any of it, not really. Willow noticed that in himself. He simply knew he would see her soon, whatever soon meant. He didn’t seem to be obsessing on the outrageous weirdness either, which struck him as more than peculiar, there being more than enough outrage and weird to go around. The only thing that really mattered was that he didn’t feel crazy anymore. (There’d been a moment when he thought he was going over the edge.) He couldn’t explain why; it wasn’t as if the bizarre encounter at the Early World Diner was fading—it wasn’t. If anything, Annie and the things she had told him were becoming more real. Taking root. Maybe that’s what she meant by her last few words. That he needed time to “integrate.”

  Maybe that’s what was going on: he was integrating.

  Well, bring it. He had to laugh (intermittently), which he thought was probably a good thing.

  Smile while your brain is breaking . . .

  He began to diligently work with the Cold Case Kids, schooling them on what Rafael, his old NYPD boss, called the “black art.” They’d certainly done their homework. Each day, he grew more persuaded that Owen’s instincts were correct—the greenhorns were made for the game. They were surprisingly au courant in the latest advances in forensic science, which were many in the years since Willow had been active. He struggled to keep up. Lydia and Daniel were some kind of prodigies—plus, their generation had an entirely new, comprehensive, unpredictable way of perceiving and interpreting the matrix. Not only was the detective impressed, but he was slowly coming around to I can learn from them too.

  Did they ever sleep? When he arrived at the office in the morning, the guard often said they’d been there for hours. Evidence and material pertaining to Troy and Maya Rummer’s case were meticulously deployed in a conference room, and when Willow came in they usually ignored him, standing hypnotized in front of blurry school photos of the bucktoothed boy and freckly, pigtailed girl. The plastic bag with the BE EXCELLENT TO EACH OTHER T-shirt was pinned to a corkboard, same as the unicorn-themed fifth birthday card Maya had faithfully carried around for a year before she died. (It was found in the basket of her bicycle.) Its horn was made of gold sequins but only a threadbare sprinkle was left. Ninhydrin had been used to reveal a latent palm print, less than two square inches, on its cover. Lydia and Daniel already ran a photograph of the palm through APIS, the Automated Palmprint ID System, a database that hadn’t been available until 2005. There wasn’t a match.

  On the table was a small stuffed unicorn, also found in the basket, removed from its smotheri
ng baggie as if by order of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Mythological Animals.

  Maya’s bike lay on the floor, replicating its position in the ditch, in crime scene photographs.

  Troy’s bike was never recovered . . .

  The files took up half of the long table. Another section was devoted to Persons of Interest, beginning with Ebenezer the neighbor, whose house the kids were heading to for lighter fluid on that fateful day. There were other POIs, paroled sex offenders living within a fifty-mile radius, though none ever panned out.

  Willow thought it compelling, even auspicious, that the newbies chose the Rummer case—yet sometimes it seemed like the case had chosen them. Though it was against his interests, he couldn’t help but think of the crime as unsolvable, destined to be no more than an invaluable laboratory of learning—training wheels, so to speak, before they were confident enough to ride full-speed on the twisting roads of Cold Case country. Of course he hoped that he was wrong, because Willow knew that he couldn’t afford to have a five-star failure right out of the gate, especially one with so much resonance in the community, so much personal history and emotion. To cover potential losses, he already planned to introduce a few more cases that he’d chosen himself. He would wait awhile; he didn’t want to dampen their enthusiasm. Still, the restive freshness and idiosyncratic focus that both deputies brought to their task were encouraging. They showed seriousness and passion in regard to finding the party or parties responsible, and demonstrated a rare, innate understanding of the sacredness of the work. For the work was sacred to the detective—which was why his failure in New York had dealt such a terrible blow.

  * * *

  • • •

  One day, when the kids were on a lunch break, Willow wandered into the war room for what he called a hover. He knew one could get lost in the details and that it was important to get a bird’s-eye view. It was corny but he had shown them a video of a seagull treading air, staying still while buffeted by the currents. The detective told them they should do just that—remain still in the windstorm of data, without losing the ability to scan the horizon and take off in whatever direction that was needed.