Along Came December

by Jay Allisan

He nodded at the papers. “Brought those in from the car. You’re welcome.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You have a good night?”

  My cheeks warmed. “We made up.”

  “Bet you made out, too.”

  “I am not talking about this with you.”

  “Hey, I’m not asking for details.”

  “Good, because you’re not getting any.” I reached for the files, my hand freezing halfway. I shot him a look. “Max doesn’t tell you this stuff, does he?”

  Paddy laughed. “Hell no. Then again, he’s got a lousy poker face. You can find out anything you wanna know just from looking at him.” I stared, mortified, and he grinned at me. “Relax, I’m just giving you a hard time. I’m happy for you guys.”

  “You’ve got a sadistic way of showing it.”

  “Need something to cheer me up. I hate this kind of shit. Kids.”

  “Yeah.”

  I looked across the cluster of desks at Josie and Whale, who were both typing intently, pretending they hadn’t been listening in. I cleared my throat. “So, uh, what’s the plan?”

  Josie glanced up. “Running names. We didn’t find much on the fire angle last night. There are about a million fires in the city every year and I don’t know how to sort them. That’s more Max’s thing.”

  “We’ll start on those files if you want to get back to the Center,” Whale said.

  I passed the stack over to Whale, who gave half to Josie. “No need,” I answered. “Rose Weatherbee said the Center’s database is linked to the CPS database, and we have access to the CPS files, so…” I woke my computer and navigated through all the portals. “There. I’ll just pick up where I left off.”

  Paddy pulled up the database as well. “Speaking of left off, you skipped all the boys.”

  “I was looking for similarities and I needed some kind of parameter.”

  “Well, I’m gonna check ‘em.”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  I went through the rest of the girls, printing anything that looked even remotely suspicious. Paddy worked silently, though Josie and Whale filled the office with background noise as they made verification calls. I eavesdropped on a couple conversations, not sure whether to be relieved or disappointed when the stories checked out. Dixon was right when he said the more information the better, but more information meant more kids would be in danger. Or maybe worse.

  I sent the last flagged file to the printer, hesitating before following it. There was one file I hadn’t looked at yet. I typed Kimmie’s name into the database and hit search.

  Two results popped up.

  I frowned, wondering what the chances were that two Kimberly Harts had passed through the Center. Then I realized the second hit was a Child Protection Services file, its creation date noted plain as day. CPS had opened a file on Kimmie nine months ago.

  I clicked the icon. Kimmie had been showing up to school unbathed, sporting bruises, and with no lunch in her backpack. Her teacher called Ray Hart, then called CPS when Ray threatened her over the phone. CPS investigated but there wasn’t sufficient evidence for removal. The case was dropped and the file went dormant. Until her father died.

  I elbowed Paddy. “Look at this. Why didn’t anyone tell us?”

  I waited impatiently as he read the file, the lines on his forehead furrowing. Before he could say anything Josie was on her feet, shaking a fistful of papers. “Guys, I think I’ve got one.”

  “Who?” I asked. “What’s the name?”

  “Nadine McAllister. Six year old girl admitted to the Center two months ago when her dad’s car caught fire and he died. She was at the babysitter’s at the time.”

  “He rolled it into the gully on Bakersview,” I recalled. I pulled up the file and skimmed the details. “Nadine went to the Center and was picked up by her uncle Simon.”

  “Uncle Simon doesn’t exist,” Josie said. “His address belongs to a little old lady up in the Greensleeves neighborhood who’s lived there for nineteen years. His phone’s out of service, his driver’s license isn’t on record, and there’s no birth certificate that matches his name and birthday. I called Nadine’s school, too, and they said they haven’t seen her since her dad died. They were told she’d be switching but never had a transfer request. Whoever Simon is, he and Nadine have disappeared.”

  Paddy leaned back in his chair, working a hand over his jaw. “A serial kidnapper.”

  “Max suggested child trafficking,” I said quietly. “Maybe it’s a business model.”

  “I’d argue it’s personal,” Whale countered, thoughtful. “Consider the use of the Center as a middleman. Why go to so much trouble? Why the formality of taking the child into his custody?”

  “It’s a clean break,” Josie supplied. “Nobody would follow up.”

  “It’s more than that,” said Whale. “It’s the legitimacy. Someone is giving him these girls. That’s significant, particularly in light of his roleplay. I think he wants to be family to them.”

  “Or he’s just a dirty bastard snatching little girls,” Paddy growled. “This uncle shit doesn’t sit well with me. He’s sick.”

  “I wouldn’t disagree, but I think there’s some deeper psychology here.”

  “There’s something else,” I said, catching Whale’s eye. “It might support your family theory. CPS had a file on Kimmie before her father died. I just checked Nadine and she’s got one too. They were both suspected victims of abuse and neglect but the investigations never got off the ground.”

  Whale nodded somberly. “Murder of an unsuitable parent coupled with quasi-adoption. This could be our suspect’s idea of justice. We need to find the common denominator between these girls. Someone’s taken their situations very personally.”

  Josie hurried towards the door. “I’ll coordinate interviews at Nadine’s school.”

  Whale turned to his computer. “I’ll continue with the files.”

  “Guess that means I’m calling Dixon,” Paddy grumbled. “He’s not gonna like this one bit.”

  “You think Dixon’s going to be bad?” I said incredulously. “I have to tell Max.”

  OLD TOWN’S Explosives and Arson Team worked out of the sixth floor, the room laid out just like homicide. As squad sergeant, Max had his own office in the back of the room. His door was open when I got there. I’d pulled it shut before I explained.

  Max sat slumped in his chair, his hands in his lap, palm-up, as if waiting to be given something.

  “Do you think,” he said at last, “do you think that she’s still alive? Nadine?”

  “Whale thinks the kidnapper’s trying to help the girls,” I said. “He could be taking care of them.”

  “But what do you think?”

  Judging from the glassy look in Max’s eyes I was thinking the same thing he was, that there were no serial kidnappers, just serial rapists and serial killers, and if our suspect took someone new it was because he’d finished with the old one. But what I was thinking wasn’t what he needed to hear.

  “I think we’re going to find her,” I told him. “Her and Kimmie.”

  “What if there’s more?”

  “Then we’ll find them too.”

  Max pressed his fists into his eyes. “I keep seeing her face,” he whispered. “We were playing at the park on Friday. Airplane tag, she called it. If I caught her I had to make her fly like an airplane, and she’d get this big smile…”

  He stopped suddenly, glancing up at me. I smiled. “It’s okay. You can tell me.”

  He smiled weakly in return. “We played for hours, airplane tag over and over, and she’d scream anytime I caught her, but then she’d laugh when she got to fly. Those kids… most of them come from bad situations, but Kimmie was always the last one to be picked up, and her dad never got out of the car. I never saw him, but I just had this feeling, and on Friday when she left she hugged me goodbye, and she said… she said, ‘I wish you were my daddy’ and then the next day she was gone, and I—”
<
br />   “You couldn’t have known, Max. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I should have known. I should have done something to protect her.”

  “Max⁠—”

  “If I’d known about the fire sooner, if it had been in our jurisdiction I could have—”

  “Max. This isn’t your fault.”

  He shook his head, his eyes falling shut. He sat quietly, the subtle rise and fall of his shoulders his only movement. When he straightened his mouth was set.

  He turned to his computer. “What was the name? Nadine’s father?”

  “Patrick McAllister.”

  He brought up the report. “Moses River investigated his death. They ruled it accidental. Given what we know about Ray Hart and the missing girls, I doubt that.” He stood. “I’m going over there. Rain check on that grilled cheese?”

  “I’ll just eat them both,” I said, and he hugged me fervently. “You okay?”

  “I’ve got work to do.” He kissed me, and then he was gone.

  LIEUTENANT PATEL’S press conference made no mention of Nadine McAllister or the two other girls we’d identified as missing: Megan Stone and Emily Waye, orphaned one and six months ago, both only children, and both with CPS files detailing accusations of neglect or abuse. Megan’s mother Catherine was found in her garage with her truck running, asphyxiated by carbon monoxide. Whale was looking into that. But Rebecca Waye’s death was an anomaly. She’d died of a brain aneurysm.

  “Victim zero,” Paddy mumbled around a mouthful of grilled cheese. “She’s different ‘cause she’s the first.”

  I slid my keyboard to the side so I wouldn’t get crumbs in it. “Emily’s different too,” I said. “She was at the Center longer, almost two weeks. The other girls were picked up within a couple days.”

  Paddy cracked open a soda. “You’re missing the point, Shirley. You can’t give somebody a brain aneurysm.”

  “I know that.”

  “So the reason Emily was at the Center so long is because our suspect hadn’t come up with his little trick yet. He was reacting to the situation, not masterminding it. He might’ve even tried something different with her.”

  “Okay, but now you’re missing the point. If he didn’t kill Rebecca, how did he know she died? They must have known each other.”

  “Rebecca kicks the bucket, Emily’s all alone…”

  “He tries to adopt her but gets denied…”

  “He realizes it’s not gonna work if he’s the mailman or the neighbour, so he makes himself into her uncle…”

  “And it works so well he does it again. Again and again.” I toyed with the carrot sticks that came with my grilled cheese, wishing they were french fries. “Maybe he really does have good intentions.”

  Paddy snorted. “Maybe he meant well the first time, but killing people to take their kids doesn’t exactly scream saint to me.”

  “We need to talk to Mrs. Weatherbee again.”

  “I’ll do you one better. We need to talk to whoever got this whole thing rolling.”

  “You mean whoever reported Emily’s neglect?”

  “Exactly. We find out who reported it in the first place and I bet we find our kidnapper.”

  I slid my plate, carrots and all, into the garbage can. I woke my computer and brought up Emily’s CPS file. “The file was opened a year ago, and the call came from… it doesn’t say.”

  Paddy frowned. “It’s gotta.”

  “It doesn’t. The file’s incomplete.”

  “Does it say who responded to the complaint?”

  “Let me see. Emily lived in Highlands jurisdiction, and the responders were… oh, shit.”

  “What?”

  “I know this guy.”

  25

  WE FOUND their cruiser parked on Fowler Street, just where dispatch said they would be. Fowler was a low income neighborhood on the northwest side of town, and I was happy to leave it and its troubles to Highlands. Turf wars and drug busts were business as usual up here, and the police were not a welcome sight. Highlands was nobody’s first choice, especially not beat cops.

  Paddy pulled in behind the cruiser. I saw coiffed blonde hair in the driver’s seat and smiled. “You take his partner,” I told Paddy. “I’ve got dibs.”

  I came up alongside the cruiser and rapped on the driver’s window. I pressed my shield against the glass. “Sir, I’m going to need you to step out of the vehicle.”

  The window rolled down and I was met with reflective aviators and a pinup mouth, stuffed with a doughnut. I waited. He chewed, swallowed, chewed, swallowed. I put one hand on my hip. He sighed, lowering the aviators just enough for me to glimpse washed-out blue. “Can I help you?”

  “I hope so. I seem to remember you owe me one.”

  The sunglasses came all the way off. “Shirley?”

  I grinned. “Hey, Scarlett.”

  He got out of the car, eyeballing me up and down. “Well, well. Look at you. Shirley Kelly made detective after all. Must have been nice having all those doors open for you with that special-snowflake placement—”

  “Oh, save it. You’ve had plenty of doors open for you. Clearly your dad got you back into the academy after they kicked you out.”

  “Wow, great work, Detective Kelly. I hope someday I can put two and two together like you.”

  “I’d say you’ve got a ways to go.” I held up my left hand. “It’s Detective Mordecai now.”

  Scarlett’s expression turned sour. “Mordecai? You married that Max guy?”

  “Careful. I will hit you.”

  Scarlett leaned against the cruiser and folded his arms. “What do you want?”

  “I want to talk about a complaint you responded to last winter. An accusation of child neglect. The child’s name was—”

  “Emily,” he said. “Emily Waye. I remember her.”

  “Something about that case stick out for you?”

  He put his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “She needed help. She was in school, her house was decent enough, and her mom said all the right things, but I could tell she needed help.”

  “What did you do?”

  “You know what we did. It’s in the file, which you’ve obviously read if you’re here asking me about her.”

  “Humor me.”

  He gave an exaggerated sigh. “We called Child Services. They opened an investigation. They didn’t find grounds to remove her from her mom’s custody. She slipped through the cracks. The end.”

  “Did you ever follow up on Emily?”

  “What for? The social workers said she was fine.”

  “You said you thought she needed help.”

  “What was I supposed to do? I did my job, the social workers did their jobs, and that was it. End of story.”

  “You think I’d be here if that was the end of the story?”

  “Are you blaming me?” He pushed away from the car. “I did my job, Shirley. I did exactly what I was supposed to do, and if she’s not fine then it’s not my fault! What did you expect me to do?!”

  “Hey!”

  Paddy glared at Scarlett from the far side of the cruiser. He caught my eye. “You okay?”

  “We’re fine,” I said evenly. “Carry on.”

  I took the opportunity to swap places with Scarlett, blocking any possible retreat into his car. He looked ready for a good sulk, but that wouldn’t be much use to me. I softened my voice.

  “Look, I really do need your help. Me and my partner are working the missing girl case—”

  “Figures.”

  “—and we think there’s a connection between her and Emily. Can you help me out or not?”

  Scarlett eyed me warily. “What do you mean you think they’re connected?”

  “Scarlett, I’m not being an ass when I say I can’t tell you right now, but I can’t tell you right now. I need you to tell me something.”

  “What?”

  “When you first got the call about Emily, who did it come from?”

  �
�I don’t remember. It should be in the file.”

  “It’s not.”

  Scarlett threw up his hands. “Well, don’t look at me. I don’t do the paperwork. If something got left out then it’s Carl’s fault.”

  I looked over the car to where Paddy was interviewing Scarlett’s partner. Carl Winters was a small, meek-looking man, pale and pasty with red, sticky lips. Paddy spoke conversationally, but Carl had his head bowed and his hands stuffed in his pockets like he was taking a beating. I turned back to Scarlett.

  “Tell me about Carl. You guys been riding together long?”

  Scarlett made a face. “Too long. Someone thought they were clever when they stuck us together. Nobody wants to ride with either of us.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t imagine why someone would pass on me, but Carl… he’s old, for one thing, but he doesn’t have much experience. He’s only been on the force a couple years and he’s never done anything but patrol. He’s quiet all the time, except when you can’t shut him up, and I’m pretty sure he’s OCD. That’s why he does all the paperwork. He needs it to be just right.”

  “But he left information out of Emily’s file.”

  “I guess so. Did something happen to—”

  His words disappeared in an explosion of noise. I ducked instinctively, taking cover behind the cruiser. Scarlett stood motionless, his mouth hanging open as he stared at something behind me. I grabbed a fistful of his pants. “Get down, you idiot!”

  He didn’t move. I jerked on his pantleg and he lost his balance, landing on all fours. I peered around the car and my own jaw dropped.

  Smoke billowed skyward just two blocks away, debris tossed like confetti in all directions. Something yellow sailed toward us. A garage door. It smashed into a Volkswagen parked across the street. The wail of the car alarm snapped me into action.

  I covered my head and ran for my car, ducking into the driver’s seat. The ignition was empty. Paddy had the keys. I snatched up the radio just as he slid into the car. He shoved the keys at me.

  I handed off the radio and tore past Scarlett, who wasn’t even in his car yet. Scraps of wood fell like rain in the streets. People were running out of their houses and down the road. I hit the sirens and the horn, forcing them to part. Paddy called for backup, bomb squad and the fire department.