Hope slipped out of Mitch’s body like the last whisper of warmth before winter. He wanted to scream, she’s fucking lying! Don’t believe her lies! Instead, he quietly asked, “You can’t believe her? She and Meghan were here that night.”
Both detectives nodded. “She’s full of shit and the boyfriend’s no stranger to the court, as we say. He’s got a hillbilly heroin problem. Against their triple bullshit, however, all we’ve got is your story and your girlfriend corroborating that someone matching her description was babysitting and left on foot before you two... turned in for the night. We got bigger problems than he said/she said, though.”
“I don’t get it,” Mitch said.
“Did you know the girl—Meghan—isn’t even her kid?”
Mitch wondered what kind of game the detectives were running on him. He stood waiting for the hand to play itself out, wondering if he’d even see the trick card slide out of Dixon’s sleeve. “No.”
“You know what a ‘private re-homing’ is?” he asked. Mitch shook his head. “It’s when someone signs their kid over to someone else because they don’t want them anymore.”
“Like Violette did with Sophie,” Braddock added. Mitch took an involuntary breath in, but didn’t respond.
Dixon continued. “We figure Faye’s where your sister got the idea for the power of attorney she left with you. See, it turns out your neighbor has been collecting kids for years. She adopts them off of a site where people go when they realize that little Vladimir or Q’ian have too many problems for them to handle and they just want to be clear of a kid they can’t control, but can’t send back to Russia or China. Here comes Faye and her boyfriend and they’ll take the kid off your hands for nothing. Just a piece of paper saying that they’re the new guardians of the child. Then they get the public benefits and tax breaks...”
“And whatever else the boyfriend wants off the kids,” Braddock added.
“Then they’re off to ditch them with some other shitheels looking for a ‘non-legalized adoption’ online.”
“I’ve only ever seen Meghan over there. She doesn’t have any other kids,” Mitch said.
“Not there. She’s a middle-man. She takes ‘em and trades ‘em. We’re not sure to who, but however it works we’re certain the original adoptive ‘parents’”—Dixon said it with such contempt that Mitch was certain he was going to spit on the porch after saying the word—“ain’t coming forward to find out what happened to the kid they dumped.”
“Why don’t you arrest her then?” Mitch asked.
“There’s no law against it in the Commonwealth yet. It’s not an adoption as far as anyone is concerned, so there’s no law being broken.”
“What has this got to do with me... and Sophie?”
The cops looked at each other and sighed. Braddock rubbed at his head looking as if he expected more from Mitch. “You ever hear of corpus delicti?” he asked.
It was Mitch’s turn to shake his head.
“It means ‘the body of a crime.’ Some people think it means that you have to have an actual body in order to prove there was a murder, but that’s not exactly right. What it really means is that in order to convict somebody of something, a crime must first be proven to have occurred. Now if you, say, killed someone and chopped up the body before stuffing the pieces into a septic tank or whatever...” Mitch’s blood chilled and he felt faint. The cop continued like he hadn’t just seen all of the color drain out of his face. “You could still be arrested, tried, and convicted as long as we could prove that someone who used to be alive is now dead, and you’re the one who did it. You follow me so far?” Mitch nodded. Braddock continued. “But if I can’t prove that you killed a guy, for example, because he’s walking around doing stuff, well then, there’s no corpus delicti, is there?”
Dixon took over the explanation. “A little birdy in the coroner’s office told us that the victim in our homicide case just... What did she say, John?”
“Got up and walked away.”
“Right! Got up and walked away. That means, no wrongful death, no case, and no arrests. But, there’s still somebody responsible for what happened to your niece. Right? And without her, we have nothing to hold them accountable. So, you see our problem with her just up and taking a stroll home. She’s our only evidence in the case.”
“She’s all we’ve got to try to stop Faye Cantrell’s revolving door of kids.”
Mitch shivered at the way the men spoke about Sophie. “She’s not evidence; she’s my niece.”
“That’s what you think,” Dixon said. “She’s a corpse, Mitch. Walking around, yes. We’ve seen other kids like this in the last couple of weeks and it’s not pretty what happens to them as time drags on. Believe me when I say you don’t want to be around when it starts to go bad.”
“And you don’t care what she did to Sophie. You only want her so you can stop this other thing.”
“We care, god damn it,” Braddock said. “We care about both. What she did to Sophie was unconscionable. But you need to understand, Mitch, that while it may have been accidental, it wasn’t unintentional. She’s a piece of shit. We want to stop her before she kills someone else’s kid. We want her to be held responsible for what happened to your child.”
“I’m only Sophie’s uncle.”
“Funny. Way I look at it,” Braddock said, “for the last thirteen months you’ve been her father whether you wanted to be or not. Now it’s time for you to do the right thing by her.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
Braddock shrugged, looking genuinely apologetic as he said, “Help us. Let us take her. I promise she’ll be treated as humanely as possible.” The addition of “as possible” turned Mitch’s stomach. It meant that there was a point at which they anticipated fully humane treatment was not practicable. They said there were others. Maybe it wasn’t anticipation. Maybe it was experience.
“And if I say no?”
“Give it a day or two, Mr. LeRoux. Take your time. And when you realize that this is bigger than you can handle, you call us. We really do want to help you.” Dixon held out his business card. Mitch took it, though he already had one. He figured they assumed he’d just thrown it away. The detectives turned to leave, but Dixon stopped and looked over his shoulder.
“One more thing,” he said. “You know what Oscar Wilde said about children?” Mitch shook his head. “He said they begin by loving their parents. But when they get older, they judge them. That... little girl in there is going to hold you accountable, Mitch. If you’re lucky, she’ll forgive you. I don’t want to think about what will happen if she doesn’t have it in her heart to do that. I don’t want to think about it because I’ve seen what happened to other people living with their dead kids. But, then again, maybe you deserve it.”
The detectives turned and walked away.
22
From their car across the street, Dixon watched Mitch peek out from behind the curtains and wanted to go back to the door and let him know that if he intended it to appear like no one was squatting in the apartment, he’d have to stay away from the windows. At the same time, it would make his job simpler if Mitch was easy to spot when they came back. It’d been difficult keeping an eye on him at the girlfriend’s place. Her apartment was on the third floor and he apparently hadn’t felt the need to look outside to confirm no one was watching.
While no one in homicide actually knew how the dead kids coming back to life was going to affect their cases, what was certain was that the DA was a political coward who put media attention and elections ahead of her prosecutors’ judgment and experience. Dixon’s girlfriend was an ADA who’d graduated to the child protection unit—her dream job—and was now looking to go into private practice. She had enough in less than a year in the special division, and Julie could put up with a hell of a lot. She was still dating him, after all. The common consensus among Julie and her colleagues was, with the amount of media attention focused on these kids, any homicide prosecution
centered on a murder victim who was walking around was officially closed. The parents weren’t organized or numerous enough to present a threat at the polls, and, dead or alive, kids don’t vote. But TV stations eat, breathe, and shit sensation, and FOX 25 would love to get a picture of DA Maria O’Brien standing next to a horror movie monster only a few weeks before the polls opened.
Braddock hung up his phone, balled up his fists and listened to the sound of his abused knuckles popping. He said, “The word from on high is we’re back in rotation tomorrow. What do you want to do?”
Dixon said, “Let’s head up to Revere. Faye Cantrell should know the girl she shook to death is home.” He smirked at his partner. “In case she wants to drop by with a fruit basket and apologize.”
“You’re a bad man.” Braddock put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. Dixon held up a hand to wave at Mitch staring out from the curtains.
23
After two days of isolation in the house, Mitch started to feel cagey and restless. He didn’t like confinement, even if he was the one confining himself. His original plan to wait and surface once the world had sorted out the problem wasn’t looking like a short-term endeavor. And he was hungry. Though Sophie wasn’t noticeably affected by the lack of food in the house—she seemed to be doing fine subsisting on what little they had—Mitch still needed sustenance. His stomach growled constantly and cramped periodically now that he’d exhausted the dry and canned goods left behind in the pantry. He’d had the last can of soup the night before and was down to a final packet of Ramen. The cupboard was bare and he needed to come up with a solution.
Looking through his wallet, he found his sister’s SNAP EBT card—Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—“food stamps.” No working Internet in the house meant they had to venture out to check the balance on the account —a proposition that he found only slightly less daunting than starving. So far, most of the other services they’d been subscribed to had taken their time to cut him off. Cable was gone, but they still had electricity and natural gas. The utilities were going to run out eventually and even if they lasted a while longer, the sheriff was coming in a week to evict them. Even if he had enough cash in the bank for a first, last, and deposit on a new place, he couldn’t pass a credit check without a job. He needed an income stream to keep them going. This is how people become homeless.
He’d called Khadija to see if he could bring Sophie back for a day or two a week. He thought he could scrape enough together for a week or two, hopefully enough time to find work and save up a little more. She’d been compassionate and kind, like always, but told him she couldn’t accommodate a child “in her condition.” He told her he understood, and didn’t press the issue. She was a decent person, and he could hear how difficult it was for her to say no. Even so, without day care, he couldn’t return to work. And no matter what Sophie’s “condition,” he couldn’t conceive of leaving her alone in the house for an entire work day—especially one that started as early as it did for a barista in a coffee shop. He was falling down a steep spiral. The only thing that could hold back the seemingly inevitable tide was money. And he didn’t have any other way to get money without work. This is how people end up in prison. One of the ways, anyway.
After giving Sophie a bath to try to dispel the odor that was beginning to haunt her, he dressed her in clean clothes and tried to make her as presentable—alive looking—as possible. He tried darkening her skin a little with some of Violette’s makeup, but was worse at that than even his diminished expectations had prepared him to be. The result was worse than simply asking her to let her hair hang in her face a little. He washed her a second time, tried again, and when he thought he’d finally done a passable job, they left.
The half-mile walk to the branch library was more like a mile by the time he’d led them down side streets and through alleys after strangers started shouting, “Ghoul!” and, “Deadophile!” at them from passing cars. He figured it was her gray hair that gave them away at a distance and regretted not bringing along a hat for her to wear.
They pushed through the library doors and paused by the checkout desk. He wanted to take her over to the children’s section to find a book or two she’d enjoy, as they had every Monday before she died. They could pretend to be normal and sit on the carpet under the hanging purple gauze with the cardboard stars and pick out some of her favorites from the picture book bins. They’d read and she’d look up and together they’d pretend they lived in a place where light pollution didn’t blank out the stars from night sky. He was pretty certain that wasn’t a good idea, however. Several of the parents and nannies who were lingering after the ten o’clock sing-along were hastily shoving their things into diaper bags and grabbing their kids, dragging them out through the rear exit. The children cried at their sudden departure, calling out for the promised book or DVD that they hadn’t yet checked out. Hisses to be quiet and assurances they’d come back some other time answered their protests. Instead of heading for the children’s room, he led Sophie to the computer station.
They sat down at an open terminal and he signed in. They were limited to twenty-minute sessions on the public computers. That was more than enough time to check the EBT account and go. Sophie sat on his lap, staring at the screen. In the past, she’d have been trying to “help” him by reaching for the keyboard or mouse and clicking at things randomly. Instead, she sat quietly and watched him work.
He accessed the SNAP cardholder login and clicked on his account. Two hundred and forty dollars remained on the card. He checked the date. A fresh deposit. He resolved to zeroing out the balance as quickly as he could before they shut the account down. It meant taking Sophie to the grocery store maybe two or three times, buying as much as he could carry home on each trip with her in tow since they were without a car again.
Whatever it takes.
He logged out of the food assistance account and, despite his better judgment, surfed over to CNN.com. A picture that had been shown over and over again on the television and had even made it to the cover of TIME stared back at him. A gray-haired boy of maybe seven or eight, face twisted in anguish as a man struggled to wrench him from his mother’s grip. The headline read, THE BATTLE OVER THE CHILDREN OF THE GRAVE. He skimmed the first article, although it told him nothing about why things were happening. There was plenty of speculation split down the lines he’d already heard on the radio and the nightly news at Liana’s. Talking heads searching for meaning without any facts to supply it other than that some kids who’d been dead had now come back. Not all of the children in the world who died came back. Just a few. But a few were enough to set off a shit-storm of panic, public hand-wringing, and moral grandstanding. While scientific experts were “baffled,” religious leaders were making hay of it. Either way, for the churches it was a win. More people than ever were suddenly interested in attending service. The comments at the end of the article were even less encouraging. Most of them encouraged stockpiling ammo and shooting the kids in the head—armchair attorneys advising it wasn’t murder to kill something already dead.
Behind him, a quavering voice said, “Mitch? I, uh, think it’s time to go.” He looked away from the monitor and saw Kathy, their favorite librarian. She’d doted on Sophie ever since he started bringing her to the library, promising her she could check out anything she wanted, and overruling Mitch when he didn’t want to get something he thought was too commercial or reinforcing of gender stereotypes. “Her books, her choice,” she’d say. “My Sophie gets to read what she wants.” Except today, Kathy wasn’t asking for a hug or taking the girl off to show her the latest books in the “New Arrivals” bin. Today, she looked like she was staring at a ghost.
Behind her, hovered a man he recognized from prior visits to the Wednesday sing-along. Curtis something. They’d bonded in the past as the only two men who regularly attended the free toddler events at the library. Curtis stared at Mitch with a barely contained hostility. Mitch swallowed hard as his vision narro
wed and his heart raced.
“I still have time on the computer, Kathy. It’s only been five min—”
“Shut the fuck up,” Curtis said. “You heard the lady. Take that... ghoul... and get out.”
Kathy shot the guy a look telling him to be quiet and returned her attention to Mitch. “Please. It’ll be better if you just go.” Mitch felt frustration and despair stab at him. She had been more than a friend: she was an ally, always making him feel welcome, usually waving his late fees, and even once helping with the online application for heating oil assistance after he’d moved into Violette’s house. Coming to the library always meant a few minutes of relief a couple of times a week as Sophie sat quietly and “read” a picture book to herself or played with the librarian. Today, Kathy looked terrified, and had even brought backup. If Mitch had any allies left, their numbers were dwindling.
He held up his hands and said, “We don’t want any trou—”
The man pointed a thick finger at Mitch and Sophie. “I said—” The child reached for his hand and sent him backpedaling away, arms pinwheeling, a look of terror on his face. However frightened this guy was of Sophie, he’d regain his bravado as soon as he found something to even the odds like one of the heavy sticks used to prop open the windows in the spring and autumn. It was indeed time to go.
Mitch shouldered his empty messenger bag and stood up, hefting Sophie onto his hip. She stared at the man who kept backing up until he banged into the checkout counter yelping in pain and fear. The guy searched left and right for somewhere else to retreat, all of his macho bluster robbed by a little girl.
Mitch looked at Kathy, silently pleading with her for understanding. She shook her head and pointed toward the door. As they passed, Curtis slid along the edge of the checkout desk, saying something about Mitch knowing what was good for him. Sophie reached out with a finger and sent a thin line of rot snaking across the countertop toward him. The man jumped away, scrambling to swing a chair around in front of him. With his equalizer and shield, a fresh line of invective spewed from his mouth. Mitch didn’t listen. Instead, he walked out into the daylight, headed home to hide.
Come to Dust Page 11
