Suffer the Children

by Lisa Black

  Ms. Washington said, both gentle and warning, “We respect each other here. Everyone has problems.”

  “Exactly,” the girl replied. “And she didn’t care about anybody’s but hers.”

  An overweight girl with dark black skin and a royal blue T-shirt said, “All she did care about was boys.”

  “She was mean.” This came from a tiny girl with a mop of dark hair, wearing flannel lounge pants with a Halloween theme of spiders on them. She sat on the rug between an occupied armchair and the coffee table, heaped with old newspapers. She had not once looked up at the cops.

  The Hello Kitty girl said, “She wasn’t always mean. If something struck her funny, she could laugh.”

  Of everything Maggie had seen and heard that day, this came close to breaking her heart. She could laugh.

  A slender black girl with her hair in spiky pigtails said, “She stabbed a bunch of people.”

  Riley asked, “She told you about that?”

  Universal eye roll. “Every day. Like that made her so, so tough.”

  Dr. Palmer said softly, “Hurting people is nothing to be proud of.”

  “I stabbed someone, too,” said the girl wearing royal blue.

  “You had reason,” the girl in black said.

  “Everyone has reasons,” Ms. Washington reminded them. “But we need to act with—”

  “Had she been here before?” Jack interrupted. “A prior—”

  “Incarceration?” the girl in black finished for him. “You can say it. Nice jacket, by the way.”

  This had to be sarcasm. He wore a brown blazer that made him look like a college professor, the kind who didn’t grade on a curve. “Had she?”

  After a pause the girls collectively shook their heads. Rachael hadn’t said, they reported. As far as anyone knew she had not been in custody before.

  “Had anyone here met her before? Knew her from—”

  “The real world?” The girl in black again. “You can say that, too.”

  “Did you?” Jack asked, skewering the girl with his harsh gaze, one that Maggie had seen too many times and that still made her stomach tremble. But either this girl had been made from sterner stuff or for all her hard-won street smarts she had no ability to sense what lay under Jack’s surface.

  But Maggie knew. She knew that Jack had murdered a number of Cleveland’s worst criminals—and those in other cities as well—in the name of sparing their future victims. Until she had both stumbled onto his secret and created one of her own. Now they were locked into an uneasy pact of mutually assured destruction. She couldn’t begin to heal until he left town, and he couldn’t leave without attracting attention. Neither of them wanted attention, so Maggie remained in a daily fog of second guessing.

  The girl said, “No. Never saw her before.”

  The other girls all agreed, with apparent sincerity. They had not known or heard of Rachael before she arrived there, and didn’t have much interest in her either. As Ms. Washington had said, they all had problems.

  “Did she know anybody else here? Either staff or residents?”

  The shy little one on the floor spoke to the rug. “She knew a kid in the day program.”

  “Who?” Riley asked, his voice gentle.

  “A boy.”

  “What’s his name?”

  The girl shrugged. In the armchair behind her, the girl with pigtails leaned forward and patted her shoulder. “Tell them. We don’t care about no boy we don’t know.”

  Still not looking at them, but with more resolve in her voice, the girl said his name was Luis Borgia. “He’s been coming here for a couple months. Her first day in class they started talking about a neighborhood around West Thirty-Seventh and he asked about some people they knew, sounded like other kids.”

  “They hook up?” another girl asked, zeroing in on the more interesting gossip.

  “Not here. But friendly. They used to talk through the whole class until Ms. Wallace made Luis sit up front. They’d still say hi before we have to sit down. Last Tuesday she asked him to bring her some cigarettes but he said his social worker would kill him and there was no place for her to smoke them without getting caught anyway.”

  “Did Rachael get mad?”

  “She was kind of pissed but said good-bye to him okay at the end of the day.”

  “Anything else you can tell us?”

  The girl hadn’t stopped staring at the rug through this entire recitation. “She was on meds but wouldn’t take them. She didn’t trust doctors, I think. She’d throw them down the sink in the lav. She said, anyway.”

  “Damn waste,” the girl in black complained in a tone of great disgust, and dropped the empty Sprite can into a small waste bin.

  Ms. Washington said, “Self-medicating is all about avoiding the world instead of living in it.”

  “Recycling,” Dr. Palmer reminded them.

  With a put-upon sigh the girl both rescued the can from the bin and placed it by her feet for later disposal, and piped down about the benefits of drug use.

  Riley said, “She carried a gold ring in her pocket. Anybody know who that belonged to?”

  The girl on the floor hazarded one quick glance up at their faces, as if she found this interesting. But the other girls shook their heads, and so did she.

  “Is that all you can tell us?” Riley asked.

  “Yep.”

  The girl in pigtails beamed down at her charge as a mother at a precocious child. “See? She sees everything.”

  “What about Rachael’s movements today?”

  One girl giggled, finding “movements” obscurely funny. But the rest complied, as if they’d made an unspoken decision that they had resisted authority long enough and could now be helpful without losing face. The day had been routine—washup, breakfast, English class, math class, midmorning snack, group therapy, lunch, science class, outside games, life skills class, individual therapy meetings, dinner, rec time. Rachael Donahue hadn’t seemed any different today than any other day, meaning she remained uninterested in classes and dorm mates, complained about the food, and didn’t appear to have had any breakthroughs with her therapist. (“Usually we come out either crying or smiling when we’ve made progress,” one girl explained helpfully.) They had gathered where they now sat after dinner, waiting for the evening’s round of family meetings, homework help, and kitchen duty assignments. They had not noticed Rachael in particular and had no idea when she left for kitchen duty, not even the observant little girl on the floor.

  “About six,” Ms. Washington said. She remembered only that for once Rachael had gone without complaining about “slave labor.”

  No one said so but it seemed accepted that while descending the stairwell Rachael either dawdled in some reckless manner or decided she couldn’t face one more class, therapy session, or dirty dish. These girls had gotten familiar with both death and despair and found neither surprising.

  The detectives wrapped it up and thanked the girls for their time. A few mumbled, “You’re welcome,” but most just stared. As a unit the adults in the room traveled out the door and into the stairwell for a quick huddle. Without any sign of foul play the cops leaned toward a conclusion of accident or suicide, and for the moment it seemed that all that could be done had been done.

  Jack asked if the therapist might be available, but she had gone home at five.

  “We’ll also want to talk to this Luis,” Riley said. “And by the way, what’s the day program?”

  “We have approximately fifty kids who come in for classes, counseling, and individual therapy services but don’t live in,” Dr. Palmer explained.

  “So Luis Borgia would only be here during the day?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any chance he hung around after class?”

  “No. They’re checked in and out of the building by the day program director. He would have alerted me if a student had not been accounted for.”

  “We’ll come back tomorrow and talk to him,” Riley said.
“I’d rather have that conversation in one of your counseling rooms than in the kid’s kitchen.”

  “They’re different on their home turf,” Ms. Washington said in apparent agreement. Then without a good-bye she returned to her girls while Dr. Palmer guided them down the steps. Riley asked about Rachael’s kitchen duty.

  “We give the older kids chores. It teaches them to take some responsibility for their surroundings, to cooperate with others, gives them something constructive to do with their time, not to mention teaching basic hygiene. Kitchen duty is mostly washing dishes, sometimes cleaning the cooking areas.”

  “Let’s check in with the kitchen staff, see if she ever made it there,” Riley said.

  “I already have, but you’re certainly welcome to as well. They should still be here.”

  Dr. Palmer guided them to the source of the mass-produced food smell. The kitchen had red tile on the floors and walls, no windows, and barely stretched to twenty by twenty feet, crammed with stoves, ovens, refrigerators, and freezers. It seemed clean enough, though the insufficient lighting didn’t stretch to the back corners. Every surface, as in most industrial kitchens, seemed to be coated with a layer or four of decade-old grease. Two giggling cooks stacked plastic quart containers in a freezer, while an older woman who didn’t appear to have anything to smile about scrubbed a stove.

  Dr. Palmer said, “As you can see, it’s not remotely adequate for a facility this size. Justin is working on our proposed budget and writing in a special capital expenditure to expand and update the kitchen—Justin Quintero, my assistant director. I’ve tasked the poor boy with getting every dime he can out of the state. We don’t even have GFI-protected outlets in here, so every week I’m on the roof resetting the breaker. And, more importantly, how can we teach these kids about proper nutrition when we don’t have enough refrigerator space to store fresh fruits and vegetables? They’re getting way too much starch now and at least one-third of them are technically obese.”

  The cooks had straightened up in a hurry upon seeing their boss, and stowed the last of the containers. They had not seen Rachael at all that day, but knew exactly who she was—the one who did nothing, complained about everything, and flounced around as if she were a long-lost princess waiting only for her true identity to be revealed.

  The microwave stopped humming, beeped, and the older woman removed a coffee cup from it. She visibly inhaled the scent of reheated caffeine and it stimulated her enough to add, “These kids are put on different custodial duties for two weeks at a time. Yesterday when she left she said she wouldn’t be back, but she was supposed to have today yet.”

  “Did you ask her what she meant?” Riley inquired.

  “Wasn’t that interested.”

  “Was she angry? Upset?”

  One of the cooks said, “No, she said it like you’d tell your boss you need next Tuesday off. We just ignored her.”

  “You should hear some of the excuses these kids come up with,” the other one put in.

  “And you didn’t see her at all today?”

  All three shook their heads in unison.

  “Did she complain about anything in particular the last couple of days? Especially yesterday?”

  The two younger cooks exchanged a glance. “What, you think she killed herself?”

  “You don’t?”

  Put on the spot, one said, “I don’t know. I guess I didn’t think of it like that—she never seemed serious about her griping. She never seemed serious about anything. She said her father was going to come and get her and they were moving to Montreal.”

  “Like, Canada?”

  “Yeah. I asked once if that was where she was from but she said no. She didn’t seem to know it was in another country, just liked the name. I told her it was cold there and that stumped her for a while, but then she said, ‘Well, I’ll buy me a fur coat.’”

  “Brainless little brat,” the older woman said, without rancor. “Most of them are. Sad.”

  The cook who had found the body had gone into the hallway to check the dumbwaiter for dirty dishes. She didn’t even know if there had been any, or if there were now. It might be weeks before she stepped into that hallway again, she added to the older woman in a warning tone. The older woman’s expression gave nothing away, certainly not the promise of temporary light duty.

  She hadn’t seen or heard another person in the hallway at any time. She’d exited the kitchen, seen Rachael, and screamed. The two other cooks had alerted Dr. Palmer, and there her involvement had ended.

  They thanked the kitchen staff and followed Dr. Palmer to the exit. As he opened the door to the street he said, “I hate to be callous, but does this have to be in the paper? Or on the news? We have an appropriations hearing coming up in Columbus and this tragedy would not help. Firebird Center is unique in the area and—”

  “The report is public record, but other than that we don’t alert the media,” Riley assured him.

  “Oh, good,” he said. “It really is regrettable about Rachael.”

  He said this with sincerity. Then he gently shut the door, leaving them on the sidewalk.

  “So the dad was going to bust out of jail, rescue her, and they’d make a run for the border together,” Jack summed up to Riley in a quiet tone.

  “Yeah, but was that her plan or her father’s?”

  Maggie drew deep breaths of September air. Somewhere on the other side of tall buildings, the sun had reached the horizon, turning the streets to a misty dark. The Firebird Center provided a caring, intelligent, and above all safe place for children with bad histories to heal and hopefully progress toward a constructive and happy life. A good place. But still a prison place, and no one inside wanted to be there.

  “What do you think?” Jack asked her as Riley checked his phone. “She took a swan dive onto the concrete?”

  “Could have. She could have thought her life had gotten too messed up to ever fix. Or she tried to balance on the bannister.”

  He snorted. “Why on earth would she do that?”

  “Because even though she’d seen and done more than any person should, she was still a kid. And that’s the kind of thing kids do.”

  “You can’t examine anything … test anything… .”

  She couldn’t help smiling as she shook her head. “No, Jack. Forensics can tell you she went over the railing. It can’t tell you why.”

  He stared up at the building, not at all satisfied with this answer.

  Neither was she.

  *

  From the conversation area, Trina watched them go, feeling both relief and apprehension at their departure. Relief because they were done asking questions, and she hated answering questions. Apprehension because they were the cops. Cops were supposed to protect people, right? This entire facility was sort of an extension of the cops, the state, the court, and yet no one had protected Rachael.

  Which meant no one would protect her.

  Chapter 5

  Friday

  Rick Gardiner, Maggie’s ex-husband, sat at his desk in the homicide unit, staring into space. Not an unusual position for him, but whereas he usually thought on the Indians’ chances for a pennant this year or what to have for dinner, this time he considered one of his open cases: the vigilante murders, in which several of Cleveland’s worst had been summarily executed by an unknown killer. Rick had no problem with said killer’s choice of victim, which ranged from a murderous human trafficker to a woman running an illegal and torturous mockery of a nursing home. But he did have a problem with the case being dumped in his lap. The killer seemed to have moved on, dooming the investigation to failure, and the chief didn’t want the open file to ruin the clearance rate of the detectives he liked. Why not let the high-profile disaster whittle Rick’s record instead? Fabulous.

  Mostly due to a pesky but hot reporter who tended to share her information without noticing she didn’t get much in return, Rick had followed up on the vigilante’s final victim, the woman guilty of severe el
der abuse and murder. She had apparently operated, under various names, in Phoenix, Chicago, Atlanta, and maybe Detroit. And in these same cities there had been unsolved execution-type murders. Rick couldn’t decide what that meant. The woman’s motive had been purely financial, and the vigilante’s motive seemed to be purely, well, altruistic, for want of a better word. Why they coincided in so many places could only mean the vigilante had been pursuing her and chronically failing. Until they reached Cleveland.

  Rick had thought he’d had a lead in Phoenix, but it hadn’t panned out. Officially. But he couldn’t quite let it go.

  He picked up the phone and dialed a homicide detective in the Valley of the Sun. The guy answered on the first ring and Rick wondered if his luck had finally hit an upswing. “Daley.”

  Rick reintroduced himself and reminded him of the conversation they had had about a vigilante’s actions in the Maryvale precinct.

  “Yeah,” the detective said, not so chatty this time around. With the three-hour time difference between Ohio and Arizona he had probably just walked in, wanted to check his e-mail and get a cup of coffee before starting his day. Did guys drink coffee in such a hot climate?

  Daley said, “You sent me a sketch for the little girl who got a look at who might be your vigilante guy, the one who killed our coyote–slash–child molester. But she said no, not him. What else … ?” He didn’t finish, too polite to ask, What the hell do you want now?

  “I’m just … I wanted to ask… .” Rick knew what he wanted to ask but couldn’t think of a discreet way to word it. Finally, he abandoned that better part of valor. “Did you guys ever have a guy named Jack Renner working for you?”

  “Working for—you mean a cop?”

  “Yeah.”

  Detective Daley gave this a quick mull. “Doesn’t ring a bell with me, and I’m coming up on my twenty. Was he with Phoenix PD? Or the county—Maricopa Sheriff’s Office?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Again, a short silence. Somebody asking questions about a crime or a suspect was one thing; someone inquiring about a fellow cop, even one he didn’t know, hit the pavement on a whole different stretch of road. Of course a cop also did the inquiring, but still—“Why?”