Suffer the Children

by Lisa Black

  “What about Dr. Quintero?”

  “Who?”

  “The assistant director. He works with Dr. Palmer.”

  The girl shook her head. “I don’t know who that is.”

  Ms. Washington came into the visiting room to collect Trina, saying it was high time she got to bed. The girl gave Maggie a look that said she felt reluctant to leave her new friend, which Maggie understood. They had a bond forged in fire, and it felt wrong to turn one’s back on it.

  Kind of like how you feel about Jack popped into her head without warning.

  Meanwhile Trina had leaned over the table to say, “Will you come back and visit me?”

  This caught Maggie by surprise. “Yes. Of course. Sure … actually I might be in and out here for a few more days anyway, given recent events.”

  The girl got to her feet under Ms. Washington’s watchful gaze. “You have to get on the reception list. Then they have to clear you.”

  Firm now, Maggie said she would take care of it. Trina’s face lit up and she all but skipped toward the door with her dorm mother.

  What have I gotten myself into? Maggie thought, feeling in no way equipped to serve as mentor for a traumatized teenager with at least some kind of serious criminal history. Someone who will stick. She started to pull her own knees to her chin, then shook it off and stood up. Her body wavered slightly as the caffeine overreacted to the change in position. She tried to walk it out while draining the last dregs of the coffee. This left her standing between the garbage and recycling bins debating where a Styrofoam cup fell. Most Styrofoam was recyclable but most facilities were curiously reluctant to accept it. She could take it to the local grocery store along with her old meat trays but didn’t feel quite that dedicated to the cause at the moment, given everything else that had gone on all day. On the other hand, she could crumple and shove it into her crime scene kit between the camera and fingerprint powder, or choose the half-assed method and drop it into the recycling bin for the authorities to figure out.

  As she puzzled over this she glanced down into the blue bin and forgot all about the recyclability of Styrofoam.

  Maggie pulled on a fresh pair of latex gloves, crouched, and poked around under the accumulated water bottles and pop cans. A minute later she stood and gazed at four small blue objects in her palm.

  Jack approached from the hallway, looking for her. “We’re about done,” he said. “What are those?”

  She didn’t look up. “Our missing EpiPen caps.”

  *

  Maggie stored the caps carefully in an evidence box.

  Jack asked, “So this person kept the caps, but then decided to dump them in the recycling? He, she, really wants to save the planet?”

  “Who knows? He might have put them in his pocket, then discovered them later and wanted to get rid of them in case we decided to search people. All the trash cans here are the standard open-topped household cubes—you can easily see inside, so he wouldn’t have wanted to throw them out in the infirmary. If we assume Damon’s death was deliberate—and that’s still a big if—he would have been hoping we didn’t even notice the EpiPens.”

  “So he took the caps with him but didn’t want to take the risk of throwing them out in his own work space. Instead, a common area, which is, of course, not monitored on security video … wait, it is. We saw it on the monitors—”

  “No, the camera gets that half of the room, not the through traffic along this wall. If we’re lucky we might get pictures of who passed through, if they stepped past, say, this point”—she traced a line on the linoleum with her toe—“but we won’t have a shot of someone dropping four little items into this bin.”

  Jack said, “Damn.”

  “We’ll try touch DNA on them, and hope he didn’t wipe them off as carefully as he wiped the EpiPens.”

  “Okay. Is the Luis crime scene all done?” he asked.

  “Staties took it over, with my abundant blessings. Meanwhile, Josh wrapped up the infirmary and took everything back to the lab. We’ve got a ton of prints, none of which we can do anything with unless you can get a warrant to seize or copy all personnel records of Firebird staff. Job applicants won’t be in our fingerprint database. The kids we should have, at least the ones with arrests.”

  “Which is all of them,” Jack muttered.

  Dr. Palmer, apparently having aged a decade or two since that morning, entered with Riley and Justin Quintero. “I think we finally have the residents calmed down for the night. Most of the day students were already out the door—that’s a mercy.”

  Maggie asked, “The boys who smuggled in the gun—”

  “Your people”—she assumed Palmer meant the police—“have already picked them up. I’m so glad I didn’t let the construction people disconnect the day entry area camera until they had a new one in place. We don’t know the boy who first brought the gun in, however; he isn’t one of ours. But Mr. Sherman’s gang is a good-sized one. Unlike me, he has no shortage of personnel.” He gave an unhappy chuckle at this witticism, and Maggie felt like patting him on the shoulder in sympathy.

  “You know all about Sherman, then,” Riley said.

  “Oh, of course. We know all about all of the children here—it’s impossible to help them without knowing the history. I had a bad feeling Mr. Sherman wasn’t going to make it.”

  “He’s the one still alive,” Jack pointed out.

  “I meant make it as in find a way out of the thug life. We’re not trying to turn these kids into perfect ladies and gentlemen; we’re not that naïve.” He sat down heavily, as if his aging legs could no longer hold him. “But if we can keep them out of custodial care, show them a way to live other than by hurting people—that’s the goal. It saves society a mountain of pain and hurt and, not to mention, money. But the best way is to identify at-risk youth before they even take their first breath, and intervene then. Not eighteen years later.”

  “How, though?” Maggie asked.

  “Simple. Are the parents poor, unmarried, have been in trouble with the law, have addiction issues? Do they come in turn from parents in the same boat? Were they shuttled from extended families to foster homes and the like? Do they have mental illnesses or issues? Do they have trouble holding a job or show poor judgment in caring for the children or pets that they already have? It’s not hard to spot a problem area. Those families need home visits with a social worker—not to judge them or to tell them what to do, but to answer questions, guide them to resources, simply listen to their thoughts and concerns. To provide support, not censure. It is amazing the change that we can make in a family, that they can make in themselves, if they’re simply given a little guidance and support.”

  “Is it a lack of funding?” Maggie asked as Jack shifted impatiently. He didn’t seem to have a lot of time for social theories other than his own. And it had been a very long day.

  “It’s a lack of will.”

  “And funding,” Quintero put in. “Despite the fact that Ohio spends two hundred and fifty million dollars on juvenile justice every year, too much of it is still sometimes put into projects that don’t work, or ‘get tough on crime’ policies that lock up too many kids while cutting staff at the same time.”

  His boss went on as if without interruption, eyes focused on the middle distance. “This intervention system needs to be mandatory, and society resists mandatory when it comes to children. America sees child rearing as one of the few bastions of personal independence left. As long as it doesn’t result in serious physical harm, no one can tell you what to do with your kids. Certainly not when or where to have them, even though doing exactly that would immeasurably improve the lives of everyone here, most especially the kids. In some states you have to have a home visit before the animal shelter will let you adopt a puppy. But you can push out a baby without so much as a driver’s license.” He glanced up. “Yes, I sound like an Orwellian nightmare.”

  “No,” Maggie said. “You sound frustrated.”

  Justin
Quintero said, “We’ll make it, Doc. We’ll wow the budget folks with our success stories until they give us the funding package just to make us stop talking. Then this place won’t have any dead zones or security loopholes. Come on, I’ll walk you folks out.”

  Maggie couldn’t resist poking her head into the infirmary to apologize to Nurse Brandreth and her counterpart, a slender black woman with graying hair, as they gazed unhappily at the black-powdered cabinets. Damon’s bed had been stripped to the mattress and not remade.

  “We tried to get everything back in its original place,” she told them, and they said they understood but would still have to do a complete inventory. And send an order upstairs for more EpiPens.

  Meanwhile Riley warned Quintero, “No chance of keeping this out of the paper.”

  “I know … and the doc has worked so hard on this. Talk about burning the midnight oil—but, hey, the paper doesn’t deliver on Tuesdays, so maybe there’s just a chance we can schmooze some promises out of the board before it lands on their doorsteps Wednesday morning. And maybe they won’t watch the evening news. Maybe,” he repeated with an air of hopelessness.

  Riley chuckled as Maggie rejoined them in the hallway.

  Quintero said, “I know, I’m an optimist. In this business you have to be, or we’d all have shot ourselves years ago. Everyone wants violent kids in custody but they also want us to be able to do it for the same money as intervention programs and community diversionary tools. It can’t be done. Our day program is fabulous for keeping kids out of incarceration, increasing their chances of staying out, but it’s not the same thing as having someone in custody twenty-four/seven. The amount of resources needed increases exponentially. Staffing is seventy percent of the costs. If we can’t show real results for the investment—”

  The outer door of the hallway opened and two uniformed officers escorted a cuffed Quentin Sherman back into the Firebird Center.

  “What the hell?” Riley demanded.

  The kid grinned at them. “Hey, thanks for the welcome back. Nice to know you miss me.”

  “What is he doing here?” Jack asked the cops.

  “They don’t have any place else to put him,” Quintero explained wearily, and Maggie wondered if he had been trying to get them out of the building before the prodigal’s return. “The juvenile ward at the jail is full and under eighteen can’t be put in the general population. He’s already known here and it’s a secure facility.”

  “But he killed someone today.” Jack seemed to be speaking through gritted teeth.

  Quintero gave him a somewhat pitying look. “Nearly every juvenile here has at least tried to kill someone, Detective Renner. Many have succeeded.”

  The cops hustled Quentin Sherman away. As he passed Maggie he gave her a smile, his eyes as dead as a shark’s. She itched to move backward, to step away from his body heat or at least out of kicking range, but didn’t let herself. She stayed still and maintained eye contact, and hated every minute of it. As they turned the corner she let out the breath she’d held without realizing it.

  Quintero hustled the two detectives and Maggie out the door—probably to avoid listening to the protestations they were too stunned to voice. Prisoners were human beings, with mass, who took up space. If the space wasn’t available, it wasn’t available. But Maggie had never before seen a killer escorted back to live at the scene of his crime.

  “What now?” Riley asked.

  Jack looked down at her. “Let’s get Maggie something to eat.”

  “Good idea,” his partner said. “I’m about to pass out.”

  Chapter 17

  They went to the Hofbrauhaus, one of the few options still open at that time on a Monday night, and even there an unhappy waitress told them they would close in fifteen minutes. Riley asked her to bring them whatever they still had that hadn’t been sitting under a warmer all day, and a couple of beers. Maggie changed hers to a Diet Coke.

  “Don’t tell me you’re some kind of teetotaler,” Riley groused.

  “Not at all. I just don’t like hops or fennel or whatever it is that gives beer its taste. But kudos for using an archaic word like teetotaler in a sentence.”

  She excused herself to wash her face in the women’s bathroom, forgoing makeup for the slight refreshment the clean water offered. She returned as Jack continued to grouse—in his abbreviated Jack-speak—about Sherman returning to the center.

  “As soon as they clean up Luis’s blood he can go back to class, have lunch, play some basketball. Maybe he’ll climb right over the chain link on the roof and we’ll find him in the street.” He set the bread plate down with a clunk and Maggie watched him over the hands she had loosely clasped in front of her mouth. The kid had gotten under Jack’s skin. If Jack were left to his own devices, Maggie didn’t want to place bets on Quentin Sherman making it to adulthood. He was safer inside the Firebird Center than out of it.

  Though given recent events, perhaps not.

  “Because there’s so much pressure being a teenager nowadays,” Jack went on, disgust in his voice. “Let him have one disabled kid and another about to go to college and then get laid off from the factory, and he’ll find out about pressure.”

  His partner cleared his throat. “He’s not alone.”

  This made Jack pause in the act of ripping a dinner roll in half. “Huh?”

  “Kids. They all feel stress nowadays. Hannah takes it in stride but Natalie—she holds it in and then it bursts out in a bunch of words. I know it sounds crazy to people our age—we think kids are more spoiled than ever. They have whole TV channels, games, stores, parks, electronics all dedicated to them. Teachers and doctors are forced to cater to their every need. Society decided that they’re the most important thing in the universe and they’re all told that they’re special, they can be anything they want, that they should reach for the stars. Great, right? But you have to look at the cost.”

  Jack waited, his face calming. Maggie listened.

  “We parents think we’re being supportive, encouraging the kids to be individuals, but the kids see a mountain of expectations they can’t live up to. We send them to school to make friends, but the other kids aren’t their friends; they’re the competition and that competition gets fierce. They’re as cutthroat as day traders who will exploit any weakness to get ahead. We tell them they’re special, they’re smart, they’re great, they can do anything, but at some point reality catches up and they figure out they’re not going to be a neurosurgeon and marry a supermodel and drive a Jag. Then they get scared. And then they get angry.”

  “But—” Jack began, and stopped.

  “Us pre-Internet-world people think they’re just whiny, weak, they want everything handed to them, they have no concept of reality. But it doesn’t matter that we never really expected them to become rocket scientists. It’s what the kid perceives, and to them this pressure is very, very real.”

  Jack said, “Okay, I get that. But most of the kids at that place—I can’t see their parents expressing disappointment that they didn’t get into Yale.”

  “True, but where parents don’t create expectations, advertising takes over. Life is supposed to be all about becoming a rap star and buying your mama a house, or winning American Idol and getting an endorsement contract. Then you can wear the designer clothes and spray yourself with the designer perfume and get a boob job so that you’ll look like the people those things are designed for. It’s not just the girls who get their body image warped and not just young people. We scoff at these ads but then go on diets.” He patted his beer belly. “Some of us, anyway.”

  The waitress brought the drinks and all three fell upon the glasses as if they’d recently crossed a desert.

  Then Maggie said, “It’s the unintended consequences of the self-esteem movement.”

  “Exactly,” Riley agreed. “We were all better off when our parents were happy as long as we moved into the next grade. We weren’t expected to get straight As and captain the T-ball
team and take piano lessons at the same time.”

  “And heroes were baseball players who played for the sport and not a million a game,” Jack said.

  Maggie added, “And models were a size ten instead of two. So what’s the solution?”

  Riley said he didn’t know. “But those days are gone, and they’re not coming back. They had their own hazards, but at least more kids got killed outside of school than inside it.”

  Jack rubbed his face. “We’re not done with the Firebird Center, are we?”

  “Nope. I want to find out more about Derald Tyson.”

  “The kid who OD’d?” Maggie asked. “Why?”

  Riley said, “This place now has four dead kids within a month. Either they’re completely incompetent—and they don’t seem to be—or they have a few employees who are completely incompetent. I think little Dr. Palmer needs our help.”

  “DORC is investigating,” Jack pointed out.

  “DOC—excuse me, Department of Rehabilitation and Correction—hasn’t spent as much time there as we have. And we still have an active murder investigation going on.”

  Maggie pushed her hair behind her ears. Late-late-night dining at least had the advantage of a quiet environment since they were the only people in the restaurant. The waitress brought them plates of sausages and mashed potatoes, about the last thing she wanted to consume before bed both in terms of calories and digestion, but fuel was fuel and her body begged for some. It tasted great, too. “Damon’s is the only death that’s truly suspicious, and even that could have an innocent explanation. Damon couldn’t communicate. It’s possible that a staff member or even another child thought he was having some kind of allergic reaction and used the EpiPens. He couldn’t describe how his speeding heart felt, so they attributed his distress to the anaphylaxis, administered more EpiPen, he died, and now they’re too afraid to speak up.”