Suffer the Children

by Lisa Black

  The diener had sliced through the child’s scalp just under the hairline and peeled it back to expose the skull, which he sawed through with a round blade about the diameter of an orange. With the bone removed, they could see the neat convolutions of the brain’s surface. Unless physically damaged, a brain never looked as scary as the glistening red-brown organs of liver and lungs, dark entities with deep secrets. Its light gray colors highlighted with white seemed so innocent by contrast. A great anatomical irony, since it could hold more evil than all the gleaming offal in the world.

  And now the pathologist patted it as if it were an obedient puppy.

  “Are you going to want to bucket it?” the diener asked.

  The pathologist patted again. “No. It’s fine.”

  The diener said okay, then took a scalpel to the optic nerves and the spinal cord and the other connections that held the brain in its place.

  “Bucket?” Maggie asked.

  “The brains of the very young and very old can be extremely delicate, the consistency of Jell-O. To be able to work with them at all we have to ‘fix’ them—use a piece of string to suspend it in a bucket of formalin for two weeks. Then it can be examined. But a ten-year-old, yeah, he’s fine.”

  “I’m sure he’d be glad to know that,” Maggie said, and the doctor gave her an odd look.

  While the diener gently removed Damon Kish’s thought center from its resting place, the pathologist turned his attention to the scrapes along the boy’s thigh. Maggie waited.

  “Huh,” the doctor said.

  She continued to wait.

  He prodded with his fingers, then the tip of the scalpel, then made some small incisions among the tiny scabs. “You said there were EpiPens missing?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Four.”

  “Got needle tracks here. Tiny hematoma, the beginning of a bruise, but then the whole area is bruised from this fall he took so that doesn’t tell me much. Four? No one would give a kid four EpiPens.”

  “No one who wasn’t trying to kill him,” Maggie agreed.

  “EpiPens shouldn’t kill anybody. They’re not designed to do that. They’re issued with a sort of ‘when in doubt, use it’ and ‘if the first doesn’t work use another’ kind of advice,” he continued to argue.

  “I know.”

  The diener photographed the now-loose brain on a flat, light gray board, present only for that purpose. Once that had been done he turned it over to the doctor, who set to work on it, still mumbling about the harmlessness of epinephrine. “Might put someone into cardiac arrest if they had a weak heart, speeds up the pulse, or—necrosis.”

  “What?”

  He had sliced through some of the boy’s brain with a large bread knife and now ran his wet, gloved fingers over a section with bits of blood in it. “Little bit bloody, necrotic here.”

  He cut the slices more thinly and looked again. He held some parts up to the magnifying lamp. He cut off a few small chunks for the plastic histology frames. Meanwhile Maggie thought she’d burst.

  Finally she did. “What does that mean? Necrotic? It means dead, I know, but—”

  “Stroke.” He kept slicing.

  “And that—”

  “No injuries to the head but there’s bloody, necrotic tissue in the brain. That indicates stroke. Between that and the needle marks—a sudden influx of epinephrine would shoot up the blood pressure, heart rate…. The kid stroked out. Why would anyone give four adult doses to a child? Especially a skinny little one like this guy?”

  He glanced at the boy who, truthfully, no longer resembled a child. With the scalp pulled down over the face, the torso unfolded and empty, the arms and legs fileted to determine the extent of the bruising and to reveal the needle tracks, he looked more like a half-boned chicken. And that made it all the more horrible. Maggie felt the bricks tremble inside the wall she kept in her head to separate the things she saw on the job from the rest of her world.

  It didn’t help that the “rest of her world” continued to, somehow, shrink, a little more every day.

  She answered the doctor’s question. “Because they wanted him to die.”

  *

  While his ex-wife watched a child be cut open, Rick Gardiner sat with his feet up on one corner of his desk, using his own cell phone to call Jack Renner’s former supervisor in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Though the Cleveland PD coming up on their caller ID might help with his story’s verisimilitude, he had decided to do what he could to keep this investigation off all official records. Cops took a dim view of cops investigating other cops. If that was what he was doing … hell, he didn’t even know what he was doing, a fact he reminded himself of approximately every thirty seconds.

  However, when Lieutenant Howard Romero answered, Rick gave him the same story about the police chiefs association awards, to which Romero didn’t seem to be listening, and Jack Renner, to which he did.

  “Renner? Sure, I remember him. Great guy. He could be a pain in the ass, but a great cop.”

  “Really? Oh … well … that’s good to hear. He was with you guys for a long time.”

  He heard a brushing sound as Romero covered the phone, incompletely, and yelled for some unnamed person to ask where the prisoner had been placed. “Yep, been everywhere, done everything in this city. I used to work details with him at the mall—you know, the Mall of America, helping out the Bloomington PD. I could tell you some stories from that place—”

  “He’s a native of the area, right?”

  “Hell yeah! Mill City all the way. I knew his mother, actually. Best friend of my aunt. I never met Jack until we were in vice together, though. Did a lot on the north side—no surprise. Those stories wouldn’t be suitable for publication.”

  “Got it,” Rick said. “I see you gave him a great recommendation when he went to the Cleveland PD.”

  A guess, but a good assumption. Surely HR would have checked his references, right?

  “I did, you betcha. Hang on—he’s in one, take Chrissy in there too. Make sure the camera’s on. Yeah, that came as a surprise, that he went back to work.” It took Rick a moment to realize that Romero had returned to their conversation. “He’d been so determined to leave it all behind, move to his land in Tennessee and spend the rest of his days like Daniel Boone, hunting bears or some shit like that. But I see that with guys—they think retirement is going to be so great, and in two days they’re jonesing to go back to work. Mistake, I always tell ’em. Give retirement a while to settle into your bones first. Don’t put yourself back in the harness the minute you feel bored for a second or two. It’s an adjustment, you know? Going to be me in another six months, and I’m making all sorts of plans. It’s going to feel weird for a while. You have to know that going in; otherwise it freaks you out.”

  “Yeah,” Rick tapped his pen against his coffee cup, trying to think of something else to ask. “This is going to sound crazy, but I need to make sure I’ve got the right Jack Renner. Tall guy? Dark hair?”

  “I don’t know if I’d call him tall. But I guess, yeah.”

  That didn’t help. Romero might be six five and no one seemed tall to him. “Kinda quiet?”

  “I don’t know if I’d call him quiet, either. Did a few stakeouts with him—he half drove me nuts. Never shut up.” He launched into a reminiscence about a drug house in the north side more heavily guarded than Bagram airfield and how he and Renner had had to sit on it until detectives could get a judge out of bed and the search warrant signed. He’d nearly asphyxiated on the smoke. Apparently Renner used to be a chain-smoker.

  “I never saw him with a cigarette,” Rick said.

  “Yeah, I’m sure the docs made him give that up. Fat lot of good it did him in the end.”

  The pen slipped from Rick’s fingers. “The end?”

  “Yeah. The cigarettes. That’s what got him. Hang on, I gotta direct—well then give him a legal pad if that’s what he wants. As long as he’s confessing he can write it on toilet paper for all I care.” />
  Rick asked, “What happened?”

  “Cancer, I guess. I assumed that’s why he left you guys or Tennessee or wherever the hell, came back home to be with his mom. Poor old lady, pretty much killed her, too, according to my aunt.”

  Rick’s feet dropped off the desk.

  “I always kinda felt bad I didn’t go to see him, but I didn’t even know where he was. And I figured he wouldn’t want any of the old crew seein’ him like that. I know I wouldn’t.”

  “Jack Renner. Died.”

  “Yeah. Couple years back.”

  “There must be some mistake. The Jack Renner here is definitely not dead.”

  “Huh,” Romero said, not too startled by this. “I thought it was Jack Renner with the emphysema. Maybe it was Andy Hastings—he also moved to Tennessee after he retired… .”

  “Is there any way you could find out for sure?”

  “Well, why? If your guy isn’t dead, then obviously it isn’t him.”

  “My guy is Jack Renner and listed you as his most recent supervisor at the Minneapolis PD. Unless you had two Jack Renners there—”

  “That’s possible, I guess. We’ve got about nine hundred cops.”

  “Both working as detectives with you as their supervisor?”

  “Nope,” he agreed as he shuffled papers, close enough to the phone to be heard. Apparently the Minneapolis homicide division kept a man busy. “Definitely would have remembered that.”

  “Then I’ve got a guy here claiming to be Jack Renner, and he ain’t.”

  This idea didn’t startle the lieutenant much either. “Nah. I’m probably just getting him mixed up with Andy Hastings.”

  Rick scrambled to sound firm while within the confines of his cover story. “I need to make sure. Obviously, the muckety-mucks can’t give an award and have the guy’s bio all mixed up. My boss would have my head.”

  “Award?” Obviously he hadn’t been listening. “What for?”

  “Some big case from last year. That half of it isn’t my job.” Rick left that vague but clear on what he needed: “Can you please check on what happened to Jack Renner and get back to me?”

  “Um …” Long pause while, Rick bet himself, Romero tried to come up with a good way to say he already had enough to do. “I don’t know. I doubt anyone here would know. When he headed off to the mountains he cut all ties, didn’t want no reunions or even a Christmas card. I only heard that he came back because of the family connection, but even there—his mom died, and last year so did my aunt. My mom’s getting forgetful and never paid much attention to anything my aunt said anyway. But I’ll try.”

  His emphasis on the last word made it clear that Rick shouldn’t expect much.

  “I’d appreciate that. When can I call you back?”

  “I usually go over there on Sundays. I’ll try to remember to ask.”

  Rick chewed the end of his pencil in frustration. He’ll try to remember to ask? “That would be great. I’d really appreciate it.”

  “If it’s for an award bio, why don’t you ask the guy?”

  “It’s a surprise. Let me ask you something else. You ever have any weird murders there? All sorts of different scumbags dropped on the street with twenty-twos in the back of the head? None of the usual crew good for it?”

  Romero guffawed. “In the north side? Every night.”

  “Ever get some you thought might be connected? Like, to each other?”

  “Yeah. Turf wars, one of the leaders expanding his territory, got to take out the other leaders. Had a rash of it a couple years ago but then they all settled into their new organizational chart and have been fairly good since. No mystery. Why?”

  “Long story. Okay, one more.”

  Romero’s tone grew in snarkiness as his interest faded. “You always spend so much time on department awards? Wish I had that kind of time.”

  “You ever have a case of an illegal nursing home? Like this woman took in a bunch of old folks, cashed their social security checks, and then left them to rot?”

  A long pause. Rick couldn’t tell if Romero took the time to think or to tell a detective ‘Get in there and make sure Chrissy asks about the money,’ because he did that, too. But then he said, “That rings some weird kind of a bell. I’ll ask around.”

  Rick said, “Thanks. I’ll call you back in a few days if I don’t hear from you.”

  “Do that,” Romero said without sincerity, and hung up.

  Chapter 20

  Riley asked Ms. Cooper in the under-twelve unit if they could speak with Damon’s therapist.

  “I told you he didn’t—”

  “Didn’t get too far, yes, we know. We’re just covering all our bases,” he told her.

  “Oh. Well.” Behind her most of the children seemed to be working in soft-covered workbooks, not uniform, probably specific to each child’s age. Some had finished and closed the books, gathering pencils and erasers. One girl had her head down on her desk, crying as if her heart might break. “He’s in early diversion.”

  “Did he do something bad?”

  She didn’t crack so much as the hint of a smile. “It’s a voluntary playgroup for local children, separate from our resident and day programs. They’re outside at the moment. Through the door at the end of the hall.”

  She shut the door with the soft thud of finality.

  “I can’t figure out if she doesn’t like us or doesn’t like child psychologist Hunter,” Riley noted as they headed for the outside door.

  “Don’t be so sensitive. She thinks Hunter is overrated. Besides, he gets playground duty while she’s locked up in Bedlam.”

  “Good point.”

  The heavy metal push bar let them out into the fenced under-twelve recreation area. Patchy grass ran underneath a few picnic tables, a rusting swing set, a jungle gym that had once been painted in primary colors, and balls of all sizes and shades. The slender blond man pointed out a page in a coloring book to a girl at a table, called encouragement to an older boy showing a younger one where to kick the ball, and spoke to two girls sitting on the grass before noticing the cops. He came over to them immediately, perhaps wondering if yet another disaster—for example, another child’s death—had occurred.

  Riley assured him they only wanted to ask some follow-up questions about Damon Kish.

  “Ah. Okay. I’m afraid I can’t tell you much. I didn’t get too far with him.”

  “So we’ve heard.”

  The man spoke calmly and reasonably, never ceasing in his surveillance of the children around them.

  “Damon—wow. I had no idea how tough it would be trying to work with a child with no understanding whatsoever of language. A completely unique situation. Most of the time for our one-on-one therapy, I’d bring him out here. He had no clue why but didn’t care. To run around in the open air was paradise for that poor kid. When I introduced him to kicking a ball it was like an epiphany.”

  “So you just—played?”

  Hunter glanced at them briefly, back to the kids. “Play is vital to children. It’s where they learn everything about socialization—making friends, being picked for the team, not being picked for the team, winning, losing, the ups and downs of life.”

  Riley now surveyed the children as well. “This is therapy?”

  “Yes and no. Early diversion is an extracurricular activity for kids we’ve identified as at risk. They’re not in any real trouble yet, their families aren’t too bad—which means we haven’t yet proven any outright abuse—but they’re having issues that their schools and families don’t feel equipped to handle. Play work can help define those issues.”

  “That’s kind of vague,” Riley pointed out, and Hunter laughed.

  “It is, I’m sorry. Let me illustrate. You’ve heard that any kind of acting out is a cry for help, and that sounds simplistic, but it’s true. Everything kids do tells us what’s on their mind. You only have to know that and then ask a few questions. They’ll tell you, in one way or another. For exam
ple”—he looked around—“Hector over there is the oldest in his family. You know how in a typical family each kid gets assigned a role? The smart one, the pretty one, the funny one. Hector is the sensible one. His father drives a truck and leaves for weeks at a time, tells Hector that he’s the man of the house—terrible thing to say, by the way. You have kids?”

  Jack had been pondering how many people would have access to the infirmary on an average morning and had to snap back to the present. He shook his head.

  Riley said, “Two girls.”

  Hunter continued. “Said with the best of intentions, make the son feel proud, that you have confidence in him. Very sweet. Except that we don’t realize kids take everything literally, and making a ten-year-old responsible for the safety and well-being of his mother and sisters is putting a crushing amount of pressure on the kid. Not to mention the resentment of his sisters feeling bossed by a sibling who’s barely a year or two older. He started pulling back in school, underachieving, avoiding the other kids. He just got bloody tired of being the grown-up and deep down he knew he was missing out on his own childhood. Here we’re trying to give him that back. I don’t give him any tasks or put him in charge of any teams, nothing like that. Here he can allow himself to be a child.”

  Over in one corner a boy held a ball away from a younger one as he spoke to an older one, apparently arguing with them both. “Stewart is my troublemaker. He’s about to be expelled for a second time because he disrupts every class he’s in—the kid’s a genius at not only getting both students and teachers to argue with him, but also with each other. Both ends against the middle, that’s Stewart. Of course, this all stems from Mommy and Daddy each drafting Stewart into their side in their daily battles. Stewart figured out that if he makes them argue with him, they’ll stop screaming at each other. He extended this to making enough trouble for the whole class to live vicariously through his rebellion. He takes one for the team, every day. We’re trying to get him out of his family role, but, well, it’s a tough slog.”

  A wail drew their view to the other side of the yard. “Maddie,” Hunter told them. “She’s my crier. Every group has one, the kid who bursts into tears if someone looks at her cross-eyed, making mountains out of molehills until you want to choke the crap out of her. At first I thought she simply learned it from her mother, who when she comes to pick the kid up, is often in tears from the car not starting or the groceries being expensive or her boss’s criticism of her use of margins. Turns out she’s simply in a crisis of self-worth—her sister is younger but gets better grades, her BFF dumped her, her father left. She wants someone to comfort her simply to make her believe she still has value.”