Suffer the Children Read online

  Riley said, “It’s too perfect. Rachael is trying to convince you that there’s nothing wrong with her.”

  “She’s trying to convince herself. This certainly isn’t her home; she lived first in a crappy apartment, then in a falling-down bungalow in Garfield Heights somewhere. This is a fantasy. Maybe it’s a picture she saw once—I don’t know. The long dress, something she’d never wear in real life—like a princess or a girl on the cover of a period novel.”

  “But the girl doesn’t have a face,” Jack pointed out.

  “Yes! That could be interpreted a number of ways. I asked her what the girl looked like, trying to draw her out—no pun intended! She said the girl was too far away to see clearly, then said she couldn’t draw faces very well. Rachael knows this isn’t her life, never was, never could be. She keeps trying but can’t really see herself as the girl in the picture.”

  “Sad,” Riley said.

  “So much about these kids is sad, Detective. If you let it, that vortex will suck you down. The real challenge is to find the life, the joy in them. Plug them back into that resilience.”

  “We heard about Rachael’s boyfriend,” Riley said.

  “Huh,” Melanie Szabo said, settling back into her chair. “I didn’t. I asked her about boys, if she had anyone special. She gave me that nineteen forties Bette Davis enigmatic smile.”

  “And that meant?”

  “That she didn’t but wanted me to think she did. Rachael had an arsenal of deflections like that. Why … why are you asking about Rachael, anyhow? I thought she was ruled an accidental death.”

  Good question, Jack thought. Ask my partner, who’s suddenly insatiably curious about the inner workings of teenage girls.

  Riley said, “It was. I just—”

  “There you are!”

  They turned. A mountain of a black man in a type of uniform said, “You’re from CPD? Your forensic girl is looking for you.”

  They thanked Melanie Szabo for her time and left her to the lanky young boy who wandered in for his appointment.

  *

  I oughta have my head examined, Rick Gardiner thought to himself. This was crazy. A city full of suspects and he found himself looking at a cop. And most of his belief that the guy was dirty stemmed from the fact that said guy had something going with Rick’s ex-wife. Rick wasn’t stupid. He knew that suspicion could be swaying his perception to ridiculous lengths. No question.

  But a cop as the vigilante killer made sense in a lot of ways.

  And what the heck, he didn’t have anything else to go on. The killer had been a ghost. The victims had had no connection with each other, operated in different theaters. A gang leader, a drug dealer, a child pornographer, a Eurotrash human trafficker. They had no clients, victims, or suppliers in common.

  They only thing they had had in common was the cops. So maybe he wasn’t so crazy after all.

  Okay, maybe some arch villain had tried to corner the market on each and every brand of vice the city had to offer. Maybe he even had a cool nickname and Rick would need Batman to come and rout the guy out.

  But in the meantime, he couldn’t make himself give up on Jack Renner. The victims hadn’t begun to turn up until after Renner joined the force. Who but a cop would be able to set up that murder room and not leave a print or some touch DNA on an old envelope or something that Maggie would find—

  Maggie.

  A cold feeling washed over him. It took his breath away, his body’s reaction stunning even himself. All those things could have disappeared from the lab—

  No. Maggie hadn’t processed the murder room; that had been one of those other idiots, the girl or the boy.

  Though Maggie would have access to anything they brought back. She could alter, ruin, or make things go away entirely.

  No. Not Goody Two-shoes Maggie. Not covering up multiple murders committed by a police officer for chrissakes. She wouldn’t even let Rick double-claim his 1040 expenses.

  Not possible.

  Get your head straight, Gardiner. You’ve got a case, you’ve got a hunch, you can either act on it or throw it out for good.

  He stood up.

  “Where ya headed?” his partner asked.

  “HR.”

  “Going to polish up your resume?”

  “Not mine,” Rick said, and headed for the elevator.

  *

  Quentin Sherman listened to the math teacher with surprising interest. Not that he let on—anyone who glanced his way would see his face frozen in the same sullen mask he wore like a suit of armor. Never let anybody know what you were thinking. Never let them get too comfortable. Never let them forget who’s boss.

  One-Eye had taught him that.

  Quentin stared at the teacher as if deciding where to put a bullet, but actually he thought of uses for calculating a percentage change. New minus old over old, then multiply by one hundred—and he could calculate how much sales from each corner had increased or decreased. He could make a rule: Decrease by a certain percent, and you get a beating. Increase, you get a bonus.

  Motivating his employees could be a problem sometimes.

  One-Eye had run the gang in his neighborhood, the gang that beat Quentin bloody once or twice a week during his ninth year. It had been worth it, though. When he kept coming around despite the beatings, One-Eye knew he’d be a good soldier and let him in. Which was all Quentin had wanted.

  Quentin had exactly enough self-awareness to know that he represented a walking cliché. No father, grew up in a falling-down pit of cockroaches and fleas, a mother who brought a revolving circle of “uncles” into the home—at least in her younger years—and who told him he was stupid and ungrateful and should have been aborted but would fight others bloody if they dared to criticize him. Joined a gang because without it he would have been entirely alone. Rose up the ranks, bided his time, struck when One-Eye violated his own rule and got too comfortable. He let Quentin get too close, close enough to put a .38 to the back of One-Eye’s head and leave his body in an alley to be blamed on a rival gang. It had been the old man’s own fault for letting his guard down. Quentin only did what One-Eye had always told him to do, and any remorse felt would have been as phony as a knockoff perfume.

  No one ever found out about that. But let him pistol-whip some white boy who couldn’t pay his dealer and suddenly the cops dumped him into this low-rent version of juvie hell. Now he had to waste every day pulling on his dick while outside there was money to be made. He ached with the frustration until he wanted to put a beat down on every person in sight. Even his therapists. Especially his therapists, since they recognized the cliché just as he did. He could feel their utter disinterest in every session.

  The sessions themselves were torture—so many better things he could be doing: having some girl, smoking some crack, eating a decent burger. He would have had a better time in a real prison, and it would sure as hell impress his boys much more than this stupid juvie halfway house. When he came out of a place like the Youngstown supermax no one would dare to do to him what he’d done to One-Eye. But when he got out of this place he’d have to watch his six like never before. His crew might be thinking they could forget him, move on to the next king of the shit pile.

  This kiddie pen sucked. No wonder the shrinks didn’t care about nothing.

  Depending on how things worked out, though, their interest might be perking up.

  Nobody forgot about Quentin Sherman.

  Chapter 13

  “What’s up?” Jack asked as soon as the two cops returned to the infirmary.

  Maggie held up the object in question by one end, the brownish iodine still clinging to its surface in vague swipes. Josh had taken over the fuming for her, making slow progress through their office full of possible weapons. She didn’t want to stop looking merely because she might have found it. “This is an EpiPen. Used in case of anaphylactic shock.” She didn’t add that she knew he knew all about anaphylactic shock after the untimely death of a criminal
defendant over the summer.

  “So?” Jack asked.

  “It’s empty.”

  “And?” he asked more warily.

  “Someone used it, put it back into its outer plastic tube, put that back in the box, and put the box back into the cabinet.”

  “Is that weird?” Riley asked.

  “Did Damon die of anaphylactic shock?” Jack asked.

  “Yes, and no. In that order. I called the ME—they aren’t going to get to the autopsy until tomorrow, but they did an external exam and there’s no sign of any allergic reaction. No skin rashes, no swelling of the throat, etcetera.”

  “What we first thought, then? Poison?”

  “Maybe. He could have had some bizarre abnormality, given the malnutrition and lack of medical care in his life to date. Or he could have been injected with four doses of epinephrine, which might threaten a grown man with heart seizure. Certainly it would do a number on a skinny ten-year-old.”

  Riley had been peering at the object in her hand. It was a rather confusing item, labeled from top to bottom with instructions and warnings. The bright orange tip put one in mind of a glue gun rather than a medical device. “How can you tell it’s empty?”

  “To use one of these, you have to take the blue cap off the end first.”

  “What blue cap?”

  “Exactly. It’s missing. Then you jam it into the victim’s thigh and the needle comes out automatically, the mechanism pumps the epinephrine into their system. It’s a single-use item, no way to refill or reuse. See this little window here? It would be clear if there were still solution inside. It turns this grayish color after emptying.”

  “You know a lot about EpiPens,” Riley commented.

  She couldn’t help a darting glance at Jack. He would know she thought about that day in the courtroom, but she said, “I had to use one on Amy a couple of years ago when we were processing a house and disturbed a beehive in the wall.”

  “So someone used the pen and put it back instead of throwing it out,” Jack said, his tone adding, That doesn’t prove much.

  “All four. All four in the box are empty. It’s their whole adult supply. There’s no way the staff would use them and not order more—they’d never risk being without one.”

  “Can you tell when—”

  “No. So they could have been sitting there for a while and no one ever noticed because they never needed them—but they haven’t. You can see from the expiration date on the box that they received this last summer. I asked Nurse Brandreth and she said she last used one on a sixteen-year-old with a peanut allergy two years ago. So this box should hold four unused pens.”

  “We’re taking this nurse’s word for a lot of stuff,” Jack said.

  Maggie nodded. “Yes, but I’m not seeing any reason to doubt her. I’ve been going through these cabinets for an hour—everything is categorized, labeled, neatly stored. This infirmary is organized and well run. This entire building seems aware of how iffy the funding is for places like this and being careless with drugs could get them shut down. The nurses have to dot every i and cross every t.”

  Riley said, “Just suppose … she thought the kid was having an allergic reaction, for whatever reason, panicked, and used too much EpiPen. Kid dies, she panics again and pretends she’s got no clue what happened.”

  Maggie disagreed. “She’d have to be completely incompetent, which she does not seem to be, to overuse the epinephrine to such an extent. On top of that you wouldn’t even use a regular EpiPen on a child Damon’s size—you’d use this.” She held up a different box, labeled EPIPEN JR.

  “Are those—”

  “Full. Not used. They were sitting right next to the adult ones, so even someone who wasn’t medically trained would figure out the right box.”

  “Any prints on the used ones?” Jack asked.

  “None. On anything—the box, the outer plastic tubes, the actual pens.”

  “Which doesn’t make any sense if they were used legitimately.”

  She said, “Maybe—molded plastic isn’t exactly the best surface. It’s not as smooth as it looks. But since to use one you’re supposed to hold it in your fist and jam it into the thick muscle for a few seconds to a minute, you would think I’d at least find smears.”

  “The killer wiped it.”

  “Okay, wait,” Riley said. “Does that thing have a needle?”

  “A pretty big one.”

  “What kid sits still to get poked with a needle four times? Especially this kid—it’d be like trying to give a cat a pill. Four times. Wouldn’t he—oh.”

  They explained to Maggie that Damon could not speak.

  “The perfect victim,” she said. “He can’t call for help, and even if he groaned loud enough to attract attention or had an incredible constitution and survived, he couldn’t tell anyone what happened.”

  Jack said, “His abilities were so backward, he would never have been able to explain … well, except for pictures. He could have drawn it.”

  Riley said, “His teacher said he was super observant. If he had survived, he might have been able to identify the killer. But would his killer have known that, or counted on it? Is that why the overkill? Or was it someone who had no idea how much epinephrine it takes to kill a ten-year-old?”

  Maggie said, “That I can’t tell you.”

  Jack pointed out, “The investigator didn’t see any injection marks.”

  “No, but he had that big scrape on his thigh, from the playground fall. The injection marks could have been hidden in that. The pathologist is going to check for them.”

  “How long would it take the kid to die?” Riley asked.

  Maggie said, “I really don’t know. That’s doctor territory. But I’d guess that by the last one or two, Damon would have been in pretty bad shape.”

  “Twenty minutes. Someone had to come in, find the EpiPens, hold the kid down, and inject him four times. That took a while.”

  Jack said, “Not that long. A couple minutes, maybe, assuming they knew where the pens were and didn’t have to browse through the medicine cabinets looking for something lethal.”

  Riley said, “Assuming they didn’t have to catch the kid first. It might have been someone he trusted—at least until that first needle hit his skin and he went into Tasmanian devil action. Or he might have been sleeping, then ditto. It took a marching band to wake up my kids at that age.”

  He paced in a wide circle. Jack rubbed his face.

  “We’re going to have to do a timeline,” Riley said.

  “Of everyone in this building,” Jack said.

  “Without cameras or prints—no one needs a key to get in the door—it’s going to be back to the Sherlock Holmes crap. Next we’ll be looking at cigar ash and the train schedule.”

  “That’s very literary,” Maggie said. “But only a few have a reason to be in this room, and anyone else should have a hard time explaining it if their prints turn up.”

  Jack said, “If they had the sense to wipe down the pens, they would have wiped anything else they touched … or could always say they popped in for an aspirin or something.”

  Riley said, “Working here, these people probably go through a bottle a day.”

  Maggie said, “But that still eliminates the kids—they’re all locked down, aren’t they?”

  Riley said, “Yes, but between classes and meals and kitchen duty and day program kids, bathroom breaks, hall passes, lawyer and family visits, I’ll bet the degree to which the inmates run this prison is a lot higher than you’d think.”

  “And they’re the killers,” Jack said.

  Riley looked up at the ceiling, where an empty black half circle bubbled out of the surface. “Why oh why couldn’t this supercomprehensive camera system already be installed?”

  “Maybe it is,” Jack said. “Let’s find out for sure.”

  *

  He took Maggie with him, just in case video existed and anything appeared on it that he didn’t want Riley to se
e, as unlikely as that seemed. Riley had never asked about his extra phone and wouldn’t start now. Probably.

  He also had little skill with most video systems and wanted to save a return trip to the reception area to fetch her. Dr. Palmer himself guided them to the tiny room on the third floor, tut-tutting about the lack of progress on the renovations, only to be called away by the demands of someone a frazzled therapist referred to as the Tank. Riley had been left in the reception area, getting a staff schedule with entry and exit times.

  The third-floor room had been set up with four monitors on a cheap laminate desk, a keyboard, a mouse, a manual, and a bank of DVRs on mounted bases on the wall. When Maggie touched the mouse the monitors sprung to life with a series of boxes, sixteen on each monitor. Most were blank.

  Jack said, “Huh. Got something.”

  One square on one monitor showed the visitor’s area, where a woman had brought a small, decorated cake to a young Hispanic girl. She smiled shyly as the woman cut slices with a plastic knife. Maggie’s stomach rumbled.

  “Hungry?” Jack asked.

  “Yes.”

  The next two monitors were blank, but the last one had three squares functioning. The camera squares had no identifiers, no time stamps. One showed a patch of grass, fenced with ten-foot chain link topped with a discreet ribbon of razor wire. At first glance it might look like an ordinary school’s play yard. Maggie had gotten oriented enough to guess aloud that it was the recreation area for the under-twelve group. The second viewed the sidewalk and entrance door by the receptionist that they had used on all their visits.

  The last showed a wide entry lobby with an exterior door and a wide counter that cut the room nearly in half. It funneled the occupants through a metal detector.

  “Where’s that?” Maggie asked.

  “The day program entrance. Serving the slightly less violent children.”