Suffer the Children Page 20

  “Nope.”

  Coglan said, “Course there’s only two ways in, through reception or through the day student entrance, so it’s not like you could sneak in a back door without anyone seeing. There is no back door except to fenced areas and the fire doors have no outside handles.” Understanding dawned in an uncomfortable grimace on his face. “You think someone on staff killed Damon?”

  “You think it’s more likely one of the juveniles?” Riley asked him.

  Szabo said, “They are here for a reason, you know. And it’s usually a violent one. Don’t look at me like that—that’s not disloyalty to my clients, it’s reality. And we’re all about reality here. Rehabilitation doesn’t stand a chance without it.”

  “Okay, okay,” Riley said, holding up his hands in mock surrender. “But the juveniles here are supervised twenty-four /seven. How would one have the opportunity?”

  The therapist thought about that as voices raised in the private meeting room. The family rumble grew to full swing. “We let them go to and fro for short errands, such as coming for an appointment with me. Especially the older ones. As long as they’re behaving. If they’re not being oppositional or suicidal or something.”

  “We noticed that.”

  A thump sounded from the meeting room. Coglan straightened up but the therapist held up her hand. “They always do this. They’ll be okay.”

  “Facilities just patched the holes in the wall from the last time.”

  “I know.”

  “Mitch ain’t gonna be happy if he has to pull that blue paint out again.”

  “I know.”

  Jack said, “So any of them could have been anyplace in the building without a record of it. And once you’re inside, this place is a free-for-all. Residents, staff, visitors can go anywhere.”

  Dr. Szabo said, “And teachers and therapists know when a kid steps out. They can’t get into each other’s age units. Only common areas.”

  “Most of the kids would have been in class,” Maggie pointed out.

  Jack said, “We’ll have to get with the teachers. And most of the visitors come in the evening.”

  Riley said, “Still can’t see it. How would a kid find the EpiPens?”

  Maggie said, “Perhaps there’s a few who spend a lot of time in the infirmary. They’d have time to explore when the nurse took bathroom breaks or responded to emergencies.”

  Riley made an oral note to check with the nurses for recent extended stays in the medical office. They packed up the time cards and lists and left Maggie to deal with her stacks of fingerprint cards and the inevitable neck strain and went off to find Dr. Palmer. Coglan went along as escort. Melanie Szabo flopped down in Jack’s abandoned chair.

  “Don’t mind me,” she told Maggie. “I’m just on fire brigade duty. Here to run for buckets if there’s an explosion.”

  “Otherwise you just wait?”

  “A great deal of therapy is waiting.”

  “A great deal of forensics is, too.”

  *

  Doctor Palmer juggled a phone in one hand and a newspaper in the other, standing behind his desk. The office looked as if a strong wind had rippled through it, though Jack couldn’t be certain what had changed. An unfamiliar secretary squeezed past them to plop a set of stapled papers on top of the small mound of similar items already covering the desk blotter, and through the window Jack saw the silhouette of a lone basketball player practicing his free throws. The day was warm but overcast, comfortable without a lot of UV exposure.

  The doctor said into the phone, “It’s not as bad as it could be. I thought the article was fair, more or less. Of course, any bad publicity … but that’s to be expected … that’s not really reasonable, though, is it?” He murmured a few more things before both sides apparently gave up and ended the call without any real resolution and turned to them. “Gentlemen.”

  “Doc,” Riley said.

  “Thank you for keeping me posted on the ruling regarding Damon’s death. Of course, you have our complete cooperation. The poor boy. We’ve come so far as a society and yet we seem to be going backward when it comes to dealing with our own children.” He slumped into his chair as if his knees had given out.

  “We’re going to need to interview everyone who was in the building that morning,” Riley said, gently but firmly.

  “Everyone?”

  “Yes. Every staff member and perhaps the … patients … as well.”

  “Ever—of course that’s fine, it’s just going to take a lot of time and time away from their duties. We’re stretched thin as it is. We always are, of course, starved for funds and personnel—that’s the lot of social services—but really thin at the moment with all the disruption. The students are restless, agitated by the drama. Besides the construction workers stomping all over the place, they can see the press vans outside.”

  “We’ll be as discreet and quick as possible,” Riley promised, adding that they had no alternative.

  “Murder. I can’t believe someone killed Damon.”

  The boy on the basketball court, Jack realized, was Quentin Sherman. He wondered if the court had a padlock on it, or if a guard had been stationed out there to keep an eye on the kid. He said, “I thought you said nearly every resident here had killed someone.”

  “I may have overstated,” the older man said, but then, compelled to be truthful, added: “Slightly. But usually in a fit of rage. That’s what traumatized kids do—they erupt. They scream, fight, throw things.”

  Outside, Quentin made a perfect shot, the ball sailing through the netless hoop without even touching its sides. He whooped to himself, gave a triumphant leap, and then ran toward the chain link that separated the roof from the open air above the street.

  “They don’t use medical supplies in a methodical manner and then carefully conceal—”

  Jack heard a short yip, an animal cry of surprise and pain. Quentin had launched himself onto the fence over the street in his usual celebratory taunting of death, but this time death taunted back. The entire section of chain link fell outward, loosened from its mooring, and it and the boy tumbled over the side and disappeared from sight.

  Jack was up and out of the office before his mind could catch up. He knew only that Quentin Sherman had probably just died—and that he had watched it happen.

  Chapter 22

  So far Maggie had identified twelve of her unknown latent prints. Ten of them belonged to one of the two nurses. She had also picked up on who in the Johnson clan felt that Donnell should be allowed to attend his prom and who in the Carter clan opposed this on the grounds of teaching the boy a lesson, when Jack sped into the visiting area with that look on his face. He glanced at her but didn’t slow, and she immediately abandoned her latent prints in violation of all chain-of-custody rules. But she had to know just what the hell had happened now.

  To her surprise he continued outside through the day student entrance and ran around the street corner. There, in the middle of the mercifully empty street, Quentin Sherman lay underneath an eight-by-eight section of chain-link fence. A September sky beamed overhead, pieces of cobalt blue peeking out from behind gray clouds. On the next block a bird sang. A car drove lazily through the far intersection.

  Maggie stopped to stare, her brain processing. Jack never slowed. He grabbed the fence section and flung it off the boy.

  A voice in the back of Maggie’s mind said, There go any fingerprints on those inches of pipe. And then she also stood over Quentin Sherman.

  He lay faceup, eyes staring into that peaceful sky. They swiveled in their sockets to her and Jack, and his lips twitched.

  Maggie crouched, putting a hand to his cheek. Blood seemed to be leaking from everywhere and she had no idea what to do. “Quentin!”

  He tried to say something to her, his expression urgent.

  She spoke his name again, desperately begging him not to die. It felt as if the day before had never happened, or happened to someone else. She didn’t see the dangerous p
redator who had so terrified her and nearly killed Jack. She saw only a young boy clinging to his life as it slipped away from him.

  Then a faint rasp, and the face went still. His gaze lost any sense of concern.

  Jack put two fingers to the boy’s carotid. “He’s dead.”

  “What happened?”

  Jack straightened and gazed upward, where each window had young faces pressed to it, witnessing yet another violent sight in the long history of their short lives. “Someone loosened the fence section. Riley is up there, making sure no one touches anything.”

  Maggie took a deep breath and consciously turned her focus to the crime. She made a phone call to Denny to ask for reinforcements, and told Jack she would get her camera from her car. Returning with it she documented the scene, the dead boy, the fence section. Her heart pounded oddly but she ignored that, reasoning that she wasn’t accustomed to her victims being so fresh—or having held her as a hostage, either. But she had a lot to do and couldn’t coddle herself right now.

  Quentin Sherman wore a T-shirt, wet with sweat from his boisterous playing, and a pair of baggy, shiny athletic pants. His shoes probably cost a hundred bucks or so and had all the normal knicks and marring of a teenage boy’s footwear. A gold chain rested against his chest, a thick twist with a single pendant that read Mom in script. His face showed a few small scrapes on the right temple, probably from yesterday’s tackle by several law enforcement officers. His otherwise perfect skin stretched over high cheekbones and long lashes framed his eyes.

  His pockets contained a contraband cell phone—which she instantly placed in a Faraday bag to prevent remote wiping by anyone who might have Quentin’s passcodes—and a pack of Juicy Fruit.

  “He had been arrested,” Jack said. “Why wouldn’t the phone have been confiscated?”

  “Maybe he’d hidden it before shooting Luis, just in case he got caught afterward.”

  A close-up look at the fence brackets bore out Jack’s theory—none seemed to be twisted or deformed. The brackets and the loose screws she located showed little damage, only some clean nicks at the tips of the screws from the final wrenching as the fence connections came apart and at the indented crosses in their heads where a tool had been used.

  “All they had to do was loosen the bolts,” she said.

  “And wait,” Jack added.

  “Could it be some kind of escape attempt? Some kids planned to tie their bedsheets together after dark but didn’t let Quentin in on the plan?”

  “It could,” Jack conceded. “But I doubt it. I think someone knew this kid liked to climb the walls and knew he’d be temporarily banished to outdoor exercise. And I doubt anyone here would leave a number four Phillips lying around, so getting a tool to use took some planning.”

  She looked again at the large bolt. “They might use a coin. If they had strong fingers. But why? Revenge for Luis?”

  “Maybe. Most likely. But what did Damon have to do with Luis? What did Derald?”

  “Jack.”

  He turned to her.

  “Just what the hell is going on here?”

  He gazed up at the roof again. “I wish I knew.”

  *

  At the top of the building, Riley guided her through the crime scene: a knee-high brick wall that rimmed the edge, with chain link atop that. The forty-by-thirty roof space included an electrical machine room (locked), a patio with three round tables with chairs, and the basketball court. More chain link provided a barrier to keep the game players from bumping into anyone sitting at the tables or emerging from the stairwell, but not the machine room. Its door had suffered copious dents from balls and bodies.

  She approached the gaping, now fenceless section. The remaining fence sections were quite sturdy, connected to their posts with tight, weathered brackets. The two involved posts showed only fresh scrapes similar to the tips of the bolts where their oxidized surface had been scratched as the brackets pulled loose.

  In the street below she saw Jack, and Amy, who had arrived from the forensics unit to help her process the scene. But again, there wouldn’t be much processing to do. Structures constantly exposed to the elements were not good for latent prints. Dirt, rust, and oxidation coated a not-that-smooth-to-begin-with surface and made finding visible ridges nearly impossible. Not completely impossible, however.

  “Three stories isn’t necessarily enough to kill,” she observed to Riley, who stood well back of the edge.

  “Yeah. If he had landed on his feet he might have made it. Of course he’d be several inches shorter.”

  “He’d have a better chance on grass, but asphalt?” She surveyed the surroundings, wondering if occupants of neighboring buildings had seen something. But though still downtown the structures had flattened out in that sector and only two stories had been built across the street to the east. To the north sat the lake and a municipal parking lot, leaving her only seagulls as witnesses.

  Even if there had been skyscrapers around, the killer had since the last basketball game to loosen the bolts. The kids would have been in school all morning, so that had probably been the night before. Cover of darkness, a few quick turns of a tool—she felt like screaming in frustration. Someone had been executing children right and left without leaving her a single clue.

  Her gaze fell on Jack.

  Jack, who had made a shadow profession of exactly that sort of work only a few short months before. Jack, who had been in and out of the Firebird Center for several days, who would be allowed access to any part of the building by virtue of the badge he wore on his hip.

  She shook her head, throwing her hair out in an agitated halo.

  “What’s the matter?” Riley asked from behind her. He had inched up but still avoided the edge. Vertigo did not seem to be his friend.

  “Nothing,” she said aloud, firmly. It was ridiculous. Rachael and Derald had already been dead before Jack ever heard of this place, right? Granted, perhaps they were not murders at all … but she couldn’t picture Jack injecting ten-year-old Damon with EpiPens. Damon’s mother, certainly. But not the small boy who had been so terribly unfortunate. Damon had been damaged—he hadn’t been evil.

  Quentin Sherman, on the other hand …

  She felt a sudden chill. From the lake, she told herself. That touch of coming frost.

  Chapter 23

  Maggie did what she could. That included processing the door leading to the roof with portable superglue wands that turned it white and illuminated the slapped handprints of dozens of teenage boys pumped up with youth and testosterone. This took an hour with camera and tripod and adjusting the light every which way while curious staff members kept catching curious children in the stairwell trying to get a glimpse of the crime scene. Some of the kids wheedled for more time, some ignored commands to move, and one thirteen-year-old pushed his social worker down the steps. The social worker managed to catch himself on the railing, or Maggie might have had another bizarre but accidental death to investigate.

  She could hear noise and raised voices from the classrooms. Yesterday they had a murder occur in science class and today a fatal fall. She couldn’t blame them if geometry didn’t hold their interest.

  Amy had carefully collected the bolts and superglued the fence section in the street after having the traffic diverted. It would be impossible to move it back to the lab without grasping the frames and possibly smudging prints that would be delicate and problematic to begin with. They didn’t even have a vehicle large enough to transport it and Maggie didn’t feel sure it would fit through the door into the lab. Better to process it on scene and then it could be loaded onto a flatbed as roughly as necessary. As bulky, heavy, and basically uninteresting as it was, it was evidence of murder and would have to be kept at the police department as long as the case remained open.

  But photographing the wisps of latent prints Amy could raise on its frame was a pain and a half. At least the roof door had been a flat surface. Trying to photograph faint white prints against the
curved dull metal of the frame in broad daylight proved an exercise in frustration. Struggling to hold them still in the breeze off the lake, Maggie held tarps up to block the intermittent sun so Amy could adjust the light source to sidelight the prints. This simply had to represent the best they could do. They couldn’t leave the piece in the street overnight for the superglue to oxidize so they could drip the prints with dye stain and use an ultraviolet light source to make the dyed prints glow, and they couldn’t get the section back to the lab without disturbing the superglue.

  Maggie doubted the killer would have left prints anyway—he, or she, had been careful enough to wipe off the EpiPens and their box. But perhaps he, or she, counted on the elements to destroy any prints, so Maggie couldn’t make herself give up on the idea.

  But once back on the roof she thought of something else.

  The sections of fence were held to their poles by round brackets that looped around the pole and then protruded to secure the section frame on either side. The ends of these brackets were held by carriage bolts, which had obviously been loosened until hanging on by a single thread, easily torn away by the weight of a fifteen-year-old boy.

  The brackets were spaced out along the pole so that the upper two were well out of reach from the roof. The killer had to have been a climber like Quentin to get to the upper bolts and would have had to cling to the pole to steady himself, or herself, as he, or she, used the tool. Even if the killer used a ladder or stacked up the chairs he, or she, probably held on to the pole as well as the still-solid neighboring section of fence.

  Riley came up behind her as she stared up at the top of the remaining fence. “Don’t even think about it.”

  “He got up there somehow.” She grasped the mesh of chain link and pumped it in and out. It barely moved. “I need a ladder.”

  “I thought you said prints were impossible.”

  “I said nearly impossible. Besides, I’m not going to try for prints. I’m going to swab the pole and links for touch DNA. I’ll bet those bolts didn’t turn easily after all these years. He would have had to work hard to budge them, he had to be nervous, risking being seen. He would have been sweating. Maybe even if he wore gloves they were cloth gloves and the sweat would have soaked through. Maybe they were an old pair of leather gloves and had a decade of skin cells built up from being pulled on and off.”