Suffer the Children Page 24

“She did that every single day. I have no idea why.”

  “Some OCD thing?”

  “Unlikely,” Maggie said. “Or she wouldn’t have been able to stand this pile o’ stuff in the corner.”

  Jack asked, “Where was she last night?”

  “Here,” Ms. Washington said.

  “All night? Are you sure?”

  “Yes and yes.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because I have to let anyone in or out, and I didn’t. If they somehow jimmy a door after bed check it will sound a claxon. It would wake me. It would wake anyone within two blocks.”

  “What about before bed check?”

  Reluctantly, she said, “It’s possible. Not probable. We maintain only fifteen girls, as you can see, so it’s not hard to realize when one has gone missing. And I don’t remember Trina being missing at all. I was keeping a particular eye on her, of course, after the goings-on yesterday.”

  “Luis’s murder.”

  “Yes. Some of the other girls still have a heart and they were trying to sympathize with her about it, but she went in her room and shut the door. It worried me a little, but it hardly seemed odd after what had happened. She’d had adults talking to her all day long so I figured she needed a break. I did check on her just before lights out, and she seemed fine. Fine for Trina, I mean. Dry eyed, but wouldn’t say a word.”

  So far in the pile the clothes had proved unremarkable, and Maggie folded them to one side. She also found a powder compact in a shade too dark for Trina, and a silver necklace with a St. Dymphna medal. The patron saint of those with mental illness.

  “Did she spend a lot of time on the roof?” Jack was asking.

  “Girls’ exercise periods. And we let them hang around out there for an hour every other evening, alternating genders and age groups.”

  “Did she play basketball?”

  “Trina? She didn’t play tiddlywinks. Not a joiner, I’m afraid.”

  “She didn’t get along with Rachael?”

  “No one got along with Rachael.”

  Other items were unearthed: a piece of ribbon, a crumpled photograph of a younger Trina and a woman—her mother, perhaps. Nothing had been written on the back. A small spray bottle of cheap perfume.

  “She’s not supposed to have that,” Ms. Washington said. “We can overlook a little eyeshadow or lipstick, but nothing flammable.”

  Then, underneath a pair of lightweight jeans, Maggie found a pair of gloves. Brown. No tag but the material felt like the standard cotton/synthetic blend.

  “There we go,” Jack said.

  “They’re too big for her,” Maggie said.

  “She probably stole them from the construction crew. They were installing the cameras in the girls’ common area two days ago—not that they work, of course; they’re merely installed.”

  “You’re sounding awfully petulant these days.”

  “I am petulant. They’ve got a building full of killers here and security is a joke.”

  Ms. Washington had had enough of Jack. “These kids aren’t cold-blooded murderers. They have painful reasons to explain the things they do.” But truth compelled her to qualify: “Most of the time.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “And our priority here is rehabilitation. These are children —”

  “Dangerous children,” Jack said.

  “—who have suffered the worst society has to offer—”

  Maggie had bagged the gloves and reached the bottom of Trina’s pile of stuff. No other items suggested foul play. She interrupted the two to say so.

  Jack got back to specifics. “What about Monday?”

  Ms. Washington raised one eyebrow.

  “Monday, say ten to eleven. Where was Trina?”

  “She would have been in class.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “As I’m not her English teacher, no.”

  “We’ll need to talk to her,” Jack said.

  Maggie corrected, “Him.”

  *

  Rick Gardiner got Lieutenant Howard—apparently not Howie—Romero back on the phone. The good lieutenant immediately opened with, “I’m so sorry.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It was Andy Hastings, died of cancer. I always did get him and Jack mixed up.”

  Rick’s stomach seemed to plunge. He didn’t often get gut feelings but he had one now. He had a theory he couldn’t define and didn’t even know if he wanted to prove and yet felt disappointed that none of the facts wanted to cooperate. He wasn’t getting anywhere, not with the vigilante case, not with his career, not with Maggie, not with anything. “So you haven’t heard anything about him since he left there?”

  “Nope. Went off to be a hermit in Tennessee. Then you guys called for a reference, so I guess the hermit thing got old. Figured it would.”

  Might as well justify his time. “And the illegal nursing home thing? Did you have a case like that?”

  “That’s the weird thing,” Romero said, and then paused to have a conversation with someone at that end regarding the unit’s coffee order and the bizarre fact that one of the guys had requested decaf. This led to Romero debating how many packets of decaf coffee the whoever at that end should order until Rick wanted to scream.

  “What’s the weird thing?” he finally demanded.

  “We did. Have a case like that. Some of my guys worked it and the gal in the Elder Crimes unit remembered it real well. Bunch of old folks left to rot. Hell of a thing. It takes a lot to disgust me after this many years, but that did.”

  “Did you get the guy?”

  “Nope. The victims were nearly all dead when we got there and those that weren’t, we couldn’t get any sense out of. Checks were deposited to an account by night depository and no one had time to sift through twenty-four hours of video. The gal that cleaned out the account had a big hat on, so you wouldn’t even recognize your own mother in the photo.”

  “Huh,” Rick said. “Listen, if I send you a photo, could you tell me if—”

  “I just said you wouldn’t recognize your own mother.”

  “Not of the woman with the old folks. A photo of Jack Renner.”

  Rick heard a rushing sound as Romero exhaled his impatience. “Now we’re back on Jack Renner. He didn’t even work that case. What does Jack Renner have to do with this old folks case?”

  “As God is my witness,” Rick said, “I have no idea.”

  Chapter 29

  Paul Lewis, Maggie thought, didn’t quite deserve the judgment of nonhotness that Trina had bestowed. Yes, his nose had been broken at some point in his past, but the tousled hair melded with the sparkling eyes to give him a boyish insouciance. Sniffing, she couldn’t detect any sausage-like odors. But she guessed him to be over forty, which in the mind of a fourteen-year-old girl might as well be 103.

  Students shuffled in and out of the room, changing classes just as they would in any school. Some gave the interlopers sharp looks while some appeared bewildered by the change in routine, but most reacted as teenagers did, with complete indifference. Whatever the adults were up to couldn’t possibly be as interesting as what they themselves had to discuss.

  Still, Maggie couldn’t help keeping her back to the wall and watching the natives for any sign of restlessness. She noticed Jack did as well.

  “Ah,” Lewis said, “Trina—I heard she went on quite the rampage yesterday. Pity. She’s a fairly good student. Surprisingly articulate, in writing. I can hardly get her to speak a word, but on paper she turns into Proust.”

  “What does she write about?” Maggie asked.

  “That’s hard to describe. Her topics are eclectic but usually loop back to death. Pretty dark.”

  “Murder?” Jack asked.

  The guy frowned in thought. “Not really. Just death. End of life, taking one’s last breath, the brink of moving from this world to the next. But she never talks about that next world, only the one on this side of that chasm. Her imagination
has limits, I suppose. Or she’s more interested in the process than the result.”

  Jack interrupted. “Was she in class on Monday?”

  “She’s always in class. As I said, she’s a fairly good student. As you can imagine, that’s not common for this group.”

  “Did she leave during the class for any reason?”

  “On Monday?”

  “Yes.” Maggie could feel his annoyance vibrate through the syllable. It didn’t seem to affect Lewis, but then he spent all day surrounded by violent teens. It would take more than a snippy homicide detective to rattle him.

  Of course, he didn’t know what Jack was.

  “I don’t think so. I keep her right in front”—he pointed to a desk second from the end in the first row—“because she gets agitated if the other students get chatty and distract her. But she does have to duck out once in a while; I don’t know if it’s a weak bladder or she just gets overwhelmed. Might have been on Monday, but I don’t know. She could have.”

  “What—” Jack began.

  “Let’s ask my co.” He turned to the door of the room, where a slim black woman spoke with two boys. “My co-teacher, Jacqueline.”

  “Co-teacher?”

  “We have two teachers in every class, one to teach, one to handle discipline. Jacqueline teaches science and we tag-team each other. You’d be amazed what a difference it makes to be able to focus one hundred percent on teaching and let the other person break up the whispering, sleeping, contraband, escorting kids to Dr. Palmer’s office, etcetera. She’ll remember if Trina had to leave. But let her finish with those two first. She’s much better with the superaggressive kids than I am. I have to fight the appealing temptation to rip their heads off their shoulders and hang them from the ceiling like Christmas ornaments.”

  Maggie felt her eyebrows crawl toward her hairline. “How’s that working out for you?”

  He laughed. “Okay, only sometimes I feel like that. On the whole, I get these kids. School is all about uncertainty. You have to learn stuff you don’t know, take tests you might not pass. Secure kids, happy healthy kids with parents who love them, they can approach uncertainty with a little bit of trepidation but also curiosity and a feeling of challenge. At worst school is tedious and annoying. But to maltreated kids, uncertainty is terrifying. It causes great distress, which securely attached children learn to tolerate because they have faith that it will be relieved. They’ll figure it out, as they have before, and if not Mommy or Daddy will help them. A child who never had that security can’t tolerate distress. It’s not annoying, it’s life threatening. But they can’t fight a math problem or take flight from it, so they freeze or freak. Tantrums, throwing chairs, screaming are not unheard of around here.”

  “They believe they can’t learn it,” Maggie said. Jack turned to check on the co-teacher, but the two boys still held her attention.

  “Yes, but it’s not that simple. Maltreatment in early life can physically alter cognitive development, the skills necessary to read, write, do math. Tissue in the brain originally available for these functions can be diverted to defense in an abused or neglected child. Instead of exploring its world the brain has to focus on staying alive. This can also affect executive abilities, which manage emotional and behavioral functions as well as cognitive. Tuning out distractions, keeping the instructions in mind and doing the work at the same time, staying aware of the time allotted, monitoring their own work for mistakes and correcting as they go—some don’t do it at all and others do it so obsessively that they never finish. Trina is the latter, by the way. She’s such a perfectionist that she never finishes anything, gets lost in a ball of self-criticism because her margins aren’t exactly equivalent.”

  Maggie thought, No wonder Trina felt so angry at Rachael for slacking off on the photosynthesis illustration.

  “And of course this difficulty snowballs as they get older and more and more behind their own peers. By this age most of them have given up hope of ever having a brain. Meanwhile schools, which are in a unique position to recognize these situations, have gone to zero-tolerance policies and expelling any kid they think is a problem—and/or, not coincidentally—a low achiever who might drag down their standardized test scores. The juvenile justice system becomes their dumping ground.”

  “How do you treat that?”

  Jack griped to her, “You’re as bad as Riley.”

  She didn’t know exactly what he meant, but ignored him anyway.

  Lewis did too. “What gets them through the distress is a relationship with the teacher. Their primary attachment—to parents—has gone awry, so they need teachers to make them feel safe and stable enough to learn. Because of the early trauma they can’t tolerate frustration, are overanxious, have to work at their own pace, and all that makes them attention seeking. Constantly attention seeking. They interrupt, disrupt, try to usurp our authority, poke, prod, fight. They’re desperate to know that adults are actually going to do their jobs this time around and take care of them. Regular old teenagers rebel to establish their independence, but these teens—they’re rebelling to bring adults closer.”

  “To see if you’ll stick,” Maggie said.

  “Exactly.”

  “Sounds, um—”

  “Challenging?” Lewis suggested.

  “Nightmarish.”

  He laughed. “Sometimes it is. But I’ll take these kids any day over some suburbanite who whines that his mom won’t do his homework for him. Each and every one of these kids is a walking, talking unique cipher, each with a unique key. What opens one won’t open another. And then the hour’s up and I get a whole new set.”

  “Speaking of which—” Jack said.

  “Yes, Detective. Let’s get with Jacqueline.”

  The two boys had moved off with pats on their departing shoulders and the young woman listened to Jack’s question. A wrinkle creased her perfect skin as she tried to remember. “Monday … Monday … Joaquin came in with a black eye, and oh, yes, we sent Laquisha home for smelling of pot.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Lewis agreed.

  “Yes, she did,” Jacqueline said. “Trina, I mean, left to use the restroom. Gone about five minutes. Maybe a little more, because I got distracted texting the paperwork about Laquisha. Trina leaves a lot—she gets anxious whenever she has to write—but she’s real good about coming right back. I can trust Trina.”

  Jack said, “You realize she tried to kill Maggie yesterday.”

  Without pause, Jacqueline qualified: “As long as she isn’t in one of her moods.”

  Maggie felt her shoulders slump. She knew she shouldn’t be surprised. Trina had tried to kill someone doing her best to be her friend—how much more irritated would she get at the supremely annoying Rachael and the wild Damon? Derald—if he had been murdered at all—had probably conflicted with gang rival Luis, and Quentin had been lucky to live through the night after his transgression. But even knowing all this, she couldn’t form a cohesive portrait of Trina as a serial killer.

  Maggie thanked the two teachers as they turned their attention to the milling, nearly full classroom, and she and Jack headed for the stairwell.

  “Could she really have gotten over to the other side of the building, down the steps, into the infirmary, found the EpiPens, injected Damon, and then gotten back to her desk in five minutes?” She kept her voice low, knowing how it carried in a concrete well.

  “Yes. She was quick and light, and it was probably more like ten minutes.”

  “How could she even catch Damon? He bounced off walls under the best of circumstances. A strange child enters his room, he’d either charge her or hide under the bed.”

  “Who knows? Maybe he was sleeping until the first injection. He did have strep throat. Or maybe she enticed him with something.”

  Like a brownie,” Maggie suddenly remembered, and told Jack how the boy had had chocolate crumbles in his stomach. If those had been eaten with his breakfast they should have been more digested.


  “A few people have said he’d do anything for sweets.”

  “That’s how they got him to sit still for the EpiPens,” Maggie said. “They enticed him with the brownie, got him close enough to get a good grip on him. That’s all you’d need. I could have held him down, he was so skinny. It was catching him in the first place that was the hard part, and the brownie took care of that.”

  “That’s how she did it, not they. Trina’s a little thing but she’s still bigger than he was.”

  Maggie persisted. “Though they might give the children midmorning snacks here. Most schools do. That would explain the lack of digestion.”

  “Fine, we can ask the nurse. But Trina had motive, means, opportunity, and a record of homicidal violence. And we already know she killed Quentin.”

  “We don’t know that. Anyone could walk into Trina’s room and plant those gloves. They had all night and most of the day to do it.”

  “It’s a locked-down unit. You seriously think someone framed—”

  “Why not? She’s psychotic. No one is going to believe anything she says.”

  “Including me,” Jack snapped.

  *

  The nurse established that she had not given Damon a midmorning snack but the kitchen staff established that they did provide snacks around ten o’clock to the under-twelve group, and they had indeed been brownies on Monday morning. “They’re not bad,” one of the cooks said. “I eat them all the time. Don’t tell Palmer, though, okay?”

  That seemed to make Maggie think of something. “Does the staff eat with the kids? Or do they brown-bag it?”

  “Yeah, most of them take a plate along with the kids. Promotes bonding, all that crap.”

  “What about therapists? Teachers?”

  “They just walk through and help themselves. One of the perks of the job.”

  Another added, “They have to bring the plates and tableware back, though. This ain’t a damn Marriott.”

  “Got it,” Jack said, and he and Maggie escaped the steamy room.

  He seemed ready to call it a day. He said they had done all they could. It only remained to get an arrest warrant sworn out for Trina, though that wouldn’t be easy. He had no smoking gun. He had no physical evidence other than a generic pair of gloves and an unreliable narrator as a suspect. He—