Suffer the Children Read online

  Maggie started up the steps.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To see Trina.”

  He caught up with her. “Why? You can’t trust anything she says, and between Ms. Washington and the public defender, they’re not going to let you ask her any questions.”

  “Then I won’t ask. I’ll just listen.”

  “You can’t be a witness even if she makes any spontaneous statements. She tried to kill you. You’re biased in the eyes of the court.”

  “I know. But I can’t shake the feeling there’s something she wants to tell me.”

  “I’m sure there is. But it probably took place in the ninth dimension.”

  “It can’t hurt to try.” She knocked on the door of the girls’ fourteen to fifteen area. “Besides, it’s a secure building. What’s the worst that could happen?”

  “She could nick my other carotid.”

  “So get Riley to come with me.”

  “He’s at the autopsy. And after that he’s got a date, believe it or not.”

  She shook her head at him. “Why would that be hard to believe?”

  Ms. Washington opened the door, only to tell them Trina wasn’t there. She had gone for a session with Melanie Szabo.

  “Again?” Maggie asked.

  “Yeah, Melanie’s putting in some overtime today. The joys of limited resources.” She shut the door as behind her the girls in her care craned their necks for a glimpse of the outsiders.

  “We can’t interrupt her therapy,” Jack said, and Maggie reluctantly agreed to give it up. They followed the stairwell back down to the ground floor. As they made their way outside her feet dragged with every step. She didn’t want to leave Trina in that building. She shouldn’t leave Trina in that building. Kids were dying in there.

  A perfect fall afternoon turned the asphalt an inky black and the sidewalk to bleached silver. She felt a breeze lift the hair around her face. She thought of the troubled children involved with the Firebird Center and her pace ground to a halt.

  Jack reached the car without her, noticed, and retraced three steps. “What now?”

  “I know what he’s doing.”

  The look on her face seemed to erase his impatience—partly, at any rate. “What who’s doing?”

  “The killer. He—or she.”

  “And they’re doing … what?”

  Now she met his gaze. “Triaging.”

  He paused. “I’m waiting for those words to make sense.”

  Maggie said, “These kids need intervention in every area of their lives, physical, emotional, cultural. This is an intensive, hands-on program for the residents, and to a lesser extent the day students, because without that nothing is going to change. Each one is different, has a different story. You can’t warehouse them or dole out treatment in an assembly line.”

  “Yes? Your po—”

  “But resources are limited. Everyone here keeps saying that. The minute a bed is open, it’s filled. They have to fight every minute to keep their funding without letting the state force them to overcrowd.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “So—”

  “So every spot here is incredibly valuable. They can’t waste space or time on a kid who’s—”

  The words now made sense. Jack said, “Hopeless.”

  “Yes. You can never know what might turn a kid around or when that might happen, but after years and years of working with them the staff here had to develop a good ability to guess as to who’s going to respond to treatment and who isn’t.”

  “Rachael wasn’t responding.”

  “Not in the slightest. They couldn’t budge her out of her fantasy world.”

  “All someone would have to do is grab her ankles, tip her over the edge. No weapons, no evidence. Not even a fingerprint.”

  Maggie went on: “Derald didn’t want to change. Why would he? He had to believe Mom and Dad’s money would always get him out of any trouble he could get into.”

  “But Damon,” Jack said, as if the idea of someone murdering Damon simply to get a bed open truly pained him.

  She’d been wrong to ever suspect Jack of killing Damon. Very wrong. “Damon would always have had severe difficulties in adapting to society. His brain had been neglected too early for too long.”

  “All that stuff about early childhood development—”

  “Yes. And Quentin, of course, he proved in the most dramatic way possible that rehabilitation wasn’t working for him. And—Trina!”

  “Trina’s psychotic,” Jack agreed.

  “They can’t even put a name to it, so they can’t treat it with any hope of success. Jack, we have to find Trina. Now.” She dashed up the steps to the ancient building.

  “Wait!” Jack called.

  She didn’t.

  He went to follow but heard his name called from behind.

  Rick Gardiner had pulled his car to the curb and got out as his ex-wife disappeared into the building. Jack opened his mouth to tell the guy that whatever it was it had to wait, but Rick Gardiner said, “Just tell me she didn’t help you.”

  Jack shut it again.

  Chapter 30

  Maggie didn’t know where to run first. She asked the receptionist, who had no way to know precisely where Trina might be right then and anyway had her hands full greeting DORC board members. Maggie left her to it and ran up the steps as quietly as she could, to the fourteen-to-fifteen girls’ area. Ms. Washington stepped away from introducing two board members to her charges and told Maggie, rather tersely, that Trina had been put on kitchen duty. But just washing dishes, of course; no food prep, given her penchant for poisons.

  Like Cinderella, Maggie thought, as she galloped back down the stairs, the unacknowledged child banished from view while her more presentable stepsisters partied. That might be unfair, of course. More noise and bustle and even well-meaning questions from strangers could hardly do Trina much good at the moment.

  She burst into the cramped, dim kitchen and felt immediate relief. Trina stood at the sink, washing pots nearly as big as she was, quite alone and apparently unharmed. Steam wafted up from the basin of hot water. Already cleaned ones were stacked in a precarious heap on a rubber-matted counter. A blender and an electric food chopper crowded the girl’s elbow. The oven gave off a delightful smell and the microwave hummed with a distinctly less pleasant odor.

  “Trina,” Maggie said.

  The girl looked up without surprise. “Oh. Hi.”

  Maggie moved closer. Now that she had found her, she didn’t know quite what to say. I think your life is in danger. I think someone is going to try to kill you. Probably not the best thing to tell a teen suffering from psychosis. So she asked what the girl had probably already been asked at least thirty times that day: “How are you feeling?”

  “Okay.”

  “Stuck on kitchen duty, huh?”

  “I think it’s punishment for acting out,” the girl said without rancor. “Because I wasn’t supposed to do kitchen until next week.”

  “Where are the cooks?”

  “They have to stay in the visiting area in case they run out of something. That nice man in the blue jacket told them so, but they didn’t seem to mind.”

  Probably not, Maggie thought. Anything to get out of that dungeon of a place. The smell from the microwave had grown stronger—ammonia-like, again. And through the glass square in the door she could see something begin to spark.

  “Trina,” Maggie asked, “what’s in the microwave?”

  The girl glanced over at it with the same lack of interest she’d shown in Maggie’s presence. “I don’t know. Something Dr.—”

  In one fluid motion Maggie pushed her away from the sink, switched on the food chopper, and knocked it into the filled sink. When it hit the water it gave a snap and a pop, blowing whatever fuse the kitchen operated on. The microwave died along with the lights.

  Trina screamed at the sudden dark, but Maggie grabbed her arm and pulled her toward where she knew the door to b
e. She walked into a counter instead, slamming her hip against it, just as the oven blew up. An explosion of hot gases, flame, and debris drove them to the ground, and after that Maggie could not see, hear, or breathe.

  *

  “What are you talking about, Gardiner?”

  Maggie’s ex-husband said, “Did she help you fake your prints?”

  “I don’t have time for this.” He turned toward the building, but Rick Gardiner scooted in front of him to block his path.

  “Because I don’t know who the hell you are but I know you’re not Jack Renner from Minneapolis.”

  Jack worked hard to keep his voice level. No tics, no tells, don’t let him know how close to the bone he’s slicing. “Gardiner, listen to me. There’s someone in this building killing kids. Maggie’s in there trying to protect the next victim and I—”

  Rick didn’t bat an eye. “I know because I sent them your ID photo, and Howard Romero, the guy you listed as a reference, the guy you say you worked under for years, hasn’t got a clue who you are.”

  Jack’s stomach, already pitching, slid toward his ankles. But he didn’t let himself look away. “Yeah, that sounds like him.”

  “The real Jack Renner retired to Tennessee. Does he know you’re using his name? They had to run your prints when you got here. Did Maggie help switch them for you? That’s all I want to know.”

  Jack thought, and thought fast. Problem was he had never been good at thinking fast; that’s why he always did a great deal of research and planning before stepping out of bounds. Rick Gardiner had just knocked him over the line without warning and any story he came up with would have holes big enough to drive a spaceship through and once Gardiner kept looking he could rip all sorts of additional gaps in his fictional history—

  He said, “I’ve been here three years. I just met your wife—ex-wife—a few months ago and you were there when I did. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about and don’t care. Everyone knows you’d rather sit around on your ass than do any actual police work. That’s probably why she dumped you. Now get out of my way.”

  “You can’t talk your way out of this one, buddy. I saw your little huddle this morning.”

  “Huddle?”

  “You put your hands on her shoulders.”

  Jack had to have stepped into the Twilight Zone. Had to have. “What? That’s what you’re on about? Seriously?”

  “I know Maggie. That’s what you all forget—I know Maggie. She’s never been the touchy-feely type. If any other cop had done that she’d have shook his fingers off in a split second and probably broken a few of them. You’re special to her. And I bet I know right where that started—last month when that maniac throttled her and you carried her off to her rescue like some sort of damn knight in real shiny armor. And who was sitting at the hospital ready to hold her hand? You were.”

  Jack didn’t know how to stop this wall of words. But he remembered the waiting room, and he realized just what he had said to tip Rick Gardiner off, start him on this journey to prove Jack Renner was a complete fiction.

  Which, of course, he was.

  What should he do?

  Maybe he should tell the guy he was sleeping with his ex-wife. That might distract him from his digging.

  It might also spur him on to ruin Jack in any way he could.

  Focus on the biggest threat. “Of course Howard Romero told you he didn’t know me. He was the department prankster for thirty years—facing retirement won’t slow him down.”

  Rick’s face turned a deeper shade of puce. “You think I’m going to believe—”

  But before he could describe what he thought Jack expected him to believe, the building beside them gave a rumble and a groan, and Jack swore he could feel the vibration through the sidewalk.

  *

  The smoke didn’t do Maggie’s lungs any good. Every breath she sucked in only tickled them more with dust and soot and burnt chemicals until white spots began to appear in front of her eyes—not from concussion but asphyxia. She plowed through this miasma, heading away from the explosion and toward the less smoky part of the hallway, dragging Trina with an arm around the girl’s shoulders. Parts of the wall had scattered along the linoleum to trip her.

  Trina’s waiflike form felt abnormally heavy, as if her feet had been encased in cement. Or as if the kitchen still had a tentacle wrapped around her ankles, pulling her back to finish the job it had started. Maggie looked down to kick at the rope-like tendrils, and knew then that she had lost touch with reality. She couldn’t take another step. The kitchen and the smoke would take them both.

  Justin Quintero, however, strode through the swirling dust and swept up Trina without any apparent struggle against cement or vine.

  “You okay?” he asked either her or the girl. She heard his voice as if from a long way off, her ears still ringing—either from the sound of the explosion or from all the blood leaving her head and concentrating in her muscles. But she managed to take another two steps, just enough to find a patch of clear air and get a breath. She immediately coughed it out, of course, but at least the white spots began to fade. She slumped against a wall and Justin carried Trina off around the corner.

  “Wait,” she called, but it came out in a squeak, quite unrecognizable as human speech.

  Maggie concentrated on expanding and constricting her lungs a few more times, flipping onto hands and knees and locomoting that way until two pairs of feet appeared in front of her and two different voices said, “Maggie!”

  She looked up. Rick and Jack stood shoulder to shoulder, each looking concerned and annoyed in such equal measures that she thought this must be some bizarre form of double vision.

  “Oh, hell,” she said.

  Chapter 31

  She found Trina. Justin Quintero had dumped the girl in the infirmary, logically enough, and Nurse Brandreth had tilted her head back and applied gauze to a bloody piece of scalp by the time Maggie staggered into the room, followed by the two cops. The nurse looked up with a forced calm.

  “I’ve called EMTs. She’s breathing but she’s not conscious. I think she took a blow to the head. There’s nothing I can do for her here. She needs a hospital.”

  “Of course,” Maggie said. “Good idea.” And she sat in the chair next to Trina’s bed.

  To her eyes the girl already looked dead, utterly limp and as pale as a piece of copy paper. But the chest rose and fell a millimeter or so every few seconds.

  “What happened?” Jack demanded.

  “What were you doing?” Rick demanded.

  “Kitchen blew up,” she told them, as if that should be obvious. Then she added, because of course it would not be obvious, “Someone put a mix in the microwave, turned it on.”

  “Who?” Jack asked.

  “What do you mean a mix?” Rick asked.

  Voices rose in the hall, adult tones, no doubt the visiting DORC bigwigs. She heard Quintero’s excited words explaining what he could to Dr. Palmer, and Melanie Szabo’s shriek of horror.

  “She was just about to tell me who it was when I figured out it was a bomb. I shorted out the GFI to kill the power, but it was too late. It blew.”

  “What blew?” Jack demanded.

  Maggie explained. By now she barely noticed her own habit of coughing every few words. “I thought I smelled ammonia when I first found Trina, but that’s just because I had ammonia on the mind where Trina is concerned. It was vinegar. Put vinegar in a cup, drop in a ball of steel wool, like the kind Trina was using to scrub the pots, and pop it in the microwave. The steel and the vinegar react to form hydrogen gas, the confined space creates pressure, and when the steel sparks it lights the fuse.”

  “Kaboom,” Jack said.

  Rick didn’t care about a microwave bomb. “Tell me what you’re doing with this guy.”

  Maggie rubbed her face and her fingers came away bloody—slightly bloody, nothing life threatening. No doubt scratches and small cuts from the flying debris. “What guy?”
r />   He jerked his head toward Jack, scowling, his expression furious. She had seen it often enough during their marriage. “This one. The supervisor he used as a reference in Minneapolis has never seen him before in his life.”

  That didn’t clear it up any, as far as she could see. And though she recognized that Jack—and by extension herself—were deeply threatened by Rick’s interest, she couldn’t make herself care right at that moment. Much more than a jail term stalked Trina, and perhaps them all.

  “I told you—” Jack began.

  Behind them two EMTs hovered in the doorway, torn between responding to the infirmary as instructed or dealing with the chaos in the hallway beyond. Nurse Brandreth flagged them down.

  Rick said, “Maggie. This guy’s lying to you about something. His name isn’t even Jack Renner.”

  “Wait—what are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Trying to figure out what this asshole’s gotten you mixed up in!”

  Maggie tried to suck in air, but her lungs could not expand. She choked.

  “We need some room to work here, people,” one EMT said as the other affixed an oxygen mask to Trina’s face. “We need you to leave.”

  Maggie told him, “Not on your life. I’m not letting this girl out of my sight. Someone wanted her dead.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “And now they need her dead.”

  The man studied her gaze with intelligent brown eyes as Jack hovered and Rick went on and on about phone calls and e-mailing an ID photo to someone named Howard Romero.

  “Okay,” the EMT said. “But I need to get on that side of her.”

  Maggie immediately stood, moved her chair, coughed, and collapsed into it again, as Rick told her that something called cooies were important.

  “Coo—eze?”

  “Coues. They’re small deer,” he told her with desperate intensity.

  She blinked at him.

  Then she shook her head, stood up, and moved toward the door, before Dr. Palmer and assorted personnel began to crowd into the tiny infirmary. “Rick, let me explain this: I have no idea what you’re talking about, and I don’t care.”