Suffer the Children Page 5

  I don’t know that either, Rick thought. I only know that Renner said he’d never been in Arizona and then used the same term you had, which is apparently native to that area. Oh, and I think he’s got something going with my ex-wife. She says no, my partner says no, everybody says no, but I see a vibe going on between them that is more than “Hey, did this latent print match my suspect?” That means any trouble I can make for Jack Renner is a good thing.

  As long as it doesn’t make trouble for me as well.

  “Long story,” he told Daley. “But I heard he may have worked a case that fits with mine. I wanted to ask him about it.”

  “Oh. Okay. When would that have been?”

  “Around the same time as that coyote was killed.”

  “Well, I had already been in homicide for, what, fifteen years by then and I’ve never heard of him. If he was county you’ll have to call them.”

  “Okay … could you check with your HR? He might have been on the road”—meaning regular patrol officers or “beat cops”—“or special ops, who knows.”

  “Sure,” Daley said without enthusiasm. “I’ll get back to you.”

  “Thanks,” Rick said, let Daley get to his coffee or Coke or whatever the hell you drink in the mornings when it’s a hundred degrees outside. Was he, Rick, really thinking of a fellow cop as a suspect in the vigilante murders? And if Renner did it, did he even want to know? Only the scum of the earth had been killed, the same people a jury would have sentenced to lethal injection if given half a chance. Did Rick really want to be the guy who fingered another cop, dragged the whole department through the mud, put Cleveland on CNN in the worst way possible?

  But did he want to let a case he could solve sit on his books, making him look like an idiot? Leaving Renner free to sniff around Maggie?

  His partner, Will, returned from the copy machine, and noticed Rick’s hand still resting on the desk phone. “What’cha working on?”

  “Nothing,” Rick said.

  *

  That morning Jack and Riley returned to the Firebird Center to speak with Rachael Donahue’s therapist, who looked, Jack thought, like a therapist. Dr. Melanie Szabo’s graying hair fell to her waist, lavender eyeshadow framed eyes the color of faded jeans, and an ankle-length multicolored skirt adorned with looping patterns and sequins gave a splash of color to the tan walls. The death of her patient gave her the sniffles and she held a lace-trimmed handkerchief to her nose, clutching a nearly empty water bottle in the other. Jack expected her to smell of patchouli, but instead caught a whiff of something floral, sweet, and expensive.

  They spoke in a tiny conference room used for legal counsel, off the main visitor’s area on the second floor with nothing but a small table, a few chairs, and a blue recycling bin. The staff preferred to keep the officers away from the residents, which suited Jack. After speaking to Rachael’s peers the prior evening he didn’t see any need to revisit that particular lioness’s den. But Melanie Szabo, through her sniffles, praised their discretion. “You know how it is! Any disruption to the routine spreads out like ripples in a lake. The teachers have a hard enough time getting traumatized and suffering children to concentrate on lessons. It’s so important to try to keep them on pace with others their age. Delinquency and academic failure are joined at the hip.”

  She probably began every session that way, Jack thought, by telling the other person something good about themselves. Smart, as far as it goes, as long as she doesn’t devolve into one of those types who believe the answer to all childhood ills is good self-esteem. The “ill” children he encountered seemed to have way too much esteem for themselves already, and none for anyone else.

  “Tell us about Rachael,” Riley began.

  Szabo did not hesitate, showed no concerns about patient confidentiality—not when her patient had died and had no one else in the world to speak for her. “She was not suicidal. Not at all. She seemed determined to attack the world and carve out a place for herself in it. Fierce, I call it. But not in a good way.”

  “What does that mean?” Riley asked, as usual ready to sit and listen for as long as it took to learn something helpful. He had so much more patience than his partner, Jack thought.

  She tucked her hair behind both ears and talked with her hands, the handkerchief fluttering from one set of fingers only to be plucked by the other as from a magician’s wand. “These kids are here because their lives have gotten out of control. Their own control as well as society’s. They have been raped, beaten, drugged, abused, and neglected to the point that they finally pushed back. Most detention facilities—in the name of protecting society from these violent predators—simply isolate them further at the one point in their life where they desperately need connections and support. That does not help anyone. All it does is shove the kid farther down the spiral, almost guaranteeing that they will wind up behind bars for a good portion of their adult life. This isn’t bleeding heart talk. Crunch the numbers and you’ll see that it’s a whole lot less expensive to pay for a couple years of intensive therapy and intervention instead of decades of incarceration. The reality is, in 2001 serious juvenile crime rates were essentially the same as they had been in 1981, but the number of youths confined in juvenile residential facilities doubled. Doubled. Society doesn’t need to be protected from these kids. The kids need to be protected from society. Protected from us.”

  Dr. Szabo might appear to be an aging flower child, but she talked as fast as a day trader.

  “So we’ve heard,” Jack said.

  “Punishment doesn’t work. Programs that focus on interpersonal skills and anger management do. Behavioral training, like stress inoculation. Positive reinforcement with graduated sanctions. Basically, we have to teach them morality. It’s an old-fashioned word and an old-fashioned concept, but like all fundamental truths we eventually come back to it. Caring about other human beings is where all civility begins and it’s a learned response that we have to teach.”

  “Because their parents didn’t,” Riley said.

  “Nine times out of ten, yes. Their parents didn’t. Sometimes they’re abusive, often they’re too wasted to notice they even have a child, or alternatively they want to be the kid’s best buddy instead of their parent. They let day cares, schools, and prisons teach their kids what they should have been teaching them.”

  “And Rachael?” Riley prompted.

  “Rachael,” she said, nodding to concede that she had gotten off topic. “All these kids want is someone to tell them that they have value, that they matter, and we have to do that first. Only then can we get into what’s been done to them and what they’ve done to others. We have to acknowledge their pain—this isn’t coddling. It isn’t being all touchy feely and agreeing that they couldn’t help taking a knife to their mother.”

  “I get that,” Riley soothed.

  “You try to get it, I see. Your partner doesn’t.”

  Jack cleared his throat. “I understand that they’ve been through a lot.”

  “A lot? Some of the things I’ve seen and heard in this place give me nightmares. Anyway, what we try to do here, above all, is be honest. About what has been done to them as well as vice versa. I needed Rachael to talk about her mother, what she remembered of her. Her father, her grandfather. Who ought to be boiled in oil as far as I’m concerned, but that’s a topic for another discussion.” She gave them a wry smile. “Then we would move on to Rachael’s violence. The fights, the threats, the kids she stabbed. Because we do need them to take responsibility for their actions. Need them to acknowledge that what they’ve been through may be a reason but it’s not an excuse.”

  “And Rachael?” Riley repeated.

  “Nowhere. I got nowhere. Nothing but bravado and arrogance—which isn’t such a bad coping mechanism. It’s better than cutting or clinical depression. But I needed her to stop coping and start dealing. In a safe place where you have support, that’s where it’s time to start dealing.

  “She refused to speak o
f her grandfather, other than to say she wished she’d killed him. Can’t blame her for that. But she also professed no interest in her absentee mother or her dad in jail. All she would say about the kids she’d killed was, ‘They deserved it.’ I’m used to kids stonewalling, arguing, manipulating. They don’t understand subtlety at that age and they’re not super good at reading faces—though these kids are better than most, since their survival often depends on it—but they’re still kids. So if one tactic doesn’t work they veer into another, obvious as hell. I didn’t worry at first, with Rachael. There’s always a testing period, waiting to see if I’ll be judgmental. If I’ll tell them they’re bad seeds. If I have the slightest clue what I’m talking about. If I can be easily conned. If I give a shit.”

  “If you’ll stick,” Jack said.

  She beamed at him as if he were a student showing unexpected improvement. “Exactly. I go in knowing it’s going to be a process to bond. Without a strong bond to an adult the kid isn’t going to make progress. It’s as simple as that. Some take days to trust me, to start really talking. Some take weeks, some take months. I figured Rachael for the latter.”

  Jack said, “Dr. Szabo—”

  “Call me Melanie. I don’t stand on ceremony.” She tossed the now-empty water bottle into the recycling bin, making the shot easily.

  “Um, yes—what did Rachael talk about?”

  “Not much. Better at asking questions than answering them. Was I married, how long had I been a shrink. Which exterior doors were locked, had anyone ever jumped from the basketball court—”

  “You think she planned to escape?”

  “All these kids plan to escape. What else do you think about when you’re behind locked doors? But I told her there would be no point in running away. She’d been doing that all her life and it hadn’t served her well. She didn’t seem serious, just yanking my chain. But about her, her life, her goals … nothing. She’d sit in the chair and stare at the wall behind my head. Or she’d stare at me, try to freak me out. One time she got up and did a handstand against the wall, as easily as a gymnast; they’re so flexible at that age. Stayed a minute, then let her feet fall, then retook her seat as if nothing had happened. Kids do a lot of wild things in therapy—that was a new one.”

  Riley said, “She carried a gold ring in her pocket. Did she tell you who that belonged to?”

  Szabo’s eyes widened slightly. “No. I never saw anything like that. She didn’t mention it.”

  “Was she close to her father?”

  “Didn’t talk about him, as I said. I asked, she ignored me. I asked when he would get out, she shrugged. I asked if that meant she didn’t know or didn’t care. She shrugged again.” Szabo gave them a rueful smile and her shoulders sank a bit. “See what I mean? Therapy hadn’t been especially productive for Rachael. I figured it would take time. I figured we had time.”

  Jack asked, “Where is her grandfather now?”

  “Jail. Permanently, or at least for all intents and purposes. The judge gave him twenty, which at his age is a death sentence. Hooray hooray. Five years too late for Rachael, though.”

  Jack couldn’t think of anything else to ask. Riley finished up with, “Is there anything else you can think of that we ought to know?”

  Melanie Szabo thought, frowned, thought again. “Only that I’d like to think Rachael had a chance. A chance to leave the violence behind. A chance to heal all those wounds and get a decent life for herself. What we would call a ‘normal’ life. Everyone deserves normal. But you know, I don’t think that ever would have happened. I would never say a kid is a lost cause … but after years and years of working with these kids every day, you get a feeling. Instinct. I don’t think Rachael would have ever achieved ‘normal.’ The damage was just too great.” She teared up again. “Poor kid.”

  Chapter 6

  Assistant Director Quintero found them a different small counseling/legal services room to interview Luis Borgia. The day students, he explained, were kids who had been kicked out of public schools and had legal procedures pending. Some were chronic runaways, and some had committed nonviolent offenses. Most had technical violations, parole offenses, curfew breaking, truancy, explained the slim young man. Justin Quintero was a dark-skinned guy of about thirty-five with the cheekbones of a GQ model. He stood in the separate entrance area for day program students, on the south side of the building. Teaching staff checked each day student in every morning and out every night. Over twelve would be given breakfast and lunch in the visiting areas with the residents in their age groups, with therapy sessions carved out from study times. After classes ended they would leave the building and go home to, one hoped, their families.

  “There’s no need to put these kids in custody. Their acting out is always—always—a cry for attention, and if we respond by isolating them, well, that just starts the downward spiral. These late teens, early twenties are when kids usually grow out of delinquency even without intervention, so—sorry, I’m lecturing.” He checked in the final youngster, who appeared to be about six to Jack, but he tended to underestimate ages. Every person had begun looking young to him. Rookie cops didn’t seem old enough to date a girl, much less carry a gun.

  He and Riley walked with Quintero as he escorted the under-twelve group from the entrance foyer to their separate breakfast area. The teens were left on their own, but since all restricted areas were locked they’d be safely funneled to their classes. Quintero herded the very young ones with an ease born of practice, and indeed, they seemed to be a fairly typical group of kids, energetic and griping at the same time. One demanded to know what they’d be having for breakfast and proclaimed that it had better not be eggs. Another pointed out that eggs were baby chickens and that was gross. A girl said the eggs weren’t baby chickens and never would be so it wasn’t gross as long as they were cooked, because that “got all the germs out.” A little boy with dark shadows under his eyes said nothing at all. A little girl with stiff pigtails talked quietly to herself.

  After they’d been turned over to the under-twelve unit, Quintero guided the cops back. The building could be confusing, Jack saw. There were so many rooms, an intake office, a shower/locker room for incoming residents—no doubt where they had washed the blood off Rachael Donahue upon her arrival—an infirmary with two beds (now empty), and a room storing new clothing in a large range of sizes, should it be needed. Three separate large rooms, resembling inexpensive hotel lobbies, for family meetings (even for parties, Quintero explained, so an extended family group could have a private area). Many small rooms used interchangeably for lawyers or counselors. A tiny break room with lockers for staff. An industrial kitchen with heavy locks on its doors to be opened only by kitchen staff or administrators (liability, Quintero explained, because of the heating elements and cutlery—not because the county worried that the night nurse might make off with a box of English muffins).

  Jack said, “I thought most of the resident kids had committed violent crimes. Isn’t there a worry putting the regular—I mean sort of regular—students with—”

  “No. Well … it’s not that simple. Not all residents have had violent incidents, and some day program kids have. A few residents have nowhere else to go and are here for a few days pending assignment to a foster home. Some of the day kids have committed assault or robbery, but their home situation is relatively stable and they’re pending adjudication. Out on bail, in other words.”

  Juveniles weren’t “convicted” when found guilty of a crime, they were “adjudicated.” And then they weren’t put in jail, they were put in detention, and usually only for a few months to a year. For offenses committed before age eighteen, they could be held only until they turned twenty-one.

  Quintero said, “Our main focus with the day students is to keep them out of custody and instead work on their mental health and their family’s parenting abilities. If all goes as it should they may stay out of jail permanently. Meanwhile they’re closely monitored and can keep up with t
heir schooling, which is another reason to do everything to keep these kids out of the usual incarceration—the late teens are when the brain is most primed to learn critical thinking and decision making. Slapping them in jail where they’ll get a rudimentary and regimented education is just dooming them for life.”

  He found them an available counseling room and ushered them inside, still talking. “We work very hard to find exceptional teachers. Usually no one is jumping at a chance to teach at a juvenile detention facility, but once they get here they find it better than the average public school. We give our teachers above average pay and every administrative support we can to retain them, and to spread the word.”

  “What’s this kid’s story?” Riley asked.

  “Luis? Runaway. His mother’s boyfriend was, let’s say, problematic. To avoid going home Luis would hang out with lowlifes, where he racked up a few minor drug charges. But his parole officer got Children and Family Services involved, his mother kicked the boyfriend out, and she and Luis are trying to make better choices. He misses his stepbrother, but otherwise he’s been doing well here.” As he shut the door he added, “Very well.”

  Jack finished the unspoken warning: “So we shouldn’t screw him back up.”

  Riley slapped his notebook on the small table. “If they don’t salvage these kids, it won’t be for lack of conviction.”

  The lavender walls held no decoration except a poster of a beach with crystal-clear water, framed with lightweight plastic. Worn but clean carpeting reached the walls. No windows. “The tables are all round here. Did you notice that?”

  Riley nodded. “More inclusive. Less confrontational. Plus kids won’t stumble and hit their head on a corner.”

  “They’re teens, not toddlers.”

  “Yeah, I know, but that mind-set … it never really goes away. I still hesitate when I set the table for the girls. Is Hannah old enough for a serrated knife?” Riley, divorced, made every effort to stay in his daughters’ lives.