Through the Evil Days: A Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne Mystery (Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne Mysteries) (8 page)

Like the chief had said, Kevin signed off on all the bagged evidence. Now he was back in his squad car, updating his preliminary notes on his laptop and waiting for Patrick Lent, who was in his car updating
his
notes on his laptop. They were going to swap files before leaving the scene.

“Fifteen-sixty-three, this is Dispatch. Respond, fifteen-sixty-three.”

Kevin unhooked his mic. “Yeah, Harlene, I’m here.” He was too damn tired to use code.

“You still at the MacAllens’ place?”

“For about ten more minutes. What’s up?”

“Hadley’s got something for you. Hold on, I’m connecting you to fifteen-seventy.”

There was a snapping sound, and Hadley’s voice came on, thinned out as it always was on the car-to-car band. “Flynn? You’ve found remains?”

“Yeah. Two adults with GSWs to the head. Why?”

Even over the bad connection, he could tell she was upset. “There may be another body in there. It turns out the MacAllens were fostering a little girl.”

*   *   *

“Her name’s Mikayla Johnson.” Hadley wasn’t great at doing the unemotional cop voice at the best of times. Now, standing in the squad room reporting on this little girl, she was worse than usual. “She’s eight years old.” Eight. The same age as Genny. Her throat tightened. “The MacAllens’ daughter told me about her when I interviewed her. It took me a while to find anyone at Children and Family Services who could tell me anything, but I finally got a caseworker who knew a few of the details.” She focused on the notes in her hand. “Mother, Annie Johnson, lost custody a few months ago after she got cranked on meth and drove into a tree. Mikayla was severely injured. She had to have a liver transplant.” She glanced up from her notebook. “The MacAllens had experience dealing with the post-transplant issues. The daughter I spoke with had had a kidney transplant when she was a kid.”

MacAuley looked at Flynn, sprawled in a chair, his usual immaculate uniform crumpled and filthy. “Any sign of a third body?”

“No. As soon as I got the call from Hadley—from Officer Knox—the fire marshal’s team and I started the search over again. By the time it got too dark to see, we’d sifted through anything we hadn’t gotten to during the afternoon. She wasn’t in the house when it burned.”

“Thank God,” Hadley said under her breath. Flynn glanced at her.

“Did anybody have overnight visitation privileges?” the dep asked. “Grandparents? Aunt and uncle?”

Hadley shook her head. “Supervised visitation only with the family members, according to CFS.”

“Yeah. Probably a whole clan brewing up hillbilly heroin.” MacAuley chewed his lip. “So this kid was taken. Why kill the MacAllens? Why burn the place down?”

“Patrick Lent, the state investigator, told me lots of first-time arsonists overestimate how much a fire will destroy.” Flynn brushed at his sooty pants almost unconsciously. “There was accelerant splashed all over the place. Could be whoever set the fire thought everything would be burned down to ashes, with no way to tell who had died in the fire and who had survived.”

“Where’s the mother?” The dep’s gaze went back to Hadley.

“Out on bail awaiting trial for possession, reckless endangerment, criminal speeding, evading and resisting.”

“Is there a father in the picture?”

Hadley shook her head. “Not according to the birth certificate CFS had on file. There are grandparents over in Fort Henry. I’ve got last known addresses.”

“Okay. We start with the mom and the grandparents.” He pointed to her, then to Flynn. “See what you can find out about the father, or another man in the mom’s life who might be involved. You’ll want to talk to the girl’s teachers and her caseworker. See if she self-reported anything funny going on beforehand. Run up the sex offenders list. It’s not likely, but it could be she was marked as a target by a pedophile.”

Hadley glanced at Flynn before looking back at the dep. “You want
us
to take lead on this?”

Flynn wiped the side of his face, leaving a faint sooty streak along his angular jawline. “Both of us?”

“Unless you’ve got something better to do, yes, both of you.” The deputy chief raised his bushy gray eyebrows. “The chief has confidence that you two can handle this, and so do I.” His jaw tightened, and Hadley could almost hear the unspoken warning:
So don’t screw this up.

“You’re going to let the chief know, right?” Flynn was usually gung ho for any investigation, but right now he sounded a little wavery. Hadley didn’t blame him.

“’Course I am. I expect he’ll head back here right quick. Skipping the murder investigation was bad enough. A missing kid’s even more time-sensitive. Not to mention—” MacAuley snapped his mouth shut.

“Dep,” Hadley said, “about that time sensitivity.”

“What about it?”

“According to the caseworker at CFS, Mikayla’s on several daily medications because of her new liver.” She checked her notepad to get the word right. “Immunosuppressants.”

“Good. Find her doctor and put out a med alert at all the area pharmacies. If we’re lucky, whoever took her will waltz right in and fill the prescription.”

Hadley shook her head. “No, listen, the caseworker told me. She has to have this stuff or her body will start to reject her transplant. If whoever took her didn’t also grab her medication, or doesn’t know how important it is, she’s going to get very sick, very fast.”

“How fast?” Flynn moved to her side, his head cocked to see her notebook.

She could feel his nearness, a tingle along her skin, a slow deep surge of blood. She stared at her notes and forced herself to concentrate. “A few days. Maybe seven or eight. After that, no drugs will help. Her body rejects the liver and…” Her voice trailed off.

“She dies,” Flynn said.

13.

Annie Johnson’s address of record was a third-floor walk-up on Causeway that looked like it was one good storm away from collapsing into the old canal that ran behind the street. This part of town, with its weary tenement houses and narrow streets running down to abandoned mills and rotting remnants of wharves, was not a place the shoppers or skiers or leaf peepers would ever see. Johnson’s was one of several apartment houses in the neighborhood that were regularly visited by the MKPD. Kevin debated a stealth arrival by parking a block away, but he figured by the time he and Hadley had walked halfway to the building, everybody on the street would be texting each other a warning. They double-parked and got out in front of the apartment house.

In the sickly orange glow of the streetlights, the sagging facade’s peeling paint and battered aluminum trim were obvious. Hadley pulled on her watch cap and gloves. “I’ll take the fire escape.”

“In case she runs? You sure?”

“I’d rather hang out in the freezing dark than breathe the air in there. Everybody over the age of seven smokes in that building. You risk lung cancer just walking up a flight of stairs.”

“It can’t be worse than the Los Angeles smog.”

“Hey. California was banning indoor smoking while you New Yorkers were still selling kids packs out of cigarette machines.” She started to grin up at him, then looked away. Their bitter words from last November hung in the air.

Look, Flynn, we can still be friends,
she had said.

With me slicing myself open every day and you waiting and dreading the next time I break down and beg you to love me? Is that what you really want? No. I guess I don’t.

He had been so heartsick, he couldn’t even face her.
I didn’t think so.

It was his fault she couldn’t even smile at him now. God, he was stupid. He cleared his throat. “I’ll give you a squawk if she’s not there. No sense waiting around in this cold any longer than you have to.”

She nodded without looking at him and headed to the back of the building. Kevin tried the front door. Locked. He flattened his hands and pressed all eight apartment buttons at the same time. Somebody would buzz him in without bothering to check.

He was right. The door clicked open at the same time a male voice crackled “Who is it?” over the speaker. Kevin slipped in and jogged up the stairs, figuring speed was more important than silence. At Johnson’s apartment, he rapped on the door. Nothing. He rapped a second time, then rang the bell.

“Who is it?” The voice was muffled but definitely female.

“Annie Johnson? Millers Kill police. We’d like to talk to you about your daughter, Mikayla.”

There was no response, except for the thudding of footsteps and a thump.

“Ms. Johnson! Millers Kill police. Open the door and put your hands on top of your head!”

His shoulder mic cracked on. “She’s running!” Hadley said. “She’s on the fire escape. She’s carrying—” The line went dead. Kevin stepped back and smashed the flat of his boot against the door’s lock. The shock of the impact vibrated up to his hip, but the door didn’t budge. Dead bolt. Great. He spun around and leaped for the stairs, bouncing down three at a time until he arrived at the phone-booth-sized foyer. He burst through the outer door in time to see Hadley race past, clutching a … blanket? Pillow? He didn’t waste time asking, just took off after her. He pounded up Causeway, rounding the corner and nearly running into Hadley, who was bent over, panting. “Lost her,” she gasped.

Kevin scanned the area. “Did you see if she cut between those buildings? She could have gone through the yards to Beale Street. Or maybe the back alley behind Depot.”

“Didn’t see her.” Hadley sucked in air. “She got too far ahead of me.”

“What the hell happened? I thought you had the fire escape covered?”

“I did! I was drawing my Taser and warning her to stop when she threw
this
over my head.” Hadley thrust the bundle toward him. It was one of those life-sized baby dolls, tied up in a couple of flannel blankets.

“She threatened you with a doll?”

“I thought it was a baby, dumb-ass! I dropped my Taser and dove for it. By the time I saw what it really was, she was off the fire escape and halfway down the street.
Shit!
” Hadley kicked a clump of ice into the street.

“Why are you still carrying it?”

Hadley looked down at the doll. “I have no idea.” She tucked the decoy baby beneath her arm. “Let’s go see what we can find in her place.”

They went in through the fire escape window. Normally, Kevin was a stickler for observing the proprieties, but he didn’t have the patience to track down the landlord or the management company and demand a key. He wanted to get in, get out, and hopefully salvage something from this goat cluster.

Annie Johnson’s apartment was a mess—crumpled fast-food wrappers everywhere, garbage piled haphazardly around the trash can, clothes in cardboard boxes and broken laundry baskets. The kitchen smelled like someone had taken a dump in it, and the bathroom mold looked like something out of a horror movie about creeping slime.

Hadley tugged on her evidence gloves. “Jesus. I am so looking forward to getting home tonight. My place is going to look like the Ritz-Carlton after this.”

Kevin was searching the kitchen cabinets for gasoline or kerosene when Hadley yelled, “Flynn. C’mere.” He followed her voice into one of the bedrooms. Hadley had snapped on the overhead light. “Take a look at this.”

The room looked like a pharmaceutical company’s loading dock. No furniture, no decorations, just box after box filled with decongestants. “Pseudoephedrine,” he said.

“All different kinds.” Hadley pointed out three different name brands and two generics in the box nearest them. “Annie Johnson’s been smurfing.”

“Yeah.” Since the Feds had starting restricting access to pseudoephedrine, meth cookers, who needed the drug to create methamphetamine, had gotten creative. The bigger operations switched to hijacking barrels of the stuff off Chinese cargo ships. The smaller manufacturers hired smurfers, who traveled from pharmacy to pharmacy buying the legal limit with fake IDs. Smurfers usually worked in teams, making their purchases over a half hour or so, then hitting the next store.

“This is a lot for one just one person to buy,” Hadley said.

“I was just thinking that.” Kevin gestured toward the narrow hallway. “Any sign there’s someone else living here?”

“One bedroom is set up for a little girl. I’m guessing it was Mikayla’s before her mom lost custody. I didn’t see any men’s things in the other bedroom.”

“She could have a female roommate.”

“Maybe. One way or the other, she’s got people helping her with this.” Hadley looked up at Kevin. “Which means one of them might be holding Mikayla for her.”

*   *   *

She let Flynn make the call to the deputy chief. It was cowardly, but after twelve hours on duty, she just wasn’t up to personally hearing what MacAuley thought of her brilliant police work. As it was, she winced every time Flynn said, “Yes, but—” and “I know, but—” Clearly, the dep was in rare form. When he hung up, Flynn looked a little green around the gills.

“He’s calling in the state CSI van to take pictures and secure the evidence.”

“We’re gonna need a bigger van,” she misquoted.

Flynn’s face creased into what would have been a grin if they weren’t both so tired. “He wants you to stay here and see they get it all loaded. Then you can clock out.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going to write up the report and put in a records request to Children and Family Services and Johnson’s bail bondsman. Eric’s already heading over to the grandparents’ to get their initial statement. We can follow up tomorrow.” He gave her a sly look. “After you put in some track practice.”

She wound up staying another hour and a half. Sergeant Morin, their usual CSI tech, brought enough coffee for four. She drank hers and the one meant for Flynn as well, and left, after helping to load the van, with a great deal more energy and a warm glow of appreciation for the staties. She could make it home in time to put Genny to bed and check over Hudson’s homework.

Her heart sank when she saw the rental car in Granddad’s driveway. She adored her grandfather and was grateful he’d given her a home after her divorce, but at least once a month he had some old navy buddy up to visit. They would stay up until all hours drinking, which was bad for Granddad’s diabetes, and smoking, which was bad for his heart. She squared her shoulders as she mounted the kitchen steps, readying herself to play Health Cop.