The Angel of Knowlton Park (10 page)

"It's Vinnie's call," Burgess said. "And it's a tough one. Let's give these people a copy of the inventory and head back downtown."

"How you gonna list it?"

"Ziploc bag of crystals. Rock candy? With a question mark." He put it into an evidence bag, then carefully logged it onto both inventories. He pulled out his handkerchief and mopped his face. "I could use a shower." He limped toward the door, carrying the stuff they'd found.

"After this place, I'd like to burn my clothes, shower, and down a six-pack."

"Gonna be a while before you get to do any of those things. Besides, that's my shirt, and I'm fond of it." Burgess thought of the canoe on his car. The fishing poles. He could shower at the station, but all he had to change into were casual clothes. He needed to grab a minute to call Chris. Tell her what was going on. That their vacation would at least be delayed and might not be taking place.

He hoped she'd understand, but even though she was wise about relationships and flexible about his crazy schedule—a refreshing change from other women he'd known—it was hard for anyone to understand the all-consuming nature of the detective's job. Hard to live with. That's why detectives had such a high divorce rate. People expected them to be normal. They acted normal. Looked normal. Even lived normal until something like this came along. Then it swallowed them up. Even if they loved their wives, girlfriends, kids, their passion was for the job—the adrenaline, the problem-solving nature of it, the competitive good guy versus bad guy thing. Detectives had too many reasons they needed to win.

They found Pap Watts at the kitchen table, staring at a bottle of beer. They gave him the inventory, and Burgess made his speech about calling if he remembered anything that might help with the investigation, especially information about Timmy's last day. Burgess left his card on the table by Watts's elbow, not sure the man had heard anything he'd said. He didn't ask that they have Darlene call when she finished work. Iris might be the only one who was clinically deaf, but the rest of the family might as well be.

Pap never acknowledged them or took his eyes off his beer. Burgess had seen enough people struck dumb by shock, paralyzed by grief to discount people's behavior right after a tragedy. Sometimes they did strange things, said strange things. Pap seemed neither shocked nor grieving. He'd given no sign that he'd cared for his son, asked none of the usual questions about suffering, would they get the guy, or about planning the funeral.

"I'll call you tomorrow, when the Medical Examiner is finished," Burgess said, "so you can make funeral arrangements."

Pap raised his head. "Don't the state take care of that?" he said. "All the taxes people pay, I should think they oughta."

Burgess doubted anyone in the Watts family had ever paid a cent in taxes. "Families usually..." Decided to save his breath. "The Victims Witness Advocate will be in touch."

Back in the car, Burgess called Vince Melia and told him they were coming in.

"Find anything?"

"Another big headache."

"Meaning?"

"Tell you when we get there."

"I already have a headache," Melia groaned, which he probably did. The heat had given them all headaches. "You're gonna keep me in suspense?"

"A few minutes longer."

"You had permission to search? Stan was there? Witnessed everything?"

"I'm not a virgin, Vince. I get something, I'm not letting some lawyer screw me out of it. Isn't that why you pulled me back from vacation?"

"A bit testy, are we?"

"We'd like to take that place apart."

"This is the dead kid's family."

"They're not exactly Ozzie and Harriet. Oh, and Vince?"

"Yeah...?" There was hesitation in Melia's voice. An 'Oh, Vince' from Burgess usually meant trouble. "Rouse whoever you have to at the Department of Human Services. I want the file on Timmy Watts. I want to know who signed off on leaving that child in such filth and neglect... what lily-livered asshole signed that boy's death warrant."

"Take it easy, Joe."

"Easy! If you'd seen."

"When you get here," Melia repeated. It didn't belong on the radio.

"And can you send out for food."

"Sandwiches. Good call," Perry said, pulling in behind Burgess's car.

Burgess got out, watched Perry drive away, then, despite the heat, stood in the street. His head was pounding. He should start the engine, get his air conditioning working. He should cool down, drink water, take Advil. But he didn't want to carry the stink of the Watts house into his car where it would linger for days, greeting him with rotting garbage, dirty diapers, stale beer and dog crap. As he knew too goddamned well, describe that shithole to some citizen and they'd say, 'Oh no, you're exaggerating. That's impossible.' But cops knew. Cops saw the impossible, the intolerable, the inhuman all the time.

He'd kept a lid on things while he was there, but now it boiled over. He pounded on the car in frustration, kicked his tire, knowing he hurt only himself. He couldn't help it. Even in the scumbag world he traveled, some things were almost unendurable. Leaving a helpless child in that violent and filthy den of thieves was one of them.

Wearily, he unlocked the door and climbed into the car. His knee didn't want to bend. He had to drag it in after him, gritting his teeth against the pain. That cloud, though, had a small silver lining. He was so tired he could have dozed off standing up. The pain kept him awake and on edge. This many years into the bad-guy business, his vacation wrecked and his disposition not far behind, he needed a little silver lining.

Cops, like shade-growing plants, learned to thrive on small things. Just a little light was all they asked. Maybe, while he and Stan had been wading through the garbage, someone had turned up something. He cranked the air up to max, swigged some disgustingly warm water, and pulled away from the curb. Fishing poles clattering, canoe ropes straining, he headed back to 109.

Chapter 8

He backed his car in next to Perry's, got the box of stuff he'd gathered from Timmy Watts's room, and took the elevator upstairs. Devlin, Perry, and he were a rumpled, sunburned, sorry-looking lot. Melia had a fresh shirt and a worn look. Joining them were "Rocky" Jordan, their computer jockey, who'd done the records search on the Watts household and was checking the neighborhood for sex offenders, and Lt. James Shaheen, the day shift commander. Shaheen had secured the scene and was coordinating the neighborhood canvass.

Shaheen was a heavy man whose sandy crew cut was making a graceful segue into gray. Burgess's hair was graying in clumps, his colorist a kindergartner with a clumsy paintbrush. They'd come on the force about the same time. From day one, Shaheen had wanted his current job. He loved the day-to-day stuff of managing personnel, liked being a gruff father figure to scores of young cops. Burgess had taken longer to know he wanted to be a detective, not so much finding it as it found him. Now being watchful and suspicious had become as natural as breathing. An empty car beside the road could send his mind racing. He faced the door in restaurants, like a gunslinger in the old west.

"You might wanna keep an eye on Delinsky," Burgess said. "He's going to run himself into the ground on this one. His neighborhood and all. And he knew the boy."

"I'll take care of it." Shaheen patted his shoulder with a beefy hand. "Had two guys pass out on me today," he said. "Rather not lose a third."

His eyes drifted to the window, where even this late in the day, the sun still had bite. "Heat's gotta break soon. I can't remember a summer like this. Even nice people are in piss-poor moods. My wife's a bitch. My kids are sitting on their lazy asses while I'm working mine off to keep a roof over their heads. Can't even get the little ingrates to mow the goddamned lawn!"

"Too hot to mow," Burgess said. Complaining about the weather was something they did. Cops had to go out, no matter what the weather was. It gave them complaining rights. "When I was a boy, the summers were cool and perfect, with wide blue skies and fresh sea breezes. Must be this damned global warming, you think?"

Melia cleared his throat. "You two old farts wanna stop reminiscing about the good old days, when men were men and sheep were nervous? Can we get started? I've sent for sandwiches and coffee. Anybody need anything else?"

Burgess dropped his bulk into a chair, feeling ugly. Soon as he got some energy back, he was going out there to shake something loose. You didn't kill a kid in Portland, Maine and get away with it. Not on his watch. "I could use a bag of ice for my knee."

"Okay." Melia
wanted
him out there being ugly. "How's it doing, anyway?"

"Hurts like a bastard. She musta weighed three hundred. Beyond that? Who knows? Long about Wednesday, I might get around to checking it out."

"Don't be a hero," Melia said, but it was perfunctory. With Kyle missing and people on vacation, he couldn't spare another detective. Not with a rape, a domestic shooting, and a barroom brawl with a vic hanging on by his fingertips. The heat was making everyone crazy. Otherwise he would have taken Burgess to the hospital himself.

A box of sandwiches and coffee, like manna from heaven, came through the door, and Melia asked the officer who delivered it to get a bag of ice.

"Okay," Melia said, "I've got the media crawling all over me. As this gets out, every mother in the city will be in a panic. So what do we know? Joe?"

They were on the clock, tension warring with weariness as the ascendant emotion in the room. All their eyes were on him, waiting for him to tell them what they'd seen and begin to make some sense out of it. This was the process. Sum up what you know about the victim, the crime scene, and what you speculate from that. What you've learned since and where you're going next. It was frustrating to know so little.

"We've got an eight-year-old boy, wearing only underwear, with multiple stab wounds to the stomach, abdomen and chest, as well as evidence of a significant blow to the skull. Body was wrapped in a blanket and left in the park. Lee says at least some of the wounds were antemortem and there would have been significant bleeding. From the state of the blanket and the ground beneath it, we know he wasn't killed where he was found. Lividity and rigor suggest the boy was dead at least eight hours when we found him, and that for part of that time, he may have been lying on his stomach.

"It's a confusing crime scene," he said. "We don't have enough information yet to know if that was deliberate. We've got a murder that's consistent with rage. We've got overkill, frenzy, a killer who got going and couldn't stop. When we find the murder scene, there will be blood, no matter how hard they've tried to clean it up. The weapon looks like a double-edged knife, three to four inches long and three-quarters to one inch wide. Not serrated. We'll know more about that, and the manner of death, after the autopsy."

He looked at the circle of strained faces. "If he was lying on his stomach, he was lying in a pool of blood, yet his face, his torso and arms and legs were remarkably clean. Someone cleaned the blood off that child's body, then wrapped him carefully—you might almost say tenderly—in a brand new blanket. A torn piece of plastic we found under the body suggests it was then put in a black plastic trash bag, driven or carried to the park, and arranged there among the roses. Look..."

He used Grace Johnston's sketch to show the layout of the park and the careful arrangement of the body. "Seven of these coves, or bays, and he's in the second one. Not closest to the road, where it would have been easiest to dump him. And centered. Almost perfectly centered, the blankets smoothed and tucked. Someone went to some trouble." He looked at Shaheen. "Any luck finding that trash bag in any of the barrels?"

Shaheen shook his head.

"So we've got a kid from a filthy house, a kid who was always dirty, scrubbed clean and shampooed when we found him. We've got a family so indifferent they not only can't tell us the hour he was last seen, they're not even sure what day. Can't tell us when he last ate a meal at home or what that meal might have been. Can't tell us what his schedule is or who his friends are. Delinsky says the boy spent little time at home. He wandered the neighborhood. People looked after him, took him in, fed him."

He nodded to Shaheen. "I'm hoping your people are going to bring us some better information to help us build a timeline. Best we've got so far is the note he left for Grace Johnston, she's the one who called it in, saying he was running away from home."