The Angel of Knowlton Park (25 page)

He had a crime to solve. This was no time to be walking, trip trap, trip trap down Memory Lane. "Come on," he said, heading toward the door.

"Jeez," she said, coming after him, dragging her brother by the hand. "You don't have to get sore, you know. Being old's not so bad. It's better than..." She stopped. Like him, she had places she wouldn't go, and she was only thirteen.

They rented
Finding Nemo
and
The Princess Bride.
Then she directed him to a shabby white three decker. She hesitated before getting out of the car. "Will you come up with us and explain?"

He walked them up onto the porch and rang the bell. A plump, red-faced blonde with black roots answered, a baby on her hip. Her mouth tightened when she saw them, and she snapped, "You said half an hour, Nina. You're old enough to tell time." Her eyes shifted to Burgess. "Who are you?"

"Detective Sergeant Burgess. Portland Police."

"Nina!" The woman's tone was somewhere between anger and a whine. "What have you done now?" Implying that Nina was habitually in trouble? He wouldn't have thought so.

"And you are?"

Her eyes shifted back to him. "Mary Turner. I'm their foster mother."

"May I come in?"

She blinked and stepped back. "Of course. Of course. Come on in. I'm sorry. After what happened with that little boy, I was just worried."

"I understand." He followed her into a dim, stuffy room with shades drawn against the heat. A large oscillating fan sent out brief, tantalizing bursts of cool. A toddler in a playpen was earnestly arranging soft cloth blocks. A small boy lay on the sofa, asleep.

"We got a movie," Nina said. "Could we watch it?"

The woman shrugged wearily. "Just don't wake Patrick. He's been a beast today."

Nina nodded her understanding. "He just misses his mother."

"Why don't you come in the kitchen," Mary Turner suggested. "I've got a fan out there. It's not too bad." He followed her through a doorway and was waved into a chair. "You want some coffee?" When he hesitated, she smiled. "Look, I'm sorry I was crabby... this heat... all these kids... you'd be crabby, too." She put the baby down in a crib, wound a mobile, then grabbed the coffee and a filter, and raised her eyebrow.

"Sure," he said. "I'd love some coffee." As she turned to fix it, he said, "They didn't do anything wrong."

"I would have been surprised if they did," she said. "Nina's such a little old lady when she's with Neddy... but she's still a kid. They're all terrible about time. I let her take an inch, one day she'll take a mile. She's thirteen, after all. So what happened?"

"Picking through the trash cans, they found some clothes that might have belonged to Timmy Watts. Nina figured it out and called us."

She set the coffee pot on the counter with a crash and sank into a chair, fumbling for a cigarette. She shoved it in her mouth, lit it, and inhaled deeply. "Oh no," she said. "Oh hell. They really didn't need that."

He waited. She inhaled again and blew it slowly out. "Last thing they need's more death and violence in their lives. Their father's up in Warren now, sent there for killing their mother. Nina and Ned were home when it happened. Father had no family. No one in the mother's family would take 'em. Court gave 'em to the state. State sent 'em here."

"All I need is a statement of what they saw," he said. "I can send a juvenile officer. But Nina knows more than she's saying. Something that happened out there spooked her."

She stubbed out her cigarette abruptly. "You'd be spooked, too, if..." Remembered she was talking to a cop. "Sorry. She's a funny kid. Sometimes she's happy go lucky and acts her age, other times, she goes all silent and broody. I keep telling her social worker to get her some therapy. Social worker says everything's fine. Shit... excuse me... but how could things be fine when you've seen your father beat your mother to death? When you tried to stop it and got beat on yourself for your trouble?"

She pushed back her chair and went back to the coffee. "I know you gotta do your job, but keep her name out of this. Both their names. Last thing those poor kids need is to be chased by reporters. It's taken me months to get Neddy out of his shell. He used to curl up on the couch and huddle there, just like Patrick, that little boy you saw out there." She poured the water in, flicked the button, and got out cream and sugar and two mugs. "You ask me, they ought to pay me for therapy. State don't hardly pay enough to keep 'em in food and clothes, let alone the things kids need, like toys and books."

He didn't need any more reasons to dislike the Department of Human Services. "I don't see why their names should become public," he said, meaning it, knowing how badly things could go wrong. Knowing Cote might do anything, even put kids in danger, if it meant he could tell the press he had a lead. Already thinking how he'd bury this.

"Damned straight," she said, and grinned at his surprise. "Can't swear around the kids. Gotta do something to stay in practice."

"It's good of you to take them."

"Someone has to." A shrug. "I figure it might as well be me." She scooped up the pot, poured his coffee, and set the mug in front of him along with a spoon. "Fix it the way you like it." She took a step toward the refrigerator. "You hungry?"

He shook his head. "We had ice cream."

"And you rented them movies." She leaned back from the waist, stretching, her hands on her hips, and studied him curiously. "You sure you're a cop?"

"That's what Nina asked. Since when are cops not allowed to be nice?"

"Since as long as I can remember."

"I'm sorry to hear that," he said. "Is Nina interested in boys?"

"As far as I know, she's at the looking stage. She doesn't date. Why?"

"It looks like they might have seen the person who dumped those clothes. Ned told me it was a woman. Nina claims not to have noticed anything. Ned says it's because she was talking with some boy. When I asked about the boy, she clammed up."

"Her private life's all she's got that's hers, you know. That might be all it is. You want, I'll see if she'll tell me anything. Sometimes she does, sometimes not."

"I'd appreciate that."

"Ninety-nine kids out of a hundred, they wouldn't have bothered to call you at all," she said. "Nina's special." Then she said, "I don't know. What I read in the paper, that wasn't any woman's crime. Maybe Neddy was wrong. I worry about his eyes sometimes. He squints a lot. Can get 'em checked if I just make ten thousand phone calls and fill out a thousand forms."

He nodded.

They finished their coffee in a companionable silence. He thanked her and left, pausing in the living room to say good-bye to Nina and Ned. They were deeply immersed in
The Princess Bride,
Ned curled up against Nina's side, the sleeping Patrick on the other. Hardly more than a child herself, Nina had become a little mother.

Chapter 19

Back on the waterfront, things were finishing up. Stan Perry was snarling at the dispersing crowd. Devlin, hot in his blue Portland PD jumpsuit, stood off to one side, his evidence kit around him, directing two gloved officers loading the trash can into a public works truck. Burgess parked at the curb, opened the trunk so Devlin could load his gear, and walked over.

His throat was scratchy from the constant temperature changes, his knee gnawed like a toothache, and his head ached from heat and lack of sleep. He hadn't looked in a mirror, but it felt like he wore it all on his face, that the world, looking at him, got back nothing but bad news.

"Detective Perry," he said, "could I offer you a lift somewhere?"

"Mars is looking good. Can't be hotter than this shit hole. Or is that Mercury?"

"Mercury. And it is hotter." Burgess waved an admonishing finger. "You know what Vince says about language."

"No. I've forgotten. I've forgotten everything except being hot and miserable. I can't even remember why it was I didn't go into my father's office and sell real estate like my brother. I must have been out of my expletive-deleted mind." He pulled down the last of the crime scene tape, looked around for the trash can, remembered that they'd taken it away. He started for the car, yellow streamers trailing behind him. "We gonna get this fucker, Joe? Before he does another kid?"

Burgess stopped abruptly. "Do you doubt it?"

Perry's big shoulders rose and fell under his sweaty shirt. "Just seems like we got nothin'."

"We've got plenty. We just have to work with it. Remember, Stan, put a lever in the right place, you can move the earth."

"You know where to put it?"

"Not yet. But I will."

"I get as old as you, will I have your certainty?"

"Probably." He didn't bother to explain that it wasn't certainty. Nothing was more uncertain than a case like this. It was faith. Faith that with hard work and persistence, it could all work out. That experience and determination counted for something. That if they did it right, the good guys would win.

Perry stalked up to the car, untangled the tape, and threw it in the trunk. "I don't know what it is," he said. "I just feel like beating on something."

Burgess slammed the door and fired up the engine. "You're not alone," he said.

"No," Devlin agreed. "You're not alone. Some cases do that to you. You get anything from those kids?"

"Little boy says he saw a woman drop a bag in that can."

Perry snorted. "No woman did that. Kid musta made a mistake. What'd the girl say?"

"She was talking to some boy and didn't notice."

"Get the boy's name?"

"Said she didn't know it."

"You believe her?"

"No."

"You push her?"

"Girl's already watched her father kill her mother. I thought I'd take it easy. Maybe send Andrea."

"Let's hope Andrea can get something," Perry said. "We got a family of know nothings, a neighborhood of see nothings. Anyone who might know something, like the sister, Iris, or this girl, they all got lost memory syndrome. This case is like swimming in a cesspool. Every time it looks like there's something solid to grab onto it turns out to be shit."

"Nicely put," Devlin agreed.

The rest of the ride back they were silent, Perry and Devlin drinking in the cool air, lolling against the seats, eyes closed, more than halfway exhausted. Devlin never complained. He was a workhorse of a man, who, like Burgess, didn't distinguish between work and life. Behind the closed eyes and the slack face, Burgess knew an eager mind was already looking forward to the challenge of lifting prints off that plastic bag, fibers off the bloody clothes.

Perry was something else, still burning with the youthful passion to "do something." The problem was that the something to be done was steady and ponderous spade work, not shoot outs and fireworks. The challenge was keeping Perry's nose to the grindstone, not letting him go larking about, chasing his theories, getting himself in trouble.

"You know, Stan," he said, "we haven't finished with the family yet. No one has talked with Jason or Ricky Martin or Lloyd Watts. Maybe you should see if you can track them down."

Perry's "Sure thing, Sarge," was pleased and eager.

"Captain Cote wants to see you," the desk sergeant told him.

Burgess nodded. He had a couple things he wanted to do first. He went straight to Melia's office. Melia was on the phone, so he waited, leaning his head back and closing his eyes. The instant he relaxed, he felt the ugliness of the case settle around him like Perry's metaphorical cesspool. The stink of it, the density, the utter filthy darkness. Competing with that scream in his head, which he knew was Timmy Watts, was another voice, the deep, rasping voice of doubt. Was he too tired, too angry, maybe too haunted by the Kristin Marks case to do this one justice? Was Perry right that he should be pushing Iris Martin and Nina Mallett? Was he going to miss something, screw this up, not because of indifference, but because he cared too much? The thought unnerved him.

Melia cradled the phone and gave him a hard look. "What's wrong?" he asked.

"Afraid I'm going to miss something."

"Don't go there, Joe." Melia ran a hand through his crisp, graying hair. Younger. And grayer. It was all that responsibility. "Get anything from our witnesses?"