The Way Things Are (3 page)

“I’m sure it’s not that bad. When we still kept files in hardcopy, they were usually about that big. I was on call last night and I did his intake assessment, he said his dad would be at work all night, but he should be here soon. The kid’s a sweetheart.”

Ken grabbed the stack of reports and fanned them out in front of her.

“I’m sure it just looks bad. He did say he’d been in trouble before. But he was remorseful, took responsibility for everything, and he didn’t try to excuse his behavior once. I recommended community service and restitution in lieu of charges.”

“Six vandalism charges and twenty-seven probation violations between age eleven and twelve, three vandalism charges and eighteen probation violations between age twelve and thirteen.” Ken summarized what he’d already read. “He had to petition the court for special dispensation just to be allowed to leave New York State because he was still on probation. Plus his file is a mess.” Ken flipped through the pages to a three-year-old treatment program report. “Addiction treatment recommended, addiction treatment provided, but under substance abuse, there’s not a damn thing. There are no notes about what the kid was on, so I’ve got no idea what to test him for. There were no criminal charges for possession or even records of regular urinalysis. I only see three urinalysis reports for the entire three years he was on supervision in New York, and they came back clean.”

“What?” Mary Anne leaned over the pages. “You need to call his case manager in New York to clarify that. Addiction treatment at twelve? That’s sad. Oh my….”

Ken stopped, flipped through pages, and turned back to a grainy, poorly reproduced picture. It showed a dirty brick wall covered in gang tags and filth. In the center of the mess was a starburst of lighter paint with a stylized woman’s face in the center. The face was painted in blocks of different colors, each one distinctly shaded, and up close Ken wasn’t sure it would be recognizable as human. But from a distance, from where ever the photo was taken, the woman’s face seemed to radiate pain and cruelty. There was nothing notably vicious about the picture, but the blocks of color and sharp angles somehow combined to create a horrifying vision.

Ken turned the page to study the picture from a different perspective. “It’s creepy.”

“It’s amazing.”

“It’s horrible.”

“Yes, it is. It’s also very good. He’s a talented young man, and a very troubled one. Is there any history of abuse reported? Abandonment?” Mary Anne grabbed the stack of papers from Ken’s hands.

Ken shrugged. “I haven’t read through most of it yet, so I don’t know. Is ‘abuse’ what this says to you?”

“Yes,” she said simply. “And he denied living in an abusive home when I did his assessment. He did say it was only him and his dad at home, though.”

Ken knew better than to doubt his boss. Aside from her doctorate in child psychology, she was also better at assessing people than Ken had ever been. “You think there’s a risk of abuse? Should I pull him out of the home or conduct a welfare check?”

Mary Anne shook her head without looking up from the reports. “No. There is a lot of anger in that painting, but it’s obviously a woman. It’s not sexualized in any way, so I’d bet it’s a portrait of his mother.” She found four full-page pictures of Jayden Connelly’s graffiti. She spread the pictures out over the top of the copy machine. “I wish these were in color. I bet those dark swatches are shades of red. These are angry, violent images. And the same face is in each one.”

Ken glanced between the pictures. It was obvious in two of them, but the other two she pointed out just looked like jumbles of paint. “Is it?”

“In the background,” Mary Anne pointed to the slight variations of shading that Ken would have dismissed. Two of them were clearly the same face, and the other two were the same basic shape, devoid of features. She stood back and shook her head sadly. “I’ve just got to say it again—wow. If you don’t think you’ll be able to handle this one, I’ll take it off your hands, but he’s better off with you. This boy has some serious trust issues with women.”

“Trust issues?”

“And I really think he needs to be in a fine arts program. These are amazing.”

“But the trust issues?”

“Maternal abuse. Probably abandonment. Something that sent him into a crisis. I don’t want to guess at what he was trying to work through when he painted these, but from a clinical standpoint, I’d say they’re very promising. See, the first one was a full portrait. The next one the woman is to the side and there’s just mayhem. Here in the third one, there’s more mayhem, and the woman’s lips and eyes are gone. The last one, the same shape is there in the background, but the foreground isn’t so busy. It’s calmer, almost hopeful. Still, get him into Mental Health Services.”

“Will do. Did you get a picture of the wall he vandalized down town?”

“The arresting officer got a dozen. I have copies in my e-mail.” Mary Anne brought up the picture on her cell phone and showed it to him.

“It’s just a jumble,” Ken said.

Mary Anne smirked. “I don’t think the officer who arrested him gave him the time to finish it. You’ll have to ask the boy what it was supposed to be.”

Ken turned his head to the side and tried to see the shapes in the tiny picture. “I guess I will. I just hope I can get a hold of his father. The last thing I want to do is leave him in the detention center all day.”

As the first few pages of the case file finally spewed out of the fax machine, Ken scooped them up and scanned them for a mother’s name and phone number. With any luck, the woman had kept the same cell phone number when the family moved to Washington. He tried calling, but the number belonged to a women’s shelter in New York, where every phone call had to be screened. He left a detailed message for Mrs. Denise Connelly and then cursed. There was no chance in hell she was going to come all the way across the country from a battered women’s shelter to bail her kid out of jail.

And the fact that his mother was in a battered women’s shelter set off more warning bells in Ken’s head. Ken’s mother had been a victim of domestic violence while she was still married to his biological father, and she had beaten the odds and escaped from the relationship with her children and her life. But all too often, a woman would stay with her abuser for the sake of her children, even if staying killed her. If Denise Connelly had escaped an abusive relationship but hadn’t been able to rescue her son, the boy might be the sole target of whatever abuse his mother was hiding from.

Ken fumbled with the pages, stacking the printouts of Jayden’s graffiti on the top of his probation history and supervision case notes. The feminine features staring at him from the first painting made him pause. He needed to learn more about Jayden Connelly’s home situation before he did anything.

The King County Youth Services Center was composed of the Juvenile Detention Center and the King County Youth Court. Juvenile Probation Counseling had its own set of offices adjacent to the building. Across the parking lot, the regular detention center stood like an imposing castle of concrete cinder blocks. Ken paused on his way to the Youth Services Center, staring at the crowd of patrol cars and news vans crowded outside the building. It looked like something big was happening, and for a moment, Ken thought about ducking back to his office so he could listen in to the radio traffic on his police scanner.

But he needed to stop thinking about that. He was never going to become a police officer, no matter how much he’d once dreamed he might.

The Juvenile Detention Center had its own entrance into the Youth Services Center, and the only thing that connected it to the youth court offices in the other half of the building was a shared cinderblock wall. Ken swiped his ID card over the electronic lock on the law enforcement entrance and wandered inside, trying to figure out how he would approach Jayden Connelly. Mary Anne had recommended a voluntary community service contract instead of court. He signed in and was buzzed through the half-dozen teal-colored metal doors leading to the holding cells used to secure youth during the booking process.

“You want Connelly?” Stacey, one of the younger detention officers, practically bounced out to greet him.

“Yeah. Has his father shown up yet? Or even called?”

“No, but he said his dad works nights, and I guess he can’t always take calls on the job.”

“It’s almost nine in the morning,” Ken said quietly. “Can you put him in an open interview room for me?”

She hurried toward the holding cells, labeled A through E, along the wall. “Interview room two.”

Ken set the stack of pages down on the booking desk, swiveled the office chair around so he could straddle it, and tried to pull up Jayden Connelly’s arrest record. Mary Anne would have seen the citation and remand form from the arresting officer, but a copy hadn’t made it into the paperwork in his inbox that morning. He glanced up as Stacey escorted the boy past the booking desk to one of the small interview rooms down the hall. The skinny, red-haired boy didn’t look remotely close to frightened, just resigned to whatever fate the detention center staff had in store for him.

He typed in the kid’s last name, scanned the first names on the list, and froze. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

Ken pulled open his own file and looked up the parental contact information the boy had provided. “Patrick H. Connelly,” he read aloud.

He clicked on the partial booking record and almost laughed as the face of another equally resigned redhead filled the screen. The boy was almost the spitting image of his father, even though his father looked like he was three times the kid’s size. They shared the same red hair with blonde streaks that looked so random they could only have been sun bleached, the same exhausted hazel eyes, and the same scattering of freckles. The only part of the booking record that wasn’t filled out was the charges he’d be facing.

“That’s got to be him,” Ken laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Stacey asked, returning to the booking desk.

Ken gestured to the screen. “Connelly’s father hasn’t called because he’s in the detention center across the street.”

“Oh, you’re joking!” Stacey’s face fell as she looked at the record. “He was just arrested? Oh my God, that’s horrible. I guess that ‘like father, like son’ saying holds true, huh?”

Ken tried to smile. “If that saying held true, I’d be in prison right now.”

The stunned expression on her face was worth it. “Oh. I didn’t mean….” She shook her head and grimaced. “Do you want me to go ahead and take him back to a regular cell until Protective Services can get here?”

Ken shook his head. “Just looking at this, can you tell me if he’s likely to bond out today?”

“Umm.” She scrolled through the record quickly. “I don’t know. They haven’t finished booking him in. See, there’s nothing listed in the charges. So, if they’ve got all this done, including his prints and picture, then odds are they’re waiting to hear back from the arresting officer about what he’s supposed to be charged with. Until they’ve got a charge, they can’t let him post bond.”

“Damn it,” Ken hissed. He scrolled down to the bottom of the booking record. There was no information about his charges. “You know what, I’m just going to head over there and ask him. If this guy can bond out in an hour, I’d rather not be the one to tell him that it’ll take him a month of court hearings to get his son back.”

“What about our Connelly?” Stacey asked.

Ken glanced down at the interview rooms. There were so many ways this could go wrong, so many ways he could destroy any chance of building rapport with the kid. Ken didn’t dare talk to him until he had the answers he knew the boy would want. “Just put him back in a holding cell for now,” he said. “If his dad’s going to be stuck in jail, I’ll take him over to Protective Services myself.”

He entered the adult detention center through the booking entrance since a crowd of reporters made it impossible to get in through the front door. Booking was where he needed to be anyway, but after three different booking officers couldn’t help him, Ken was ready to go through the full booking holding cells on his own until he found the missing Patrick Connelly.

“Kenny? What are you doing here?”

Ken turned around to find his brother Malcolm looking more flustered than Ken had ever seen him. “Hey, Mal. Rough night?”

His older brother took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and then shook his head. “You haven’t heard?”

“Just got to work. I’m trying to track down the father of one of my kids. What’s going on?”

Malcolm ran his hands through his hair and took another deep breath. “I….” Malcolm glanced around at the chaos of the booking platform. “Come on, I can’t talk about it out here.”

Ken followed Malcolm back to one of the observation rooms, with its adjoining interview room connected by a two-way mirror, a closed-circuit security camera, and a microphone that recorded everything.

“I’ve got three dead bodies,” Malcolm began. “Five people who were lucky they didn’t die too, and none of them speak a word of English. The only officer working who speaks Bengali, or whatever the hell the Chinese translator said it was, is stuck in rush-hour traffic.”

“Wow, slow down there, Mal. Three dead bodies?”

“In a big metal shipping crate down at the docks,” Malcolm nodded. “It… it was bad. There were eight people inside, I don’t know for how long. I guess they’re a family, probably just trying to get into the United States.”

“Holy shit.”

“It’s a mess. This has been a fucked-up night.”

“Sounds like it. Have you had time to take a break?”

Malcolm shook his head. “I couldn’t eat right now if I wanted to. And I’m so wired coffee’s pointless. Sorry, man, I just had to.”

“It’s okay, Mal. Everybody needs to talk sometimes. You know I won’t say anything.”

“Thank you,” Malcolm whispered.

Ken glanced around at the dark observation room. Malcolm’s partner, an old man named Richard Kowalski, was inside the adjacent interview room, taking notes while an inmate in handcuffs gave what looked like an emotional statement. The first thing Ken noticed was that the inmate in the other room had the type of body most men spent hours in the gym working for. He was practically triangular, with wide shoulders and arms that tapered to a narrow waist. He was in nothing but jeans and a black tank top that clung to him like a second skin. The second thing Ken noticed was that the inmate in the other room was Patrick Connelly.