A Child Shall Lead Them (A Joe Burgess Mystery, Book 6) Read online

  A Child Shall Lead Them

  A Joe Burgess Mystery, Book 6

  Kate Flora

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Copyright © 2019 by Kate Flora. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

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  Published by ePublishing Works!

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  eBook ISBN: 978-1-64457-043-2

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Before You Go…

  A World of Deceit

  Also by Kate Flora

  About the Author

  To all the generous cops who’ve helped me along this writing journey, with special thanks to:

  Chief Carl Johnson (ret.)

  Commander Hugh Holton, Chicago PD, deceased

  Assistant Chief Joseph K. Loughlin, Portland PD

  And

  Deputy Chief Brian Cummings, Miramichi Police

  Prologue

  Veteran police officers often say they’ve seen everything. It’s a reasonable assumption. After the decades on the job Burgess had, the accumulated experience of inhumanity, filth, and horrific crime scenes had dulled his ability to be shocked. He’d seen the disemboweled, the beheaded, the decomposed. He’d dealt with victims where justice had failed, and the memories of those cases never left him. More recently, though, his solitary obsession with victims and crime solving had been derailed by the acquisition of a family. Having people in his life whom he loved and needed to keep safe changed him. They pulled him in a new direction and divided his loyalties between work and home. Still, when faced with the mutilated body of a brutally abused young girl, the pull of work became paramount.

  Until he got the phone call that almost stopped his heart.

  The two a.m. call from his sister Sandy came during those hours when calls seem most urgent—when people only disturb each other’s sleep when the matter can’t wait.

  Not that he was sleeping. Burgess was up to his ears in the search for the killers of a young girl. He was at their third crime scene in as many days, waiting for an ambulance to arrive, his focus on a missing man, a drugged woman, and a mystery man. But his sister wouldn’t call this late at night if it wasn’t important. As the roar of an arriving ambulance filled his ears, he reached for the phone, mumbled “Burgess,” and Sandy’s terror poured into his ear.

  “Cherry is missing, Joe. She didn’t come home.” A gasp for breath, and then she said, “She wanted to help you with your investigation. She said she had an idea about someone who might be involved. I told her to call you and let you follow up. But dammit, Joe! She wants to be a cop like you, and insisted she had to investigate it herself. She wanted to show you how clever she is. And now she hasn’t come home. She always obeys her curfew or she calls. But she didn’t and she’s not answering her phone. It’s going straight to voice mail.”

  Burgess stepped away from the ambulance’s engine roar and began the litany of questions that might help locate his missing niece, cursing himself for the foolish enthusiasm he’d displayed when he told Cherry about his work. He should have told her horror stories instead. Now, given what he’d learned about the people he was dealing with, he was really worried that a sweet sixteen-year-old girl he loved might have set herself up to become his next horror story.

  One

  The call from dispatch came in the middle of a Fourth of July picnic. In Burgess’s experience, callouts to a crime scene often came when they could cause the most disruption. They were having the picnic in his sister Sandy’s big back yard, and the kids—his three, Sandy’s two, and Moira’s one—were excited at having a big gathering and the prospect of a family softball game after the cookout.

  Burgess and Sandy didn’t always get along. Despite his role as the big brother who’d kept the family together during their father’s descent into alcoholism, as adults they’d drifted apart. She had been scornful of his dedication to his job, accusing him of using it as an excuse to avoid commitment and family. She’d softened since his precipitous acquisition of a family—his partner Chris and three children in only a couple of years. Now his kids were getting to know their cousins, Cherry and Maddie, and, for the next generation at least, things were without stress or acrimony.

  His other sister, Moira, was there with her second husband, Patrick, and their twelve year old son Jared. His investigative team, Terry Kyle and Stan Perry, were there with their families. Terry with Michelle and his two daughters, Lexi and Anna, and Stan with his quite pregnant girlfriend Lily. There was betting at the department about whether Stan would marry her before the baby came. So far, even those closest to Stan had no clue, unless his girlfriend’s smiling demeanor was a clue. Chris, who was a nurse, and had a low opinion of Stan in the commitment department, thought it was pregnancy hormones. Stan was silent on the subject. Burgess figured discretion was the better part of valor, and Terry, who was under increasing pressure about marriage from Michelle, gave the subject of matrimony a wide berth.

  Plunked down in a lawn chair and surveying things with a benign smile was Chris’s mother, Dorothy, or Doro, whose presence in their lives gave the kids a loving and doting grandmother. The weather was warm and perfect, though the temperature was forecast to drop later, with clouds and wind coming in. The wind and clouds were going to blow out to sea in time for the evening fireworks.

  It was a classic moment of t
he job jangling its way into his personal life. Burgess, having courteously waited until the kids and the ladies had been served, was just biting into a hot-from-the-grill burger when the phone in his pocket vibrated. He let it go a moment while he savored that first bite. He’d been a detective long enough to know it wasn’t going to be good news, and he hated to spoil a perfect July day. He took a second bite, knowing he was going to answer, and Dispatch was going to get an earful of Detective Joe Burgess chewing. Then he drew out the phone like a reluctant gunslinger, and mumbled “Burgess.”

  The calm, efficient voice on the other end said, “Jogger reported a body on the Stroudwater Trail. Patrol is on scene.” As she reeled off directions that he really didn’t need, he was already picturing the spot, a parking lot and running trail along the Stroudwater River, out past the airport.

  “Has Lt. Melia been notified?” Melia was his boss, the head of Portland’s CID.

  “He’s not answering. We’ve left messages for him.”

  “Kyle and Perry are with me. We’ll respond,” he said, and shoved the offending device that had ruined so many of his days back into his pocket. Knowing the body would wait another thirty seconds, he took one more bite

  Across the yard, Chris had interrupted her conversation with Michelle and was watching him. He saw her face fall as he headed toward Kyle. She had been looking forward to a family day. Now this one, like so many others they planned, was going to be a Chris and the kids day instead. He hated to do this to her. True, she’d known about the demands of his job when they met, and she was the one who wanted kids, but despite her best efforts, she didn’t always roll smoothly with the punches his life served up. In fairness, neither did he. Transitioning from someone answerable only to himself to someone who answered to four other people was an ongoing challenge.

  Kyle was watching his daughter Lexi teach Neddy, Jared, and her younger sister, Anna, some soccer moves, while the teenagers, Burgess’s son Dylan and daughter Nina were hanging out in a corner with Cherry, the three of them laughing about something. He loved watching Nina and Neddy, the foster children they were adopting, recovering from a life that had dished up unimaginable trauma, and his son Dylan turning into a protective big brother, just like he had been.

  Kyle shifted his gaze as Burgess approached, and knew without a word what was happening. “Damn, Joe. Not today,” he said. “We need this break. You know we do.”

  “I can call in the B team, Terry, if you want to stay.”

  Kyle’s fierce gaze turned toward him, blue eyes lasering Burgess’s face, looking for information. “Like you’d ever do that. Unless this is one the B team can’t screw up?”

  In reality, there was no B team, just one of the three of them and some other detectives from personal crimes that Burgess had trained enough to trust them to help investigate a homicide. But Kyle knew, just as Burgess did, that if it was a tricky scene or a case that was going to draw the press and the public’s gaze, their bosses would want the three musketeers to handle it. Assuming they were upright and taking nourishment.

  “Jogger found a body out on the Stroudwater trail,” he said. “No details, but dispatch said it was a bad one. So I’m thinking this is one for the A team.”

  “I’ll tell Michelle. She’s going to be pissed. She’s been looking forward to this. She made a point of saying she didn’t want to be doing this picnic by herself.”

  He gazed heavenward. “Things are getting tense in the Kyle household. It’s three women against one now. The girls are lobbying for me to marry Michelle. Don’t know how much longer I can hold out.”

  “So don’t hold out,” Burgess said. “She’s great. You love her. You guys are happy.”

  “She wants a baby,” Kyle said.

  “I’ve got three kids,” Burgess said. “It’s not so bad.”

  “Except you missed the sleepless nights, diapers, and potty training.”

  It hadn’t been a choice. Burgess didn’t even know he had a son until the boy was fifteen. “I’m just one clever guy,” Burgess said. “You talk to Michelle. I’ll grab Stan.”

  He grabbed Stan, got another version of “what the hell!” and went to update Chris and the kids. By the time he’d done that, apologized to Sandy, and said a quick goodbye to Moira, Kyle and Perry were ready to roll. Sandy, after complaining about what she was going to do with so much leftover food, said she’d give Chris and the kids a ride home, so they took his truck.

  “Maybe they can bring some food home with them,” he suggested. “I’m so frustrated to be missing all this.”

  “And there’s strawberry shortcake,” Sandy said.

  “Don’t rub it in.”

  That made Sandy grin, and for a second, they were kids again, teasing each other like siblings do.

  When they were belted and rolling, he shared the other details he’d gotten from Dispatch. “Looks like a young woman. ID’s going to be tough, though. She’s got no head and no hands.”

  Two

  The two patrol officers protecting the scene had their hands full with complaining runners and walkers venting their displeasure at being unable to use their favorite trail. That was the nature of the business. Cops were the bad guys, and patrol took a lot of the heat from a public unwilling to have their lives disrupted in any way just because some poor unfortunate had been murdered.

  En route, Burgess had made the phone calls necessary to bring their crime scene techs and the Medical Examiner to the site. Since the trail ran along a river and through some dense woods, he grabbed insect repellent along with the rest of his crime scene gear. They took a moment to spray themselves before heading down the trail. He was glad he hadn’t worn shorts to the cookout, as Stan had. He and Kyle both wore jeans and polo shirts.

  Stan wore a tee shirt for a music group Burgess had never heard of, and those shiny, baggy athletic shorts all the kids wore. He studied his costume ruefully, shook his head, and said, “At least it’s not as bad as at the Timmy Watts scene.” After dressing while still half asleep, Perry had appeared at that scene on a blistering hot summer day wearing a tee-shirt that read: Homicide - Our day begins when your day ends. Burgess had loaned him a jacket and he’d nearly died of heat, but it was better than letting the press photograph him in that shirt at the scene of a small boy’s murder.

  Before they started down the trail, Burgess spoke to the officer controlling the scene. “The guy who found the body. Where’s he?”

  The officer pointed to a man in running shorts about fifty yards away, pacing nervously back and forth at the far end of the parking lot.

  “Can you call someone to take him downtown? I don’t want him talking to anyone before we interview him, especially not the press, and they are bound to be showing up soon.”

  “I’m on it, sir.”

  “Who’s at the scene?”

  “Aucoin and Simmons, sir.”

  “Any joggers come through since you set up and started taking names?”

  “Just one, sir.” He pointed to a name on the sheet.

  Burgess copied the information. One of them would need to talk to the man later. He might have seen someone on the trail or in the lot before he started his run. Might even be the perpetrator. Burgess had no idea yet how big a net he’d have to spread.

  As they headed down the trail, he was already running questions in his head. How long had the body been here? Why here? Why choose this spot, which was remote for the city of Portland, but used by enough joggers so the body was likely to be found quickly. Was this what the killer wanted? Was the body displayed for the shock value? For some message it might send? When would this place be deserted enough for someone to dispose of a body unobserved? He figured Perry and Kyle were running similar questions. Maybe what they found at the scene would answer some of them.

  Because of what Dispatch had said, he expected to find the body right on the trail. Instead, after walking about five minutes, he came to crime scene tape stretched across the trail, but no sign of officers
or a body. They ducked under the tape, then stood there, taking their bearings, looking for tracks or something that would tell them where the body actually was. Rather than waste time, he yelled, “Aucoin!”

  A voice came from the woods to his left. “Over here, Sergeant. Follow that line of tape I’ve laid down.”

  Burgess looked down. About five feet to his left, a stripe of muddy yellow crime scene tape lay on the ground, snaking between two trees and disappearing into the brush. Smart, he thought. One essential element of preserving crime scenes was identifying a single route in and out for everyone to use. In thick woods like these, and with a scene some distance off the trail, that was harder. He’d ask, but he assumed Aucoin had chosen this route to protect what might have been the one the killer used. He took an almost paternal pride in watching Remy Aucoin become a good police officer.

  They followed Aucoin’s yellow tape for fifty feet or so, and came to another circle of crime scene tape. Aucoin and Simmons were waiting for them at the edge of it.

  “She’s over here,” Aucoin said. “I probably don’t need to say this, but brace yourselves. This is pretty ugly.”

  Before they moved, Burgess said, “How the heck did that jogger find her? She’s not visible from the road.”