The Betrayed, page 8
It was my turn to golf clap. “You’re hired,” I said. Rae gave a little mock bow. “I think our next move is to go look around to the south of that park. I’m sure Detective Stephenson drove the street, but I think it’s worth another look.”
“I agree,” Rae said. “What if we don’t find anything?”
“Well, in that case, it may be time to talk to the parents, especially Mr. Gilroy. But I think if we don’t see any similarities with the missing homeless after speaking to the parents, we need to step back and reconsider the connection.”
Rae looked troubled. “But what about these kids, Rev?”
I shrugged. “It sucks, but that’s not our job. Our contract specifically states who we are looking for, and the kids aren’t on the list.”
“We could always volunteer our time,” Rae said, tone turning a bit pleading. “Besides, Fitzgerald supposedly funded the search in the hopes we would turn up these kids. He’s probably not going to like it if we just give up.”
I shrugged, thinking that what Fitzgerald did and did not like didn’t mean shit to me.
“Come on, Rev, they are just teenagers. Have a heart,” she said, blinking those big blue eyes at me.
I stared at her for a moment, a very frugal part of me worrying about profit margins and hourly rates. Then I realized I didn’t have to be such a tight-ass anymore. The business was doing well—I even had some savings.
I sighed, then nodded at Rae. “Once we finish with the case they hired us for, we’ll help with these kids.”
Rae beamed at me as the waitress brought our food.
I pulled the cruiser to the curb and scanned the grounds. It was a city-block-sized cleared lot with almost nothing on it but grass. A set of soccer goals sat off to each side, and some bleachers were arranged along the back edge of the lot. No one was at the playground, but that was to be expected at nearly 2 PM on a school day.
“Not much to be found here,” I said.
“Doesn’t look like it,” Rae agreed. “Let’s drive down Brooklyn Avenue, see if we spot anything.”
I nodded and pulled the car around the block, making a left on Brooklyn. The road itself was an unmarked patch of two-lane blacktop, running nearly straight north-south. It was bordered on the east by a mix of working-class homes and warehouses, and on the west by a double set of railroad tracks. Past the tracks, perhaps 200 feet to the west, the artificially raised ground dropped off steeply into the Mississippi.
We slowly followed the road south, keeping our eyes peeled in both directions for anything that might attract a teenaged boy.
“What types of bikes did they have again?” I asked.
Rae consulted her notes. “Shane had a ten-speed Schwinn, fairly new. Jamie had an old Huffy BMX bike.”
I nodded, head on a swivel as I guided the car. We passed the Greater New Orleans Bridge, both of us marveling at the huge cranes at work building a second span across the mighty river.
Past the bridge, Brooklyn became Madison, and we passed an unbelievable quantity of railcars, most of them tankers, as the tracks expanded from two to at least six in some kind of holding yard. The tankers fully blocked the view to the west. To the east, the landscape was taken up by huge distribution centers feeding the rail traffic.
We continued farther south, but just got deeper inland as the coastline disappeared to the west. Madison dead-ended into Virgil Street south of here; I sighed as I pulled the cruiser into a driveway and turned around.
“Guess it’s over to the parents now?” Rae asked.
I chewed the inside of my cheek. “Let’s keep a lookout as we head back north,” I said.
We continued back north, eyes scanning both sides of the road for anything interesting. As we neared the bridge, I felt Rae grab my forearm as she pointed between some railcars. “Rev, there!” she said.
I pulled the car off to the side and looked. Through a gap in the railcars, I saw a paved path, like a bike or walking path, on the other side of the tracks. To two teenage boys, riding their bikes on a path through rail yards probably sounded like a blast.
I turned to Rae, nodded, and shut off the car.
Chapter 9
The Scene
New Orleans, Louisiana: 2:07 PM, Wednesday, October 17th, 1984
Iholstered my weapon, then locked the car and crossed the street to catch up with Rae, who was already heading for the gap between the railcars. I followed her, keeping my eyes out for security.
Past the railcars, we had four more sets of empty tracks, the gleaming rails spiked firmly into huge timber beams sitting atop great mounds of gravel. I crossed them and clambered up the grass berm upon which a paved, single-lane path sat. Rae stood on the path, a hand over her eyes to shield them from the sun, turning slowly to scan the area.
I came up to stand beside her and took a quick glance around. To the north, the path continued, mostly straight, crossing under the bridge near a set of supports.
To the south, the ribbon of the path ran straight to the horizon, passing an enormous warehouse or train yard, then curling to the west and out of sight.
To the west, the mound rounded back off then leveled out, running for another forty or fifty feet until it ended in a flood wall, flush to the ground and sprouting wild bushes and shrubs at the edge. On the far bank of the Mississippi, I could see the World’s Fair, where at least eleven different nations had been invading sovereign Louisiana soil for the last six months.
I turned back to Rae. “See anything?”
She pulled her hand from her eyes, looked up at me, and shrugged.
I glanced around one more time, then pointed north. “Let’s check that way first. There’s bound to be security at that big building south of here, so the boys probably would have avoided it.”
Rae nodded, and we began walking north. As we neared the support columns, I noticed a blemish, perhaps graffiti, gracing the stacked concrete base, maybe three feet off the ground. I tapped Rae on the shoulder, pointed, and we began crossing the grass to the support.
As we got closer, I stopped and stared.
“Well, what do you make of this?” I asked Rae as we got closer. She pulled out her Polaroid, snapping off a picture before answering.
“Looks… pretty fresh,” she finally answered. “Less than a month old, in any case.”
I nodded as she began circling the foundation, looking for any other anomalies. I walked over toward the edge of the flood wall and looked down.
The wall, such as it was, only rose about six feet above the muddy shoreline, making it level with the ground I stood on, and was constructed of unbroken concrete. The shoreline extended out from it for another thirty or forty feet before sloping down into the brown waters of the Mississippi.
On this spit of shoreline was a kind of bowl-shaped indention a little lower that the rest of the land, where a pool of water, maybe six feet in diameter, had collected. Surrounding the pool were a riot of small shrubs and bushes, along with trash and other bits of flotsam.
I scanned the bushes from atop the wall, wishing I had remembered to bring my binoculars from the cruiser.
Just as I was about to give up, something caught my eye. It looked like five gray spokes shooting out from a central hub to a surrounding rim, with a knobby black tire, still inflated, sprouting from it.
I leapt from the wall and carefully made my way through the sucking mud to the bushes. After a few moments, I heard Rae call out behind me.
“Rev, got something?” she asked, excitement in her voice a perfect complement to the feelings inside me.
“Maybe,” I called back. “Hang tight for now.”
I was nearing the pool, and it had a smell: chemically, like sulfur, oil, and paint thinner all mixed together. The light reflecting off the pool showed a prismatic sheen, little fractal patterns in the top layer of water reflecting all the bands of the spectrum, like the film you see in a greasy pot after running hot water into it.
As I reached the bush, I could make out more of the object. It was a black Huffy BMX bike with gray rims, an exact match for Jamie’s. It was spattered with mud, but hadn’t yet begun to sink in and be reclaimed by the land.
“We’ve got Jamie’s bike!” I yelled up at Rae, excitement clear in my voice now as well.
“Shit, coming down,” Rae said, and she jumped down from the wall, squatting down with the impact and absorbing it with her legs—almost like she knew what she was doing.
“Careful,” I said. “This just became evidence. Stay on the hard pack. We don’t want to contaminate the scene with more footprints.”
I, unfortunately, was already in the mud.
Rae nodded, staying on the dry ground and being careful where she stepped. Behind her, I saw something that had escaped my attention on the way over.
Directly across from the pool, a pipe about three feet in diameter jutted from the flood wall. A steady trickle of dirty, brackish water flowed from it and ran down onto the ground, where it flowed lazily into the pool. Inside the pipe was darkness, the contrast between it and the bright sunlight outside looking like a hole in the fabric of reality.
I kept my feet planted to avoid disturbing the scene any further and looked around again. The bushes were cluttered with junk: scraps of plastic bags, torn and dirty clothing, random wads of decomposing paper products.
There was a flash of something white and shiny under a fluttering plastic bag, so I carefully crossed over to it. I put a glove on, then eased the bag aside to reveal a long, cylindrical ivory object, mostly submerged in the mud.
I recognized it immediately as bone.
Rae and I spent the rest of our afternoon being interviewed by Detective Stephenson and his partner, Detective White. Stephenson was about as dumb as a crate full of stumps, but White was alright. They finally let us go without so much as a ‘thank you’ for breaking their case wide open.
I located Freddy, who was over by a small throng of reporters giving a statement. I motioned to Rae, and we strolled over, staying out of camera shot.
“…and I can make no statements about the identification of the remains at this time,” Freddy said into the cluster of microphones thrust before his face.
Following this, there came a burst of chaos as all the reporters tried to talk over each other.
“No further statements at this time,” Freddy almost shouted, then he turned from the throng. The reporters continued to assault him with shouted questions, but Freddy ignored them, heading off toward the crime scene.
I whistled, getting his attention. He shook his head wearily as he approached.
“Rev, what in the hell have you dug up this time?”
“More crud from the underbelly of your lovely city.”
“Jesus Christ, what a shitshow,” Freddy said as he removed his cap and ran a hand through his thinning brown hair.
“How many bodies?” I asked.
Freddy replaced his cap, then looked from me to Rae and back, indecisive. He sucked his teeth, then said, “Don’t know yet. At least four—we've found that many skulls. Going to be some time before we know for sure.”
“Looked like an old site,” I said. “All that was left was bones. Didn’t even stink.”
Freddy nodded, an uneasy look on his face. “So far, that’s all we’ve found: bones. But that Huffy was Jamie Gilroy’s, we got a positive ID from his mother. We also found what we believe is Shane McQuillan’s Schwinn, but we don’t have confirmation yet.”
“Well, it seems unlikely any of these skeletons belong to those boys.”
Freddy nodded. “Coroner is going to check the dental records to verify, but yeah, the boys are probably still out there, maybe being held by whoever did this.”
I jerked my head over toward the pipe. “You check that pipe out?”
Freddy shook his head. “Not yet, but I’ve got an officer on it.”
I nodded. “What’s the plan for finding this guy?”
“Well, other than chasing all these new leads, we are going to post a watch over the site.”
I cocked my head, uncomprehending. “Why?”
“Something the feds taught us. Lots of these ‘serial killers’—that’s what they are calling them—lots of these guys apparently like to come back to the scene. They get some kind of charge from it. So, one way to find them is just to wait for them to show back up.”
He looked over his shoulder, back at the men fussing over the crime scene. “And shit, this is just about as good of a scene for that as you could ever want. We can set up watch from tons of places, including on the bridge up there, or across from the other bank of the river. Even better, this is a restricted area, so we won’t have to deal with tourists. If he comes back, we’ll nab him.”
I nodded. “One other thing: See this?” I asked as I pulled the Polaroid of the symbol from my pocket.
Freddy studied the image. “Yeah, looks like some kind of old Egyptian symbol.”
I nodded. “We found this one painted on that support up there,” I said, pointing to the column.
Freddy shrugged. “So? It’s odd looking, but it’s probably just graffiti.”
“We found the same symbol at two of the sites where the homeless were abducted.”
“Well, that is interesting,” Freddy said. “But it could still be graffiti, just coincidence.”
I nodded. “Could be, but Rae analyzed the paint and figures they were each painted about the same time as the folks were abducted. I got a feeling, Freddy, like this symbol is a calling card. Can you just have the coroner check and see if there’s a match between these bodies and the missing homeless?”
Freddy nodded. “Sure, I’ll put a bug in Stephenson’s ear about it.”
“One more thing,” I said, just as Freddy was turning to go. “I have some candy wrappers from the missing folks’ stuff all bagged up. Maybe worth running the prints on them, see if there’s any overlap with the crime scene.”
Freddy thought for a second. “Sounds like a long shot, but get me the wrappers and I’ll run them,” he replied.
Chapter 10
Burke's Place
New Orleans, Louisiana: 6:19 PM, Wednesday, October 17th, 1984
The brakes made a light squealing noise as I eased the cruiser to a stop on Chartres Street, in front of the old nunnery. Across the street sat the Burke residence, a historic home in the style of the Greek revival.
An imposing porch dominated the front, with a short basement entry front and center in the four-foot-high wall, covered by a wrought-iron gate. To either side of the porch was a beautiful fence, also wrought-iron, reaching three feet high and terminating at each side in an iron gate supported by small stone columns. Behind these gates on each side was a short walkway which flowed into a winding iron staircase that delivered visitors onto the porch.
The house was painted a kind of dim yellow, like a lemon pie, with white trim and forest-green shutters. A hip roof supported by four white columns covered the porch. The first-floor wall was pierced by four double-casement windows and a simple-but-elegant white double door.
A sleek silver Jaguar XJ12 sat in the driveway off to the left of the house, the four round headlamps looking somehow as sinister and predatory as its namesake.
Rae issued a long whistle. “Damn,” she said, “this Burke lady must be loaded.”
I nodded, once. “Old money, too.”
“What’s the play here, Rev?”
I shrugged. “Not totally sure myself. Mostly, I just want to find out what’s in this for her. Call me cynical, but I don’t much believe in altruism, especially when it comes from the rich.”
Rae barked a little laugh. “What, you don’t think giving away money was how these folks got rich?” she teased.
I arched a brow, glancing at her, then back at the house. “Anyway, just keep an eye out for anything that looks odd, and follow my lead on the questioning.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” Rae said, turning to face me. “Since you are the one with the magic peepers and I’m the one with the gift of gab, how about I do the talking and you do the looking?”
“That does make a bit more sense, now that you mention it,” I agreed, smirking. “Just don’t upset her. If she is involved, I don’t want to tip her off.”
Rae nodded. “You got it, boss,” she said in a teasing tone as she pulled the door handle and hopped out of the car.
We were met at the door by a thin, middle-aged white man in a spotless black suit. When he opened the doors, a polite, wooden smile was already affixed to his face.
“Mr. Parata, Ms. Gordon. Ms. Burke welcomes the pleasure of your company. Right this way,” he said in a clipped, neutral accent.
Rae shot me a wide-eyed glance and made an ‘O’ with her mouth as the servant turned away. I rolled my eyes.
The front door opened on a hallway that ran, as far as I could tell, the entire length of the house. A long rug with three columns of squares, each square containing some intricate design, covered the hallway. The pattern was perfectly terminated at both ends, cementing the impression that the rug was made specifically for the hall’s dimensions.
A small, gilded chandelier provided sparse illumination. The goal might have been cozy intimacy, but to me it felt gloomy and brooding. Paintings graced each wall, and three doorways led off to either side of the hall, with a twin of the entry doors gracing the far end of the hallway.
The butler, or assistant, or whatever the hell he was, led us to the first door on the left, which was some kind of parlor or sitting room. Full of antique, carved wood furniture, and marble, everything in the room looked expensive and breakable. A white vintage Steinway grand piano with gold trim sat in the corner, the jewel of the room. Despite the splendor, the gloomy lighting trend continued here as well.
“Please, make yourselves comfortable,” the manservant said, and left the room.
I decided to avoid sitting on anything, lest I bankrupt myself.
Rae walked over to a fireplace on the left-most wall and perused the small, delicate figurines resting on it. I moved across the room to a huge painting of an older, stately man.
