Call Before You Dig - Part 4 of the Neverland Disorder, a Detective Kelli Hench Mystery

I put one hand on his back, one foot in front of the other, and somehow, by fate, by grace of God, but surely not by any native ability but sheer bullheaded determination, I didn't put my face into the gravel. I got us to the car, and him into the back of it. When I closed the door, I leaned up against the side of it. Where I could watch the trailer. Where I could breathe what little clean air the fading daylight vouchsafed me.

Where I could not puke, for just five breaths, now six, now seven. I could ignore the nerves and the shakes and I could by God not throw up.

"Big time killer, right?" the FBI suit asked me. "Guy's a big timer, made the New York by-God Times, and he's begging you to put a bullet between his eyes and make it all go away."

Yeah.

"You ok?" the suit continued.

No. "Yeah."

The suit's named Willard Mason Trevanian. Former ground pounder, psych degree and law degree. He's a mensch.

"Kelli," he said.

I turned to look at him. Somehow or another.

His face is wide, pushed-flat nose that helps him look like George Foreman. Will's in on the joke, he's even got a signed picture with the big man on the desk next to his wife's. Two of them like long lost cousins, all smiles.

Will doesn't smile now, he's still working. "Don't forget this. Hold onto it, hard as it sounds right now." He held out his hand, not as big as the champ's but still big enough I had to make sure I didn't get my skinny bones crushed grabbing it. Will waited 'til I grabbed it, then he used it to ease me up a little. "There's no such thing as an easy case."

We'd stood there. Him across from me, between the sights of the gun. "Pull it, you know you want to."

So I had.

After I shifted the barrel, just a little to the right, so the bullet passed between his shoulder and his ear. "On your face, just like I said." And he'd done it and just like that the whole thing was done. Except for the part where I had to stand there and wait for the shakes to finish.

Their faces passed through my mind while the nerves in my legs caught up to the necessary. Seven children. Rodrick Washington. Menna Luongo. Tracy Shepherd. Geno LeGuin. Amos Turner. Jeffery Modesto. William Benne. Seven young faces. And the families, the family they'd all become in the interminable months between William's disappearance and when I shoved the man who called himself Septimus into the back of the cruiser.

Ten years before Peter Pan entered our life. I'd moved over to this cold-case job just five months before, that's when I found the first set of folders. Forensics degree and the academy and ride a beat for a year, then ten years past the detective label and there I was. Here we all were.

How'd we all get here?

Rod and Menna, Tracy, Geno, these were the faces I knew only from a pile of folders on my predecessor's desk. "Your first job is to clear these old cases," my new boss told me. "Chris left us a parting gift, to go along with the finger."

That was the picture of Christopher Simmons' middle finger, the one taped to the door. He'd slapped it up there on his way to retirement. The stack of folders were the cherry on the sundae, I guess, the acknowledgment of the only truth.

There'd always be another case.

I cleared those folders, one by one, but somehow or another there was always another one coming in. The lost, the case that didn't get solved, some murders, some burglaries, some of this and that. The weird and the wild and the just plain "Didn't fit anywhere else."

Amos's case turned up for what eventually became familiar reasons. No one could connect his disappearance to anything that made any sense.

I still come into the office the way I did then, when the world is working on normal shift anyway. Wander up the stairs because it's likely to be the only real exercise I get that day, huff and puff and remind myself that I really should do better. Set the cup of coffee down next to the phone and dig for my notes from the day before.

Then pass through any folders that might have drifted my way overnight. Don't get me wrong, I don't get a case every night, because my colleagues all know their business. Most of the overnight mail is the same thing that comes into the email box: HR paperwork, memos from working cases, the day to day business.

Amos's face stared up at me. A school picture, like most kids the most recent image available.

Twelve. He's twelve, maybe thirteen at the most. Why do I know this?

Because I'd been taking my reading home, that's why. I picked up Amos's folder, paged through it, looked for the basics. A walker, he'd left school like normal, walking home, latchkey kid just old enough Mom and Dad felt he could handle the responsibility. He didn't make it home. Simple as that, and there were no skeletons in the family closet, no bad neighbor stories or skulking vans or anything the detectives and the beat cops could find to go somewhere with.

Why'd I guess his age? I reached for the other folders, four of them, not in a row because this morning was the first time I'd put them all together. Rod's folder was in my bag, so was Geno's but I had to hunt for his. Tracy's lay on my desk, I'd seen that one last week, Menna's was back in the file cabinet because I'd needed to rotate a little. Were there others here, other folders and pictures?

No. I stopped and went through Chris's stack of leave-behinds, one by one, and these were the only kids he'd left me. Four other disappearances.

Geno, another latchkey kid, and walker. His teachers hadn't known that. Tracy, she'd taken the Y's van from school, she only walked home from the Y Tuesdays and Thursdays, single mom a nurse she'd had that kind of shift but "Tracy was pretty good about it."

Rod was the slightly odd one out. Mother and father at odds with each other, divorced and Mom had a new husband, Dad wasn't there yet and he was the one lived close to school. Not close enough to walk though, so Rod hopped the bus and rode for a few blocks, then got down and went to Dad's apartment to wait 'til Mom finished her day and came by to pick him up.

Mom and Dad might have been at odds, but they were just elbows up, the legal business and the divorce fresh enough the wounds hadn't scarred over. They managed it well enough for Mom to drive by her ex's apartment every day.

Different neighborhoods, different schools. Midtown Amos, Geno from the Heights, out Westheimer for Menna and Tracy but different schools, the Fifth Ward for Rod.

All of them in September. Rod and Geno two years past, Tracy and Menna last year, Amos just four months ago.

I had a pattern, was it real?

I learned something then, but it might not matter as much these days. Then, the Chronicle was moving online, one of the first big papers to do it, but their archives were still dusty microfilm. I went to their library to put my pieces together.

The reporter showed up at my office three days later. DeJuana Rusch, ten years older and more cynical than I, and she wanted to know what I'd found.

How she hadn't already put it together I'll never know, except like us the news crews were always scrambling to match the bits to the picture frame they'd come from. "I don't have anything, yet."

"You didn't come to our library for nothing, detective."

And I hadn't. So I told her; I forgot to ask her to keep it off the record. Which is why I ended up with a boss sitting in my office, complaining about the headline the Chronicle graced us with. "Houston PD On the Trail of A Serial Kidnapper: Why'd It Take So Long?"

"You'd better be sure of this, Kelli. Five months in and you've got the paper breathing down my neck already."

Considering he'd parked me on the cold case desk to keep me out of the way of the rest of his crew... "Lieutenant, I didn't know she'd go running off to write something like this."

I have to give Penrose this much credit. He didn't keep griping about it. He just warned me. "Next time a reporter comes to visit, the first thing you tell them is?"

"Off the record?"

"Exactly." And he left me alone to keep putting pieces back together.

Though I did have to buy him lunch. "For running interference. The Chief called me first thing this morning, right after he got off the phone with the Mayor. They both know this wasn't your fault, but that means they're paying attention now. If you get anywhere with this, don't let my phone stay quiet."

I give credit to DeJuana, as well, because her story never once brought up the term "killer". Not yet, that would come soon enough.

And in the meantime, she was the one with the parents calling her. And Penrose. They didn't put my name into the ring until later.

When we found Amos and Tracy.

The Bayou City. They run through the place, the still waters. Always there beneath and alongside the roads. Ready to flood when the rains come. Ready to catch what people hide away.

Some breaks happen because we make them. Pull at the strings until something comes into the light, and we practice watching and listening for those moments. Others happen through nothing but accident. We were in the middle of a rain year, rainy few years, spring fronts that just wouldn't pass us by without putting down two, three, five inches of rain. The flood gauges on the roadways got a workout that year.

I'd moved into a new apartment that summer. Just up the road from Buffalo Bayou, close enough to walk to the bat bridge. Close enough so that when the call came in, Penrose knew which of his detectives could get there soonest.

They were chained together. The spring floodwaters had washed the bucket of concrete loose from the bottom, wherever they'd gone in. We had to wait for the identity folks to nail it down, but I didn't have any doubt that I'd be adding another piece to my puzzle.

"Did he keep her?" Penrose asked me. "All those months, did he hold her and wait?"

"He, Lieutenant?" I wasn't ready to go there, not quite yet. Sure, I knew the odds, but we didn't have anything that pointed that way.

"Call it a placeholder until you find more information, Kelli."

I could accept that. "You're not pulling me away for someone else to take over?"

He was halfway out the door. DeJuana hadn't waited to file her next story; the Times would file theirs the next day. Not a headline, not national news yet, just an A3, but the beat was picking up. "Tell me again when the first kid went missing? How long?"

"Two and a half years."

"And you're the first one to notice?"

I didn't answer that.

"No, Kelli. They're your kids. Do right by them." And he left to go mind the phones.

So that's when I called the FBI. Kidnapping being a big part of their business; the serial killer thing, they're the ones with the patience and the institutional memory. Problem being, while I had the history and the case studies in my memory, I didn't have a phone number or a name to contact. I worked the phone tree until I landed Will Trevanian's number.

"You've got a pattern of missing kids, and now you've got a body."

Two, but ok. "That sums it up."

"I can't really solve your case for you, detective."

Sure, but one can hope, right? "I'm assuming you're here for ear-bending, ideas..."

"Match-ups if I have them. You got it. And you know I'll have to fly down and pretend we did all the hard work, when you finally do catch the killer?"

"If they pay somebody to take the pictures and give the quotes, where do I send the reporter that's barking up my tree?" Now that I had him on the line...

I got the laugh I was looking for. "There's a practical limit. At least this way that reporter doesn't know you've got the feds on side. Keep me in the loop, will ya?"

I could do that. I'd have to if I wanted someone else doing the institutional clog dance for me.

Trevanian made me pay for it. My homework arrived a week after the first phone call. By bulk mail, the folders came in ten at a time. I think I've still got them all, probably in the bottom drawer of my first real file cabinet, the one I ended up putting in about a year later to handle all the folders I'd built up.

They weren't light reading. Trevanian sent me the ones who went after kids. He also sent me the ones who went after old folks, only boys, only girls... the list goes on. If there's a group, something to focus on, from looks to color to language or country or...

There's someone out there who's obsessed enough to target them. Trevanian didn't spare me. "You can't afford to miss a connection."

"What about the lighter crimes?" Cons, people who go into old folks' homes and walk out with a couple hundred grand and half a dozen heartbroken, bankrupt, lonely victims behind them. "Or, well..."

"The rapists?" He wouldn't let me hide behind myself, either. "Those are a lot harder to take in, Kelli."

Considering the autopsy pictures I currently had sitting on my desk, that was a little much to fathom.

"I mean, for every real serial killer, there's a hundred, maybe two hundred rapists. In practical terms, that group's a lot harder to get understanding of. And a lot more varied."

"We don't have anything else to go on yet. What if I miss because I let the pedophiles go without looking into them?"

He hmm'd a bit. "Gimme a couple days. You're right. I've already sent you the ones we know of that turned killer."

I got up, pacing, thinking, glad the cord of the phone let me pick the base up and walk around the office with it. "How about this? You've got your own groupings, right?"

"I don't want to bias your investigation..."

"I'm not... Ok, I am asking you to. But only to this extent. I bet, if I asked you which, say, twenty of your sex offender profiles you'd pick out, first thing without stopping to think, of the ones you'd peg for most likely to graduate..." I was reaching. Not for a list of interviewees, suspects. But for exactly what Trevanian had built up from twenty more years' experience. A profile, a way of thinking.

A little insight.

"I'll mail them to you tomorrow."

The files, like the killers I'd already poured through, told me far more than I'd wanted to know about the predators. Who's got time to watch the vulnerable? Read their habits. When they come home, when they leave. Where they go.

All of them, killers and rapists, there were common touches, little linkages. And there was the one that they all needed. Time. Time to observe, plan. Except for the spur of the moment, while they were still in control enough to not want to get caught, they had to be able to plan. So they got the jobs I'd expect, the ones the nightly news and the daily headlines accidentally condition us all to be so suspicious of, to worry over.

Nurse. Caregiver. Teacher. Priest.

September is the time when new classes come through. Here, it's about two, three weeks into the school year, when the classes have got through the first rush and started to settle into the rhythm of the year. Twelve year olds, seventh grade.

Different schools. Was I looking for someone with a teacher's badge, but who only taught here and there? Substitute work? Teacher in-service?

If the Chronicle'd reacted like a wasp's nest to me coming into their archives, Houston ISD would react like a fire ant mound. This one, if I didn't want to spend months fighting the politics, I'd need some help up front. I stewed on it over the weekend, knowing damned well I'd be walking into my boss's office Monday morning and dreading the moment.

It was the first time I'd come to him first with an idea.

He didn't blink. "You sure?"

"It's the hole in the cloud bank. What fits into it, who'd be able to watch that many kids well enough to know they were vulnerable to that particular kind of kidnapping?"

"Give me a couple days. The head of the school board's police department is an old friend, he'll know who to talk to."

I'd have loved to be able to get into their employee records myself. In the end we had to settle for giving them dates and schools. "They don't want to put their entire workforce at risk," I told my boss.

"The teacher's union would sue us the minute they found out," he replied. "Not that I blame them, I'd be pretty pissed off if someone were doing the same thing to our crew."

"How long do you think they'll sit on it, before they let us look at the files?" I asked

Maybe if we'd pushed... We had that conversation in Penrose's office in July. I'd picked up Amos's file February; that's how the clock moves for these things. Amos and Tracy's twinned flood exhumation, that was March.

Jeffery and William vanished, William the first day after the Labor Day break, Jeffery the week after that. On schedule.

We met in Penrose's office. We being the Mayor, the Chief, Penrose, and me hiding in the corner, as best I can. When I explained why we needed to get a look at the school district's employee files, the Mayor pulled the phone over, punched a number in, and put it on speaker. "Tell her the same thing you just told me."

So I did that. The superintendent started to gripe. Until the Mayor leaned back into the conversation. "Jennie, you lost two more students in the past two weeks. Spare us the boilerplate." Or we'll be on the phone to the New York Times, he didn't add.

That's when our cases finally made the headline of the Times. When William didn't come home.

The superintendent dropped it. "We'll need a lawyer present."

The Mayor looked at me. I shrugged. "I don't much care. Just don't get in my way when I need something, that's all I ask."

I had to start at the school board's main offices. I ended up going to each of the schools. Every step of the way with the school board's attack dog trailing along behind me. I didn't blame him. When, not if but when the union got the news... These days, the electronic search would have gone through a lot quicker.

These days, I'd need a warrant just to get to that level. They don't do fishing expeditions, databases and their minders, unless you've got someone on the other side willing to do the work. Which goes back and forth.

I had my ideas. Middle school is that step up, a little bigger school, a few more teachers, cycle's the same and there are only so many of them. Who'd been to more than one? Was I looking for a janitor, no, because if there was anything more permanent at a school than the tenured teacher it was the janitors. Maintenance staff? They had to be able to move around, right, electricians and plumbers, but when would they have the chance to not just watch but learn a kid's patterns?

He was a goddamned bus driver.

There was one other thing the kids all had in common. They were GT kids, gifted and talented. Extra classes, projects, like the athletes and the band kids the GT kids always had just that extra little time at school. Enough so he spotted them. On his way back to the bus barn every day, he'd drive past the school and there would be the stragglers, heading out for home by bus or by foot.

Or, for Rod, and here was the guy's mistake: he'd been the bus driver for some of the GT kids. Run a regular route and come back to pick up the half dozen smart kids and Rod had been one of them. The very first one of them; Rod had set the pattern.

After, he'd known what to look for. Who his prey were, how to watch for them.

I found him the old fashioned way. Accidentally. Because I'd put together my lists, and I'd gone through them and found nothing. No flags, no histories, the teachers didn't match up, none of them had rotated to the schools I needed, even the interns and the substitutes didn't overlap. The techs and the maintenance crews, even the nurses, I couldn't make a pattern of their assignments. There wasn't one, not that connected with my kids.

So, I went back through the list of names and jobs, and there was one that didn't fit. Teachers and staff, but I didn't remember looking for bus drivers, how'd this name get there?

Not his, not the guy I'd only come to really know by his internet handle; she really was an accident. A bus driver whose name had ended up in my list for some reason I never did figure out.

But it finally jogged the brain cells loose. Eleven months, I'd bird-dogged the school district personnel files for eleven months, every passing calendar page telling me I was one month closer to next September.

I'd missed a category.

The attack dog wasn't happy about it. "You've already had your fishing expedition, detective."

"If you think it's so easy, how about you come down here and I give you the case to solve, counselor? We can start with the autopsy reports, so you have a clear understanding of what we're dealing with."

I got the access. And this time, just in time, I found the pattern that had to be there. There are only so many bus barns, and an awful lot of routes to run. There was only one possibility, seven kids and seven different schools and the years between. I had his address and real name within hours, once I had the right category to search through.

He went by Septimus, on the internet as it was then, barely more than a handful of bulletin boards for the midnight warriors to meet and hash out their complaints and frictions. I didn't see that up front, not until after.

I didn't go to the trailer by myself. Trevanian had shown up. The Times has, had, that way about them. When they got the bit in their teeth, the powers that be noticed. When DeJuana spotted the pattern, with just weeks to go she went for the gold medal and filed her story on the "September Killer"; the Times picked it up from the Chronicle and ran with it. And just about the time I was going back to the school board to look for bus drivers, Trevanian was boarding his plane for my world.

He knocked on my door right as I circled the name, and the address. I waved the strange man in while I went digging for my Key Map. "Help you?"

"Will Trevanian, detective." I took the big mitt he hung over my desk, mumbled something incoherent and flipped the binder open.

"First time I've seen you in person, detective, and I have a feeling you're about to take me on a very interesting drive."

Give him credit. He'd been doing this long enough to know what that look is, the one when you've got something, something real. We were twenty minutes away, forty if traffic was bad. The bus routes, he'd have to be home by now, rush hour was winding down and the South Freeway wasn't yet the mess it's turned into.

Another difference between now and then. My boss now would have a blue screaming fit if I took off to confront a possible killer without letting him know about it. I didn't know any better. Besides, I had a six-three, ex-mil, no-fooling FBI agent sitting in my office.

"I don't know if this guy is the one who did it or not. Would you be willing to help me find out?"

Trevanian looked at the folders, the lists of names. The pattern I'd drawn up across an accordion sheet spread of green and white striped printer paper.

The address I'd circled, the name, and the Key Map binder.

"Detective, I sure as hell didn't fly down to Houston in August hoping you'd blow me off and send me back to D.C. emptyhanded. Just promise you'll talk it out as we drive." Because whatever else Trevanian was here for, he wanted me to be right. Now, on the drive, walking up to the trailer house sitting on a half-acre of flood-prone coastal prairie.

Sitting on the guy's beat-up old couch, asking if he'd known my kids. One by one, Amos, Rod. Tracy. Geno. Menna. William. Jeffery. Naming every one, going through the list, when the guy's face is breaking in front of me, Will's moving I can hear the floor creak under his weight maybe not the guy's moving his hand behind the counter and now.

I don't yell. I say, "On the floor, Mr. Billings, on the floor now." And he's still reaching for something when my gun rises and the sights settle in over his nose.

And here we are. "Go for it, lady. Pull it, you know you want to." And so I do, only I don't shoot the son of a bitch like he wants me to, he's smiling as he says it. Until the bullet passes by his ear, into the hood vent behind him and Will and I move like we'd been doing this all our lives, me first around the counter and Will right behind me, I keep the sights centered on him.

Even as he slides down onto the floor in front of us. Maybe he'd have gone for the gun, a revolver he kept in the knife drawer, if I'd have been stupid enough to show up by myself.

As it was, he went to his face; Will cuffed him. And I holstered the gun and lead Pierce Billings to the car.

We didn't go back into the trailer until we'd done the rest of the work. The details stuff. A warrant, that was easy, dispatch put Penrose through and then Will and I were swearing to the judge over the radio. "I'll be there in an hour with the warrant," Penrose told me when we got through with that. "The badges should be there a lot quicker."

The first marked car was close enough the red lights reflected across my car as we spoke. "Got it. We're not going anywhere."

What we found in the trailer, well, it got to the papers because DeJuana had started listening to the police band. She beat Penrose there; she didn't have to wait for Judge Emmett to sign any paperwork. I didn't recognize the Jeep, but I had enough suspicions to leave Will with our suspect and head DeJuana off. "Just do me a favor and wait at the end of the driveway. This guy could be a nervous drug dealer who doesn't have anything to do with anything."

"Uh-huh. Just answer one question, and I'll wait here like a good girl."

I could do that. "Shoot."

"Do you really think the guy you've got in the back of the car was just someone dumb enough to overreact to you coming in to ask him a question?"

That was the first time I'd had a chance to think back, to remember Septimus's face, the hunger that flew into his eyes when I named my kids. Amos Turner, Tracy Shepherd, Geno LeGuin, Menna Luongo. Jeffery Modesto. William Benne. Rod Washington. The first chance I had to reflect on that hunger, and that he couldn't help but feel it even as I was reaching for the gun on my belt.

"No, DeJuana. He wasn't a dumbshit we stumbled on by accident. He knew why we were there."