Birthday Girl Read online

  “But, in the end, my ‘performance’ didn’t matter. Skimpy evidence and prosecutorial screwups meant Kerrigan went to a halfway house and then was out. When I heard the verdict, I was bitter, I was disappointed, but I let it go—the system had failed like it sometimes does, but we’d get the next one, right?”

  Outside, a car horn honked. There were shouts, laughter, then silence.

  “A year later,” Elliott continued, “my daughter Cecilia—Cee Cee—and I went to a nearby playground. She was abducted, in plain sight of everyone there, including me. We never found her.”

  He swallowed loudly, coughed.

  “There was no trace of her until her clothes turned up in a park in Virginia months later, covered with her blood and . . . evidence from Kerrigan. The courtroom threats became relevant. After they arrested him, he admitted kidnapping her, doing things to her, killing her, though they never found her body. Witnesses later remembered seeing a blue panel van—like the one Kerrigan owned—hanging around the park. I still can’t see one without getting tied into knots. So, between the evidence and the confession, they threw the book at him this time, but of course it didn’t matter. Like so many other things we do, it was too late.”

  Amy put a hand over her mouth.

  “We tried to have another child. It was a disaster. We separated and Marilyn left DC. By December, I’d stopped working—I couldn’t take the stand without seeing Kerrigan across from me. By March, I’d been evicted and started sleeping on couches. By June, I was on the streets. Lucky me, I had a few months to learn to live off the grid before it got cold. That was eight years ago.”

  A silence fell between them.

  “So, now you know. That’s why Dave sent me to you. I’m a kindred spirit. With a psychology degree. I know what you’ve been through. I know the kind of mind that would conceive of taking your daughter.” And, if the worst should happen, I can warn you just how deep you can sink.

  “Elliott, I’m so sorry,” Amy whispered.

  He nodded, not trusting himself to speak for a moment, then sighed and shook himself. He drained his coffee and put it down with a bang. “Let’s get back to work.”

  They took their places on the futon, and Amy resumed the process of taking dozens of dates from Dave’s files, turning them into numbers from her Abjad chart, then reciting the values to Elliott. He, in turn, jotted them down, added the results, then recorded the final figure in her homemade spreadsheet, a yellow legal tablet with hand-drawn lines. The work moved along in a steady drone, punctuated by Elliott’s sighs as they added what seemed to be an endless succession of nonsense numbers without context. He reminded himself that this was part of Amy’s coping strategy, a way to take control of her situation. There would be time later to add some intelligence and deduction to the search.

  He dutifully scratched the figures onto the paper. 509 plus 9 plus 2015 equals 2,533.

  Next.

  110 plus 16 plus 2014 equals 2,140.

  Next.

  618 plus 31 plus 2013 equals 2,662.

  Elliott scowled, his pencil hovering over the paper. 618 plus 31 . . . Something about the combination plucked at his memory. “What category are we on?”

  Amy looked back at her work. “The dates they . . . discovered the bodies.”

  “We’re into the kids who didn’t make it?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  Elliott looked at the tablet. There was hardly a space on the paper that wasn’t filled with scribbles, but he looked at the total for the last addition problem and circled it, then scanned the cramped sheet until he found another, circling it, as well. He frowned. That’s not it. Something else had caught his attention.

  “What was the calculation before that?”

  Amy consulted her book. “The birthdays of the victims. Why, did you find something?”

  “Hold on.”

  His eyes skimmed left along the row to the first column. Cameron King. He swallowed so hard his throat made a clicking noise. Putting a name to the numbers was painful. But he willed his eyes to trace the row to the right, reading the numbers that summed a child’s life. Born in March—a Pisces, Amy had already noted in the margin, of course she had—and only eight years old when he’d been reported missing seven years previously.

  His birthday calculation was 618 plus 28 plus 2001 equals 2,647.

  He glanced over at his “date of discovery” calculation: 2,662.

  He tapped the number with his pencil. In a vast spreadsheet where nearly all of the entries differed in value by the hundreds, this one was off by fifteen.

  Holding his place with a finger, he nodded at the red-tagged stack of folders. “Can you find Cameron King’s case file in that mess?”

  Sensing his growing excitement, Amy slipped the sheet out and handed it to him. He read the summary, piecing together a narrative in his head from the handful of facts.

  Cameron King’s body had been found behind a dumpster near an exhaust grate on Georgia Avenue. New track marks on his arms had suggested a recent, sickening addiction to heroin—Elliott swallowed; that clicking noise again—at just twelve years old, a legacy of a child’s life on the streets. At the time of the discovery, the mother had been in jail for solicitation and possession. The father, unknown. The mother was released in custody long enough to identify the body. Cameron was written off as a throwaway-turned-junkie and the case was closed. Or, more accurately, never opened. A young boy, nearly a teen, dead sadly close to his birthday.

  Elliott froze. How close to his birthday?

  He squinted at the abbreviated police report. The body had been found by a beat cop in the predawn hours of March 31, already in the early stages of decomposition. The coroner had put the date of death seventy-two hours earlier.

  Subtract three from the date of discovery and Cameron King had died on his birthday.

  Somewhere between Elliott’s heart and his stomach a vacuum took hold, a falling feeling that wouldn’t go away. He took the spreadsheet he’d recorded his final numbers on and folded the paper like an accordion so that the column marked “birthday” was now butted against “date of discovery.” He felt Amy’s eyes watching him. With a finger, he traced down the paper, comparing the Abjad numbers in each column, then glancing at the victim’s “age” column for confirmation. Each time his finger stopped, the two Abjad numbers were nearly identical.

  Why not identical? Well, different years, first of all. And assume that not all bodies are found immediately. The date of discovery would naturally be a few days after the actual death, which was not explicitly listed in Dave’s files but implied in the coroner’s reports.

  If you took that slight margin of error into account, then the exact difference between the victim’s birth date and the day they died was their age.

  He raised his head and looked at Amy. His heart was hammering in his rib cage. A large part of his calculus for getting involved in Lacey Scowcroft’s case melted away. While his offer to help find Lacey had been an honest one, at least a part of him thought that his real challenge would be to lead Amy gently back from the edge when they learned that the worst had happened, that Lacey was dead. To convince her to fold her past away and accept a different future before she ended up like him, or worse. All that evaporated in the face of what he was reading on the pages in front of him.

  She looked at him, anxious. “Elliott? What is it?”

  “There’s a connection.”

  Her face paled. “Show me.”

  He pointed to the columns, having a hard time containing his excitement. “Your crazy Abjad numbers, for the vast majority of these kids, bear no resemblance to each other. Which makes sense, of course. The dates these kids were born have no connection to any other date, so the Abjad values are wildly different from each other.”

  “Right.”

  He pointed to Cameron’s row. “But these values are close. Really close. Meaning the dates they were derived from are very similar. I didn’t notice because I wasn’t seeing the
actual days, the months and so on. I was just adding numbers.”

  “Those are the birth date and date of discovery Abjad values,” Amy said, then frowned. “They’re close, but they’re not exact.”

  “No, they’re not, but that’s the date the body was discovered. If you assume the victim actually died a day or two or three before they were found, then the values are only off by Cameron’s age, which means . . .”

  “He died on his birthday,” she finished for him, then paled. “How many did you find?”

  “Six. About five too many to be a coincidence.”

  Amy’s eyes widened. “Oh my god. Someone’s killing them on their birthdays?”

  “It seems that way,” he cautioned. “It’s only a pattern at this point.”

  “But how did no one see that before?”

  He gestured to the files. “Six kids across dozens, maybe hundreds, of cases? Over a five-year spread? Not to mention . . .”

  “What?”

  Elliott hesitated, then made a face. “Cameron was the throwaway kid of a junkie mom and an absent father. My guess? When he disappeared, his case got bounced back and forth between CPS and the MPD. The cops glanced at it and threw some manpower at the case, but not a lot—check the shelters, watch the street corners, keep an eye out.”

  “And when his body turned up and the examiner called it an overdose . . .”

  “The cops filed it ‘closed’ and moved on to the next one. Why would an already overtaxed police force have any reason to look for random correlations between birthdays and death dates?”

  Suddenly, Amy gasped and grabbed a fistful of his jacket.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Elliott,” she choked. “Lacey’s birthday is in ten days.”

  15

  Dave

  “I’ll take a large coffee and a marble frosted—aw, hell . . .”

  Dave glanced over as the radio on Fracasso’s hip barked. His partner’s face, lit up for once in anticipation of a donut and a coffee, fell back to its pouchy, hound dog look as they listened to the call come in.

  “Baker 37 and Baker 36, respond for a possible overdose on the fourteen hundred block of Levis Street in the Trinidad. A white male approximately twelve to fourteen years old was seen lying on the ground unresponsive. Medics are staging.”

  Fracasso turned the volume down as other customers glanced up. A minute later, the response came back.

  “Baker 37, 10-4. I’m en route.”

  Ten seconds later: “Baker 36. I’m busy with an assault in Edgeworth. Anyone else in the vicinity?”

  They were on a lunch break and weren’t a patrol unit, so they wouldn’t be expected to respond to a radio call . . . but they were six blocks away. Fracasso looked at the donut case longingly. “Do we gotta?”

  “Tony, we’re Youth and Family Services, remember? Forget the donut.”

  Fracasso sighed, but grabbed the mic. “Cruiser 553. I’m in the area of that last call. Go ahead and hold me out.”

  They jogged out to the car and hit the street, making it to the Trinidad neighborhood in three minutes, even with traffic, but were stymied by the collection of small, urban streets. Bent over the steering wheel to better see street signs, Fracasso hummed and muttered to himself. “Levis, Levis, where are you, Levis?”

  Dave poked at the GPS. “Two blocks up, take a left.”

  When they got to Levis, Fracasso gunned it, spotting a group of people knotted up by the curb of what they assumed was the fourteen hundred block. Fracasso swung to the curb. They jumped out and were ready to run when Dave stopped short.

  “They said overdose, right?”

  “Drug kit, good call.” Fracasso swerved back to the cruiser and popped the trunk. He snatched out a small black duffel bag. “Got it.”

  The people shouted and pointed toward the back of a low row of tenements. The last house appeared abandoned, with broken windows and a boarded up door. They sprinted down a narrow walk squeezed between the house and a rotting fence to the backyard where, propped up against a brick wall, was a young man—stick thin, pale, head lolling. They knelt to either side of him.

  Dave swore as he snapped on plastic gloves, then lifted one of the boy’s eyelids. The eyes were wide and blank, with pinpoint pupils. Sirens in the distance. Fracasso had two fingers on the kid’s throat. “Dave, no pulse.”

  “Do the NARCAN anyway.”

  Fracasso broke open a small plastic box from the duffel bag, then pulled out a slim paper sleeve. Ripping it open, he slid out a thick-bodied syringe with a wedged white plastic head.

  “Hold his head,” Fracasso said through gritted teeth. Sweat beaded along his hairline in the chilly air. “Where’s the freaking medic?”

  Grabbing the chin and top of the skull, Dave positioned the boy’s head so that his partner could place the syringe just inside the right nostril. With steady pressure, Fracasso depressed the plunger halfway down, then switched nostrils and emptied the rest of the syringe. There was no apparent effect, and they began rubbing the boy’s wrists and ankles.

  Which is when Dave noticed that the boy’s clothes were odd even for a young teen junkie or tweaker. He was wearing faded green work pants, like the kind old men preferred, worn smooth at the knees and the inner thighs. His top was a blue, long-sleeved plaid shirt with a wide cowboy collar and sleeves that fell several inches short of the boy’s wrists. Across the shoulders was a stylized yoke with decorative white stitching. The material was so thin the boy’s ribs were visible through the fabric.

  Dave frowned. “I think I—”

  Heavy footsteps thudded as two EMTs rounded the corner wheeling a stretcher. They brought it as close as they could, then ditched it when the ground got too rough. They jogged over to the cops, dropping kits and bags next to the boy.

  “James,” Dave said, recognizing the bigger of the two EMTs.

  “Hey, Dave. What’s happening?” James said as he knelt, his eyes never leaving the body. The two cops backed away to give them room. “We got ourselves a case of the ol’ meanie greenies?”

  “Maybe. Didn’t have time to check the pockets. Reported as an OD. Dilated pupils, clammy skin, unresponsive. We did the NARCAN thing.”

  James frowned. “How old is this kid?”

  “Peach fuzz says teen, but he’s skinny as shit,” Fracasso said. “I bet I weighed more than him when I was born.”

  “He still high?”

  Fracasso snorted. “Don’t know if he’s still alive.”

  James glanced at the other EMT, who had a stethoscope out and on the kid’s chest. The EMT nodded. “He’s alive. Well, a little bit of him, anyway. We’ll grab the Reeves and haul him out of here. The NARCAN’ll keep him breathing till we can get him to Mercy General.” He grinned humorlessly at the two detectives. “Fourth one we caught today!”

  “That a record?”

  James gave a derisive snort. “Not even top ten. But you gimme till suppertime, I’ll let you know.”

  Baker 37 pulled up and started interviewing the small crowd on the street while Dave and Fracasso watched the medics slide the boy’s body onto a Reeves device, a flexible orange sling with straps, and from there onto the wheeled stretcher. James lifted the boy tenderly from the Reeves sling onto the stretcher.

  “See this shit all the goddamned time and I still can’t stand it,” Fracasso said.

  The words barely registered for Dave. He couldn’t stop staring at the boy’s ridiculous, ill-fitting shirt, a raggedy old thing too short at the wrists and stretched tight across the bony shoulders. It stirred a childhood memory so long forgotten he was wondering if he was just imagining it, filling in blanks of his mind that he didn’t know were there. He’d seen it, he was sure, as a child. Maybe on a TV show or in a comic? A cowboy shirt with a wide collar . . . it had the taste of something familiar, an object that had been in his vision all the time once. Then, nothing. An absolute blank.

  Fracasso nudged him. “Everything still working in there?
”

  Dave shook himself. “Sorry, Tony. Guess I’m not used to it myself.”

  “Hey, at least he made it this far,” his partner said as they watched them roll the teen around the building and to the ambulance waiting in the street. “Fingers crossed he’ll pull out of it in the hospital.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So,” Fracasso said. “We going back for those donuts or what?”

  16

  Evan

  Julie leaned over and shouted at Evan above the applause. “It’s going to be a total madhouse out there!”

  He nodded wearily and kept clapping until his hands stung. The kids—dressed in their turkey, Pilgrim, and Native American costumes—looked dazed at all the attention. No surprise—they were on their third curtain call, but no parent of a Saint Andrew’s student wanted to be seen as anything less than insanely enthusiastic. Especially if your ex was somewhere in the audience. With her new husband. He fought the temptation to look over his shoulder to see how hard she was clapping.

  Julie nudged him. The Pilgrims had come back out onstage for their bow, and his son was looking right at him. Evan waved like he’d never seen him before. Jeremy, wan and willowy but tall for ten, would’ve been mistaken for one of the middle-school chaperones if he hadn’t been dressed like a sixteenth-century Dutch Master, complete with buckled shoes on his feet and black sugarloaf hat sitting atop his burst of red hair. Shifting from foot to foot, the boy held on to a papier-mâché blunderbuss with both hands like it was a life preserver.

  To the relief of every adult in the massive theater, the overhead lights came on after the last bow and the children trooped offstage. The sounds of general bustle followed as everyone reached for their coats and began filing out of the rows and into the aisles.

  The Thanksgiving extravaganza was a two-part affair, with half the children at the school having given their performance the previous night, so what could have been an orderly process disintegrated into complete chaos as the kids in the audience—made to sit still and quiet for nearly an hour—exploded out of their seats and began tearing around the space, hooting and whooping at each other. Behind him, a kid let out a scream like he was being disemboweled, then vaulted over the row of seats so he could run pell-mell along the row with three other friends who had done the same.