Repressed Page 23

  He shifted his weight, letting his pants rub against that forever-tender spot in his leg. In the oblivion, he’d find his family. And if he didn’t find them in time, he’d release himself into the oblivion, heaven or hell on the needle, it didn’t really matter so long as he didn’t have to consider the world without his family in it. Without Shannon. Without Evie.

  He was almost panting now, the dizziness pulling at him, tunneling his vision until he sucked in a thick burst of oxygen. The agitation lessened. And then, there on the computer screen, large as life: The Juggler. Morrison’s breath caught. Lots of child abusers. Fewer with a penchant for cult bands and bloody clowns. But with that name...

  He scoured The Juggler’s pages, poring over chatrooms, conversations.

  “He was so sweet. I really think God made them adorable to tempt us—and that’s not a bad thing. Even the priests get away with it. They know these boys were meant to be loved.”

  Translation: “I’m entitled to rape. It’s their fault for being appealing.” Morrison pictured Evie’s beautiful little face and covered his retching with a choked grunt. Decantor turned and looked across the room. Morrison swallowed hard and went back to the computer.

  He clicked on the bar to message users privately, picturing the man on the receiving end: scraggly hair, sneering at the screen, Shannon locked up in the background, lips mangled and swollen and bloody. He paused, his trembling fingers poised over the keys.

  Finally, he typed:

  “The jugglers were always my favorite at the circus.”

  Morrison consulted the song lyrics from his desk drawer and finished:

  “Don’t get under those knives, motherfucker.”

  He hit send.

  Somewhere, a phone rang. Morrison jumped, touched his pocket where Decantor’s phone rested—it wasn’t buzzing. Nor was his own cell. The words on the computer screen were hypnotic, pulling his attention from all else.

  He searched through more of The Juggler’s pages, looking for IP addresses or anything else he could use to track him. But The Juggler was well protected. Firewalls. Encryptions. Rerouting mechanisms. This asshole wasn’t living in Kazakhstan, that was for damn sure—he was craftier than Morrison had given him credit for. Even his profile picture gave nothing away: a mask like one from a Mardi Gras parade, white, porcelain maybe, with black checks around the eyes and fangs, much like the clown face on the cover of one of the CDs he’d seen. In one thread The Juggler had bragged:

  “Made it myself.”

  The bag that Xu had mentioned seeing the guy handing off … had he made a mask for a friend and taken it to him? Morrison tried not to picture that hideous mask. He didn’t want to imagine that mask being the last thing his daughter saw before she was stomped to death.

  Focus on the clues. Find them.

  Morrison went back to the private message screen and typed:

  “Also, I love your profile picture. Do you make masks for other people, too? If so, I’d love to buy one.”

  Cold. Find the cold. Too forward? Would he scare the guy off? He squinted at the computer, willing a response. Nothing. The words ran together on the page, swimming, then solidifying, wooziness pulling at him the more he stared. I can’t stop until I find her. I’ll never stop.

  And these bastards wanted to be found, didn’t they? Karen did anyway. Don’t stop working your cases. You’ll know where to find me. That’s what she’d said. So Morrison was supposed to find them. He’d be walking into an ambush, but he had no alternative.

  Find him. Find them. Think, Surfer Boy.

  Somewhere nearby, a phone rang again. Morrison eyed the phone on his desk, patted his pockets. Not his. He rubbed his eyes with his palms. He needed coffee. No.

  He needed heroin.

  One little prick and he’d finally remember how he knew Karen. But it was an excuse. Or was it? He could stop again—he’d done it before. And no one would ever have to know.

  But Shannon’s voice pealed through his head: “Evie needs you. I need you.” Could he do that high? Yes, the drug whispered. No, he whispered back, less convincingly, his veins practically trembling with the memory of the drug, craving it, begging for it.

  He was losing his mind. The phone rang again, and he looked up. The phone. Petrosky’s phone. He leapt from his seat, stumbled over Petrosky’s chair, and threw the receiver to his ear.

  “Detective Petrosky?” Music blared in the background over the voice, a male voice, gruff and thick with what might have been liquor.

  “This is Detective Morrison. How can I help you?”

  “This is Zach.”

  Zachary Reynolds. The Juggler’s first victim that they knew of and a connection to the kidnappers. A connection to his little girl, to his wife. Morrison sat at Petrosky’s desk and opened the top drawer, rummaging for a pen and something to write on. He snapped open the drawer on the other side and found a nub of a pencil. No paper. “What can I do for you, Zach?”

  “I found something. Or … maybe. I mean, I don't know if it’s something, but Detective Petrosky asked me about that number.”

  “The number one.” Morrison pulled a fast food bag from the first drawer and turned it inside out, throwing an old French fry to the floor and crushing it underfoot as if it were The Juggler he was stomping to death. The way Acosta had been stomped to death.

  There was a sharp inhale on the line, like the kid was smoking, and Morrison gritted his teeth against the pause, every synapse in his brain firing with impatience.

  “Got this box in the closet. Shit I wanted to forget about. The scans and pictures of me in the hospital bed.” Cancer. The kid had beat fucking cancer only to be raped and strangled. Some luck.

  Another inhale on the line, this one longer, sharper. “Had some toys in there, things I forgot about. Cards and little teddy bears and shit. But one of them was this little brown bear with a Get Well Soon balloon sewn to his chest.”

  Morrison’s nub of a pencil trembled over the bag.

  “The balloon says ‘You’re number one.’”

  Probably commercially produced, but … Too much coincidence. Morrison’s heart palpitated, growing bigger with each beat, but his rib cage squeezed tighter and tighter around his lungs. “Zach, do you remember who gave it to you?”

  This time the exhale was hard, as hard as if he were blowing up a balloon. “I don’t know. I was out of it.”

  Morrison’s stomach dropped. “Would your mom know?”

  The music changed, and the bass vibrated through Morrison’s hand and up to his elbow, rattling his already frayed nerves.

  “Nah, she wasn’t there all the time.”

  “Wasn’t where?”

  “At the hospital. Where I got it.” Zach’s voice was vaguely defensive.

  Shit. He’d missed it. Hadn’t Dylan Acosta’s mother mentioned him being in the hospital, too? If that was how their pedophile was choosing his victims, grooming the kids while they were sick and vulnerable … “Emerald Grace, right?”

  “Yeah.” The music stopped so abruptly that Morrison felt he’d been pulled into an alternate universe where the world was wrapped in cotton. “You think I’ll go back?” Zach said, his voice so low that Morrison had to strain to hear him.

  “Back to the hospital?”

  Zach was silent on the other end. Then: “I’m just tired of being scared.” The line went dead, and the pressure in Morrison’s chest erupted with heat. The kid was going to fucking kill himself.

  32

  Strings of multicolored Christmas lights and the finger paintings strung from the hospital walls did little to mask the scent of rubbing alcohol and some kind of lemon cleaning fluid. Morrison kept his eyes on the center of the corridor, footsteps echoing back to him in time to his heart. Both too fast. At least a phone call had verified that Zachary Reynolds was not in immediate danger from himself or otherwise: his mother was home with him, and he was most certainly fine—physically, anyway.

  The halls on the children’s w
ard were empty. Maybe morning rounds. He peered into the nearest room at a little black-haired child, scrawny body wasting away under a thin sheet. Air hissed through a tube into a cannula held under his nostrils by a piece of clear tape. At the kid’s bedside, his mother slept, face planted into the foot of the bed, one hand on the child’s leg. Connected.

  Shannon was stuck in a collar. And Evie was alone.

  The next kid was just as asleep as the first, the gentle glow from a light in the corner glistening on her bald head. Maybe the stabby killer worked here and shaved his head as a way to connect with the kids. A doctor maybe. A nurse. An orderly. Or maybe their rapist had shaved his scraggly hair which is why no one recognized him now.

  “Can I help you?” A young nurse with butterfly-print scrubs and an afro approached him: L. Freeman, according to her name tag. “Visiting hours don’t start until ten, but if you want to wait in the cafeteria downstairs for fifteen minutes—”

  He flashed his badge. “I’m not visiting. Looking for information.”

  Surprise registered in her eyes. “On who?” she whispered. “Are you family?”

  Zachary Reynolds had been there too long ago for most current staff to remember any pertinent details. But Acosta—they might get lucky. If he could get her to cooperate. “I’m looking for a killer.”

  Her mouth fell open. She closed it again.

  “Dylan Acosta was a patient here a year ago. Did you know him?”

  She crooked a finger, and he followed her to the main desk where another nurse—short, thin, brunette—was bustling around with files. Morrison startled when a buzzer sounded, and the other nurse glanced at him, then rushed off to attend to it. Freeman watched her go.

  “I … saw on the news what happened to Dylan. Killed at school right? Just horrible.” Her voice shook with emotion. She had known him.

  “I need to know who he would have been in contact with,” Morrison said, as softly as he could manage. “His doctors. Staff who had access to him.”

  She shook her head, crossed her arms—preparing for battle. “I’m sorry, I can’t give that kind of information out. I’m not even supposed to tell you if he was a patient here.”

  She was right. But he didn’t have time to waste on a warrant or on a fucking release from Dylan’s mother. So why the hell was he here? He could get all the information he needed on the doctors just by looking at the hospital website. Same for the nursing staff. Maybe if he hacked into the database—but no, hospital websites were notoriously tricky. One wrong move and he’d shut the whole thing down. He didn’t want to give the killers a chance to sew any more of Shannon together, or carve her up like they did to Bell.

  “But …” the nurse began, glancing over her shoulder, “if you can give me a date, I can tell you who was on duty without discussing individual patients.” She punched a few buttons and looked at him expectantly.

  He opened his mouth to talk. He had no idea. But it wouldn't have been just one day. It would have been multiple days. Acosta and Reynolds had had been admitted with cancer, not broken bones.

  “Dylan Acosta was here for a few weeks.” And in that time … had the pedophile given him a gift? Like he had with Zachary Reynolds? Other parts of The Juggler’s pattern had remained consistent over time. “Specifically, ma’am, I’m looking for someone who gave Dylan a toy. A teddy bear, maybe.”

  “A teddy bear? Sounds pretty common. They sell them in the gift shop downstairs.”

  “Outside of parents, are there staff members who sometimes give toys to the kids?”

  She squinted at him. “Sometimes? Most of the kids need a little distraction, so that wouldn't be out of the question.”

  “Anyone who does it routinely?”

  She shook her head.

  “What about someone who takes a special interest in certain children? In Dylan?”

  She studied the ceiling, the wall, then her eyes widened and Morrison’s heart picked up. She’s got something.

  “Actually … nothing out of the ordinary, mind you. But we have people who come in to cheer the kids up, and those are the ones whose job it is to distract, to play. To take an interest. It’s not that we don’t, but we can’t always take the time to play as much as we’d like.”

  “No one’s accusing you of being inattentive.”

  Her shoulders relaxed, but her mouth stayed tight. “The people I’m thinking of are volunteers from a company called Winning with Grinning. Incredibly nice, all of them. So kind to the kids.”

  “How often do they come?”

  “Once a week. Usually Mondays. Sometimes they do puppet shows here in front of the reception desk … or magic. And they always bring something for the kids who’re here—books or toys or games.”

  These people wouldn't be protected by HIPAA—they weren’t patients. He had every right to their files. “Do you have records for the group? Names, addresses?”

  She nodded slowly. “They would in HR. Anyone who has contact with our patients has to have a file. Background checks, vaccine records, all that. Especially with how ill some of our kids are.”

  Morrison glanced at the clock on the wall, ticking away precious seconds of his family’s life. Felt the file under his arm. He’d almost forgotten.

  He pulled out the photos and composite drawings and handed them to Freeman. “Any of these guys look familiar?”

  She frowned at the bald man and shook her head. But slowly.

  “Are you certain?”

  “I’m … no. There’s something familiar about him, but I can’t place where I know him from. Maybe he was here visiting someone? But we get lots of people in and out. He definitely wasn’t here regularly.” Freeman flipped to the second photo, the scraggly brown hair, squirrelly face, and her eyes lit up. “This one I know. He’s here like clockwork. Missed this Monday though.”

  Because he was busy behind Dylan's school bleeding him to death.

  She shook her head again. “But you can’t possibly be looking for him. He’s amazing. So sweet and always makes everyone laugh.” She beckoned him around the counter and over to a back wall with a bulletin board covered with photos. In one, a guy in dreadlocks and a magician’s hat held up a deck of playing cards, his face every bit as animated as the children who sat in a circle around him. In another, a woman had a puppet on each hand, mouth open, apparently talking in what looked like a silly voice for the green caterpillar on her right fist.

  And … him. Morrison’s heart skipped a beat.

  He was cleaner than he’d been in Jenny’s rendition of him, and his thin brown hair was covered with a yellow wig, though a few strands had come loose and were plastered to his cheek. His light eyes were just the right shape. His mouth. But in this photo his squirrelly nose was covered with a red foam ball.

  The Juggler was an actual clown.

  33

  An hour and a half later, Morrison had a photocopy of a driver’s license with Michael Hayes’s face on it—a face that looked like their suspect. And Hayes was here. In the city. With Shannon. With Evie.

  According to the volunteer records pulled by the harried head of HR, Hayes worked full-time at a plant that manufactured nuts and bolts for the auto industry. More telling was Hayes’s website: Paraphernalia for Performers, which offered custom masks, shoes, boots, and even puppets, all made to order. Looks like they could guess what he was bringing to his buddy outside of Xu’s nail shop. He’d been married and divorced in the same year about four years ago—maybe his ex-wife had discovered his little fetish. His sickness. He’d look for her too, just in case. But later.

  Now he drove.

  Every traffic light seemed to take extra long and he flipped on his flashing red and blues and blew through the intersections in a blaze of angry horns despite the police lights.

  Fuck them. Fuck everyone. When he found the kidnappers, he would stomp them to death with their own fucking boots.

  Michael Hayes’s neighborhood was good, not great, with smooth asphalt and adequate
streetlights but noise pollution from the nearby freeway. The house was just another two-story colonial on a block with a hundred nearly identical colonials, but The Juggler’s house was somehow more formidable than the rest, despite its white aluminum siding, brown shutters, and curtained bay window. It was the basketball hoop—probably there to tempt neighborhood children onto the property—that seemed to buzz with the energy of a thousand angry hornets. On the backboard was a painting of a clown, its fangs dripping green venom into a puddle just below the ring.

  How many kids had Hayes taken? How many had he raped? Killed? Morrison glanced up and down the street as he drove by, but no one was out besides the brilliant midday sun searing the new growth on the lawns. His chest tightened. At Hayes’s home the grass was newly cut, though not edged. Bushes grew too tall against the house, but the sides had been trimmed back from the walk. Someone lived here. He looked again at the backboard clown. The Juggler lived here.

  Morrison drove by the house twice, then parked in a neighbor’s driveway where four newspapers sat piled on the porch. They were probably on vacation. He shut the car off and got out, then climbed into the backseat so he could watch, hidden partially by the headrest and the shadow of the carport, looking for … what? He tamped down thoughts of the blood on Shannon’s seat back. Her head. And then her mouth … Oh fuck, stop thinking. He breathed in the cold, let it take the fire from his belly.

  Karen had taken her time kidnapping his wife. It had been a year since her first attempt to harm Shannon during that bullshit with Griffen. So would Karen choose to hold Shannon here, in the middle of suburbia, with a highly visible creepy clown in the driveway? Of course not.

  He shouldn’t be here. This wasn’t the place.