The police station was located in a three-story granite building at the heart of downtown, nestled between an Olive Garden and the town hall. Due to its proximity to the restaurant, the station sometimes smelled of garlic and tomato sauce. Natalie pulled into the parking lot around back and sat for a moment, her head throbbing as if a thousand pneumatic drills were boring into her skull. She hadn’t had her third cup of coffee yet and was struggling with caffeine withdrawal. She gathered her energy, got out of her vehicle, and headed for the back entrance.
Seventy-five sworn law officers made up the rank and file of the Burning Lake Police Department. There were twenty support staff, and whenever things got a little heated around here, like they were now, everybody chipped in by taking a heavier caseload and volunteering for overtime if necessary.
Natalie stopped by the kitchen for a cup of coffee before grabbing her mail and heading for the elevators. She took a steel car up to the third-floor detective’s unit, where her desk was situated across the aisle from Detective Buckner’s. Brandon was on unpaid leave pending the internal investigation. He was staying with his father across town and hadn’t returned any of her messages yet. She sat down at her desk and answered a few emails. Her mouse pad said PROPERTY OF BLPD. Her ivy plant had died a few days ago because she kept forgetting to water it, and now the leaves were brown and curled. The only other personal touches on her desk were two crayon drawings by five-year-old Ellie and a framed picture of ten-year-old Natalie and her sisters dressed as witches one long-ago Halloween.
“Hey, Natalie.” Detective Augie Vickers, a bland-looking man in his late forties, came over and stood so close to her desk, she could smell the liverwurst on his breath. His exhaustive reports were no fun to read. You got lost in a sea of details. “We didn’t get the tox results back from the hospital yet, but my contact at the state lab says some of the contraband we found at Haymarket Field was Kush, not marijuana.”
K2 was a synthetic cannabis that went by a hundred other names—spice, black mamba, fake marijuana, blaze. Synthetic cannabis was created in homegrown labs, combining noncannabis herbs with chemical compounds that could be highly toxic. It was easy to overdose on K2, because it wasn’t anything like marijuana, more like amphetamines, and could lead to hallucinations, seizures, convulsions, tachycardia, stroke, acute psychosis, brain damage, and even death.
“Confirmed Kush? That might explain Riley’s seizures,” Natalie said.
“Exactly. I’ll head over to the hospital after the team meeting and find out if the tox results are back, but I’d bet my left nut that’s what caused them. We found two other witnesses who attested to the fact that Brandon didn’t touch Riley, was in fact nowhere near him when he collapsed. So I think we can rule out the use of force. Fuck it, Natalie. How do you spell relief?”
“Let’s hope so,” she said, her desk wobbling just a little.
“Oops. Gotta fix that,” Augie joked and walked away.
“Hey, thanks,” she said cynically. Her first day on the job—as was the custom for all rookies—the guys had given Natalie the worst desk in the unit, the one with the wobbly legs. She kept a matchbook tucked under the shortest leg to keep it from driving her insane, but once in a while it slipped out of place.
The afternoon sun glared through the office’s wide, old-fashioned windows. She got up and closed the nearest set of blinds. The air vent above her desk cooked her head in the wintertime and froze her scalp in the summer. Today she had a pounding headache, and the drone of background noise drilled into her skull.
On the far wall, next to an old-fashioned clock, was a large-print calendar, big enough to read from across the room. All the significant information was posted there—team meetings, interviews, appointments, court appearances. The Criminal Investigations Unit consisted of seven detectives and a supervising lieutenant detective. The unit handled homicides, suicides, non-traffic-related accidental deaths, in-custody deaths, and any other suspicious incidents resulting in life-threatening injuries. Traffic accidents, however, were handled by a small team of qualified officers.
A row of heavy-duty binders lined the shelves to Natalie’s right, and her active investigative files were spread across her work table. A case was declared “cold” when the detective-in-charge had reached a dead end and her more current cases were piling up. It was a matter of priorities.
The Missing Nine were different, however. Special. They’d been passed from detective to detective inside the unit for years in order to get new eyeballs scouring through the voluminous information. Why had they failed so far? Conflicting stories, few verifiable facts. The homeless population was afraid to talk to the police, whether their apprehension was justified or not. Details were scarce. Witnesses scattered. Leads dried up. Transients were almost impossible to track.
Natalie had been studying the nine case files for months now, searching for any new links or leads. A few weeks ago, she’d found something that appeared to connect at least two of the cases together—but hadn’t informed Luke about it yet, preferring to dig up more evidence to support her theory first. And today, she’d gotten an intriguing third connection.
It all began with Dustin Macgowan, a transient so covered in dirt he looked like a paperdoll-cutout come to life, limbs and clothes covered in earth, two radiant eyes lined with cracked mud. He disappeared nine years ago, simply vanished from an alleyway that smelled of urine and garbage. All that was left of Dustin was a paper bag in the shape of his hand wrapped tightly around the neck of a pint of whiskey and a bloodstain pattern on the brick wall.
Natalie had recently discovered an overlooked clue in Dustin’s file, however—something that wasn’t mentioned in any of the police reports. A dead crow was visible in one of the police photos of the cluttered alleyway Dustin once called home.
Now she opened the binder and leafed through its careworn pages. There. She used a sticky note to mark the spot, then pulled down a second binder. Like Joey used to say: Reduce it down to the basics—beginning, middle, end. Natalie carried both binders with her down the hallway and knocked on Luke’s door.
“Come in,” he said, hanging up the phone.
“Got a minute?”
“Sure, Natalie. What’s up?”
She closed the door behind her and took a seat. “King Edward,” she said, handing him one of the binders and opening it to a specific page.
Luke’s office chair squealed as it rolled over the antistatic floor mat. “Edward O. King,” he repeated, looking down at several color photographs in their transparent sleeves. “Yeah, I remember this guy. One of our Missing Nine. Used to wear a fright wig, mumbling to himself and scaring the tourists. Disappeared five years ago. What am I looking at? Pictures of his shopping cart?”
“He vanished without a trace and left the cart behind. These pictures were taken about a week later, after his social worker reported him missing. See here?” She pointed at one of the photographs. “There’s a dead crow in the cart, underneath all that junk. You can only see its wings in this picture, so we don’t know if it was mutilated or not. It could be roadkill.”
Luke nodded. “King Edward was certainly a hoarder.”
“Now check this out.” She handed him the other binder and opened it to a bookmarked page. “Here’s a photograph of the alleyway where Dustin Macgowan used to sleep before he disappeared nine years ago. See the dead crow next to the dumpster? It wasn’t mentioned in any of the police reports, because it was just a dead crow on the ground, but cumulatively, if you look at these two cases, plus today’s find—”
Revelation bloomed in Luke’s eyes. “Peter Skinner found the mutilated crow at Big Rock, which was the last place Juan Navarro was seen alive, sitting on top of Big Rock, before he disappeared fifteen years ago.”
“That’s three of our Missing Nine,” she said.
“Are you suggesting it’s a calling card?”
“Could be.” Juan Navarro had probably three whole teeth in his head. He used to hang out at the shelter on Palmer Avenue, drumming his fingers on the tables and listening in on other people’s conversations. An anorexic guy with greasy hair down to his waist, he’d turn up his nose at the hot meals, because he just wanted to be around other folks. He’d warm his hands on their company, like a wood-burning fireplace. “In the meantime,” Natalie said, “I’ll keep looking through the archives for any other photographs or mentions of dead birds, but as of now … we have three dead crows associated with three disappearances. Add to that the handwriting on Teresa’s grave,” she continued, “which you said was similar to the graffiti you and Mike found on the spot where Minnie Walker disappeared…”
Luke nodded. “I’ve asked Mike to dig Hannah Daughtery’s file out of archives.”
“Thanks.”
“But don’t get your hopes up. The timing of the Juan Navarro case is off. I doubt that a mutilated crow has been out there behind Big Rock for fifteen years. Which means that somebody put it there more recently. Maybe some sicko who’s obsessed with the disappearances, or who’s into witchcraft—not necessarily the perpetrator of the abductions. Same with the handwriting. This could all add up to nothing. At any rate, it’s definitely worth investigating. See where it takes you, and keep me apprised. At some point, I may want to get involved.”
“Great,” she said.
“Good job, Natalie. But remember your priorities.” He checked his watch. “Ready for the team meeting?”
Natalie nodded. “Be right there.”