“This is August, right? Why are they wearing coats?”
“That’s what we noticed first, too. Four identical coats. White trenches.” He leaned over the photograph and placed his finger near center. “What do you see right here?”
Fogel leaned in closer, too. It took her a moment. “Looks like a kid walking between them.”
“Her mother identified the tee-shirt. It’s Rebecca.”
“If you’re six years old and four adults tell you to go somewhere, you probably just go, right? She probably didn’t put up a fuss.”
“If she did, nobody noticed. But yeah, I bet they just told her her mommy was looking for her, they’d take her to her, and walked Rebecca right out.”
Fogel said, “The camera didn’t capture their vehicle?”
“All I’ve got is this photograph. When I first started piecing all this together, I tried to pull the tapes from evidence, and they were gone, lost. I figured another camera might have the vehicle, or maybe earlier footage caught this crew walking in, but without the tapes, we’ll never know.”
Fogel traced the adults with her fingertip. “If all these murders are connected, this tells us there are at least four perps, not one. The identical coats could mean a cult of some sort. Considering the state of the bodies, it’s hard not to go there. These murders span such a long time frame. That would suggest a cult, too—possibly different perps over time, all working toward the same thing.”
Faustino only nodded at this. He had suspected some kind of cult for years. “Rebecca was found in a Dumpster, 8/8/1982.”
The two of them fell silent at this, both lost in their own thoughts. All these deaths, but that little girl always seemed to hit Faustino the hardest. By the expression on Fogel’s face, he knew he was not alone in that.
After about a minute, he cleared his throat and went back to the board. “1981, unknown male. 1980, unknown male. 1979, unknown female.” Each of the bodies in the photographs looked the same: black, dry skin, almost powdery, burnt, clothing untouched. “Considering the age, I don’t know that we’ll ever identify them unless we catch whoever is responsible.”
Fogel stood from her desk and approached the board. “What happened in 1978?”
“From what I can tell, this was our first, and by far the worst. Three bodies that year, all male.” He pointed at the picture in the center. This guy had a metal plate in his head from an injury in Vietnam. The ME used the serial number to identify him. Twenty-four years old, his name was Calvin Gurney. He came back from ’Nam in ’75, got picked up for some petty stuff early on—vagrancy, shoplifting. Otherwise, there’s not much on him. The other two guys were never identified. They were found at a bloodbath, though. The crime scene was completely different from all these others. I think it was our ground zero.”
“Different how?”
Faustino reached into his drawer and retrieved one more file. This one was about half an inch thick. Inside were a dozen photographs and various reports. “They were found inside a townhouse in Mount Washington. A three-bedroom with a nice view of the city. The place was supposed to be vacant, looked like a squatting situation. Two adults were found downstairs, both dead, both shot. These three men were found in a bedroom on the second floor. Their bodies match all our others. The investigating officer wrote it up as a B&E that went sideways.”
He slid the folder across the desk to her. “Read it. We’ve got time. I’ve got someplace to be.”
“Where?”
“I’m gonna stick to the Bellino kid all day.”
“Seriously? The Flack murder was five years ago. At best, he stumbled into it.”
“It’s all I’ve got.” He pulled his car keys from his pocket and tapped at the folder. “Read. I want to know what you think it all means.”
“What part?”
“You’ll see. It’s different.”
A few other detectives had arrived while they were talking. As he started out of the room, they turned away from him, from the board, murmured to each other. The Wall of Weird was out. Today would be an interesting day.
2
Oddly, the cancer didn’t start in Auntie Jo’s lungs, but in her blood. I couldn’t remember a day when Auntie Jo wasn’t tired, but in the spring of 1992, she gotreallytired. She’d come home from one of her shifts at the diner and collapse into her chair and sometimes didn’t get back up until morning. She lost her appetite, and I noticed that the random bumps and bruises inherent to waiting tables stopped fading from her arms, instead becoming dark, this nasty shade of purple, lingering for weeks. Then the random fevers started. I convinced her to go to the clinic in April, and a blood draw revealed a high count of white blood cells.
The doctor at the clinic referred her to another doctor, and in turn, she referred us to a specialist with offices near West Penn Hospital. Dr. Pavia called the extra white blood cellsblastsand said they weren’t fully developed. Unlike normal white blood cells, these blasts could not fight off infection. They originated in her bone marrow.
My Auntie Jo had leukemia.
Acute myeloid leukemia, he called it.
He was quick to point out her smoking was probably a contributing factor but not the sole cause. He advised her to quit anyway. She said she would, but she lit up a cigarette the minute we left his office, and I had yet to see her cut back from her current pack-a-day habit.
