John stood in the doorway taking in the wreck of what was apparently going to have been some kind of children’s room in the new library.
The place was now being used as a teenagers’ party den.
John knew it was teenagers because there were empty pizza boxes and mini bottles of cinnamon-flavored whiskey strewn across the room, in addition to dirty sleeping bags, piles of clothing, and—oddly enough—numerous books from the Little Bridge Public Library.
It was the empty bottles of syrupy-sweet flavored whisky—the preferred alcoholic beverage, John knew, of the young and inexperienced drinker—that gave away the age of the trespassers, but the phone chargers plugged into the wall outlets and the fact that most of the books appeared to be from the library’s young adult section helped. John recognized them as some of the favorites from his youth—Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, and even Sternberg’s Wilderness Survival Handbook (updated edition).
It was odd that the kids had checked out—or, more likely, stolen—so many books on wilderness survival, then chosen to camp out inside an unoccupied building that had air-conditioning, electricity, and working restrooms.
But that wasn’t what bothered him the most. What really bothered him was the graffiti: red, black, and purple slashes across the once virginal white walls. This wasn’t the ordinary, occasionally even beautiful, graffiti he found over by the new high school or under the bridges and viaducts—kids’ names, lovers’ initials entwined in hearts, goofy doodles, or other attempts at immortality by aspiring artists.
This was something different, something ugly, something someone—or several someones—had sprayed simply to desecrate and destroy.
It was the graffiti that gave it away and caused his heart to sink.
Sunshine Kids. The damned Sunshine Kids were back.
But the graffiti wasn’t even the worst of it. The worst was the girl the kids had left behind, curled in a sleeping bag on the floor, for Molly Montgomery to find along with the rest of their mess.
“At first I thought she was dead,” Molly explained to him when he returned to the neighboring room in which she’d been asked to wait until she could be questioned.
By him, of course. He wasn’t going to allow any of the nitwits who worked for him—except for Martinez, who was shaping up to be more than competent and would be due for a promotion to corporal soon, and Marguerite, who was excellent—anywhere near her.
“I see.” John was careful not to look her in the eye. He didn’t want her to see the rage he was having such a difficult time suppressing. Damned kids. “Well, I can’t blame you. She looked awful rough.”
“But Mrs. Tifton’s dog kept licking her face,” Molly went on. “And she kept pushing the dog away. So I knew she was alive.”
John grunted. He didn’t trust himself to say anything more. He couldn’t believe that this had happened—again—in his own town, right under his very nose, and he’d been completely unaware of it. He must have driven by this building a hundred times in the past week, canvasing the neighborhood for the knucklehead who’d committed all those burglaries, and he hadn’t noticed a thing. The kids had to have been keeping the lights on at night in order to have their pizza-and-cinnamon-flavored-whiskey-fueled graffiti parties.
How could he—or anyone—not have noticed?
“That’s when I saw the blood,” Molly went on.
The blood. There was blood, all right. Not a lot. Not like the crime scenes he used to see almost nightly in Miami.
But enough to have seeped through the sleeping bag in which the girl had been curled, and into the new gray industrial carpeting.
The stain would probably come out.
But John’s anger over what those self-entitled little ass clowns had done wouldn’t as easily be washed away.
“So I just sat by her until the EMTs got here, holding her hand, telling her everything was going to be okay . . . except, of course, I wasn’t sure everything was going to be okay.”
This was too much. He knew he was supposed to stay impartial. He knew he was supposed to stay detached. He wasn’t supposed to refer to packs of privileged teenage vandals as “ass clowns,” or to assure any citizen with whom he worked of any kind of outcome regarding a case, because no officer of the law could ever be sure what was going to happen.
But the Sunshine Kids were different. Molly Montgomery was different.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” he heard himself say, meeting Molly’s gaze for the first time.
This was a mistake. Her dark eyes were as large as ever, and they met his with what felt, to him, like a shock from one of the Tasers he and his deputies carried.
Except that the shock from Molly Montgomery’s eyes felt much, much more startling.
“How do you know that?” she asked.
“Because,” he said, “Marina—that’s one of the EMTs—said the girl’s vitals were good. She’s got a little bit of a fever, but that’s only to be expected after—” He caught himself and went mum.
But it was too late.
“After giving birth?” She reached out and grasped his arm, her fingers even more of a shock than her gaze, her skin cool on his. He suddenly felt as if he’d burst into flame. But that was ridiculous, of course. “So you think it might be her—the baby’s mother? She has to be, right? When the EMTs got here, I heard one of them say she wasn’t shot or stabbed. All that blood has to be from giving birth.”
He’d put his foot in it now. He’d been so careful, too, separating her from the crime scene as soon as he’d arrived. Molly was the one who’d been with the girl the whole time. The feverish teenager had been barely conscious, not saying much, asking only for water—which Molly had just happened to have with her, in a rose-gold reusable bottle, of course, because, like his daughter, the librarian was environmentally conscious and would probably never dream of using a disposable plastic container or single-use straw.
But no. John wasn’t going to let what happened yesterday happen again. He wasn’t going to allow the pretty librarian to suck him into another one of her conversations where she played amateur sleuth. No way. No matter how nice she looked in today’s outfit, which happened to be a tight skirt paired with a white blouse under a cardigan.
A cardigan, on a tropical island!
No. He was a professional lawman. He would not stand for it. He was going to solve his own crimes. He’d already solved this one. He knew who was behind this gross atrocity, and he was going to make sure they were punished to the fullest extent of the law.
And quite possibly tased, if the opportunity arose.
“Well, I guess we’ll just have to wait until she’s in good enough shape for us to ask.”
There. That sounded very professional. Exactly what a sheriff would say to someone in whom he had absolutely no romantic or sexual interest whatsoever.
“She’s just so young, though.” Molly had stopped touching him and was hugging herself instead. He guessed he understood what the cardigan was for. It was quite chilly inside the building, what with the air-conditioning. No wonder those ass clowns liked it there so much. “She can’t be more than seventeen or eighteen. Surely, if she’s the mother, you wouldn’t press charges against her for what happened to the baby. She can’t have been the one who left it at my library. I doubt she’d have had the strength to walk to the window, let alone two blocks away. Someone else must have done it. Whoever did that”—she nodded her head toward the wreck in the room next door—“probably.”
He wasn’t going to admit it—at least, not to her—but it was looking more and more as if she was right.
“Well,” he said. “We’ll just have to see.” He began walking toward the door, indicating that the interview was over. He was relieved when she followed. At least he was going to get out of this without having made too big a fool of himself. “In the meantime, I’d appreciate it if you’d keep all this to yourself.”
Molly gave him a look that he recognized. It was the same look his daughter gave him whenever he said something about a popular celebrity that was wrong—crushing disappointment.
“Of course! The privacy of my patrons is one of my highest priorities. And even though these people are not exactly my patrons—I’m fairly certain they stole all of those books—they were still in my library, so it’s not in my best interest to go blabbing to the press about them.”
John nodded, satisfied by this response—even though it seemed a little defensive—and opened the door just as members of his tech department were trudging down the hallway.
Molly saw them, too, and froze in her tracks.
“What are they doing?”
“That’s a crime scene.” He nodded toward the other room. “Trespassing and vandalism, at least.” Who knew what other charges he’d come up with after the girl was well enough to start talking? If he had his way, he’d track down her friends, lock them up, and then throw away the key. Although he was sure their rich mommies and daddies up North would hire them expensive lawyers, and he’d never get the chance. “We’ve got to record and save the evidence.”
“Am I going to get my books back?”
“Eventually, after they’ve been processed.”
“Does ‘processed’ mean dusting them for fingerprints?” She sounded excited. She was craning her neck to look back at his techs, even as he was steering her toward the stairs.
“Uh . . . maybe.”
That brought her head sharply back around. “What do you mean, ‘maybe’? Those books were stolen. And whoever stole them is probably the person who left Baby Aphrodite in my library. You should see if any of those prints match the ones left on that box we found her in.”
That halted him in his tracks. “Baby Aphrodite?”
“Yes, didn’t I tell you? I renamed the baby Aphrodite last night on Facebook. I had to. Do you know that people were calling her Baby Garbage Sacks?”
“Yes, well, I was made aware of that—”
Her hands went to her hips. “Then why didn’t you do anything about it? It’s unconscionable to call an innocent baby Garbage Sacks! And you’re in the perfect position of authority to put a stop to such nonsense.”
“Well,” he said, taken aback. “It’s not really the sheriff’s job to—”
“Set an example for the people of your town? I think it is. Especially when they’re doing things like that.” She waved a hand in the direction of the vandalized media room. “That is simply amoral.”
“Hey, now hold on a second.” Unconscionable? Amoral? He wasn’t going to let her stand there and bark SAT words at him like he was one of her patrons. “This wasn’t done by locals.”
Her dark eyes widened. “How do you know?”
“Because I don’t recognize that graffiti. And I don’t recognize that girl. So most likely what we’ve got here is nothing but a bunch of Sunshine Kids—”
“Sunshine kids? What are sunshine kids?”
Damn. So much for getting out of this without doing anything foolish.
“Never mind. Thanks for all your help. If we have any further questions, someone will be in touch. Let me walk you out.”
He held out his hand to escort her down the stairs.
This was yet another mistake. She glanced at his hand, then at the stairs. She was wearing heels, but they were of a sensible height (of course). She didn’t need his help and was miffed not only at the offer, but at his not sharing more information about the crime.
“Thanks, but I can see myself out,” she said, before beginning to descend the steps on her own. “I’ll let you know if I run across any more crimes I can help you solve.”
Then she was gone.
Great. Just great. He’d blown it again. Of course.
