Sarah Sparrow - A Guide for Murdered Children

Willow wondered if he would do the same. Would he plea bargain with God Himself, if it meant bringing the closure that he imagined would be provided by a body? Closure! Symmetry! Balance… He hadn’t seemed to care enough when she was alive; might caring too much when she was dead be the ultimate selfish act? When God fulfilled his request and her body was retrieved, plucked from earth or water or the barrel the killer encased it in, when He laid Pace at his feet, where would that leave Willow? Would he realize what he’d done and put a shotgun to his face? The travesty of demanding back the girl who had hated him in life and now would hate him in death for calling her back as if she were his property, like a teenager grounded for violating curfew, seemed like the worst desecration, unholier than letting her be, letting her go.

He dreamed those dreams of losing her for years, but they stopped right around the time of his first dream about the train.

When would he see Annie again?

The peculiar thing is that he wasn’t dwelling on it, any of it, not really. Willow noticed that in himself. He simply knew he would see her soon, whatever soon meant. He didn’t seem to be obsessing on the outrageous weirdness either, which struck him as more than peculiar, there being more than enough outrage and weird to go around. The only thing that really mattered was that he didn’t feel crazy anymore. (There’d been a moment when he thought he was going over the edge.) He couldn’t explain why; it wasn’t as if the bizarre encounter at the Early World Diner was fading—it wasn’t. If anything, Annie and the things she had told him were becoming more real. Taking root. Maybe that’s what she meant by her last few words. That he needed time to “integrate.”

Maybe that’s what was going on: he was integrating .

Well, bring it. He had to laugh (intermittently), which he thought was probably a good thing.

Smile while your brain is breaking…

He began to diligently work with the Cold Case Kids, schooling them on what Rafael, his old NYPD boss, called the “black art.” They’d certainly done their homework. Each day, he grew more persuaded that Owen’s instincts were correct—the greenhorns were made for the game. They were surprisingly au courant in the latest advances in forensic science, which were many in the years since Willow had been active. He struggled to keep up. Lydia and Daniel were some kind of prodigies—plus, their generation had an entirely new, comprehensive, unpredictable way of perceiving and interpreting the matrix. Not only was the detective impressed, but he was slowly coming around to I can learn from them too .

Did they ever sleep? When he arrived at the office in the morning, the guard often said they’d been there for hours. Evidence and material pertaining to Troy and Maya Rummer’s case were meticulously deployed in a conference room, and when Willow came in they usually ignored him, standing hypnotized in front of blurry school photos of the bucktoothed boy and freckly, pigtailed girl. The plastic bag with the BE EXCELLENT TO EACH OTHER T-shirt was pinned to a corkboard, same as the unicorn-themed fifth birthday card Maya had faithfully carried around for a year before she died. (It was found in the basket of her bicycle.) Its horn was made of gold sequins but only a threadbare sprinkle was left. Ninhydrin had been used to reveal a latent palm print, less than two square inches, on its cover. Lydia and Daniel already ran a photograph of the palm through APIS, the Automated Palmprint ID System, a database that hadn’t been available until 2005. There wasn’t a match.

On the table was a small stuffed unicorn, also found in the basket, removed from its smothering baggie as if by order of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Mythological Animals.

Maya’s bike lay on the floor, replicating its position in the ditch, in crime scene photographs.

Troy’s bike was never recovered…

The files took up half of the long table. Another section was devoted to Persons of Interest, beginning with Ebenezer the neighbor, whose house the kids were heading to for lighter fluid on that fateful day. There were other POIs, paroled sex offenders living within a fifty-mile radius, though none ever panned out.

Willow thought it compelling, even auspicious, that the newbies chose the Rummer case—yet sometimes it seemed like the case had chosen them. Though it was against his interests, he couldn’t help but think of the crime as unsolvable, destined to be no more than an invaluable laboratory of learning—training wheels, so to speak, before they were confident enough to ride full-speed on the twisting roads of Cold Case country. Of course he hoped that he was wrong, because Willow knew that he couldn’t afford to have a five-star failure right out of the gate, especially one with so much resonance in the community, so much personal history and emotion. To cover potential losses, he already planned to introduce a few more cases that he’d chosen himself. He would wait awhile; he didn’t want to dampen their enthusiasm. Still, the restive freshness and idiosyncratic focus that both deputies brought to their task were encouraging. They showed seriousness and passion in regard to finding the party or parties responsible, and demonstrated a rare, innate understanding of the sacredness of the work. For the work was sacred to the detective—which was why his failure in New York had dealt such a terrible blow.

One day, when the kids were on a lunch break, Willow wandered into the war room for what he called a hover. He knew one could get lost in the details and that it was important to get a bird’s-eye view. It was corny but he had shown them a video of a seagull treading air, staying still while buffeted by the currents. The detective told them they should do just that—remain still in the windstorm of data, without losing the ability to scan the horizon and take off in whatever direction that was needed.

He let his mind drift, glancing at the corkboard as he played back that afternoon at the Rummers’. Ronnie went to find the kids to borrow lighter fluid from a neighbor. When he came back to the grill, they bullshitted awhile. Stomachs were growling and Ronnie got mad that Troy and Maya were taking so long; Willow could remember his face darkening, as if by a shadow. Ronnie jumped in the Camaro and went looking. Then all hell broke loose. A few days later, they drank some beers in Ronnie’s garage, a small reprieve from the hourly onslaught of fresh agonies. That was when he told Willow what was going through his head as he hightailed it down the road to find them—crazed-parent images, like his children being cut down in the middle of a field by a Cessna as it made an emergency landing.

The detective walked to the window. He saw Lydia and Daniel in the pocket park across the street, in deep discussion. He wondered what they were saying. He was growing inordinately fond of the two. Willow had never met anyone like them but didn’t even know what that meant. He thought of sucking on a cigarette but reached in his jacket for a Nicorette instead. He’d lost the craving for drink and drugs—maybe all it had taken was the new gig. Someone showing a little faith.

He bent down to gather a balled-up scrap that missed the wastebasket. He unfolded it, for no particular reason—a stick figure drawing of a girl with flaming red hair. Below it, also in a child’s scrawl, was hoo hert me? For a moment he thought it was evidence, but there was no stamp or penciled case file number. They wouldn’t be crumpling up evidence and tossing it anyway. He retrieved more drawings from the basket. One was of a small boy, with a cartoon bubble drawn above his head that read PAPA!!!!