Children of Chicago Page 11

  “Stopped? How? Daniel?”

  “No! It wasn’t him.” He slapped himself. The sound ripped through the room with a crack. “Nothing!” He shouted. “Nothing!” He clenched his hands into fists and pressed them against his temples. He squeezed his eyes shut. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything. I just...couldn’t give him what he wanted. I didn’t know that was part of the deal.”

  “First, you need to calm down,” Lauren raised her voice and held out a hand. “Hitting yourself and shouting is not going to make things any easier for you.” Lauren looked down quickly at the few notes she had been handed by Commander McCarthy. There was no mention of a store, or a robbery, or an assault. “Does what happened in Humboldt Park have to do with your dad? Siblings? Your family’s store?”

  “No. Yes. I don’t even know anymore. Nothing makes sense. Everything is water.” He glanced around the room as if the concrete walls would give him an answer.

  “Back up,” Lauren dropped her pen on the pad of paper and crossed her arms in front of her chest. None of this was making any sense. It could be because he was trying to write the lie as he spoke, but lying now was not going to help him. As far as she understood it, Mo was here suspected of murder and attempted murder. He would be tried as an adult. Maybe this was the girl’s idea, Fin. Perhaps this was an accident. Self-defense. Maybe there was someone else involved. Or maybe, this was entirely his idea, and he intended very well to kill those kids and get away with it. Right now, what Lauren needed was the full picture.

  “Let’s start where all stories start, at the beginning.”

  Mo looked from the door to the table, to his hands. There was nowhere to go, so he might as well start talking.

  “There was this book at the library...”

  Lauren reached for her pen then stopped. “Library?”

  Mo lowered his head into his hands. “It’s stupid.”

  The book. He mentioned the book.

  He knew.

  “What’s stupid is if you don’t start telling me exactly what happened.”

  “It was Fin’s idea. All of it.”

  That did not take too long, pointing the finger to the other person.

  A metallic bang rang down the hall. Mo looked towards the door. A look of fear burned across his face. “We messed up,” he said. “And now here we are.”

  “Just stay right there,” she held a hand out, motioning for him to stay in his seat as she moved to the door and looked out of the small window in it. There was no one in the hallway. She texted Van:

  “The hell?”

  “I fell.”

  She rolled her eyes as she shoved her phone back in the pocket of her jacket. She turned back to face the table and Mo.

  He was giving her a look that she could not quite read. Was it a scowl? Was it a smile? “Your mother liked music, didn’t she? Wait,” he closed his eyes. His eyeballs moved rapidly from side to side. “She wasn’t your real mother. Your stepmother, a woman who could see through her eyelids. Stepmothers who cast spells on forest streams. Children are swept away too far and too fast by their angry feelings. Ever since mother died, we haven’t had a single happy hour, and those who fail to move are banished into exile.”

  The lightbulbs above them exploded and sharp shards of glass rained down on Lauren. She could feel the grass beneath her toes, and the sounds of outside things. Crickets and chirping. The whooshing of leaves in the wind. The howling of wolves in the distance. The lapping of water somewhere close. She reached in front of her and felt the body of a tree trunk, rigid and rough beneath her fingers. She could smell the sharp scent of a wood burning fireplace, and then something else. Roasted meat? Pork?

  “I will pick the remnants of your milky eyes from between my teeth with my claws if you don’t pay me, Lauren.”

  She reached out into the darkness, feeling nothing but the night, and then the lights turned back on.

  Lauren fumbled back into the door. Her heart erupted in her chest. She looked around, searching for answers. She could still feel the cool forest air on her flesh.

  “What did you say?”

  Mo looked from side to side. “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You said my mother liked music.”

  “No,” he raised his hands in defense. “I didn’t. I don’t know your mother. I’m sorry. I didn’t say anything.” He hung his head and cried. “I just want to go home.”

  Lauren was tired. Last night she had stayed up all night going through some of her father’s papers, literal stacks of newspapers that sat piled on the living room table, arranged in some order she could not decipher. She filled several large, black garbage bags full of them and when she walked past his office, she hesitated for a moment. She reached for the doorknob, turned and pushed, making sure the door was locked. She could handle what he left throughout the house. She could still not handle what was in his office, and she did not know if she would ever be able to reach for the key that sat in the cupboard.

  “Tell me about this book, Mo.”

  “There was a nursery rhyme we found in the book.”

  She reached for her water but knocked it over. There were no napkins nearby with which to dry off the tabletop, so Lauren just grabbed her notepad and set it on her lap before it got wet. She breathed deeply, willing her heartbeat to slow and then cleared her throat. “Tell me more, Mo. I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s going on.”

  “It was the Pied Piper. Not me. Not Fin. The Pied Piper. He did this.”

  Mo leaned his head back, resting it against the wall, tears filling his eyes. “I told Fin. This was stupid. It wasn’t real, but she said we had to. She said we just needed to give the Pied Piper a name, a name of someone we wanted dead and that he would kill them for us. I didn’t know he would come back and ask for more.”

  Lauren lowered her voice, all the while trying to control her breathing. She felt like she was suffocating, drowning. “You want me to believe that the Pied Piper, a real one, from the kid’s story is behind what you and your girlfriend did?”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “I don’t know, Mo. I don’t know if I can believe anything you’re telling me. I can tell you what I do know, everything coming out of your mouth is a goddamn lie!” She shouted.

  Mo shook his head. “No. I’m not lying,” his eyes wide. “It was Fin. She said we should do this.”

  “I thought you said it was the Pied Piper?”

  “It is,” he sat up straight. “I mean. It was. But it was Fin too. It was her idea. She found the page in the book. She wrote the words down, and…I don’t know. She figured it out. She figured out that we had to say the words in front of a mirror, in the dark with a candle to call him.”

  “What?!” Lauren said. “The page in the Grimm’s fairy tale book?”

  Mo blinked rapidly. “I didn’t tell you which book.”

  Lauren remained silent for a moment, chasing her thoughts. “We found a book, Grimm’s Fairy Tales. It’s in evidence. Whose book was it?” She said, changing the direction of the questioning.

  “Evie’s, but that’s not the book I’m talking about, the one where we found the page.”

  “Where then?”

  “At the Newberry Library. We were on a field trip there last year. We were shown an old copy of the Grimm’s fairy tales. I forgot the exact name, but that wasn’t it, the one you found. This one was really old. From the 1800s or something. There was a page, a black page with gold writing.” Mo pressed the palms of his hands into his eyes. “I didn’t think she really meant to do this.”

  “What did the page say?” Lauren asked. She needed the confirmation.

  Mo dropped his hands. “A rhyme. I don’t know. Fin had the copy, but she lost it in the lagoon.”

  “Where’s the book now?”

  “Back there, in the stacks.”

  Mo looked toward the door. His eyes widened. La
uren watched him. It was as if he saw something outside the window.

  “Do you realize how this sounds? Is this what you’re going to tell your lawyer? The judge? That you and Fin found a rhyme in a book of fairy tales and that it told you to kill your classmates?”

  Lauren knew the interview was being recorded, so not only did she have to be cautious of what she said and how she said it, but of her body language as well. She could not show she was worried.

  “I’m going to need a lot of coffee because your story is not making any sense.”

  “It’s real!” He shouted. “You have to believe me.”

  “Mo, you really believe that the Pied Piper is a person, like you or I?”

  “Yes,” he said without hesitation. “Once you say those words, you have to go through with it. The Pied Piper gets rid of whoever you want.”

  “By get rid of you mean kill.”

  He nodded.

  “That doesn’t make any sense. Why not just kill them yourself? Why fake that some fairy tale monster is doing this?”

  “If you could kill whoever you wanted to kill without getting caught, wouldn’t you?”

  She did not answer.

  “But then...” Mo ran his fingers through his hair. “Something went wrong.”

  “You think? Something went very wrong the moment you and your friend decided to try to kill two people!”

  “Try? They’re not both dead?”

  “What? Are you disappointed she’s not dead?”

  “No. No.” Mo’s face grew pale. “This is bad,” he shook his head. “This is very bad.” He stood up and paced the room. “They’re both not dead?!”

  Lauren stood up slowly. Raising her hands up to show him her palms. She was not afraid, but she very well knew why he should be worried. “Sit down. Now.” She ordered.

  Mo sat down on top of his hands and proceeded to rock back and forth in the chair. The metal legs squeaking beneath his weight.

  Lauren looked back down to her notes. She did not write down the information about Newberry Library. She hoped no one would review the recording and ask about it.

  Mo looked down at his pant leg and winced as he adjusted his feet.

  “We’ll make sure your bandage gets changed.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters because he’s coming for me.”

  It was now time to ask the next important series of questions. “Who stabbed who first?”

  “Fin stabbed...”

  “Stabbed who?”

  “I don’t know. It was dark. I don’t know. She was getting impatient.” He rubbed his shoulders. “It’s cold in here.”

  “Little bit.”

  The squeaking from the metal chair stopped. “You really don’t remember, do you?” He asked.

  Lauren paused, looking up from her handwriting and noticed he stopped rocking back and forth in his seat. Mo was sitting perfectly still now.

  “Remember what?” She glanced back at the page of notes she had just written.

  Mo leaned in slightly. “You really don’t remember anything, do you?”

  “I don’t think I’m following...”

  “About yourself. You really don’t remember?” Mo leaned in further, Lauren watched as he studied her face. “Oh,” he said as if he found what he was looking for in the contours of her face, and the depths of brown in her eyes. “Sometimes we forget. It happens.”

  “Forget what?”

  Mo said, “What do you mean?”

  “You said ‘sometimes we forget.’ Forget what?”

  Mo looked confused. “I didn’t say that.”

  He started to rock back and forth in his seat again, slower this time. “My dad’s going to be so mad.”

  Lauren rubbed her eyes. “You’re not making any sense, Mo.” She knew she had not misheard, but she did not want to ask him again, for fear of bringing too much attention to it in the recording.

  “You said you learned how to call him last year, so why did you both wait until now to ask for the Pied Piper’s help to kill someone?”

  “Fin did call him last year.”

  “Are you telling me that Fin killed someone before?”

  He nodded once.

  “Why two people now?”

  The smell of firewood filled the room.

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s over for me.” He looked up to the ceiling and screamed a harsh, jarring scream. His hands covered his ears, and he just yelled, the veins in his neck bulged. “Help me! I need help!”

  Lauren rushed to the door, opened it and locked it behind her. She stood at the door, looking through the glass, watching as he screamed louder and louder for the kind of help he could never ever get. Mo slapped himself again, and again, screams echoing from the room. He picked up a chair and threw it at the door, and then turned and kicked over the folding table. He pressed his back against the wall, staring at Lauren, mouth open, a long continuous agonizing scream escaping his body, veins bulging in his neck. He banged his head once against the concrete wall, and then again, a spot of red staining the surface with no end in sight. She took out her phone and called in an ambulance.

  People came rushing to the hallway, asking her if she needed assistance, and if he was all right. Neither of them were fine.

  CHAPTER 11

  “Did you guys talk about doing this beforehand?” Van asked as he wrote the date on the upper right-hand corner of the page like he was preparing to write out an assignment for school or a journal entry.

  He needed immediate distraction. He understood that the coldness of this place could generate shock. He could not imagine what he would have felt if he were placed in a cruiser and driven to a police station, escorted past the main desk through a collection of locked doors into an interrogation room. He wondered how Medina felt, questioning someone, when she had once been questioned under similar circumstances.

  The room was small. Claustrophobic. A camera in the upper corner of the room served as a watchful eye, recording all audio and video. The concrete walls in this room had recently been painted white. A lingering chemical scent of paint hung in the air. There were no windows, except for a strip of one in the metal door. A girl younger than Fin with pale blue skin and long dark ringlets pressed her face to the window and smiled. Fin raised her fingers to wave, but the girl disappeared.

  Van spun around in his chair, but returned to his notes when he did not see anyone.

  Fin sat cross-legged in front of him and seemed at ease, comfortable. Too relaxed for the situation she was in. Most people he brought back here were manic, angry, or anxious. Not Fin, she sat still, almost bored.

  “It’s cold,” she said, pulling the hood from her large dark blue jacket up over her head. She pulled the sleeves down over her hands, just the cuffs of the sleeves showing. Her form seemed collapsed inside the giant material.

  Several sheets of white paper lay face down on the table. It was reported to Van that during the ride to the Grand and Central police station Fin did not speak, but she did laugh incessantly the entire trip, howling each time the officers asked her to quiet down. When the arresting officers finally asked her what was so funny, she only laughed louder and kicked their seats.

  When they arrived at the station, the knife was placed into evidence and Fin and Mo were separated. When Officer Bauer passed Van in the hallway after placing Fin in the interrogation room, she told him, “That was the most terrifying ride of my life. She just laughed. There’s something wrong with her. Him. All of this.”

  “Mo told me we had to do it,” Fin’s voice was as soft as pages being flipped in a book.

  Van wrote her exact words down on paper, a quote moving on to admission. Many questions ran through his head, but he remained focused. He wanted her to do most of the talking. This was how it was going to work. He was here to guide the conversation, ask tricky questions, and gather a clear picture of what had occurred. Like with all cases, a confession was t
he goal, but each time Van looked up at the girl he could not, or perhaps, did not want to, believe that she was involved in something so heinous. If a child so young could do something so terrible, then anyone was capable of anything.

  “Why?” He asked looking directly at her, waiting for a response before starting to write down her answer.

  Fin adjusted herself in the plastic chair. She folded her knees up to her chest and pushed out her hands from inside her sleeves. She crossed her arms on top of her knees, resting her chin on the back of her hands. She looked like a pile of clothes tossed on the chair with a head sticking out on top, her oversized sweatshirt stretched down past her knees.

  “Because Mo said he’d kill our families.”

  Van felt his stomach twist.

  “Mo would kill your families?”

  “No, the man.”

  He felt uneasy about the way she coolly said that, but still, he wrote it down.

  “What man?”

  “A man,” Fin scratched her nose. “I don’t know him, but Mo knows him.”

  “Do you know the man’s name?”

  “The Pied Piper.”

  Van did not look up from his writing. “And who is the Pied Piper?” He thought it was someone’s street name. A graffiti artist. A gangbanger. A guy from the neighborhood whom everyone knew by nickname only. Fin’s response stunned him.

  “The Pied Piper. From the fairy tale.”

  He stopped writing. Now he felt it, what Officer Bauer had mentioned. This felt wrong. This name and this crime. For the first time ever, he felt uneasy interviewing a suspect, and even though she was a teenager, a child, a streak of fear ran through him, and he wished he could excuse himself. The room seemed too small, too quiet, too cold. He wondered how Medina was doing.

  Footsteps shuffled down the hallway, but he did not hear any doors open for someone to have access to this private area of the precinct. The door to access this area was a sturdy metal door which screeched as it opened and produced a loud slam when shut. Van looked through the corner of his eye, making sure not to add distraction to the questioning. A black and white form, flickering like an old television program, moved past the window.