Author's Notes: Hmmm, it would seem that people only seem to like to read my smut... :(
Thanks,LadyFey, for editing this story. If only we could get a few people to come along and read it.
Hey, you should be reading The Brides of Frankenstein by ManateeMama. Another awesome story from the Procedural Queen.
The Veil, Chapter 2
Later on that afternoon, Brenda stood in front of her squad and shared the contents of the hidden safe in the Bannon's bedroom. They looked back at her, brows furrowed, and like she taught them, dissected each bit of information she presented and turned it around, examined it, compared it to what they already knew, and questioned her. Normally she would be proud of their critical thinking skills, but today she just wanted to yell at them to shut up.
"So you knew to drive back to the Bannon's house and dig through their closet how?" Gabriel said, crossing his arms over his chest and tilting his head at her. Brenda suspected he was just busting her chops because she dared to go somewhere without taking him along.
"And how do we even know these kids are Kerry and Andrea Bannon? The date on the envelope was a year before they were born," added Flynn, around a toothpick.
"Everyone I've talked to said the Bannon's were good people," contributed Tao. "No criminal history either. Not the type to illegally buy themselves a couple of kids and pass them off as their own."
"Excellent questions, gentlemen," Brenda said wearily. "And if you'd stop grillin' me and start followin' up like I ask, I'm sure your amazin' police skills will give us the answers we need." She impatiently shifted from one foot to the other.
"You have a source, don't you, Chief?" said Sanchez. "That librarian-looking chick I met in the elevator yesterday. She said she had things to tell you about this case." He leaned back in her chair and looked pleased with himself.
"You know what the benefit of bein' the boss is?" Brenda said, losing her patience. "I don't have to answer your questions, but you have to answer mine." She picked up her purse. "Y'all got your assignments. I want a report in three hours." She stormed off to her office and shut the door, throwing herself into her office chair like she used to flounce onto her bed when she was a teenager. She opened her candy drawer and pulled out a Twix, a spasm of excitement passing through her at the thought of losing herself in chocolate and caramel for five minutes.
When the empty wrapper was balled up in her hand and the last bit of sweet escape faded away on her tongue, she was forced to come back to earth and face the situation. The mysterious papers raised all sorts of questions relevant to the investigation. In the grand scheme of things, she was, of course, glad to find out the additional information. Her conundrum was Katie LeGuin. What exactly was she supposed to tell her squad? The whole thing was a lucky guess, she told herself. Closets are always full of secrets. Still, part of her felt uncomfortable and angry at Katie—and of the ghost girls who supposedly passed on the information. For heaven's sake, if you are going to be an informant, provide information that's useful!
An idea dropped in her head and she sat up straight in her chair. There was another person who knew what it was like to deal with Katie LeGuin and her vague messages while trying to solve a case. Calling the detective in New York would also give her the chance to check on the veracity of Katie's story.
Brenda rummaged around her messy desk, looking for Detective Reardon's business card. It was an utter mess, covered with files about the current case strewn about on top of papers from earlier cases, last week's newspaper, a Halloween party invitation, candy wrappers and a couple of empty coke cans, and her hunt felt similar to an archaeological dig. Brenda spotted what she was looking for next to several photos of the Bannon family, Her eyes, and attention, were drawn to a picture of the Bannon twins and the phone call was momentarily forgotten. She picked up a photo of Kerry and Andrea in soccer uniforms, the green of a well-kept field the backdrop, their hair mussed and eyes bright. The girls looked quite a bit like each other but clearly weren't identical. Kerry had a round face and shoulderlength curly, unruly dark brown hair that instantly Brenda related to. She imagined all the mornings in the Bannon house that involved a comb, hair balm, a patient mother and a reluctant little girl who was tired of getting her hair pulled. In the picture Kerry was missing her front teeth, but that didn't stop her from smiling with abandon. Andrea seemed to have won the "hair gene" toss-up, and Brenda saw only a slight wave in her bobbed tresses. Identical blue eyes pegged them as sisters, and looking into their little faces,Brenda felt rage twist her insides at the futility their murders. No no no, she admonished herself, and she peeled off the emotions evoked by the little girls' image like one sheds a wetsuit. There is no room for distractions like feelings in a murder investigation.
After a few steadying breaths, she picked up the rumpled business card she had unearthed from teh cacophony on her desk and dialed.
"Detective Chuck Reardon, Homicide." The voice on the other end of the phone was loud and upbeat with a New York accent as thick as a Hollywood mobster's.
Brenda introduced herself, all the while debating how she should play this. According to Katie LeGuin, the man was a convert, and Brenda wanted a lot more proof before she sacrificed her devotion to rational thought. She didn't want to insult him.
"Ho ho, a call from LA!" boomed Detective Reardon. "You got some big celebrity coming to Brooklyn that you need special protection for? If so, sure hope it's a hot lady movie star who needs someone to show her the town." He chuckled.
As she spent her days with the profoundly cynical Flynn and Provenza, Brenda found his friendliness and warmth refreshing. She couldn't help but smile.
"No, sorry sir, Angelina Jolie and her gaggle of kids aren't comin' to Brooklyn, as far as I know," she said. "I'm callin' with a slightly stranger inquiry." Here goes nothing. "You know a woman named Katie LeGuin? She used to live in New York a few years back."
"Ahh, yes." The groans and creeks of an old office chair could be heard through the phone, and Brenda pictured the man moving from a casual reclined position to one hunched over the phone. "I know Katie. Did she come to you with information on a case? One that she got from a -different source?"
Well, he made that easy, she thought. "Yes, that's right. Tell me Detective, is she what she claims to be?" Brenda felt embarrassed. She couldn't believe she asked such an uncharacteristic question.
"If you are asking about her being an accountant, I can assure you she is. She did my taxes for me a couple of years ago and got me a huge refund." He had adopted a teasing tone, but Brenda wasn't in the mood.
"Sir, that isn't what I was talking about. The…other stuff. The coma and the, um, unique abilities she claims to have. She told me that you believed her."
"Don't you? Look, I get it, Chief Johnson. I definitely had her pegged as some kinda kook when she first started coming around with information about a triple homicide I was working on. It wasn't until the day I actually listened to her and solved the case that I finally accepted what she was. We're cops, so we are trained to look for proof. Mediums are people with names like 'Madame Zelda' who read cards in New Ages shops. I had to wrap around the fact that she really is able to communicate with the deceased. When faced with the truth, I had no choice. I had to believe." He paused, and Brenda heard more chair springs groan. "I'd like to save you from the same doubt, Ms. Johnson, for Katie's sake."
"I'm not goin' to be showin' up at her job or callin' her friends," Brenda said. "At worst, she's harmless. I did take her, um, suggestion, and found things in a location she named. But honestly, it could have been a lucky guess. But that doesn't make it any easier when my squad wants to know where I got my information from. I thought since you dealt with Ms. LeGuin, you might have some ideas…"
"Oh, I have some ideas, Chief Johnson," the detective interrupted. "Ones that will save you a lot of grief. First of all, stop trying to talk yourself out of the obvious. I wasted a lot of time during a critical investigation assuming she knew what she knew because she was involved. I put that poor girl through a lot of grief at first, and I feel real crappy about that." Brenda could hear the regret in his voice
"So how did you explain…"
"I told the truth," Detective Reardon said. "I knew I was gonna get crap about it, and I had to make sure and get a confession or else obtain evidence from sources besides Katie in case it was brought up in trial, but for the most part, I was honest."
"How did people react?"
"By that point, with deep gratitude. They didn't understand it—hell, I don't understand it, how victims come back and whisper in her ear, freaks the hell outta me to be honest—but just stuck with the truth and people accepted it. You know, Chief Johnson, you just might find that people are a lot more open-minded than you think they are."
"Ha. You haven't met my squad," Brenda said.
"Listen to Katie," he said again. "She hates her gift she has and would only risk you doing to her new life what I did o the old one if she really was getting information. The girl would rather be behind a computer figuring out someone's taxes than getting involved in a murder case. She never signed up for this in the first place, so go easy on her."
Brenda rolled her eyes and murmured comforting sounds. Truth was, her general policy was never too easy on anyone,
When she stepped out of her office a few hours later, there was a palpable energy coursing through the murder room, a low hum that electrified the air. It was synergy; when one person found out an answer to someone else's question, more questions were borne, and then answers found, and so on, as a successful investigation builds and feeds on itself to an eventual climax. This is why I became a police officer, Brenda thought, pausing to watch her people buzz from the phone to the white board to each other. The straining and stretching toward the truth was the most exhilarating thing she had ever experienced.
"Chief!" Provenza cried when he saw her. "We got good stuff here. Things were a hell of a lot simpler before you found that other crap, but we have some answers for you."
"Let's wait until Fritz gets here," Brenda said. "I called him about a few things." As if on cue, the elevator opened and Fritz stepped out, looking rumpled and tired. Brenda glanced at the clock. Was it really 10PM?
She walked to the white board and found an open, pristine space in which to jot down a few notes. "Let me start," she said. "I wanted to find out who, if anyone, knew that those kids didn't belong to the Bannon's, because I just have this feeling that the whole illegal adoption thing is at the center of this.
"To review, Dr. Bannon was a well-respected psychiatrist, and Naomi Davis-Bannon co-owned two art galleries, one in San Francisco and one in LA. She and her husband lived in San Francisco up until six years ago. They appeared to have moved right after the illegal adoption." She squinted at her handwriting on a legal pad and wondered where she had put her glasses. "Both were well liked by colleagues, had friends, no criminal history. Mr. Bannon was estranged from his parents but did have contact with his sisters, who live in the Seattle area. Ms. Davis-Bannon's parents are dead, and she had a brother in Santa Fe she saw once a year. As we already know, Naomi had pretty severe clinical depression, and was hospitalized twice in her twenties and two more times about seven years ago. Seems she was desperate to get pregnant, and she kept havin' miscarriages. It was sendin' her around the bend."
"Who told you that?" asked Gabriel. "You and I interviewed her best friend Maggie Lu the other day, and she didn't say anything about babies. She just said the little girls were the center of Naomi's life."
Brenda nodded. "I talked to Maggie Lu again tonight and confronted her with what we found. I was sure she had to know, but she was shocked to hear about the adoption, and in fact said she wasn't going to believe me until I could produce evidence."
"Wait, she didn't tell her best friend that those kids weren't hers? I don't believe it. Women tell each other everything," said Tao.
"Let me finish. In 2006, when they were still in San Francisco, she said Naomi just had her fourth miscarriage, and she found out that, because of her psychiatric problems, she couldn't adopt from China. She was in a real dark place, and then she just left. She told Maggie she was going to a special clinic in Switzerland to rest up, which Maggie thought was strange. She turned over the running of her art galleries solely to her partners. While she was gone the family moved to LA when Roy agreed to come and join the practice of two medical school colleagues, something these guys had been trying to get him to do for years, and all of a sudden, he just called and said, 'count me in.' All this movin' and supposedly goin' to recuperate in a clinic far away meant no one saw Naomi for about a year and a half. And when they did, they were holdin' twin baby girls Naomi had supposedly given birth to."
"That's bullshit," said Provenza. "First of all, the birthdate written on the envelope shows the babies in this picture are a year older than Kerry and Andrea. How in the world did people not notice that she had particularly large kids? Not to mention that a woman dying to get pregnant would tell everyone she was carrying twins, and since she didn't, that had to raise a few red flags," Provenza shook his head. "Something isn't right here."
"I thought the same thing," Brenda said. "But Maggie Lu told me that Naomi said she was superstitious about the supposed pregnancy because of all the other losses, and that the twins had been born early and were sickly. Given her fragile mental health history, Maggie said people bought that." Provenza considered this for a second, then nodded. "Also, I noticed something on Dr. Morales' autopsy report, something he probably didn't think was all that important. X-rays of the twins show two things: question of nutritional deprivation in infancy, and bone age shows that they are 7 years old, not six. Look at the pictures of those two I found today. Those kids were 9 months old and don't look older than four months or so."
"They were so small, and most likely so behind developmentally, that it was easy to pass them off as younger," Tao said. "Foreign orphanages do that all the time in order to get older kids adopted by Western parents who want pre-verbal children."
"My thoughts exactly," Brenda nodded. "And Roy was a doctor, I bet dollars to donuts that he took the kids to a pediatrician friend off the books."
"Speaking of radar…" Fritz said. "I got the information you wanted." He put his briefcase down on a nearby desk and pulled out a manila folder. "Well, part of it. Chief Johnson gave me a copy of the kids' birth certificates, and asked how they could be forged. The answer lies in the receipt for $25,000 to Simon Cleo. Mr. Cleo is part of a large crime syndicate that specializes in giving people new identities. If you have the money, his group can get you new papers for any country you want to go to. The Bureau has been after them for years, but they are slippery SOB's. The question is, how do fine, upstanding citizens contact criminals who contract for the Mob?"
Flynn half-raised his hand. "I think I might have the answer to that. Chief, you wanted me to find criminals in the Bannon's life. I talked to like ten family members before I got to this one. Let me see: Roy Bannon's sister Carol's ex-husband's brother-in-law's brother spent ten years in a federal prison in the 90's for racketeering. With a little cajoling Carol remembered a hypothetical conversation about the people her ex-brother-whatever might know if someone needed a new identity. She didn't think anything of it, except it was a strange thing for Roy to ask her. I'm trying to get ahold of this guy, but no one seems to be able to find him nowadays."
"Good work, Lieutenant Flynn."
"Speaking of faked records," Gabriel said. "I spoke with the IT department at Good Samaritan Hospital, where the twins were supposedly born, according to their birth certificates. Medical records were opened for both girls on their fake birth date, so at first glance it does look like they were born there, but the records are empty."
Brenda suddenly felt tired and sat down on top of a nearby desk. Her head was spinning, shards of data flying around like pieces of a puzzle, connecting and breaking apart. A sick realization was dawning over her, one that she wanted to turn her face away from and not look at, but she couldn't. Her job was all about the truth.
"Well, gentlemen, everyone did a great job verifyin' what was found in the lock box. DNA results will be back tomorrow for confirmation. But the bottom line is…" she sighed. "We still don't know who killed those little girls and Ken Kinsky. We can guess as to motive…perhaps the mother returned after all these years wantin' her babies back. We had a case similar to that a few years ago, and Lieutenants Flynn and Provenza may remember. Maybe even Kinsky's the father. All this information and, at the end of the day, all we have is…diddley." Exhaustion and frustration pressed against her with meaty hands, and she looked at the various pictures of the Bannon family taped to the white board. I have failed you, she thought miserably.
The squad made noises of disagreement, pointing out how well they know the Bannon's compared to three days prior, it was just a matter of time…but Brenda didn't want to hear it. She gestured to Fritz to follow her and she turned toward her office, saying to the men behind her, "Go home, everybody. See y'all tomorrow." Fritz's hand was soon on her lower back and she indulged herself in a moment of warmth from him, sucking it up greedily. It was amazing how the smallest touch, or a smile or simply watching him do something banal like the morning dishes, was able to rejuvenate her.
Her small respite of calm was rudely ended as she approached her office door. Due to the darkness of the late hour and extinguished hall lights, she almost overlooked the large mass at her feet. Katie LeGuin was sitting on the floor, out of sight of the murder room, her arms wrapped around her knees as if trying to tighten herself into a ball. Gone was the suit-clad accountant with every hair in place; rather she wore faded jeans and an old paint-splattered gray sweatshirt. Her rumpled clothes matched the look of confusion and exhaustion she wore on her face, and her hair looked like she had combed her hands through it repeatedly. Katie stood as soon as she saw Brenda and Fritz, anxiety palpable around her like a swarm of bees.
"Whoa," Brenda said, startling at Katie's sudden rise from the floor. "How in the world did you get in here? It's after hours!"
Katie shrugged. "No one noticed me." Brenda frowned at her, then gestured for Katie to enter her office. Fritz followed, with an eyebrow raised at Brenda.
"What are you doin' here so late at night, Katie?" Brenda asked, sitting in her office chair and leaning her elbows on the desk. "It better be good, cuz I'm frustrated and in a real bad mood."
Katie was eying Fritz suspiciously. "It's okay, that's my husband," said Brenda. "You got any more messages from beyond the grave, you can say them in front of Fritz." At this, Fritz's eyebrows almost reached his hairline, but Brenda ignored him. She would think of something to tell him later.
"You're tired and frustrated?" Katie said, a hint of anger in her soft voice. "I was trying to sleep and I kept getting woken up by the twins. I gave up and came down here, figuring you would be working."
She sighed. "They're driving me crazy. I have a huge project due at work and I have these two buzzing around me like flies. Please solve this case, Chief Johnson, before I go crazy."
"The twins?" Fritz asked, looking back and forth from Katie to Brenda. The women ignored him.
"Did the little girls give you somethin' useful, like, say, a name?" Brenda asked. "Cuz without that, I don't know what you can tell me that's gonna be more helpful than what I found in their house."
Katie pulled a piece of paper folded into quarters from her pocket. "I'm not much of an artist, and taking instructions from a couple of 6-year-olds isn't easy." She handed the picture to Brenda, who unfolded it and smoothed it out. "Kerry said it was the last thing she saw before she died."
On the paper was a drawing of a design of sorts, interlocking symbols circumscribed by a dark band. Brenda recognized an Ichthys at the center, the simple fish used to symbolize Christianity, and within the fish's body was the Eye of Horus. The tail formed the top part of a Star of David. Sitting on the slope of the fish's back was a crescent moon, the symbol for Islam, and nestled below was a yin and yang. All this was encircled by a thick black circle.
"What the hell is this?" Brenda asked testily. "Besides the cover of a World Religions textbook."
"The last thing they saw," Katie repeated. "The papers said they were smothered, right? Both girls told me that a lady had this picture on her arm."
"A tattoo," Brenda said. Katie nodded. "It looks like something that would be tattooed on someone's arm, maybe their forearm. And a lady…okay, so we know the killer is a woman."
"I have one more thing for you, Chief Johnson, but it's not helpful." She took a ragged breath. "I'm so sorry things aren't clearer. You have to understand, they are still six years old, so getting details out of them is like pulling teeth."
"The twins?" Fritz repeated. "You've been talking to the twins?" He wore a look of utter confusion.
"Later, Fritz," Brenda said sharply. She looked at Katie. "Okay, what other cryptic tidbit do you have for me?
"The girls were emphatic that I say this to you: this is bigger than just the two of them."
Brenda just stared at her. Katie cast her eyes down and turned toward the door. Brenda extended her finger and pointed at her. "Stop right there. I need answers. What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
Katie shrugged and opened the door, glancing quickly at Fritz before turning back to Brenda. "I asked you earlier today, please don't shoot the messenger. I can ask questions but it doesn't mean they will be answered. I'm giving you everything I have." And with that, slipped out the door and was gone.
"Brenda, who in the world—" Fritz started, and she quickly interrupted him.
"Not now, Fritz, my head is spinnin'." She glared at him, and she knew he knew her well enough to back off when necessary.
She felt the strong urge to cry but fought it back. She didn't want to believe the young woman, but something in her gut told her Katie was right. And if this case was bigger than she knew it to be…
Was it too big for her?
END Chapter 2
I would really if to know if anyone is reading this…please review if you are. I am trick-or-treating for feedback...
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