(Not Quite) Dead and Buried

by MR

“Frase?”

“Yes, Ray?”

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

We’re sitting side by side on the couch in my apartment watching some stupid slasher movie (Friday the 13th: Part 86?). Makes you hungry for Bela Lugosi and Vincent Price; real actors who knew that real terror is more than just blood and guts and gore.

I glance over at Fraser; he’s staring into the distance with a faraway look in his eyes. Damn, he’s gone abstracted on me again. He does that any time I ask him a question he has to think about before answering; gets this vacant look in his eyes that says he’s off in Fraserland; that icy, snow-covered place in his mind he goes when Chicago and the noise and the dirt and the shit get to be too much for him.

I know, I know. Abstracted. Pretty big word for a skinny Pollack cop who dropped outta college, huh? Scares me sometimes; not just that I actually find myself using the words, but that I know what they mean.

Such is life in Fraserland.

I give him a dig with my elbow. “You gonna answer, or you plan on sitting there all night with your mouth open catching flies?”

He looks at me, something I can’t quite place in those dark blue eyes “I’d be a liar if I said I hadn’t seen some strange things in my life, Ray.”

That’s Fraser-Speak for, “Yes, Ray, I do.”

I nod and stare at the TV a minute; a pair of brain-dead teenage kids are about to get whacked by insensate evil. Sort of like police work, except our bodies don’t get up and go home at the end of the day. They go downstairs to Mort, and we get to spend our time trying to find whatever sicko decided that lobotomizing someone with an ice pick is a really neat way to kill them.

“Wanna hear a ghost story?” The words are out of my mouth before I realize I’m going to say them. Damn, damn, damn!! I did ‘not’ mean to say that!

He looks at me, one eyebrow raised. “You know ghost stories?”

“Well, not Louuuu Skagnetti-type ghost stories,” I say, and we smile, remembering that night in the park. “It’s more sort of a true ghost story.”

That surprises him. “You’ve seen ghosts?”

“That’s the thing. I’ve never been sure whether they were real or not. Could’ve just been the pressure of the case. But let’s be literal and go with seeing ghosts. I once had six of them follow me around for nearly two months.”

I’ve got his attention now. He shifts sideways so he’s facing me. “Tell me about it,” he says, his voice soft; almost like he knows how long I’ve been holding this inside, how many times I’ve wished I could discuss it with someone. Except before he came along, the only people I could’ve discussed it with would’ve either laughed in my face or sent me to see the department shrink. Probably both.

I was working at the 13th in Homicide then. Been a Detective for all of three years, and I figured I’d seen just about everything: Kids killing their parents for insurance money, husbands (or wives) killing their wives (or husbands) so they could run off with their boyfriends/girlfriends, guys who thought it was perfectly okay that they’d 86’d their main squeeze “Cause she was cheating on me, man!” I’d pretty much lost my shine, but I hadn’t been in the game long enough to go completely stone cold.

I’m still not stone cold, thank God. The day I go stone cold is the day I eat my gun.

I was working alone; my last partner had transferred to vice, and TPTB couldn’t find anyone green enough that they could force him to partner up with Crazy Kowalski. I’ve wondered, sometimes, if having a partner would’ve changed things.

Got a call one morning; a construction crew doing some work on the site for a new mall had dug up something out-of-the-ordinary. Place where they were working had been a residential neighborhood back in the 50s and early 60s, one of those family-type, downtown areas that disappeared when the suburbs began to spring up. Everyone who lived there had either moved away or died, and the buildings stood vacant for quite a while before someone bought the land with an eye towards making some money. They were knocking down the few houses still standing when they found the bodies.

Bodies. As in six of them, buried deep in what had once been the back yard of a two-story white frame house. Dead long enough that nothing remained but their bones and a few scraps of clothes. Wasn’t the worst part though.

Worst part was that they were kids. The ME at the 13th figured the oldest one had been maybe 11 or 12, the youngest about four. Three girls and three boys.

The sort of case that makes you go “Oh shit,” and wish you’d become a doctor like your parents wanted.

We tried to keep it wrapped up tight; you always try to keep homicides involving kids wrapped tight because they tend to bring out the parent in everyone. The media scooped us anyway, and the case ended up plastered all over the front page and the six o’clock news. But for once, that journalistic zeal to find out what’s going on right this minute worked in our favor. Because a woman from one of the newspapers went out on her own and researched everything she could find; old maps, city directories, school and church records, you name it, she probably looked at it. Essentially she did my work for me; but because she didn’t have a half-dozen other cases to juggle, she found the information long before I got a chance to get started. And all of a sudden, one morning, our six skeletons had names and faces.

And that’s when the ghosts showed up.

Eddie, Oliver, Sheryl, Clara, Max and Bridget Henninger. Parents were Mike and Carol Henninger; in their early 20s, married going on five years. They’d moved into the house on Ashcroft Circle when Eddie was four and Oliver two. Mike worked at a meatpacking plant (the same one my old man worked at, I later discovered). Carol did the typical McCarthy-era June Cleaver thing; stayed at home and took care of their rapidly growing family.

Maybe it was the fact she’d found school pictures of the kids (turned out Bridget was five, not four, and had started Kindergarten that fall) that made the ghosts come. Before they’d just been faceless, nameless piles of bones. Now they had names and ages, and parents, and a two-page article full of information from school records that Dianna Coster (the newspaper writer) had unearthed. So we knew that Eddie, 12, was ‘very serious about his class work, which is always done in a timely manner.’ Oliver, 10, was 'a bit of a daydreamer; he shows promise, but tends to have trouble staying focused on the task at hand.’ Sheryl and Clara, the twins, were eight, 'they lag behind others their age, due, perhaps, to their attachment to each other-seperation into different classes may be advisable.’ Max, who was seven, ‘displays an intelligence far beyond his age level; we’re looking into the possibility of getting testing done.’ And Bridget, the baby, ‘works and plays well with others; she enjoys story time and has learned to write her first name.’

The night after the story appeared in the paper I had my first dream. The dreams remained the same during the two months I worked on the case; I was always somewhere dark and quiet, except for the sound of something (water? blood?) dripping in the background. And they’d all six be standing there like they were in line-up: Eddie holding Bridget in his arms, neatly dressed, the girls’ hair done up in pony-tails (except for Bridget, who had braids). They never said anything, but that was okay, because from the first dream on I knew what they wanted: For me to find who killed them and bring them to justice. Never mind that the statue of limitations on their murders had run out years ago, they were kids, not criminal lawyers. Their lives had been snuffed out before they’d even begun, and somewhere out there whoever had done it was still alive. It was up to me to give them peace.

The Lieu at the 13th agreed that working the media angle was our best bet. In exchange for vague promises of exclusives, several of the papers printed notices in which we asked anyone who’d known the Henninger’s when they lived on Ashcroft Circle to please contact us immediately; stressing that solving the case was going to depend on any information we could glean from people who’d known the family and might have a clue as to what happened, however small.

The ghosts, meanwhile, had set up housekeeping. It got to the point, after the initial shock wore off, that I could go several hours without really ‘noticing’ them. Kind of like a blind spot in your vision; after a while you just get used to it, and it only bothers you when it prevents you from seeing something. Even when I wasn’t looking at them, I still knew they were there, grim and silent.

Surprisingly, we got a few good leads. Within a week, I’d been to a nearby retirement home to talk to Mrs. Elnora Norris; she, her husband Lee, and their three sons had lived in the house next door to Henninger’s when they moved in. Elnora, who was in her mid -70s, remembered them well. “A nice young couple. Two little babies, and of course, she was expecting the twins when they moved in. They kind of kept to themselves, rather standoffish actually, though she and the children joined the Methodist Church. Eddie was a year behind our youngest boy Davey in school. Mr. Henninger worked odd hours, but a lot of men in the neighborhood worked at the packing plant too. And Carol would always come over and gossip if she happened to be outside when I was hanging up clothes. The twins were a big surprise, and she was sick quite a bit while carrying them. Peggy Delong, who lived across the street, used to baby-sit Eddie and Oliver for her.”

Peggy Delong, I discovered, had died in 1973; she’d been a widow with grown children when she lived in Ashcroft Circle. I talked to Elnora’s sons, and it was from Davey (now David Norris, co-owner, with his brothers, of Norris Consulting) that I got the first inkling all had not been sweetness and light at 352 Ashcroft Circle.

“It seemed to me his father was hard on Eddie; he never got to come out when the guys in the neighborhood decided to play stickball or football or something. Never said much, but I sort of got the feeling he was expected to watch the younger kids. I can’t imagine why; I don’t think their mother ever left the house, except to go to the church and the market. They didn’t even have a car when they first moved in, which everyone thought was odd; Mr. Henninger used to ride the bus to work. Didn’t get a car until, oh, right before they moved.”

“Wait a minute,” I held up a hand. “They moved?”

He nodded. “In the fall of 1961. Or at least everyone assumed they’d moved. Obviously Mr. And Mrs. Henninger left without the kids. But I distinctly remember Mrs. Henninger telling my mother they were moving back east where her family lived. They took the kids out of school and there was a big moving van came one day to take away the furniture. And when we got up the next morning they were gone. Mama thought it was strange that they left without saying good-bye, but they’d never been really friendly to start with, so maybe it wasn’t that surprising.”

I’d thanked him for his help, and left the building to find the Henninger kids waiting for me on the sidewalk outside. It was a rotten day, rainy and cold, and I remember standing there looking at them and saying, “It was your parents, wasn’t it? Either one of them or both?” Course they didn’t answer me, but I was pretty sure I was on to something.

The question now was ‘where’ back east? Could’ve been anywhere from Maine to Florida, though I had this idea that if it’d been Florida, she would’ve said ‘south’. Which left us with the New England states. On the other hand, Mrs. Henninger could have lied; for all we knew, they could have gone west, north, or halfway round the world to Borneo.

So we put out APB’s to all the police stations we could in the east, and the west and north too, just to be on the safe side. Sort of like looking for a needle in a haystack, but the FBI database wasn’t up and running back then; it’s not like we could switch on a computer, tap in and find anyone in the US in a few minutes. I tried to explain that to the kids, but they weren’t impressed. Stella had moved into the guest bedroom; she refused to sleep with me until I saw a doctor about the nightmares I was having. Not that I ever gave her any particulars, and I’m positive she never saw the Henninger kids; otherwise, the marriage would’ve ended right then and there, instead of dragging on for another two years.

Just when I’d resigned myself to the Henninger’s being a permanent part of my life, we got another lead.

It started with a call from a State Trooper in Maine concerning a small town named Partridgeville, and the fact that he remembered a couple named Henninger moving there in the mid-70s when he’d been a teenager.

His name was Sam Roberts, and I spent almost an hour on the phone with him that afternoon. “They were a strange pair,” he said, with that peculiar twang that characterizes the New England area. “My dad was town Sheriff, and he hauled Mr. Henninger in at least once a week for being drunk out of his mind. Used to remind me of Otis on Andy Griffith.”

“So he drank a lot?”

“Almost constantly. I think he hit town dead drunk and didn’t sober up until he got sent to Westcourt.”

“Westcourt. That’s a prison?”

“It’s a maximum-security psychiatric facility for the criminally insane. They sent him there after he went berserk and beat Mrs. Henninger to death with a baseball bat.” I winced. “Damnedst thing I ever saw in my life; took my dad, me and three deputies to get that bat away from him, and he wasn’t that big a guy. Once we got him restrained, we found out he’d been next door before he came home and beat an older woman who’d been his wife’s best friend to death too. Laura Brisco, her name was; close to 80 and wouldn’t have harmed a fly. But she’d gotten Mrs. Henninger involved with St. Thomas’; apparently, that’s what set it off.”

“St. Thomas’s?”

“The local Catholic church. Mrs. Henninger never went out much; I think he kept a real close eye on her. But she and Mrs. Brisco got to talking over the back fence the way women do, and Laura invited her to come to Saturday mass with her. Don’t know what religion they were before moving here, but Mrs. Henninger ended up taking catechism classes and joining the church. Sent her husband into a flaming fit.”

“You think he physically abused her?”

“I know he did. Dad got called over there at least once a month, sometimes twice, and there’s she be, with her eyes blacked or her lip swelled up. He’d haul Mike down to the lock-up and keep him there long as he legally could, but she’d never press charges, so he always had to let him go. And things just escalated after she joined St. Thomas’. Mike Henninger wasn’t real fond of religion; not that he hated it, more that he seemed almost afraid of it, if that makes any sense. I know he never set foot in any church in Partridgeville.”

“Do you know where he is now?” This was the question I’d been waiting to ask; I could sense the Henninger kids behind me, hanging on every word.

“Still at Westcourt. He was found guilty but insane and sentenced to life. He’s an old man now, but no one’s willing to take responsibility for letting him out. I’ve got a cousin works there as an orderly, from what he tells me, he’s spent almost his entire sentence in isolation. I guess they tried putting him in a less secure area when he first got there, and by the time evening bell came two guys were dead and another one was in the infirmary.” He gave a barking laugh. “Truth to tell, my cousin’s scared of the guy. Says he’s got the devil in him for sure.”

By the time I hung up the phone, I knew just where in Northern Massachusetts Westcourt was, and had talked to the head doctor and obtained permission to interview Mike Henninger.

“Not that I think it’ll do you much good, Mr. Kowalski. The man’s a true psychotic; if not for the fact we have isolation, I’d be inclined to ship him somewhere he’d never see the light of day again.”

That struck me as such an odd comment I had to ask about it. Dr. Olivetti sighed. “I’ve only been head psychiatrist here for a few months; I inherited Mr. Henninger from my predecessor, Dr. Termain. Termain’s the one who had him put in isolation when he first came here. To be quite frank, Detective, I think justice would have been better served if someone had shot him through the heart and thrown his body to the wolves.”

And though I couldn’t see them, I ‘knew’ the Henninger kids were all nodding agreement to that statement.

I was on a flight to Massachusetts the next morning; courtesy of three vacation days I had coming and paying for my ticket. The Lieu couldn’t see what good it would do “To go to the middle of nowhere and talk to some senile old maniac. Christ, Kowalski, even if he did kill them, it’s not like he’d be charged with it.”

“It’s the principal of the thing, sir,” I said. It was easy enough for him to not care; he didn’t have the Henninger kids hanging around his neck like six albatrosses.

I flew the last leg of the flight on a small private plane, finally setting down at an airport outside the town of Westchester. Thankfully, despite their size, they had car renta, and within a half hour of landing I was on the highway heading towards the even smaller town of Burlington. The Westcourt Facility stood just outside the city limits.

By now they’d been with me so long I’d taken to talking to the Henninger kids like I would’ve a partner, bouncing ideas off them, soliciting their opinions. Not that they ever answered me, but I can truthfully say that while I might have been lonely, I was never alone.

“You guys are gonna help me, right? Cause I’m assuming that if I can see you, he’ll have no trouble seeing you either. So maybe seeing you’ll shock him into confessing. Or maybe seeing his six dead kids in his isolation cell, along with a Chicago cop with experimental hair, will give him a heart attack. Then he’ll be dead and you can deal with him in the afterlife.” I didn't bother to ask them how all seven of us fit into a car designed for four; I’d quit speculating over how the Henninger’s did their magic early on.

Westcourt looked nothing like I’d expected. If not for the 20-foot high chain-link fence with the barbed wire coiled on top, you wouldn’t have known it wasn’t some rest home for the rich and easily upset. It wasn’t until you got closer that you realized the place was a prison of an entirely different kind.

The guards at the gate looked at me sort of strange (I wondered, briefly, if they could see the Henninger’s too), but they called and buzzed me in, saying that Dr. Olivetti would meet me in the front foyer. The long, scenic road ended in the parking lot in front, where a nice young lady with a gun the size of a bazooka assigned me a parking space. Another guard waited at the door; I had to be buzzed in by someone inside.

Rather like Westcourt, Dr Olivetti looked nothing like what I’d expected. He was a small, gray-haired man with a moustache and wire-rimmed glasses; put me in mind of Einstein. He greeted me cordially and took me into his office, to “Have a little talk before I set you loose amongst the wolves.”

“Detective Kowalski,” he said, once he’d positioned himself on the other side of his massive oak desk, “exactly why are you here?”

“I told you last night on the phone, sir; digging in Chicago uncovered the bodies of six children who were positively identified as belonging to Mike and Carol Henninger.”

“I know that.” He waved a hand in the air. “But what do you hope to accomplish? Even if you can get him to confess to the murders, I know enough about the law to know the statute of limitations on this crime is long past. And that’s assuming you could talk the state of Massachusetts into extraditing him back to Illinois. There’s got to be something more personal going on.”

For just a second I considered telling him about being haunted by the Henninger kids. On the other hand, I’m not so stupid I’d make a confession like that to psychiatrist in an institution for the criminally insane. “It’s the principal of the thing, Doctor,” I said, echoing what I’d told the Lieu. “I’ve had this case hanging over my head for two months now. We need…what it is you call it, closure here?” He nodded. “That’s why I’m here. I have to see this man and get some sort of closure. I hope I can get him to confess, but even if I can’t, at least I’ll know then I’ve done everything I can.”

He studied me closely, and then gave a slight smile. “I can understand that. Tell me, have they buried the children’s bodies yet?”

“No sir; they’ve been waiting until all leads were exhausted.”

“So irregardless of what Mr. Henninger tells you, if, in fact, he tells you anything, they’ll likely bury the bodies when you return?”

I hadn’t really thought about that; it occurred to me he was probably right. “I imagine they will, yes.”

Again that small, slight smile. “Very well, Detective. If you’ll follow me.”

I’d never actually been inside a prison before, but even I knew enough to realize what I was looking at here wasn’t your average prison.

Too clean, for starters. And while most prison guards are fairly impressive guys, they aren’t built like pro-football linebackers.

“Do you have any women working here?” I asked Dr. Olivetti, as we went through yet another set of double-bolted doors.

“Not very many. The ones we do have are more than capable of taking care of themselves. Despite how it looks from the outside, Detective, Westcourt is not a nice place. Most of the felons here won’t be seeing the outside world again in their lifetime, unless some idiot gets it in their head that they’re innocent. We had a couple of cases like that, both before I came here; some lawyer decided, based on court transcripts and the likes, that the person had been ‘unfairly imprisoned.’ In both cases, they managed to get the men released.”

“What happened?”

He stopped before a set of reinforced steel doors that wouldn’t have looked out of place in an industrial warehouse. “One of them, I believe, is now living a peaceful life somewhere in Vermont. The other celebrated his release by killing six people; none of them, unfortunately, the lawyer that was responsible for unleashing him on an unsuspecting public. Needless to say, I doubt anyone will be speaking positively at ‘his’ next parole hearing. This is Isolation.”

We’d gone through the first set of reinforced doors, a smaller door made of what I suspect was what they make riot shields out of, which apparently worked on some sort of voice-print system, and a second set of doors identical to the first. If I’d thought the outside had been white, it was nothing compared to this place.

Everything was padded. Walls, floors, ceilings; hell, even the outsides of the doors had padding on them (so, I found out, did the insides). I’d already been thoroughly frisked when I came through the front door and relieved of everything on my person, including my comb. Now, a guy who could’ve been a close relative of King Kong’s did it again, far less gently. He also frisked Dr. Olivetti, who grinned at me. “No one is above suspicion here, Detective Kowalski. Not even the help.”

Having assured himself I retained nothing but my clothing and what little pride I had left, the guy moved to one side. Dr. Olivetti rummaged in his jacket pocket and came out with a ring of keys, each of them color-coded. “Before you go in, Detective, let me tell you how things work here. This entire area is soundproofed and padded. And you’ll notice the padding is smooth, with no seams?” I nodded. “We used to have the kind with seams in it; one particularly dedicated inmate managed to pick a hole in it and cave his skull in on the brick wall underneath. Each room is wired for sound, and has four video cameras.”

I glanced around. “Where’s the control room?”

“Ah, that would be telling. Suffice to say it’s closer than you think. Additionally, each inmate is put in restraints when they have visitors. So basically, what you’re going to find when I open the door is Mr. Henninger sitting on the floor of a bare room in a straightjacket. Arnold here,” he gestured at King Kong Jr., “will remain right outside the door, and you’ll be monitored constantly.”

I gave him a careful look. “I thought that sort of stuff was against the law. Cruel and unusual punishment.”

He was toying with a blue-marked key. “I imagine it is in more civilized parts of the world, Mr. Kowalski. Of course, last time I checked, repeatedly raping and eventually beating to death your wife, her 82 year old mother, your 14 and six year old daughters, and your 12 year old stepson was also against the law. If you want, I can have Arnold take you down the hall and introduce you to that gentleman?"

I shook my head. “Didn’t think so. If you could please stand back.” He put the key in the lock, but instead of just turning it once, he turned it in a series of motions, as if he were working a padlock. Eventually, there was a faint click and the store opened about 1/4 of an inch. “Mr. Henninger,” Dr. Olivetti said, pulling the door open just far enough that we could slip in. “Mr. Henninger, you have company.”

The lighting in the room was so bright it was almost painful; it took my eyes a minute to adjust enough that I could see the old man huddled in one corner.

I don’t know what I’d been expecting. Jack the Ripper, I guess, given what he’d done to his children, his wife and the next-door neighbor. What I hadn’t expected was the brittle, dried-up twig of an old man huddled in a corner. His head had been almost completely shaved, but he had a couple days razor stubble. He was flinging himself from side to side, all the while, chanting something in a monotone. “takeemawaytakeemawaytakeemawaytakeemaway…” He stared at me with wild eyes, and I remembered what Steve Roberts had said him having the devil in him. It was still there. Maybe not as strong as it had been when he was younger, but it was still there.

Dr. Olivetti looked at me and smiled that small, secretive smile again. “You have 15 minutes, Detective Kowalski. Make your peace.”

He walked past me, and I heard the door click closed. No one there but Mike Henninger and me.

I glanced at the six Henninger kids standing against the wall furthest from their father, and realized, with a shock, that they seemed more ‘real’, somehow. Less like the lost souls they were; closer to actual flesh and blood.

I looked at the old man, who’d stopped his screeching and was staring at the wall as well, eyes wide, and it clicked into place. “You can see them too, can’t you?”

His head whipped back around. “Don’t know how you got’em here, damn worthless pups, but take’em the hell away now.”

“Sorry, Mike, I can’t do that.” I moved over to lean against the wall by the door. “It’s funny, really. Here these last two months I thought they were my ghosts; but they’ve been yours all along, haven’t they?”

“Don’ know what yer talkin’ ‘bout.”

“Do you see Carol and the other woman…Laura? Are they here too? Maybe been waiting a while, hanging around in the background, because they knew the kids were coming? They knew it and so did you. And we know why they’re here, don’t we?” He was shaking his head no. “Evil eventually turns on itself, Mike. You knew that all along. That’s why you killed Carol and Laura; because you were afraid they were going to tell someone. Maybe they already had?”

“Damn bitch!” He spit the words out. “Told’er not to get involved with anyone in that sorry-ass town, told’er to keep to herself, but she never would listen to me, never had, not from the very beginning when I tried to tell her why we couldn’t have kids. ‘You don’t mean that, Michael’, she’d say, an’ she just kept turn’em out like a sow with piglets.”

“Why couldn’t you have kids, Michael?” I hazarded a glance at the Henninger children; they were pretty much ‘complete’. Eddie had put Bridget down. Oliver straightened his glasses, and I almost let out a relieved sigh; I’d spent two damn months wanting to push that kid’s glasses back up his nose.

“I had to do it, don’tcha see?” He was staring at me, his expression carefully calculated. “You say I’m evil, Mr. Kowalski, and you’re right, I am. I was born evil and I’ll die evil. That’s why I killed’em. I could see it already in Eddie’s eyes when he looked at me.”

“See what?”

“Myself, Mr. Kowalski. It was better they die young than live the kind of life I’d lived, do the things I’d done. My mother should’ve taken a coat hanger and made sure I never came into the world. I was evil from the womb; giving birth to me killed her. And after a while, nobody tried to take me in as their own child because they could see the evil too.”

Something tugged at my arm, and I looked down to meet Bridget’s blue eyes. She was smiling now, which made me smile back; then she held out her arms and I picked her up. She leaned forward and kissed the bridge of my nose. “Thank you.” She whispered.

I just nodded and sat her down, repeating the same thing with Sheryl and Clara, except they were too big to pick up. Max and Oliver shook my hand and thanked me as well; Oliver’s glasses were already slipping down his nose, and I gave in to impulse and pushed them back up. He smiled even wider, then ducked his head shyly.

Eddie came last. I’d never realized he was big for his age; he’d seemed smaller, somehow, when he was still a ghost. He shook my hand firmly. “Thank you for bring us here, Mr. Kowalski. I’m sorry about the last couple of months, but you understand why we couldn’t speak before now, don’t you?” I nodded. “I want to apologize for the nightmares as well; I hope you and your wife make up.”

I thought about Stella, how she’d been growing away from me even before this had happened, but I just smiled and said, “We will, Eddie. Can I ask you something?”

He nodded.

“How did he do it? Kill you, I mean? The coroner said there were no marks on your body.”

“He poisoned us.” This from Oliver, who’s come over to stand beside Eddie. “Not all at once, but a little bit at a time, so we got sicker and sicker.”

“And nobody in the neighborhood noticed?”

Eddie shrugged. “We weren’t allowed to talk to anyone, Mr. Kowalski. If we made friends, he’d just sit us down and lecture us about how evil we were going to be when we grew up, so we might as well get used to being alone now.”

I look past the six of them, fair-haired and blue eyed, at the wild man against the far wall. “They look like their mother, don’t they?”

He starts to say something, decides against it, and simply shakes his head.

“Mr. Kowalski?” It’s Bridget. Her smile’s gone, and her clear blue eyes are clouded. “We’re not evil, are we, Mr. Kowalski?”

“Oh no.” I pick her up and hug her. “No, no, Bridget, none of you are evil.”

She glances at her father, who shrinks backs. “But what we’re going to do to him is bad,” she says worriedly.

“Hey, what’d I tell you?” Eddie takes her out of my arms and swings her over his head. “What we have to do to him is divine justice.”

“Like God.” Max offers.

“Yeah, like God.”

She frowns, obviously puzzled. “But why can’t God do it and let us go ahead and see Momma?”

“Cause God’s very busy, Pigeon,” Sheryl (or maybe it’s Clara) comes over and straightens her braids. “He can’t do everything; sometimes, he has to send…” she looks at her twin, “what’s the word, Clare?”

“Divine agents,” Clara says solemnly.

“Right. Sometimes he has to send divine agents.”

“And divine agents can’t be evil,” Max is missing a front tooth, which makes him lisp slightly. “That’s why they’re called divine.”

“SHUT THE BLOODY FUCKING HELL UP!!!” Mike’s scream probably just broke glass in the control room. It makes my ears ring; though the children seem unfazed. “Divine agents my ass! You’re no more divine than…”

Bridget marches over to him and, before he can get the words out, smacks him so hard my ears ring again. “Shut up, please.” She says, in her soft, little-girl voice. “Blaspheming his name isn’t going to make it any easier”

“Momma!!” The shout goes up simultaneously from at least four of them and I look towards where they’re gathering around a fragile,care-worn looking woman with graying hair. Carol’s finally arrived.

I check my watch, realizing my 15 minutes are almost up, and make my way over to the knot of children. “Mrs. Henninger?”

She looks up and I find myself staring into the children’s eyes; blue as a summer’s day. She smiles slightly and holds out her hands. “Detective Kowalski. I understand you’ve been taking care of them these last few months?”

I shake my head. “Not like it was that hard a job, ma’am.”

“Don’t give me that,” she says, gently touching my face. “I’m their mother, Detective. Even on a good day, they’re a handful.”

I look at the smiling children and her, then over at the frantic man trying to burrow his way into the wall. “My times almost up, Mr. Henninger. And you and the children have a job to do.”

She smiles sadly, nodding. “It wasn’t all bad, Mr. Kowalski. There were times it was actually almost good.” She looks at her children, and her eyes shadow. “At least until he sent them away.”

A few minutes later the door pops open; Arnold and Dr. Olivetti are standing there panting. “Mr. Kowalski! Thank God you're all right!"

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Because we lost audio and video shortly after you went into the room. And the lock was frozen; it’s taken me almost 15 minutes to get it undone.” He glances past me at Mike Henninger, who’s bucking and twisting on the padded cell floor as if trying to shake something off, his constant litany of “pleasenopleasenopleasenopleasenopleaseno!!” almost drown out by the inhuman screeching of something only I can see. “What’s wrong with him?”

“I think he’s having a fit,” I offer, not bothering to turn around. Viewing divine justice in action once is more than enough to last me the rest of my life. “You might want to do something before he strokes out.”

I smile at Arnold as the good Doctor fumbles in his jacket pockets and pulls out a cell phone. "Could you show me the way out?"

I follow him down the hall, Mike Henninger’s screams echoing off the walls in chorus to the sound of six happy children and their mother laughing, celebrating being together again after far too many years spent apart.

For a long minute, Fraser and I sit there in silence. “You don’t believe me, do you?” I try not to let the disappointment show in my voice;

“I never said I didn’t believe you.” He interrupts my pity-party by touching the side of my face. “If you say you spent two months with the ghosts of six children following you around, then you did.”

“How can you be so sure?” I don’t know why I always feel the need to challenge his faith in me; maybe because I still can’t quite believe he’s here in Chicago and not up north where he belongs.

“Because you’re an honorable man, Ray Kowalski. It’s part of why I love you so much.”

“Oh.” As always, his ease in admitting it makes me feel like the jerk I probably am. “Okay, then.”

“Did you miss them?” It’s my turn to look at him askance; he’s got the same lost look in his eyes he had earlier. “Yeah, I did.” It feels good to admit it after so long. “Didn’t miss the nightmares, but I wish I could’ve gotten to know them better before they had to leave.” He nods as if he knows exactly what I’m talking about. And maybe he does, freak that he is. “Your turn now,” I say.

“My turn for what?”

“You said you believed in ghosts.” He looks genuinely surprised. “I did?”

“Well, not exactly those words, but trust me, I’ve been translating Fraser-speak long enough to know what you meant.”

He studies me a moment, then a grin steals across his face. “Louuuu Skagnetti…”

I smack him, but I’m laughing too hard for it to have much impact. “Not ‘those’ kind of ghosts, you dim-witted Mountie!”

He’s very close now, close enough that I can see him even with my eyes closed, close enough that I can smell him without having to inhale. “I love you, Ray Kowalski.”

“You'd better,” I answer, leaning in to steal the first kiss of the night.

FIN

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