Girl, 11 by Amy Clarke (grave mercy TXT) 📗

“I know, okay? I know. But try anyway. I need to take care of this body and then figure out how to get home.”

When he hung up, she swiped to get to Sash’s name. The call went straight to voicemail. Sash was probably in court.

No one was here when she needed them. Anger coursed through her, however unjustified. Martín was trying to get home to her; Sash would call her back as soon as she could. She knew that, but the rage and fear persisted.

Elle had been freezing two seconds ago, but now felt like she was boiling alive. She parked outside Sash’s house and jumped out of the car with her coat open. The only way past the sheer, blind panic was to be angry with Natalie. She tried to work up the motherly fury because even if she wasn’t a mom, damn it, she could have motherly fury. Because of course, Natalie just walked home when Elle didn’t answer her phone to come pick her up. It was only ten blocks. No big deal.

Except she was nowhere to be seen. The lights were off in her house, but Elle walked up the slippery path and knocked on the door anyway. “Natalie?” she called, fishing in her purse for the spare key. As soon as she found it and opened the door, she knew Natalie wasn’t home. The house was cold, set to the daytime temperature that was just high enough to keep the pipes from freezing.

Elle stumbled back outside, tears finally flooding her eyes as she looked up and down the sidewalk on their block. The evening sky glowed pale orange from the freshly fallen snow. The streetlights illuminated sparkling tree branches, parked cars, and a couple abandoned plastic sleds. But there was nobody in sight.

Natalie was gone.

22

Justice Delayed podcast

Recorded November 28, 2019

Unaired recording: Elle Castillo, monologue

Elle:

Every investigation has flaws. Every investigator makes mistakes. Over the decades since he officially became inactive, detectives and even a couple investigative journalists have blamed cases on the elusive TCK. Sometimes they did so with compelling evidence: a case of ricin poisoning, eleven-year-old girls who went missing or were killed at various times, another couple found dead in a cabin fifty miles north of the one TCK’s last victim escaped. Even Detective Sykes admitted to being fooled once, in 2008, by a series of four murders in Fargo that seemed to revolve around an obsession with numbers.

But they have all been wrong. We have all been wrong.

Longtime listeners might remember that I actually knew Ayaan Bishar, Commander of Crimes Against Children at Minneapolis Police Department, before we worked together on the Jair Brown case. We met when I worked in CPS, when I was put on a case that involved a missing child.

I responded to a call from neighbors concerned about a young girl named Maddie Black. They hadn’t seen her in several days, which was unusual as she often played on the swing set outside their apartment building. Her mother was separated from her father and lived with a man that the neighbors said was often verbally abusive. The mother and the boyfriend both claimed to have no idea where Maddie was, and based on witness statements from the girl’s friends, it seemed the last time she had been seen was when she got off the school bus to walk the two blocks to her house. No one saw her get taken, but she never arrived home.

We looked into the girl’s father, which was routine procedure. He lived two hours away and seemed to be shocked about Maddie’s disappearance, although a couple of her friends mentioned that Maddie had seemed afraid the last time she was supposed to spend the weekend at his house.

I . . . I should have listened. Those are the kinds of clues that make a good social worker’s senses fire up, but I ignored them.

The circumstances of her kidnapping were eerily familiar to me. Even at that time, I knew the TCK case inside and out. Maddie was eleven years old, and although her family was in much more turmoil than those of the other TCK victims, it seemed possible to me that he was responsible. Once I started looking at the similarities, it seemed obvious. She was the right age, from the right background. She had disappeared the same way most of his victims had—walking alone in the course of her normal daily routine. So when I spoke to Ayaan Bishar, who was the detective assigned to the case, I told her I was certain that TCK had decided to start killing again. By the time two days had passed and there was no ransom call or sign of a body, I thought I had her convinced. Not only had Maddie been taken by TCK, but another girl was due to be snatched the next day. Other clues came in, a couple of family friends saying we should really take a closer look at Maddie’s father, but TCK was so clever, I wouldn’t have even put it past him to choose a victim that would have us pointing the finger at someone else. Maybe it was an improvement, a sophistication of his technique that he had added over the years.

It was not. Four days after Maddie disappeared, Ayaan pursued a tip about an alias Maddie’s father used, and she tracked down an apartment he’d rented under the fake name. Having heard police busting down the door, the man decided that if he couldn’t have his daughter, no one could. They broke in just before he could shoot her. She was saved, but the next day when I went in to work, I had a resignation letter with me.

I was burned out at my job. I feared my mistake had nearly cost a girl her life. At the same time, in my personal life, I had my first and only taste of what it was like to be a parent through a burgeoning friendship with