She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,45

Dumpster behind an Eat’n Park in West Mifflin on August 8.”

“Isn’t that the mall where they filmed Dawn of the Dead?”

“The same.”

“Creepy.”

Faustino said, “Her mother was shopping at Sears, browsing clothes, and Rebecca wanted to look at the toys across the aisle but within eyeshot. We have about ten minutes unaccounted for, so we think that’s when she was grabbed. Most stores put the toy section as deep into the space as possible for two reason—kids tend to drag their parents there, so you want the parents to have to walk through as much of the retail space as possible, hoping for an impulse buy or two. The second reason is to get it as far from the exits as possible. Most kids are taken from the toy department. This gives store security a fighting chance at stopping someone before they get outside. When Rebecca was taken, no alarms went up. She vanished.”

He reached back into his drawer, found another folder, and opened it on the desk. There was a grainy eight by ten photograph inside. He handed it to Fogel. “The security cameras didn’t capture anything worthwhile inside, but we got this picture from the parking lot.”

Fogel studied the picture and frowned. “What exactly am I looking at?”

“Four adults, from the back. Female, we think, based on the long hair. Can’t be sure, though.”

“This is August, right? Why are they wearing coats?”

“That’s what we noticed first, too. Four identical coats. White trenches.” He leaned over the photograph and placed his finger near center. “What do you see right here?”

Fogel leaned in closer, too. It took her a moment. “Looks like a kid walking between them.”

“Her mother identified the tee-shirt. It’s Rebecca.”

“If you’re six years old and four adults tell you to go somewhere, you probably just go, right? She probably didn’t put up a fuss.”

“If she did, nobody noticed. But yeah, I bet they just told her her mommy was looking for her, they’d take her to her, and walked Rebecca right out.”

Fogel said, “The camera didn’t capture their vehicle?”

“All I’ve got is this photograph. When I first started piecing all this together, I tried to pull the tapes from evidence, and they were gone, lost. I figured another camera might have the vehicle, or maybe earlier footage caught this crew walking in, but without the tapes, we’ll never know.”

Fogel traced the adults with her fingertip. “If all these murders are connected, this tells us there are at least four perps, not one. The identical coats could mean a cult of some sort. Considering the state of the bodies, it’s hard not to go there. These murders span such a long time frame. That would suggest a cult, too—possibly different perps over time, all working toward the same thing.”

Faustino only nodded at this. He had suspected some kind of cult for years. “Rebecca was found in a Dumpster, 8/8/1982.”

The two of them fell silent at this, both lost in their own thoughts. All these deaths, but that little girl always seemed to hit Faustino the hardest. By the expression on Fogel’s face, he knew he was not alone in that.

After about a minute, he cleared his throat and went back to the board. “1981, unknown male. 1980, unknown male. 1979, unknown female.” Each of the bodies in the photographs looked the same: black, dry skin, almost powdery, burnt, clothing untouched. “Considering the age, I don’t know that we’ll ever identify them unless we catch whoever is responsible.”

Fogel stood from her desk and approached the board. “What happened in 1978?”

“From what I can tell, this was our first, and by far the worst. Three bodies that year, all male.” He pointed at the picture in the center. This guy had a metal plate in his head from an injury in Vietnam. The ME used the serial number to identify him. Twenty-four years old, his name was Calvin Gurney. He came back from ’Nam in ’75, got picked up for some petty stuff early on—vagrancy, shoplifting. Otherwise, there’s not much on him. The other two guys were never identified. They were found at a bloodbath, though. The crime scene was completely different from all these others. I think it was our ground zero.”

“Different how?”

Faustino reached into his drawer and retrieved one more file. This one was about half an inch thick. Inside were a dozen photographs and various reports. “They were found inside a townhouse in Mount Washington. A three-bedroom with a nice view of the city. The place was supposed