All the Dying Children by James Halpin

Author:James Halpin [Halpin, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781070630175
Published: 2019-07-01T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

Thursday, April 5, 2018

11:24 a.m.

When Daly pulled onto Noble Street, he could see from down the block that he wasn’t going to find a spot in front of the house. The Ford Thunderbird was still in the driveway of a home with peeling paint and rusting furniture on the front porch. But the porch was now adorned with crime scene tape that police bent under as they came and went into the house.

Police dispatchers are trained to keep their cool, especially when the shit hits the fan. But when a serious emergency arises, the stress and excitement still show in their voices. The dispatcher on the scanner hadn’t sounded very excited at all. From a single glance at the scene, Daly could tell the police weren’t too excited either. There were only three patrol cars and a sport-utility vehicle from the coroner’s office. The front of the house was blocked by crime scene tape, but the sidewalk and street were open. The cops and deputy coroner seemed to be going about business as usual.

Someone had clearly died, but the cops definitely didn’t think it was a murder.

Already, a reporter from the Other Paper was standing a couple of doors down, trying to give the cops a respectful distance as he waited for someone to come tell him what happened. The TV stations hadn’t yet shown up — if they were even coming. Daly walked over to stand by him.

“What’s up, Derrick?” he asked. “They say anything yet?”

“No,” he said. “One of the cops said the chief would be over in a few.”

“You want to tag team it?”

“Sure,” Derrick said. “It sounds like a suicide anyway.”

If so, it almost certainly wouldn’t be a story. Unless it turns out to be David Kowalski, Daly thought.

Some of the older newspapermen still held a grudge from the union strike that led to Wilkes-Barre becoming a two-newspaper town, but most of the younger ones were more concerned about their increasing workloads and job security. Daly fell into the latter camp. After years of covering the same perp walks and court hearings as reporters on the other side, he’d become friendly with many of them. He offered to do a joint interview because he figured there was no sense in trying to hide something from another reporter when the reporter would easily get the same information as soon as he talked to the cops.

That said, there was no way Daly was letting on he knew who lived at that house. Or how Kowalski was connected to the dying children.

Chief Jerry Fitzgerald was a portly man with a brown bushy mustache that had overrun his upper lip and sharp eyes that gazed out from behind rectangular rimmed glasses. As he sauntered over to Daly and Derrick, he raised a finger to his temple and brought it forward in salute.

“Nothing much for you here, boys,” Fitzgerald said amiably.

“What happened?” Daly asked.

“We have a seventeen-year-old male with a gunshot wound to the head,” Fitzgerald said. “His father found him in his room shortly after ten-thirty this morning.

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