“Yeah, and I think that one is Wayne’s,” Yasiv replied, pointing toward a white trailer with the numbers ‘212’ taped to the side.
Yasiv pulled onto the grass in front of the trailer and inspected it through the windshield. It was actually in better shape than most of the places they’d passed on the way in. Sure, the siding was peeling in several places, but all of the windows appeared intact and the steps leading up to the door weren’t rotted through completely.
“Yeah,” Dunbar confirmed. “Two-twelve, this is it.”
Yasiv checked his gun in his holster, but before getting out of the car, he turned to Dunbar.
“I’m taking the lead, all right? We’re just here to have a look around and if we see Wayne, we just want to talk to him.”
Dunbar nodded, but Yasiv made sure to hold the stare a little longer than was comfortable to make sure that his partner caught his meaning. The DA wanted Wayne back behind bars; what he didn’t want was a complicated legal battle as the result of an unarmed man on parole being gunned down by an NYPD Detective.
“Yeah. I’ll be okay.”
Yasiv stepped from the vehicle and as soon as the cool air struck his face, the urge to smoke became nearly unbearable. He had to keep moving, keep occupied, otherwise nicotine withdrawal would set in, then he’d be the one with the itchy trigger finger.
The lights in the trailer were off and the grass leading up to the small wooden steps was straight and unbent. Yasiv aimed his flashlight on the grass and indicated the unmolested area with a flick of his wrist. Dunbar acknowledged the movement then raised his own light to the door.
“Doesn't look like anybody's been here for a while,” he said, stating the obvious. As if confirming this point, there were several letters hanging halfway out of the outer screen door. “I say we knock, then see if the super can open it up for us.”
As he spoke, Dunbar started forward, but Yasiv held his hand in front of the man.
“I'll go,” he said, moving toward the steps. “And I don’t know if we can go in. I don’t know if PC covers—”
A light flicked on in the trailer, and Yasiv fell silent. The blinds in one of the windows spread and a dark set of eyes peered out.
“Shit, that's him!” Dunbar shouted. “That's Wayne!”
The man was already running for the door, his gun drawn.
Yasiv pulled his own gun from his holster and then the light flicked off.
“Dunbar!” Yasiv yelled. “Dunbar, wait up!”
But Dunbar was beyond the point of no return. The detective yanked the screen door open, then tried the knob. The inner door was locked. With a curse, he reared back and planted his boot right next to the dented doorknob. The wood was so saturated with moisture that it flexed in the frame but didn't break.
“Dunbar!” Yasiv shouted. He was on the bottom step when he heard another door opening, followed by an earthy thump.
As Dunbar drew his foot back again, Yasiv focused on the sound and realized that he could now hear footsteps moving away from them.
“Dunbar! Dunbar, he's out back! He went out the back way!”
Without waiting for his partner to reply, Yasiv turned and bolted around the other side of the trailer.
He immediately spotted a shadow weaving in and out of the rows of dilapidated trailers.
Yasiv pressed his flashlight to the bottom of his gun barrel and took aim.
“NYPD! Stop! NYPD, stop, or I’ll shoot!”
Chapter 14
“No cheating. If I catch you peeking under your blindfold, you will immediately be expelled, and I will seek criminal prosecution,” Beckett proclaimed. For emphasis, he tapped his pointing stick against the chalkboard. Only it wasn't a chalkboard, but a Smart Board and it made a strange sonic sound. He cringed and quickly walked toward his six residents. “Do you understand?”
A grumble of something that passed as an affirmative spread through their ranks.
“This game is called the mystery—” Beckett paused. “—no, no, not mystery. It’s called the Bird Box Medical Challenge. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it’s copyrighted, but I don’t care. That’s what it’s called, and these are the rules: rule number one, no talking about the Bird Box Medical Challenge to anyone, and in particular any IP lawyers. Rule number two: you do not talk about the Bird Box Medical Challenge to anyone. Rule number three: no peeking… shit, I already said that. Okay, this is even annoying me. Let’s just cut to the Chase Adams: in the box in front of each of you, there is a body part. Men, the person to your left is your partner. They also have a body part in their box. Each pair of body parts is from the same person. Your goal is to first identify the body part—easy peasy. You can talk to your partner, but no taking off your blindfolds. Capiche?”
“Excuse me, Dr. Campbell, sir?”
Beckett rolled his eyes.
How can there be a question already?
He walked over to Maria and rapped his stick on the desk in front of her. She jumped.
“I'm not sure how you can have a question now, given that the instructions are clear and explicit and that you haven't started yet. But, by all means, go ahead and ask away.”
The woman cleared her throat and started to tilt her head backward. Beckett pressed the stick to the top of her head to stop her, so she couldn’t peek.
“I don't seem to have any gloves? I just—”
Beckett whacked the desk with his stick.
“No gloves! No gloves!” he shouted. “Just kidding, there are gloves on the desk. Slip them on, we’re not spreading diseases here. Speaking of which, after you confirm the body part, I want you to identify the disease that killed the patient. That, my doting students, is the Bird Box Medical Challenge.”
With that, Beckett took a step back and surveyed his residents.
The six remaining doctors had been with him for more than half a year now, and he was actually impressed with both their aptitude and their ability to put up with his unorthodox teaching methods. Predictably, they were led by Grant McEwing, better known as Boy Wonder or Doogie Howser or Dr. Gregory House, who seemed to know everything.
Except for who really killed his sister, that is.
Beckett massaged the tattoos under his arm. He was impressed not just by the man’s didactic memory, but also by his ability to deal with the diarrhea storm life had thrown his way. First, his father dies of cancer, then his sister goes off the rails and starts killing people, then she meets her unfortunate end at the hands of Yours Truly.
Grant may be socially awkward, but he was also brilliant and trustworthy. If circumstances had been different, he might even consider the man a friend.
Beckett shook his head and went back to his desk to observe the hilarity at a safe distance. The first challenge was to put on gloves while blindfolded, which was no easy task, especially considering that Beckett had made sure to give each resident gloves one size smaller than they were used to.
Eventually, however, they managed and then hesitantly reached into their mystery boxes.
I should try this on Halloween, he thought. That would be a real treat. Or trick. Ha, you’re hilarious, Beckett.
“Take your time, people, you've got an hour. Use it. Feel your organ, caress it, love it.”
Beckett slid his phone out of his pocket and set a timer for thirty minutes.
Grant was the first to begin, of course. His gloved hands massaged the diseased liver in his box in a way that made Beckett shudder.
Okay, yeah, I’m not going to watch this.
Instead, he pulled out his phone and started doing a little more research on Rev. Alister Cameron’s impossible claims.
“Curing death, phff,” he whispered to himself as he read. Most of the articles consisted of the Reverend’s braggadocio or anecdotal claims of his super mega powers. But there was a line at the end of the article in the Times that caught his attention: In addition to testimonials, genetic testing confirms that several parishioners of Rev. Alister Cameron’s parish have been
cured of a rare, hereditary form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and cystic fibrosis, among others.
This couldn’t be true, of course. Neither disease was ‘curable’; they were both fatal genetic conditions.
“I'm done.”
Beckett wasn't surprised to see that it was Grant who made this proclamation.
“Fine, recite the alphabet backward, then. As for the rest of you, you’ve got ten more minutes.”
Chapter 15
Thankfully, Yasiv didn't have to shoot the man from the trailer. In truth, he wasn’t sure that he would have, given that it was unclear if it was even Wayne, or if he had just cause.
“Please, don't shoot!” the man shouted as he put on the brakes and raised his hands. “Please, don't shoot me!”
“Keep your hands up and drop to your knees,” Yasiv instructed as he moved toward the man. A red-faced Dunbar suddenly appeared at the sergeant’s side and, knowing how amped up the detective was, Yasiv purposefully stepped in front of him as he approached the man on his knees.
“Now, I want you to slowly interlace your fingers and place them on the back of your head. Slowly.”
Again, the man obliged.
“All right, no sudden—dammit!”
Dunbar pushed by him and grabbed the man by the wrist and pulled him backward. He cried out as he folded onto his own heels before his feet shot out in front of him.
“You’re going back to prison, you piece of shit,” Dunbar swore as he started to drag the man across the patchy lawn.
“What? What’d I do? What the fuck’d I do?”
Yasiv tucked his gun into his holster and shined the light on his partner.
“Let go of him, Dunbar.”
But Dunbar was so incensed that it wasn’t clear he could hear anything but his own voice. He just continued to curse.
What in the hell is wrong with him?
Yasiv shined the light directly in Dunbar’s face, which finally got his attention. He let go of the man’s wrist and took a step back.
The commotion had drawn people out of their trailers, some of whom were aiming cell phones in their direction.
“Keep it together, Dunbar.”
“It's not him,” Dunbar growled. “Yasiv, it’s not him.”
Before Yasiv could flick his flashlight in the direction of the man on the ground, a burly man brandishing a baseball bat stepped from the doorway of his trailer.
“Hey, what's going on over there?”
Yasiv pulled out his badge and flashed it in the newcomer’s direction.
“NYPD, go back inside.”
This failed to dissuade the man. He actually took a step forward and adjusted his grip on his bat. Yasiv frowned and deliberately placed his free hand on the butt of his gun.
“I said, go back inside.”
The man growled and cursed under his breath but did as he was ordered. Only then did Yasiv turned back to Dunbar.
“What do you mean it’s not him?”
“It's not Wayne Cravat,” Dunbar said angrily. “Fuck, I don’t know who this clown is, but it’s not Wayne.”
“I'm—I’m reporting you guys. You assaulted me, man. I got rights, I-I-I—”
“Shut up,” Yasiv warned. “Dunbar, you sure it's not—”
“I’ll sue, I’ll sue the entire NYPD. This maniac just broke my knee or some shit, everyone here saw that. They saw—”
“I said shut up. Dunbar, cuff him.”
“Cuff me? Why—”
Dunbar strode forward and teased his handcuffs from his belt. Then he roughly grabbed the man's arms and twisted them behind his back. He cried out again, but his bravado was suddenly nowhere to be found. Nor were his threats of legal action.
“Why? Why? Because you were breaking into a known child murderer’s trailer, that's why. Now get the fuck up. You're coming back to the station with us.”
Chapter 16
“You done? Yeah, you're all done. Pencils in the air and step away from your culinary creation.”
Despite the inanity of the comment, all the residents moved away from their boxes.
“Can we take our blindfolds off?” Maria asked.
“Of course not. Now, there are six of you so—carry the one—that means there are three different diseases. Let's start with… I’ll just pick at random… Maria, let’s start with you. Please tell me what the organs you felt were, and what disease they were afflicted with. Trevor or Taylor or whatever the hell your name is, you can help her when she struggles.”
“Well… my first organ was definitely a heart and the second was a brain. Part of the brain seemed to have some bleeding or an abscess or something in the pre-frontal cortex, while the heart was covered in fat. I think… I think my patient died of an aneurysm due to being obese, which led to the fatal heart attack.”
“Why would you think that the person had the aneurysm first, which led to the heart attack, and not the other way around?” Beckett asked, tapping his stick on the desk as he spoke.
“I mean, it's just because I think that, umm, I guess—”
Beckett whacked the desk hard and the woman jumped.
“Right, so let's not do any guessing. This isn’t the Price is Right. And Trevor? Shame on you for watching the poor girl suffer. I assume that you concur with her assessment of the aneurysm and the heart attack?”
“I do,” the man with the manbun confirmed. “I would say that the aneurysm occurred first, due to the radius of bleeding. If the patient had the heart attack first, it would be unlikely to produce that much bleeding in the brain.”
“Very good. I see that you're more than just a man with pretty hair,” Beckett remarked. “But that was the easy one. All right, moving on, Pedro and Margo? What were your organs and what disease did your unfortunate patient suffer from?”
Pedro or Pablo—Beckett was horrible with names—took center stage.
“We had an eyeball and some sort of bone,” he stated with confidence. Almost immediately, Margo contradicted him.
“No, that's not right, it wasn’t an eyeball—”
Beckett tried to keep a straight face, but he couldn't. He broke out into laughter.
“Don’t be coy with me, Pedro. An eyeball? Please. Don't act like you've never played with your balls before. Margo, I see you have more experience than your partner. Why don’t you go ahead and learn him something?”
The girl cleared her throat and shifted in place uncomfortably. Beckett hadn’t intended on his residents keeping their blindfolds on the entire time, but this was turning out to be very amusing.
“We had a testicle with a tumor. The bone was brittle around the head, so I'm thinking that the person died from testicular cancer that spread to the bones? Most likely—”
“Okay, that's enough, Margo,” Beckett said, with a chuckle. “No more talk about balls and head, I don’t have enough street cred to survive another #metoo allegation. But, for the record, you are correct. Okay,” Beckett said clapping his hands together. “Now onto you, Boy Wonder and Bat Girl, you got the difficult one. Let’s hear it.”
There was no way that even Grant would get this one correct; Beckett had deliberately chosen an exceedingly rare disease.
“We had two organs,” Grant McEwing began, “a liver and an eyeball.”
Pedro reached up and started to lift his blindfold but stopped when Beckett whacked his stick again.
“Pedro, hands down or the next one will be across your knuckles.”
The man's hands dropped to his sides.
“Go on, Doogie.”
Grant nodded.
“As I was saying, we had an eyeball and a liver. The liver was afflicted with diffuse nodules, which were primarily concentrated to the right lobe, but there were a few in the left. I suspect that these were metastatic nodules, based on their texture and multiplicity. The eyeball was stiffer than I expected, although it's difficult to tell if this was a consequence of processing or a result of increased intraocular pressure. However, due to the
nature of the liver nodules, I suspect that the latter is correct. Therefore, based on these facts, our patient suffered from uveal melanoma, which metastasized to the liver. Our patient died from liver failure.”
Beckett gaped.
No way. No fucking way.
“Am I correct?”
Beckett blinked several times and stared at the organs lying in the glass containers.
Oh, I really thought I was going to stump you this time. Fucking Doogie Howser.
“Shit, you’re right. You cheated somehow, but you are correct. I hope you guys learned something today, other than the fact that Margo is a bit of a freak. You can tell a lot about organs and cause of death even if, for whatever reason, things aren’t in their correct anatomical location or if they are occluded by some process.”
Maria raised her hand and Beckett rolled his eyes.
“Yes? What is it now?”
“Can we take the blindfold off?”
Beckett whacked the desk.
“No! You must keep your blindfold on for the rest of the day. It is mandatory if you want to pass my class. Also, I’m going away for a week, but I have eyes everywhere. I expect you to keep up on your studies, go to bed no later than ten o'clock, and get plenty of exercise. Don't drink, don’t do drugs, don’t drive fast cars. Most importantly, don’t fart in the tub.”
“Where are you going?” Pablo asked.
Before Beckett could answer, Trevor chimed in.
“Prison?”
“Haha, very funny. No, I'm not going to prison, I'm going on vacation. Wait, scratch that, just in case the IRS is listening, I'm going on an ultra high-tech holistic vegan medical journey into my metaphysical penumbra. Huh, that sounded kinda sexy. Anyway, in all seriousness, you guys did great today. I'm proud of you, my children.”
After a fake sob, Beckett hurried from the room, leaving his students standing in place with their blindfolds on.
I wonder how long it will take before they realize that I’m gone. I wonder—
“Beckett.”
He whipped around and was shocked to see Suzan coming at him. She was smiling, a clear indication that she’d done well on her test.
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