Finally cleansed, we had continued on to Mr. Estevan’s, only to find he wasn’t home. I dug up his phone number. No answer, no message. Neighbors didn’t know or wouldn’t tell us anything. We wrote a note and wedged it under his door.
We finally reached him this morning, Thursday, and were at his place twenty minutes later.
The boss went in easy: “Sorry again about your loss. I can’t imagine what you’re going through. From your photo, he seemed a wonderful son. Are you getting help from your family?”
Mr. Estevan produced short answers—one word, two—as if words had lost their capacity to do any good. Jen kept saying, “Yes,” and, “I understand,” although she was thinking, I don’t understand any of this.
Jen explained that she’d spoken to a doctor who specialized in genetic diseases, and said how unusual it was that Miguel’s symptoms had showed up at his age. She said there’d been a second case on Monday.
She asked if she could ask him a few questions; it wouldn’t take long.
His mouth said, “Yes”; his eyes said Why?; and his shoulders said, What does any of this matter?
“Mr. Estevan, before this started, how was your son’s health?”
“I told them. No problems.”
“Nothing you can think of?”
No answer.
“Had he been tested?”
“For what?”
“Rapid Onset Spongiform Encephalitis. ROSE.”
“No. I don’t know. He would have told me.”
“Did he, I don’t know, seem different before this happened?”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Anything.”
Mr. Estevan gazed toward the framed photographs.
“Mr. Estevan, you are …”
Sixty-four, I said.
“Sixty-four?”
He nodded in agreement.
“Were you planning on exiting?”
For the first time, Mr. Estevan became animated. “What are you saying about me? I was a good father. Carlotta was the best mother. What are you saying?”
“I’ve no doubt you both were wonderful parents. I assumed you’d be exiting, but I needed to check. Mr. Estevan, would you like a glass of water before we continue?”
For a second, Mr. Estevan stared hard at her, as if ready to take on the world. And then his shoulders slumped.
Jen said, “I know this is a difficult question, but please let me ask it. How did Miguel feel about it? Was he in agreement with your decision?”
“It made no difference what he thought. It was Carlotta’s decision, and now it was my turn.”
“I’m sure that’s true, but people have feelings.”
Mr. Estevan looked utterly lost. Jen continued, “Like my boyfriend. He doesn’t want his parents to exit. It’s natural that children might have feelings about this.”
“So?”
“Did your son ever express such feelings to you? Was he opposed?”
“He said he heard of a different way.”
“For what?”
“To get the treatment. And I wouldn’t have to exit.”
“How?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. He said he didn’t want to get me in trouble.”
“Did he say he was going to get the treatment?”
And now we finally had Mr. Estevan’s full attention.
“I don’t want to get in trouble,” he said.
“You won’t … I’m sure you won’t.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, he was getting the treatment?”
“Isn’t that what I said?”
“Was he going to get it for you too?”
“He said he would take it first.”
Mr. Estevan broke down into sobs that wracked his body for fifty-four seconds.
“Mr. Estevan, you had a brave son.”
“It’s what killed him, isn’t it? I know it’s what killed him.”
* * *
13:27:48. There were more cases of Berardinelli-Seip lipodystrophy. Three in Newark. Two in Richmond. Two in Philly. Nothing in the rest of the country.
Enough to make the news this morning.
Enough for the first monster scratchings of panic to hit social media feeds.
Enough to get Gray Suit back to our station.
Right after completing her report on the Estevans, Jen readied herself to go up and speak to Captain Brooks. But instead, the summons came through to hit the conference room.
Posted outside the door was a cop with a drill-sergeant flat top. He was short, with the build of a light welterweight boxer. His fists were the size of Virginia hams, and his nose was mashed in, as if one day he’d decided he looked much too pretty for the job and smashed one of those ham hocks right into his own face. He checked out Jen, as she later said to Les, “from tits to toes and back again.” Her words, not mine.
In we went. Gray Suit had the same two people with him. Seersucker suit from the DEA and Lieutenant McNair with her razor-sharp red hair.
The Drug Squad was there and seemed to have already been scolded for bad behavior. For once, the Card wasn’t cleaning his nails with his knife, and even the Starlet looked serious.
We sat down. The briefing began. No warnings this time about turning off phones or comms.
Damn, I thought, they’re just about begging us to leak it.
“Thank you for taking a moment to meet with me,” Gray Suit said. His tattooed face ratcheted to the next person. “I’m sure you’ve all heard the strange news about this outbreak that causes rapid aging, and I understand you’ve had two cases yourselves.” Again, with each sentence, he was on to the next person. His voice lacked drama, and there was no expression in his tattooed face. “There has already been a lot of speculation about the causes. A new virus or retrovirus. A scientific experiment gone bad. Chemical warfare from China, India, or Russia. And, naturally, the CIA makes the list.” He did not smile, but this drew muted laughs.
“Our people”—whoever his people were—“think we’ve got it figured out. Don’t ask me to try to explain the science, but they believe it’s caused by a counterfeit treatment getting distributed by some underground network. Turns out it’s one bad fake.”
Tell him what Mr. Estevan said. But Jen held her tongue.
“People want it and pay big dollars to get it. Thousands and thousands. And then they pay for it with their lives. We’ve got to stop it.”
Les said, “How is it administered?”
“It would have to be a doctor or a nurse, most likely in multiple treatments. This stuff isn’t a hit of smack.”
Murph from the drug squad said, “You think it’s them, the doctors, selling it?”
“Maybe. But more likely organized crime.”
“They’re not going to have many more buyers if this keeps turning people into cadavers.”
“It could be a bad batch, but I suspect the whole thing is a scam. We won’t know until we catch them.”
The Starlet flicked her hair and said, “This time, we’re allowed to tell people?”
“Definitely. Like before, I’m meeting with officers in all the districts. My colleagues are doing the same in major cities. This time, though, there are no secrets. We need to catch these bastards fast. And there’s one other thing. It’s small, but it might help track them down. Yesterday, we received a report for the first time that this stuff is being called Eden.”
Yesterday? Jen said to me. I told Brooks a week ago.
Our eyes flicked to Brooks, who calmly picked up his phone and typed. A second later, I received a text. Keep it shut.
“So,” Gray Suit was saying, “I owe an apology to Detective—” Gray Suit jumped ahead four people and his eyes landed on Jen.
“Lu, sir.”
“To Detective Lu. At our initial meeting, you asked if this drug might be related to the rumors of Eden. It turns out your hunch was right. It was a hunch, wasn’t it?”
“It wasn’t even a hunch. Just a question, sir.”
“In that case, smart question.”
His teeth smiled, his mouth smiled, his jaw smiled. But his calm, switchblade eyes could slice a stone in half.
* * *
“Captain Brooks, I—”
“Do this,” he said. He placed his mobile onto his desk and put his index finger to his lips.
Jen stared at him. Like the maître d’ at a fashionable restaurant, he waved his hand in silent invitation. She put her phone next to his.
He headed for the door and into the hallway. We followed him up the flight of stairs to the scorching rooftop. I felt like an ant who’d stepped under a magnifying glass and would burst into flames at any second.
“Diagnostic mode. Your implant.”
“Sir?”
“That’s an order.”
Sorry, Chandler.
24
“He’s down?”
“Sir, it’s—”
“Is he down?”
She’d only flipped Chandler into diagnostic mode four times before, twice in their first months working together, then twice more for his annual checkup. Chandler was minimally aware and Jen felt him—foggy, dreamlike, but present—but his memory, speech, and communication functions were disabled.
“Yes, sir.”
“Why did you want to see me?” Brooks asked. “If this is about the lawsuit, I’m not interested in talking about it.”
“I have a report to show you.”
“Relevant to that meeting?”
“Yes, sir. I interviewed Enrique Estevan. He’s the father of the man who died last week. He said his son got hold of a counterfeit version of the treatment. He thinks that’s what caused him to die that way.”
“What do you think?”
“I’m not exactly a scientist.”
“I asked what you thought, not what you know.”
“Maybe it’s the same as what Olive Ortega thought Child’s Play was getting her. And it’s the same as that guy—”
“For the last time, he’s Teko Teko Mea.”
“It’s the same as what he said. That maybe Eden’s the street name for the treatment.”
“Didn’t you have a responsibility to report this at the meeting?”
“Yes, sir. I suspect I did.”
“Then …?”
“I don’t know, sir.” There was something Gray Suit had said that had troubled her. A shiver of déjà vu. What did he say? Her mind stumbled onto Brooks’s text to her, and this pushed away the thought of Gray Suit. She said, “Why did you tell me to keep my mouth shut?”
“What do you mean?”
“When he said he’d heard the rumor about Eden only yesterday, you messaged me to shut up. I told you a week ago, sir. You said you would tell him.”
“Detective Lu, questioning your superior officer isn’t in the cards. Particularly someone in your present position.”
“Sir, I—”
“Here’s what you will do. Keep looking into all this with the others. But if you find out anything that doesn’t make sense, something that doesn’t seem right, you come straight to me.”
“Like what?”
He seemed to give this some thought, then shook his head. “You’ll know if you see it. And come straight to me if you get a solid lead about who’s distributing it. You do not write a report. You do not tell anyone over the phone. You do not tell your fellow officers. You come straight to me. Understand?”
This all seemed rather strange, but his reluctance for her to follow up the leads around Eden had seemed strange from the start. Still, she had always trusted him, and anyway, it was an order.
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“And when you do, you leave your phone behind, you walk into my office, you point to my ceiling, and we come up here.”
“Isn’t that a bit dramatic, sir?”
“No shit. But that’s what you’re going to do.”
* * *
It had only been three weeks since her last visit, but Jen was back in the bosom of the retirement and nursing home. The frothy administrator seemed to be having a new problem with her mother but was too embarrassed to say what it was on the telephone.
A note taped to the administrator’s door said, Back in 5!!! followed by six hearts. Jen plunked herself down on the single chair in the waiting area.
A man supported by a walker painted fire-engine red pushed himself in.
He said hello to Jen and read the note. “Ms. Sunshine’s out, is she?”
“Seems to be.”
He kept standing.
“Would you like my chair?” Jen asked.
“No, that’s fine. You’re young.”
It didn’t quite make sense, but he said it with such certainty that somehow it did.
He waved at the building around them. “Are you thinking of taking very early retirement?”
“Might be a good idea, the way things are going at work. But I suspect I wouldn’t move in here right away.”
“You a cop, by any chance?” he said.
“The only people who spot that right away are cops and criminals. You a retired criminal? By any chance?”
He thought this was funny. “No, but it would have paid better. I wrote for the Post. Investigation. Politics.”
He asked what district she was with. And then, when she said she was with the Elder Abuse Unit, he said, “I’m not a huge fan of exit. But that seems to put me in a minority these days.”
She didn’t want to talk about this. “Were you writing back during the DC18 stuff?” she asked.
He smiled. “Stuff? Did you know that the Russian Revolution back in 1917 was fueled by troops refusing to fire on demonstrators? That was one of the issues for the Eighteen.”
“The Russian Revolution?”
“I’m being serious and you should too. No offense, but those were some brave women and men. Not only the eighteen who became the figureheads, but dozens of others whose names we’ll never know.” He then softened. “No, what I meant is that one of the big issues was how police responded to protest and demonstrations.”
“Our job is to maintain law and order.”
The man groaned.
“What’s the matter with that?”
“In one sense, nothing at all. We need laws, we need order. But what if some laws work against the common person?”
“You’re making a speech.”
“Okay, here’s an example. Climate change is killing us, right?”
“Obviously.”
“Did you know that for years, oil and gas companies made sure laws were passed that effectively stifled protest about climate change and protecting the environment? And if a protest took place, you guys ended up doing the dirty work for them.”
“That’s not what we do.”
The man smiled tolerantly. “Of course it’s what police sometimes do. Ever bust a Shadow for vagrancy?”
The very mention of Shadows made her shudder. “I thought we were talking about climate change.”
“Well, how many of those people were left homeless by the Great Storms? How many of them used to live in Miami before it was wiped off the face of the earth? Ever think of that? And, anyway, forget about climate change. Do those people have an alternative? There isn’t enough work anymore, and we don’t look after our poorer folks. We punish them.”
She’d heard this sort of thing before. In fact, far too often at Zach’s. He and his parents swore they weren’t attacking her personally, but she sure felt they were.
Then he laughed. “Sorry, I don’t get much chance any more to climb onto my soap box.”
“As a friend of mine likes saying, ‘What the hell.’”
“What I really wanted to do was congratulate you guys. That’s what the DC18 were about. Not only against the racism built into the laws and police practices, and racist cops in your ranks. It had a much broader agenda. Your fellow officers did really well. I was proud of the DC Police and still am, at least for some of the changes you made. We sure
haven’t seen that as much in New York or Chicago.”
At that moment, Ms. Sunshine appeared and welcomed Jen inside.
The administrator patted her helmet of hair. She forced such a big smile that Jen worried her makeup would crack. Then her smile faded. Red shone though the makeup. “My, this is difficult to discuss.”
“Ma’am,” Jen said, “I discuss some pretty difficult things every day at work, so you don’t have to worry.”
The administrator tittered. “I guess you must, but …”
It took some coaxing, but finally the administrator said, “It seems that—mind you, I’m not making any accusations—but there have been reports that your mother, well, she’s—well, they say, flirting awfully aggressively.”
Jen laughed. “You must be confusing my mother with someone else.”
The administrator consulted a note on her desk as if making certain. “No, it seems it is her.”
“Is that a problem?”
“Well, she keeps telling men that she wants to, well, f-f- … she wants to have sexual relations with them.”
Jen didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. She did neither, discussed the situation briefly, thanked the administrator and, as she left the office, mumbled over and over again, “Two months. Just two more months.”
The man was still in the waiting area, leaning on his red walker. He handed Jen a scrap of paper. “If you’re interested, here’s a link to the series I wrote about the trial.”
She stuffed the paper in her pocket, intending to throw it away when she got outside.
Instead it ended up on top of Zach’s dresser after she emptied her pockets that evening.
* * *
Raffi and Leah were making raspberry jam. Each year, they made a large batch of one or two types of jam or jelly—raspberry, strawberry, peach, apricot, pear, apple, or grape—as they came into season, and that batch would last about three years.
No one said the obvious: they were now cooking for posterity.
Raffi said, “Raspberry jam is the queen of jams.”
Leah said, “Apricot.”
Jen said, “Any of your jams.”
Then she felt embarrassed because she thought of the shelves of jam in the basement storage space that would last Zach and her until long after Raffi and Leah were gone.
The Last Exit Page 14