by Keith Thomas
Like always, the cherry end table ended up a transitional piece.
Though Kojo wasn’t instinctively drawn to any contemporary style, he found his hands made simple forms. He was minimalist by nature. When he looked at the wood, he never saw complicated pieces. He saw plain geometric shapes, mostly angled. It was not the sort of work his family would have expected.
Kojo’s grandfather Ekow came from a long line of woodworkers in Aburi, Ghana. While Kojo had inherited Ekow’s artistic bent, he didn’t get his lighter skin tone or squat stature. Kojo was dark and tall, with broad shoulders and a permanently furrowed brow. Kojo had never met his grandfather, he only knew his face from his mother’s photo albums, but he grew up surrounded by Ekow’s work—there were masks on every wall and stools in every corner of his family home. Ekow’d made the traditional items for the souvenir market: Akan masks, Ashanti stools, mortars, fertility dolls, and drums. Despite being immersed in the culture, Kojo didn’t come up thinking he’d make masks, dolls, or furniture.
He didn’t think he’d be a cop either.
In high school, all the aptitude tests he took suggested he’d be an engineer or a physician. He had a thing for numbers and an intensely rational mind—his father had taken him to see The Return of the Jedi when it first came out; Kojo was ten. After the movie, his father asked him what he thought. Kojo said, “The spaceships wouldn’t have really moved like that. There’s no air in space.” His parents were delighted and took to calling him Professor. The nickname certainly fit. Kojo had been a serious boy. Kids on the block had other nicknames for him, of course: from the innocuous “Poindexter” to the scalding “faggot.” He let them talk, not ignorant to their taunts but not deterred either. But when he fought, which he rarely did, they got the message quick. Kojo’s father had done some amateur boxing as a young man. He taught his son to always keep his hands up and head tucked.
“Key to winning a fight,” his father told him, “is keeping their fists from your jaw. They hit your jaw, you’ll drop.”
Kojo’s high school grades were good. There was even talk of college scholarships. And he was ready to take them, ready to fully dive into the “white world” in Wisconsin or Maine. But senior year, Kojo’s mom got sick with sickle cell anemia. She went into renal failure just two days after his eighteenth birthday. She died six months later. Kojo’s father took it badly. He drank himself into a stupor nearly every night. So Kojo spent his last year of high school taking care of the house, the meals, everything. He never went looking to be a cop, the academy came to him—there was a recruitment drive at the library. He’d been having a bad day and completed an application more out of frustrated boredom than anything else. Regardless of his attitude, he took the application seriously. Recruiters noticed he filled out every single comment box with blocks of carefully worded text (he even fixed two seemingly innocuous typos)—first time they’d seen that since creating the new application ten years prior.
That should have been their first warning sign.
In his garage, Detective Omaboe found the cathedral pattern in the cherrywood board. He spun it around and started to sand it down when he heard a crash, like a pan dropping onto a kitchen floor. He turned off his sander and, listening carefully, opened the door to the detached garage. It was quiet outside and early enough that the expressway wasn’t yet choked with traffic. There were no sirens. As he stood in the doorway, looking across the street at the boarded-up windows on the old Hayder place and wondering if the tattered pink condemnation letter would ever fall off the front door, he heard the clattering sound again.
It was coming from his house.
Kojo scrambled across the backyard and opened the patio door.
“Brandon?”
Another crash. This time something shattered.
“Shit.”
Kojo rushed into the kitchen to find his twelve-year-old son in a rage. Brandon was a big kid, easily half of Kojo’s weight, and he was putting all of it into smashing the pots and pans onto the tile floor.
Seeing Kojo, Brandon began to cry.
“No!” Brandon wailed.
“It’s okay.” Kojo walked over, draping an arm around his son. “This is something we can fix. Not going to be a big problem, all right?”
“No. . . . No. . . . No. . . .”
His face puffy with tears and impotent rage, Brandon tried to wrench away from Kojo. But Kojo held tight, locking his hands around his son’s waist. Brandon fought at first, his fists hammering down on Kojo’s back. But Kojo only held him tighter. The doctors had explained that deep pressure touch sometimes helped kids with Down syndrome relax. Within seconds, Kojo could feel Brandon’s racing heartbeat slow as his crying softened. His breathing normalized.
“It’s okay,” Kojo kept repeating. “It’s all gonna be okay.”
Brandon unwound in his father’s arms, the tension dissolving away.
More and more, until Kojo could loosen his grip.
“You cool, now?”
“I’m cool,” Brandon said.
Kojo let Brandon go. The boy slumped to the floor, and Kojo lay down beside him. He lifted up his son’s chin so they could see eye to eye.
“What’s going on? What’s got you so upset?”
“Where’s Ophelia? She’s not here.”
“I know, son. She’s on her way.”
“I want her here now.”
“Come on.”
Kojo stood and pulled Brandon up. Still wobbly with emotion, the boy shuffled over to the kitchen table and sat down with a sour face. As Kojo picked up the pots and pans, he examined several cracked tiles on the floor. Not a big deal. He could replace them over the weekend.
“Listen, buddy, I need for you to come find me when you need something, all right? You call me on the radio or you come find me. We talked about this just the other day, remember?”
“I couldn’t find the radio.”
“Well . . . it was in the living room earlier this morning. Did you look there?”
Brandon shook his head. “I’m hungry.”
“Of course.” Kojo bristled.
He wanted to throw the pot through the kitchen window. He would’ve loved to see it turn the pane of glass into a spiderweb before it jettisoned into the humid morning air and bounced with a tinny clang onto the driveway.
Instead, Kojo placed the pot on the counter and walked over and kissed Brandon on the forehead. As he did, he closed his eyes and took in his son’s scent, a mix of coconut (lotion that Ophelia put on him), sweat, and the sweet, cloying smell that was unique to Brandon. It reminded Kojo of prekese, a Ghanaian spice with a sugary, fragrant aroma that he recalled from the gingery iced tea brew his grandmother would sip on hot days.
“I miss Mom. She’s not coming back, is she?”
Kojo cleared his throat. “No, Brandon. You know that.”
“She’s dead is why.”
“Yes.”
Yesterday Brandon had begged for Constance to come back. He told Kojo he’d clean his room; he’d even clean the bathroom with a toothbrush like he saw someone do on a TV show. When Kojo reminded Brandon that his mother died five years ago, it took twenty-eight minutes for Brandon to still his frustrated shaking and calm down. Kojo knew he couldn’t get caught up in that loop again.
“So what do you want to eat?”
Brandon thought for a second as he rubbed the last tears from his eyes. “Cereal,” he said.
“The loops or that other junk?”
“That other junk.”
Kojo filled a bowl with shockingly neon-colored cereal, added skim milk, and then placed it in front of Brandon with a spoon. Brandon reached for the spoon but paused. He looked up at Kojo and grinned.
“Thank you, Dad.”
Brandon’s smile hit Kojo like a meteor every time he saw it. All the horrible things that had passed before his eyes, the memories that woke him screaming—the dead woman with her legs eaten to nubs by rats, the child with his hands nailed to the dinn
er table, the unidentifiable drowning victim with skin that sloughed off like sheets of phyllo dough—all dissolved instantly. Kojo could never envision living without that smile. While the woodworking was an effective salve for existential worries, Brandon’s smile was the only true cure for Kojo’s world-weariness.
Watching Brandon eat, Kojo poured himself a bowl of the sugary stuff and was taking his first bite when his cell phone vibrated on the kitchen counter. Kojo calmly placed the spoon back down and answered the phone.
“This is Detective Omaboe.”
Brandon quietly repeated Kojo’s words as he chewed a mouthful of cereal.
“Got a ten-seventy-one at the university hospital,” a brusque voice intoned. “Carson and Briggs are already en route, but Chief figured you need to be there too.”
“Casualties?” Kojo asked.
“Casualties?” Brandon said.
“Several,” Dispatch confirmed.
“I’ll head out soon.”
Kojo hung up and turned to Brandon. He was already getting upset again.
“Daddy has to work, B,” Kojo said, shaking his head.
“I know that.”
“Doesn’t mean I don’t want to be here with you.”
“I know that too.”
Kojo got up and patted Brandon on the shoulder.
“Finish up, dude.”
Ophelia arrived at the house a minute later. She was a Ghanaian immigrant who had immigrated to Chicago several years earlier to be with her adult children and three grandbabies. The rest of her family, two sisters and three brothers, lived in Accra. She had told Kojo that she did not anticipate returning to Ghana to see them for many years, if ever. He told her he’d help any way he could. At the time, she just smiled, thanked him, and said, “You already have so much on your plate.”
When Ophelia walked into the house, Brandon jumped up from his cereal and ran to her. He hugged her long and hard and told her that Kojo yelled at him about throwing the pans. Ophelia, her singsongy accent thick but clear, told Brandon that it wasn’t good to throw pans.
“You know better than that,” she told him.
Brandon nodded, then looked back at Kojo.
“You need to get dressed proper, Dad.”
25
8:43 A.M.
NOVEMBER 14, 2018
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
MATILDA WATCHED ASHANIQUE tuck into her second round of pancakes.
“These are pretty good,” Ashanique said.
The girl was starving.
Matilda, however, couldn’t take a single bite of her food.
Clark’s demise kept running through her head.
Yet she couldn’t cry. She couldn’t feel those emotions anymore.
Earlier, while hospital staff ran a few tests with Ashanique, Matilda took a moment to grieve with colleagues in one of the psychology department meeting rooms. Clark’s secretary of fifteen years broke down sobbing, knees buckling. Matilda calmed her, though inside she felt a spreading numbness. She knew it was trauma too—sometimes the body can be in such a stage of emotional siege that it chooses to shut down, to conserve resources like tears and breath. Sitting in that near-empty meeting room, Matilda thought: This is what it means to move on. This is how a heart becomes hardened.
Ashanique took a break to chew, then swallow, before she asked, “What did the cops mean when they said I was poisoned?”
Matilda didn’t realize Ashanique had been conscious during the events following the incident in the pharmacy. After security had arrived, and shuttled Matilda and Ashanique to safety, they were taken across the building to the ER, where doctors pumped Ashanique’s stomach. Matilda called in an oncologist she knew. He assured her the MetroChime wouldn’t harm Ashanique, at least not in the doses she’d taken. Matilda had been assured that Ashanique was given propofol via IV drip during the procedure. Whatever recollections the girl had, Matilda assumed, were either figments or the drug had been ineffective.
“They were worried about the drug your mom gave you.”
“They shouldn’t have been,” Ashanique said. “She took it all the time.”
“What do you remember after . . . ?”
“It was gross.”
Matilda laughed, the stress of the morning easing.
“The cops came in and talked to you,” Ashanique said. “I heard them ask you about how you knew me. Why they thought that man would be after my mom.”
“Yes. I told them I didn’t know the reason why.”
“But you mentioned the Night Doctors. . . .”
“I did. I thought it was important.”
Ashanique chewed her food in silence for a moment.
“I warned you, though,” she said.
“That man in the pharmacy, was he one of them?”
Ashanique shrugged. Matilda sipped her coffee and then leaned back and watched people eating, milling about the cafeteria. A day ago, this place was banal—just another unfurnished link in the averageness of her day—but the creeping unease that had settled into Matilda’s gut transformed it. Now, every movement, every scrape of fork against plate, every cash register chime, raised her hackles. The world around her was newly pregnant with danger. “I’m not going to have to throw this up, right?” Ashanique asked.
Matilda turned her attention back to the girl. “No,” she said. “You can eat as much as you like. Your stomach feels okay?”
“It’s fine.”
Ashanique put her fork down.
“My mom’s never coming back, is she? I can tell. If she were, she’d be here by now. I’ve been watching the doors to this room. Looking at the hallway over there, thinking I might see her. But I won’t.”
“You don’t know that,” Matilda said.
“I feel it, though.”
Ashanique leaned to her right to look over Matilda’s shoulder.
“Here they come again.”
Matilda turned around in her chair to see two uniformed police officers approaching the table. Matilda was hopeful they had news about Janice. Maybe they’d caught Clark’s killer and she could start grinding the edges off the fear.
Clark’s gone, Maddie. Don’t be selfish. Think about his wife, his kids . . .
“Dr. Deacon? We need you and Ms. Walters to come with us. Sorry to interrupt your meal but . . . it’s important we do it now.”
“Is this about my mom?” Ashanique asked.
“You’ll need to discuss everything with the detectives.”
Six minutes and two elevators later, Matilda and Ashanique found themselves in an administrative wing of the hospital. They were separated. Matilda escorted Ashanique to a meeting room where several nurses were waiting. She gave the girl a kiss on the forehead.
“I’ll see you soon, okay? Don’t worry. They’re just going to ask you a few questions. Tell them everything. They only want to help.”
Ashanique seemed anxious to be separated from Matilda, but she went into the room without raising a fuss and sat down at the table with the nurses. They immediately moved closer to comfort her as the door was closed.
Matilda followed an officer to a small conference room that overlooked a parking lot. Outside of the table and chairs, the only other thing in the room was a spider plant, its soil dry and cracked. The plant’s leaves were yellow, blackened at the tips like they’d been burned. Matilda wished she had her water bottle, the one she got at a conference two years ago and kept under her desk. She considered getting up to bring the plant over to the bathroom, suddenly convinced she had to save it too, when a detective stepped into the room.
He sat down across from her, a cup of coffee in hand.
“My name is Kojo Omaboe. I’m a homicide detective with Chicago PD. I was called in to get your side of what went down earlier this morning. That was a very traumatic event. You need anything?”
“No, I’m okay. Thanks.”
Matilda was struck by Kojo’s bearing. Unlike the dozen or so
cops she’d already seen that morning, she sensed a deep-rooted worldliness to him. It wasn’t just his name or his dark skin. It was his demeanor. The other officers had been visibly shaken by the attack. Matilda could sense their discomfort; they radiated nervous energy. As a psychologist, Matilda understood why. Even people exposed to stress-inducing situations for years, decades even, can’t override their body’s natural inclination to downshift into the fight-or-flight response. The heart races; the skin sweats; the eyes dart.
But Kojo exuded a grounded calm that was reassuring. Rather than losing himself in his anxiety, Kojo seemed to be the type of person who could step outside his own body and say, You’re anxious. Let’s not be anxious.
“Great,” Kojo said. “Should we begin?”
“Okay.”
Kojo placed a tape recorder on the table and pressed record.
26
IN THE MATTER OF:
INTERVIEW WITH:
Deacon, Matilda
INVESTIGATIVE SGT: KOJO OMABOE #2716 / Chicago Police Dept.
VOL. 1 of 2
NOVEMBER 14, 2018
TAPE 1
00:00:28
KOJO OMABOE: Today’s date is the fourteenth of November 2018. The time is 8:57 a.m. What I’d like to have done is, I’m going to identify myself and then have you tell me your name. I am Kojo Omaboe, homicide with the Chicago PD. Dr. Deacon?
MATILDA DEACON: Matilda Deacon.
KOJO OMABOE: As you can obviously tell, this is being recorded. Is it okay if I call you Matilda, Dr. Deacon?
MATILDA DEACON: Yes.
KOJO OMABOE: At this particular time, do you have any medical conditions that you know of?
MATILDA DEACON: No. Not now.
KOJO OMABOE: Do you take any regular medication?
MATILDA DEACON: Blood-pressure meds. Runs in the family. I also have a prescription for Prozac. Haven’t taken it in several months. Probably expired. Is this important? I just— Uh, there was a shooting this morning.
KOJO OMABOE: I know. We’re getting to that now.
MATILDA DEACON: Okay.