by Robert Pobi
Phelps headed into the garage. Linderer followed.
Hemingway stood at the threshold to the damp space under the house, examining the mad scribbled effigy of the spider, wondering how it had fit into Trevor Deacon’s world.
Had it been his god?
His tormentor?
His confidant?
His lover?
From somewhere beyond Trevor Deacon’s spider, Phelps said, “Hemi, there’s something in here you should see.”
She stepped through the steel door with the array of padlocks and security crossbars, past the arachnid sentinel, and into the gloom.
The garage was an ancient damp shadow that felt like the perfect place to keep a monstrous spider. The floor was patched and fissured and there was a filthy carpenter’s bench in the middle of the room under the single bulb. Garden tools and lengths of welded chain hung from spiral nails planted in the concrete. The garage door was upholstered in pink insulation and part of the wall near the door was covered with moldy egg cartons—improvised soundproofing.
She passed another dark crescent of what could only be blood near the door—another shoe print like the one in the kitchen. It, too, had been covered with an evidence hood.
Phelps stood in the corner, beside an old coffin freezer. Linderer held the lid open with a rubber-gloved hand. Phelps was looking at her, not the freezer, and a feeble light that washed up onto his face gave his skin a yellow cast. Frozen vapor wafted over the lip of the appliance and slunk down to the floor.
She moved toward the light. Toward the open space that looked as if it were smoking. Her line of sight crawled over the lip of the metal box and she saw the neatly stowed plastic sandwich bags. It took a minute for her to figure out what she was looking at.
She closed her eyes, kept them shut for a second, then opened them, hoping that it had somehow taken on another form.
It hadn’t.
Hemingway stepped toward the freezer, summoned by Trevor Deacon’s madness.
She no longer felt Phelps or Linderer in the room. She could see them. But they were so far away that they could have been in another time zone.
The psychotic rendering of the spider on the door wasn’t a representation of his god—it was something else, something a lot more basic; that drawing was Trevor Deacon’s version of a BEWARE OF DOG sign.
Inside the freezer, stacked like dumplings, were dozens of little blue-white feet in Ziploc bags.
||| NINETEEN
MARCUS SPENT a few seconds cleaning his glasses on the tail of his lab coat. Then he returned them to his nose, yawned, and pulled a file from a rolling trolley that sat in the aisle between the tables. He cracked the folder and read from the cover sheet. “Deacon, Trevor A., male, fifty-six years old. Case number 551.2101.677.” The medical examiner peeled back the plastic sheet, bundled it into a sloppy knot, and put it in a bucket on the floor.
All the king’s horses, all the king’s men, and every forensic specialist in the land couldn’t put Trevor Deacon together again. He was arranged in a more or less orderly anatomical position, except that his parts were not connected. His feet were at the end of the table, sitting on the soles, the sheared-through ankles pointing up at the ceiling like bloodless osso buco about to go into the oven. Deacon’s head was in two parts, cut in half at the jaw. The top part of his skull sat at the head of the table, a meat helmet with slightly open eyes, one pupil dialed in toward his nose, cross-eyed in a way evolution had never intended.
Phelps stood on the other side of the stainless steel slab, across from Hemingway. She knew that he would rather be somewhere else from the way his head was cocked to one side. Which was understandable—it was hard to gather any sympathy for the disassembled man laid out on the table like a set of wind chimes waiting to be strung together.
Examined from one angle, Deacon amounted to little more than another piece of human garbage subtracted from the cesspool of predators. Another broken person who did little other than transfer his own pain to the people he came in contact with. It wasn’t hard to look at his remains and think that whoever had broken out the saw had done the human race a giant favor. But this was connected to Tyler Rochester and Bobby Grant; there was too much coincidence at play for it not to be. So they would be spending a lot of time thinking about the man on the slab before they put this one to bed.
“TOD was somewhere between midnight and two thirty a.m. last night.” Dr. Marcus looked up. “And he did not die of natural causes.”
Phelps snorted. Hemingway shook her head; this wasn’t her first time in a lab, and certainly not her first time around a dead body, but she believed that a certain amount of respect was due the dead, even life’s monsters. “What did he die of, Marcus?”
“Exsanguination.”
“From one of these cuts?” Hemingway asked, sweeping her hand over the general area of the corpse.
The ME put the file down on the edge of the trolley, then picked one of Deacon’s feet up. He pointed to the neat line of stump. “Sometime while his feet were being cut off is my guess.”
At this Phelps said, “And he was alive when this happened?”
Marcus put the foot back in its place and as it touched the table, the flesh on the heel dented in, like a wax candle on a hot day. “Yes, he was.”
Hemingway answered the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. “This was done by the same guy who chopped up Tyler Rochester.”
Marcus nodded. “This time the cut lines are straight, with very little travel. He’s better than he was with Tyler Rochester. Smooth, long strokes and a lot of stamina. Taking a big guy like Deacon apart would have taken a good hour, maybe ninety minutes. But it’s the same small-toothed saw—twenty-four teeth per inch.”
“Same anesthetic?”
“The initial scan says yes. Again, thiopental with no analgesic is a fair guess. I’ll know more in a couple of days when the tox screens come back but the MO is identical. If you look at his right eye you can see the damage where he was injected. A jab in the vitreous humor and then to work.” Dr. Marcus paused, removed his spotless glasses, and cleaned them with a static-free wipe from a dispenser.
“Would it have taken thirty-five seconds to take effect, like the Rochester kid?” Hemingway asked.
“Longer if the same dosage was used; Trevor here was a big boy and he’d absorb it a lot slower. The effects might not even be as debilitating. But on top of the anesthetic I found heroin in his system. Heroin combined with something like thiopental would have made him a big, slow-moving target. Might have even killed him.”
Phelps jammed his hands into his pants pockets and rolled up on the balls of his feet. “To get close enough to jab a guy like Deacon in the eye, it had to be someone he knew. Or at least felt comfortable enough to let in. The doors are fitted with back-locked Abloys and the bars on the windows are so close together a pygmy would have a hard time squeezing in.”
Marcus readjusted the foot he had just put down, aligning it to some invisible grid that only he could see. “Even then, when someone jabs you in the eye with a hypodermic, a few seconds is enough time to take a swing. There were no defensive wounds. No tissue or fabric under his fingernails. Teeth were clean. No bruised knuckles. Nothing knocked over in the apartment. The only damage to the body was a broken toe on his right foot—probably when it hit the floor after it was removed. Technically it’s postmortem even though he was probably alive when it broke.”
Hemingway knew that this kind of work was nothing new but it took a special kind of someone to saw up a human being and place the parts around a room like accessories from Pottery Barn. And there had to be a purpose to the act. What had been the motivation?
“The similarities don’t stop there,” Marcus continued. “Like the Rochester boy, the inexperience in anatomy left some signature wounds. The right upper arm was cut an inch too far into the humerus then torqued to separate it from the body, like my grandkids do with chicken wings.” He pointed to the corresponding joint but He
mingway didn’t bother to lean in and examine it. “But he was already dead at that point.”
The medical examiner went back to his notes and flipped through a few pages as if making sure he hadn’t missed anything. “More than a little ironic that Mr. Deacon should meet his end by vivisection.”
“Live by the sword.” Phelps smiled and it was not a friendly expression. “Die by the sword.”
||| TWENTY
AFTER FINISHING with Dr. Marcus, Hemingway and Phelps headed down to the sequencing and analysis labs, the backbone of the city’s missing persons initiative. It was a maze of quarantined cubicles walled off from one another with frosted glass. Behind those walls was a twenty-four-hour horror show that never got canceled.
They moved past the sally port, through the main space, passing locked rooms where bodies in an advanced state of decomposition were being examined. In a discipline where DNA was now the defining factor in solving many cases, every effort was made to keep remains—or partial remains—from coming into contact with one another.
They found their way to Dr. Dorothy Calucci’s lab. The two detectives had worked with her a year back on a case where a mother had locked her twin daughters in the oven as punishment for spilling milk on the floor. It had taken four screeching minutes for the girls to die. The mother was doing twenty-six years upstate but would be eligible for parole before she was thirty-five.
Calucci led the two detectives to one of the frosted rooms off the main lab where a few dozen stainless steel containers were distributed over as many tables. Each container was numbered and had a glass window in the hinged cover. Hemingway didn’t have to look inside to know that they held children’s feet, the handiwork of one Trevor Deacon.
Calucci lacked the bedside manner and dark humor of Dr. Marcus, a temperament a little more in tune with a case where the common element was live humans taken apart with a saw.
Calucci began the briefing without any greeting or salutation; she operated on the let’s-not-waste-time frequency. “There were seventy-five feet in the Deacon house. Swabs determined that they belonged to boys. Sizing dictates that they were between eight and eleven years old. All of them were removed with a hacksaw or similar-type tool while the victims were alive. Out of seventy-five feet, there are thirty-one pairs and thirteen singles. So far we have identified six children—four pairs and two of the singles—by matching prints to online hospital registries that have been sistered to missing children networks. We expect to garner more matches through tissue samples submitted to the FBI’s missing persons program within the CODIS database.”
Hemingway didn’t have to ask how long the process would take—as a lead detective in a squad specializing in child murders, she knew that nuclear DNA could be sequenced in about forty hours. Once sequenced and submitted to the FBI for identification, it took less than an hour for the software to find a match if there was one; there was no way to rush the process.
“We should start getting results Thursday morning.” Calucci nodded at the protocols she had handed over. “You have six children identified there, detectives. The oldest case dates back to August 1992—a boy named Victor Roslyne. Disappeared on his way home from school.”
Hemingway’s pen stopped over the paper and she raised her eyes. “You mean to tell me that there are more than twenty years’ worth of missing children’s cases here?” she asked, indicating the stainless steel graveyard.
“So far, yes. There might be older cases but we won’t know until we identify all of the victims. If we identify all of the victims.”
Hemingway’s focus wandered over the bins and she saw the diminutive feet beneath the clear windows. Staring down at the fruits of Trevor Deacon’s labor, it was easy to understand Phelps’s indifference up in Marcus’s lab.
Hemingway wondered where, precisely, the system had failed—and it had failed. How else could you justify the disappearance and murder of at least forty-four children? Why hadn’t Deacon been stopped years ago? How had his sickness managed to survive for so long? To flourish? Lincoln was hunting down the files now—they needed to know why this guy had walked.
Calucci continued with her briefing. “No heavy decomposition in any of the remains; they were frozen when fresh. There is a lot of cellular damage due to less than ideal freezing and improper storage conditions but we have usable DNA from all of the vics.”
Hemingway scanned the forest of little feet then went to the files that Calucci had given her. “Are all six boys that you’ve identified from New York City?”
“Every one.”
“Jesus,” Phelps said in a low whistle. “This guy was a one-man plague.”
Like Phelps, Hemingway knew the stats. Sixty-five hundred children go missing in Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs each year: ninety-seven percent of those are runaways; a hundred and fifty cases turn out to be abductions by noncustodial parents or family members; and fifteen simply disappear from the known Newtonian universe. “Whoever killed this guy just reset the statistics.” She tried to focus on the white field of her notebook instead of troughs filled with the screams of little boys. “Anything unusual with the remains?”
Calucci nodded and flipped through the sheaf of papers in her hand until she found what she was looking for. She folded back the page and handed the clipped bundle to Hemingway.
She read the page then looked up. “Are you sure?”
Calucci nodded. “On all of the single feet we found traces of competing DNA. I can black-light them if you want.”
Phelps cleared his throat and held up his hand as if he were in grade school. “Can we have the dummy talk?”
Hemingway passed him the file. “Read.”
He pulled out his glasses—cheap dollar-store grandpa deals—unfolded them, and plunked them onto the tip of his nose. For an instant he looked like he would begin with, “ ’Twas the night before Christmas,” but the color quickly dropped out of his face. “You gotta be fucking kidding.”
The grim line of Calucci’s mouth barely moved. “It hasn’t been matched to Trevor Deacon yet but there is no doubt that it’s semen.”
||| TWENTY-ONE
HEADMASTER FREYTAG stared at the boy, trying to figure out a way to bridge the communication gap. The headmaster had been at this a long time, and he had ushered the school through twenty-one years of minor catastrophes with a character that was strict, intelligent, and fair. But there were times when he needed to be creative. Maybe even a little vulgar. Times like now.
“Miles, do you know why you’re sitting here?”
Miles Morgan shrugged as if it didn’t make a difference. And in a way, it didn’t. Like all the boys at the academy, Miles Morgan’s future was written on watermarked paper. Whether he managed to finish his education at this institution or at another, he would walk into a life devoid of financial worries. He would spend his summers in Montauk, winters on Mustique. Except for the divorces coming his way, Miles Morgan would ride a worry-free wave to the cemetery.
But this was where Miles Morgan differed from the other boys at the school; he didn’t care about any of that.
And Freytag found this refreshing.
Morgan followed his shrug with, “You’re pissed about those four faggoty seventh graders.”
Freytag sighed and leaned forward, his hands on the leather top of the desk. “Miles, you can’t use language like that. Sexual orientation shouldn’t be equated with weakness.”
Morgan stared at him for a few seconds. “What?”
“You can’t call someone ‘faggoty’—it’s not proper. Choose another term.”
The boy shrugged again. “Can I call them assholes?”
Freytag wanted to sigh again but this time he held it in. “How about calling them bullies?”
Last Friday, four of the older boys had cornered Morgan in one of the bathrooms, thinking his heavy-lidded gaze revealed a victim in waiting. Their intentions were less than noble but fundamentally innocent—they tried to give him a wedgie. By the
time a teacher had responded to the yells of terror and pain echoing from the bathroom, Miles Morgan had a broken finger and a crushed nose. But he had doled out nine lost teeth, one broken foot, one ruptured eardrum, one chewed-off nipple, two broken noses, and myriad cuts, contusions, and bruises—smiling a bloody smile the whole time. A younger boy, hiding in one of the stalls, had relayed the story—and the older boys had confessed; the only reason they hadn’t been expelled was because Morgan thought the whole thing had been “a hoot.”
“Bullies?” the boy asked. “Sure, bullies.” He laughed, an inelegant, unselfconscious yodel.
“Miles, I know I don’t have to tell you that fighting is not acceptable here at the school.” Morgan didn’t seem to grasp much; it didn’t make the boy bad, of course, but it did make the job of explaining things to him somewhat difficult. “There are other ways to solve problems. It’s not always necessary to—to . . .” he paused and scanned the report, “. . . bite someone’s nipple off. There are ways of diffusing these situations.”
Morgan yawned. “Yeah? Like how?”
“You can always try to talk your way out of trouble.”
“I don’t try to talk my way out of anything, sir.”
Freytag thought of the newspapers, of the missing boys out there, and he wanted to impart some caution to Miles Morgan—it might help him at some point. “All I’m saying, Mr. Morgan, is that you can’t always fight your way out of a bad situation.”
Miles looked up and smiled. “Wanna bet?” he asked.
||| TWENTY-TWO
THERE WAS a commonality between the Rochester and Grant boys. On the surface, it was appearance, and while sometimes that might be enough, it wasn’t here. Not with Trevor Deacon thrown into the mix. Hemingway didn’t know what the link was, only that it existed out there in the mind of the man who had lopped off the feet of one child and abducted the other. They could have passed for brothers. This one had a very specific fantasy to feed. There was an exactness to it.