by Robert Pobi
There had been no real cooldown period: fifteen hours could hardly be called downtime. These guys needed a refractory period to recharge the batteries. At least usually. But not this one. He was on a mission. This was not happenstance. This was not wrong place wrong time. There was planning behind this. Good old-fashioned analytical thinking.
Which translated to purpose.
And woven into the geometry of the problem, was Trevor Deacon, predator extraordinaire. Someone had jabbed old Trevor in the eye with a hypodermic, then gone to work on him with a hacksaw. Trevor’s death had taken patience, a taste for inflicting star-spangled agony, and time. A boy and two grown men killed, another child missing. They had an overachiever on their hands.
How did Deacon fit in with Tyler Rochester and Bobby Grant?
The first thing they had looked into was the financial standings of the two families. The shortest distance between a murder and a motive was usually a dollar sign. Every large city had come across someone who wanted the police to think that they had a serial predator on their hands when in point of fact all they really wanted was one single victim dead, usually someone with a life insurance policy. But neither Tyler Rochester nor Bobby Grant had been insured and a cursory glance into their parents’ financial holdings showed that money wasn’t a problem for either family.
So who was doing this? Why was he doing it? And how was he picking his victims?
Where was the link?
She wanted to find it while there was still time to get to Bobby Grant. Not in a day, after he was dead. Not in a week after another—God forbid—boy had disappeared. Or washed up with his feet missing. No, Hemingway needed to see it now.
“You okay?” Phelps asked from his desk.
Hemingway looked up, blinked. “What? Yeah. Why?”
“You were grumbling. When you grumble, it usually means that you’re going to shoot someone or stab them or some such shit.”
Even in the cold of the air-conditioned office, she was sweating. She put her hand up under her collar and slid it over her shoulder, feeling the muscle just below the skin. Her fingers found the familiar disc of scar where a red-hot chunk of metal had exited her body and thunked into a barstool. It was burning.
She looked up and smiled at the expression painted on Phelps’s face; he looked troubled.
She pulled her hand from under her shirt and her palm was moist and smelled of Irish Spring. How the hell could she be hot when it was sixty degrees in here?
“I’m good. Just trying to figure out what makes this fucker go ticktock.”
“You know, for a woman educated at Yale, you sure sound like a cop most of the time.” And he smiled a little, more of that fatherly approval coming out.
Alan Carson walked in, wearing Chuck Taylors and pressed jeans. He had the unmistakable air of nerd about him. His department was allowed a certain leeway in the unwritten dress code of the NYPD, mainly because they never interacted with the public. And they would have cried if they weren’t allowed to wear their hipster-geek T-shirts and skinny jeans. “Beware of strangers bearing gifts.”
“And it doesn’t get stranger than him,” Phelps mumbled to Hemingway. Like a lot of the old-timers, Phelps mistrusted both technology and the people who worshiped it.
“What do you have for me?” she asked Carson, ignoring Phelps.
He held up a portable hard drive. “I’ve got three years’ worth of Trevor Deacon’s Internet records here: every click-through in a thirty-six month period—more than ninety-one thousand pages. Some will be dead links but his entire online life is here.”
“Anything interesting?” Phelps asked.
“Plenty to work with. But therein lies your dilemma—weeding out the relevant from the irrelevant.” Carson slaved the hard drive to her computer. “Knock yourself out.”
Hemingway opened Deacon’s Internet log and it didn’t take long to see that the man had spent a lot of time visiting school websites. She did a quick search and found that he had visited the Damien Whitney Academy for Boys and the Huntington Academy a little over three months back—Tyler Rochester’s and Bobby Grant’s schools.
The big question, of course, was could it be a coincidence?
“Once we identify the remains of his victims, we’ll be able to cross-reference it with these websites.” She lifted her head, waved Lincoln over.
“Yeah?” he asked. After their time at the Deacon house, Lincoln and Papandreou had spent the morning running down files on anyone associated with the Damien Whitney Academy for Boys and the Huntington Academy. They had not yet found a single thing to link Tyler Rochester to Bobby Grant.
“Do a search on these schools,” she said, tapping the screen. “See if any children have gone missing in the past three years.”
“Sure. Can you put it into a PDF?”
She looked up at Carson. “Can we?” Carson had a crush on her—it was one of those obvious things that, had she been of a different makeup, could have been the poor man’s undoing. But she kept him at arm’s length, always being polite because she didn’t want him to think he had a chance with her.
Carson leaned over her shoulder and she heard him take in a breath of her scent. “Sure. Just . . . let . . . me . . .” His fingers tap-danced across her keyboard, then he stood up and nodded. “Done.”
Lincoln thanked him and went to the printer.
“What was with this guy and the feet?” Carson asked.
“Feet are the most common nonsexual body part to be fixated on. Research suggests that foot fetishism increases during times when sexual epidemics are an issue; by sexualizing feet, participants avoid diseases transmitted through regular sexual channels. With a guy like Deacon it was probably a further step in desexualizing his actions. He was probably taught that sex was a depraved act; by focusing on feet, he was able to live out his fantasies yet not bend the fundamental principles of the shame he had been taught—technically, it could be justified that the act isn’t sex. We’ll know more once the psychologist talks to his mother.”
Carson’s face squinched up but Phelps just nodded as if this were common knowledge. He had been hunting child predators since the mid-seventies and understood the power play at work in many of their minds, usually the result of some deep trauma inflicted upon them as children.
“Thanks, Al. I’ll call you if I need anything.”
Carson nodded and his eyes dropped to her chest for a split second. Then he flushed, brought his eyes up to hers, and nodded. “Sure. Anything at all. I’ll let you know if I find anything else. This guy wasn’t big on encryption.”
When Carson was gone, Lincoln made smooching sounds. “He’s got it bad for you, Hemi. I hear Club Med in my ears. Maybe Aruba. A hut on the beach. A hammock. You and Carson . . .”
“What are you guys? Twelve? I pity the women in your lives.”
Lincoln smiled. “So do they.”
She turned back to Trevor Deacon’s life reduced to bits and bytes, a bread crumb trail that led back into his fantasies. No sane person would want to peek in there.
Her phone rang. “Hemingway.”
“Detective Hemingway, Mat Linderer here. I have the results on that pinkish powder we found at the Deacon residence and I’ve analyzed the torn photograph corner you wanted me to check out. First the powder. It’s—”
“Heroin,” she interrupted.
There was a stunned moment of silence. “Um, yes.”
“The autopsy,” she explained. “What’s the cut?”
“It’s about thirty-five percent pure, sixty-five percent baby laxative.”
“Low-end street grade.”
“Yeah.”
“Why is it pink?”
“The color was added after the manufacturing process—there’s no molecular binding. It’s a vegetable dye of some sort. My guess is it’s not supposed to be there. Maybe it was smuggled in something red.”
Hemingway added the information to her notes. “And the corner of that photograph?”
“Thanks, Mat. Appreciated.”
Hemingway put the phone in her pocket and lifted her head to see Phelps staring at her. She filled him in on the vegetable dye and the printer.
When she was done, Phelps reached over and lifted his own notes from under a cup of long-cold coffee. The chair squeaked under his considerable bulk. “How the hell did Deacon walk all those years ago?”
It was one of those things that made you wonder if the whole system wasn’t completely broken, or corrupt, or both.
Phelps found the page he had been looking for. “As per Nick’s findings. I haven’t seen the files yet.
“The initial jacket from 1984 states that the arresting officer—a street cop named Ronald Weaver—deceased May twenty-third, 2004—made a wrongful search. And since they couldn’t find a body, and the feet didn’t match anyone who had been missing, they couldn’t prove that it was murder. Deacon’s attorney, Marcel Zeigler—deceased July 2010—alleged that Deacon had purchased the feet from a man who worked in a medical research facility, and that they came from a donor. They ran down all possible cadavers in storage, from medical supply companies to hospitals, schools, and private research labs. They couldn’t positively match the feet to a donor, but the body of an eleven-year-old boy had been stolen a month previously. Zeigler made a reasonable argument that Deacon had unknowingly purchased the feet of a stolen cadaver. They clocked him on disrespectful treatment of human remains.
“Zeigler argued that Deacon was guilty of bad judgment, not murder. The judge bought the story and Deacon went home after a six-month vacation at a minimum-security facility upstate. Enjoyed shop class. Model guy all the way around.” Phelps looked up, took off his glasses. “In the three years set by the parole board, he was never late for a meeting. Followed up with therapy. No felonies. No misdemeanors. Gold stars across the board. When parole was over, he dropped off the face of the earth and no one thought to look at him ever again.”
Hemingway thought back to Deacon’s garage. The memory of those frozen little feet, blue and brittle, had been popping up in her head all afternoon. “Did they ever ID the feet found in his car?”
“Before DNA by almost a decade. Blood-typed but no tissue sample. Incinerated as medical waste. Nope. Unsolved.”
The sky was hazing over in late afternoon and Hemingway knew they had to get out there and do something. Even if it was empty motion, it had to be better than sitting in here second-guessing everything that made sense. Which was very little. “I hate the waiting,” she finally said.
“You and me both, kiddo.”
She looked at the conference table with the neatly stacked files, then at her computer screen, then back up at the clock. “I’ve gotta go,” she said and stood up, pulling on her jacket. “I can’t sit here.”
Phelps began to rise, then his body locked in a half crouch, as if a silent message had been radioed in from headquarters. He lifted his head, looked at her face, took in her body language, and sat back down. He nodded once. “Say hi for me,” he said, then turned back to his work.
||| TWENTY-THREE
WHENEVER SHE was here, it was as if she had never left. When she was away, she couldn’t remember what the place looked like at all. And she knew it would always be like this.
Her shadow stretched over the grave and wavered on the headstone, a small rectangular chunk of black granite with the words MOSES MANKIEWICZ chiseled in tight, noncursive hammer strokes. He had chalked forty-one years up on the fuselage before being shot down. A long time compared to some, short compared to others. A fucking miracle when applied to Mank.
Hemingway stood there for a moment, the whir of traffic on the Jackie Robinson Parkway close enough that she could hear the ricochet of gravel off the curb just beyond the trees. Mank lay with his parents—they had died in a car accident when he had been six.
The headstone was small and simple, a totally incongruous monument to a man who had lived as large as Moses Mankiewicz. A man who had epitomized the saying that too much can never be enough.
A few small stones rested on the marker, left by her on previous visits. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the one she had picked up on the esplanade last night, fifty feet from Tyler Rochester. She knelt down on the grass and put it on the edge of the granite slab. It wobbled for a second.
It took her a few minutes to build up the courage to talk to him—it always did. It seemed weird, foolish, even, that she was here. It was surprising that Phelps didn’t say more about it. But when she needed to open up to someone, coming here seemed like a justifiable pilgrimage.
The sound of the cars faded away and she sat down on the grass, facing the headstone. Each time she came here she was surprised that it didn’t destroy her. Wasn’t that what was supposed to have happened? This was Shakespearean territory. Gabriel García Márquez, at least.
“Hey, Mank—” She stopped, pushed her hair away from her jaw with her finger and tucked it behind her ear. She liked to think of Mank looking up and seeing the new her. She had walked through fire and made it. He’d be proud.
“It’s been a busy couple of days.” She felt the tears getting ready and she stopped them, consciously pushing them back to where they would be forgotten, shut down for safekeeping. “I’m pregnant. Really pregnant. And I don’t know what to do.”
A warm dry wind fluttered her hair off of her ear and then went still. She pushed it back, took a breath, and wondered what she was doing here. She didn’t need advice. She needed conviction. One way or the other. Something definitive. After that, it would all be fine. “Girly, huh?
“And there’s this guy. He took a little boy last night. Name was Tyler Rochester. Kid walked off the face of the planet on the way home from school. Three hours later he’s found in the East River. His feet were cut off.” She went on, laying the case out piece by piece.
Mank had always been a great detective. His knack for figuring cases out had only been matched by his knack for getting into trouble. Real trouble. David Shea kind of trouble. Sometimes she came here and all they talked was shop. A one-sided conversation that always helped her see the method in the mayhem. With everything unfolding in her new life the way it was—with work and Daniel and the possibility of a baby—she worried that she might lose these times, another ill-fated long-distance relationship.
When she was done laying out the case, she went back to the baby, eventually getting around to Daniel. She didn’t talk to Mank about him all that much—something about it felt like a betrayal—but she had talked about him at first, so Mank would get a feel for the guy.
She doubted that Mank would have given a shit anyway. He would want her to be happy. And he wasn’t one for handing out judgment. The guy treat you well? Yes. The sex good? Yes. You get butterflies in your stomach when he touches you? Yes. He put the seat down some of the time? All of the time. Open car doors for you? All the time. Then we’re done here, sweetheart. Thank you. Good night. Please leave your 3-D glasses in the bin by the door on your way out.
She never expected to have any kind of a therapeutic breakthrough when she was here, but something about the ritual was comforting. Even now, when she didn’t really have the spare time to piss around playing Ouija phone with Mank, it did her good. And maybe that was the problem. She was here talking to a dead guy when back at home she had what was supposed to be the next phase of her life. No matter which way she turned it, it was a little self-destructive.
What would Mank
have done if she had told him they had been having a baby? He’d have laughed. Then hugged her. Then started calling her Mother. Never stopping to ask if it was something she wanted. And if she told him that she wasn’t sure, the walls would get hit, plaster cracked, knuckles maybe even broken.
Mank had problems with his temper. He had never hit her, never even hinted at it, and after that first time, when she saw that his rage was focused at the world, she had never worried for herself again. He was nuts, but he was a good man. When he let go, he took it out on a wall or a fridge or the hood of a car. Sometimes on some poor schmuck who ended up in the hospital breathing through a tube, grateful that he hadn’t been kicked into a vegetative state. Mank had been dangerous. The kind whose unsmiling mug shot showed up on the news every now and then accompanying a story about a cop who had crossed the line. But he never would have hit her.
And he had made a lot of enemies along the way. Enemies like David Shea.
One afternoon he had embarrassed Shea in front of his boys. And that had been the final fuck you Mank had ever handed out. The next morning his heart was no longer beating.
When it was over, and she was in the hospital staring up at the acoustic ceiling tile, calculating the number of holes per square foot, she realized that she had peaked. There was no greater test ahead of her.
And now she was pregnant.
Her hand was on the tightly clipped grass above where his chest might be. She closed her eyes, whispered the words, “Sorry, honey,” and stood up. “I gotta monster to find.”
She walked back to the truck, grudgingly leaving Mank back there in the ground. The sounds of the world slowly came back—first the wind; then the traffic on the expressway; finally her own footsteps.
Hers was the only vehicle in the parking lot. She opened it with the remote, climbed in behind the wheel, put on her seat belt, and began to cry.
||| TWENTY-FOUR
HEMINGWAY, PHELPS, and an NYPD patrolman named Paul Kowalski headed upriver at a forty-knot clip. They had been combing an abandoned dock in Queens, not far from Trevor Deacon’s residence, when the sun dropped behind the skyline of the city to the west. Hemingway watched it the last few minutes, wondering if the final gasp of daylight going out would be punctuated by the scream of a child.