by Robert Pobi
“I get that a lot.”
||| TWENTY-EIGHT
CAPTAIN DENNET got his wish; Manhattan looked like a police state. A pair of cruisers was assigned to every school on the island and surrounding boroughs. This blanket effort was extended to all institutions—public, private, male only, female only, coed—to keep the specter of favoritism from rearing its politically incorrect countenance. Those who criticized this overuse of manpower felt it would have been better utilized at schools where white ten-year-old boys were to be found—after all, that seemed to be the victim of choice. The champions of the citywide display of force said that even though the killer had chosen a certain demographic up until this point, there was nothing to say that he wouldn’t change his taste, especially if another vast segment of school-age children were left unguarded. The logic, of course, went against all known research but the loudest voices got their way. Which meant that the NYPD had to be everywhere.
Hemingway and Phelps were assigned to the James Crichton Prep School in Morningside Heights. Papandreou and Lincoln were thirty-one blocks up, at the Esther Marring School of New York—an all-black girls’ school. The rest of the day’s shift, culled from precincts as far south as Staten Island and as far north as the Bronx, were out en masse. They had a single message to convey: we mean business.
The news teams did their utmost to make the police look like the twenty-first-century equivalent of the Keystone Cops. They interviewed people on the street about security, as if the population had suddenly become surveillance specialists. They interviewed parents. Children. Registered sex offenders with computer-garbled voices and blotted-out faces. All in the name of constructive criticism.
They talked about Detective Alexandra Hemingway’s oratory skills. Discussed her clothing. Brought up old news footage of the bloodbath she had left behind in David Shea’s bar. Before and after photos of her where they discussed the scar tissue that made up the side of her jaw—as if she had chosen a bad pair of shoes, or worn stripes with plaid. They discussed the investigation into Shea’s death and how Shea had killed her boyfriend, Moses Mankiewicz—a cop with a violent past.
They fixated on Hemingway’s refusal to admit or deny that there were any suspects. Many hinted that this meant the police had a suspect, because that’s what would bring in the ratings. But they were careful of being too certain of what they said, just in case they were wrong; no one wanted to risk damaging their imaginary integrity.
They focused on the easy money by generating fear.
They reported that attendance was down all over the city and that the poorer schools had higher absenteeism than the wealthier institutions. They went on that this was likely because the socioeconomically disadvantaged felt the police were there to protect and serve the rich, not everyone else. And the higher attendance at the wealthier schools seemed to support these thin accusations.
The simple truth was that the rich believed their money bought them some kind of divine protection.
But belief often fails when tested against reality and at 8:13 a.m. another boy disappeared.
||| TWENTY-NINE
HIS NAME was Nigel Stuart Matheson. It was no surprise that he had brown hair and eyes. Or that he was thirteen days older than Tyler Rochester—three older than Bobby Grant. He was handsome. And wealthy. And gone.
Nigel disappeared while walking to school with a group of boys who lived in the same neighborhood—part of a strength in numbers program that many of the schools had adopted; a measure that made parents feel a little more secure. Everyone thought it was a good way to protect the children. After all, who would grab a child from a group?
One minute Nigel was there, waxing poetic about Curtis Granderson’s strikeout record.
The next he was gone.
From the group.
From the street.
He came back in a big way: within fifteen minutes his picture was on every television and news website in the country. Smiling. Happy. Alive.
||| THIRTY
HEMINGWAY AND Phelps spent an hour individually interviewing the sixteen boys who had been with Nigel Matheson when he vanished.
After the first boy, Hemingway had to coach Phelps on his approach. These children were brought up to believe that they were special. They were taught that they were smarter and more gifted and when they looked at their lives they had to believe it. They would inherit the world and they knew it.
Phelps called them entitled little fuckers.
Hemingway just shrugged.
They were identical in dress and manner, and all had the easy comfort of certainty in who they were being groomed to replace. They were identical in their perfect hair, sly smiles, and blandness. Their versions of what had happened to Nigel Matheson were also the same.
They had passed a few other groups of schoolboys—one from Saint Dominic and another from the Jasper Collegiate Institute.
They crossed two intersections.
Went past a park.
Were captured by a surveillance camera inside the door of an apartment building.
He was there, among them.
Then he was not.
||| THIRTY-ONE
THE APARTMENT opened up onto a lush vista of Central Park that stretched away to the north. There was a big balcony with a stone railing where bronze hawks sat watch, a leftover from before urban renewal had destroyed most of the building’s original charm. The space was a combination of chrome, leather, and plastic that had all the earmarks of a collection rather than being merely well decorated. Hemingway saw that most of the paintings were by the top black American artists, something not usually collected by whites.
Wendy Matheson was tall and graceful, with a fat-free body and natural beauty that resembled Hemingway’s in some lateral way. Besides wealth and photogenic DNA, she did not appear mean, jealous, or hypocritical but it was obvious that Mrs. Matheson had always been very happy that life was about her.
Until now.
Mr. Matheson had been boarding a flight at LaGuardia when the school called. The NYPD offered to pick him up but he insisted on making his own way back. Until then, it was Hemingway, an uncomfortable-looking Phelps, and Mrs. Matheson.
Mrs. Matheson did not say much; she answered in monosyllables and had the same distant expression of Mrs. Rochester, but none of the slurred speech.
As they talked, Hemingway’s hand was on her stomach again—something she found herself doing too frequently now. Sitting there, staring down a woman whose son had just been taken, the gesture felt disrespectful, blasphemous.
They ran through the usual questions, from the basic to the invasive. With two boys down, Trevor Deacon dead, and the Grant boy’s driver squirted all over the interior of the Lincoln, there wouldn’t be a happy ending to the Nigel Matheson story unless they asked the tough questions.
They were at the point in the interview where they focused on lists and routine. The people Nigel Matheson spent time with and the places he went. They didn’t bother asking about a life insurance policy.
They sacrificed poise and tact for truth and results. And it was obvious that Mrs. Matheson wasn’t used to being hammered like this. Hers was a world of afternoons at Bergdorf’s and weekends on the ocean. The only time she bothered to look at a cop was if she was pulled over and even then she probably didn’t pay much attention; to people like this, the police were something to be dealt with, not listened to.
After a few moments of listing Nigel’s friends, she stopped in mid-sentence. At first Hemingway thought she had remembered something, an important detail or a significant event. She looked up and said, “He was special.” Her eyes went from Hemingway to Phelps then back to Hemingway again. Then she reached over and picked up a leather-bound book from the coffee table. “He wrote a play.” And she began to sob.
Hemingway did something that was out of character but she couldn’t stop herself. She went over to the sofa, sat down beside Mrs. Matheson, and put her arm around the woman.
“I’m sorry about this. I know that right now you can’t believe me, but I know what you’re going through. This isn’t fair or right or anything else that makes sense. But now—I mean right now—we need you to be focused. Can you do that?”
Mrs. Matheson turned, buried her face in Hemingway’s collar, and let out a scream so primal and rooted in anguish that it jolted Phelps in his seat.
Then she pushed herself up, wiped her nose in a handkerchief, and gave a single solid nod. “Okay.”
Hemingway kept her arm around the woman. She felt the skin beneath the blouse, the muscle beneath the skin, the piston of her heart below that. Her whole body vibrated as if the molecules were on the verge of dispersing. “You want a coffee? Detective Phelps makes a great cup of coffee.”
Mrs. Matheson seemed to actually consider the offer, then gave a soft, almost childlike nod. Her housekeeper materialized out of what appeared to be thin air, asked the detectives if they wanted some coffee as well, then disappeared.
“Look, Mrs. Matheson, we need—”
The front door kicked open, blowing Hemingway’s question off the road.
Mr. Matheson barreled in, eyes red, tie in his fist. He ran to his wife, picked her up off the sofa and drew her into a hug. Over her shoulder he said, “I’m Andrew Matheson. What happened to my son?” He was tall, black, with close-cropped hair and the no-nonsense air of a man used to getting things done on a schedule.
“I’m Detective Alex Hemingway and this is my partner, Jon Phelps. Your stepson is missing, Mr. Matheson.”
Andrew Matheson’s face went brittle. “He’s not my stepson, he’s my son, detective.”
Hemingway felt the saliva hit the back of her mouth in a surge of adrenaline. “Are you Nigel’s biological father?” she asked.
“Of course not. Does it matter?”
Hemingway looked over his shoulder, at the family photograph on the console beside the Bang & Olufsen stereo. She focused on the boy between his parents.
Same as the others: brown hair, brown eyes.
White.
Dr. Grant said that after all the trouble they had gone through to conceive, this was going to destroy his wife.
Tyler Rochester’s mother said that it had been hard to get pregnant. Twice.
Phelps said they could have been brothers.
All of a sudden she had it. “Mr. and Mrs. Matheson, I need you to tell me where you went for fertility treatment.”
||| THIRTY-TWO
PHELPS TOOK the driver’s seat and Hemingway strapped herself in, lit up the cherry, and pulled out her phone as they swung into traffic. They wound their way south and she cycled through her call log, looking for the Rochesters’ number. She found it and dialed.
“Yes, hello. This is detective Alex Hemingway of the NYPD. I need to speak to Mrs. Rochester right now.”
Pause.
“No, it’s urgent.”
Pause.
“Yes, very.”
Pause.
“Sooner. Yes. Thank you.”
She hung up and scrolled through her data for the Grants’ number.
Dialed.
“Yes, this is Detective Alex Hemingway of the NYPD. I need to speak to Mrs. Grant immediately. It’s urgent. Yes. Yes.”
Phelps swung the big four-by-four around a double-parked limousine and Hemingway suddenly wished she was driving. She hated the passenger seat. Always had.
“Yes, Mrs. Grant. I am very sorry to trouble you right now but I have an important question to ask you. It’s personal and you have to keep it confidential—is that clear?”
Pause.
“Yes. I understand. Are you alone?”
Pause.
“Yes, I’ll wait.”
Pause. She covered the phone and said, “She’s going to the bedroom.” Pause. “Yes, I’m still here. Was Dr. Grant Bobby’s biological father?”
She listened. Then punched the dashboard. “What was the name of the clinic you went to?”
Pause.
“Thank you.”
She hung up. “Same fucking place—Park Avenue Clinic. Hit it.”
And the big man in the gray suit flew the truck south on 7th Avenue.
||| THIRTY-THREE
THE SUBURBAN slid around the corner with the grace of a smoking cathedral. Hemingway kept one hand protectively over her stomach as she tried not lose the phone. “Nick, do we have anything on the Park Avenue Clinic? Or on a Dr. Sylvester Brayton who works there?”
“Park Avenue Clinic? What kind of a fuckin’ name is—?”
“Jesus Christ, Nick, just do it without the commentary.”
“Sure. Sorry. Okay . . . all right, the Park Avenue Clinic is a swanky place where a hundred grand buys you a bun for the oven—”
Hemingway closed her eyes and tried to push the blossoming headache away. “Forget the goddamned brochure stuff. Do we have anything in the system?”
“Let’s see . . .”
Hemingway opened her eyes just as Phelps punched around a bus and missed clipping a taxi that had stopped on a stale yellow—possibly the only cab in history to not run a yellow.
Papandreou came back. “They’re stock market country. They pay their taxes and look legit. One OSHA infraction during a renovation a few years back but that’s it. Owned by big pharma.”
Hemingway filed that away. “Now the doctor—Sylvester Brayton. B-R-A-Y-T-O-N.”
There was the sound of fingers on a keyboard and he came back with, “Here we go. Brayton, Sylvester. Graduated George Washington School of Medicine. Then Johns Hopkins. On staff with the clinic as of a year before it opened its doors. Disappeared from staff rosters a little over a year ago.”
Phelps slalomed through the tight crosstown traffic that seemed oblivious to the red flashing light clamped to the dash.
“Where is he now?”
The sound of typing was followed by, “I don’t know.”
“Nick, give me something.”
More typing. “The guy just dropped off the face of the planet. No driver’s license. No car registration. No cell phone contract.” More typing. “Sweetfuckall. He just disappeared.”
Hemingway ran through her conversations with the Grants and when she was done, Papandreou swore in Greek, a peculiar oddity; he was a fourth-generation New Yorker who didn’t know a word of his ancestral tongue.
“We’re on the way there right now. Find Brayton. And get a black-and-white to the clinic.”
“Could be a coincidence,” Papandreou said with no conviction at all.
This wasn’t monkeys typing Shakespeare; Hemingway had already confirmed that two of the three victims were conceived at this clinic. There were no odds this good. “Get someone to the Rochester funeral—someone with a little tact—to find out about Tyler. I bet we’re three for three.” The dashboard clock gave them nine hours until sundown—nine hours that would sweep by like they had never been there at all. “And check out the other principals at the clinic. From the ground up. Find out if any of the MDs there have malpractice or ethics cases being reviewed—check with the medical board and the courts. If you find any cases, check out the plaintiffs. I’m guessing it’s not a doctor—Marcus says whoever is taking these kids apart has no prior knowledge of anatomy.”
“You think it’s someone there?”
“I think it’s someone everywhere. Do it. Put it all in motion.”
||| THIRTY-FOUR
THE PARK Avenue Clinic was a renovated brownstone sandwiched in between a law firm and a glass building that housed an art gallery. It had passed the status of clinic and entered into the realm of corporation more than two decades back and it wore its muscle proudly. There was valet parking and three limousines sat at the curb.
Phelps rammed the truck across two lanes, plugging a hole a Rolls had staked out with its massive gauche ass. The driver looked up, acknowledged the flashing bubble with a shake of his head, and pulled out into the cars heading downtown. Hemingway was on the curb before the Suburban came to
a halt, her shield out, feet pounding the concrete. By the time she was at the front door to the building, Phelps was patiently bringing Dennet up to speed with that no-nonsense diction he was famous for. The next call would be to the District Attorney.
Hemingway yanked the big metal handle and the ten-foot polycarbonate door bowed out, then flew open.
The welcome desk was sculpted from a single chunk of volcanic rock, cut to show the negative space of a mother and child swallowed by the ash of Pompeii. The handsome woman behind the counter backed up when Hemingway came at her with the badge. Outside, the screech of a police siren stopped at the curb and the sound of car doors slamming punctuated her footsteps.
“Detectives Alex Hemingway and Jon Phelps, NYPD. I need to speak to your CEO right now.”
The receptionist was mixed race but her dialogue was heavy Brooklynese. There was a tiny black microphone peeking out of the hair beside her ear. “May I ask what this is about?”
“You have ten seconds to get the CEO or director or whatever you call the head cheese down here. At the end of ten seconds, I am going get annoyed. You don’t want me to get annoyed,” Hemingway said.
The receptionist’s eyes shifted from Hemingway’s badge to the restructured line of her jaw, then back to the badge. She took a step back. “That would be Marjorie Fenton.”
“Then phone her, sweetheart. You get Fenton down here right now.” She leveled her finger at the microphone. “Ten seconds,” she repeated.
It was then that a woman appeared beside them. Her face was a perfect blend of poised calm and subtextual annoyance. Five hundred pounds of security squeezed into two suits stood behind her. Whatever her title, there was little room for doubt that she was a major player in the clinic’s ecosystem. “I’m Director Fenton, how may we help you—detectives, is it?” She was small, maybe five foot one. Close to sixty but could pass for fifty if the light and makeup were right. She put her hand firmly on Hemingway’s elbow. “I am happy to make an appointment. We are terribly busy and can’t operate with the police barging in and—”