by Robert Pobi
Hemingway saw how this was going to go—or at least how Fenton imagined it would go—and she had no intention of letting the woman railroad her. “I am going to shut you up right now.” At that, the wall of suit behind the woman flexed and Hemingway heard Phelps’s shoes scrape the travertine behind her. She knew he had taken a step forward and that his hand was probably on the big automatic under his arm. For a man of his size, Phelps was able to move with surprising speed.
Hemingway continued in an even cadence. “You have heard about the two boys who were found in the East River? The other who was abducted this morning? Very shortly he is going to have parts of his body sawn off while he lies in the dirt somewhere, wondering why bad things are happening to him. If I don’t get your help—and I mean right fucking now—I will go outside and call a press conference on the sidewalk. I will tell Wolf Blitzer and the rest of the cackling idiots that patients of this clinic are being murdered and yet you refuse to cooperate with us and I am going to emphatically state that the commonality between these victims is that they were all conceived here. You, Mrs. Fenton, can piss your retirement right down the toilet.” Hemingway knew that this would all come out eventually anyway, but she was going for a knee-jerk reaction, not a rational response.
Fenton opened her mouth and Hemingway cut her off. Again.
“You may consider threatening me personally, but you’d be wasting your breath. I have a family attorney on retainer: Dwight Hemingway of Hemingway, McCrae and Pearson. They’re a few blocks up, in nicer digs than this. I won’t have to make meetings for three years, by which time the story of our little conversation here will be at the film stage and you will be on record as the director of Jeffrey Dahmer, Inc.” Hemingway, almost a solid foot taller than the woman, pulled her elbow out of Fenton’s grip and leaned over, her hands on her thighs as if reprimanding a child. “Now do you still want to play Queen Bitch with me?”
The door opened and the clink of cops in gear had everyone but Hemingway turn their heads. She kept her eyes locked on Fenton’s, but this was a woman who gave nothing away. She just stared back, her expression frozen in the indifference that seemed to be her prime emotion.
Fenton turned to the receptionist. “Maya, we’ll be in the big consultation room.” Then she led the two detectives away.
Hemingway beckoned the two uniformed policemen to follow. Fenton moved fast in her heels and Hemingway recognized the rhythm of a runner in the way she timed her shoulders. The two security men and the two street cops closed up the rear. They rounded two ground-level corners and just before they came to an elevator, Phelps—still on the phone—said, “Yeah, we’re there now,” loud enough that Fenton shifted in her designer one-off.
They dropped into the building’s guts in a backlit car, three of the walls decorated with Keith Haring acrylics—happy linear representations of parents and children with rays of goodness shooting out of their bodies. Hemingway’s parents had a moderate collection of American modern, the brunt of their focus on Georgia O’Keeffe and Jacob Coleridge, but they owned a Haring or two; it didn’t take a dealer’s acumen to see that there had to be a million dollars’ worth of canvas hanging on the walls. Money was evidently not an issue here.
That would change when the lawsuits started.
Hemingway was neither spiteful nor petty, and she wasn’t holding Fenton at fault for her Sarah Palin imitation downstairs. She wondered if Fenton had an inkling of what was about to happen. Probably not—too much confidence in the way the world was supposed to treat her—which meant that Hemingway would have to bully her.
The elevator opened to a subterranean conference room that could have been under the White House if the president was into Ralph Lauren. The walls were paneled in bamboo and fitted with an array of multimedia presentation equipment, tools to help talk prospective parents out of their money. The table was a block of polished concrete and the chairs were high-backed leather deals that looked like they were lifted from a fleet of Bentleys. A heavy silver coffee service sat in the center of the table, along with sandwiches, muffins, and cookies.
They stepped out as a procession, Fenton doing her best to look authoritative. Hemingway was annoyed at the time they were losing and she could feel Phelps vibrating behind her like an angry infection. No doubt, this was one of those times when he would be silently lamenting the loss of the old days he always talked about, a time when the letter of the law hadn’t been obscured by red tape and bureaucracy.
Fenton gestured to one side of the table and reached for the chair at the head but Hemingway grabbed it. Phelps dropped into the seat to her right. The two uniformed officers took up position at the door and Fenton was forced into one of the cheap seats with her security men behind her.
Fenton opened her mouth and Hemingway nailed her again. “Mrs. Fenton, there is no discussion here. My patience and time is running out.” She checked her watch. “You are almost at the end of my rope.”
“Do I need counsel present?” Fenton didn’t ask politely, courteously, or even as if it were any kind of a real possibility. She wanted to show she couldn’t be pushed.
Hemingway turned on her predator face. “You know about Tyler Rochester and Bobby Grant?”
Fenton stared at her. “I read about it in the paper, yes.”
“A third boy, Nigel Matheson, was abducted a few hours ago.”
Fenton just stared, waiting.
“Bobby Grant and Nigel Matheson were conceived at this clinic and I expect to have the same news from the Rochester family in a few minutes. Dr. Brayton handled the pregnancies. Your clinic—or Dr. Brayton—are what links the victims. Very soon, the media will descend on this place and you can forget the right to a due process. You can forget the right to a fair trial. They will paint this institution black. And for just a second, I want you to imagine what the parents of the next child who turns up dead with his leg or his arm or his foot chopped off is going to do when they find out that we came to you.” And she stopped cold to let that sink into Fenton’s core reactor. “And you told us to go fuck ourselves.” She looked into the points of anger that had replaced Fenton’s eyes.
After a protracted pause, Fenton said, “First off, I do not know the name of every child we helped to conceive—the number now totals in the thousands.”
“Would a doctor remember his patients ten years later?”
“I expect so, yes.”
“So where is Dr. Sylvester Brayton?”
“Brayton left us a year ago and I am not in the habit of staying in touch with former employees. I heard he took a position somewhere in Europe.”
“How long had Brayton been with the clinic?” Hemingway wanted to see if Fenton would be up front with information.
“I can’t be certain, but an easy twenty years. Since before we opened this facility at least.”
“Why did he leave?”
Fenton paused for a second. “We had mutually exclusive visions for the future of this clinic.”
“So you won’t tell me?”
Fenton shook her head. “I cannot discuss internal politics unless it has bearing on your case.”
“Who picked up Brayton’s patients?”
At that Fenton reached for the phone and punched in a four-digit extension number. “Yes, Maya, is Dr. Selmer back from Paris? Good. Could you please get him on the phone? Yes. Yes. Immediately. Then put him through.”
Fenton hung up and looked at Hemingway. “Dr. Michael Selmer picked up Dr. Brayton’s files. You have to understand that we are a fertility clinic, not a pediatrics ward. I doubt even Dr. Selmer will know that these boys were conceived here.” She reached over and poured herself a cup of coffee. “What do you want from me, Detective?”
“That phone call to Selmer is a good start. Anything you can give me in the way of due diligence. I understand the doctor–patient privilege; I understand that we need a court order to access Dr. Brayton’s files; I understand that we have to be very specific in our requests and that you can
only release information that pertains to this case—we can’t go fishing and we can’t guess. But I am making the not-too-far-reaching assumption that these two—and soon to be three—children are not the only children at risk. There are more of Dr. Brayton’s patients out there. Which means other children may be in danger. Until we have a court order in our hands, which will take—” She turned to Phelps and raised an eyebrow.
“Two hours,” he said flatly.
“Since you cannot give me the names of Dr. Brayton’s patients without breaking your fiduciary responsibility to this clinic and its patients, I expect you to get on the phone and contact each and every one of them. You will give them my coordinates and you will ask them to call me. You will be persuasive. They need to know that their children are in danger.”
Fenton shook her head. “I don’t have the legal authority to do that. They are Dr. Selmer’s patients, not mine. Maya should have him on the phone any second.” She pointed at the phone in the middle of the table beside the coffee and food.
The elevator opened and the receptionist came in. She was out of breath and held her pumps in her hand. “I can’t find Dr. Selmer. I’ve called his apartment and he’s not answering. I—”
Fenton pushed her chair back and stood up. “Did you call the doorman?”
Maya nodded, and with her mouth frozen in a perfect circle, she looked like an umlaut O come to life. “The doorman says there’s no answer. He’s not allowed to go in.”
“Are you sure he’s home?”
Maya nodded again. “He landed at nine thirty-five this morning. British Airways flight . . .” She pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from inside one of the shoes still dangling in her hand. “. . . flight two-two-nine-two. JFK. George, our driver, picked him up and dropped him off. Gate to apartment door. I called him. George left him at eleven oh five a.m. and the doorman says he hasn’t left and no one answers his door. His car’s in the garage.”
Hemingway stood up. “We need an address.”
||| THIRTY-FIVE
IT WAS earlier than yesterday; they had forced him to advance his schedule and from here on out time would be in short supply.
He looked down at the body; the best of what the boy was about was now missing.
He held him for a second, looked down on his face, on his features, and felt as if he were looking at part of himself. Nigel Matheson had been handsome. And talented. And many more things that no one could understand.
But all of those things were gone now. The handsomeness most of all.
He held him in the current as he said goodbye. He smiled down at the boy—his friend, really—and let go of his ankle, giving him up to the cold hands of the river.
Nigel Matheson floated out a few feet, scraped between the rocks and bumped the decoy that floated there. Then the current fastened its fingers on him and took him away.
He picked up the insulated knapsack with the Canadian flag sewn to it, the one he used to transport their parts. He slung it over his shoulder and scrambled up through the scrub.
||| THIRTY-SIX
DR. MICHAEL SELMER had an apartment on West 86th Street and Amsterdam. The doorman wore a green suit wired with ten yards of gold braid and looked like he had forgotten his tuba somewhere. His name tag read PEPE and after a few seconds of pressing his finger to the buzzer, he shook his head. “I told the lady on the phone—he ain’t answerin’.”
Hemingway let Phelps take this one; it was his turn to do some heavy lifting.
Phelps knocked and put his ear to the door. Then he leaned down and went to work on the lock. There was a soft click and he swung the door in.
They went through the apartment, weapons out, communication reduced to hand signals. Pepe stayed in the hallway.
The living room, dining room, kitchen, and study were empty.
Then Hemingway held up her hand and they listened. There was an odd, raspy sound coming from somewhere at the opposite end of the apartment.
They found him in the master bedroom.
He was asleep: plugs in his ears; a mask over his eyes; mouth open to the ceiling; snoring a jet-lagged slumber. He wore silk pajama bottoms and nothing else.
Phelps reached out and touched his toe.
Selmer lifted straight off the bed in a screaming cat launch. He had the mask off and was up against the headboard in a single startled move. Then Pepe walked into the room and the fear in his face converted to confusion.
Hemingway had her badge out. “I’m Detective Hemingway and this is Detective Phelps. We need to speak with you.”
He put his hand to his forehead and for a second it looked like he would faint. “Jesus Christ, why didn’t you knock?”
———
A few minutes later they were in the living room, overlooking a church. Dr. Selmer still had his silk pajama pants on but had thrown a Paul Frank T-shirt over his chest. He had a coffee in his hands and looked like he was about to fall over, his squinty-eyed stare not dissimilar to the monkey logo. “Sorry, I took two Seconal about—” He checked the gold Cartier on his wrist, tried to focus, and gave up. “Hell, I don’t know. Before I went to bed.” He took a sip of his coffee and tried to follow Hemingway as she paced.
“Dr. Selmer, have you read the news?” she asked, indicating the iPad sitting on the coffee table.
He shook his head. Slurped more coffee. He clearly just wanted to get back to bed.
Hemingway stepped forward, yanked the iPad up off the exotic wood surface, and found the New York Times website. Then she handed him the tablet. “Maybe you should.”
His eyes ratcheted down and he tried to focus on the print. When he couldn’t, he reached for his glasses.
He scanned the screen and the tired look dropped away. Without taking his eyes from the screen he leaned forward and placed his mug down on one of the coffee table books neatly stacked on the table. He swiped through the content and what little color remained in his face drained away. He went to put the iPad back onto the coffee table but it slipped from his fingers and bounced on the floor. “Oh Jesus.”
“So you recognize those names?”
He no longer looked like the drugged-out monkey on his T-shirt. “Before I say anything, what are you doing from a legal standpoint?”
Hemingway was glad he wasn’t another Fenton. She ran through the chain of events, starting with her epiphany at the Mathesons’ apartment and ending with her showdown with Fenton. “Our captain has this before the DA right now. From there it goes in front of a judge. We should have a court order giving us access to your files by the close of business today. Which is five hours closer to sunset and if this guy sticks to his routine, we’ll find Nigel Matheson in the river just after sundown.”
Selmer shook his head as he put it all through his processor. “This is bad.”
“Your career?”
At that he laughed a single, derisive snort. “My career? When my name becomes associated with these horrors, what do you think will happen to me? I might as well move to Finland. My career, Detective Hemingway, is over.
“I am thinking about my patients—and they are my patients now, regardless of how they began their association with the clinic. Or with Brayton.”
Something about the way he said the doctor’s name set off some low-level alarm in her mind. “What can you tell us about Brayton?”
He shrugged. “Great doctor. Smartest guy in the room. A narcissist, but that’s not uncommon in exceptional people.”
“You know where he is?”
He shrugged again. “Scandinavia somewhere. Norway, I think.”
She smelled bullshit behind it all.
“If the link between those three boys is Brayton, there are bound to be others. I can’t tell you who they are. Not yet. Not legally. But I can put them in touch with you. I can warn them,” he said, mimicking Hemingway’s thoughts. He stood up. “I have to get to the clinic. To my files.” He ran to the bedroom, pulling off his shirt. There was nothing sluggish about his movements
now that the adrenaline had kicked in.
Hemingway stood up and her cell phone went off. She nodded at Phelps who went after the doctor and she answered her phone.
“Hemingway here.”
“Hemi, it’s Marcus. I found something you need to hear. The Rochester and Grant boys were half brothers.”
“How is that possible? They were—” And then it hit her. “Sonofabitch, they had the same father.”
“He’s not hunting them because they’re his type. He’s hunting them because of who they are. It’s not a phenotype; it’s a genetic link.”
||| THIRTY-SEVEN
THE ELEVATOR was large—an anomaly for Manhattan no matter what the price point. There were no Keith Harings hanging on the paneled walls but Dr. Selmer’s parents had to be proud.
Selmer stood in a corner, staring at the floor. They would escort him to the clinic where he would begin calling the parents of other children who had been sired by the same donor. At least that was what he said the scope of his activities would be. Papandreou and Lincoln would stick with him until the footwork was done and they had a list of parents. Always the list.
Hemingway’s phone made him jump.
She pressed it to her ear. “Hemingway.”
“Hemi, it’s Papandreou. It looks like they found Nigel Matheson in the East River.”
She felt the air leave her lungs and she checked her watch. It wasn’t yet 1 p.m. “What do you mean, ‘looks like’?”
“It’s hard to tell; the bottom of his face has been sawn off.”
||| THIRTY-EIGHT
HEMINGWAY DROVE, Phelps rode shotgun. The lights and sirens were dialed to their apex as they pushed through traffic. The early-afternoon sun was behind the rolling sheet of clouds that stretched to the horizon but it still felt like the streets were heated to within a few degrees of combustion. A storm was coming and everyone hoped it would bring a brief respite from the heat and humidity.