by Robert Pobi
She and Phelps had switched out with Lincoln and Papandreou who were now with Selmer at the clinic. They would act as chaperone until the court order came through. No one thought he would run but they were all concerned that Fenton would offer him a check to keep a united front for their house of secrets.
Hemingway pulled around a florist’s truck, then rocked through a hole between two taxis, her tires screaming across the hot city pavement. Phelps held tight, his face the same impassive mask he had sewn to his skull whenever they were at work.
“He’s early,” she said, hating that she expected anything of this guy. There was an old cop rule that said the most you could count on from the other side was nothing. And even that was often hoping for too much.
Phelps shrugged, as if it all amounted to the same thing—which it did—another dead child.
A lane opened up in front of them and Hemingway pounded down on the gas. The truck lurched forward at nearly sixty miles an hour.
Rochester and Grant were half brothers.
They shared a parent.
A father.
A donor.
Which was as narrow a commonality as they could hope for. They had more than a lead—they had their case. She didn’t know where it was yet, but the boys were the key. If they busted their asses, they’d find him. Hemingway didn’t know how long it would take, only that it would get done.
||| THIRTY-NINE
THE BOY looked like a mechanic had taken his head apart to get at the transmission inside. Only there was no transmission. And there was no putting it back together again. He was waxy, lifeless, and horrifying.
Phelps looked down at the child, coughed once, then walked out of the room, leaving Hemingway and Marcus in silence.
Hemingway had seen a lot of damage done to the human body but she couldn’t get used to what this guy seemed to feed on. There was no way to hammer this into any kind of comprehensible geometry. No. Way. At. All.
She looked down at the boy and gulped in a lungful of air. She could smell the river in him. “What am I looking at?”
Since Phelps’s departure, the only noise had been the scratch of Marcus’s pencil and the distant tidal force of her own heart. His pencil stopped and Hemingway looked up to see him staring at her. “His jaw was cut out,” he said.
She forced herself to lower her eyes, to focus on the boy. “With our hacksaw?” It seemed a pointless thing to ask.
Marcus didn’t add any body language to his response. “Same saw. Same anesthetic. Same type of victim. Same injection point. Same everything. Except for the parts he took.”
Hemingway tried to make sense of the ugly thing she was looking at.
“And he learned something from taking Deacon’s skull apart. As opposed to going straight through like last time, he used two cuts, one straight back into the condyle, the second up from under his chin. Saved himself having to go through the ramus and spinal column.”
“Was Matheson alive when this happened?”
Marcus waved the question away as if it were academic. “Of course.”
Bobby Grant’s half brother; Tyler Rochester’s half brother.
Hemingway stared down at the boy. His lower jaw was gone and the meat on the skull above was swollen and distorted. The corners of his mouth were opened up to his temporomandibular joint. His top teeth and uvula hung in the wreckage of his face—a purple mass of bloodless anatomy that looked like it lived on the bottom of the ocean. Part of his larynx poked up through the top of his neck, like an exposed pupa. He looked worse than dead; he looked defiled.
For a second, Marcus put aside his professional demeanor and asked the question that was running through everyone’s head. “Hemi, do you know the kind of person it takes to do something like this? What kind of experiences a human being needs to have under his belt to do this to a live child?”
Hemingway had no answer, she doubted anyone did. She stared at the boy. This hadn’t been done by a human being at all.
The door to the lab opened and Phelps came back in. “Sorry about that,” he said.
Marcus continued, business as usual. “Again, there are no defensive wounds. His hands are clean. Washed by the Hudson—true—but in good shape. No ripped nails, abrasions, cuts, bruises, lacerations, ligature marks, or fractures. I can see that on one victim. But all three? They don’t fight and they don’t see it coming.” He looked up. “Our boys are comfortable around the killer.”
“So was Deacon,” she said.
||| FORTY
DR. MICHAEL SELMER wasn’t prone to greed and this had always made him suspect in the eyes of Director Fenton; there is nothing a medical corporation values less in an employee than moral rectitude, even in the abstract. The clinic and its principles were fundamentally positive but the ends-versus-means formula that was dictated by corporate survival often cast it in an unsympathetic light. Like now.
Selmer wasn’t afraid of Fenton as much as he was worried about her. She wasn’t evil, but she was devious. And tenacious—a trait worth ten times its weight in brains. In medicine it was all about staying power, and in his thirty-one years in the industry, he had never worked under anyone more driven than Frau Fenton.
She ran the clinic with relentless precision. She didn’t outlaw the thieving of office supplies or begrudge her employees parking passes—no, if anything she was overly generous with benefits: Hermès briefcases each Christmas; a new Benz each spring. But there was a price for her love: you had to perform. Continually on. Continually perfect. Continually nervous.
This hypercompetitive atmosphere ensured that only the strongest survived and competitive mechanics had refined the clinic’s personnel to the top stratum of American medicine. Which in turn attracted the top stratum of clientele. And the self-feeding machine acquired the finest research facility in reproductive endocrinology anywhere in the hemisphere.
Fenton had been waiting for him in the lobby and had insisted on walking him to his office. She had been alone, her two security baboons conspicuously absent. She had talked about loyalty. About the greater good. About finances and bright futures.
Before she left him at his desk, she pushed a copy of his contract into his hand, reminded him that he had a legal responsibility to the clinic and an ethical one to his patients. She didn’t mention Brayton; she didn’t need to. Then she had left him alone with his conscience.
Right from the start Brayton had been her golden boy, a handsome dark-haired wunderkind. He attracted all the right clients. All the right money. Until he had been found out.
As soon as Fenton left his office, Selmer had called his lawyer, his personal lawyer, not the clinic’s people. Counselor Harwick had listened carefully, then told him that the press would catch on to this within twenty-four hours. He said Selmer could forget distancing himself from the great big mushroom cloud painted on the wall—it would make no difference that none of this was his fault.
He didn’t ask Harwick about Brayton.
Harwick said the best path to a future was to have everything ready for the police when they arrived with the warrant. Legally, he couldn’t tell Selmer to coach them ahead of time as to what portion of the files they’d be looking for, but he suggested that reaching out to the NYPD might not be the worst idea right now; being a live dog was better than being a dead lion. He closed by saying that in ten years Selmer would look back and tell him he had been right. Then he hung up.
He couldn’t tell them about Brayton—he had signed a confidentiality agreement—but he could help protect the children.
The matter of confidentiality was largely one of interpretation and Selmer had a broad range of choices here, from helpful to near criminal. They could subpoena information they believed was there, but they could not come in like the gestapo and confiscate said information if he refused to hand it over. And they might not request the correct information.
Selmer worried about Frau Fenton, upstairs concocting a plan of defense with the clinic’s battery of legal
help. She wanted him to hold out until the last moment—the best thing for the clinic and maybe even for him, she had said. Which was bullshit.
She was worried that Brayton’s indiscretions would be made public.
Brayton had crossed so many lines—ethical, moral and legal—that no one knew how far-reaching the consequences would be. He had been sent into exile. But he would be found—it was only a question of time. And when it all came out, the fires of hubris would burn the clinic to the ground.
He could call the parents, but he knew these people, knew the filters he’d have to go through. He was looking at three days if he was diligent. And they didn’t have three days. So he went over his options. He could do this without breaking the law but he couldn’t do this without violating the nonnegotiable tenets of medical practice. But he would never practice medicine again—so what did he care about doctor–patient confidentiality?
And of course he’d be sued after this. The Rochesters or the Grants or the Mathesons would go after him in civil court and the litigious judicial system would take away everything he owned. But he wouldn’t do jail time because he had done nothing illegal. Strictly speaking. So why not give it away with his head held high instead of letting them take it while he fought a losing battle?
Detectives Lincoln and Papandreou were in the lobby, as both protection and reminder that he was now under the eye of the law. If he walked out the front door, they would be with him. Which might be a good thing.
But Fenton would know. And she’d slap the lawyers on the NYPD faster than anyone could imagine. He’d go under glass and the bickering would start.
He looked at the spreadsheet, a list that had taken him a year to piece together. By law, the clinic was required to report this information to the Society of Assisted Reproductive Technology, under directives from the Centers for Disease Control. But government forms do not always ask the right questions.
It didn’t take very long to see the pattern the police were onto: Tyler Rochester, Bobby Grant and Nigel Matheson had all been fathered by the same donor.
He wondered how long it would take them to figure out that the father was Dr. Brayton.
||| FORTY-ONE
HEMINGWAY AND Phelps threaded their way through traffic from the medical examiner’s office downtown to the Deacon house in Astoria. Deacon and the boys were somehow linked; the question was how. Maybe they had missed something at the house.
When they pulled up outside, Phelps let out a protracted “Fuck me,” stretching the first word into three syllables.
Without the cavalcade of police cars out front, it should have looked like any other house on the block. But the villagers had tried to exorcise the demons from its walls and it looked like the setting for a lynching. The big elm in the front yard was toilet papered and dozens of bicycle tires hung from the branches like black sightless eyes. The sidewalk was dotted with pentagrams laid out in bloody bright epoxy paint. The bricks and garage had been spray-painted with the words monster, motherfucker, and beast. The planters that had been by the door were smashed on the driveway. Evidently things were just hunky-dory in Walley World.
Hemingway maneuvered the two-ton SUV into the empty space in front of Deacon’s and they stepped out into the humidity.
A man in a wifebeater sitting on a stoop across the street yelled, “I wouldn’t park there if I was you.”
Hemingway crossed the street and pulled out her badge. “Yeah? Well you’re not me, fuckface. And if anything happens to that truck while I’m inside, I’m going to come back here and kick the shit out of you. We clear, cupcake?”
The man spit into the brown bush beside the steps. “Yeah.”
As they walked up to the door, Phelps said, “He’s either a fuckface or a cupcake—he can’t be both.”
“What are you, the grammar police?” They approached the cracked concrete steps and Hemingway caught the movement of a shadow by one of the windows. “And what was with the Virginia Woolf reference the other day? You start reading them book things?” she asked, in a fake hillbilly accent.
“Discovery Channel.”
The door opened before they had knocked. “You got my check?” Mrs. Deacon barked into Hemingway’s face.
Phelps took a step back and Hemingway did her best to smile. “That’s a different office than ours, Mrs. Deacon, and I’d—”
“The name’s Bergen, lady. Deacon was that bastard’s father. A bum. Like his kid. Knew it from the moment he was born. Didn’t do nothin’. And now them people spray-painting bad words on my house, toilet papering my tree, like I had anything to do with the stuff what went on downstairs. How’s I supposed to know, huh? Damn stupid people. They think I’m gonna move, they got another think-a-dink coming. Tryin’ to scare an old lady in her golden years. That’s just mean.”
“Why aren’t you in a hotel?”
“They let me keep my per diem—don’t mind if I do—if I stayed here. Don’t need niggers going through my suitcase when I’m in the shower.”
Hemingway closed her eyes, wondering where they made people like this. “We’re here to look at your son’s apartment,” she said, trying not to sound angry.
The old woman’s mouth pursed up, reprising its role as a furry sphincter. “I already told you people. I ain’t been down there in years. Can’t get there through the house—he had it locked up like the floor was paved in gold or somethin’.” And with that she slammed the door.
They turned and headed around to the basement entrance. On the bottom step Phelps leaned over and said, “I know hit men got bigger hearts than her.”
What could she say to that? She had hunted these men long enough to know that for the most part monsters weren’t born, they were made; it didn’t take a lot of imagination to see how Deacon’s mother could be worked into the flowchart.
Hemingway punched her code into the lock box, took out the big ring of keys, and opened the door—Phelps’s entry shots were now repaired with a neat plywood patch fitted with new locks. They stepped under the bright yellow X of police tape into the gloom of Trevor Deacon’s lair.
Just below the scent of disinfectant and ammonia was the stench of death and misery. It felt like a living presence. It wasn’t the way Deacon met his demise—being sawn apart in his own bed—that rippled across the pond of her conscience; no, it was the thought of the children he had taken apart down here that made the place feel like a dark corner of the underworld.
They didn’t know what they were looking for, only that it might be here, hidden in the gloom. The boys were tied to the clinic—which would probably be enough. But they still had a long way to go, and until it came together, they had to run down everything they had. And right now that meant Trevor Deacon’s world.
She flicked on all the lights and even without Deacon’s parts neatly displayed on the teak wall unit a feeling of sadness seemed to emanate from the very pores of the dwelling. It was difficult to imagine any happiness in this room. She couldn’t picture anyone laughing or watching old movies or throwing birthday parties. But misery and mutilation and screams and loneliness were no stretch at all.
Hemingway laid the initial crime-scene photographs out on the table and they each took half, Phelps the kitchen/living room, Hemingway the bedroom and garage. The metal bed frame was still there, stripped down to the springs. It had once been a glossy white but was now a chipped dirty gray that cried rust at the rivets. She stood in the doorway and opened up her mind, willing herself into Trevor Deacon’s headspace. It wasn’t profiling or channeling or any of the populist ideas of how a detective worked, it was merely an effort to understand the man’s thoughts and how he had acted on them. If she could see who he had been, she might get a line on his killer.
She stood at the foot of the bed and reached out, touching her fingertips to the cold metal. This was where Deacon had ended his time. The four main posts were scarred and scratched and she remembered the padlocks and lengths of chain in the garage, hanging on big spiral spikes.
She wondered how many children had been in this room. And as much as she wished the bed could talk to her, she was grateful for its silence; she wasn’t sure she could handle the things it had witnessed.
There were the children they knew of back in the medical examiner’s office. But how many had been erased from the planet? How many would never be put to rest? They would remain ten-year-olds forever, grinning out from photographs on mantels and nightstands and websites for parents who hoped that they were out there somewhere. Lost, maybe, but alive. Growing up calling someone else Mommy. Not disassembled in a garage in Astoria.
What had Deacon done with their bodies? The forensics team had gone through the property with every available technology and found nothing. There was no backyard, the foundation had been scanned and there were no bodies set in the concrete. They had interviewed Deacon’s coworkers and no one knew a thing about him. He hadn’t owned a car in years and the neighbors said they never really saw him around much. He went to work, came home late, never spoke to anyone. It would take months, at least, to figure out how he had snatched the kids, where he had snatched them, why he had snatched them. But that shit could wait. What they needed right now was to find out who had killed him.
Other than the bed, the only furniture was a dresser that contained clothing and the two camera lenses Linderer had catalogued. They were hidden behind the shirts in the bottom drawer.
She pulled them out—both were Nikon telephoto lenses. One was a massive 500 mm affair that looked like the barrel assembly of a howitzer and the other was smaller but only marginally so. She was familiar with photography equipment and the lenses looked like the ones Daniel was always packing and unpacking for work. She dialed his number.
“Hey, baby,” he answered. “All good?”
“Yeah. Look, can you tell me the price of a couple of lenses?”
“Maybe.”