by Robert Pobi
“Nice to see you both again, detectives.” If an electric fence had a voice, it would have sounded like her.
Phelps had the honor of handing over the sheaf of warrants the DA had secured, the only positive consequence of the death of Dr. Michael Selmer. Fenton didn’t bother to look at them, she just handed them back to the lawyers.
Hemingway stepped into character. “Mrs. Fenton, Dr. Michael Selmer was murdered an hour ago. Someone cut his throat.”
Fenton’s expression twitched for a second, then snapped back to its former impassivity. “I didn’t know.”
Hemingway nodded at the warrants the lawyers were flipping through. “Those warrants entitle us to any and all computers, cell phones, fax machines, tablets, and other electronic devices that may have been used by Dr. Michael Selmer in the past twenty-four hours. We are also entitled to a list of any and all phone numbers that he may have used in this building within the same period, including fax numbers. The failure of anyone employed by this clinic to follow directives issued from any of our people will result in the charge of obstructing an investigation. Mrs. Fenton, would you please have someone show us to Dr. Selmer’s office?”
Fenton stared up at Hemingway for a moment and her face had that same flat expression. Then she turned back to the wall of legal advice. They shook their heads in unison, and for a second it looked like the security men would break into a gruff harmony. Fenton rotated her gaze back up to Hemingway. “Please follow me,” she said.
||| FORTY-EIGHT
IT WAS well past supper and the precinct was set to its usual voltage in the ever-present battle of good versus evil. Once the rainstorm had finished throwing its tantrum, the heat had come back, baking the streets and sucking the rain back into the atmosphere. Before the puddles had gone, it was hotter and more humid than before the cloudburst. The air-conditioning did its best but the computer lab was stifling, the heat magnified by the red-hot processors humming within the server towers. There seemed to be a thousand little plastic fans spitting out air and even the Iron Giant looked irritated.
Alan Carson—the senior analyst from the cybercrimes division and the brains of their IT lab—had gone to work on Selmer’s off-the-shelf encryption software. The clinic had provided all of the doctor’s passwords but he had added a few of his own and it was chewing up time. Carson kept knocking back Yoo-hoos and throwing more horsepower at the problem.
Hemingway hated reducing anyone to a stereotype but there was no other way to look at the man. He was probably the same age as her—somewhere in the tail end of his thirties—but everything about him said teenager, from his black Chuck Taylors to his silly T-shirts. Probably had a doll collection at home—only he’d call them action figures. But he was good at his job—gifted, even—and never threw around any of the macho bullshit like some of the other cops. Besides, she got an admitted kick out of the crush he had on her. It was nice to cash in on free ice coffees every now and then. And the guy always remembered the sugar.
One of Carson’s minions had hooked Dr. Selmer’s hard drives up to a server. This computational life-support system was one of more than sixty such setups in the lab—now the second most well-funded sector in the department.
The goal was to retrace the doctor’s last few virtual hours on the planet, an exercise that in the new digital world was usually more productive than retracing real-world hours. They had his phone records—both office and cellular—and Phelps and Hemingway were going over the list, running each number through the system and marrying it to a name.
Would someone he had called turn out to be the killer?
Until they knew, they’d keep digging into the patient files. That was the pressure point—everything met there. Somehow.
Between the time he had been dropped off and his final run-in with a razor-sharp piece of steel, Selmer had been a busy man. He made a total of one hundred and three phone calls. Of those, sixty-six were to residences in Manhattan, eleven were to directory assistance, and twenty-six were to out-of-state numbers, including three to Italy, two to Sweden, four to Australia and one to Mexico.
Hemingway went over the column of calls, short-listing anyone who was within driving distance of the clinic. The closer they got to Selmer’s time of death, the shorter the distance had to be. There was still a chance that the killer wasn’t any of these people but when you had nothing else to go on, you went with anything you could.
Carson punched the desk and howled, “Motherfucker!”
Phelps asked, “Motherfucker good or motherfucker bad?”
Carson flicked the screen. “I’ve cracked his off-the-shelf encryption. What do you want?”
Hemingway took up position over Carson’s shoulder. “Start with the donor: bring up Tyler Rochester, Bobby Grant and Nigel Matheson’s files.” Her shirt was stuck to her body and the air held the hot oil smell of a tool shed. It was stiffling; how did Carson take this, day in, day out?
Carson clicked through the system, rapidly opening and closing fields. It took a few clicks for him to figure out how the patient files were organized but once he had it he went straight to Tyler Rochester’s file. “Here you are. Donor 2309432. Guy was a Scandinavian atheist,” Carson said.
At any other time, Hemingway would have smiled—for now, the reflex was turned off. “Check Bobby Grant’s file.”
Carson clicked around until he had the information up on the screen. “Here you go. Just like the Rochester kid. Another Nordic atheist and—” Carson pointed at the donor number: 4022393. “If they had the same father, how is that possible?”
Hemingway commandeered the mouse and clicked through to Nigel Matheson’s file, reading the attributes of his donor: 3249023. “This guy came with the same options.”
“He’s a man, not a BMW,” Phelps said.
Hemingway looked over at him. “This is marketed by men for women—trust me, there are options.”
“You’re a cynic,” Phelps said.
She clicked around the page. “Height: six one; weight: a hundred and eighty-two pounds; hair color: brown; eye color: brown; complexion . . . blah . . . blah . . . blah. Here we go—religion: atheist; ethnicity: Scottish/Swedish; education level: PhD; area of study: medicine/biology; blood type: O positive; CMV status: negative; pregnancies: n/a; accumulated number of pregnancies: n/a; IQ: Stanford-Binet (version five) score of one hundred and seventy-one.” Hemingway turned to Phelps. “Still think these aren’t options? And they’re identical to the Rochester kid’s.” She nodded at the screen. “The donor number might be different but the rest of the information is identical. What do you make of that?”
“If it’s the same donor, why give him different numbers?” Phelps sounded frustrated.
“Look at the donor numbers—they’re all seven digits and they all contain zero, two, two, three, three, four and nine. Which is different,” she said, and negotiated to a random file, “than the other donor numbers the clinic used—they are ten digits long. Didn’t you see that when you were flipping through?”
Carson looked embarrassed. “I must have missed that.”
“Why would he do that?” Phelps asked.
“He wanted people to think they were different donors.”
“So what do we do?” Phelps asked. “If he lied about the donor identity, how can we find other children with the same donor?”
Carson raised his hand. “That’s easy. I just enter the search parameters using the profile values that are specific—how many six foot one, hundred-and-eighty-two pound brown-eyed Scottish/Swedish atheists with a PhD in medicine and biology who have O positive blood and an IQ of one seventy-one can they have in the database? And I make sure the donor numbers contain those seven digits. Here, let me try something.” He took back the mouse, set up a search with the donor’s stats as parameters, and hit enter.
The results were instantaneous. “Here are the kids you’re looking for,” he said, raising his hand for a high five.
They ignored him, both leaning in
to better see the data. After a few awkward seconds Carson lowered his hand. “Right back at ya.”
Hemingway read the screen and shook her head. “Is this wrong?”
Carson ran the search again and the same total came up. “Nope. It’s right. This guy fathered sixty-seven children.”
||| FORTY-NINE
SIXTY-SEVEN SUCCESSFUL pregnancies?” Hemingway asked. “You’re kidding.”
Carson flicked the screen again. “It’s right there.”
The more answers they found, the further they seemed to be from any kind of a solution. From a technical point of view it was progress; from a practical standpoint it was more work.
It was Phelps who spoke up. “It’s actually very common. Fertility clinics are not subject to any kind of demographic responsibility. There have been multiple cases where kids who are dating find out they are related. Some donors father hundreds of children and usually in the same neighborhood—almost always in the same city. The Scandinavian countries have limited the number of times a doctor can use a specific donor in any given year. The UK is thinking about legislation.”
Carson stared at him, his mouth open.
“Discovery Channel,” he offered. “I started watching for Shark Week and it kind of became a habit. Ask me about Stonehenge.”
“Or the Bloomsbury Group,” Hemingway added.
Phelps shook his head. “You’re mean.”
She kept her eyes locked on the list of successful pregnancies. “And this should be criminal.”
It was Carson who spoke. “Why? Look at this guy. Six one, PhD in medicine, Scandinavian, athletic, high IQ. Flip through their catalogue and I’ll bet he comes with fucking cup holders and clear coat.”
“Where’s his name?”
Carson shrugged. “This is his donor profile, my guess is this is the preliminary stuff when you’re trying to make a decision on which model to download. If you like what you read, it’s probably on to . . .” He clicked around until he was back in the main directory then ran a search. “There’s nothing on this guy in the system.” He ran all the different donor numbers through the database. “Nada.”
Phelps started up with his Discovery Channel education. “There should also be a profile detailing his hobbies, favorite food, allergies, medical background, and other assorted shit.”
Carson smiled. “I’m sure that’s exactly how it is worded on their website: check out your donor’s food allergies and other assorted shit.”
And then Hemingway had another of her lightbulb moments. “It’s him.”
“Him? Him who, him?”
“Brayton. Jesus, just think about it. You guys are men. If you needed sperm, where’s the first place you’d go to get it?”
Phelps closed his eyes and shook his head. Carson blushed.
“That’s right. You’ve got your own dispenser.” She went to the worktable and pulled Brayton’s file out of a banker’s box she had lugged over from the squad room. She read off her notes. “Height’s right. Weight’s right. Brown hair, brown eyes—check. Scottish-Swedish—mother’s name was Lindenberg—and Brayton could be Scottish. PhD in biology? Check. Very smart? Check. Like I said, options.” She leaned forward, her face a few inches from the monitor, as if trying to smell out meaning in the lines of information. “Get me the names of all sixty-seven of this guy’s children. If we don’t figure this out soon, this is nothing more than a hunting list.”
Carson wiped his palms on his thighs and reached for the keyboard. “You know, for a woman you can be pretty grim.”
“I get that a lot.”
||| FIFTY
HEMINGWAY AND Phelps were on their way to visit the first family on their list—the Atchisons, parents of a ten-year-old boy named William. They lived on the Upper East Side.
Hemingway was calling Daniel to tell him not to expect her home. There were things they had to talk about and she didn’t want him to think she was avoiding him.
He answered immediately. “Hey, babe.”
“Hey yourself, Mr. Man. What’s what?”
“Your sister’s here.” There was a pause. “She said you told her to come by.”
Hemingway mouthed the word fuck without saying it out loud. “I might have.”
“Yeah, well . . .” He let his voice trail off and she knew Amy was within earshot.
“She’s with you now, right?”
“What are you, a detective?”
“Has she started drinking yet?”
“Yet?”
“I’m sorry, baby. She called me from the train, said she was checking into the Plaza. I told her to come by and she said she’d rather be at the hotel. I thought we had worked it all out.”
“Yeah, sure.” He didn’t sound angry, just unhappy. The last time they had seen one another she called him a fag and a peasant, in that order. She had been pretty drunk and didn’t remember it when Hemingway called her the next day but the damage had been done—Daniel had been raised with the belief that there was no greater sin than being a bad drunk. “I made the guest bed up for her. She told me that was quaint.”
Hemingway flinched. Daniel had stayed as far away as he could from her family’s money, and her sister took a spiteful joy in pointing out the financial shortcomings of their lives compared to hers. Not that Daniel gave a shit about money, but he hated being insulted—for all his Bohemian artsy fartsy weed-smoking patience he was still a proud man. That Daniel hadn’t thrown her out was yet another testament to his goodness. “Sorry, baby. Can you take it for tonight? I don’t know when I’ll get back. If at all.”
“That case? The one with the camera lenses you called me about?”
“Yeah. Can you cover for me? Be charming and shit.”
“I won’t be her punching bag.” There was a pause on the other end of the line that ended with a deep breath and, “Okay. Sure.”
“Thanks. I only have one sister.”
“That’s more than enough.”
“You’re a good man.”
“You mean I’m a pushover.”
“No. I mean you’re a good man. Did you have plans for tonight?”
“Iggy has a gig downtown and I was going to head out with Matty to take some photos but that’s kind of changed now.”
“Go. Work. Have fun. She’ll be fine by herself. Give her the spare key. We have lives to live, bills to pay. Get drunk, stay out all night, and keep your hands off the wimmens.”
He laughed. “There ain’t no wimmens but you, Allie.”
Why did she hate it when her family called her that but loved it when it came from him? “Later, baby.”
“Later,” he said, and hung up.
She slipped the phone into her jacket pocket, and Phelps said, “Tell me, Hemi, how the hell does a guy like Brayton just disappear? He’s making—what?—seven figures a year? Guy like that only disappears if he wants to disappear.”
“You think he’s hiding?”
Phelps shrugged. “Could be. If he’s the donor, and if Fenton found out, I can see the logic in the decision. Would you want her on your ass? He’s probably vacationing at Lake Vostok.” When she looked over at him he said, “Discovery Channel.”
If Brayton had indeed crossed all the lines they suspected—and Fenton found out—she would be a force to fear. “Think she has the balls to put him away?”
“Nothing would surprise me about that woman.”
Her phone rang and she answered in typical Pavlovian form. “Hemingway.”
“Detective, it’s Dr. Marcus. I’m finished with Michael Selmer’s body.”
“And?”
“He was killed with a right-to-left sweep across his throat. Long, sharp blade. It was thin, so it’s not a hunting or fighting knife. I’d say we’re looking at either a fishing knife or one of those Japanese chef’s knives. Single incision. He would have been unconscious almost immediately.”
“No needle in the eye?”
“The MO matches the Grant boy’s driver to a degree. Somet
hing was removed from the car before your people got to the scene. The surveillance camera from the back door at the clinic showed that he left with a black leather bag—it looked like a Ghurka Express. It wasn’t found in the car and there was a smudge of blood on the backseat, as if something were pulled from the car.”
Selmer had printed up all of his files earlier in the day. There was a good chance that the killer might now have the same information as they did. “Thanks, Marcus. If anything else interesting comes across your table, I’m here.”
“Not me. I’m going home. All work and no sleep makes me a cranky boy.”
“You have any idea what I should be looking for in this guy?”
“Classic psychopath. Disarming. Friendly. Smart as hell. Manipulative and narcissistic. I can’t see anyone with this kind of pathology living a totally normal life. The more murders he gets away with, the more his confidence grows. He is good at this. But he’s running. The more you push, the sloppier he’ll get.”
Hemingway didn’t agree. “I get the feeling he knows exactly what he’s doing; I don’t think we’re pushing him, I think he’s leading us.”
“We’re allowed to have our differences.”
“Keep me informed.” She hung up and the heavy summer smell of the city, that mix of exhaust and baked asphalt and electricity, hit her and took her back to that last summer with Mank.
They had moved in together. Stopped fighting. Things were going well. Or at least less shitty than they had been. She remembered their last night together. They had gone for a walk and ended up at a little Italian place in Morningside. It was good, maybe one of their best nights. They had walked slow, holding hands, ending up in an antique shop that for some reason was still open. Mank bought her those four equestrian portraits, the ones hanging at the top of the stairs. There were fireflies on the way up Amsterdam and Mank carried the paintings under his arm, wrapped in brown paper and twine. They bought a bag of plums from the fruit stand on the corner. They had gone to bed, made love and fallen asleep in a happy sweaty knot.