by Robert Pobi
“Right here,” Hemingway said.
Delaney spun the dial down to real time and the seconds began ticking off in a familiar beat. A child approached one of the doors.
“That’s the staircase between the main deck and the saloon deck—the same one Detective Phelps went down—the same one we’ve been using.”
It was a boy. Dark brown hair, dark school jacket, light—probably white—shirt, school tie. He had a knapsack over his shoulder.
“That’s the victim,” Hemingway said.
Marcus moved closer to the screen, trying to see into the past.
The boy hunched in front of the door for a few seconds, his back to the camera, the knapsack jostling back and forth as he worked his hands. After a few seconds he put his shoulder to the door, turned the handle, and pushed into the staircase.
Delaney spun the knob and the clock began fast-forwarding again.
Eleven minutes later the boy was back at the same place and he entered the same door again. This time he wasn’t carrying his knapsack.
Marcus held up his hand. “He went back up, then down again?”
Delaney pointed to a schematic. “There are some small grates at the end of the downstairs corridor here and here that lead to a pipe that runs up to an emergency hatch where the cars used to park before those terrorist assholes brought a war down on our asses. The hatches open up here and here. He had to have used one of them as a passage.”
“And his killer?” Marcus asked.
Hemingway shook her head and went back to the monitors. “You can’t open the escape hatch from the outside. Linderer said one of the hatches was opened—they aren’t picked up by any of the surveillance cameras and they’re not wired into any alarms because they can only be opened from belowdecks—MTA personnel only. We have the boy coming onto the ferry once, going through that door twice.”
Marcus shifted his gaze to the schematics. “And you don’t see his killer go down there at any point?”
“Like I said,” Hemingway offered in what sounded like a defense to her. “A ghost.”
The medical examiner stared at the screen for a few moments. “And we know it wasn’t anyone on the crew.” His people had black-lighted the staff and hadn’t found a single trace of genetic material—whoever had taken that child apart would have lit up like phosphorescent plankton. And no one had been out of sight of the cameras long enough to have made the mess they were cleaning up downstairs.
It was Delaney who spoke. “None of my guys have records—as MTA employees they’ve had their assholes—excuse my French,” he said sideways to Hemingway, “X-rayed. They’re on camera all morning. They’re good.”
Hemingway waved it away. They were back to ghost.
Phelps pointed at the screen again. “Nowhere do we see anyone going in any of the access points to get to the basement. No one went through any of those doors. No one went down that corridor today.”
Marcus shifted and a bead of sweat on his forehead shook loose and rolled down behind his glasses. He scooped it out of his socket with a finger that had just been probing a mutilated child, blinked, then squinted like a cartoon character.
“Carson will take apart all the footage that the MTA has for the past three days, to see if anything’s been doctored.”
Delaney shook his head. “That means they’d have to get by my people. And our surveillance system isn’t online, it’s autonomous. It ain’t us. That video hasn’t been touched. But knock yourself out.”
“We have one crescent of blood downstairs. Looks like a size ten or ten and a half man’s leather-soled shoe.”
The same as the two back at the Deacon house, on both sides of a door guarded by a giant spider. “Anything different?”
Marcus looked down at Delaney who nodded his head. “I know, below my pay grade.” He disappeared.
“I can’t tell if the anesthetic was administered through either of the eyes for obvious reasons, but he’s added a new tool to his repertoire.”
“Which is?”
Marcus shrugged. “I won’t know till I scope some metal I found in the spinal column, but it looks like a chisel. Probably driven by a hammer.”
They still hadn’t identified the victim. They had his school tie and Papandreou and Lincoln were running that down. The boy went to—or at least had a tie from—St. Mark’s School for Boys on the Upper East Side. They’d start with the list of patient names they had culled from the Brayton/Selmer files. From there they’d narrow it down to a student at St. Mark’s. But they’d have to rely on DNA for the final say-so. They couldn’t get an ID based on a photo of the remains—there was no legal way they could show pictures of this boy to anyone. And if they did, it wouldn’t do any good; it was impossible to identify a child without a face.
“We gotta go.” It was too hot in here and this wasn’t even movement, let alone action.
On the way out they said goodbye to Delaney and thanked him for his help. Cards were exchanged, promises to phone if anything new was discovered were made, and the two cops headed for the staircase that led out to the terminal.
As they passed the ramp, Hemingway saw the guys from the medical examiner’s office rolling the too-big stretcher over the painted boilerplate. It didn’t look like there was anything under the plastic.
Hemingway and Phelps headed to the police boat. The air felt as oppressive as it had down in the basement with the dead child and she wondered if a trip on the water would help cool her off or make her feel worse. One thing was certain, the empty stomach was no longer agreeing with her. She looked up at the sky, wondering when it was going to let go again.
When they hit the steps down to the police Zodiac, Phelps stopped and turned back to her. “You do whatever you feel is the right decision. And I promise no one will think any different of you.” Meaning: me. “Just make the right long-term decision, not the easy short-term one. And if that means you need a place to stay if it comes to that—me and Maggie got the guest suite out back. You can stay—for a reasonable rent—as long as you want. Babies. No babies. It’s all the same to me.”
She stared at him for a second, and realized that was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to her. “Thanks for worrying, Jon.” Code for I love you back. “Now let’s go get some food.”
“You know, for a lady, you sure can eat.”
“I get that a lot.”
||| SIXTY
THEY WERE drilling through the Brayton/Selmer patient list. One call after another. Alphabetically. Some people were home. Some weren’t. Black-and-whites had been sent out. The parents they reached had initial reactions ranging from horror to disbelief yet were all tinted with the same underlying timbre of fear.
Two parents had directed them to their legal representation and hung up. Hemingway was on her eighth family—the parents of Casey Dorf.
“The Dorf residence.”
“This is Detective Alexandra Hemingway of the NYPD, may I please speak with Mrs. Angela Dorf?” They always started with the mother—it was only a matter of statistics until they came across a couple where the father had no idea he wasn’t the child’s biological parent.
A pause.
“This is Mrs. Dorf.” The tone was suspicious.
“Mrs. Dorf, I need to talk to you about a very private matter and I need to make an appointment for a pair of local officers to come around and talk to you in person. Until that can happen, there are some things I need to warn you about. Are you in a position to speak freely?”
“Yes.” Still suspicious. Maybe even more so.
“I need to talk to you about your daughter.”
In a farmhouse somewhere in Connecticut, Mrs. Dorf gasped.
“Where is she right now?”
There was a long pause. “She’s dead, Detective Hemingway. She died last summer.”
“I’m, I’m sorry.”
“Yes. Well. Of course you are.”
“May I ask what happened?”
“Casey fell on the pla
yground. Middle of the afternoon. Lots of children around. She was there and then she wasn’t.” And the tone of her voice said that the conversation was over. She hung up.
Hemingway wrote the word deceased beside the Dorfs’ name. She lifted her head to find Phelps staring at her. He had a phone in his hand and his finger was on the cradle. “The Everetts’ child, Tanya, died last year. Drowned at the beach in Greece—middle of the day.”
Hemingway stared at him. It hit them simultaneously.
They rifled through Brayton’s folders, looking for the same page in each. It took the better part of five minutes and when they were done, they went down the list pregnancy by pregnancy.
Of the sixty-seven children, there were fifty-nine boys and eight girls.
Two of the girls—a full twenty-five percent—were dead. Which was either a remarkable coincidence or a red flag.
It took Hemingway five more minutes to locate the next patient on the list, the mother of Stephanie Gordon. She had moved a few blocks down Fifth Avenue.
Hemingway asked to speak to Mrs. Gordon.
After a full minute of waiting, there was the sound of high heels on marble and Mrs. Gordon answered.
Hemingway introduced herself, then asked Mrs. Gordon about Stephanie.
There was the sound of a single deep breath, then Mrs. Gordon said, “My daughter is dead, Detective.”
“I’m very sorry.” She paused—the next part felt cruel. “May I ask what happened?”
There was another pause. “She was at a playdate with some other children. At the park—”
Hemingway didn’t have to hear the last part to know what it was going to be.
“—in the middle of the day.”
She thanked Mrs. Gordon and hung up.
Three out of the eight girls were dead. This was something much, much grimmer than bad luck.
She wrote the word deceased beside Stephanie Gordon’s name before picking up the phone to call the mother of the next girl on the list.
||| SIXTY-ONE
THE BOY they had found on the ferry was named Zachary Simmons. He had been a brilliant painter. He was scheduled to start studies at the Sorbonne in mid-July, which would have been his tenth birthday.
Phelps and Hemingway suited up in silence, far too familiar with the routine of talking to the parents of dead children.
||| SIXTY-TWO
THE SUN had crawled below the skyline to the west. The air still felt like fluid and everything glistened but the rain had not come down. The offices were still sinister and if the garbage cans suddenly burst into flames, no one would have been surprised. It felt like hell. With bad coffee.
After talking to Zachary Simmons’s mother, they had come back to the precinct, loaded up on coffee, and gone after the patients who had had baby girls.
Hemingway made the calls—a woman was less threatening than a man. At least that was the theory. She was met with anger, bewilderment, and hysteria.
They had the eight names up on the board.
They stood in front of it for a few moments, taking it in.
They now had another commonality: all of the female children from Brayton’s files were dead.
Eight little girls had stopped being alive at some point last year.
All had died in freak accidents.
In most of the deaths there were dozens of witnesses.
Not one of the mothers so much as hinted at a suspicion of foul play; the general consensus was the old wrong place, wrong time catchall.
Casey Dorf: fell on a playground and died in the hospital two days later—June 24.
Tanya Everett: drowned while swimming at a beach in Greece—August 20.
Stephanie Gordon: fell off her bike in Central Park and broke her neck—July 22.
Cynthia LaColle: fell off her bike on the East Side Esplanade, driving her jaw up into her brain—May 27.
Belinda Marsh: fell off a swing, landed on a bolt that secured the iron base to the ground and it speared her in the throat; she bled to death in front of her mother—Sept 2.
Heidi Morrison: fell off the subway platform in front of a train—August 5.
Tiffany Rostovich: drowned in the bathtub at home—June 10.
Pamela Zager: died of an apparent heart attack in her sleep—July 8.
Hemingway took out her pen and began a new page on her legal pad, arranging the deaths chronologically. “With the exception of Tanya Everett—who died fifteen days after Heidi Morrison, but thirteen before Belinda Marsh—these girls died exactly two weeks apart from one another.”
“And then there were none,” Phelps said.
||| SIXTY-THREE
HIS FATHER stood at the window, his eye fastened to the antique brass telescope, watching the birds in Central Park across the street. The only time his father seemed at peace was when he watched his beloved birds. He barely moved. Barely breathed. Barely seemed there at all. He could be found here every night, scanning the foliage for rare taxa.
What was it about them that fascinated him?
Like the birds he hunted, Benjamin’s father was anomalous to the general population. Even in the world of academia, where eccentrics were the norm rather than the exception, his father was misplaced. He couldn’t help his physical appearance—a car accident before Benjamin had been born had crushed parts of his spine and done irreparable damage. He walked with a pronounced, stooped-over gait that made him look like one of his avian subjects. Some of the boys at school laughed at his father, but that was to be expected from people who couldn’t grasp the concept of fractions. Things would be better at Harvard. Hopefully.
Their apartment was unlike the home of any of the other children he went to school with. Whereas their parents decorated with porcelain vases, bronze busts, and modern art, his father had filled the house with glass-cased birds. Most of the boys he knew had stopped coming over because his house was simply “too weird,” as they put it. It wasn’t as if he had a lot in common with these boys in the first place, but it was interesting to interact with people his own age. Even if they couldn’t read Homer in the original.
His father slowly swung the scope around, looking for wildlife where it shouldn’t be. Sure, the park was filled with trees and grass and water, but it was artificial; everything was primped and manicured to within an inch of its life. Why would birds gravitate to the park when a ten-minute flight could carry them clear of the concrete landscape and put them in real nature? Maybe that was the origin of the expression “birdbrained,” because they sure didn’t seem to use their heads.
A few weeks back Scientific American had published an article comparing Benjamin to William James Sidis, the youngest child prodigy ever to be accepted to Harvard; Benjamin was younger than Sidis by a whole year.
He was also a lot smarter.
Benjamin was special. His father had always told him so. Which was why he loved him so much.
And Benjamin wanted nothing more than for him to stop.
||| SIXTY-FOUR
HEMI FINALLY found Brayton. He had thrown a rope over a pipe in the basement of a rented apartment in Helsinki some eight months back. No note. No life insurance.
The body had been cremated.
Brayton’s last employer had been a traveling clinic that served Lapland. The head doctor, Mika Jula, said that Brayton had been exemplary and wondered why he had chosen to work for so little when his skills would obviously be much more valuable elsewhere.
Jula had agreed to send a copy of the death certificate to Hemingway, and stressed that he wished there was more to share about Brayton.
Hemingway got off the phone and stared at Phelps. “Brayton’s dead. Has been for months.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. Shit. I’m hungry.”
Phelps got up and started to put on his jacket. “Why am I the one always getting the food?”
Hemingway tapped her index finger to her temple. “Because I do all the thinking.”
———
; While Phelps was out hunting down more coffee and food, Hemingway called Marcus at home. She filled him in on Brayton then moved on to the eight dead girls. Lincoln and Papandreou were at the far end of the office, making calls to parents of the boys on the list.
She spent ten minutes laying out what she probably could have done in five—but she wanted no misunderstandings. When she asked him to start an inquest he didn’t pause, didn’t start any of the usual pissing contest conniptions he tended to do simply because he could; he just listened patiently. When she was done he asked if she’d send her notes over. He would need the night and some of the next morning to get his ducks in a row.
Hemingway understood: he’d have to mobilize massive amounts of manpower to open the deaths of these girls. Eight court orders. Eight sets of grieving, and not necessarily rational, parents. The newspapers. The injunctions. The scrutiny. Overnight seemed more than reasonable, it seemed like a gift.
Hemingway was not naive; Marcus also needed this mess behind him as soon as possible. The CSI effect had already gripped the talking heads and everyone was yakking about carpet fibers and DNA and all kinds of fancy shit they knew nothing about. People wanted answers; in lieu of answers, media-driven public opinion would accept scapegoats. His detractors were already spewing stupidity on the television, newspapers, and Internet. Marcus wanted this gone as much as she did.
There was no challenge in convincing him the girls hadn’t died in random accidents. By the third girl he was a silent presence on the end of the line. And this didn’t fit the MO of the ghost with the hypodermic and saw who had added a hammer and chisel to his toolbox.
He figured out the timeline as fast as she had.
“There were sixty-seven successful pregnancies in Brayton’s files from the donor. We’ve lost four boys plus the Grant boy’s driver, Dr. Selmer, and the eight girls.”
“And the inimitable Trevor Deacon.”
“Yeah. Deacon. I better get back to work. Call if you need anything, I’ll be here all night.”