The Julian Year

by Gregory Lamberson

  “Happy New Year,” Weizak muttered.

  Eight

  Feeling cool wind on her face and vibration beneath her, Rachel opened her eyes.

  A black female paramedic holding the rails of a gurney studied her. “She’s awake.”

  Rachel glimpsed an ambulance parked behind the woman, then the bottom of the overhead movie theater marquee. Sirens provided a steady background ambience.

  Morelli’s grinning face filled her vision. “Hey, partner. Don’t worry. You’re fine.”

  She remembered entering the auditorium. “What happened?”

  “The perp hit you with a fire extinguisher. I guess it’s not your day.”

  She swallowed. “Did you get him?”

  “Yeah, I took care of him.”

  “How long have I been out?”

  “It’s been half an hour, but you’ve come to a couple of times. You don’t remember?”

  Rachel tried to shake her head, but pain blazed through her brain. She raised her hand to touch her head.

  Morelli caught it. “Don’t. Your head is bandaged. You need stitches and you probably have a concussion.”

  Rachel glanced at her hand in Morelli’s. “Are you coming to the hospital?”

  “Try to keep me away. But you know how it is. I have to go back to the station first and fill out my report.” He winked at her. “You go ahead without me.”

  She managed a smile. “Ten-four.”

  The paramedic and her partner, a pale man with red hair and freckles, set the gurney in the street, and the woman opened the ambulance doors. Then they lifted the gurney and slid it into the back of the ambulance. The doors closed and the man sat beside her. “Tell me your name.”

  Instead, she went to sleep.

  “Rosen and Nowak are meeting with the troops right now,” Ruth said. Nowak worked as the Daily Post’s editor in chief.

  “Which doesn’t include us, as usual.” Weizak gestured to the piles of printouts. “Half of these people were murdered. The other half were the murderers, who were killed by police or well-meaning mobs or committed suicide rather than face incarceration.”

  She looked down her glasses at him. “Do I look like an imbecile?”

  “You look marvelous.” He selected two printouts, one in each hand. “Look, High Lord Bop made the list.”

  “Who?”

  “High Lord Bop, one of the founders of hip-hop.”

  “I had it on the tip of my tongue.”

  “Born Ricky Graves on January 1, 1959.”

  “Which pile does he belong in?”

  Weizak clucked his tongue. “It looks like things got a little wild at his birthday bash, which was also a New Year’s Eve party. Three people got killed before police arrived and took the host down in a hail of gunfire.”

  “Happy birthday.”

  Weizak chewed on the inside of his mouth. “It was my birthday yesterday.”

  “You don’t say? Happy birthday to you too. I’m glad you behaved yourself and didn’t get shot.”

  He looked at the printout in his other hand. “Sylvia Jorgens, born January 1, 1964.”

  “Was she a rapper too?”

  “No, she was a piano teacher.” He seized two more printouts. “Charles McBryde, born . . . January 1, 1974. Dante Quispe, January 1, 1980.” He snatched two more printouts. “Julie Lyons, January 1, 1991. Carmen Rodriguez, January 1, 1982.”

  “Get the hell out of here,” Ruth said.

  Weizak exchanged the printouts for fresh replacements. “Jason Nolan, January 1, 1989. Shanya Willis, January 1, 2000.”

  “I know you’re pulling my leg.”

  “Brian Wilcox, January 1, 1977. Sharon Bonet, January 1, 2009. Lalo Perez, January 1, 1988. Miriam Walker, January 1, 1994. Leon Little, January 1, 2000 . . .” He looked at Ruth. “Are you just going to sit there?”

  Gliding her wheeled chair over, Ruth grabbed two printouts. “January 1, 1959. January 1, 1983.” With an incredulous look on her face, she grabbed two more printouts. “January 1, 1998. January 1, 1979. This is impossible.”

  “It’s called a pattern. Every one of these people who snapped was born on New Year’s Day.”

  “This is crazier than crazy.”

  “Crazier than thousands of people flipping their lid over the course of ten hours?”

  Ruth took two printouts from another stack and read them. “May 15 and February 4. There goes your theory.”

  Weizak stood. “Wrong. Those people weren’t killers; they were victims.”

  “We need a larger sampling.”

  “We need arrest reports.” Weizak went to a tall stack of printouts and deposited half of them on Ruth’s desk. “Get busy, lady. We’ve got to hurry if we’re going to make the front page.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  Weizak saw the glare of Ruth’s monitor reflected in her glasses. “What is it?”

  “Reuters just reported a meltdown at the Laguna Verde Nuclear Power Plant in Mexico.”

  Anibal set a cup of coffee on Larry’s desk. “Fresh brewed.”

  “Thanks, dear.” Larry sipped the hot coffee. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve had all the homicides I can handle for one stretch.”

  Anibal sat at his desk. “Yeah? I’ve had all the bitching I can handle.”

  “Oh?”

  “You’re a cop. Act like one. The city needs us.”

  Larry scowled. “You know I’m just blowing off steam.”

  “Your steam is annoying me. There are places I’d rather be too. I got family. I got friends. I got cold beer waiting for me in my refrigerator. You don’t hear me crying.”

  “You’re a machine. You’ve got no feelings.”

  “Fuck you. I’m not a machine. I’m a man. Are you?”

  “I’m all man,” Larry said.

  “Mm-hm. Heads-up.”

  Larry looked over his shoulder as six men entered the squad room wearing identical suits and matching haircuts. He was pretty certain they owned identical sunglasses too. “Wing tips.”

  One of the feds showed his ID to Lugones, who took him into Perry’s office. Perry rose and listened to Lugones and the man. He gave them a perfunctory nod, and Lugones walked the fed out of the office and over to the detectives’ area. The other suits followed.

  “Palmer and Rivera, this is Agent Hipson from Homeland Security. These gentlemen have come to take Konigsberg’s suspect into the great wide yonder.”

  “Keiper?” Larry said. “What’s he got to do with national security?”

  “We’re going to find out,” Hipson said.

  Larry surveyed the stony faces before him. “Where are you taking him?”

  “That’s privileged information.”

  “Come on, Palmer,” Lugones said. “Take them to holding. I’m sure we’ll all be happy to see Keiper go.”

  Larry rose. “I didn’t say I was going to miss the crazy motherfucker. I just want to know where they’re sticking him. This way, boys.”

  Larry and Anibal led the feds out of the squad room, up the rubber-coated stairs, and into the detention area, where a khaki-clad clerk with glasses looked at them.

  Larry gestured at the men. “These guys may look like they’re here for a wedding, but they’re taking custody of one of our guests.”

  Hipson handed the clerk a form. “Wilhelm Keiper belongs to us now.”

  “How nice. I’m sure you’ll enjoy cleaning up after him. He likes to throw poo at the other children.” The clerk pressed a button and a metal door buzzed.

  Larry opened the door, and Anibal led the men inside the holding area, which consisted of ten cells, five on each side.

  Larry moved to the front of the line, outside the cell where Keiper sat alone, his back to the wall. Keiper’s nose had been bandaged and his face wiped clean. “That’s right, you sick son of a bitch. You and I won’t get that chance to play cards after all: you’re leaving us. These well-dressed gentlemen have plans for you.”

  Rising, Keiper grinned.<
br />
  “He doesn’t look so dangerous,” Hipson said.

  “Yeah?” Anibal said. “Look around you.”

  Larry watched the feds take in the two dozen or so men incarcerated in the other cells, who looked away.

  “Most of these guys are real badasses,” Anibal said. “They’re repeat offenders who have done time in lockup before. Yet here they are, cowering like little bitches, all afraid of a skinny, unarmed dude like this who has no record. Why do you think that is? He killed only two people, one of them a woman. I bet half of them did the same thing when they were in high school.”

  Keiper stretched his arms before him so the feds could handcuff him.

  “Yeah, he’s all yours,” Larry said.

  Weizak watched Joe Rosen and Jeff Nowak descend the spiral stairway into the area he shared with Ruth and Byrne.

  Nowak, in his late fifties, had been a newspaperman since delivering papers as a boy and had run some of the most successful dailies in the country. He wore a tie with his shirt but no jacket. “What’s your important news, Weizak? This is the biggest crisis this paper has covered since the merger, and I’m more than a little busy.”

  Weizak gestured to the dusty filing cabinets. “Welcome to Obit Central.”

  “I’ve been here before.”

  “Those are the people who have been killed in the last eleven hours.” Weizak gestured at the stacks of paper. “Approximately half of them were born on January 1.”

  Nowak blinked.

  “Today is the birthday of every person who’s inexplicably turned into a homicidal maniac this same day.”

  “How large is your sample?”

  “Over fifteen hundred, with no deviation from the pattern.”

  “That’s—”

  “Impossible? We have yet to come across the obituary of a single person in this city who flipped his lid today and wasn’t born on January 1.”

  Nowak looked in Ruth’s direction.

  “The man shits you not,” she said.

  “The victims weren’t born today,” Weizak said. “But why would they be?”

  “How many cases haven’t you sampled?”

  “Another seven thousand?”

  Nowak stared hard at the reports. “Start counting.”

  “I think my time would be better spent writing this story.”

  “You report news now, do you?”

  “That’s what my journalism degree from Columbia says. I made the discovery; this is my story. I deserve to write it.” He turned to Ruth. “You understand.”

  Ruth shrugged. “Knock yourself out. It’s not like we split a Lotto ticket or anything.”

  Nowak glanced at Ruth and then Rosen before returning his attention to Weizak. “Is today your birthday too? Because you’ve apparently gone mad. This isn’t a story. It’s a preposterous theory.”

  Weizak snatched a sheet of paper from his desk. “It isn’t a theory that these perfectly ordinary people became killers today on the birthday they share. It’s a fact. And it’s a fact that this phenomenon is occurring all over the world from Peoria to Zimbabwe. For whatever reason—call it astrological, supernatural, or divine intervention—I believe that in the next thirteen hours every single human being on the planet with a birthday today will act on homicidal urges.”

  Nowak measured Weizak for a moment before he burst into laughter. “Oh, you’re wasted down here. You really are. You should have been a science fiction writer.”

  Weizak waited for Nowak to compose himself before speaking again. “Twenty thousand dead people in the boroughs of our fine city can’t be wrong. By my calculations, 3.8 Manhattan residents per minute are becoming homicidal maniacs. That works out to 228 per hour and 5,472 per day. It also works out to 24,657 people in all five boroughs of New York City; 54,794 people across the state; 857,534 people in the United States; and 19,178,082 people around this lovely planet of ours who will have contributed to the single greatest killing spree in the history of mankind. It’s like some massive invasion from outer space without the mother ships.”

  Nowak snorted like a bull. “That’s insane.”

  “I made these calculations with an old beat-up adding machine. I guarantee that government agencies around the world have already reached this same conclusion and are debating when to release this news to the public.”

  Weizak moved closer to his superior. “You’re obviously running a second edition today. Well, this is your chance to break the biggest story to see print since the invention of the printing press. This story needs to be told. It’s too colossal to be covered up, downplayed, or misdirected. It will be told so let’s be the ones to break it. Let me break it. Post it on the website, get the second edition out early, send smoke signals into the sky. Let’s just do this.”

  Nowak eyed Rosen. “What do you think?”

  “If the facts hold up, we have to run the story and give it front-page treatment. But we need to avoid any conjecture whatsoever, or we’ll be guilty of contributing to the chaos.”

  Nowak took a deep breath. “All right, Weizak, you’ve got your chance: write the damned story.” He turned to Rosen. “Get all our fact checkers down here to go through this paperwork and run the numbers. Don’t approve Weizak’s copy until every single birth date has been verified.” Nowak fixed Weizak with a stare. “You’re scaring me.”

  “You think you’re scared now? Wait until midnight. What if the whole thing starts all over tomorrow?”

  Nine

  Morelli handed his report to Lugones and remained standing before the desk. “What do you want me to do now, Lieutenant?”

  Lugones sat back in his chair. “IAB took your gun, right? That’s standard procedure. Go home. That’s SOP too.”

  Morelli looked at the hive of activity in the squad room. “I can’t go home in the middle of all this.”

  “I’d love to take your place.”

  “This is big, bigger than anything that’s ever happened anywhere. I need to help out.”

  “Psych has to make sure you’re okay first. You did kill a man.”

  “To save my partner’s life and my own. I’m not exactly torn up inside.”

  Lugones sighed. “Go grab a desk.”

  Morelli made a show of raising his eyebrows. “You want me to ride a desk for thirty days with everything that’s going on out there?”

  “I’m sure this won’t last for thirty days, and we can use help here too.”

  “But—”

  “You’re not fit for the street until Psych says you are. Go find a desk.”

  As soon as Morelli reached the door he turned around. “Permission to visit Konigsberg at Beth Israel?”

  “You should have taken time off if you wanted to play nursemaid.” Lugones seemed to think better of his decision. “It’s almost lunchtime. Take a long one.”

  “Thanks.” Closing the door behind him, Morelli crossed the squad room to where Sergeant Hauser finished speaking to a uniformed officer Morelli didn’t recognize. “I’m taking lunch. I’ll need a desk when I get back.”

  “Tell Konigsberg I need her back on her feet.”

  “You got it.”

  In the locker room, Morelli pulled out his duffel bag and unzipped it. Making sure no one watched, he slid out his .32 revolver and strapped it around his ankle. No way in hell was he braving the city without a piece.

  Outside, he trotted down the stairs with his hands jammed in his pockets. He had turned in his car keys along with his service revolver, and it was against regulations for him to sign out a new vehicle while riding a desk. Spotting a patrol car idling at the curb, he strode over to it. Terry Sloan rolled down the driver’s side window, and Morelli peered in past him at Ken Meister.

  “What’s up, fellas?” Morelli said.

  Sloan raised a sandwich. “We’re wolfing down a few bites before we go back out. How’s Konigsberg?”

  “I don’t know. The circuits are still busy. I’m going down to Beth Israel now. You think you can give me
a lift?”

  Meister snorted. “Hauser would have our asses if we left the precinct. What’s the matter with your wheels?”

  “I took down the perp who got Konigsberg. That means no gun and no wheels.”

  “You wouldn’t catch me out here without at least a six-shooter.”

  “I know what you mean.” Morelli winked at him.

  “How about we drop you off at Fifty-ninth Street? At least you can catch the express there.”

  “Sounds good to me.” Morelli got into the back of the car. “What time did you guys come on?”

  Sloan steered the car forward. “At 0800, thank God.”

  “Four hours and you didn’t have to use your weapons?”

  Meister checked his watch. “We cornered a perp over on Seventy-seventh Street. Little Vietnamese dude wearing a bow tie. We chased him down into the subway, and the cocksucker jumped in front of an incoming number six. Can you believe it? There was nothing left of him. We got to keep our guns, but we still had to fill out a mountain of paperwork.”

  “That was your morning? You guys have had it easy.”

  “We also nabbed a purse snatcher over by Hunter College, which meant more paperwork,” Sloan said. “The real criminals aren’t sitting on the bench just because law-abiding citizens have gone insane.”

  They drove down Second Avenue. Morelli had never seen the street so quiet.

  “If you ask me, this is just what the doctor ordered.” Meister checked his watch again. “A little population control. White, black, brown, yellow—let God sort them out.”

  “Spoken like a true believer,” Sloan said, disdain clear in his voice.

  “You think this isn’t God’s wrath? This is God’s fucking wrath; it has to be. I hear that over a million people have been killed around the world since midnight.”

  “I heard it’s more like two million,” Sloan said.

  I heard it’s more like four, Morelli thought. “There’s a protest going on in Union Square.”

  “Protest against what?” Sloan said. “Against who?”