Feast of Shadows, #1

by Rick Wayne

  I pointed with my thumb back toward the office. “Tucker spent ten days lecturing sixth graders about pertussis.”

  “It wasn’t only about pertussis.”

  “He got a buncha ‘attaboys.’ Not an interrogation.”

  “Tucker’s smart enough to know the commissioner wants ammunition in the public relations fight with the anti-vaxxers. Public school outreach makes a nice feel-good story for the papers.”

  “Tucker’s dad is a professor at Johns Hopkins,” I said. “And a former chair of the Association.”

  Oliver snorted.

  “Okay.” He raised his hands. “You’re right. About everything. Have at it. Your appointment’s almost up anyway. Your choice. In a couple weeks, you’re Sowell’s problem.”

  The implication was clear: I wouldn’t remain Dr. Sowell’s problem for long.

  “Does that mean I can stop crunching the numbers on the Farm-to-Table Program?” I asked.

  “Christ.” Ollie twisted his face in disgust. “Don’t sound so broken up about it. That one happens to be mine, you know.”

  I got up. “I know.” I smiled.

  He got serious. “Chalmers is gonna give you enough rope to hang yourself. Just don’t hang the rest of us out with you.”

  “Meaning?”

  His chair creaked as he leaned back. “I get it. You see the guys with the pedigrees snatching up all the jobs and you’re wondering where that leaves you. But you’ve been after Chalmers about this thing for, what, five weeks now? In the team meeting. Where notes are kept and emailed out to everyone under the sun. And you berated her into sending out that Health Alert.”

  I squinted. “Isn’t that what it’s for?”

  “Fuck . . . Don’t be so naive. You ever watch the local news?”

  I stood with my hand on the door. “Not if I can help it.”

  “You should. If you’re serious about staying in public health. Local politics lives and dies on two things.” He held up fingers. “Crime. And health. Last year, the department was all over the local outlets for a couple weeks straight after the commissioner yanked an ad campaign, a PSA combating teen pregnancy. Placards at bus stops and subway stations and shit like that.

  “The week before, one of the network affiliates asked for access to the sex worker survey data, which they thought would make a nice nightly lead and salaciously sell some advertising.” He waggled his head with the alliteration. “We said no. It’s confidential, as you know. Two days later, they ran a story critical of the PSA. Swore up and down the two were completely unrelated, that it wasn’t retaliation. Suddenly, we were flooded with calls. The mayor’s office, too. As if no one had noticed the signs plastered all over town until they were on TV.”

  “They probably hadn’t,” I said.

  “Exactly. Manufactured controversy. The NAACP didn’t like it because it made a young black girl the poster child for the issue. The conservatives didn’t like it because not a single ad used the word ‘abstinence.’ The liberals didn’t like it because we didn’t explicitly hold boys accountable. You know whose campaign that was?”

  I shook my head.

  “Chalmers,” he said. “A black woman who put herself through a PhD program while raising two kids. By herself. Didn’t matter.” He leaned over his desk again. “Let’s say you’re right and you find something. New strain of avian flu. Homeless people shitting in the reservoir. Whatever. Everything you collect could be used to suggest that an assistant director of this department repeatedly ignored warnings from her staff about a serious public health threat.” He made quotes in the air.

  I scowled. I let go of the door.

  Waxman saw my face. “Don’t believe me? Okay. Let me spell it out for you. You don’t get to be three rungs down from the mayor of a city this size without making enemies. Get it? There are people out there right now whose full-time job is to find ways of criticizing this administration. That’s it. That’s all they do. Lawyers. PR firms. Political mercenaries. Well-paid, too. And if they can’t find anything, they make shit up. You want a job? Don’t look up one day and find yourself on their side.”

  “So . . . if I find anything, we take it to the boss first and let her run it upstairs.”

  He nodded sagely. “Or into the ground.”

  I looked at the man. At his well-lit comb-over. “What about you?” I asked.

  “What about me?”

  “Anyone every approach you for dirt?”

  “Not me.” He smiled. “I’m straight as an arrow.”

  Tucker was due back that afternoon for a team session, so I skipped the office and went to a diner and asked for a booth at the back. I ordered pie and coffee and flipped through the pictures I’d taken in the grocer’s basement. I looked at the man’s stub of an arm, at his atrophied legs, at the tufts of hair that fell out of his head. I looked at the kids, foreheads together, and of course the old woman. The tips of her fingers were cracked and split. I hadn’t noticed that before. I had been too focused on the gaze, the gaze right through me, as if her ghost were still there. I’d seen that before.

  I rested my chin in my palm and zoomed in. Her nails were frayed. I moved up to the symbol. Then down to the white bag. Someone had put those people in that dungeon, had given them food, and then never came back. Was that because they were already sick? Or did that come later? ICE said the doors were left open. Could someone have gone to retrieve them, found them dead, and fled? Nothing frightens people quite like disease. It’s not rational.

  My pie and coffee came and I closed the photos and called my wife. Video chat. I asked to see my daughter and her big head of frizzy hair. I missed her. I missed her smell. She showed me the picture book she’d been reading with her mother. Something about a cat and a magpie. She showed me one of the pages and explained that the magpie was the black-and-white one and that it was one of the smartest animals in the world. Then she finished her sentence and without pause said “Okay, bye Daddy!” and set the phone down.

  I laughed.

  My wife picked it up. She was smiling, too. But it faded pretty quick. She looked at me.

  “She can’t keep calling here.”

  “I know,” I said, which was to say I knew why Marlene didn’t want her to. In my head I was thinking that my wife only had our daughter to look after and it didn’t seem crazy for her to help with her sick mother-in-law while her husband was out of town. But I didn’t want to argue.

  “I get why you don’t want to tell her about everything,” she said. “But you at least have to talk to her. You can’t keep giving that job to me. It’s not fair.”

  I nodded.

  Mom had been in and out of the hospital for years. She was only 56, but then, that’s what years of drug abuse will do. She swore she was dying each and every time. She was always a lot to deal with. Especially after Cliff left, her third husband. She met him at the casino. They married after a few months and he left her four years later. I wanted to feel sorry for her, and to help, but she made it so damned hard. She was just plain mean. I didn’t mind the awful things she said to me. I was used to it. But my wife . . .

  My mother slapped my daughter’s hand once. Mari was barely old enough to walk. It wasn’t hard, but it made Marlene hella mad. Her mother had been a teacher. As a kid, she didn’t get slapped. She got a “time out.” Marlene tried to be diplomatic, but Mom is so damned sensitive. She immediately got defensive and said some things that are hard to take back.

  Not that she ever tried.

  Half the time Mom was around, I felt like a hostage negotiator. The rest of the time, the hostage. She, on the other hand, had no problems speaking her mind, no matter the damage, and walking out the door like it was no big deal.

  And she’d never talk about my brother.

  “Don’t you say his name!”

  I went to a professional. Briefly. Before my dissertation defense. I thought talking about everything might help with my marriage. He urged me to take care of myself before anything, whi
ch was a nice way of saying I should cut Mom loose, emotionally. I just didn’t know that I could do that. To my own mother. She didn’t have anyone else. Now she was back in the hospital and calling the house every eight hours looking to guilt me into visiting. Or giving her money we didn’t have. And if it wasn’t that, it was crackpot theories about how the government was poisoning us with chemtrails, or the President was a member of the Klan, whatever.

  “Please,” Marlene said from the screen.

  I knew that look. I knew that voice. My phone dinged with the receipt of a new message. ALL CAPS. I had been summoned back to the office for some big announcement.

  I nodded to my wife. “I hear ya. Gotta go. L—” I stopped.

  Almost said it. Out of habit.

  “I’ll talk to you later,” I said.

  I caught a white takeout bag out of the corner of my eye. Two tables down, it sat on its side, its bottom facing me. I walked over and asked if I could see it. The couple at the table looked at me like I was nuts, but they complied.

  Black circle with the letters CE. Sold all over the city apparently. I sighed.

  Strike two.

  My tablet beeped in the darkness, which meant a middle-of-the-night work email. Nothing else was set to give an alarm. I turned to look at the clock. 3:05 AM. I’d been wide awake for at least an hour. I sat up and rubbed my face. I’d left the TV on with no sound. The dancing light helps me sleep. I turned the light on and the TV off and flipped open the cover of my tablet. I thought the message would be from Dr. Chalmers, who was known to work early, but it was from Officer Stacy Montalvo with the NYPD. And there was an attachment. I responded with a quick thanks and said I’d submitted the information request. Technically, that wasn’t true, but I’d make it true later that morning.

  I opened the file and was flipping through the detectives’ notes when my tablet dinged again. Officer Montalvo had responded. She asked what I was doing working so late and provided a link to the online form where I could make an official request for information. She must have checked the system and found it absent.

  Touché, I wrote. Sorry about that. Busy trying to find a nonhuman killer. What’s your excuse?

  The response was quick. Missing girl. What a world, huh?

  The only one we got, I said.

  True. Guess that’s why we do it, right? Hope you find your bug.

  Not a bug. Don’t know what it is actually. Hoping to hear back from the ME soon.

  Good luck!

  That bad?

  I dunno. I know those guys are under a lot of pressure, and they don’t want to get it wrong. Just seems like everything that goes in there slows down.

  Thanks for the heads up. Maybe I should pay them a visit. How old is your girl?

  How’d you know I had a little girl?

  A second email came before I could respond. Duh. Sorry. That’s what I get for working at 4am.

  So how old are they?

  Mine is 8. Vic is 14. You?

  Five. I can’t imagine.

  Me either. Hey, nice talking to you. Home now. Gonna grab a couple hours before my shift. Don’t forget that request!

  It took less than an hour to read everything the police had gathered on Alonso White. Officer Montalvo was right. He was something of a local saint. He’d been written about in the papers a couple times even before his disappearance. The last person to talk to him was a colleague, Cecilia Flynn, with whom he’d organized a protest—or vigil, I guess they called it. He had promised her he would arrive early. When he didn’t, she called to remind him. An hour later, she checked his location through the position-sharing app on his phone. Apparently, his inner circle all had access. When Mrs. Flynn found the signal was no longer broadcasting, she called the police, who responded later that evening.

  “It’s unheard of,” she had told the detectives. “For Alonso to be out of contact.”

  To their credit, they seem to have taken her at her word. They pulled his phone and data records, location history, everything, which confirmed everyone’s description of him as a very busy and well-connected man. In the days before his disappearance, he visited seven churches, four places of business, a hospital, two schools, and nine wealthy residences—the latter in pursuit of funds for his numerous charitable projects. Somewhere in there, he encountered something that made him sick.

  The police had focused on the hours leading up to his disappearance, which made sense. When that turned up nothing of interest, they focused instead on several other lines of inquiry, including a possible revenge motive with an investor that Alonso had accused of misappropriating charitable funds. It was a stretch. The total malfeasance amounted to no more than a couple thousand dollars—not so much direct embezzlement as wastefulness: extravagant dinners and the like. According to witnesses, Alonso never even contemplated filing charges. He simply asked for the money to be paid back. Seemed crazy to me something that small would figure into a man’s disappearance, but people have done worse shit for less, I guess.

  As I went over the documents, I had this sense I was missing something very obvious, that I was staring right at it, in fact. I took a shower and decided to change tack. I didn’t need to find Alonso White. I needed to find what had made him sick. The clock by the bed announced in tall red letters that it was just before 7 AM, and yet, my inbox was already bursting, including requests from two reporters, both marked urgent. I deleted them and emailed Ollie and told him I was going into the field.

  The announcement from the day before, the one that had come in all caps, had been a kind of summons. Everyone in my unit had gathered in the team room the previous afternoon for an impromptu session. The speaker was the assistant commissioner, Dr. Chalmers’ boss, who reminded us that we were not to talk to the media about the five dead bodies in Flushing. Standing rules said we weren’t supposed to talk to the media about anything, of course. All information released to the public had to go through the press office. But there was already enough interest in that case, he had said, to warrant a “special reiteration” of departmental policy. Although he never came right out with it, his speech was peppered with vague legal threats toward anyone who might be thinking of breaking that silence in return for monetary gain. He also mentioned that the FBI had taken over the criminal case from the NYPD, and that we were to share all our findings promptly with them. He said that last part in a way that made me think he actually meant the exact opposite.

  I found a print shop and made copies of Alonso’s schedule before visiting the law office of Cecilia Marie Flynn, esq. The sign on the door said she was a community relations attorney—whatever that is.

  “Thank you for seeing me so early,” I said, following her into a spartan office.

  Her diploma hung proudly in a wide frame over a single potted plant.

  “Yes, well, your call made me very curious.”

  She took her seat behind the desk. There was barely enough room between it and the open door for me to sit, and I had to face her at an angle.

  “What exactly is the Department of Heath’s interest in Alonso?”

  “We have reason to believe his disappearance may have been related to a spate of recent illnesses.”

  “Illnesses?”

  “The police report indicated you were one of the last to see him alive—before he went to the Outreach Clinic.”

  “Outreach? Is that where he was? The police said he was in Jersey.”

  “Was that unusual? For him to go off like that?”

  “Not especially. He was always chasing after one thing or another.”

  “How long had he been feeling ill?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When he showed up at the Outreach Center, before the vigil, he mentioned nausea and fatigue to the staff, and that some of his hair had come out in the shower.”

  “What? He never mentioned that to me.”

  “How did he seem that day? You saw him that morning, correct?”

  “That’s right, a
nd he was fine. Certainly he didn’t seem sick. He even played basketball with some of the schoolchildren. It was just for a few minutes before a meeting with the superintendent, but he didn’t seem tired in the least. He was laughing and joking with them.” She was scowling. “What makes you think he was sick?”

  “Would it have been unlike him to hide something like that?”

  “Well . . .” That seemed to catch her off guard. “I mean, I don’t know. Not usually, no. Alonso didn’t keep secrets.”

  I waited. “But?”

  “I suppose, if he didn’t want to make other people feel like a burden, he might refrain mentioning that he was feeling unwell. He was always trying to do too much. But I just can’t believe he was sick. I would’ve known.”

  “Any idea why he might have driven to Jersey that evening?” His cell phone signal had stopped just off a parkway across the Hudson.

  “As I told the police: No, I have no idea. He was supposed to be on the other side of Manhattan.”

  “In Brooklyn Heights?”

  “That’s correct. At the site of the old Watchtower building. You know it?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Well, we were meeting there to protest. Nonviolently,” she added. “Unlike so many of his generation, Alonso didn’t believe in violence. Of any kind. He didn’t believe it ever actually changed anything. He took his lead from Dr. King.” She paused. “He had the potential to be a great man.”

  “Had?”

  “He’s been missing for almost three weeks, Doctor. Let’s just say I don’t have a lot of hope. What is it he was supposed to have? This illness, I mean.”

  “We’re not sure exactly, but it mimics the effects of chemotherapy.”

  “Chemotherapy?” She sat forward.

  I nodded. “Nausea. Fatigue. Immunosuppression. Hair loss.”

  “Alonso didn’t have cancer.”

  “None of the victims did. Not that we can tell, anyway. They certainly weren’t being treated for it.” I pulled out my papers. “I wonder if you wouldn’t mind taking a look at these for me.”

  She reached for her glasses.