Feast of Shadows, #1

by Rick Wayne

  When I finally called that night, Mom started off well enough, even asked a question or two, but within a couple minutes, it came: the check from the state still wasn’t right and when were they going to fix that? And her doctor wasn’t giving her enough meds for her back and she was going to report him to the state medical board because he was hurting her on purpose because she was Christian and he was a Jew. And what kind of son was I that I hadn’t rushed back to see her as soon as I found out she was in the hospital? My wife was poisoning me against her—and the Lord. Wouldn’t even let her see her own granddaughter. And she had told me all along what a bitch that woman was. On and on.

  By the time it was done, all I wanted was sleep. I had to get up early anyway. Dr. Chalmers had called a big team meeting. The whole unit. I couldn’t be late. Not again. Although, as it turned out, I wished I had been. First thing after everyone quieted down, Dr. Chalmers chewed me a new one. It was short, as those things go, but effective.

  “Did you give a private citizen access to police records?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Then why was Cecilia Flynn on TV last night claiming that you showed a police file to her?”

  “Alonso’s attorney?” I had to think. “I showed her the schedule the police had put together detailing his last movements. I was trying to ascertain—”

  “So in other words, yes, you did show her the file.”

  “I showed her a schedule.”

  “Which came from the file.”

  I didn’t know what to say. The room was utterly silent.

  “She mentioned you by name, Alex. She claims the city is trying to blame that man’s disappearance on a fictional public health threat, that this is all part of a cover up. I got a call from the mayor’s office at 9:00 last night wanting to know why members of my staff were leaking sensitive information to the public.”

  I still didn’t know what to say.

  “You were told to keep everything locked tight. You do remember that, correct?”

  I nodded.

  “So, what are you going to do from now on?”

  “Not reveal anything to members of the public.”

  “What were you trying to do, anyway? What does that man have to do with anything.”

  As I fumbled with an explanation that didn’t make me sound nuts, I realized Oliver was right. I should’ve stayed at the office and written up my theory. Trying to explain it to a room full of skeptics, it sounded crazy. Ridiculous, even. Fair-haired Tucker Davis pointed out from the front row that the hospital report indicated a puncture mark on the boy’s back and that his blood had traces of turpentine and a common chemotherapy cocktail.

  “Chemotherapy?” Oliver scowled.

  “I didn’t think the labs were done,” I said.

  Tucker was so calm. Casual. “Things were blowing up and I could tell you were busy, so I thought I’d run over after work last night.”

  “Very nice of you,” I said.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  He hadn’t told me. He knew damned well I was the lead on the case. He scooped the report anyway. The hospital staff didn’t email me because as far as they knew, they’d already turned the information over to the department.

  No one snickered, but the silence in the room was patent. Here I was babbling on about predatory Amazonian fungus. And the kid had clearly been poisoned.

  I looked to Oliver, but he stayed silent.

  Dr. Chalmers said that since it was a poisoning, the police had jurisdiction, and that at that time, there didn’t seem to be any relation between the little boy and the Chinese immigrants.

  “Or Alonso White,” she added.

  She didn’t say “case closed,” but she may as well have. She was about to go on to the next topic when I interrupted.

  “And what about the woman I found?” I asked. “All of these people with the same unusual symptoms—neutropenia, fungal infection, hair loss. They all show up within weeks of each other, and you’re suggesting that’s just a coincidence?”

  I didn’t mention the symbols.

  “I’m suggesting,” Dr. Chalmers said sternly, “that whatever it is, it’s not a wasp-borne predatory fungus.”

  Now the snickers. Even Ollie looked down to hide his smile.

  “Keep an eye out,” she said reluctantly. “If anything else shows up, we’ll consider reopening.”

  I think she felt a little sorry for me. But she was also making it clear—in front of everyone—that we were done and I wasn’t to work on it anymore. I got the sense that she’d lost a little credibility among her colleagues, like maybe she’d gone to bat for me earlier, after we’d found the bodies in the basement, and I’d screwed it up.

  A couple members of the staff glanced at me to see my reaction. There was no sense in hiding anything. I was angry. Frustrated. But yelling about it on everyone else’s time wouldn’t do any good either. I looked to Ollie—for a hint of hope, I guess. But he was buried in his phone. He leaned back in his chair while looking at the screen and scratched his ample sides. He’d already moved on. We were off the hook, or he was anyway. He liked me well enough, I knew, but he understood that in a couple weeks, I’d be gone, and since he’d neither hired me nor picked me for the program, my misbehavior would have no lasting effects on his career. And now “Alvin” was the NYPD’s problem. Everything was back to normal.

  Dr. Chalmers went on to other business, but I didn’t listen to any of it. I had started down this path for a lot of reasons, none of which seemed to matter anymore. In those kinds of situations, it’s always tempting to start catastrophizing: that not only would I not get a unique paper out of my appointment, that I wouldn’t get any paper out of it; that as a result, I wouldn’t get a job and I’d end up disgraced, just one more PhD working retail.

  I had picked New York. It was my choice. It was understood, once I’d been selected for the program, that I could more or less go where I wanted based on the strength of my work in Africa. But the thing about the Africa trip . . . I was never entirely sure that one of the reasons I’d been allowed to go was the color of my skin. No one ever suggested it was. And I believe I was qualified either way. No one ever suggested I wasn’t. And nothing will change the fact that what we did there saved lives. I’m proud of that.

  But I never felt like it was wholly mine. Or maybe I was just worried other people would think that—the Tuckers of the world—and I wanted something I could hold up and say this . . . this is me. So I picked New York, the largest metro in the country. One of the largest in the world. When I told Dr. Sowell, my supervisor, he looked up briefly over the rim of his glasses before marking it on the paper.

  Later that morning, I was back at my desk crunching numbers on Ollie’s Farm-to-Table program, just as I had been the week before, when I got a text from Dr. Massey.

  ANY LUCK?

  YUP! ALL BAD

  She sent a frowny face.

  WHAT HAPPENED?

  TELL YOU ABOUT IT LATER

  ALONSO FILE TURN UP?

  I’LL CHECK

  And a few minutes later:

  NADA. I’LL CHECK AGAIN

  TOMORROW

  And then after a bit:

  YOU SURE YOU’RE OK?

  I sent a thumbs-up.

  Early that afternoon, I got a call from Ollie’s cell. I didn’t know where he was. Probably in a meeting I hadn’t been invited to. With the rest of the team. None of them were at their desks. I was practically alone in The Pit, just me and a handful of others and that hard line to God.

  I answered and he said two words—with no warning or preface or anything.

  “Boy’s dead.”

  I stopped. “What?”

  He repeated it and my hand dropped.

  “Hello?” I heard Oliver faintly through the speaker. The phone was in my lap. “Alex? Are you there?”

  That wasn’t supposed to happen, I thought. I was supposed to save him.

  “Hello? Alex?”

&nb
sp; I was supposed to save him this time.

  “Yeah.” I took off my glasses. “When?”

  “Two hours ago. I just got the call. Thought you’d want to know.”

  “Yeah. I did. Thanks.”

  A pause. “You alright?” he asked. “You need to talk to one of—”

  “I’m fine. Thanks for calling. Really.” I hung up.

  I put my hands to my eyes and pressed. Hard. I’ve never felt like a bigger failure. Ever. Everything in my life was wrong. And everything that was wrong compounded everything else that was wrong. My marriage was failing. I was probably going to be fired. I’d just been publicly torpedoed by an elitist prick who was probably turning down more job offers than I’d ever get in my life.

  I wasn’t even mad that he did it, I guess. I was mad at myself for not seeing it coming. I was mad at myself for going back to the hotel to call Mom. And I was mad at Marlene for making me. I should’ve followed up with the hospital instead, like I had with Dr. Pratt. But Mom takes everything out of me. I just wanted sleep. Besides, I was sure I was right. Why bother when you already know the answer?

  Except that’s not how science works. Good scientists don’t fall into that trap. And I had. And that’s why I was mad. I felt worthless. Outplayed. Out of my league. Hopeless. Why the hell had I spent eight years in higher education—and all that money, all that debt—if this was the best I could do? Tucker made it seem so goddamned effortless. I was the fake.

  And now a seven-year-old boy was dead.

  Jesus. Seven.

  Everything he coulda been.

  I had to get out of the office. I didn’t care if anyone saw. I didn’t care if Dr. Chalmers called Dr. Sowell that day and I got fired on the spot. Part of me was daring them to.

  Go ahead.

  Make it worse.

  Y’all can’t hurt me.

  Fuckin’ street hustler bullshit. We hit stress and we all fall back to our roots. I was standing chest-to-chest with C-Note Wilson, daring him to punch me so that I could swing back.

  I took the train to a nearby park. I got a genuine New York dog from a sidewalk vendor and sat on a bench. It was getting cooler. The leaves were changing. Everything was changing. What the fuck was I doing? I missed my daughter. My wife. My mom. Not the monster she’d become, but the woman I remembered from my childhood. I missed my little brother—or maybe I missed what he represented: the clarity of family, of having someone to look after, the good feeling you got when you did it right.

  A white raven landed on a branch. I’d never seen a white raven before, but I’d read about them—or about their condition anyway. Most people think they’re albinos, but they’re not. It’s called leucism. Not a loss of pigment but a different expression of it during development. Albinos have pink eyes due to the blood vessels under a pigmentless retina. But this animal’s eyes were dark. They looked completely normal except for the slight blueish tint that made them seem somehow otherworldly.

  The odd raven flapped to the ground and looked at me. Then it looked at the hot dog in my hand. I wondered what it was like for an animal to be a different color from the rest of its peers. I wondered if they treated it any differently. I tore a piece off the bun and dropped it on the pavement. The raven waddled forward fearlessly and deftly tossed the morsel into the air. It swallowed the bite in two snaps of its cream-colored beak. Then it looked up at me, head turning from side to side.

  “Hungry, huh?”

  It certainly seemed like it, so I tossed another piece.

  Hungry.

  I jumped to my feet and the bird squawked and flew away.

  Shit.

  I dropped the rest of the dog in the trash and ran for the street.

  A predatory fungus wouldn’t distinguish between human flesh and animal.

  I called Tucker from the corner as I tried to hail a cab. The phone rang long enough that I’m sure it nearly went to voicemail. He was deciding whether or not to answer.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, it’s Alex. You were at the kid’s housing complex the other day, right?”

  “Yeah. We missed you.”

  “Did anyone find any dead animals?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Pigeon. Cat. Anything.”

  “Uh, I think so. Yeah, I think some of the guys found a cat carcass or two. Why?”

  “Do you know what happened to them? The carcasses.”

  “We turned them over to Animal Control. Why?”

  Humans aren’t the only animals in the city that need to eat.

  Twenty-five-year-old Julie Festinger was running with her dog on the border of gentrified Williamsburg. She turned a corner and a feral cat hissed at them from a brick retaining wall. The animal’s fur was sparse—more than three-fourths of it had fallen out—and its eyes were frosted. Her dog barked and the cat rose on shaking legs as if it were going to pounce. Julie pulled her pet back and called the city. By the time the Animal Control officer arrived, the cat was dead. The call was logged and the corpse incinerated.

  Just like all the others.

  And the chef knew. My colleagues and I were the dense ones. We didn’t see animals as compatriots. We saw them as vectors. As carriers of disease. As threats. Not as potential victims. But to a man raised in the jungle, they were allies. Guides, even. The first place to turn for help.

  Cats eat rats. Rats eat anything. The city doesn’t record the same level of detail with the animal population as with the human, but they at least had a record of every “work order.” The best I could do was filter by date. I plotted it all on a map, everything they’d handled since Alonso White disappeared. The case management software they used actually made it very easy. The scatter plot was messy, though. Dots were all over the place. But there definitely seemed to be an arc cutting around the east side of the city.

  When I restricted the date range even more, the pattern became clearer. Fewer dots, but a definite curve. It moved clockwise from the lower Bronx, into Queens and down toward JFK, then around to Brighton, then across the water to Staten Island, which is where the data stopped—at the New Jersey border. I couldn’t say for sure, but it certainly looked like two-thirds of a circle. A big circle—around 30 miles wide and roughly centered on Manhattan, south of Midtown. I spent the better part of an hour manually removing any obvious outliers, such as animals killed by automobile, and fitting a clean circle to the data so I could see where we would expect similar cases in Jersey. Then I added the spot where Alonso’s signal stopped. It was less than half a mile off the line. The apartment complex where I cut myself was actually smidge closer. It fit.

  But I had no idea what to make of it. And I didn’t want to rush it this time. It was always possible this was chance, that I was seeing a pattern where there really wasn’t one. Modern cities do have a sick kind of circular geography to them: a city center that’s the focus of wealth and trade; around that, a ring of restaurants and nightlife and hi-rise condos for the single crowd and childless couples who don’t need lots of space or a good school district; around that, a ring of urban decay—older, predominantly minority neighborhoods. Less money. More crime. Finally: white flight. The wealthy suburbs. What I was seeing could’ve been an artifact of that. Or it could’ve been the cause. I didn’t know.

  The perfect test, I decided after staring at the map, would be a visit to Hoffman Island. Built from a shoal in the 1800s, it used to be a quarantine for immigrants entering nearby Ellis Island. Anyone who had indications of contagious disease had to lay up there. It rested very near the line of the circle and bridged the water gap between Brooklyn and Staten Island. It was tiny, the size of a city park, with nothing but trees and a couple decaying structures. Would be easy to search. But human visitation was prohibited by the Park Service, who kept it as a wildlife preserve, including for a small population of harbor seals who wintered there. I wouldn’t have minded breaking that particular regulation, but the simple truth was, I didn’t have access to a boat, nor was there
any way Dr. Chalmers would approve a requisition. I needed to make my case first.

  I packed up my tablet and notes and went for coffee. Unlike the multi-borough megalopolis of New York, the Jersey side of the metro was a collection of smaller communities, none of which had all the data I needed in one place. Much of it was collected by the state, but I’d found that the State of New Jersey didn’t like dealing with the City of New York. More to the point, positive cases wouldn’t be enough. To do it right this time, statistically, I’d also need negative cases—otherwise I’d just be fitting data to the circle, looking for evidence of what I wanted and nothing else.

  There was no way I could do all that in a day, which was about as long as I could disappear without getting into trouble again. I was now being deliberately insubordinate. Dr. Chalmers wouldn’t be as nice the second time. There would be consequences. Permanent ones. So I decided to focus on identifying a single positive case on the hopes that it would be enough to justify my actions and maybe even renew her interest. I spent the rest of the afternoon at a cafe hunched over my tablet, combing the metro sections of local newspapers. Luckily, none of them were very big, and I only had to go back a few weeks.

  Oliver called while I was there. Twice.

  After 45 minutes of tedious failure, I realized I was going about it all wrong. I brought up the map again and looked for a town that my circle ran squarely through.

  East Orange, New Jersey.

  Since I couldn’t submit an expense report for a taxi, I took a train across the river and a bus to city hall. I used my credentials to cut to the front of the line—by then it was near closing time—and got access to the city housing records. I brought up a list of all the structures in East Orange that were condemned and cross-referenced it against all records of sale. It wasn’t a long list, but there were more than I expected. I plotted the locations on my map. Two looked like clear fits. I flipped a coin and hoped luck was with me. It was gonna be dark soon.