Shadow People

by James Swain

  “You drew something very dear to you, a special place.”

  The desk sergeant lit up like a Christmas tree.

  “Boy, you’re good,” she said.

  “It’s a house in the suburbs.”

  “Right again.”

  “Is it the house where you live?”

  “I’ll be damned. You’re amazing.”

  Behind the desk appeared an attractive brunette wearing a sidearm strapped to her side. Detective Colleen Schoch, the very person he’d come to the precinct to see.

  “Hello, Peter. How have you been?” she asked.

  “I’m okay. I need to speak with you. In private.”

  “May I ask what this is about? I’m kind of busy right now.”

  “The night my parents were killed.”

  Schoch did not know what to say. She’d been the first officer on the scene the night his parents had died, and had taken Peter to the station house and taken care of him. Schoch was a friend, and one of the few people outside of his Friday night group who knew of his powers.

  Schoch motioned him to come around the desk, and they walked to a bank of elevators and waited for a car to come. She brought her face up close to his. Their eyes locked.

  “What’s going on?” Schoch asked.

  First things first, Peter thought. “The creepy guy behind me on line is a killer.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “I read his mind. He shot a guy in Hell’s Kitchen Friday night. His victim was left lying in an alley. If you don’t grab him now, he’s going to escape.”

  “You’re sure about this?”

  “Positive. I saw the whole thing clearly.”

  “How do I prove this?”

  “He stole his victim’s wallet. He’s still carrying it.”

  “Wait here. I’m going to go arrest the son of a bitch.”

  * * *

  Most criminals were stupid. The man in line was no exception. His victim’s ID was still in his wallet when Schoch arrested him.

  Schoch was beaming as they sat in her tiny cubicle in Homicide. Her desk was as neat as a pin, which could not be said of the desks around her. She offered him a soft drink.

  “No, thanks. Let me tell you why I’m here,” Peter said. “I’ve been having some problems lately, and I think they stem from the night my parents were murdered. I’d like to ask you a couple of questions, if you don’t mind. It will help me sort things out.”

  Schoch leaned back in her chair. “What kind of problems?”

  “Anger issues.”

  “That’s not uncommon for victims of violent crimes.”

  “These are extreme.”

  “You’re becoming violent?”

  “Close enough. Will you help me? Please?”

  Her face softened, if just a little bit. “All right, fire away. What do you want to know?”

  “Did I become violent the night my parents died?”

  “No. You cried a lot at the station house, but that was it.”

  He thought back to what he knew about his demon. It came out right at the moment he became angry, like a spark turning to a flame. “I mean at the scene of the crime. Did I do anything out of the ordinary?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” Schoch replied.

  “But you were the first responder. You would have seen how I was acting. Try to remember. It’s very important to me.”

  “I don’t know if I ever told you this, but when I first got to the scene, you weren’t there,” Schoch said. “I was a foot cop working Times Square with my partner. A call came in that a man and his wife had been abducted in an alley beside the Shubert Theatre. We got to the scene as fast as we could, and discovered there were plenty of eyewitnesses. We took their statements, and every single one of them said there had been a little boy. Well, there was no little boy.”

  “I wasn’t there?”

  “No, and we looked high and low for you. You vanished.”

  “Then how did I show up at the station house?”

  “A man brought you. I remember him quite clearly. He had snow-white hair and was theatrical looking. I pegged him for an actor. He said he’d found you wandering the streets.”

  “Did you get his name?”

  “No. It was weird. He came into the lobby and handed you off to me. You were in a state of shock and not communicating. While I was watching you, he disappeared.”

  He disappeared? Peter felt the invisible stab to his heart. The physical description matched that of Max, his teacher. He took a deep breath before continuing. “How long I was gone?”

  Schoch had to think. “The call came in at ten o’clock at night, and you showed up at the station house at around three A.M.”

  Five whole hours. That was a long time. Yet it made sense, the pieces of the puzzle falling together, the empty holes filling in. Right as his parents were abducted, he’d looked into his mother’s eyes, and had known that he was never going to see her or his beloved father again. He’d known his parents were about to die, just as they’d known. A shared truth had never been more painful. And with that terrible knowledge had come an anger so great that the little boy in pajamas who’d maimed a burglar had gone on a rampage that had lasted into the small hours of the night. Once the rampage was over, he’d somehow ended up with Max, his parents’ dearest friend.

  There was no doubt in his mind this is what had happened that awful night. The only question was, how much damage had he caused?

  37

  Peter sat on the edge of the detective’s desk and tried to act calm, even though his heart was racing out of control. “I have another question. I know this is going to sound strange.”

  “I’m sure it isn’t anything I haven’t heard before,” Schoch replied.

  “The night my parents died, were there other deaths in the city that you didn’t solve?”

  “Deaths? Do you mean murders?”

  He swallowed the lump in his throat and nodded.

  “That’s a strange question,” she conceded. “Why do you want to know that?”

  The detective wouldn’t have believed him if he’d told her, so he said instead, “I’ve been having some weird dreams lately that concern that night. I’ve been wondering if the things I’m seeing in my dreams might have actually happened.”

  “Fair enough. Let’s ask Dag. He’ll know.”

  Schoch told Peter that her toothpick-chewing partner, Dag, had recently been assigned to work on a slew of cold cases from that year, and he’d be the person to ask. She called Dag on her intercom. “You busy? I need a favor.”

  “What’s going on,” Dag replied over the squawk box.

  “Peter Warlock is here. He needs our help.”

  Moments later, Detective Sal Dagastino, known as Dag to his friends, entered the cubicle and pumped Peter’s hand. “How’s life in the fast lane?” he asked.

  “Traveling at the speed of sound,” Peter replied.

  “I need to score four tickets for Saturday night’s show,” Dag said without missing a beat. “My in-laws are coming to town, and I want to show them a good time.”

  “Consider it done. You can pick them up at Will Call. Will third row center do the trick?”

  “Perfect. Now it’s my turn. What do you need?”

  “I was wondering if there were any unsolved murders or violent crimes which took place the night my parents died. Detective Schoch said you’ve been working cold cases lately.”

  “Peter was roaming the city that night and might have seen something,” Schoch explained.

  As a rule, cops did not share information about open investigations. But Peter had helped Dag and Schoch solve a difficult murder case not long ago, and gained their trust. The toothpick twirled between Dag’s teeth as he considered their visitor’s request.

  “There were several violent killings in the city that night that were never solved,” Dag said. “We recently reopened them because of a new DNA test called ‘scraping.’ Scraping lets us test for DNA in pl
aces we weren’t able to test before.”

  Peter swallowed hard. Several violent killings. Were they his doing?

  “Were the cases linked?” he asked.

  “They sure were. All our victims had skin underneath their fingernails which wasn’t theirs,” Dag said. “With scraping, we were able to find DNA, and compare it. The same assailant was responsible, and might be a serial killer. Kind of scary to think this person has been roaming around the city for the past eighteen years and we didn’t know it.”

  Pools of black opened up before Peter’s eyes, and he would have liked nothing better than to jump through one of them, and disappear. He felt the weight of Dag’s stare, and realized the detective was waiting for a response. If the police shared information with you, they expected you to give something in return, and he said, “The memories from that night have recently been coming back to me. Maybe while I was roaming the city I came across your killer.”

  “Would you remember him?”

  “I might.”

  “How about his victims? Would you remember them?”

  He took a deep breath. “I don’t know.”

  The toothpick did another slow twirl. Going to the next cubicle, Dag grabbed a manila folder off the top of a pile, and dropped it in Peter’s lap upon his return.

  “That’s them,” Dag said.

  “You mean the victims?”

  “That’s right. The photos aren’t pretty.”

  The file felt heavy. “How many unsolved cases were there that night?”

  “Six.”

  Peter thought he was going to be sick. Possessed little boy runs amok in city, killing six innocent people. It sounded like the plot to a low-budget horror film.

  “Not that any of them were going to be missed,” Dag went on. “Whoever took those guys out was doing the good citizens of New York a favor, and deserves a medal.”

  “You’re starting to sound like a vigilante, Dag,” Schoch said.

  “Just speaking my mind,” her partner said.

  “Were the victims bad people?” Peter asked.

  “Scum of the earth,” Dag said. “I say good riddance.”

  Peter went through the file. It contained six Homicide reports that had been written back in the day when cops used typewriters. Each report had its own collection of gruesome crime-scene photographs. Each victim had died in a pool of his own blood. He thought back to the snapshot of him in his Batman pajamas. The front of his pj’s had been blood soaked. No doubt the shedding of blood was something the demon found appealing.

  38

  An approximate time of death was printed on each report. All the victims had died during the five hours he’d been roaming the city. All had also been found within a twenty-block radius of the Shubert Theatre in Times Square, where his parents had been abducted.

  The cases had other similarities as well. Each victim had a lengthy criminal record, and was wanted by the law. One rapist, an armed robber, three men wanted for murder, and a drug dealer known for selling poisonous drugs to his clients. In keeping with the theme of his rampage, they had died brutally, with their necks broken and skulls crushed in, their bodies left in alleyways to be discovered a few hours later.

  He closed the file. He was going to have to find a way to deal with this; he just didn’t know how. When he spoke, his voice sounded like a recording. “Did anyone see who did this?”

  “There was one eyewitness,” Dag said. “A woman walking her dog saw our killer kneeling over one of the victims, strangling the crap out of him.”

  I killed them with my bare hands, he thought. How lovely.

  “Did she give you a physical description?”

  “Witness said he was a little guy, if you can believe that.”

  He started to tremble. For the first time, he realized what a huge risk he’d taken coming here. If he wasn’t careful, Dag and Schoch would realize that he was the little guy the eyewitness had seen, and they’d take a sample of his DNA, compare it to the victims’ samples, and then they’d have to arrest him.

  Dag wore a blank look, and wasn’t making the connection. Schoch hadn’t made the connection yet, either. So far so good, but what about later on? They were smart cops, and their brains worked like filters. Eventually, it would dawn on them why Peter had come to see them.

  He needed to stop that from happening, and decided to blur their memories. Magicians were masters at blurring their audiences’ memories, and he would do the same with the detectives.

  He asked Dag what several notations he’d seen in the homicide reports referred to. Dag obliged him, and spent five minutes explaining the notations. When Dag was done, Peter asked Schoch to explain the coroner’s reports in the files. Schoch obliged him as well, and five more minutes were spent. Getting the detectives talking served an important purpose. Instead of asking questions, they were now having to answer questions. This made them switch gears, and use a different part of their brains.

  The second thing it did was kill time. The further away they moved from the thing Peter didn’t want them to remember, the less in focus the memory became. If he killed enough time, the memory would become blurred with the things he was now asking them. Magicians called this stalling technique time delay. During a magic show, things happened onstage which the magician did not want the audience to remember. By creating a time delay, the audience often forgot the very thing which allowed the trick to work.

  Peter worked his magic on the detectives. Soon they looked bored, and ready to go back to work. “Thanks for talking to me. I’ll let you know if I remember anything from that night.”

  The phone on the desk lit up. Schoch snatched the receiver and waved good-bye. Dag walked him to the elevators and punched the button.

  “I’ll e-mail you about those tickets,” the detective said.

  “I won’t forget,” Peter promised.

  * * *

  Riding down in the elevator, Peter hugged himself and shut his eyes. How could he have murdered six men with his bare hands and not remember the act? It just didn’t seem possible.

  Perhaps someone else was responsible, a madman maybe, or another poor soul possessed by a demon. Those were logical explanations, and he was willing to accept them, except he still couldn’t understand how he’d managed to end up with Max.

  Stepping outside the 19th Precinct, he texted Liza that he’d be home in a few hours, then hailed a cab and headed downtown to the Village.

  39

  Long ago, a freight rail line had run high above the streets of Manhattan on the West Side. One day the trains had stopped running, and the elevated line had fallen into disrepair, with weeds and garbage strewing the tracks. The city had planned to tear down the constant eyesore along with all the memories.

  Only this was New York, where everything old became new again. A vocal group of residents had banded together with the goal of preserving the tracks. Calling themselves Friends of the High Line, they’d begun the arduous process of convincing the city’s leaders to change their minds. In the end, they had won, and the tracks were saved.

  Today, the tracks served as a pedestrian walkway that stretched from Gansevoort to 34th Street, and was filled with well-tended gardens, dozens of pieces of modern sculpture, and comfy places to curl up with a book, which many people did when the weather was pleasant.

  Because this was New York, the High Line had plenty of rules. No smoking, biking, skateboarding, picking flowers, climbing, throwing objects, littering, filming movies, or blasting boom boxes were allowed. And there were no street performers of any kind.

  Except for one.

  One performer was allowed to hold court on the High Line and entertain the masses, and his name was Max Romeo.

  Max had lived in New York most of his life, and knew everybody. He’d pulled some strings, and had gotten the city to issue him a permit to perform magic on the High Line whenever the mood suited him. In Peter’s opinion, it was the greatest gig in the city.

  Tuesday aftern
oon, bright and sunny, Peter found his teacher near the West 20th Street entrance. Max was plucking shiny silver dollars out of a young boy’s ears and nose, the coins landing into a metal pail with a loud clunk! The appreciative crowd laughed and applauded.

  “Stand up straight, my boy,” Max commanded with a playful air.

  More coins appeared and were tossed in. Soon the pail grew heavy in Max’s hand. The old magician shook the coins while casting a suspicious gaze at the crowd. There was no tougher crowd than a bunch of New Yorkers. Yet Max had them in the palm of his hand.

  “On the count of three, I will perform a miracle,” Max proclaimed. “Please count along. Are you ready? Here we go. One.”

  “One!” the crowd echoed.

  “Two.”

  “Two!”

  Max started to say “Three” and dumped the bucket into the crowd. Silver-colored confetti floated to the sidewalk, the coins miraculously gone. Max gave a matadorlike bow.

  It was all about the applause. Shakespeare had said that, and he’d been right. The crowd rewarded Max generously. When the applause subsided, several members of the crowd tried to give Max tips. The old magician politely but firmly refused. Only when the crowd had dispersed did he address his student.

  “Why, Peter, it’s good to see you,” Max said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me I was a murderer?” Peter asked.

  * * *

  They sat on a bench with their backs to the gloomy Hudson. Max treaded softly.

  “You look troubled,” Max said. “Have the shadow people visited you again? I saw one earlier when I stepped out of my apartment.” He patted the five-pointed star resting beneath his shirt. “Thank God you gave me this.”

  “I didn’t come here to talk about the shadow people,” Peter said.

  “Milly saw one, too,” Max said, as if not hearing him. “So did Lester, and Homer called to tell me that his wife believes one was floating outside their apartment window this morning around breakfast time. Have you figured out what they want?”