by Robert Pobi
He held her at arm’s length and stared into her eyes. “Why don’t you take a shower? The dumplings will be ready by the time you’re done, then you can get some sleep.”
“I have to talk to you.”
He backed up and crossed his arms—they had had plenty of “talks” over the past two years and she had learned that his standard MO was to listen. Not that he was the strong silent type, but there was a certain fortitude necessary to deal with the kinds of problems she came with: the job; the way she dealt with the world; her family; the gun she kept under the pillow; the times she’d be gone for days on end, chasing down some depraved monster. Daniel’s way of dealing with her was to listen. The last one—Mike—had opted for throwing shit and screaming. That had lasted for precisely one argument before she had tossed his ass out. Before that it had been Mankiewicz and that had always been—what was the word?—broken seemed to be the only thing that fit. Their relationship had never been built on a healthy foundation.
Daniel looked at her, his head cocked to one side the way Phelps often did, and she wondered if it was a trait common to the men she ended up with in one capacity or another—the ones she worked with and the ones she loved. She looked into his eyes, saw the trust in them, and dug down into herself for the courage to tell him. He was incapable of lying and that innate ability she had to read people had never detected so much as petty jealousy in him. If anyone could take this—and let her deal with it in a way that made sense to her—it was Daniel.
“I’m pregnant.”
His mouth broke into a shy smile then quickly flattened out as he realized that her tone had not been as happy as it could have been.
She continued. “Six weeks.”
“And?” He reached out and took her hand. There was nothing possessive about it. It was simply his way of saying he was there.
“And tonight I had to talk to the parents of a boy who had his feet sawn off while he was still alive.”
Daniel kept his fingers pressed into her palm while he examined her. He didn’t look judgmental or angry or confused. But it was obvious he was waiting for her to say something.
“And I don’t know if this world needs another child. The good is bleeding out of our species and when I look at all the messed-up things that happen day in and day out, I wonder if it’s fair to foist this upon another human being. The notion of any kind of a god is laughable when I see what happens to good people all the time. Fuck free will. Any kind of a god who cared about us wouldn’t let the shit that goes on happen.”
She paused, waiting for Daniel to say something. All he did was look at her and in that instant, she realized that she had found him—the one for her. She thought Mankiewicz was the one but, like so many other things, that had ended when Shea put him in the ground. Daniel had asked her to marry him three times and she had turned him down. It had not driven him away, or made him bitter. He seemed content just to be with her. He gave her space, and he appreciated his. “I love you,” she said.
That made him smile. “I know.” And that was it. Nothing about the baby. Or about the shitty condition of the world. Or about her doubts. “You want those dumplings?”
She nodded. “Why not?”
Daniel went to the kitchen, turned on the lights, and opened the fridge.
“It’s not that I don’t want your input. I do. Just not now. I need to know how I feel about things before I ask you how you feel about them.”
With that he stopped and turned to her, the foil plate held in both hands. He looked like a long-haired Oliver Twist in a pair of boxers and a wifebeater. “Baby, you don’t have to explain this to me. But let me know where you stand before you do anything”—he paused, then added the word—“decisive.” He stared at her. “Is that fair?”
“You amaze me.”
He smiled, put the dumplings into the oven. “That’s me—amazing.”
“How long until the dumplings are warm?”
“Twenty—twenty-five minutes.”
“That’s just enough time.”
He pulled a plate from the cupboard. “Enough time for what?”
She headed for the bedroom. “You’ll see.”
He followed her. “At least we don’t have to worry about you getting pregnant.”
But at the back of her mind she couldn’t forget that somewhere out there a child killer was alone in his head. Thinking bad thoughts.
And planning bad deeds.
||| NINE
TREVOR DEACON couldn’t take his eyes off him. He wasn’t handsome, at least not classically, but he had that unnamable quality Trevor had always been drawn to, the vibe of a young Montgomery Clift. Trevor stared at the photo, at the way he leaned against the fence, hands in the pockets of his gray flannel trousers, tie loose, top button undone. His jacket was over his shoulder—it was supposed to look casual, unpracticed, but Trevor knew better.
The boy was maybe ten years old.
Eleven tops.
Trevor stared into the dark eyes, rife with mischief. The boy would be his. Like the others, a gift.
Trevor used to hunt children through one of the big Internet auctions but that had become boring—like injecting vegetables with hypodermics down at the market, it was too easy. No sport. No challenge. No adventure. No fun.
With the auction, it had been easy to find them. He remembered the first; standing on the lawn, holding up a pair of deer antlers that had a starting bid of ninety-nine cents. VeryHappyWendy1977 had 629 feedbacks. Trevor had cycled through some of her completed auctions, and had been able to put a decent file together. The house was white stucco with a small mulberry beside the porch. In the background, behind one of the trees, he could see the spire of a church—this one pale green with a crystal ball at the transept of the cross. There was a number on a porcelain plaque beside the door: 15891. There was a car in the driveway, an old Volkswagen Jetta in white (she had been smart enough to blur the license plate with a basic spray paint command). She also mentioned her son, Franklin, as her reason to live. This, of course, had made Trevor very happy. He was sure that Wendy would be thrilled to know that someone was going to love her little boy for the rest of his life. VeryHappyWendy1977 would have to add a second very to her moniker.
The very first time Trevor Deacon had plugged into the collective database of the Internet, his world had forever changed. Since then, there had been no break from the voices in his head. No reprieve from the throbbing between his legs. And he had to keep the spider happy. Always the spider. Or else.
And so he had started hunting.
That first one had taken a little creative thinking, but not much. He had stared a little harder, connecting the dots that Wendy had been happy enough to supply. The child was wearing a Carlyle Academy shirt.
He had tapped into Google and found that Carlyle Academy was located in Staten Island. He found a directory of churches in the area, then Google-Earthed them one at a time until he found one that had a distinguished color to it—green. From there it hadn’t been difficult to find 15891 Kottler Road. All because of this wonderful thing called the Internet.
The Internet had helped Trevor go from being a lonely, frightened, frustrated man to being a world-class lover. With the advent of cyberspace—thank you very much, Mr. William Gibson, for that wonderful phrase—Trevor no longer had to make do with used-up teenagers. Now he got the good ones.
When it came to his boys, Trevor was a benevolent god, teaching them true love with a patience they could never have found out in the world. And like all pure sociopaths, Trevor took this responsibility very seriously. In the old days he had felt special, as if maybe he was one of the last members of a tribe that no one knew about. But now, with the digital world of bits and bytes swirling information around the globe at the speed of light, he had found others out there; like-minded souls he probably passed every day on the train and in the aisles of the liquor store where he bought his mother her Yukon Jack. But along with its blessings, the Internet had also bro
ught about a lot more competition. It was social evolution, and only the smartest would survive.
The rest would be carted off to prison.
A story on the Times website had recently reported there were eight million Facebook users under ten years of age.
Then YouTube came along.
YouTubers loved uploading videos of cute kids with the looks he wanted. And it was easy to find them. All he needed as a starting point was a car license plate or a fridge magnet or a grocery bag in the background. Hell, it was amazing how many people had the local news on the TV in the back of their videos and photos. And nothing helped nail down a region like the local news. Why did people insist on leaving it out there for him?
Because they secretly wanted to help.
Trevor clicked back to the picture of little Bobby brown-eyes and staring into that smiling little face made him want it. But Trevor didn’t want to use him up in his mind before he got to use him up in the garage; he’d have to make do with one of the others.
On the way to the garage he passed the birthday present his sole friend had given him—a photograph of a duck decoy floating in the current. As he walked by he reached out, brushing the back of his knuckles across the glossy paper. It was the only present he had ever received. As he walked by it he decided on Simon Becker.
He paused in front of the garage door, his hands out on the cold steel skin. The only thing he feared in the world lived in there. The door was riveted quarter-inch steel plate but it was an empty gesture—nothing could keep the spider in. Not if it wanted out. Some nights he’d be alone in his bed—maybe with one of them to keep him company—and he would hear it, the watermelon abdomen popping as it squished under the door. Trevor would freeze. He had read an article that said spiders hunted by carbon dioxide output, so he held his breath.
It would rattle the bedroom doorknob until its claws found purchase. Trevor never looked at it—never made contact with its million and a half eyes. He would lie still, shaking as it came snuffing over, its hairy legs rasping on the carpet. Then it would crawl up into bed with him.
One spiny appendage would wrap around him from behind. Then another. Pretty soon it would be spooning with him. Trevor would shut his eyes and pray. But it didn’t do any good. The spider was too powerful to wish away.
When he woke the next morning, it would be gone, back under the garage door to live in the damp shadows of the garage. Waiting for him to feed it.
In the fifty-six years Trevor had lived here, he had never seen it in daylight. When he was a boy he had asked his mother about it. She had lied. There was no spider, she said. And the beatings had gotten worse. So he had stopped asking her about it.
The only thing that kept it away was screaming. Their screaming.
Trevor opened the two deadbolts, the padlocks, and the metal crossbar. He swung the door in, waiting for the bloated insect to launch at him from the shadows. But it didn’t; somehow it knew he was working on getting another one and it would leave him alone for now.
The wire-caged bulb overhead did little to illuminate the gloom of the space. He walked over to the big coffin freezer, lifted the lid, and took one out. A perfect little foot, frozen solid, five neat little toes bunched up in what looked like a Babinski reflex because the boy had still been alive when he had sawed it off. He had a recording of the screams that he would play back sometimes; Simon Becker had had an amazing pair of lungs. He had one of Simon’s feet put away at the back of the box, kept in waiting like a fat blue Mr. Freeze for the perfect summer afternoon. An afternoon like today.
It was small cold beautiful magic in his hand, with five little toes. It would help him forget the one he was working on. Until he was here. Chained down to the workbench. Screaming for him. For the spider.
Trevor sucked the frozen little toes, brittle and hard as china against his teeth, and wept with happiness.
Soon there would be more feet for the freezer.
Oh, thank Jesus for the Internet.
Thank Jesus and Mary and Joseph and God and William Gibson and Montgomery Clift and his mommy and the spider. Thank them all. For the Internet and all the little boys. The boys most of all. Above everything. Thank you thank you thankyou thankyouthankyou. THANK YOU.
Behind him the coffin freezer full of little feet sat silent, a larder waiting to be enjoyed.
As long as people kept posting photos of their children on the Internet, Trevor Deacon would be able to keep the spider away. And in the process, feed his freezer.
And feed it.
And feed it.
And feed it.
||| TEN
TYLER ROCHESTER’S fourth-grade picture had been destined to become part of the collective American consciousness from the moment someone with a hacksaw had fastened his sights on the boy. The information pipeline hammered every television, newspaper, magazine, tablet and smartphone with the boy’s school portrait. The Times had carried a front-page piece on him, below a crisp image of the smiling face. Dark brown hair. Brown eyes. Blue jacket. White shirt. Striped school tie.
Hemingway threaded the Suburban through the staggered gauntlet of news vans. The main event was in front of the police station, a scattered collection of vehicles with one distinct purpose—to entertain. With the daunting task of feeding the twenty-four-hour news cycle, fact had already succumbed to fancy footwork and finger pointing. The reporters would camp at the precinct’s doorway until the next tragedy scarred the American landscape and then they would move on.
Their first order of business would be to fault the police. Then, when they were done asking questions and pointing fingers, they would move on to the beefed-up police presence at schools in the city, signing off with the old barn door analogy, asking if the extra security was too little, too late.
Hemingway had slept for two hours, then gone back to the morgue to visit the Rochester boy before they released him to the family. She had been in homicide for ten years, promoted to violent homicide investigation almost seven years back. Not a lot of time under her keel in one respect. A lifetime in another. Many lifetimes, if she considered the dead.
Child killings were the worst. It was one of those things that always felt personal, no matter what you tried to tell yourself.
As a detective, she was, if not used to, then at least familiar with the twisted pathologies of killers; this was going to get worse before it got better. There would be no reprieve, no reassignment. The only break would come when they solved the case. Or it went cold. And if that happened, she’d lose everything she had worked for. She’d lose the street time and the exams and all the hard work—years of having to be just a little more careful than the other cops, always having to do something better than the men she worked with in order to get equal credit. If she messed up the investigation, the derogatory language would start. They’d call her scared or a pussy; the hardened lowlifes in the department would call her a bitch and a cunt. No way—she was not backing down. She’d stick this out because that’s what she did, what she had always done. When the status quo were howling in pain, she kept banging away at it. Another trait inherited from her father.
The case would be media heavy to the end. When it came to murders, the value the media puts on lives was directly proportional to the entertainment value of the victim; it was about ratings. Drifters and homeless people got the leanest media coverage and, often, little in the way of investigative resources. The next layer up—another lost cause—were drug addicts. Then came the prostitutes, a layer of individuals no one cared about until the third or fourth victim. After that were drug dealers, followed by felons. The further up the social hierarchy you climbed, the closer you got to the American Gold Standard in murder victims: the rich white child.
She pulled into a reserved parking place and realized that her left hand was on her stomach. She stared at it for a while. Was she trying to feel a baby she wasn’t sure she wanted? Or trying to shield it from the bad juju of the job? She rubbed her stomach, a new habit th
at felt oddly familiar. Then she grabbed her backpack and the Rochester file from the back and got out into the early morning.
She cut around back to avoid the news teams. She clocked through the gate and walked through the garage, nodding a good morning to Albert Chance, the car dispatcher. When she was inside she felt the familiar vibrations of the precinct, a building that never slept. But riding just below the familiar current of the place was a foreign species of white noise, that of interlopers.
The cops she passed on the staircase looked irritated, the natural defensive position of policemen under scrutiny. The morning was always busy as the collective mind of the hive geared up for the day but today it was in overdrive as the eye of the media dialed in on it. The usual hallway chatter was noticeably absent.
Hemingway climbed the back staircase to the top floor, doing the full five flights in a quick jog. With this case looming in front of her, she knew she would be doing little running and no kayaking. Spare time had just evaporated—what little would be left after the investigation was done chewing through her days would end up being spent on not enough sleep. And trying not to lose her mind. Stairs would be her only exercise for a while.
Phelps was at his desk, wearing another of his ubiquitous gray suits and a solid tie, this one a deep navy. He had a coffee in his hand and the same indignant look that the cops on the staircase had—siege mentality setting in as he prepared for battle.
“Detective Phelps,” she said officially, handing him a paper bag.
“Hey, kiddo.” He looked into the bag, finding four bagels stuffed with lox and cream cheese, all wrapped in wax paper. “Let me guess, one of these is for me, right?”
“Half of one.” She winked.
He unwrapped a bagel and began fueling for the day. “You’re the best.”
She went to the window and looked out onto the street. From up here it looked worse than it had at street level—cameramen running around pulling establishing shots; reporters preening in handheld mirrors; yellow power cables reaching over the ground like tropical vines, feeding electricity to the lights. She put her hands into her pockets and felt the stone from last night. She wrapped her fingers around it. “You ready for this?” she asked.
