Harvest

by Robert Pobi

  Phelps took a slurp of coffee from his mug and shrugged. “I ain’t never ready to deal with those pricks outside asking questions like ‘did we find anything in the boy’s ass?’ I spoke to Dennet. He’s making you PIO.”

  Being dubbed public information officer was a thankless job that every detective dreaded—it took time that wasn’t available for people who didn’t appreciate it. In the broadest sense, her job would be to feed the press tidbits of information meant to solicit their help whenever possible. But as the official talking head for the investigation she’d also be the official whipping post if things went screaming off the rails. Besides adding a lot of weight to her workload, it would also put her under a microscope, something she had learned to live with in the wake of the Shea investigation.

  Her phone went off at her hip and she checked the message. “Dennet’s here.”

  The noise five floors below rose in pitch as the captain’s car pulled up in front of the precinct. From her bird’s-eye perch she watched him step out into the glare of lights and he lit up like the Silver Surfer. She watched him shake his head, ignore shouted questions, disappear up the steps and into the building.

  “Let’s get this party started.”

  Phelps stood up, grabbed the second half of the bagel and lox he was working on, and pushed the paper bag across the desk. “Load up, you ain’t gonna have time to eat after this.”

  “I hate the press.” Hemingway kept her eyes on the group of reporters below. “Any suggestions?”

  “With your education and family? Yeah. Go downstairs, resign, and become a Park Avenue plastic surgeon.”

  “I meant about the press.”

  “Just don’t shoot anyone.”

  “Thanks.”

  They took the back stairs down to Dennet’s office passing plainclothesmen and uniformed officers scuttling between floors, silent and on edge. Hemingway walked ahead of Phelps, a habit past the point of being unlearned; with Phelps in the back they both had a clear forward view—imperative in their line of work.

  Ken Dennet was cornered in front of his office, trying to ease away from a duty cop hammering him with questions. When Hemingway and Phelps came out of the stairwell, he pointed at them, his thumb and forefinger miming a gun. “My appointment is here, we’ll talk later.” He ushered them into his office, waving Mike Babanel, the precinct’s lawyer, over from a corner. When they were all safely inside, Dennet closed the door.

  The captain dropped into his seat and stared at Hemingway. From down here the chatter of the media outside had the windows vibrating. “Where are you with the Rochester kid?”

  No one wanted to hear that more killings were probably on the way. “We’ve gone through everyone who was even remotely connected with Tyler Rochester, from the school’s personnel records to the Rochester family’s list of help, through friends and business acquaintances. No red flags. We’ve hit all the registered sex offender lists—federal and state—and the recent parolee alerts. No one in any of the databases fits the MO.”

  Dennet looked up at the ceiling and the word sonofabitch came out of his mouth in a protracted hiss. “The good news is that the extra security we’re putting on the street will help bolster public confidence. We’ve got a little over a week until the schools are out for the summer and anyone walks within two blocks of a schoolyard between now and then, I want them to see blue.” Dennet leaned forward and pushed a security schedule across the desk. Hemingway picked it up and scanned it while he went on. “We’ve assigned a police officer to every school in Manhattan—our men are doing double shifts. After school’s out, there’s extra security around parks, day camps and anywhere else kids hang out.”

  “For how long?” Hemingway looked up from the three-page schedule, a stopgap measure to make the media think things were under control. Which they were. For now.

  “Until you get a break or we arrest someone. I don’t need to tell you that those news assholes outside aren’t going to get tired, do I?”

  The inference wasn’t lost on Hemingway; for the three months the Shea investigation lasted, she had been under constant attack from reporters. “Nossir.”

  “Phelps tell you that you’re public information officer on this?”

  “Who do I clear my releases through?”

  The captain reached for the coffee on the edge of his desk, took a slurp off the top, and nodded at Babanel on the sofa. “Mike will make sure you’re golden.” Then he made a point of looking at his watch and clapped his hands. “Okay, school duty starts. Go talk to Desmond downstairs—he’s got the assignments. You’ll handle the daily brief and we’ll send a summary out to the other precincts. Then it’s off to protect and serve the school children of this city—I want people to think that this is a police state. And above all, I don’t want anyone else disappearing. One fucking kid goes off the reservation and those cocksuckers outside will do more harm than good. If you need help, or don’t understand something, you ask. Clear?”

  “Crystal, sir.”

  “Good. After school duty, you and Phelps hit the lists again. Do the rounds and ask questions. Find this guy.”

  ||| ELEVEN

  HEMINGWAY AND Phelps had pulled duty at the Lyle School for Boys—one of Manhattan’s oldest private educational institutions and a fixture of the Upper East Side. It served the same demographic as the Damien Whitney Academy for Boys where Tyler Rochester had gone. Maybe the man they were hunting had a taste for the neighborhood.

  Phelps leaned against the hood of the cruiser, going at his fourth coffee of the day. He looked like he was oblivious to his surroundings but two tours on a sniper team in Vietnam had honed his observational skills to near clairvoyance; if anything within sight was anomalous, he’d spot it. Hemingway paced the sidewalk and watched the street, her hands on her hips, her jacket open. The final bell had rung ten minutes ago but there was a fifteen-minute override in place to help with latecomers. This made no sense to Hemingway—the Lyle School was not the kind of place where the students were late. Especially not after one of their kind had been splashed all over the news.

  The cops weren’t out for surveillance. They weren’t out as a deterrent. They were there so it would look like the NYPD was on top of things. It was a PR move that Hemingway and Phelps resented because it pulled them away from the case. Now that the coroner’s reports were finished, there were things to do, places to go, people to visit. Their window was floating by and they were making sweetfuckall in the way of headway because they were stuck here, making an appearance to appease the news cockroaches.

  The heat was in a dancing mood again and the day was a sultry motherfucker. Hemingway wanted to take off her jacket but a white shirt rendered invisible by perspiration was no way to keep the boobage dialed down—something she never forgot on the job.

  Her phone went off, startling her with its shrill chirp. She slid it from her pocket and answered the call. “Hemingway.”

  “Yeah, Detective Hemingway, this is Marvin Stapleton, I’m with the Nineteenth. We got a problem.”

  “What?”

  “I’m at the Huntington Academy. Detectives Lincoln and Papandreou just left.”

  Hemingway knew the school; she had briefly dated a boy who had gone there. It was three blocks north, two east.

  “And a kid got snatched.”

  She felt her stomach lurch and she regretted the second breakfast she had pounded down after the briefing.

  “The perp killed a driver and took a boy.”

  “Rope it off. We’ll be there in four minutes.” She whistled for Phelps as she ran for the SUV.

  ||| TWELVE

  STAPLETON HAD cordoned off the street and put up screens to conceal the mess from prying eyes. A single news team was already there, drawn by the scent of blood in the water. His cruiser was parked in the middle of the asphalt, beside the crime-scene screens, lights thumping like a heart. The Suburban slid around the corner in a four-wheel drift, tires smoking. Hemingway punched up the final hun
dred yards, screeched to a stop at the perimeter, got out, and ran under the tape with Phelps closing up her wake.

  Officer Marvin Stapleton stood by the cruiser looking shell-shocked. Another man—the school’s headmaster, Hemingway guessed—stood off to the side of the vehicle. He wore a good-quality suit and brogues.

  “What happened?” was the first thing out of her mouth.

  Stapleton jerked his head toward the wall of accident screens he had set up. “Driver for one of the kids is dead. Kid’s gone.”

  “We know the name of the kid taken?”

  Stapleton shook his head. “I called you as soon as I found out and been pulling out screens since.”

  Hemingway turned to Phelps. “Run the plate. Get us an ID on this kid now.” Her need-to-know programming was up and running and she ducked behind the screen.

  It was a big Lincoln sedan, black, with tinted windows. The driver’s door was open about a quarter of an inch. A puddle of blood had accumulated on the pavement under the sill, already scabbing over in the heat. She pulled a pair of latex gloves from a kit in her pocket and eased the door open. The stink of blood and shit rose out of the vehicle, made all the worse by the sour heat baking the street. Off in the distance the thrum of emergency sirens was nearly buried by the morning noise of the city.

  A man in a black suit was sprawled across the front bench. He was a big man who had not yet been reduced by death. He was slumped sideways onto the passenger’s seat, twisted and lying faceup. His left hand was on his throat, middle finger dipped into the long gash. Blood had pissed everywhere, splattering the steering wheel, dash, windows and carpets. His mouth and right eye were open. A jet of blood had squirted up onto his face and his left socket was a flat glistening puddle of red.

  Hemingway scanned the interior. “What happened?” she asked Stapleton from the door of the vehicle.

  The whir of emergency vehicles was gaining on the clatter of street noise, the distant Wagnerian thrum of police cars, fire trucks, and EMT vehicles: cavalry on the way.

  Stapleton leaned in so he wouldn’t give the news team at the fence ammunition and Hemingway gave him a point for that one. “Lincoln and Papandreou were here with me all morning. They had the back; I had the front. It’s a big school, nearly six hundred students. The final bell rang and I saw Headmaster Sinclair outside,” he nodded at the man in the suit standing at the edge of her vision. “He gave us the wave off and then I saw the car.

  “It was just sitting here, idling in the drop-off zone. I came over. Rapped on the window. The sides are tinted but when I looked in the front . . .” He let the sentence die and swallowed loudly. “I saw.”

  Phelps was off his phone on the other side of the car, his body over the windshield at an odd angle as if it were electrified and he were afraid to touch it. He looked over the roof of the car at Hemingway. He, too, spoke softly. “Car is owned by a Jesse Grant.”

  Hemingway turned to the headmaster. “Do you know if you have a student by the name of Grant?”

  He was rattled out of suspended animation. “Yes. Of course. Bobby Grant. Grade five. One of our brightest musicians—a pianist.” His head ratcheted down to the car and his mouth went into a perfect O, making him look like an emoticon. “Is this the Grant boy’s driver? Oh, Jesus.”

  Hemingway wondered how many black Lincolns turned up here every morning to drop off children. Since the recession, conspicuous consumption was out and low profile was in; a lot of the wealthier urbanites had traded their Bentleys and S-Class Benzes in for the less showy, and less costly, Lincolns.

  “What’s he look like?”

  Sinclair’s eyes scrolled up and to the right. “Ten years old. Brown hair, brown eyes. Thin. School uniform.”

  The description set off a tremor somewhere behind her eyes. She glanced up at the school and the windows were filled with the curious faces of hundreds of boys. Did any of them know how lucky they were?

  Two patrol cars came around the corner, sirens blaring, pushing the early-morning pedestrians up onto the sidewalk. She was grateful that there wasn’t much to attract tourists to this area at this time of day.

  She grabbed the headmaster by the elbow and steered him toward the school, gesturing Phelps over as chaperone for the man. “I need a picture of the boy and I need it right now.”

  Phelps took over steering duties and ran the headmaster across to the school.

  The approaching police vehicles were a live presence that shook the earth, a cacophony of pulsing sounds and lights at the corner of the street. When they cleared the traffic lock, they barreled up the street in a cloud of scorched pavement and rubber that scared the news crew out of the way. The legion of flashing vehicles screeched to a halt. Doors opened. Officers spilled out onto the pavement and raced over.

  “You see anything unusual?” Hemingway asked Stapleton.

  He glanced at the car and shook his head. “Kids running up and down the street like they’re on Broadway. The bell rang and they headed in. When the street was clear I saw the guy in the Town Car was just sitting there. That’s it. No honked horns. No flurry of motion. No distraction—I watch for shit like that.” He rolled up his sleeve, exposing an Airborne tattoo on his forearm. “Two tours in Iraq. You don’t sneak up on me.”

  Hemingway glanced at the screens that hid the Town Car and thought, Obviously.

  “Nothing unusual until I spotted the car idling here.”

  “How long was it running before you came over?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Six, maybe eight minutes. It took me a few minutes to realize that it should have gone. It kind of fit in with all the kids in the formal wear. It belonged.”

  “They’re not tuxedoes, they’re uniforms.” She turned away from Stapleton and wondered if the gap between detective and street cop had broadened since she had made it up through the ranks. She looked up and down the street, thinking that with a twelve- to fifteen-minute lead time the kid could be on the dark side of the moon by now. Or floating in the East River.

  The uniformed cops closed in on her, a field of blue glittering with nickel and brass. She turned back to Stapleton. “They have a no-idling policy in front of the school?” She had done a lot of work with the board of education and in the big push to go green, a lot of schools had implemented a no-idling policy.

  “The headmaster said they don’t tell the parents how to behave because it would be ‘counterproductive.’ ”

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding.” Her eyes drifted over Stapleton’s shoulder to the mouth of the street. Another cruiser rounded the corner, nearly taking out a cameraman. There were now six police cruisers, an ambulance, and a van from the fire department just over the tape. She was surrounded by uniformed police officers.

  She took a breath and let it power her voice. “It looks like a little boy has been abducted. Brown hair and brown eyes. School uniform.” Over the line, the reporters began chattering at the flurry of motion.

  Her phone chirped and when she held it up she saw Bobby Grant’s face smiling out at her—a citywide memo from Phelps. Within seconds all of the cops in front of her were staring at the same image on their own phones.

  Bobby Grant looked so much like Tyler Rochester that they could have been brothers.

  ||| THIRTEEN

  THE REPORTERS had a hard time finding fault with the NYPD’s reaction time. Under Hemingway’s direction, the police had fanned out from the Town Car epicenter like an antivirus program, scouring every shadow and dark corner in the neighborhood. The smart money was on a vehicular abduction but they went on a thin wedge of hope that the boy had been taken by someone on foot. It wasn’t the smartest line of reasoning, but sometimes the easy money pays off.

  The police didn’t find Bobby Grant. He had been pulled into a wormhole.

  No witnesses. No surveillance photos or video. No sign of him at all.

  Hemingway and Phelps ended up in the headmaster’s office, fielding calls while appropriating files. The ro
om smelled of mahogany and ancient pipe smoke and history. The sofas were tufted leather and the Persian carpet was worth more than many homes.

  The first order of business was to make certain that the Grant boy had been in the car with the dead man. A call to the home verified that he had left for school with Desmond—the man with the slit throat cooking in the heat-baked Lincoln outside. It seemed like a silly thing to have to verify but it was entirely possible that the driver was there to either pick up or drop off homework—something the headmaster said happened from time to time.

  It took another ten minutes of no news before Hemingway succumbed to the grim truth that they had lost Bobby Grant. And there had been three cops at the school—two if you discounted Stapleton. She wasn’t prone to claustrophobia and she had never experienced a panic attack, but she suddenly felt like she wasn’t getting enough air. She nodded at Phelps, who was standing over the headmaster’s shoulder as they went through attendance logs. “I’ll be outside,” she said, and turned to the door. “Get a faxed release from the Grants and a copy of the boy’s file. And I want a list of everyone who has stepped foot in this school. Then we go talk to the parents.”

  Phelps, who looked like he belonged behind a tractor instead of a badge, nodded and by the way his eyes narrowed he confirmed that he understood something was up with her. Like many partnerships—business or personal—they had developed a silent communication that transmitted more than language often did. “Sure.”

  She cut through the outer office and was met by the worried stare of two secretaries. Once out in the hall she was hit with more uncomfortable looks from faculty and students.