by Robert Pobi
Hemingway had firsthand experience with the immutable pain of having someone taken: her eight-year-old sister Claire had been abducted from their beach house when they were kids. The police were called. Private detectives hired. Armed bodyguards for the rest of the children. Her first taste of too little, too late.
Claire was found in a field in East Hampton three days later; she had been beaten to death with a framing hammer. The killer was a nobody—just a bad man with worse ideas and poor self-control. The loss of Claire had manifested itself as a weird presence on the periphery of Hemingway’s mind, always ready to remind her that things went off the rails more often than anyone wanted to admit.
Her parents had brought in counselors. Dr. Bryce, the family psychiatrist, had talked to her for a couple of years. She still talked to him every now and then. But all the therapy and role-playing and talking it out hadn’t killed the feeling that the world was a place that couldn’t be trusted, not in any real sense of the word. All because someone couldn’t stop his id from grabbing the steering wheel and punching down on the gas.
She stepped through the double oak doors into the tiny courtyard. The heat hit her from the asphalt up. Before she was at the fence—twenty paces away—her head was shimmering. She took off her jacket and the movement made her shoulder blade click and she realized that this was going to get a lot worse before it got a little better—something about the way it was unfolding was more oppressive and threatening than the heat and the helplessness.
The forensics guys in their space suits had set up a clean tent around the car and even with the pumped-in air-conditioning she knew it had to be a million degrees under the plastic enclosure. Cops had come back from their search for the Grant boy. They milled about like extras in a film who hadn’t been given any direction other than to look defeated. She cut through them and headed across the street.
As she moved, she consciously avoided turning her head toward the news cameras set up at either end of the street.
Papandreou stood beside one of the big panels that blocked the crime-scene tent from the cameras, sucking on a smoke and generally looking like he was trying out for an I-don’t-give-a-fuck-athon. “Hemi,” he said flatly.
“Where are we?”
Papandreou took a drag, blew the jet straight up into the lifeless air, and nodded at the screens. “They just pulled the guy out of the car. ME’s still in the tent.” Hemingway stepped around one of the protective panels. Behind the barriers, where the tiniest breeze couldn’t reach, it felt like a foundry.
She recognized Mat Linderer outside the blue tent in his static-free suit, his attention nailed to a Panasonic Toughbook.
“Find anything?” she asked, simultaneously checking her watch.
Linderer looked up, then went back to his screen; everyone knew the clock was ticking. “Bunch of prints, looks like two sets. The majority belong to Desmond Grossman, our driver. A bunch of smaller prints that probably belong to the child are all over the back door and seat belt buckle on the right side. Both passenger doors were wiped clean.”
Hemingway filed that one away. Whoever had killed the driver and—presumably—taken the child, had not only touched the car but had the presence of mind—or training—to wipe their prints off. Which meant they hadn’t been wearing gloves. “The body tell you anything?”
“Single swipe with a very sharp blade across his throat. Nicked the top of the larynx. Severed both jugular and carotid. Didn’t know it was coming is my guess.”
“How’s that possible?”
Linderer stopped in mid-keystroke and turned to her. “I collect the data, you answer the questions.”
“I thought Friday was let’s-be-a-prick day; today’s only Tuesday.”
Linderer stopped typing. “I didn’t mean—”
“Yes, you did. We exchange ideas, that’s what we do. You want to be an asshole, do it on someone else’s time. I know it’s a hundred-and-fifty fucking degrees out here but we’ve got a missing child and we just pulled a human Pez dispenser out of the Lincoln. I would like to find this kid before someone does bad things to him, understand?”
“Yeah. Of course. I’m hot.”
“We’re all hot, Matty. This weather sucks. But you don’t see me being a cunt, do you?”
He opened his mouth to protest but something stopped him. “I’m sorry.”
“What else have you got?”
Linderer tapped the screen of the laptop. “When I model the blood spatter, Mr. Grossman in there had his pipe cut on a downward angle.”
“You mean a downward stroke?”
He nodded and the collar on his space suit rasped in the lifeless air. “Yes, but the cut was in a straight line—there’s no sweep to it. It was pulled across his throat from a low angle. The killer was probably kneeling on the pavement beside the car and when Grossman leaned over—probably to get something from the glove compartment—the door opened and he was hit with the blade.”
“What was in the glove box?”
“Two Charleston Chews, a cell phone, a handgun, and three shots of Cialis.”
“What kind of a pistol?”
“Small automatic. Beretta. He had a carry permit.”
Hemingway was once again amazed at how quickly the forensics guys were able to turn someone’s life into the past tense—it always struck her as abrupt.
Mr. Grossman hadn’t known much about guns—a Beretta was as deadly as far as you could throw it. But it was expensive. For some, cost equated to value; the pistol had probably been purchased by someone who wanted the best but didn’t know what to look for.
Linderer continued. “I’ll have a full report once we get the car back to the lab but don’t expect any surprises. Whoever did this knew what he was doing.”
Phelps was suddenly there, straightening his tie. “I caught Dr. Grant at the office. A car is on the way to take him home.” He held up his smartphone, the photo of Bobby Grant smiling out of the screen. “It’s already on the news.”
She took out her own phone and cycled to a photo of Tyler Rochester. She held it up beside the phone in Phelps’s hand and stared at the pictures of the two children. It was impossible to miss the similarities.
“We’ve got one break,” she said.
“Which is?” He pulled off his jacket and his shirt was stained with a deep shadow of sweat down the front and under both arms.
“We know his type.”
||| FOURTEEN
ACCORDING TO Dr. Grant’s files at both the DMV and city hall, he was two weeks shy of his sixty-first birthday. He looked like a mummified fifty, a benefit of being one of the city’s most prestigious plastic surgeons. Mrs. Grant was twenty-five years his junior and had the classic look of a certain kind of second wife, replete with breast implants and a flat expression that differed from Tyler Rochester’s mother in that it came from Botox, not booze and pills. The resemblance to a ventriloquist dummy was hard to miss.
Unlike the ministry of help at the Rochesters’ townhouse, there was only one other person in the apartment—Mrs. Grant’s mother, who looked in some strange way more suited to Dr. Grant than his wife. Everyone was holding up well considering their world had just been destroyed by a man with a razor blade.
Hemingway sat down in one of the wing chairs facing the sofa and explained that they had a few questions that they had to deal with now—things they needed in order to move forward with the investigation. She ran through the questions she had put to the Rochester boy’s parents, focusing on new people in their son’s life.
Mrs. Grant’s mouth barely moved as she talked about her missing child. She began by saying that he was a good boy. Hemingway had interviewed many parents and they always began with that same heartbreaking expression. After that, Mrs. Grant went on in an orderly fashion, almost a summation of Bobby’s life. He excelled at school, particularly science, taking MIT’s Young Achiever’s award this year for a robot he had designed and built that cleaned countertops using black light to targ
et bacteria. She nodded at the piano in the corner of the living room, a shiny art deco Bösendorfer; she thought he played too much but when she approached the subject, he had reacted like most kids when told they had to cut back on video games. With pride she related how he had written two piano concertos over the winter and had a recital coming up at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in late July.
Bobby’s driver, Desmond, had worked for them for six years now, driving the boy to and from school, to his extracurricular activities and piano lessons from the first time he had stepped out of the apartment on his own. Dr. Grant had purchased the pistol they found in the glove box. It was clear to Hemingway that both Dr. and Mrs. Grant were upset about Desmond’s death. They seemed like compassionate, decent people.
The deeper they got into the questioning, the tighter Dr. Grant’s face got, until he stood up, nodded at the door, and told them that they would better serve his son if they were out trying to find him.
After cards were exchanged, Dr. Grant walked them to the elevator, telling them to do anything necessary. If they faced any budgetary restraints, they were to come to him. The bell pinged and the doors slid open. Phelps stepped into the car and as Hemingway turned to shake Dr. Grant’s hand, he held it and looked into her eyes.
“After everything we went through to have Bobby, it will kill his mother if something happens to him. Find my son.”
Hemingway did her best to look confident as she nodded. Then she turned and stepped into the elevator. As the doors slid closed, Dr. Grant stared at her, his face still locked in disbelief. On the descent to street level, something told her that he was still standing there, staring at the elevator doors, trying to figure out who he had to speak to in order to trade his soul for a time machine.
They moved through the lobby and out to the no-standing zone where she had parked the Suburban. When they reached the SUV, her phone chirped.
“Hemingway.”
“Yeah, Hemi, it’s Lincoln. I got you that appointment you wanted at the Manhattan office of the Department of Waterways and Estuaries. Your contact is Dr. Inge Torssen . . . Torssen . . . Torssensomethingorother. It’s up near the Bronx—One Hundred and Forty-fourth on the West Side. Can you be there in fifteen minutes? This Torssen woman has a flight out of Newark in two hours and she won’t be there for much longer.”
“Fifteen it is,” she said, hung up, and pulled a U-turn in a smoking arc of rubber.
||| FIFTEEN
DR. INGE TORSSENNSON was tall, blond, intelligent, and hypereducated. A quick Internet search showed that she had started her career as an undergrad at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, studying particle theory under the loose rubric of general physics. She eventually moved to fluid dynamics, garnering a PhD in a branch of wave refraction from MIT. Her specialty was Doppler current profiling. She was at the Manhattan office of the Department of Waterways and Estuaries on a one-year sabbatical before accepting a professorship at UC Berkeley.
She had the stride of a wide receiver and as they descended into the basement of the building, Phelps whispered to Hemingway that he now understood why the Vikings had kicked so much ass.
“I’ve looked over the maps and times you forwarded and have come up with a few things that might help with your investigation.” Her English was excellent but flowered with the soft consonants Scandinavians are famous for. At the end of the hallway she pushed open the double doors. The blast of humidity was a much heavier presence than the New York summer five floors up at street level. The walls were literally sweating.
The scale model of the Hudson River rolled to the far end of the room, a complicated pool under a domed ceiling that could have housed a fleet of jumbo jets. The shorelines of Manhattan, New Jersey, and Brooklyn were recreated in scaled detail, the earth, concrete, stone, grass and glass represented by a uniform brown resin. Wires, cameras, and sensors monitored every square inch of the man-made island, sending the stream of digital information to several computer stations positioned around the installment. Hemingway’s eye was immediately drawn to the scaled-down Statue of Liberty, roughly the size of a Barbie doll, at the far end of the pool.
Beyond the diminutive Lady Liberty, a couple of modelers stood in thigh-high water at the Jersey docks, wearing waders and double filter particle masks. They were modifying the shoreline to post-Sandy specs and they looked like giants in an Asian science fiction film.
“I’ve reverse-engineered the boy’s most probable path based on the drop times you provided. You have to understand that there are numerous variables involved, not just current. I’ve factored in salt flux, wind, and tide—but this is all very speculative. The body may have hung up in debris somewhere for a while. The good news, if you can call it that, is that the particular area of the river where he washed up is subject to extremely heavy currents that have established patterns.” She walked them to one of the platforms at the far end, a steel balcony above the northeast corner of the island of Manhattan.
“If the boy was abducted between six twenty-one and six thirty-one p.m. on Monday, as you indicated, and his body was found at nine twenty-one by a jogger,” she said, pronouncing it yogger, “we have a window of a little under two hours. You suspect that the boy’s body was dumped at—or just after—sunset, which was eight twenty-two p.m. If he was put in the water at, say, any time between eight twenty-five and eight forty-five, with wind and current factored in, I’d estimate that he was put in the water somewhere here . . .” The laser pointer came to life in Torssennson’s hand, the red dot of its eye zeroing in on a stretch of water that boiled and bubbled with the diminutive currents fed through the simulated topography. It was a stretch where the Hudson River cut between Randall’s Island and Astoria.
The red dot crawled along the shorelines of Astoria, then crossed the channel, and negotiated the terrain of Randall’s Island, once again crossing water—this time the Harlem River—hitting the shore of Manhattan at 120th Street. “I can’t be certain where the boy was dumped, but it was above here,” she said, circling a bubbling epicenter of foam at the southern tip of a stretch of scaled-down real estate stenciled with the words RANDALL’S ISLAND.
Hemingway knew that stretch of water; she had kayaked around it hundreds of times, and knew that fickle patch of roiling anguish had a reputation of being evil as far back as anyone in New York could remember. It was one of the few places on the river that the pleasure boaters avoided, especially the weekend sailors with the expensive nav systems on boats tattooed with monikers like Daddy’s Li’l Girl and My First Million. Only the big river barges—laden with garbage or stone—negotiated its wrath.
Hemingway focused on the scaled-down current and eddies. “That’s Hell Gate,” she said.
Then her phone rang, something that surprised her; she figured that this far into the earth there wouldn’t be any reception. She mimed an apology to Dr. Torssennson and went to the far end of the platform.
“Hemingway,” she answered. Across Manhattan the men in particle masks were busy mixing whatever it was they used for landscaping material and the visual was so surreal that she wouldn’t have been surprised to see a guy in a Godzilla suit somewhere off to their right. The office parties down here had to be YouTube worthy.
“Hemi, it’s Lincoln. I just got a call from a retired judge who saw the Rochester boy’s story on CNN this morning. Name’s Jack Willoughby. Lives in Boca. He said there was a remarkable similarity between the Rochester case and one he presided over back in eighty-four.”
She didn’t get the flush of elation or the push of adrenaline that most people would have; years of following leads that enticed her down the road to nowhere had hardened her hope reflex. “That’s three decades ago, Linc.” She wasn’t being negative, just pragmatic—according to Dr. Marcus, the Rochester boy had been taken apart by a nascent killer, not someone with a history for this kind of thing. And these guys had a window that usually closed in their late forties as their testosterone waned. Something about this
didn’t seem right. “Did you run a check on Willoughby?”
“Thirty-eight years as a trial judge in the city—solid record.”
“What did he have to say?”
“He had a case where a twenty-eight-year-old male was pulled over for running a light in Queens. After a shouting match that made the duty officer suspicious, he checked the car and found a pair of children’s feet in a grocery bag in the trunk. The perp ran but the car was registered in his mother’s name and they picked the guy up at his home a few hours later.”
At that her adrenaline kicked in. “And?”
“The prosecutor couldn’t prove that the feet had come from a murder victim; Deacon’s lawyer argued that his client had purchased them from a man who worked in a medical supply warehouse. And the body of an eleven-year-old Indian boy had indeed gone missing from one such facility a few weeks before. The perp served six months for disrespectful treatment of human remains. Probation afterwards—judge couldn’t remember the details but I’m looking into it now.”
“We have a name? An address?”
“Name’s Trevor Deacon, that’s d-e-a-c-o-n. I checked—he’s on Crestwood in Astoria. Hasn’t moved in all this time.”
She hung up and turned to Phelps. “Jon, it’s go time.”
“Whacha got?”
“We have a line on a perp with a similar MO. Retired judge called it in. The guy lives right there,” she said, pointing to where Dr. Torssennson’s pointer had just walked across the water. “In Astoria.”
||| SIXTEEN
THE HOUSE was a little slope-roofed postwar with a garage, a small front yard taken up by an ancient elm, and a faded Post-it taped inside the screen door that told peddlers, Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses to take their business elsewhere.
Hemingway pulled up to the front of the house with two patrol cars as escort. She and Phelps hit the pavement and headed up the front steps while two of the patrolmen headed around back, guns out. The second pair of uniforms stood at the curb.
