Harvest

by Robert Pobi

  She and Phelps took up position on either side of the door. Thirty seconds after she pushed the bell, the front door opened and a small woman who had to be in her early eighties stuck her head out.

  “Cantya read?” she rasped through a puff of tobacco smoke and jabbed a finger at the faded paper sign. “No Jesus. And no fuckin’ Girl Guides.” She stared at Hemingway for a second, then her eyes slid over to Phelps before coming back and settling on the undone top buttons of Hemingway’s white cotton blouse. “Not if they know what’s good for them.”

  Hemingway held up her badge, her other hand behind her, fingers wrapped around the rubber grip of her revolver. “We’re looking for Trevor Deacon.”

  The old woman tightened her mouth around the cigarette and took a long haul, her lips wrinkled like an ancient, furry sphincter. “What’d he do this time?”

  Hemingway took a step sideways so the woman would see the cruisers on the street. “Is Trevor Deacon here?”

  From behind a cloud of smoke she seemed to teeter on the precipice of indecision for a few seconds before she nodded. “Yeah. He lives downstairs.” She stepped out onto the porch in her ancient stained bathrobe and a pair of Pink Foil Nikes. “That’s his door.”

  “Is he home?”

  “How the fuckinell I know? I got X-ray vision I don’t know about?”

  Hemingway leaned down and looked the woman in the eyes. “Anyone else in the building?”

  The old lady eyed her for a second. “Yeah, Elvis,” she snapped, then tried to step back into the house and slam the door.

  Hemingway grabbed her arm, swung her around, and Phelps had cuffs on her before her screaming started. Hemingway put her finger to her lips in a be-quiet gesture, and handed the old lady off to one of the uniformed officers. He dragged her down to the car, screaming that the cops were a bunch of assholes.

  The two detectives ran through the upstairs part of the house, checking the rooms one by one. The door that led to the basement was boarded up. When they had finished, they headed down the steps outside. The old lady was still screaming inside the cruiser, every sentence accentuated with a subwoofer thud as she tried to kick her way out.

  Hemingway looked for a buzzer at the basement door. The button had been taped over with another curled-paper ballpoint pen sign that read NO SOLISSITERS. She pulled the screen open and knocked on the heavy multilock metal door—the kind designed to keep people out. Or in.

  They waited.

  She knocked again.

  Phelps eased sideways, took off his sunglasses, and leaned into the window, cupping his hands to see into the dark.

  Hemingway raised her fist to bang on the door again when Phelps let out a low groan. “Jesus, no!” he said, and pushed her aside.

  He hammered the door with two good bottom-foot kicks and the impact barely registered.

  “Phelps, what the—?”

  But he already had his automatic out. He leveled it at the door and blew out the two padlocks. Then he kicked it in. It flew into the wall and bounced back.

  He screamed, “Call EMS now!” to the cops at the curb.

  Instinctively, Hemingway went in first, crouching low and taking the left flank like they had done a thousand times in drills and a few dozen on the job.

  As she swung the muzzle of her pistol around, she saw why Phelps had blown out the locks.

  Whatever it was now, at one time it had been a human being.

  “This must be Elvis,” Phelps said, and holstered his pistol.

  ||| SEVENTEEN

  BENJAMIN WINSLOW ticked off the final multiple-choice question, dropped his pencil, and raised his hand.

  The scratch of graphite on paper around him ceased and a shuffle whispered through the lecture hall; he was the first one finished. Again. All three parts. Benjamin picked up his knapsack, walked to the front of the hall, and dropped his test paper and the Number 2 pencil onto the monitor’s desk. He didn’t bother nodding at the man; he often found the openmouthed look of awe annoying.

  He pushed through the polished bronze doors and stepped out into the day. A photographer leaning against one of the massive limestone columns that flanked the door snapped a photo and gave him the thumbs-up. “Congratulations, kid. How’s it feel to be a genius?”

  “Lorem ipsum,” he said and headed down the steps before the guy figured out that he was being made fun of.

  Benjamin took out his phone and dialed his father as he had promised.

  He answered in one ring. “Dr. Winslow here.”

  “Hey, Dad, I’m done with the SATs.”

  “How’d you do?” his father said in his usual monotone.

  Tests of all kinds had been a constant in Ben’s routine ever since he could remember. Beyond his vast library of talent was an acute ability for predicting test results. But it wasn’t much of a prediction; it was simply the ability to recall the number of questions he had known the answers to versus the number of questions he hadn’t—simple math, really. “One of the multiple-choice questions in the reading section was interpretive so it depends on the test bias. Other than that, perfect.” He got to the sidewalk and headed west, toward the park.

  “Why don’t you come to the museum? I’ve got to finish up some notes for tomorrow’s lecture but I’ll be done by the time you get here. We can walk down to the Garden Vegan and get a nice salad. Bean curd for the genius.”

  “How about a cheeseburger?”

  “Kings don’t dine on cheeseburgers, son.” His father was quiet for a second and Benjamin wondered if he was angry. “Grab a cab.”

  Benjamin stopped at the curb and looked both ways before crossing Madison. “It’s a nice day. I’d like to walk.”

  This time there was no pause. “We’ve talked about this. I don’t want you walking through the park. It’s filled with all manner of miscreants in the summer. Take a cab.”

  Benjamin wanted to tell his father that technically it was still spring but settled on, “Dad, I’m not a kid anymore.”

  “To a predator you’re just a ten-year-old boy. Take a taxi.”

  I can take care of myself, he wanted to say but it came out as, “Yes, sir.”

  “See you soon, son.” And his father hung up.

  Benjamin reached around and put his phone into his knapsack, then he headed across the street to the gauntlet of yellow taxis. This was ridiculous—who did his father think he was, a baby?

  He got into the cab, smiled at the driver in the mirror, and said, “Central Park West between Eighty and Eighty-first, please. In front of the museum.” Then he settled back for the ride across the park—a trip he would much rather have done on foot on such a nice day. What could happen to him out here?

  ||| EIGHTEEN

  HEMINGWAY STARED at Trevor Deacon. He had been a pedophile.

  Had been.

  Past tense.

  Trevor would not be molesting children anymore. Trevor would not be doing much of anything anymore. What was left of him was neatly placed on the various pieces of furniture in the basement room, mostly the bookshelf and the old Telefunken record player/television combo under the window with the heavy bars.

  His parts were all there, displayed like a collection of prized Franklin Mint plates. But the Franklin Mint wasn’t going to be putting out decorative dinnerware to commemorate Trevor Deacon’s accomplishments. Not now, not ever.

  The forensics team was done with everything but the garage—the main body of the basement apartment was now open—so Hemingway busied herself learning what she could from Trevor Deacon’s home. She stood with her hands in her pockets, her head tilted to one side as if she were scanning titles at the library, examining the demented performance art that looked like it had been lifted from a Rob Zombie storyboard. Deacon’s body had been reduced to its unarticulated components. Everything from his jaw to his feet was neatly placed in the cubbyholes of the teak shelving and on top of the stereo.

  Hemingway was no stranger to violent death, and she was certainly no s
tranger to the closed-in world of the psychopath, but she needed to concentrate and with the old lady screeching through cigarette smoke from the door it was impossible to get a single thought going.

  “Who’s gonna clean this mess up?” she barked. “Me? Oh no. Not me. I’ve cleaned up after this piece of shit his whole life and I ain’t gonna do it no more, I can tell you. He’s a pig. And a sonofabitch. Just look at this place. It’s a mess. A mess—”

  Hemingway turned her head and nailed Papandreou with a hard stare. “Officer Papandreou, would you please escort Mrs. Deacon back out to the car. This is a crime scene.” She turned back to the chunks of Trevor.

  “Oh no you don’t!” the lady screamed when Papandreou wrapped his fingers around her elbow. “I gotta keep my eyes on you sonsabitches. Last time you were here you ripped the place to shit. I ain’t gonna clean up after you, neither. Take me upstairs, I ain’t leaving my purse lying around with all you thieving cop assholes skulking around. I got experience with you guys.”

  Without taking his hand from her elbow, Papandreou said, “Mrs. Deacon, the last time we were here was 1984 and the police report said you opened the door and threw hot bacon grease at a police officer before he could open his mouth.”

  “I thought it was Trevor. I told the judge and he believed me. Check your fancy computers, ya dumb Greek cop bastard.” She turned her head back to the basement and barked, “You still ain’t said—who’s gonna clean this mess up?”

  Hemingway resisted the temptation to walk over and slap the woman. “Nick?” she said, stretching it out to two irritated syllables.

  Nick began pulling the old lady from the door. “We will have people come in and take care of that. But we have to record the evidence first. We can’t do that with you standing here screaming. Let me take you upstairs and we’ll get your purse. Then I’ll have someone take you to the local precinct where a social worker will handle the logistics. You’ll go to a hotel for a few days so we can catalog and clean up. While you’re there, someone from social services will help you fill out the papers—as the victim of violent crime, you are entitled to compensation.”

  The old woman’s eyes narrowed and her mouth pursed up again. “Compensation? How much compensation?”

  “It depends on your current income but somewhere around six hundred dollars a month.”

  “Six hundred dollars a month! That sonofabitch over there is worth six hundred dollars a month! I wish he would have got this years ago.” She picked up her pace. “Well, dipshit, you gonna take me to get my pension or not?”

  Papandreou led Mrs. Deacon away and the rat-tat-tat of her voice was finally swallowed by the ambient noise in the apartment. Hemingway stepped back into character. Yesterday at this time, none of this had existed. Tyler Rochester had still been alive and the world was spinning happily on its axis. Less than a full turn of the planet later and little Tyler, a driver named Desmond, and a pedophile named Trevor Deacon had been turned into headlines. And then there was Bobby Grant—a child who looked so much like Tyler Rochester that they may as well have been brothers. Still missing. Still gone. Still on his way to joining the others in the headlines unless they got lucky.

  Deacon hadn’t shown up on the predator list because he had never been registered on any of the databases. They were running down the case jacket but she already knew what they’d find. The guy had walked on a technicality and then got lost in the massive paperwork of the record-keeping engine. Three decades had gone by and he had slipped from communal memory because he had been careful. Until that judge had remembered him.

  Of course, someone else had remembered Deacon as well: a guy with a saw and a lot of time to kill. What was the connection?

  Hemingway turned back to the room—back to the task lighting and the strobe of the photographer’s flash—and was grateful for the sudden silence. She walked around the space, a rec room turned apartment where Trevor had spent his life hiding from the world. His bed—an old iron frame—sat in the bedroom. The mattress, pillows, and sheets might have been another color yesterday—maybe white, maybe yellow—but were now a sopping mess of cracked red and black.

  Deacon’s torso lay on the bed. No arms. No legs. No head. No genitals. Just a big blood-spattered hairy roast waiting to go into the oven.

  There wasn’t much to look at in the rest of the apartment. There was an old Formica table with one chair, a toaster oven, a plaid sofa and the Cold War stereo/television combo. A coffee table with a book on birds and an ashtray on top. Not much of a place when you really looked at it.

  The only thing that seemed new was the computer system set up near the fridge. Alan Carson, from the cybercrimes division, was in the process of dismantling Trevor’s PC—a sleek red plastic tower with two forty-two-inch monitors. Carson looked like a guy tinkering in his garage, not a man working a few feet from a chopped-up human being.

  The forensics guys moved around in their space suits, hoods off now that they were done black-lighting the carpet and plucking samples with tweezers. The one thing that didn’t make sense was that for a place so full of blood, there were no footprints or fingerprints, handprints, or glove smears. The only immediate evidence was on the Naugahyde covering of the single kitchen chair: a dried red crescent of blood that had come from the tip of a shoe.

  But the crescent of blood frowned toward the back of the chair—an impossible position to tie your shoe, unless you had eight-foot legs.

  He had stepped on the chair. Why?

  The ceiling was barely seven feet tall and, with the exception of three ceramic sockets armed with bare forty-watt bulbs, was popcorn Sheetrock. Nothing had been taken down, nothing put up.

  Carson looked up from the tower he was working on. “No hard drives.” He pushed the Buddy Holly glasses up on his nose. “Panels were pulled, at least four hard drives gone. We can go after Internet records but if he pirated a neighbor’s bandwidth it’s gonna be tough.”

  If Deacon had been logged into the databases all those years ago—even on one of the “to watch” lists—there would have been a yard of ironclad conditions tacked on to his parole terms. Convicted pedophiles were not allowed within two hundred yards of anywhere children could be found, parks and schools in particular. They were not usually permitted to use the Internet; and if they were allowed to access the Internet, they had very strict access. Since Deacon had never been entered in the system, he had been completely unsupervised.

  Mat Linderer from Dr. Marcus’s office came over, sweating in his breathable antistatic suit. He had a wavy red line on his forehead where the sweatband had cut in and combined with the cornrows of a hair transplant, it looked like the top of his head had recently been sewn on. “Detective, there’s not much here that looks out of place. Plenty of genetic material but most of it looks like it belongs to the vic. I found a pair of expensive telephoto lenses in the bottom drawer of the dresser.” His tone was much friendlier than it had been that morning at the Huntington Academy.

  “No camera?”

  “No camera. But I did find this in the fridge.” He held up a plastic Parkay container and peeled back the lid to show her the contents. It was lined with small clear polyethylene bags filled with a pink powder.

  “What is it?”

  Linderer shrugged. “I’ll know when I get it back to the lab. Could be drain cleaner. Could be anthrax.”

  Hemingway took out her iPhone and snapped a picture for her files. “I want the results as soon as you’ve nailed them down.”

  He nodded, closed the lid, and eased it into a refrigerated cooler. “I’ll call when I have something.”

  She walked over to a spot on the wall where four yellow pushpins were tacked to the fake paneling, the corner of a torn photograph hanging off one. The pins were spaced out for an eight-by-ten. What was missing?

  Phelps, the Iron Giant, cycled slowly through the place, somehow managing to not be underfoot. Of all the people Hemingway had seen around crime scenes, no one had Phelps’s uncanny a
bility to avoid being in the way. It was more than a skill, it was some kind of magical power.

  Linderer waved him over and said, “I don’t think this was a B and E but Detective Phelps’s .45 did a lot of damage so I can’t be sure. Both rounds went into the tumblers. But if the perp didn’t break in, he was let in—those locks are very difficult to pick.”

  “The windows?” Hemingway asked, pointing at the two in the front and one in the bedroom. All three had heavy steel bars set into the sills. She had seen jail cells with leaner security.

  Phelps, who had examined them carefully, said, “My grandson would have a hard time squeezing his skinny ass through there. No getting in.”

  “Or out,” she added. “So whoever killed Trevor Deacon was let in and he locked the doors on the way out. Or had keys.”

  “We found one set of keys but not a second,” Linderer said. “Everyone has a spare set.”

  Phelps pointed at the three steel doors to the basement: one that led upstairs to the boarded-over house passage; one for the garage; and one for the side entrance he had shot open. All the doors were secured with an array of security locks from the best manufacturers in the world. Thousands of dollars’ worth of locks per door. “This guy liked his privacy.”

  Hemingway examined the door to the garage, painted over with the scribbly effigy of what could only be a spider, an image out of the dark recesses of Trevor Deacon’s diseased mind. The forensics guys still weren’t done in there but from the look she had seen on the face of the photographer, she knew it would be more of the same.

  “What’s with the spider?”

  Phelps shrugged. “It’s beyond me. Maybe he was a fan of Charlotte’s Web.”

  Hemingway wasn’t so sure.

  With the thought still hanging over her, the task lighting from under the door blinked out and the door opened up. Two of Marcus’s men came into the room, pulling off their hoods as they stepped over the threshold. They didn’t look shaken—they were beyond being shocked on the job—but they did look upset.