by Robert Pobi
They moved on.
The second door was stenciled with the words TOOLS/ROPES in a red Boston Traffic font. Phelps stepped in front of the metal portal and stopped dead center. He raised the pistol and gently turned the knob with his free hand.
Then he pushed the door in.
And found a room from hell.
||| FIFTY-FIVE
THE DOOR swung in.
He was waiting for her.
He saw a shadow. Larger than himself. Coming through.
He reached out with the blade.
The shadow stumbled backward. Reached up. Gripped its throat.
Blood pissed out in a fan-shaped arc. Splattered the wall. The sill. Shoes.
||| FIFTY-SIX
PHELPS STUMBLED back.
And stared down at the destroyed architecture of the child.
Between his time in the jungles of Southeast Asia and four-plus decades as one of New York’s Finest, he had seen the human body exposed to unimaginable indignities. But this tipped the scales in a whole new sport. Tyler Rochester’s phone sat neatly on an overturned bucket beside the body. It was covered in bright happy stickers.
Phelps backed away from the door and keyed his mic. “He ain’t here, Hemi. But he was. He left another one behind. He’s been—” He paused as he tried to make sense of what he was looking at. “—Destroyed.”
||| FIFTY-SEVEN
HE STEPPED over the body of Mrs. Atchison. Blood still thrummed out of her neck in a steady pulse but instead of the bright pyrotechnics of a moment ago it was now a thick diminishing throb. She was already brain dead. He moved cautiously by, lifting his feet over the blanket of red that had already filled the low points in the floor and was now reaching for the corners with thick rounded fingers.
He thought that she was alone with the boy but thinking something was not the same as knowing it. He checked the main floor. William was upstairs—he had seen him from the street, through the window of his bedroom. Now the boy was in the bath, singing and splashing while his mother bled out on the floor in the foyer.
On the other nights he had watched them from the park across the street, the housekeeper left at five; they were supposed to be alone now. But better safe than sorry.
He went through the house quickly, starting with the living room, the study, then on to the dining room and kitchen. A quick peek down the basement steps told him that the wine cellar was empty because there were no lights on. Besides, anyone in the basement would have heard Mrs. Atchison’s body hit the floor and would have been drawn upstairs by the sound.
He went back to the foyer. She was dead now, sprawled out in an awkward pose that was almost comical because one of her hands was on her peepee. He smiled at that.
Then he walked up the stairs with the long filleting knife hanging from his hand.
The master bedroom, en suite, three guest bedrooms, main bathroom, and powder room were all empty. He went through the closets and even stooped to look under the beds.
William was in the tub, singing an old-fashioned song that he didn’t recognize. The boy couldn’t sing at all. But there was another thing that William did well and that’s why he was here; to extract the boy’s other gift.
After placing the filleting knife down on the antique console beside the bathroom door, he unslung the knapsack with the Canadian flag sewn to it and slid it to the floor. He removed the syringe from the plastic case in the side pocket and held it up to the light.
He didn’t bother to tap out the bubbles but he did give it a quick check to make sure that it was still primed with anesthetic.
He reached out, placed one gloved hand on the bathroom door, and pushed it open.
William’s singing echoed off the tiles. He was in the tub, head back, eyes closed, singing about being a lonely boy without a home. He had a wig of suds on his head.
Listening to whatever instinct was running through him, William opened his eyes. He saw the figure in the door. He smiled, maybe thinking for a split second that it was his mother.
And saw that it wasn’t.
His smile grew puzzled. “What are you doing here? I thought that we were getting together tomorrow.”
“I couldn’t wait,” he said, and stepped toward the boy in the tub.
||| FIFTY-EIGHT
BY THE time Delaney got Hemingway through the terminal, over the evacuating decks of the ferry, and down to Phelps, he was sitting on the bottom of the tight metal staircase to the maintenance corridor with his head in his hands.
“Don’t go in there, Hemi.” His voice sounded a little off in the confines of the space and she took it as echo. But what he said bothered her; in all their time together, he had never babied her, never tried to protect her from the sometimes horrifying realities of the work. If he had, they never would have made it as a team. That he was doing so now was unsettling.
Hemingway walked by, putting her hand on his shoulder as she passed. He was shivering, something that seemed impossible in the hundred-and-ten-degree heat that made the place feel like a terrarium. And then she realized the Iron Giant was crying.
The two uniformed cops leaned against the far bulkhead across from the stairwell. One looked like his brain was unplugged and the other had his eyes closed, fingers pressed to his sockets.
The hallway was tight and smelled like a hot engine after a day on the road. The space was lit with caged overhead bulbs that lent an extra air of malignancy to the stifling atmosphere and dark passage. She moved slowly toward the light spilling over the sill, across the floor, and up onto the wall in a flickering weak oval. It looked like a television was on in the room.
The engines were turned off and Manhattan-bound passengers would be taking another of the MTA’s ferries, boarding at the secondary dock. The corridor was quiet and all she heard, other than the sound of her shoes on the boilerplate deck, was her heart chugging away in her ears.
She paused in front of the open door but didn’t look in. Something else was mixed in with the smells of the engine deck and she recognized it as the stench of death. She turned slowly, swinging her eyes around, and focused on the dimly lit body spilled across the floor of the tool room.
The lubrication had left her sockets and she could not swivel her eyes. All she could do was stand there. Dumbly. Mutely. Staring at the dead child.
When the image had finally been absorbed, her CPU came back online and she ran down the hall, skidded to a stop at a garbage can, and threw up.
||| FIFTY-NINE
THEY STOOD on deck, staring at the city across the water. Phelps cradled a Styrofoam cup of coffee Delaney had been kind enough to provide and Hemingway sipped water she hoped would wash the taste of puke and Tic Tacs out of her mouth. They hadn’t said anything for a few minutes and both were busy repairing their hard drives after what they had seen.
They were waiting for Marcus to finish in the tool room.
After what could have been an hour or a minute, Phelps asked, “How pregnant are you?” He took another sip of coffee, eyes still locked on the distant spires of Sodom and Gomorrah across the waves.
She thought about lying to him. She thought about asking him if he was nuts. She thought about punching him in the arm and saying, Good one. She even thought about crying. All she said was, “About six weeks.”
Phelps pulled the cup away from his mouth and nodded a single, authoritative time.
“How’d you know?”
At that, he smiled. It was a shy, gentle smile and it always caught her off guard when he pulled it out during working hours. “I’m a detective, Hemi. I know you think I’m old and blind but I’m not that old or that blind.”
That hadn’t been an answer. At least not the kind she was looking for. “That doesn’t explain the how part, Jon.”
He took another sip of coffee. “You’ve been eating a lot lately—even for you.” At that his smile broadened—her eating habits were a continual source of amusement to him; they had been since the first time they sat down to
a meal together. “You keep your hand on your belly a lot. You’re not touching alcohol. And you’re glowing.”
“Glowing? Did you say glowing? Now I know you’re lying.”
Phelps shrugged like it didn’t matter one way or the other. “I remember how Maggie looked when she was pregnant with Francis. She had that same look you got now. I saw it again when Shane came along—hell, I knew she was pregnant before she did. And I seen Francis’s wife when she was pregnant. I know what it looks like and it looks like you.”
“That doesn’t sound very scientific to me.”
“What do you want me to do, lie?”
She took another swig of water and heard the clank of the gurney being wheeled over the steel deck on the way to the stairway to the basement. She thought about the boy in the tool room and she burped and tasted Tic Tacs again.
“And in all the time I’ve known you, nothing has made you throw up on the job.”
“That was pretty bad, Jon.”
“We’ve seen worse.”
“When?”
“Remember the Dionne lady? That was worse. A lot worse.”
She thought back to that one and the Tic Tacs spit a little mint up the back of her throat again. “Isn’t it supposed to be called morning sickness?”
“We got odd hours,” he said. “Daniel know?”
He wasn’t trying to walk her—he was pitching fastballs. “Yeah.”
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. Keeping it, not keeping it—it’s up to you.”
And now it was her turn to ask a question. “Why would you say something like that, Jon?” She hoped that hadn’t sounded as accusatory to him as it had to her.
He paused this time, as if deciding if what he was going to say was a smart thing to do. “I was just wondering about Mank. I know you miss him.”
“Of course I miss him—I was in love with the guy—but what the fuck does that have to do with anything?”
Phelps turned and looked at her—really looked at her. “Hemi, I don’t stick my nose in where it doesn’t belong. But we’re friends. Hell, we’re more than friends in many ways, and I want you to be happy. But I know you. I’ve watched you chew through a few guys in the past couple years. Mank’s death killed a little piece of you. And that shit with Shea afterwards didn’t help. You’ve always said you never wanted kids. I just assumed that you meant you didn’t want kids right then. But maybe you never do. It’s none of my business, except to be your friend. You love this Daniel of yours?”
She felt like he had just punched her in the stomach. “Yes. Yes, I do.”
“You love him enough to have him in your life forever?”
Phelps was saying all the right things—all the things a friend would say—all the things that she had asked Mank at the cemetery yesterday. “I hadn’t thought about it like that.”
“Now who’s lying? You know me—I’m not big on handing out judgment—so this ain’t about any kind of right or wrong. But you and I see the worst that people have to offer. We see the world as a broken damaged place full of broken damaged people who inflict the most frightening kind of pain on one another. That ain’t an easy thing to forget.
“When Maggie got pregnant with Francis I had only been a cop for two years but that’s long enough in this city. Hell, I think it’s long enough in any city. I didn’t want kids, not after what I seen in ’Nam and at work. But Maggie did. And you know what? My family helped me stay sane while I waded through all this shit over the years.”
She jabbed a thumb over her shoulder, at the medical examiner’s team fighting the stretcher down the stairs to pick up a child who had been defiled with a sharpened blade. “And what if something like that happens?”
“You know, after Shane was born I went to get a vasectomy. I was in the doctor’s office and I was worried that I was making some kind of mistake. What if my children died? I talked to the doctor about it and he said one of the smartest things anyone has ever said to me in a time of crisis. He said, ‘You can’t plan your life on tragedy.’ ”
“Sure you can, Jon. Just ask the parents of that little boy downstairs. Ask them if bad things happen. They’ll tell you that bad things happen all the time.”
“Good things happen all the time, too. You got a guy who loves you and you love back. He ain’t Mank and you know what? Good he ain’t because you know and I know and everyfuckingbody knows that a life with Mank would have been a goddamned disaster. The only thing that guy could be counted on for was being angry. Everything else—as sunny as you want to paint it—was just wishful thinking.”
He had never spoken to her like this, and she knew the process had to be difficult for him. And he wasn’t wrong—maybe that’s all Uncle Dwight had tried to tell her. It was time to move on a little. Mank was dead. He wasn’t coming back.
“I’ve been thinking about all those things, Jon. And I’m thinking myself into a hole. I don’t know if I can do it.” And that was as truthful as she was ever going to get with anyone.
Phelps took a deep breath of hot, heavy air. “I’m going to tell you one thing, and if you ever repeat it, to me or to anyone else, I’ll never forgive you. When I was your age, I had a fourteen-year-old and a twelve-year-old. And I was never there, so Maggie raised our kids. I love Maggie with all my heart—she’s the best thing that ever happened to me. And those boys. But she thinks that the South Pole is hot because people head south in the winter, she’s convinced that Ikea is the capital of Sweden, and she hasn’t read a single book that doesn’t have pictures in it in the forty-one years we’ve been married. But I fucking love that woman. And she did a phenomenal job with those boys, all while taking care of her dying mother.”
She focused on the new Manhattan skyline. The Freedom Tower still looked odd, foreign to her eye. She wondered how long it would take to become familiar.
“You got everything it takes to be a great mother, kiddo. And I don’t just mean your family’s money. Maybe I’m reaching, but your brother and sister have to get a very nice allowance to live those lives—so I assume that there’s some there for you if you want it. And a child might be a good reason to want it. At least to pay for good schools and tennis lessons. Trips to Europe, maybe see a few museums. Braces and a fucking pony. Maybe you can give your kid a better life than most cops can. If you want to. If Maggie could do it, you sure can. I’m with you no matter what. You need someone to drive you to the clinic, and you don’t want to tell Daniel about it, I’m there. This is your life. And that’s all I am going to say about that. I am sorry if I hurt your feelings.”
She had to pull her focus away from the city at that one. She turned, looked at him. He was a big, goofy-looking man who had been shot three times, stabbed once, had his nose broken more times than anyone could remember and had hands that looked like they were salvaged from a broken prizefighter. And she realized that in Daniel she had found a man who would measure up to Phelps, if not in battle scars, at least in caring. And the way they both cocked their head to one side when they were thinking or smiling. “Why is it that no matter how lousy I feel, you always manage to make everything seem just a little bit better?”
“Call it a gift.” He nodded over her shoulder. “Speaking of gifts, here comes Dr. Death.”
Dr. Marcus was in pants and shirtsleeves, the jacket and tie of earlier lost somewhere along the way. “Detectives,” he said. “I am not in the habit of telling other people how to do their job, but you two need to make some headway and you need to do it fast.”
“Same guy?” Hemingway asked, knowing it was a stupid question as soon as it was out of her mouth.
The medical examiner ignored her. “You have any suspects?”
“The only thing we’re going on now is a connection to Dr. Brayton.”
“Still haven’t found him?”
Hemingway shook her head. “We’ve got it out to the FBI—if he’s alive, we should know something soon.”
“He your only suspect?”
There was no satisfactory way to answer that so neither cop said a word.
“I am going on the record as saying that I am sick and tired of looking at dead kids.”
Hemingway ran a hand through her hair and straightened up, pushing the kinks out of her back. “Come up to the control room, you have to see the surveillance tapes. The Rochester boy’s phone was programmed to send that text at a predetermined time. Did he set it before the murder or after? He had the processor in hibernation and the phone went on just before it sent me the text. And we damn well know he was here, on the boat, at the TOD.”
“At around two p.m.”
They walked across the yellow boilerplate ramp. The walk felt good. She felt her chest and head clearing out again. Her stomach, too.
The control room had seventy feet of river frontage with a clear view of Manhattan across the bay. How long had they been at this now? It felt like a lifetime.
Hemingway steered Dr. Marcus over to the back corner where Delaney was waiting.
“Show him,” Hemingway said.
Delaney fiddled with a few buttons then paused to point out four monitors, “Here, here, here, and here.” The displays flickered to life, showing the doorways on the passenger deck. “These are the doors to stairwells that drop to the engine deck.” The time stamp started at 6:50. “This is ten minutes before the ferry’s first cycle of the day.” He hit a button.
The timer began spinning in hyperdrive. People danced by, paused in front of it—all in the jittery mercury-poisoned body language of fast-forward. The seconds on the counter turned into minutes turned into hours. No one said a thing as the past closed on a little boy’s future—a little boy who was being strapped into a stretcher as they took a trip in the four-monitor time machine. The hours zipped by and not a single passenger—or employee—approached any of the doors.
1:30:21 . . . 1:34:30 . . . 1:38:15 . . . 1:41:10—Delaney cued back the knob and time slowed down.
